Foreign Affairs - RSS

The Axis of Upheaval Goes to War

Andrea Kendall-Taylor, Richard Fontaine — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 08:00:00 GMT

On July 17, an Iranian missile struck Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan, killing three American soldiers and wounding four others. The strike was unusually precise. In the weeks that followed, U.S. officials discovered that before the attack, Tehran had received high-resolution satellite images of the base that could aid its targeting. Afterward, Iran obtained more imagery, potentially helping it assess the damage and hone future attacks. The images came from Chinese entities.

China is not alone in assisting Iran. Russia, too, has helped Tehran find and hit American and allied targets. Two days before the March 27 attack on Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia that wounded 12 American personnel, 14 Russian spy satellites passed overhead. U.S. officials later concluded that Moscow had fed Iran satellite intelligence that aided Iranian precision strikes. Moscow has also provided Iran with weapons and military expertise, including upgraded versions of Iranian drones refined on the battlefield in Ukraine, and Russian engineers are helping Iran develop supersonic cruise missiles that could evade U.S. and Israeli air defenses.

Neither Russia nor China has directly entered Iran’s war with the United States. They haven’t needed to. By providing intelligence on American targets, military technology and components, and economic and diplomatic support, they can give Iran what it needs without joining its war.

The United States entered the conflict with advantages its adversaries lacked: a vast network of formal allies, military bases, intelligence-sharing arrangements, defense partnerships, and interoperable forces spanning Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Yet many of Washington’s traditional partners were reluctant to associate themselves with the campaign, and some denied the United States specific forms of military access, at least for a time. Others publicly resisted U.S. calls to help secure the Strait of Hormuz.

The contrast illustrates a striking shift since we first described Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea as an axis of upheaval in Foreign Affairs two years ago. The United States’ adversaries began this war with this weaker network, and Washington with the far stronger one. But after helping Russia fight its war in Ukraine over the past few years, members of the axis are now finding ways to make their network work in a new theater. They are fine-tuning their cooperation to make their partners more resilient—and more dangerous to the United States—while limiting costs and risks. Washington, for its part, is creating friction in many of its partnerships instead of deepening them, and risks squandering its network just as its adversaries are learning to make more of theirs.

SOURCES OF UPHEAVAL

Much has changed since 2024. Most obviously, the United States itself has become a source of upheaval in the international system. The Trump administration has challenged international institutions, strained traditional alliances, and adopted a more transactional approach to foreign policy. It has upended trade agreements, threatened the sovereignty of allies such as Canada and Denmark, and embraced unpredictability. It has also pursued improved relations with China, North Korea, and Russia while seeking to weaken Iran. None of this has loosened the ties among the United States’ adversaries.

Early in the Trump administration, U.S. officials expressed hope that normalizing relations with Moscow might peel Russia away from the group. Yet President Donald Trump’s oft-expressed bonhomie toward the Kremlin has opened no gaps with the other three. As seen from Moscow, the administration has been unable to deliver a deal on Ukraine, and any Trump-driven rapprochement with Washington is unlikely to endure: Congress continues to pressure Russia, and a future administration may well adopt a tougher approach.

More fundamentally, attempts to weaken the axis misunderstand what holds it together. Its members object to an international order that they see as enshrining Western dominance at their expense. But more pointedly, they oppose the United States’ extraordinary power to constrain, isolate, and punish them, and potentially to threaten their regimes. Recent U.S. actions have only rekindled those concerns. The United States’ capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro and the killing of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei reinforce long-standing fears in Beijing, Moscow, Pyongyang, and Tehran about U.S. intervention and regime security.

The axis countries may moderate their anti-American rhetoric when doing so is tactically useful, but their motivation to reduce their vulnerability to American power remains. The Trump administration’s own skepticism about international order will not ease minds in axis capitals. On the contrary, Trump’s efforts to create a more transactional and coercive world may increase the value of their partnerships. As rules and institutions constrain less and brute power matters more, countries will seek partners to help them blunt sanctions, access critical technologies, compensate for military weaknesses, expand their room for maneuver, and resist isolation. Axis cooperation is evolving to meet the moment.

NEW REGIONS, NEW PROBLEMS

When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, cooperation among the four countries was relatively easy to map. Iran provided Russia with drones, and North Korea sent ammunition, ballistic missiles, and later, troops. China became Moscow’s most critical lifeline, buying Russian oil and supplying the machine tools, microelectronics, and other components it needed first to sustain and then to expand its military production. Russia, in turn, transferred increasingly sophisticated military technology to its partners.

These exchanges were consequential, but they could still largely be understood as a series of bilateral transactions focused on Russia’s war. That is becoming less true. Cooperation is increasingly networked and geared toward solving new problems in new regions.

Russia’s drone program illustrates the change. Iran initially sold Russia its Shahed drones and then helped Moscow establish production at home. Russia did not simply replicate what it received; it incorporated Chinese components and continually modified the drones’ navigation, communications, payloads, propulsion, and tactics in response to Ukrainian defenses. New military units fed successful modifications back into production, generating an unusually rapid cycle of battlefield adaptation. Russia’s Unmanned Systems Forces, a drone-and-robotics branch of the Russian armed forces, was established last year to help institutionalize this cycle. The combination of domestic adaptation and axis partnership has proved effective. Russia’s latest jet-powered Geran drones, for instance, are faster, carry larger payloads, and are significantly harder for Ukrainian forces to intercept than earlier variants.

Russian improvements do not stay in Russia, either. They circulate through the axis network. For Iran, the technology that originally flowed to Russia is now returning, along with tactical advice drawn from Russia’s experience in Ukraine. If Russia’s jet-powered drones also show up in the Middle East, as they likely will, Iranian attacks on U.S. forces and regional energy infrastructure will become harder and costlier to defend against.

North Korea and China are also benefiting. According to Ukrainian reports, Russia struck a deal to help North Korea expand production of its Shahed-type drones. North Korean engineers have learned from time spent working in Russia’s massive Yelabuga drone factory, and North Korean forces fighting alongside Russia have gained firsthand experience in integrating drones into modern combat. Chinese military personnel have received training in drone warfare from Russian forces, and Chinese suppliers are gaining valuable information about how their technologies perform in combat. Beijing is thus seeing gains from the evolution of drone warfare that began with Iranian technology and has been refined in Russia’s war in Ukraine.

THE MODEL CAN TRAVEL

Two years ago, it was not clear whether partnerships among the four members of the axis could outlast the war that accelerated their formation. If the Ukraine war ended and Russia no longer needed Iranian drones, North Korean ammunition, or Chinese economic and technological support, the relationships might lose momentum.

Yet the war did not only create an immediate need for cooperation. It has also provided proof of concept for what these partnerships can accomplish, beyond what any country might attain on its own. Ukrainian defenses, Western sanctions, U.S. military supplies, and diplomatic isolation have all been less effective than would be the case if Russia were operating alone. By helping one another withstand pressure, the axis countries make it harder for the United States and its allies to compel them to change course.

Iran is now showing that the model can travel. Russia’s support for Tehran has been operationally meaningful but carefully bounded. Even as it fights its own war in Ukraine, Moscow has found ways to help Iran strike American targets and sustain the fight through diplomatic cover and material support while stopping short of actions that could draw Russia into direct conflict with the United States. China has been even more cautious, but its sharing of dual-use electronics and purchases of Iranian oil have similarly enhanced Iran’s ability to withstand U.S. pressure.

Russian, Iranian, and Chinese officials meeting in Beijing, March 2025 Reuters

Such restraint is not evidence that the axis is weakening but rather a defining feature of how these partnerships work. With the striking exception of North Korean soldiers deployed on Russia’s behalf, the axis countries have generally avoided fighting one another’s wars. Instead, they provide political backing, economic support, intelligence, technology, and limited military assistance when doing so advances their own interests at manageable risk.

The wars in Ukraine and Iran have taught the axis another lesson: supporting a fellow member does not merely strengthen the recipient. Conflict in one theater can also create opportunities for partners elsewhere. Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz, for example, sent oil prices soaring, delivering a windfall to Russia and prompting Washington to temporarily ease restrictions on Russian oil exports. Iran’s war thus generated resources Russia could use to sustain its own.

Before attacking Iran, the United States redeployed key military assets, including air and missile defenses, from the Indo-Pacific to the Middle East. As the fighting continued, U.S. forces put two aircraft carriers in the region, leaving none in the Indo-Pacific. China gains operational freedom from a thinner U.S. military presence in the western Pacific and is less vulnerable when U.S. munitions stocks are depleted. If Washington settles into a prolonged strategy of containing Iran, as it did with Iraq in the 1990s, Beijing could enjoy the advantages of those diversions for years.

DO NO FURTHER HARM

The experience of the axis of upheaval shows that the size and strength of a network matter less if its members cannot turn their individual capabilities into collective power. The United States and its allies start from a position of considerable advantage: greater economic and technological resources, more capable militaries, and a far larger network of allies and partners. The question is which network can make better use of its assets.

That starts with leadership. For decades, the United States favored an international order that forbade wars of conquest, upheld freedom of the seas, maintained a generally open global economy, and allowed populations to exercise democratic rights, even if autocracies remained. Washington coupled this vision with an implicit bargain: any country that wished to join the order could do so. Upholding the order’s basic principles conferred benefits, including from the United States: trade relations, diplomatic preferences, sometimes military alliances.

For countries that rejected the open international order, as the axis countries do today, the benefits were far fewer and the penalties considerable. The United States sanctioned, pressured, and sometimes went to war against rogue states, and it resisted the establishment of competing orders such as the Cold War communist bloc. U.S. foreign policy started from the seemingly uncontroversial premise that Washington should befriend like-minded countries and treat them better than rejectionists.

The United States should reverse policies that undercut its own network.

The Trump administration demonstrates, at least at times, something like the opposite inclination. The U.S. ambassador to China recently said that Trump offered to sell Beijing weapons, while stalling arms sales to Taiwan. The president has expressed greater interest in and affection for North Korea’s dictator, Kim Jong Un, than for South Korea’s democratically elected president, Lee Jae-myung. The administration has also intermittently pressured Ukraine to cave in its war of survival against Russian aggression. And Trump has threatened to bomb Oman, a longtime partner. Such moves both strengthen the axis countries and weaken the cohesion of the network best positioned to confront them.

Doing no further harm would be a good start in dealing with the axis. Beyond that, Washington should help its partners grow stronger. Just as the axis countries are helping one another work around sanctions, preserve access to critical technologies and components, and sustain their economies under pressure, the United States should aid its own network. That means strengthening supply chains that run through trusted partners, sharing technology, and encouraging allies to take on greater security burdens. Washington must take care, however, not to transfer defense responsibilities faster than allies can develop the capabilities to assume them—and not to do so in ways that erode trust, interoperability, and coordination. Otherwise, the United States and its allies could become individually more capable but collectively less effective.

The United States should also reverse policies that undercut its own network. Tariffs and other protectionist measures harm allied economies and their industrial bases. Expressing a desire to seize allies’ territory and attempting to undermine their political leaders do not make for a more capable international network. Washington should project vision and leadership to its friends, not jarring uncertainty and bullying transactionalism.

Even if the United States changes course, American and allied policymakers should prepare for a long struggle. As the unsuccessful regime-change effort in Iran demonstrated, there are no shortcuts to besting the axis countries, together or individually. The contest of networks will be nearly global, waged in multiple domains, with huge stakes riding on the outcome. The United States and its allies have the capacity to prevail. They should demonstrate the will.

The Nuclear Deal That Could Save NATO

Ivo H. Daalder — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 08:00:00 GMT

At a meeting earlier this year, top foreign ministry officials from several European countries were asked who among them still believed that the United States would come to their defense if they were attacked. Not a single hand went up. It was a stark indication of the extent to which European governments have concluded that the United States—for so long the backbone of European and NATO security—is no longer a reliable ally. Over the past 18 months, conversations in Brussels and in other NATO capitals have revolved around how to boost the continent’s conventional defense to make up for Washington’s retrenchment. But a quieter and more urgent discussion is also taking place, focused on the status of the ultimate deterrent: the U.S. nuclear guarantee.

More than half a century ago, the Great Debate, as the French strategist Raymond Aron termed it, broke out between European countries and the United States over how to preserve European nuclear deterrence in the face of the Soviet Union’s expanding nuclear capabilities. Then, European leaders feared that Washington’s growing emphasis on the conventional defense of the continent reflected an increasing reluctance to protect Europe with nuclear weapons—especially as Moscow developed missiles that could reach the U.S. homeland. Would the United States be willing to risk Boston to defend Berlin? That debate was ultimately resolved through a new grand bargain: in return for a commitment from European countries to forgo developing nuclear weapons, the United States would invite more European participation in nuclear decision-making. That essential bargain stuck for 60 years, helping secure both the United States and Europe and preventing nuclear proliferation.

Now, however, that bargain has come undone. Washington says that it wants a new division of labor: the Europeans need to take on primary responsibility for their conventional defense while the United States continues to ensure their nuclear defense. But that hardly addresses the problem. “If you don’t believe in the United States’ Article 5 commitment,” one of the officials attending the meeting told me, “then extended deterrence is effectively dead.” Already, alternative options are being considered. In some European capitals, officials are quietly raising the possibility of acquiring their own nuclear weapons. France, meanwhile, has offered to adapt its nuclear policy to help defend its European allies.

Each of these options has real logic. But none of them adequately addresses the problem of ensuring European security without risking further proliferation. A better approach would be a fourth alternative: a renewed U.S.-European nuclear bargain, this time with a real European core. Led by France and the United Kingdom, NATO’s European members need to take on a larger role in their nuclear deterrence while working to restore the transatlantic defense link that has been the foundation of U.S. and European security for so many decades.

FOUNDATION OF PEACE

The Soviet Union’s 1957 launch of the Sputnik satellite posed a profound dilemma for NATO. Until then, the alliance had counted on U.S. nuclear weapons deployed in Europe to deter an attack by a much larger Soviet conventional force. But once Moscow demonstrated its ability to launch intercontinental rockets, Europeans feared that the United States would no longer be willing to use nuclear weapons to prevent a Soviet invasion of Europe.

These concerns prompted a fierce debate within NATO about how the continent could ensure its nuclear defense. Some, led by France, were convinced that European countries needed their own nuclear weapons. Others sought less costly ways to restore some control over nuclear deterrence. One American idea that gained substantial traction was to create a so-called multilateral force—a fleet of vessels carrying some 200 missiles. Such a multilaterally operated and funded force could give Europeans a sense of ownership and control over the use of nuclear weapons, the thinking went, while preserving the U.S. president’s final authority over their launch.

The debate exposed a fundamental problem with extending U.S. nuclear deterrence to allies, especially if an ocean separates those allies from Washington. An adversary might be deterred from attacking an American ally by even the small possibility of a U.S. nuclear retaliation; the consequences of a miscalculation would be catastrophic. But that same small possibility would offer little comfort to the ally, who needs to believe that Washington would actually risk nuclear devastation on its behalf. Denis Healey, the United Kingdom’s defense secretary throughout much of the 1960s, postulated what became known as the Healey theorem: “It takes only a five percent credibility of American retaliation to deter an attack, but it takes a 95 percent credibility to reassure the allies.”

The Sputnik launch posed a profound dilemma for NATO.

The debate was ultimately resolved through a bargain. Washington’s European allies agreed to forgo their right to acquire nuclear weapons in return for a greater say in U.S. nuclear weapons policy and strategy. Although the idea of a costly multilateral force was abandoned, the creation of the NATO Nuclear Planning Group (NPG) provided a vehicle for Europeans to give input into U.S. nuclear planning and for Washington to demonstrate that European security interests were integral to its nuclear strategy and force posture. Reassured, European countries (aside from France and the United Kingdom) agreed to codify their nonnuclear status in the 1968 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

Many European countries retained ground- and air-based systems that could deliver U.S. nuclear weapons deployed on their territory. Today, about half a dozen European countries still deploy dual-capable aircraft that can carry U.S. B-61 nuclear bombs. These nuclear consulting and sharing arrangements proved far more crucial to reassuring allies than the hard-power measures (such as counterforce targeting, low-yield weapons, and greater precision) that U.S. strategists typically believe were essential. The latter measures focused on resolving the five-percent problem; the former addressed the 95-percent questions.

France was the only country to reject this nuclear bargain. (The United Kingdom had become a nuclear power in the 1950s, but it committed all its weapons to NATO and participated in the NPG and the dual-capable aircraft missions.) Under President Charles de Gaulle, France came to believe that it could not count on another country for its nuclear security. Paris embarked on its own nuclear program, refused to participate in the NPG or the dual-capable aircraft mission, and, in 1966, withdrew from NATO’s military command structure. The overall bargain, however, laid the foundation for what has become a highly successful deterrence, reassurance, and nonproliferation regime.

DEAL BREAKER

Unlike in the 1960s, today’s nuclear debate has not been prompted by a change in the global balance of power. It has been precipitated by a unilateral change in the United States’ attitude toward Europe. As I explained in Foreign Affairs last year, in Trump’s second term, the United States has rejected the two core principles of NATO’s collective defense commitments: that there is a shared understanding of the threat to NATO members and that members’ security is indivisible.

European members of NATO can no longer assume that the U.S. commitment to their security—derived from the fundamental idea, born of two devastating world wars, that American security is inextricably linked to the security of Europe—is ironclad. Instead, as the Pentagon’s policy chief, Elbridge Colby, has repeatedly noted, “under President Trump’s leadership, the simple fact is that countries can no longer take America for granted.” European countries have never taken America for granted. They have assumed that it shares their belief in the indivisibility of U.S. and European security—and they proved their own commitment to this belief when NATO invoked Article 5’s collective-defense obligation for the first and only time, in response to the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.

The American president and other senior officials have made it clear that the United States’ security commitment to Europe is based not on a shared understanding of the threat that both entities face but on secondary considerations, such as European countries’ level of defense spending and their support for U.S. foreign policy. In August, the Pentagon sent its 31 NATO allies a long questionnaire stressing the conditionality of Washington’s security commitment: it asked them to profess their loyalty to Trump’s foreign policy, commit to procuring defense equipment from U.S. firms, and prioritize funding the restoration of the U.S. industrial base by opposing any “buy European” initiatives.

Some European NATO leaders still refuse to admit in public that anything fundamental has changed. Privately, though, most have reached the same conclusion as senior European political officials: that the United States can no longer be counted on to come to Europe’s defense. And if that is true when it comes to conventional defense, it is even more true with respect to the nuclear guarantee. That leaves Europe facing questions it has never had to ask before. What if Russia attacked NATO territory and Washington told Europe it was on its own? How would nonnuclear allies stand up to a nuclear-armed Russia? What if Moscow used nuclear threats, implicit or explicit, to try to force Europe to end its support for Ukraine? None of these scenarios are far-fetched. Russia has issued veiled nuclear threats against Europe repeatedly since 2022, most recently in September, after NATO conducted air exercises above northeastern Poland, near Kaliningrad.

FOOL’S BARGAINS

Three options have begun to emerge to fill the gap created by the change in U.S. policy. Washington favors reestablishing the nuclear bargain with a new distribution of responsibilities, which it calls NATO 3.0. “We will continue to provide the U.S. extended nuclear deterrent,” Colby told NATO defense ministers earlier this year, “with Europe taking the lead for its conventional defense.” The United States has even suggested that it might be willing to expand its nuclear umbrella by extending its nuclear sharing arrangements to other countries (Poland, for instance) and developing a next-generation nuclear bomb for potential deployment in Europe.

But this option ignores the core problem. The Trump administration has done nothing to convince its allies that the United States remains committed to NATO other than saying so. No additional weapons deployments can compensate for the central implication that U.S. security commitments to European allies are now conditional on political loyalty.

A second option would end the nuclear bargain altogether. In its place, European countries would acquire their own nuclear weapons. The clearest statement of this idea came in March 2025, when Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk told the country’s parliament that “we would be safer if we had our own nuclear arsenal, that is beyond doubt.” A year later, he told his cabinet that Poland would “strive to prepare . . . for the most autonomous actions possible” on nuclear security. And Poland isn’t the only country thinking seriously about this option. In Sweden, some politicians have invoked the country’s secret nuclear program during the 1960s to indicate their interest in pursuing a national option. Even in Germany, where discussions of defense have historically been constrained by its own history, a Bundeswehr general argued publicly earlier this year that Germany “needs its own tactical nuclear weapons,” an assertion that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. Similar ideas are being voiced in Asia, especially in South Korea, raising the prospect of a cascade of allied proliferation.

U.S. security commitments to Europe are now conditional on political loyalty.

In theory, if more European countries acquired nuclear weapons, it could resolve the extended deterrence dilemma. In practice, it isn’t a workable solution. It would take many years for Poland, Sweden, or even Germany to develop independent nuclear deterrents. European nuclearization would break the Nonproliferation Treaty architecture that the original 1960s U.S.-European nuclear bargain was built to protect, and it could set off a nuclear arms race that could make Europe less, not more, secure. A strategy designed to bolster deterrence would end up weakening the very alliance structure it aimed to strengthen.

As an alternative to these two options, France has spearheaded a third approach that would aim to replace, or at least augment, the U.S. umbrella. French President Emmanuel Macron proposed this solution in a speech in March 2026, announcing a “forward deterrence” initiative that would include European allies in nuclear training exercises, temporarily forward-deploy French nuclear-capable aircraft on allied soil, and host extensive nuclear discussions with participating countries. So far, ten European countries have joined the initiative by establishing bilateral nuclear steering groups to discuss French nuclear strategy and how its evolution could enhance their security.

The Macron proposal represents a major evolution in French thinking by explicitly extending France’s vital interests to include the security of its European partners. Paris’s willingness to engage European neighbors in direct talks about nuclear issues is welcome. But there are real drawbacks to such an initiative. In his announcement, Macron reiterated the long-standing “four nos” that underpin France’s defense doctrine: no joint decisions on nuclear use, no joint nuclear planning, no shared definition of French vital interests, and no nuclear guarantee “in the strict sense of the term.” The framework’s reliance on bilateral discussions also weakens the idea that Europe’s defense ought to be a collective NATO effort.

And crucially, France’s nuclear doctrine—which allows for a warning shot, followed by a devastating response if the warning fails to deter the adversary—gives it fewer options for managing conflict than does NATO’s more flexible strategy, which allows for gradual escalation. This narrower range of options could make its nuclear threats less credible in a conflict over an ally’s security. In the end, the French proposal would add a measure of reassurance and deterrence, but not enough to overcome the voids created by the change in U.S. policy.

MUTUALLY ASSURED PROTECTION

None of the three options now being discussed resolve Europe’s extended nuclear deterrence dilemma. But elements of all three point to a possible solution. NATO needs to bolster both the European and the U.S. legs of its nuclear deterrence posture, bring France into its nuclear consultation and planning structures, and extend the existing nuclear sharing arrangements to incorporate additional members. These tasks will require NATO members, especially its three nuclear powers, to make significant adjustments to their existing beliefs and policies. The alternative is not the status quo—which is already unsustainable, given the nature of the Russian threat and the changes in U.S. policy—but rapid nuclear proliferation.

NATO countries will need to agree to three major adjustments in their nuclear posture: in the number and kind of weapons deployed, in how nuclear and nonnuclear NATO members consult one another, and in the alliance’s doctrine for using nuclear weapons. First, NATO nuclear powers need to modernize their nuclear forces. The United States should replace the B-61 gravity bomb, which will be difficult to use effectively against heavily defended targets, with a stand-off missile that can reach deep into Russian territory from NATO airspace. Such a modernization is long overdue. In addition, European nations should agree to develop a long-range missile that could be outfitted with a nuclear warhead developed jointly by France and the United Kingdom. The missile should be financed by European countries and be deployable on aircraft owned and operated by nonnuclear allies. Finally, these new U.S. and European nuclear capabilities need to be based in a wider range of NATO countries, expanding European participation in the nuclear deterrent mission.

Changes to hardware are necessary to restore the credibility of Europe’s nuclear deterrence. But the software of consultation needs to be at the core of the effort, as it was in the 1960s. Back then, France refused to join the NATO consensus and withdrew from the integrated military command structure. Even when it returned, in 2009, its nuclear deterrent remained fully independent, and it did not join the Nuclear Planning Group. That insistence on independence is what led Paris to pursue bilateral nuclear arrangements this year. But these parallel bilateral discussions not only create confusion and distrust about Paris’s true intentions among dialogue partners; they also fail to foster the cohesion that could come from a collective European nuclear deterrence dialogue.

The security of Europe and the United States is, in fact, indivisible.

Put simply, Paris needs to join the NPG. Doing so would not automatically place its nuclear capabilities under NATO command and control. But it would give European partners a better understanding of French thinking and afford France more knowledge of European requirements for deterrence and reassurance. European NPG members could agree to meet regularly without the United States to discuss how to integrate the new European nuclear missile forces into NATO’s nuclear strategy. For many years, countries hosting U.S. nuclear forces have met separately from other NATO members in the NPG; a similar, European-only caucus would build on that precedent.

The third necessary adjustment needs to be doctrinal. One element of NATO’s nuclear doctrine cannot change: that the ultimate decision to use nuclear weapons will always reside with the nuclear powers, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States. These decisions cannot be delegated. And national nuclear deterrents will continue to be guided by national doctrine, not subject to NATO control. If France wants to retain its one-warning-shot escalatory doctrine, it can do so, even after it joins the NPG. But it would need to explain how this doctrine would reassure allies and enhance deterrence. At the same time, France’s participation in the NPG and the addition of the new European nuclear missile force would expand Europe’s influence over the development of NATO nuclear strategy. And it would confront Moscow with the reality that the decision to use nuclear weapons in Europe’s defense no longer rests in Washington’s hands alone.

These are major posture adjustments that will require significant changes in policy and perspective. Washington will have to accept that the deployment of additional European nuclear forces means it can no longer dictate NATO’s nuclear policy and strategy—including, ultimately, the decision to use nuclear weapons. Paris, meanwhile, must accept more integration into NATO. London will need to extend its nuclear cooperation with the United States to France, develop a second nuclear system (in addition to its submarine force), and find the resources necessary to design and build a new warhead in collaboration with France. Nonnuclear European countries will have to agree to finance the development and procurement of new missile systems and possibly airplanes (although not nuclear warheads, which would violate their treaty commitments). They must also collectively finance security, communications, and other upgrades to enable the expanded deployment of dual-capable aircraft. Most important, these nonnuclear allies would need to reiterate their commitment to forgoing nuclear weapons of their own, reaffirming the essential bargain that was cemented 60 years ago.

None of this will happen quickly or easily. It will require London, Paris, and Washington to give up an element of control over their nuclear arsenals that each has jealously guarded for more than 60 years. But the alternatives are worse. The security of Europe and the United States is, in fact, indivisible, no matter what the current administration in Washington may believe. If Europe were left to fend for itself and nuclear weapons spread from capital to capital, Americans would be less safe, not more. Yet U.S. retrenchment is also real, and no amount of reassurance from Washington will restore the credibility of a nuclear guarantee that Europeans have come to doubt. With the United States pulling back, a new bargain in which Europe carries more of the nuclear burden and has more say in the choice to use these weapons is the only way to ensure transatlantic security.

Ukraine Can Turn Imminent Peril to Its Advantage

Eric Ciaramella — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 08:00:00 GMT

Ukraine is facing its most precarious moment since the early days of the war. Since late July, Russia has used its growing stockpile of ballistic missiles and a new generation of jet-powered drones to dramatically intensify its long-range attacks. It is now targeting Ukrainian population centers all over the country, with a focus on logistics, transportation, and commercial infrastructure. According to Ukrainian intelligence reports, the Russian government is planning an even more intense campaign against energy and water supplies this winter in an attempt to decisively break Ukraine’s economy and society.

On October 9, U.S. President Donald Trump seemed to make Ukraine’s situation even more perilous when he announced a deal with Moscow to unilaterally lift sanctions on Russian diesel and called on Ukraine to suspend strikes on Russian oil refineries. Those strikes have been one of Ukraine’s most potent forms of counterpressure in recent months. But Trump’s unexpected announcement is not necessarily a major setback for Ukraine. It comes amid a broader shift by the Trump administration in recent weeks to move away from pursuing an elusive comprehensive peace agreement in favor of a mutual cease-fire on strikes against energy infrastructure—a shift that could ultimately be beneficial to Kyiv. Moreover, in his angry retort to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s criticism of the diesel deal, Trump revealed a potential way forward: as long as Ukraine stopped hitting Russian refineries, the president said, “you can do whatever you want to Russia.”

Ukraine should take Trump at his word. If upheld by Moscow as well as Kyiv, an energy cease-fire would be a crucial step toward containing the war. Framed in the right way, it would also leave open other forms of pressure by Ukraine that could help compel Russian compliance. Ideally, a reciprocal halt in long-range air and missile attacks could then be replicated across other sectors—maritime, commercial, and transportation—thus forming the basis of a broader aerial cease-fire.

Thus far, Russian President Vladimir Putin has given no indication that he is prepared to halt or even curtail his strike campaign. He sees the widespread destruction of Ukrainian cities and infrastructure as his most direct path to victory. But Putin is also under pressure from the widening war. In part, his accelerating air campaign reflects weakness on the frontlines, where Russia has achieved negligible progress throughout 2026 and Ukraine has even begun to make some gains in the Donbas. Russia also faces growing costs at home from Ukraine’s long-range strikes, which have disrupted energy and commercial infrastructure and heightened public anxiety over a prolonged war.

The United States and Europe can capitalize on Russia’s mounting challenges if they allow Ukraine to apply targeted pressure to convince Moscow to agree to pause or significantly limit its reckless air campaign. To be effective, this approach needs to be combined with focused diplomacy aimed at that specific objective. In fact, there are tools available for this purpose, and the barriers to putting them quickly into play are far more surmountable than has been commonly recognized.

The key will be credibly signaling that critical Russian military and economic assets will be at risk if Russian forces continue pummeling Ukraine’s civilian economy and society. Only then might Putin conclude that his current approach has reached the point of diminishing returns—and then pivot, as he has done at other junctures in the war. At the same time, this diplomatic play must be hitched to a broader effort by Kyiv’s Western partners to help it urgently shore up its air defenses and finances ahead of winter. Such a strategy may not immediately succeed, but failing to try would all but ensure that Ukraine suffers an extraordinary degree of damage that will be much harder to reverse.

PRESSURE POINTS

The Trump administration’s repeated failure to advance its stated goal of brokering peace between Russia and Ukraine has led many observers to write off diplomacy as a waste of time. Over the past 21 months, the Trump administration has gotten nowhere in its attempts to mediate a comprehensive peace settlement. Russia’s war aims and Ukraine’s requirements—on such thorny issues as territory, Ukrainian security arrangements, and Russia’s future relations with the West—are simply too far apart. Washington also missed opportunities to build meaningful leverage over Russia, instead lavishly courting it with potential commercial deals and other incentives while pressuring Kyiv to accept Moscow’s conditions.

Yet that experience has helped drive the administration’s current efforts to achieve more plausible and narrowly defined goals. Following their visits to Moscow and Kyiv in early September, Trump’s envoys, Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, pivoted toward a more limited energy cease-fire. Since then, the president has also reiterated his support for such a deal. Trump’s interest in an energy cease-fire is largely self-serving—he has attributed spikes in fuel prices to Ukraine’s strikes on Russian oil refineries—but this shift could serve Kyiv well, especially if it becomes the basis for a coordinated drive to secure broader reciprocal limits on air and missile attacks.

The core challenge is convincing Russia to embrace such an agreement. To date, Putin has rejected calls for restrictions on aerial strikes of any sort. He views the damage he is inflicting on Ukraine as outstripping the pain Russia is sustaining from Kyiv’s attacks. But the United States and European countries have several ways to change this calculus. Crucially, the United States and Europe must enable Ukraine to strike missile launchers and other military targets inside Russia—or at least allow it to credibly threaten to do so. Thus far, Ukraine has largely focused its long-range attacks on energy infrastructure, because targeting Russia’s hardened military installations and mobile launch systems is technically much more complicated. But it is exactly these harder-to-replace assets that Putin is most concerned about losing.

An energy cease-fire would be a crucial step toward containing the war.

In fact, it would not be difficult for the United States to facilitate strikes on military assets. For months, Ukraine has pressed the Trump administration and the SpaceX CEO Elon Musk to enable Starlink access over a swath of Russian territory opposite the Ukrainian border from which most ballistic missiles are launched. Kyiv needs such access to allow its drone teams to target mobile launchers. As soon as Ukraine acquires this ability, Russia would likely be compelled to pull the rest of these systems farther away from the border, thereby considerably reducing the ballistic threat to Ukraine. Thus far, Trump and Musk have both deflected Ukraine’s request—each one claiming the decision rests with the other. But neither has foreclosed greenlighting such access.

Kyiv’s case for acquiring Starlink access over Russia might be more persuasive if Ukrainian officials focused on how it could be deployed as negotiating leverage, as part of a wider U.S.-led diplomatic strategy to secure an aerial cease-fire—especially if it were an element of an agreement with Washington to refrain from striking Russian oil refineries. Specifically, Trump could authorize access without public fanfare while signaling to Moscow that he is doing so only until an aerial cease-fire is in place. There is reason to think such a tactic would succeed. Earlier this year, Musk worked with Ukraine to create a registration system that effectively limited Starlink use to Ukrainian drone operators, a step that for a short period sent Russian forces into operational disarray along the front. Washington missed a chance to exploit that moment of Russian weakness to push Moscow toward a tactical de-escalation, however, because U.S. attention shifted just weeks later to the war against Iran.

The German government has a similar card to play. Kyiv has long sought to get Germany’s Taurus air-launched cruise missile, which would allow it to target fixed sites hundreds of miles into Russia, such as defense plants that produce jet-powered drones and ballistic missiles. Thus far, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has resisted sending the Taurus system to Ukraine, arguing that it would be escalatory and would require a level of on-site technical assistance that would make German forces party to the conflict. But Merz might be persuaded to relent—or at least to authorize Ukrainian troops to start training on the system—if he believed that doing so would create momentum toward an aerial cease-fire, ideally in lockstep with a move from Trump on Starlink. In turn, other European partners could also contribute to such a plan by leaning in more with intelligence and technical expertise to enable Ukraine to target launchers inside Russia.

EUROS AND PATRIOTS

Any such leveraged diplomacy, of course, will depend on Ukraine’s partners showing that they remain committed to addressing Ukraine’s immediate war needs and that Russia will not succeed in its stepped-up campaign to break the country this winter. And this means having a coherent immediate strategy for shoring up both Kyiv’s air defenses and its economy, irrespective of U.S. involvement or support.

Above all is the question of Patriot interceptors. For Ukraine, the Patriot’s PAC-3 variant is by far the most effective protection against Russian ballistic missile attacks. Yet Kyiv’s stockpile has dried up as the United States husbands an arsenal that has been significantly depleted by the Iran war. Kyiv’s European partners have been scouring the world for Patriot missiles but have so far been unable to meet Ukraine’s modest request of 300 interceptors to get through the winter. Countries with robust Patriot stocks, such as Greece, Japan, South Korea, and Spain, have been reluctant to transfer them to Ukraine for a variety of security and legal reasons.

Here, Europe should take a page from an earlier U.S. playbook. During the Biden administration, U.S. officials cajoled recalcitrant partners and engineered creative multiparty swaps and backfill agreements—many of them subsidized by the United States—to free up critical munitions for Ukraine. For example, the United States bought 155-millimeter artillery shells from South Korea and PAC-3 interceptors from Japan to backfill American munitions for Ukraine. This time around, Ukraine can finance the purchases itself through the loan package it is receiving from the EU.

On the economic front, Ukraine’s most acute needs could be met if the EU agreed to frontload the disbursement of the tranches of its 90 billion euro loan that are scheduled for next year. EU leaders have made clear that Kyiv must first meet Brussels’ reform conditions to secure the tranches of the loan already promised this year. But the EU will also most likely need to find additional resources because the loan itself, expected to last through 2027, will fall short of meeting Ukraine’s needs.

In August, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, and Sweden again proposed the option of tapping into Russia’s frozen sovereign assets, an estimated $240 billion of which reside in the EU, mostly in the Belgium-based financial services company Euroclear. The legal and political obstacles to taking custody of those assets for onward transfer to Ukraine may be too formidable to resolve in time to help Kyiv in the coming year. But Ukraine’s partners have come up with creative solutions in the past. In 2024, the G-7 designed a $50 billion loan to be serviced by the future windfall profits generated by the frozen Russian assets. The EU’s 90 billion euro loan is another creative example: it is financed from EU borrowing on capital markets, to be repaid by Ukraine only if Russia pays reparations; otherwise, the EU has reserved the right to reimburse itself with the frozen Russian assets. The EU and likeminded partners—notably Canada, Japan, and the United Kingdom—can revisit and expand both mechanisms to generate additional funding for Ukraine while steering clear of political poison pills.

COORDINATED COERCION

Ultimately, each of these steps needs to be coordinated to have maximum influence on Putin’s thinking. The fact that the Trump administration invited top European officials to join last week’s talks with Ukrainian negotiators in Miami is a sign that such transatlantic coordination is possible, even if Washington’s ties with Europe are otherwise strained. On the other hand, reports that the Trump administration has threatened to cut off intelligence support and supplies of air defense missiles and other critical munitions for Ukraine underscore the reality that Washington is at best a capricious interlocutor. In any case, European leaders who have constructive working relations with the White House, such as Finnish President Alexander Stubb, should continue arguing that granting Starlink access, among other steps to pressure Moscow, would advance Trump’s stated aim of de-escalating the conflict.

Putin is committed to his overall war aims, and no amount of external pressure is likely to force him to abandon those. But he is an opportunist and has shown himself adept at making tactical adjustments in pursuit of his broader ambitions. In early 2022, he gave up his ground attack on Kyiv when it became evident that it would fail. Later, he pulled the Black Sea Fleet away from Ukraine’s shores after Kyiv proved it could sink valuable Russian naval assets; in 2022, he also entered the Black Sea Grain Initiative, which for nearly a year allowed the safe passage of grain shipments from Ukrainian ports and was brokered by the United Nations and Turkey, under pressure from African nations suffering from grain shortages.

For Putin, these were not goodwill gestures but measures of self-preservation designed to advance his broader aim of subjugating Ukraine. With the right kind of leverage applied by the United States and Europe, there is no reason to assume he would rule out a similar pullback from attacks on Ukrainian civilian populations and economic infrastructure. He would be even more inclined to view an aerial cease-fire as advantageous if he saw an expansion of Ukraine’s ability to upend life in Russia’s major population centers—a goal Kyiv no doubt is intent on pursuing, as shown by its effective recent strikes on Russian data centers.

Of course, there is the possibility that, even faced with these new costs, Putin will still refuse to budge. But in that scenario, enabling Ukraine to target Russian missile launchers and defense production sites—combined with continued economic pressure—will be even more essential to helping Ukraine counter Russian escalation. In addition to relieving immediate pressure on Ukrainian cities by making it harder for Russia to launch strikes, it will also undercut Russia’s military capacity. That would be beneficial even if it falls short of containing the air war.

Paradoxically, the adaptability that has enabled many of Putin’s successes also gives Kyiv and the West more space to maneuver than they realize. Trump, Zelensky, and European leaders need to organize their actions in a way that relieves pressure on the Ukrainian economy while showing growing willingness to exploit critical Russian vulnerabilities. Only then might Putin consider that he is better off making a tactical adjustment—in this case, agreeing to an aerial cease-fire—than maintaining the present course. He would do so not to concede but to find a more effective way to achieve his broader aims. In that adjustment period, Kyiv and its partners will gain urgently needed breathing space to regroup, fortify, and prepare for the next round.

The Middle East’s Quiet Liberal Revolution

Mansoor Moaddel — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 08:00:00 GMT

The idea that the Middle East is becoming more liberal may sound counterintuitive. Nearly 50 years ago, a revolution in Iran dismantled the country’s secular order and ushered in an absolutist clerical regime grounded in Shiite fundamentalism whose battle cry was “Death to America.” The region has since been an incubator for numerous terrorist attacks in Europe and North America, insurgent movements committed to authoritarian theocracy, and repressive regimes that subjugate women, crush free expression, and marginalize minorities. By now, it might seem easy to conclude that Middle Eastern societies are simply less interested in liberalism—that they are governed by a fundamentally different, more religiously oriented “regime of truth,” as the philosopher Michel Foucault declared in 1978 about the uprising in Iran. In this view, a system of rule in which fundamentalists claim authority to define the faith as they see fit—subordinating individual liberty to religious diktats, promoting male supremacy, and imposing restrictive dress codes on women—will forever distinguish the region from the West.

But this assessment mistakes the consequences of domination for its causes. Beneath the authoritarian entrenchment, another history has been unfolding. Between 2000 and 2020, I supervised a series of surveys in the Middle East, conducting face-to-face interviews with representative samplings of people in five key countries to understand why citizens hold the values they do and to track shifts in those values. To varying degrees, respondents in these countries—Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Saudia Arabia, and Turkey—expressed an increasing preference for liberal values, even as their rulers sought to suppress popular demands for democratic change. (We focused on these countries because their size and political importance made them valuable cases for testing sociological theories.)

The survey queried respondents about a broad range of values, but we sought to capture their attitudes toward liberal values with 15 questions covering three dimensions: expressive individualism, gender equality, and secular politics. Expressive individualism was measured by a preference for marrying for love rather than parental approval, independence and imagination over obedience and religious faith as desirable qualities in children, and the right of women to dress as they wish. Views on gender equality were elicited through questions on polygamy, wifely obedience, and giving priority to men in politics, the job market, and education. Perspectives on secular politics were assessed through queries about separating religion from politics; Western-style governance; Islamic government; and sharia law. We then combined the responses to generate a “liberalism index” score of 1 to 4 for each population in each survey, with higher scores indicating greater support for liberalism.

These indices showed significant increases in liberalism, although the magnitude of the change differed by domain and country. Support for Islamic government and sharia generally declined across the region. Among Iranians, there has been a growing demand for the separation of religion and politics, for gender equality, and for freedom of dress. These changing values have translated into political action, most notably in the Woman, Life, Freedom movement of 2022 and the nationwide protests of 2025–26, when tens of thousands of protesters were reported to have been killed by the Islamic Republic’s security forces. In Egypt, the proportion of respondents who considered Islamic government to be “very good” fell from 25 percent in 2011 to 16 percent in 2020; the share who felt sharia law was “very important” declined from 28 percent to 18 percent. Among Iraqi respondents, the proportion that strongly supported Islamic government and sharia law fell from 30 and 34 percent, respectively, in 2004 to 15 and 14 percent in 2011.

Although many survey questions on forms of government were excluded in Saudi Arabia because of political sensitivities, surveys in that country captured significant changes: the proportion of respondents who considered it very important to implement sharia law fell from 73 percent in 2003 to 35 percent in 2011. On gender equality, meanwhile, the share who strongly agreed that university education is more important for boys than for girls declined significantly, especially among Egyptians (from 15 percent in 2001 to eight percent in 2020) and Iraqis (from 29 percent in 2004 to eight percent in 2011—a level that remained unchanged, on average, in 2021–22, according to the research group Arab Barometer).

A more fine-grained look at the results in individual countries suggests that the experience of religious domination itself may have fed, rather than foreclosed, a desire for a responsive political order. It can take time for popular ideas to reshape a society’s governing institutions. Yet Middle Eastern history shows that shifts in values can be crucial in bringing about changes in social and political organization. The rise of liberal nationalist movements in Egypt, Syria, and Iran in the early twentieth century, for example, was preceded by the emergence of liberal and nationalist ideologies decades earlier. The same pattern is evident in the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in the 1960s and 1970s, which culminated in the establishment of Islamic regimes and the spread of Islamist extremism.

A STEADY SHIFT

Between 2000 and 2020, we conducted five surveys in Egypt, three in Iran, seven in Iraq, two in Saudi Arabia, and three in Turkey. We also considered specific findings in surveys conducted after 2011 in Iraq by Arab Barometer and in Iran by the World Values Survey in 2020, in which the questions mirrored our own. These data reveal a striking contrast between political developments and public opinion: even as the Arab Spring was smothered in its cradle, jihadist movements terrorized the region, Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan pursued dreams of Ottoman revivalism, Iran’s supreme leader sought to cast the country as the center of a Shiite-led axis of resistance, and Saudi leaders defended Sunni sectarianism, publics in each of these key Middle Eastern countries increasingly favored liberal values.

For instance, Egypt’s liberalism index rating rose from 2.09 to 2.28 among men and from 2.08 to 2.39 among women. The most striking change was a surge in support for separating religion and politics and for adopting a Western style of government. Respondents were asked whether they strongly agreed, agreed, disagreed, or strongly disagreed that Egypt would be a better place if religion and politics were separated and if its government resembled those of Western countries. The percentage that strongly agreed or agreed with separating religion and politics rose from 44 percent in 2007, when we first asked the question, to 56 percent in 2011, 82 percent in 2016, and 81 percent in 2020. Support for Western-style government increased from 30 percent in 2007 to 37 percent in 2011, 55 percent in 2016, and 82 percent in 2020.

To understand these shifts, we interviewed a sampling of panel respondents whose views had changed between 2011 and 2020. Among those who remembered their earlier responses, a large majority attributed their newfound support for separating religion from politics to disillusionment with the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist movement whose candidate won Egypt’s 2012 presidential election. Those who had come to favor Western models of governance cited the economic prosperity of Western countries and hoped that the adoption of similar institutions would bring comparable prosperity to Egypt. Egyptians’ support for gender equality and expressive individualism also increased, albeit more modestly.

Turkish popular opinion also shifted significantly toward liberal values. Between 2013 and 2020, Turkey’s liberalism index rose from 2.64 to 2.88 among men and from 2.70 to 2.91 among women. In both Egypt and Turkey, liberal values expanded more broadly among women than men. But whereas the liberal shift in Egypt was especially pronounced in attitudes toward secular politics, in Turkey the largest shifts toward liberal views related to views of gender equality and expressive individualism.

These liberalizing trends unfolded even as Erdogan pursued an increasingly authoritarian, Islamist political project. Erdogan’s appointment as prime minister in 2003 after a ballot-box triumph by his Justice and Development Party was initially hailed as a sign that a form of Islamism could coexist with democracy. But he would eventually abandon any real commitment to democratic governance, dismantling institutional checks and balances and forcing a 2017 constitutional referendum that entrenched his power. Erdogan’s attempt to foster an Ottoman-style pan-Islamism appears to have accelerated liberalization rather than strengthened religious conformity.

An important indication of this process is the shift in Turkish respondents’ self-identification toward nation rather than religion under Erdogan, alongside a decline in mosque attendance. In 2001, 64 percent of respondents identified primarily as Muslim, and only 34 percent identified foremost as Turkish citizens. By 2013, these figures had shifted to 39 and 44 percent, respectively; in 2016, they stood at 36 and 53 percent, and by 2020, at 24 percent for Muslim identity and 63 percent for Turkish citizenship. Mosque attendance also declined over this period: the proportion of respondents who reported attending a mosque more than once a week fell from 19 percent in 2001 to 16 percent in 2013 and then to just 11 percent in 2020. Given that mosque attendance was already declining before Erdogan came to power, his initial appeal may have owed less to religious conservatism than to his record as mayor of Istanbul and widespread frustration with Turkey’s secular political establishment. But our survey respondents’ subsequent shift toward national identity, coupled with a further decline in mosque attendance, suggest that Erdogan’s turn toward authoritarianism may have intensified an ongoing trend toward liberalization.

RELIGIOUS RECOIL

It may seem an irony of history that the very forces seeking to discredit liberalism have helped generate support for it. But conventional explanations emphasizing liberalism’s association with economic development and the rise of a middle class cannot fully account for ideological shifts. A given class may embrace liberalism under one set of historical conditions and illiberalism under another. (For instance, liberal values in early-twentieth-century Egypt were supported by the new middle class, the effendiyya, but later, the same class came to favor the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood.) Rather, ideas acquire meaning in opposition to other ideas that dominate society. This contestation takes place through philosophical debates, religious disputations, and public discussions, whether direct or indirect, open or clandestine. When a constellation of ideas comes to occupy a dominant position in a society, it simultaneously becomes a target of contestation and a catalyst for the production of ideas. A yearning for political equality tends to arise in opposition to authoritarian power, just as demands for gender equality emerge in reaction to patriarchal institutions, the desire to express one’s individuality in response to familial or communal constraints, and the demand for freedom of dress in defiance of restrictive sartorial regulations.

The Middle East’s interest in liberal values—that is, the value of separating religion from politics, the celebration of individual judgment, and the recognition of the individual rather than a collective as the fundamental unit of a political community—appears to have developed in recent decades in opposition to Islamic fundamentalism and its coercive regulation of conduct. Restrictions on women’s mobility in Saudi Arabia and dress regulations imposed on Iranian women, for example, made the exercise of religious control over individual conduct especially visible. Resistance to specific limits such as these can help foster a wider conviction that political power should not arbitrarily determine matters properly belonging to individual judgment.

This process is evident in Egypt and Turkey, where declining mosque attendance has accompanied the growing appeal of liberal values, particularly secularism. In Egypt, average mosque attendance (scored on a range of 1 to 4) fell from 2.65 in 2011 to 2.30 in 2020, while in Turkey, it declined from 1.96 in 2013 to 1.82 in 2020. It is striking that Iran and Saudi Arabia, both governed by Islamic regimes, recorded the lowest levels of mosque attendance among the countries we surveyed in the early 2000s, with an average of 1.86 in each country. In Iran, this figure declined over time, reaching 1.79 in 2020.

Religious coercion has contributed to the rise of militant liberalism among Iranians. The Islamic Republic has faced sustained opposition for more than three decades: first, the reformist movement of the 1990s; then, the Green Movement of 2009; and, more recently, the nationwide protests after the 2022 death of Mahsa Amini, a young woman who died in police custody after being arrested for allegedly violating compulsory veiling rules. Over time, the objectives of this opposition have shifted from reforming the regime to challenging its authority. Although the regime has retreated from enforcing compulsory veiling, the opposition movement has continued to radicalize. The revolutionary movement of early 2026 expressed a growing determination to liberate the country from the authoritarian rule of the Islamic Republic itself.

Authoritarian conditions may lead people to conceal their true preferences in surveys. Nonetheless, the data reveal a marked decline in Iranians’ religious attachment over the past two decades. The proportion of survey respondents who considered religious faith an important quality for children to possess fell from 71 percent in 2000 to 55 percent in 2020. Similarly, the share of Iranians who expressed “a great deal of” confidence in religious institutions dropped from 59 percent to 36 percent. Religious intolerance also declined sharply: the proportion of respondents who said they would not want members of other faiths as neighbors fell from 80 percent in 2000 to 34 percent in 2020.

A 2022 survey of approximately 20,000 Iranians conducted by GAMAAN, a research foundation based in the Netherlands that focuses on Iran, further illustrates this shift. Fully 88 percent of respondents expressed favorable attitudes toward democracy, while 67 percent held negative views of a government based on sharia. A secular republic or constitutional monarchy was preferred by 53 percent, compared with just 22 percent favoring an Islamic government.

In Iraq, the 2003 U.S. invasion appears to have contributed to a rise in Iraqi nationalism and a stronger sense of national identity. Respondents were asked, “Which of the following best describes you above all: (1) I am an Iraqi; (2) I am a Muslim; (3) I am an Arab; (4) I am a Kurd; or (5) other?” The share identifying primarily as Iraqi rose from 23 percent in 2004 to 68 percent in 2020. Attachment to a shared national community, rather than to religious or ethnic identity alone, is an important component of liberal citizenship. The sectarian violence that followed the invasion appears to have convinced Iraqis of the importance of both national solidarity and separating religion from politics. The share of Iraqi respondents who agreed that religion and politics should be separated rose from 54 percent in 2004 to 76 percent in 2008, before falling to 69 percent in 2013–14 and rising again to 80 percent in 2018.

The parallel increases in support for secular politics and a sense of national identity are unlikely to be accidental. Sectarian violence made religious mobilization increasingly unattractive, while foreign occupation provoked an awareness of Iraqi nationhood. After 2014, the expansion of Iran’s meddling in Iraq may have additionally driven national solidarity.

READY FOR CHANGE

Even if governance in these Middle Eastern regimes does not yet clearly reflect a shift toward liberal values, it may in the near future. After all, ideas drive history—and they have clearly done so in the Middle East. The formation of modern secular states in Egypt, Iran, and Turkey in the early twentieth century was preceded, in the late nineteenth century, by a rise in the popularity of liberalism, constitutionalism, nationalism, and secularism. The subsequent emergence of Arab nationalist governments in Egypt, Iraq, Libya, and Syria from 1952 to 1969 was likewise heavily influenced by the pan-Arab nationalist ideology formulated several decades earlier by Sati al-Husri, a Syrian thinker, and Darwish al-Miqdadi, a Palestinian educator. The late-twentieth-century rise of Islamic states and movements followed an earlier ideological transformation in the opposite direction, as secular projects lost legitimacy and political Islam gained influence.

Egypt and Iraq illustrate how changing social values can reshape politics in different ways. In Egypt, disillusionment with the Muslim Brotherhood appears to have weakened the appeal of political Islam as an alternative to authoritarian rule, while growing support for secular politics and Western-style government points toward a broader rejection of the country’s established authoritarian ideologies. Such attitudes do not by themselves produce democracy, but they may create the foundations of a future democratic movement. And because liberal values have spread more extensively among women than men, they may encourage greater female participation in political life. In Iraq, by contrast, growing support for secular politics could strengthen movements that appeal to territorial nationalism as an alternative to sectarian mobilization.

The spread of liberal values among ordinary people does not guarantee political liberalization. Yet the political alternatives that once dominated the region have lost their capacity to command popular allegiance. This has important implications for how outsiders view the Middle East. For decades, Western democracies have often treated Middle Eastern politics as a choice between a stable authoritarian rule and political Islam. This binary no longer represents the preferences of the region’s citizens. And the rise of liberal values in the Middle East should not be understood simply as a result of Western cultural influence. The liberal awareness documented here has emerged from distinctly regional experiences: religious authoritarianism has exposed the dangers of mixing sacred and political authority in the same institutions, sectarian violence has made national citizenship more attractive, patriarchal regulation has accelerated demands for gender equality, and restrictions on speech, belief, and the body have boosted the appeal of individual autonomy. Liberalism has gained ground in response to the failure of the political projects that preceded it, most significantly the rise of religious regimes, the persistence of religious monopolies, and the maltreatment of the human body, particularly of women. Even where efforts to build democratic institutions have faltered, as after the Arab Spring, liberal ideas have nonetheless persisted and expanded.

Although support for liberal democracy appears to be in retreat in parts of the West, the history of democracy is far from over. The Middle East has already experimented with Arab nationalism, state socialism, secular authoritarianism, monarchy, military rule, and political Islam. None of these experiments have offered political accountability, legitimate governance, or economic prosperity. Liberalism’s next chapter may arise in societies that have experienced the failure of alternatives firsthand. The important question now is not whether the Middle East is ready for democracy but whether its political institutions can keep pace with growing public support for individual rights and freedoms—and whether democracies outside the region are willing to acknowledge and back its people’s democratic aspirations.

Editor’s Note

The data used in this article were collected with support from several grants from the National Science Foundation and the Office of Naval Research.

A Democratic Reckoning in India

Pratap Bhanu Mehta — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 08:00:00 GMT

India is in rebellion. At stake is the very future of the country’s democracy and the potential of its renewal. The mass protests that have unfolded in Delhi since July and flared again this month are nothing less than a contest over the foundations of the Indian state and whether it lives up to its constitutional commitments.

Demonstrations began in the summer as students decried perceived unfairness in the country’s examination system. They have now widened to a struggle over the integrity of India’s elections, after authorities began to purge over 130 million people from draft voting lists over the last year. Many of those stripped from the electoral rolls are appealing their removal—an often laborious process—but the possibility of mass disenfranchisement is real. Tens of thousands of mostly young people have taken to the streets in Delhi in the past week, with protests now spreading to other major cities. The demonstrators are demanding the resignation of India’s chief election commissioner and questioning the credibility of India’s ostensibly independent institutions. And they are holding Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi directly responsible, accusing him of “stealing democracy.” In their rejection of the country’s current trajectory, the protests pose the most significant challenge to Modi’s authority since the prime minister came to power in 2014.

The main opposition parties, which have never come close to dislodging Modi in national parliamentary elections, put up a united front under Rahul Gandhi, the leader of the Congress party, and an impressive show of force at a rally in Delhi on October 12. But the real heart of the protest is the intense political energy and inventiveness shown by Gen Z students. These young people have defied prohibitions on protest, breached draconian security clampdowns, and endured detentions to relentlessly question the government’s authority.

The government, for its part, also sees this confrontation as an existential battle. This is evident in its determination to contain the protests, deploying over 40,000 security personnel, closing down metro and train stations, barricading central Delhi, suspending mobile Internet, and detaining over 7,000 people. It has doggedly defended the chief of the Election Commission and it has refused to talk to the opposition or the youthful protesters about their demands.

Modi is in no danger of falling; this will not be a rerun of recent Gen Z protests in neighboring Bangladesh and Nepal that successfully toppled governments. But the Indian government faces a subtler danger: its writ no longer carries unequivocal sway. A strongman such as Modi likes to project unquestioned personal authority. Since 2014, his ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has consolidated and centralized power to an unprecedented degree. For the government, the open defiance of young people—who come from all class, religious, and caste backgrounds and cannot easily be dismissed or stigmatized as belonging to an “antinational” group—is an unprecedented challenge. It makes the Modi government’s once adamantine grip on power seem more fragile. The future of Indian democracy hinges on whether this contest opens up more democratic space or leads to greater repression.

THE PROMISE OF EQUALITY

Modern India is founded on two legitimizing institutions: elections and exams. Since its independence in 1947, India has maintained a reputation for conducting free and fair elections. The Election Commission of India, an independent constitutional body, has sweeping powers to ensure that the polls remain beyond reproach. The credibility of the commission has been central to the credibility of Indian democracy.

India also conducts recruitment for public-sector jobs and admissions to public and several private colleges through competitive national exams. For millions of young people, the stakes in these exams are high. Success can send candidates scrambling up the ladder of opportunity, but failure can consign them to never climbing it at all. It is important, therefore, that these exams be conducted fairly and have the imprimatur of honesty and impartiality.

India remains a doggedly unequal society in which money, kinship, and power distort almost all institutions. In this context, elections and exams are the only two processes that make the state’s promise of equal treatment tangible. Elections give even the poorest Indians the prospect of dignity and agency, and as a result, voter turnout rates are routinely high. Exams sustain a parallel promise: they keep alive the idea that academic diligence and performance can trump other forms of social capital. To be sure, the staging of both elections and exams has never been perfect, but the overall integrity of the processes has never been in doubt.

Over the last year, however, the actions of the Indian government have cast doubt on elections and exams. In 2024, the main nationwide entrance examination for medical schools was engulfed in controversy over a slew of irregularities, including the advance leak of the exam’s questions. Protests ensued, and students raised serious questions about the reliability of the examination system. The episode also put the National Testing Agency, the central body that under Modi had become responsible for conducting many important exams, under intense scrutiny. Centralization was meant to ensure greater efficiency and regularity. Instead, it made the crisis deeper by concentrating responsibility at the level of the federal government. In July, antigovernment protests forced the resignation of the education minister over frustrations with the examination system.

Similarly, over the last year or so, the Election Commission decided to undertake what is known as a Special Intensive Revision, or SIR, an assessment of India’s voter lists to ensure their accuracy. The exercise is well within the powers of the Election Commission; the last such revision was conducted between 2002 and 2004. But the process has become quite controversial this time because of concerns that it places excessive burdens on citizens to prove their eligibility to vote; the lack of transparency about why names are being added or deleted from the lists; and the use of new software that has given the Election Commission the ability to strip citizens from the voter rolls on trivial grounds, often overriding established procedures and the recommendations of those local officials who do the actual verification.

An image of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in New Delhi, February 2026 Anushree Fadnavis / Reuters

According to his critics, Gyanesh Kumar, the chief election commissioner, acted unilaterally and recklessly in pursuing the revision of voter rolls in ways that violated normal procedures. Since June 2025, the SIR has tagged roughly 130 million names for removal from the voter rolls. Although many of the deletions were duplicates and the names of people who had died or left the country, millions of Indians have found themselves stripped of the right to vote and now burdened with the difficult task of appealing to a tribunal to prove their citizenship. In this light, the protests have already had one constructive effect: the election commission is trying to placate its critics by making it easier for those excluded to lodge appeals.

Gandhi has alleged that the SIR is an instrument for manipulating elections. Already, in the state of West Bengal, where nine million names were taken off, millions of Indians found themselves unable to participate in state elections in March because their appeals were yet to be heard. The elections brought Modi’s BJP to power in the state for the first time. But even if the Election Commission is not systematically targeting voters based on their identity or their political preferences, the exercise still risks disenfranchising millions through sheer ineptitude.

To make matters worse, India’s Supreme Court, another vital democratic institution, has also played an unfortunate role in this train of events. The Supreme Court effectively collaborated in the disenfranchisement of voters in West Bengal by blithely claiming that those whose petitions were under appeal could just vote in the next election after their appeals had been adjudicated; it didn’t matter if they missed voting in the current election.

The sense of the Supreme Court’s callousness was compounded in May after Surya Kant, the chief justice, compared a group of young lawyers pressing for change to “cockroaches.” That stray remark precipitated a social movement, with the creation—initially as a joke but then in earnest—of the “Cockroach Janata Party,” a group that has galvanized young Indians both on social media and in the streets. It played a key role in forcing the resignation of Dharmendra Pradhan, the education minister, in July, after mass protests in Delhi and across the country. It is now driving young Indians to call for the resignation of Kumar, the chief election commissioner.

Most significantly, it has linked the credibility crisis directly to Modi, encouraging a veritable explosion of public mockery of the prime minister on social media and the Internet. That has punctured Modi’s carefully cultivated image of an invincible leader who delivers on every promise. He has prided himself on his dominance of social media, but the loss of control over the political narrative, especially on the image-sharing platform Instagram, was palpable. The prime minister has feebly tried to make his own reels in response, but that failed to stem the tide of public irreverence. The ridicule was noteworthy not simply as political satire. It lifted the pall of fear that had hung over Indian democracy since Modi became prime minister, as critics have been silenced through intimidation and opposition leaders targeted through legal proceedings. In mocking power, young people found their voice.

The threat they pose to Modi is significant. These young Indians are not saddled with the historical baggage of ties to conventional opposition parties. The issues they focus on—exams and elections—cut across social divides and even partisan political affiliations. And the protesters’ grit, wit, inventiveness, and fearlessness have dented Modi’s authority like nothing else has in the past 12 years.

THEIR OWN FUTURE

The movement must still contend with the brute reality of state power, which has been evident in the streets of Delhi this past week. Authorities tried to physically suppress and contain dissent by prohibiting it and preventing protesters from entering certain public spaces. That in turn has given young Indians another reason to go to the streets, to protest the right to protest and reclaim public spaces. The government has deployed thousands of security forces in the national capital, as if it were facing some invading foreign army, not young people making reasonable demands, and all signs are that Modi will continue to maintain a hard line on the protests.

For the government, the movement’s principal demand, the resignation of Kumar, is not simply a question of one official’s tenure. Modi has secured extraordinary loyalty within his BJP through an implicit assurance that those who act at the government’s behest will be protected from the consequences of their actions. If that assurance begins to fray, ministers and party functionaries may worry about what might happen when they can no longer take for granted the protection of the leadership. Modi’s defense of Kumar, then, may be less about the SIR than about preserving loyalty to the government within the ranks of his party.

Moreover, Modi has built much of his political persona around turning perceived slights into demonstrations of strength. To yield in the face of public mockery would be especially difficult and out of character. Kumar’s removal could be read as an admission of guilt. Such a retreat could then embolden Modi’s rivals and encourage further protests—and raise the prospect that a galvanized opposition might finally unseat the prime minister in the next parliamentary elections scheduled for 2029.

The danger facing the Indian government is that it comes to believe its own propaganda.

To be sure, the future electoral consequences of the protests remain uncertain. Public anger does not automatically translate into votes. The Election Commission may yet blunt the controversy by admitting voters whose appeals are pending or by making procedural concessions that reduce the immediate grievances. The BJP may still benefit from a fractious opposition and from the fact that voters in a country as large as India are rarely united in their motivations and perceptions of the political stakes. The next major electoral test, in the state of Uttar Pradesh, is still some months away, in March 2027. A victory there for the BJP would allow the party to claim that its authority remains intact; a defeat would make it much harder to contain the political implications of the present controversy. The government is likely to double down on repression against dissenters nationwide, trusting that it can succeed in limiting public expressions of anger.

The BJP is hoping that the more disruptions there are in Delhi, the more it can cast the current upheaval as the work of rabble-rousers and anarchists and rally Indians behind the prime minister. The government and its supporters are already seeking to discredit the movement as the work of foreign hands, invoking conspiracy theories and examples of alleged malign foreign intervention in the youth demonstrations in Bangladesh and Nepal that ousted sitting governments.

Yet the greater danger facing the Indian government is that it comes to believe its own propaganda and ignores genuine discontent. In both Bangladesh and Nepal, the depth of popular grievance was obvious for anyone willing to look—as it is in India. Despite India’s headline growth rates, young people worry about their economic future. Graduate unemployment is at 23 percent, white-collar job growth has slowed to a creeping one percent this year, and nearly a quarter of Indians between the ages of 15 and 29 are not in employment, education, or training programs. The very institutions that were meant to secure their future—elections, courts, and independent agencies—are losing their trust. The strongman is failing, even as the opposition struggles to inspire a great deal of conviction and enthusiasm. What is powerful about this moment, then, is the spectacle of young people who, lacking many good options, are still choosing to fight for their democracy the only way citizens can when it is in peril: with energy, aspiration, and the belief that they can craft their own collective future, wherever that may lead.

China’s Next Frontier

Kathleen Curlee, Sam Bresnick — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 08:00:00 GMT

On the morning of August 19, China’s space industry crossed a major threshold. Shortly after the Chinese aerospace company LandSpace launched a rocket in northwestern China, its booster—the part needed to thrust the rocket into orbit—successfully detached and landed back on earth. It was the first time a Chinese firm recovered a rocket on land, and it came six weeks after the country’s first-ever rocket recovery, carried out in the South China Sea by China’s premier state-owned space contractor. These events mark the dawn of China’s reusable rocket launch—a capability that will unlock enormous potential in the country’s booming space industry.

Washington’s response to these developments has been muted. The United States still conducts more than twice as many launches and has more satellites in orbit than any other country. But China is catching up. Between 2020 and 2025, the number of rockets launched annually by Chinese companies more than doubled, from 39 to 92. Chinese entities have applied for licenses for hundreds of thousands of communications satellites, and Chinese space companies are proliferating. Many of them, such as LandSpace, are relatively new but already innovative.

This progress has both economic and military implications. Chinese companies could soon compete with U.S. firms to provide vast swaths of the globe with space-based services such as satellite Internet. Meanwhile, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), which sees space superiority as essential to winning future wars, is developing a range of space capabilities as well as a suite of weapons that can attack satellites. This poses a serious risk to the U.S. military, which depends on space for communications, situational awareness, and navigation, as well as for conducting precision strikes and receiving missile warnings.

China’s development as a space power should be a wake-up call for the United States. After the end of the Cold War, Washington began to take its dominance in space for granted. It can no longer afford to do so. As Beijing’s space industry advances, its cost advantages will make it much harder for U.S. companies to compete, and China’s military capabilities will increase the risk that space becomes a battlefield in future conflicts. The era of unassailable U.S. space power is ending, and Washington has no choice but to adapt.

BLASTOFF!

China’s space program dates to the 1950s, when Chinese leader Mao Zedong initiated efforts to modernize the PLA and boost technological innovation. In 1970, China launched its first satellite, and in the 1980s, it made space technology research a national priority. But the watershed moment for China’s space program occurred during the 1990–91 Gulf War, when the U.S. military’s adept use of space-based assets allowed a relatively small but technologically advanced coalition to defeat Iraq’s army in just a few days. Satellites allowed U.S. forces to navigate difficult desert terrain, gave commanders information about the battlefield with greater speed and accuracy, and enabled soldiers to coordinate seamlessly across long distances. Beijing, which had not realized just how far behind it was, leaped into action to catch up.

In the years that followed, PLA doctrine emphasized the growing importance of advanced technology, especially satellites, for warfighting. In 2000, the Chinese military began developing its own satellite-powered navigation service, called BeiDou, so that it would not have to rely on U.S.-operated GPS. In 2015, the PLA created the Strategic Support Force, a now defunct organization that consolidated China’s space, cyber, and electronic warfare missions, with the aim of accelerating the country’s space progress. That same year, a Chinese government white paper identified outer space as a critical national security domain. China has since created spacecraft for communications; navigation; and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance that would have been unimaginable to PLA officials who observed Desert Storm.

Encouraging commercial space activity has become one of China’s main tools for expanding its space program. In 2014, Beijing opened parts of the space sector to private investment, and more than 400 Chinese commercial space companies have since sprouted. Beijing and provincial governments have provided commercial space firms with financing through state-backed investment funds, subsidized factory upgrades and rocket launches, and given private companies access to government test facilities and technologies. In 2025, commercial space missions accounted for 54 percent of China’s national total, and commercial satellites made up 84 percent of Chinese spacecraft placed in orbit. China’s broad space-industrial ecosystem, composed of commercial companies, state-owned enterprises, research institutes, and universities, has allowed the country to eliminate its dependence on GPS and paved the way for the development of new domestic remote sensing and satellite communications companies.

In reusable rocket technology, the U.S. company SpaceX has enjoyed an enormous advantage, conducting five out of every six launches in the United States. But China’s two controlled recoveries of rocket boosters in July and August suggest that it could be a real competitor to the United States within a decade. Reusable rockets drive down the cost and increase the speed of space launches significantly; should China master the technology, it could develop large satellite constellations much more easily.

Reusable launches will also allow China to develop space-based Internet capabilities to compete with SpaceX’s dominant Starlink network, an extensive satellite Internet system with connectivity that rivals many land-based networks and which has been crucial for Ukraine in its defense against Russia. Although Chinese companies are still in the early stages of developing this technology, they are scaling fast. The entities operating the Guowang and Qianfan satellite constellations, which intend to compete with Starlink, plan to launch nearly 30,000 communications satellites over the next decade or so. These systems are currently much smaller than Starlink, which has more than 11,000 satellites in orbit, but they could eventually become legitimate alternatives. Qianfan already has trial agreements with Brazil, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, and Turkey for the use of its satellite network.

ROCKET SCIENCE

China’s commercial space development has gone hand in hand with a growing ability to use space to support its military modernization. Beijing has spent decades studying the U.S. military’s use of satellites, and it is now developing its own national security–related space capabilities. According to the Pentagon, China operates more than 500 satellites that can conduct intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance missions, in addition to its satellite-enabled positioning system, allowing the PLA to locate and track U.S. and allied forces around the world. PLA strategists have identified Defense Department space assets as valuable targets because the U.S. military depends on them for nearly every step of what it calls the “kill chain”: finding, aiming at, and striking targets, and then assessing the results.

To exploit U.S. dependence on satellites, Beijing is investing in antisatellite weapons. Since 2007, when it conducted its first successful test of an antisatellite missile, China has developed other tools, including electronic warfare and directed-energy weapons, which can interfere with satellite signals or damage sensors without physically destroying satellites. Chinese spacecraft can also execute increasingly sophisticated maneuvers: in 2022, a Chinese satellite called Shijian-21 attached itself to a defunct Chinese satellite and moved it into a different orbit. Such an action could be benign—it could be used to repair and refuel satellites or remove debris—but it could also enable Chinese platforms to manipulate other spacecraft, including U.S. military satellites. Beijing’s ability to take down U.S. satellites could pose an especially serious challenge for the U.S. military in East Asia, where, in the case of conflict, China would be much less dependent on space-based assets than the United States.

China’s space rise is already influencing broader international security dynamics. During Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, in 2022, Chinese firms provided satellite imagery of the battlefield that helped Russian forces conduct military operations. Throughout the war in Iran, Chinese entities have also supplied Tehran with satellite imagery, including images of a base in Jordan that Iran struck in July, resulting in the deaths of three American service members. As China’s commercial space sector expands, so could these relationships, giving more countries and nonstate actors without advanced space programs access to their benefits. Such expanded access could be used during natural disasters or other emergencies to save lives. But it could also provide adversaries with the ability to more effectively target U.S. and allied forces across the globe.

MISSION CRITICAL

As China’s space power grows, Washington has moved to protect some of its satellite networks. The U.S. Space Force has diversified the placement of some of its most sensitive assets and increased procurement of new satellites. Such investments are useful but insufficient to address the United States’ vulnerabilities. Given the capabilities that China already has or will develop soon, there are now many possible scenarios in which the U.S. military would have to operate when satellite communications are denied or degraded, GPS signals are jammed, and intelligence from orbit is restricted.

The U.S. military should invest in nascent technologies, such as inertial navigation systems and quantum sensors, which could one day help its forces move with precision without GPS. It should also invest in emerging alternatives to satellites, such as high-altitude relays, which include drones or balloons that operate closer to Earth and can link communications networks; laser-enabled communications, which use light to transmit information and are difficult to disrupt; and mesh networks, which automatically reroute signals around nodes that have been destroyed, making communications more resilient. Mechanisms for delegating decision-making will be even more essential than in the past, as the danger of disconnection increases.

Washington should also increase its efforts to foster a more competitive domestic launch industry. The United States leads the world in space launches largely because of SpaceX. Although the company is an enormous asset, its near monopoly is a risk. If technical failures or damage to launch infrastructure were to interrupt SpaceX’s operations, the United States’ ability to launch satellites would be severely curtailed. This year, SpaceX announced plans to retire the Falcon 9, its main reusable rocket. The Falcon 9 will eventually be replaced by Starship, a new high-capacity rocket that will carry more satellites into orbit with each launch. But the beginning of the phase-out has already created a launch shortage that threatens the continued development of the U.S. space economy. To mitigate this risk, Washington should continue awarding government contracts to more companies.

SpaceX is an enormous asset to the United States, but its near monopoly is a risk.

In addition to investing in launch capacity, the United States should provide support to companies building emerging space technologies that have important national security applications but which struggle to attract sufficient commercial demand in their early years—an approach it took with SpaceX starting in the first decade of this century. Federal agencies could be anchor customers for technologies that Washington identifies as crucial for national security purposes, providing companies that make them with stable revenue and legitimacy that will allow them to grow.

Identifying important emerging technologies and consistently funding them is essential to maintaining a lead in space. Unfortunately, U.S. priorities in the sector have been susceptible to changes across presidential administrations and in Congress. When the Soviet Union collapsed, so did Washington’s willingness to invest heavily in space. The United States did not, of course, completely abandon space, as evidenced by projects such as the space shuttle program, the Artemis moon missions, and the founding of the U.S. Space Force. But the government’s interest in the domain has waxed and waned. Beijing, on the other hand, has pursued its space objectives consistently since the early 1990s, revising programs as technology evolves without losing sight of its end goal. If Washington is to continue competing with China, it should sustain its commitments, too.

Finally, the United States would benefit from working with its allies. NATO is already experimenting with ways to share members’ space expertise and integrate it into allied operations. In July, eight U.S. allies launched the HALO initiative, which aims to connect sovereign military satellites into a network that streamlines communications, intelligence, and missile tracking. NATO’s STARLIFT project, established in 2024, is exploring how launch sites across allied territory could speed up access to orbit during a crisis. The United States, which has deprioritized international security cooperation in recent years, should recommit to allied space security. Having access to allies’ space resources will be essential in future conflicts that stretch across vast distances, especially if the United States’ own space-based assets are taken down.

Even the most effective modernization and resilience measures will not be enough to protect U.S. assets in space from determined adversaries. For decades, the United States was able to depend on space dominance in fighting wars. Now, overdependence on satellites and on SpaceX are major liabilities. Washington must protect itself in a world in which it is no longer the sole space power. Staying ahead in the new space race will require both investing in space architecture and establishing backup plans to offset the dangers of the emerging multipolar space age.

The Real Lesson of the Iran War

Justin Bronk — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 08:00:00 GMT

For months, Iran’s resilience in its war with two of the world’s most capable militaries has perplexed many politicians and confounded public expectations. Israel and the United States have hit thousands of Iranian targets, systematically destroying much of the country’s military infrastructure and killing many of its top leaders. Yet the Islamic Republic has not only survived but also continued to maintain significant offensive capabilities. To account for this, some have pointed to Iran’s effective deployment of low-cost precise mass weapons, such as the Shahed-136 one-way attack drone. Others have looked at the decentralized and self-replacing nature of the regime itself.

Although these and other factors have played a part, there is a more straightforward reason for Iran’s staying power: the American and Israeli decision to rely on a sustained air and stand-off naval campaign to bring the regime to its knees. This approach did not come out of nowhere. Air supremacy has been the defining tenet of U.S. and wider Western military strategy for decades. In the post–Cold War era, the United States has perfected the art of airpower—winning control of the skies so that enemy armies, navies, and territory can be bombed at will—to a degree that no country or even alliance of countries has matched. When pitted against an adversary’s deployed ground forces, this strategy has consistently yielded impressive results. The U.S. ability to achieve rapid air superiority has also long served as a powerful deterrent to would-be aggressors.

Yet there are few examples in history of adversaries conceding to maximalist demands in the face of punitive bombing campaigns alone—even by the world’s greatest air force. Indeed, Operation Epic Fury is only one of several recent or current conflicts—including Russia’s war in Ukraine and international responses to the Houthi threat in Yemen—that have exposed the drawbacks of relying heavily on airstrikes to try to unseat a government or to defeat insurgent forces. For American strategists, then, it will be crucial to distinguish the different uses of airpower. The Iran campaign has been a disastrous misuse of military resources, and it showcases the policy limits of what airpower can achieve. Yet it would be a mistake to conclude that the United States should shift away from its doctrine of prioritizing air superiority, as it prepares alongside NATO and Asian allies for very different threats in the coming few years.

THE WAGES OF DESTRUCTION

During the major wars of the twentieth century, U.S. and Allied air superiority was critical to successes on the battlefield. But airpower still failed to force political capitulation by adversaries. In World War II, Nazi Germany fought to the very end despite the Allies’ systematic bombing of its cities, its industrial base, and its transport and fuel networks. In the Korean War, North Korea fought the United States and its allies to a standstill, even as fleets of U.S. bombers obliterated most of its cities and infrastructure. And in Vietnam, the North Vietnamese outlasted the United States, despite the U.S. military dropping more than a million tons of ordnance on cities, factories, and supply routes, in successive punitive air campaigns.

In the defining counterinsurgency conflicts of the twenty-first century, there is little evidence to suggest that air superiority proved any more effective. In Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States and its allies quickly established total air superiority over the enemy and were able to call in precision airstrikes at will, giving allied troops a huge advantage in combat. Yet in both cases, these campaigns also ultimately failed to achieve their political objectives.

Despite near-daily barrages of Ukraine’s cities, power infrastructure, and industry, Russia is no closer to vanquishing the country more than four and a half years after its brutal invasion began. In Iran, there has been little sign that U.S. and Israeli airstrikes have fueled popular pressure to end the war. This is despite major antigovernment protests throughout the country shortly before the campaign began, which were stamped out only after mass state violence. Indeed, inflicting hardship on the population seems especially unlikely to change the calculus of the Iranian regime, given its willingness to kill thousands of protestors to stay in power.

If anything, there is reason to think that it may be even harder today to win wars than in the twentieth century. Because of the increasingly multipolar nature of the world order, countries can often rely on international support to mitigate the damage from a sustained enemy strike campaign. In Ukraine, this can be seen in the influx of American and European weapons and economic, military, and technological support into the country since Russia’s 2022 invasion. This assistance has not prevented Ukrainians from experiencing terrible loss and hardship, but it has enabled the Ukrainian economy to continue functioning and its military to consistently replace lost and expended equipment and ammunition over time.

For Iran, China has provided a stable market for Iranian oil and gas exports, which helped keep Iran’s economy afloat until the imposition of a U.S. naval blockade in April. More recently, Beijing has also provided military support in the form of short-range air defense systems, which will sustain and improve Iran’s capability to pose a pop-up threat to U.S. and Israeli aircraft loitering to seek targets at medium or low altitudes. Russia also remains a key Iranian ally, providing Tehran with intelligence to target U.S. forces in the Gulf and helping it develop new military capabilities, such as supersonic antiship missiles. In both wars, external support has made sustained air and missile strike campaigns far less likely to result in political capitulation, or economic or military collapse.

SITTING DUCKS AND HIDDEN JACKALS

Despite the poor record of punitive bombing campaigns in forcing political capitulation, air superiority has proved decisive in many wars through its impact on the battlefield. The U.S. military’s overwhelming success against the well-equipped and battle-hardened Iraqi army in Operation Desert Storm, in 1991, was, perhaps, the defining example of how an air-centered approach can be effective. The initial U.S. air campaign in January and February 1991 sufficiently degraded Iraqi forces and command and control capabilities to allow coalition ground forces to decisively defeat the Iraqi army in less than 100 hours of ground combat operations.

Other partial successes include NATO’s intervention in Kosovo in 1999, in which a 78-day air campaign led Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic to withdraw his forces. Yet another was the European-led air campaign against Muammar al-Qaddafi’s forces over Libya in 2011, which rapidly destroyed government tanks and artillery attacking the city of Benghazi, and facilitated a subsequent rebel advance to Tripoli with further airstrikes. In each of these cases, air superiority made the battlefield situation untenable for enemy ground forces and forced them to retreat. The fundamental difference that distinguishes this effective use of airpower lies in the objectives that the enemy was seeking to achieve. When an adversary is pursuing goals that require the significant deployment of ground forces—such as an invasion to seize the territory of a neighboring state—establishing air superiority over that adversary almost always confers a decisive military advantage.

In World War II, the Anglo-American combined bomber offensive against German cities and industry failed to force Germany to surrender. But once the Allies established air superiority in any given theater of operations, the operational defeat of Axis armies in the field was only a matter of time. In the Western Desert, and then in Italy, Normandy, and Germany itself, roving Allied fighter-bomber patrolsrapidly rendered movement by armored vehicles and supply columns by day prohibitively dangerous. They also could provide devastating close air support whenever Allied ground units met strong Axis positions or units.

In 1991, Saddam Hussein’s objectives required the Iraqi army to hold territory in Kuwait against U.S.-led ground forces, and U.S. tactical airpower rapidly made that impossible, by destroying Iraqi air defenses and then conducting a massive interdiction campaign against armored vehicles, logistics convoys, bases, and communications infrastructure. In Libya in 2011, Qaddafi’s forces deployed tanks and artillery around Benghazi to bombard rebel forces and civilians, but these were easily found and destroyed by European combat aircraft, as were units that Qaddafi deployed to try to stop later rebel counterattacks toward Tripoli. The ultimate rebel victory and killing of Qaddafi did not deliver long-term policy success in Libya as the Western world would define it. But Qaddafi’s military forces were decisively defeated by Western airpower and his objective of crushing a popular uprising by force was rendered impossible.

Air superiority has proved decisive in many wars.

In Afghanistan and Iraq, by contrast, none of Washington’s adversaries needed to field regular military forces in the open to achieve their objectives. Simply by maintaining a steady tempo of IED strikes and ambushes against U.S. patrols, and then melting back into the wider civilian population, these groups were able to deny coalition forces the security they needed to foster democratic state building. Of course, whenever militant groups attempted larger operations designed to overrun bases or towns, they were met with ferocious firepower, much of it delivered by airstrikes, thanks to ubiquitous U.S. and coalition air superiority. But just as in Vietnam, victory in most major battlefield engagements was not enough to secure the political objectives that the United States sought. All that the Taliban in Afghanistan or militant groups in Iraq had to do was to maintain a security vacuum for long enough to exhaust U.S. and European patience with discretionary “forever wars.”

Although every war is different, the United States confronts a similar problem in Iran: it is trying to use airpower to achieve maximalist aims against an enemy that can largely afford to keep its conventional military forces dispersed, hidden, or underground. The initial U.S. and Israeli campaign to establish air superiority was very successful, and in general, the advanced aircraft and tactics the two militaries deployed worked as intended. But although subsequent months of airstrikes have destroyed some of Iran’s enormous ballistic missile arsenal, most of the country’s significant remaining stocks and production capacity are in deeply buried “missile cities,” out of reach of almost all conventional bombs and missiles. Because of the earlier 12-day war, in June 2025—when U.S. airstrikes targeted Iran’s nuclear infrastructure with highly specialized 30,000-pound bunker-busting bombs—the bulk of Iran’s remaining highly enriched fissile material, movable equipment, and scientists were likely dispersed and hidden from further airstrikes long before Operation Epic Fury began.

To defeat U.S. war aims, therefore, the regime does not have to deploy regular armed forces in the open. It simply has to maintain control of the Iranian population, which the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is well placed to ensure through widespread day-to-day repression. And in Hormuz, Iran can easily conceal the small boats it needs to drop mines, its antiship missile launchers, and its drone launch positions along the extensive and rocky coastline. Airpower alone is unlikely to deliver a victory against Iran, despite Israel’s and the United States’ ability to functionally strike almost anywhere in the country, at will, for months on end.

This is in fact the same problem that has frustrated earlier attempts by the United States and its allies to stop antiship drone and missile strikes by the Houthis in Yemen. Airpower can be and has been used repeatedly to destroy any Houthi forces identified in the open, but it cannot prevent the group from posing a sustained threat to commercial shipping with concealed missile and drone launch sites in coastal territory that they control.

THE BOMB POWER NATO NEEDS

The war in Iran has significantly tarnished the global aura of U.S. airpower. It is unlikely that the Trump administration would have launched Operation Epic Fury if it had known that seven months later it would still be facing an inconclusive slugging match—one that has wasted a huge part of Washington’s complex munitions stockpile and come at exorbitant economic and geopolitical cost. Alongside the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine, in which neither side has been able to achieve air superiority, there is a real risk that policymakers and the public lose faith in advanced air capabilities as the central pillar of American and wider Western military advantage.

That would be a huge mistake. The first lesson of the war against Iran in 2026—as in numerous other wars, including Vietnam, Iraq after 2003, and Afghanistan after 2006—is that conventional military superiority gained through overwhelming airpower will not be enough to achieve unrealistic political goals. But the second lesson is that this failure is not about weaknesses in U.S. air capabilities themselves. On the contrary, airpower remains the most potent piece of the United States’ conventional forces, as well as its main source of both deterrent capacity and warfighting advantage against conventional aggression by hostile states. If the U.S. goals for Operation Epic Fury had been to defeat an Iranian invasion of a neighboring country, then the air campaign would almost certainly have done that within a few weeks.

That hypothetical scenario is highly relevant because it bears on the most significant nondiscretionary threats that the United States may be forced to deal with in the coming few years. In the case of a Russian invasion of a NATO member state in eastern Europe or a Chinese move to take Taiwan, the enemy would need to make large deployments of regular ground forces to seize and then hold territory. In either case, advanced U.S. and allied airpower capabilities would be absolutely essential to defeating them quickly. As with Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, both actions could be rendered militarily untenable if NATO or U.S. forces could rapidly win and exploit air superiority over the territory that had been invaded.

To prevent larger, far more costly wars between Western powers and either China or Russia, then, it will be vital to convince both adversaries that NATO forces in Europe and U.S.-led forces in the Pacific can rapidly establish and leverage air superiority should either power decide to attack. To do so, the United States will need to make the right investments and force decisions. Especially urgent priorities include restocking and improving U.S. air-launched munitions, ramping up production of missile interceptors to defend airbases and naval task forces, and accelerating the development of next generation fighter, bomber, and enabler aircraft.

Although establishing air superiority over an area contested by Chinese or Russian forces will be far more difficult than doing so over Iran, it is an essential task for the United States and its allies if they want to maintain conventional deterrence and avoid a major great-power conflict. Air superiority cannot win all wars. But if it can be credibly achieved, it all but guarantees deterrence by denial against state opponents considering territorial aggression of their own.

The Global AI Bust

Ruchir Sharma — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 08:00:00 GMT

Few people doubt that AI is among the most transformative technologies to emerge in the past century. By many measures, it is spreading faster and more widely than any innovation since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Steam engines came into common use in the nineteenth century and electricity in the early twentieth, but their full potential was not realized before the completion of railways, highways, and power grids decades later. Computers for business use emerged in the 1950s, but they gave no visible lift to the economy before the Internet connected them in the 1990s.

Commercial artificial intelligence, by contrast, appeared almost overnight on screens worldwide, at a moment when the overwhelming majority of humans already had access to a computer or smartphone. Less than four years after the release of ChatGPT, roughly 30 percent of Americans are now using AI, five times the share of Americans who were using smartphones, the Internet, or electricity at comparable stages of development. Revenue for AI companies is three times what previous digital technologies, including the Internet, cloud computing, and early mobile apps, generated in their early years.

Policymakers, investors, and business leaders are counting on AI to be a miracle cure for everything from runaway public debt to the costs associated with aging populations. Among investors, even some of the world’s most successful contrarians—who make their fortunes betting against conventional wisdom—are embracing the idea that AI could yield bigger benefits more rapidly than any past technological advance.

The euphoria is not universal, however. An ever-lonelier minority of skeptics argue that AI’s rise may seem unusually fast but is in fact following a centuries-old script. Major technology revolutions have always triggered dramatic boom-bust cycles. People get overexcited about the latest breakthrough and begin investing indiscriminately in the companies driving the innovation. As a team of researchers from Texas Tech University, Texas A&M University, and the Vlerick Business School in Belgium found in 2018, all of the most revolutionary technological innovations of the last two centuries inflated a major market bubble—a rapid increase in stock prices, followed by a precipitous decline.

The word “bubble” tends to conjure an idea as thin as air. But as with all previous tech bubbles, the innovations of the current AI boom are real, the hype born of genuine promise. That promise, however, is exactly what is inflating the bubble. Once the mania begins to crack, as it inevitably will, the shock will ripple back through financial markets into a global economy increasingly dependent on AI for growth. The damage will be felt worldwide, not only in the countries leading AI’s development but in the many now battling to supply them with inputs, as well. The weakest players will be wiped out, and the survivors will consolidate their lead. And from the rubble, a more stable AI ecosystem will emerge.

ALL IN

The AI competition is already reshaping the economic world order. At the top of this order stand the United States, where the foundational AI model, ChatGPT, reached consumers in late 2022, and China, where DeepSeek made its debut around a year later. Since then, the race for supremacy has come to drive both countries’ economies. In the United States, growth has been fueled primarily by the hundreds of billions of dollars of Big Tech investment in AI projects and by consumer spending energized by gains in a stock market dominated by AI. The top ten stocks in the benchmark S&P 500 are all big AI players and together account for nearly 40 percent of the index and around half of its returns this year.

China is spending far less on AI but would be lost without it. After falling in the last decade, net exports—mainly of AI-related goods—now account for a third of China’s growth. The domestic economy is otherwise moribund, hampered by bad debts and a shrinking labor force. Beijing is also heavily supporting the export of its homegrown AI models, which are catching on because they are cheaper than American frontier models but perform nearly as well.

The AI rage now extends beyond Washington and Beijing. Investors are plowing funds into companies that supply American tech giants with the computing power, semiconductors, and other building blocks they need, fueling stock market booms worldwide. In Asia, for example, three major semiconductor companies have reaped the benefits: TSMC in Taiwan and SK Hynix and Samsung in South Korea, which comprise an even larger share of their local stock indexes than big American tech firms account for in the U.S. index. In these relatively small economies, the global frenzy for AI has generated even greater shocks than in the United States. The total value of South Korea’s market exploded from $1.5 trillion at the start of 2025 to over $5 trillion this summer. Individual investors saw bigger gains in stock wealth over 18 months than they had in a lifetime. Chip exports have driven real growth in Taiwan toward double digits in some recent quarters, a pace rarely approached in any economy.

At a technology conference in Montreal, September 2026 ANDREJ IVANOV / AFP / Getty Images

Other countries at this level of the so-called AI stack of computing infrastructure have benefited similarly from the global market tilt toward builders of AI hardware, or “picks and shovels.” High tech now accounts for as much as half of all economic growth in Israel, owing in part to the country’s expertise in the high-speed networks needed to train AI. In Japan, firms that specialize in AI-related equipment, materials, robots, and semiconductors have become market darlings; after Kioxia, a pioneer in memory chips, became a major supplier to U.S. tech companies, its share price spiked to more than 45 times what it had been a year earlier, briefly becoming Japan’s most valuable stock.

All five of these leading tech powers—China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and the United States—spend, on average, much more than other countries on R & D and technology as a percentage of GDP. But they are far from the only countries racing to secure footholds in the AI stack.

Below them, secondary suppliers are forging ties to the leaders. U.S. and Chinese AI giants are spending billions on data centers in Singapore and Malaysia. Firms are investing heavily in AI server production in Mexico, which is emerging as an important exporter of AI-related hardware, as well. At least half a dozen tech companies have launched AI projects in Vietnam, including a major R & D center and training facilities to develop the country’s talent pool.

In turn, the worldwide AI construction project is expected to provide years of steady demand for the raw materials required to wire and store energy for data centers: nickel from Indonesia, lithium from Australia, copper from Chile, Peru, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. And the large cloud-service providers known as hyperscalers are looking far and wide for that energy. Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft accounted for half of all clean energy deals signed across the globe in 2025.

Private spending on data center construction is up by roughly 50 percent from a year ago.

Not all countries have joined the bonanza. Those outside the stack struggle to attract investment and credit as the overwhelming focus on AI sucks money away from their industries. Much of Europe finds itself excluded. So do countries with emerging economies such as India and the Philippines, doubly shunned because their thriving back-office service sectors are particularly at risk of displacement by artificial intelligence.

It’s hard to think of any period in history when the markets were so obsessed with—and so dependent on the success of—a single sector. The Internet era saw money spill out of the booming sector and into other industries. Today, AI, and little else, is hot. Private spending on data center construction is up by roughly 50 percent from a year ago, while spending on all other building projects in the United States is down by five percent.

So far, the lift from AI has been strong enough to shield the global economy from the geopolitical shocks of the last two years, including U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs and the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran. Gains in advanced manufacturing and stock market–driven consumer spending continue to power growth in the United States, and AI-related exports are propping up countries further down the stack. Tech exports from Mexico and Thailand, for example, are rising fast enough to offset slack domestic demand in both economies.

The question is whether AI can sustain the world economy or is a bubble waiting to pop. A bubble can be characterized as a good idea taken too far. And there is mounting evidence that markets have begun to push the tantalizing idea of AI beyond its limits.

THE FOUR O’s

Going back centuries, pioneering innovations have spawned remarkably consistent patterns of human behavior. Firms spend heavily on developing a new technology in the hope of dominating a burgeoning industry. Investors follow, with professionals leading the way and amateurs jumping in later. The firms borrow to build; investors borrow to buy more stock in those firms. Trading reaches manic intensity. Prices rise beyond a point that potential profits from the innovation can support. As the peak nears, price increases both accelerate and become more volatile as doubt begins to gnaw at the edges of the frenzy.

This basic dynamic has driven bubbles in everything from tulips to housing since at least the 1600s. In short, the object of desire becomes overvalued, overowned, overinvested, and overleveraged—what I have elsewhere called the “Four O’s” of a bubble.

Historical evidence suggests that the most impressive innovations generate the biggest bubbles. The scale of the bubble also depends on how far and fast word of the hot new thing travels. In the 1870s, a series of bubbles, including one in railroad stocks, moved quickly between Europe and the United States via the new transatlantic telegraph. In the 1920s, electricity and electric gadgets were promoted over the airwaves on one of those gadgets, the radio. Today, hype for AI is spreading on smartphones and social media, digital products that did not yet exist when the Internet bubble popped, in 2000.

Taken together, these phenomena should raise concerns over just how far the mania will go. If AI is indeed the most transformative and most rapidly diffused new technology ever, the bubble it creates could be the most dramatic yet.

THE PRICE IS WRONG

In the major bubbles of the past half century, prices have typically risen tenfold, adjusted for inflation, over a period of 15 years. U.S. tech stocks crossed that threshold in 2025. The AI bulls argue that unlike the dot-coms of the Internet boom, today’s marquee tech firms are generating strong earnings and will continue to do so, and their escalating stock prices are therefore justified.

But the excitement about tech bubbles is always stirred by genuine progress, not mere marketing. Although the dot-com era, for instance, is linked in the popular imagination with profitless startups such as Pets.com, these were minor players. The giants of the late 1990s, including Qualcomm, Oracle, and Cisco, logged earnings on par with Amazon, Google, and Microsoft today. The tech sector posted the same annual rate of earnings growth in the late 1990s as it has in the current decade: 22 percent.

The assumption that a boom can’t be a bubble if corporate earnings are strong is belied by history. It is in fact not uncommon in a bubble for earnings to be artificially inflated as well. This twin risk was only partly evident in the dot-com period, but it was clear when the craze for housing and commodities took off in the early 2000s.

What is more, earnings may not be as solid as they appear. They are propped up in part by “circular funding,” in which a hyperscaler invests in a frontier AI lab such as OpenAI or Anthropic. The lab then uses the money in part to buy services from—and thus pump up the earnings of—the hyperscaler. Hyperscalers also revalue their stake in an AI lab and report the increase as “other income,” a category that has accounted for a quarter of their earnings growth this year.

AI labs are among the many U.S. companies that have been choosing to remain private for as long as possible to avoid public scrutiny of their earnings. Now, many of these firms are planning to go public, but they are far less profitable than their predecessors in the late 1990s were. The two biggest names in the pipeline for an initial public offering of stock are Anthropic and OpenAI. To gain customers and market share, both companies are charging their subscribers less than it costs to train and run their AI models. Analysts have already estimated each company’s value at well over a trillion dollars, even with no profits, based on rapid revenue growth alone.

OWNERSHIP SOCIETY

Americans, meanwhile, are investing in stocks as they never have before. The United States is the only country in which families hold more wealth in stocks than in their homes. The typical U.S. household holds more than 30 percent of its wealth in stocks, surpassing the prior peak of 27 percent in 2000. Since much of this money is held in “passive” funds that simply track the S&P 500 index, the bulk of it goes into the AI stocks that dominate the index.

Professional money managers aim to beat the market by being different, but they are finding it difficult to buck the crowd. Their holdings look increasingly like those of the retail investors they once dismissed as “dumb money.” Nearly a third of the stocks held by amateur traders are also held by hedge funds and other quintessentially aggressive pros, a record share.

Over the last five years, the number of shares traded each day in the United States has surged by 50 percent to around 18 billion. Retail investors have surpassed the pros as the most active traders and are aggressively “buying the dips”; in 2026, trading on down days has surged to more than three times the average for all days. Foreigners are betting big on American AI, too; their holdings of U.S. stocks have mushroomed from under $2 trillion to more than $20 trillion since the dot-com bust, with most of that increase coming since the launch of ChatGPT, in November 2022.

AI is thus already overowned by all players in the market. The zeal among retail investors has spread to other AI-driven markets, including South Korea, which in the past has been a bellwether of global stock market movements. Sharp drops in big semiconductor stocks pushed the Korean index down this summer, before locals once again started “buying the dips.” This kind of stop-and-go volatility often signals that a market rally is in its last stages.

BIG SPENDERS

Much of the debate about the economics of AI focuses on whether the enormous sums that technology firms are investing in building infrastructure can generate commensurate returns in the foreseeable future. Tech investment has more than quadrupled in the last three years, a boom unmatched in scale or speed by the rise of railways, canals, or the Internet. Tech spending on new plants and equipment hit a record 6.0 percent of GDP at the height of the Internet bubble. Today, it stands at 6.3 percent and is projected to keep increasing.

One way this splurge could pay for itself is by raising productivity, or output per worker, and energizing the entire economy. But at a similar stage of the Internet boom, growth in the key measure of “total factor productivity,” which aims to capture how much output workers are generating from machines, was surging. Now it is barely rising.

Even if productivity does ultimately rise, most AI firms may not reap the rewards. The economist William Nordhaus has shown that only two percent of the value created by innovations of the past, including railroads, airlines, and the Internet, went to the companies that built these networks. The rest went to the consumers and businesses that used the inventions. Most of the 50,000 startups of the dot-com boom were wiped out in the eventual bust, destroying wealth for their investors; around ten survive today as tech giants.

AI faces the prospect of a similar crunch in a wider field. With 70,000 AI-related startups in the United States and abroad, as the tech strategist Jeff McMillan recently put it, “the coming massacre of AI companies and the coming growth of the AI economy are the same event.” But caution fades before a bubble reaches peak size. AI spending is spreading worldwide, with roughly 40 percent of all outlays by U.S. hyperscalers going into projects abroad. Cumulative global AI-related investment is expected to more than double again, to $6 trillion by 2030.

In the biggest bubbles, investment reaches a tipping point after which the cost of the bust in failed businesses, bad debts, and job losses outweighs the benefits of the boom. Even companies at the vanguard of the new technology end up investing too heavily to earn a return. The Bank for International Settlements, a consortium of the world’s major central banks, warned in July that the hyperscalers’ spending race was on track to blow past this “socially optimal level” of investment.

DEBT COLLECTORS

The AI investment boom rests on hidden subsidies and debts, which makes it more fragile and harder to measure. A few years ago, the top five hyperscalers were still generating large piles of surplus cash flow; today, only Microsoft does. Four of them have seen an increase in net debt, issuing bonds as they run low on cash and have to borrow to fund their buildouts.

As of July, U.S. tech firms still had a relatively small reported net debt burden of $250 billion. But these visible figures do not include projects the hyperscalers are financing through complex leases and other off-the-books deals, which could add around $3 trillion to their borrowing over the next decade.

More support is coming from the public sector. During the late 1990s, the U.S. Federal Reserve kept monetary policy tighter than it does now, and the U.S. government ran a surplus. The money that financed the Internet boom came almost exclusively from the private sector.

A boom can be a bubble even if corporate earnings are strong.

Everything changed over the next decade, particularly after the 2008 global financial crisis. To revive and sustain growth, the Fed markedly loosened monetary policy—and kept it loose even when good times returned. Today, the Fed is holding its basic lending rate a full point below what standard academic guidelines would advise, given today’s low unemployment and solid growth. Inflation has exceeded the Fed target of two percent for more than five years running.

Meanwhile, the U.S. government deficit has doubled over the last decade to more than six percent of GDP, in effect transferring billions in borrowed money to households and corporations. According to the Kalecki Levy equation, which tracks the flow of government largess into corporate profits, the budget deficit has accounted for more than half of U.S. corporate profits this decade—twice the level of the dot-com era. Without sky-high deficits, AI earnings would not look nearly as strong as they do. And if AI earnings are not what they appear, the industry’s ability to manage a fast-rising debt burden is likely to be shaky, as well.

It’s not unusual for bubbles to hide behind murky accounting, but the scope of these hidden subsidies is new. So are the sources. The torrent of money pouring out of the government, the central bank, and the private sector will make the AI bubble much bigger than any of its predecessors.

BUBBLE TROUBLE

Debates over how the current AI mania might end tend to focus on scenarios in which AI firms cut back on investment, report surprisingly weak earnings, or appear to concede one way or another that AI is not going to pay off richly or soon enough to justify current stock prices. Yet bubbles do not burst entirely of their own accord; investment crazes don’t wane because fundamentals suddenly change. Earnings can remain strong as bubbles inflate, and in a downturn, stock prices typically begin to fall several months before earnings do.

The one consistent signal comes from the financiers. Bubbles pop when liquidity tightens, meaning higher rates or stiffer regulation make money harder to borrow, and private creditors grow less willing to lend at any rate. As money dries up, firms and investors are left with less money to invest. This can happen in myriad ways.

Over the past century, central bank rate hikes have preceded the popping of every significant bubble. Now, however, it is governments, not corporations, who shoulder the largest burden of rising debt, and the most important players to watch are no longer central bankers. They are the “bond vigilantes,” investors who periodically punish free-spending governments by selling their bonds, pushing long-term interest rates to painfully high levels. Of late, vigilantes have been rearing their heads in the United States, Europe, and Japan. If they return in force, rising rates and the resulting liquidity squeeze will make it much harder for AI firms to keep funding their expansion plans through heavier borrowing, and could send the stock market plummeting.

This is how the endgame unfolds. Problems surface first in the debt markets, then spill over into other financial markets. Symptoms started to appear this summer in the U.S. and Asian markets with tremors in semiconductor shares, but other AI stocks may be at imminent risk. It’s hardly a surprise, then, that a research note from Bank of America recently warned that “bubble-like instability” was spreading worldwide.

AFTER THE CRASH

Every boom sows the seeds of its own demise. Big tech stocks had been rising since 2009, but began to falter four years ago, as the Fed aggressively hiked rates. The release of ChatGPT and the end of Fed tightening then gave the tech bull a second wind. As the Bank for International Settlements noted, “The larger the boom, the larger the eventual bust.”

Each bubble since the crash of 1929 has been larger than those of the past. One reason is the financialization of the economy. Financial markets were roughly equal to global GDP in 1980, but nearly three times as large in 2000, when the Internet boom went bust. Today, they are five times larger. As markets have grown to dwarf the economy, the potential fallout of market crashes has grown with them. A 25 percent drop in the S&P 500 index, for example, would be about half the decline of 2001 or 2008 but would generate equally large losses for American households.

When a tech bubble deflates, the fallout tends to follow a standard trajectory. Lenders pull back, firms at the heart of the boom cut costs or close, bankruptcies pick up, building projects are shelved. Laid-off workers compete for jobs elsewhere, depressing wages in other industries. Some economies slow; a few may tip into recession. The economies that gained most at the height of the AI frenzy would be the first to suffer some combination of these effects. The shock would radiate from the United States to Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, then down the AI stack through smaller suppliers, and eventually to the miners and power producers. Every burst bubble causes economic damage. This one would be felt around the world.

And the fallout could be magnified by distinguishing features of the AI era. To an unusual degree, growth in economies up and down the AI stack is driven by the twin investment and market booms. Rising stock prices are in turn having an inspiring “wealth effect” on consumer spending, as households feel richer and spend more when the value of their investments rises. This narrow dependence on AI could amplify the shock when the bubble deflates.

Another new twist is the debt backdrop. Never has the world entered a crisis of any kind carrying a debt burden this large. Driven mainly by government borrowing, total global debt spiked over the last year at the fastest pace since the COVID-19 pandemic, to more than $350 trillion. That is more than three times the size of the world economy. Once the AI boom ends, few governments will have the money to stimulate battered economies or bail out affected businesses.

Any attempt to rescue AI companies would meet serious resistance. Most Americans say they are more concerned than excited about AI. Seven in ten expect it to leave fewer jobs for humans. Data center projects across the United States now face determined community opposition. Local revolts blocked or delayed projects worth some $130 billion in the first quarter of this year alone. Politicians may read those numbers and think twice before stepping in to rescue faltering AI firms.

Each bubble since the crash of 1929 has been larger than those of the past.

The worst bubbles form in industries that offer little in the way of innovation and are financed mainly by debt. The real estate bubble of the 2000s is a classic example. When it burst, the result was the long and painful Great Recession of 2008–9. Overextended lenders and borrowers took years to dig their way out of trouble, and the crash left behind nothing of value—no new inventions, no new industries, just deflated home prices. By contrast, the dot-com boom was a classic “good bubble” in a productive industry, financed by equity rather than debt. After it popped in 2001, the drop in stock prices was painful but fleeting. With debts low, borrowers did not struggle for long, and the resulting recession was short and mild. And this time, the crash left behind something of tremendous value: the Internet.

AI is a hybrid. It is a “good bubble” in an innovative technology financed by huge flows of both equity and debt. The fallout from the most recent big bubbles offers no clear framework for estimating the immediate economic losses of such a crash. This is uncharted territory, complicated by the fact that overextended governments cannot easily step in to stem the losses.

When good bubbles burst, they leave behind a streamlined network of stronger survivors, as was the case with the Internet and the railroad, canal, automobile, and television industries before it. Survivors of the AI crash will push the technology forward to the benefit of users worldwide and, in the rosiest scenario, provide the hoped-for boost to productivity growth.

The question is how big this boost might be—and when it will materialize. Often, new technologies raise productivity growth only decades after they appear in commercial form. Cars replaced horse carriages on the streets of New York in the 1910s but made their maximum impact on productivity only after the construction of the national highway system in the 1950s—decades after the market crash of 1929 wiped out hundreds of automakers, leaving only Chrysler, Ford, and General Motors standing.

At the construction site of Google’s new data center near Kronstorf, Austria, August 2026 Christian Bruna / Reuters

A similar shakeout and delay could occur before artificial intelligence makes its mark. The most recent forecasts for AI’s potential boost to annual productivity growth range from 0.1 percentage points, which would barely be noticeable, to nearly 2.0 percentage points, which would be extraordinary. An increase that large would roughly double the sustainable economic growth rate worldwide, ushering in a golden age of prosperity at astonishing speed.

Earlier stages of the digital revolution offer reasons to temper those expectations. The Internet was also expected to spark a productivity boom and did so, briefly, in the late 1990s. But that boom eventually faded, overwhelmed by larger forces including the rise of the regulatory state and increasingly generous government bailouts. An AI-driven productivity boom would face similar headwinds.

That AI is advancing at a dizzying pace does not mean it is advancing outside history or the norms of human behavior. Manias create imbalances too large to last. When the crash comes, the damage will be severe but not permanent. To borrow a line from chemistry, nothing is created, nothing is destroyed, everything is transformed. The technology will keep moving forward even as the speculative frenzy around it fades, leaving behind a more balanced global marketplace, more rational spending by companies, and a reordering of the crazed AI world that exists today.

America Shouldn’t Let Go of the Middle East

Philip H. Gordon — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 08:00:00 GMT

Michael Corleone’s famous lament in The Godfather, Part III could serve as a motto for every American president of the past three decades when it comes to the Middle East: “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.” Bill Clinton promised to focus “like a laser beam” on the economy but would spend the end of his presidency consumed by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and trying to contain Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. George W. Bush came to office pledging a “humble” foreign policy and ended up invading and occupying Afghanistan and Iraq. Barack Obama announced a “pivot to Asia,” only to be drawn into the aftermath of the Arab Spring, a military campaign against the Islamic State (or ISIS), and an all-consuming negotiation with Iran. Joe Biden tried to deprioritize the region—until Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel consumed much of Biden’s presidency. And most strikingly, Donald Trump, having campaigned against “endless wars,” has ended up gambling on a reckless war against Iran that could define his second term.

The Iran war has given new impetus to a long-standing debate about U.S. policy in the Middle East. Writing in Foreign Affairs in August, Michael Fuchs argued that the conflict—an “epic disaster”—should spur a long-overdue withdrawal. The United States, he contends, should pull all its bases and forces out of the region and “end its role as guarantor of regional order,” freeing Washington to concentrate on higher-priority objectives in Asia and Europe. It is a serious argument that will resonate with the many Americans who have watched their country spend trillions of dollars and sacrifice thousands of lives in the region with little to show for it.

This diagnosis of U.S. overcommitment is right. But the prescription of “letting go”—and essentially leaving the region to its fate—is not. The Iran war has not demonstrated that the United States no longer has interests in the Middle East; it has demonstrated, very painfully, that it does and that the way Washington has been pursuing them for a generation is unsustainable. The lesson is not to abandon the region but to rethink an approach that has become both too costly and counterproductive. The United States should instead defend a narrower set of core interests with a smaller military footprint, more diplomacy, more alternatives, and more partners. Neither doubling down nor walking away offers a way out of the cycle that has trapped every recent president. A more pragmatic and disciplined middle course might.

FOREIGN FOLLIES

Consider what critics of U.S. foreign policy in the region get right. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq cost at least $2 trillion each, along with the lives of thousands of U.S. service members and hundreds of thousands of local civilians. The wars severely tarnished the United States’ global reputation and left a generation of Americans skeptical that the country could be a force for good in the world. Twenty-five years of counterterrorism operations did significantly degrade the global terrorist threat, but they also left the region no freer and, in many places, less stable. Now the Iran war has added new consequences of U.S. hubris and military overreach: tens of billions of dollars in direct military costs, thousands killed or wounded, the diversion of military assets from other vital regions, depleted stocks of scarce munitions, strained alliances, a windfall for Russia from higher oil prices, an even more hard-line Iranian regime, and the biggest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market.

The critics are also right that the U.S. military presence in the region, which was long considered essential for deterring war and keeping energy flowing, has in many ways become a liability. The network of large bases that Washington built after the 1991 Gulf War is now vulnerable to Iranian drones and ballistic missiles, offering Tehran targets and leverage rather than deterring it from taking military action. Forward-deployed forces, meanwhile, tempt U.S. leaders to reach for military solutions, and the need to protect those forces creates a self-defeating loop in which the threat to U.S. forces becomes a large part of the rationale for keeping them there. And critics are right that U.S. support for regional partners has been too easy to take for granted and too easily abused. Washington’s almost unconditional backing for Israel, for example, has created a moral hazard—an implicit insurance policy that encourages Israeli risk-taking and draws the United States into conflicts it did not choose and cannot control. The U.S. dependence on Gulf partners to maintain its security presence has likewise led to Washington’s muted criticism of repression and acquiescence to destabilizing interventions in places such as Libya, Sudan, and Yemen.

As a result, U.S. domestic politics are moving in the direction of restraint if not outright withdrawal. A large majority of Americans tell pollsters that the Iran war is not worth fighting, and voters in both parties, especially younger ones, are increasingly skeptical of the U.S. security partnership with Israel and of “forever wars” that do not seem to make the country safer or address the issues they care most about. Any strategy that ignores that skepticism is unlikely to survive the next election or to be funded by the Congress that is likely to emerge from it.

THE INTERESTS ABIDE

Acknowledging that U.S. policy has failed, however, is not the same as concluding that U.S. interests have vanished. Some of the most important reasons for past American engagement in the region—for example, Cold War competition with the Soviet Union, heavy U.S. dependence on imported oil, threats from al-Qaeda and ISIS at their peak, and a vulnerable Israel’s need for protection against hostile Arab armies—have indeed faded. But the interests that remain are real, as the Iran war has so vividly illustrated.

Take the continued importance of energy supplies. The United States is now a net exporter of oil and gas and imports little crude from the Persian Gulf, leading many to conclude that the region’s energy no longer matters much to Americans. But the notion of U.S. “energy independence” is vastly overstated. Oil is a fungible commodity with a single global price. As the Iran war has shown, when supplies are cut anywhere, Americans pay more at the pump, and slower growth in Asia and Europe drags down the U.S. economy, too. Nor is the world weaning itself off fossil fuels as quickly as many had hoped. Despite the real boom in renewables such as solar, wind, and hydropower, global consumption of oil and coal recently reached an all-time high, and fossil fuels still supply roughly 80 percent of the world’s energy, down only modestly from around 85 percent in the early 1990s. The relentless spread of energy-hungry data centers is pushing demand higher still.

The Iran war has been a brutal reminder of these realities. Iran predictably responded to U.S. and Israeli strikes by attacking regional energy infrastructure and closing off shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, through which a quarter of the world’s seaborne oil trade and nearly a fifth of its liquefied natural gas had flowed, along with fertilizer, refined products, and other critical goods. Oil prices spiked, leading U.S. gasoline prices to rise by more than 40 percent, and diesel by more than 70 percent, fueling inflation and pushing up interest rates. Only a combination of surprisingly sharp Chinese oil import cuts (facilitated by stockpiling and a pivot toward renewables), emergency releases from strategic petroleum reserves, and Saudi and Emirati pipelines that bypass the Strait has kept the damage from being far worse—for now. When contemplating whether the United States still needs to care about oil flowing out of the Middle East, it is worth remembering that a one percent annual decline in U.S. GDP triggered by an oil-supply shock would cost the United States over $300 billion in lost output; a one percent hit to global output would cost the world over $1 trillion. Those are consequences all Americans should care about.

The United States has positive interests in the region, not just threats to avert.

Nuclear nonproliferation is another enduring interest. Some scholars argue that a nuclear-armed Iran could be deterred, and even that the spread of nuclear weapons might stabilize the region, as it arguably did during the Cold War. Others believe that with the threat of U.S. military intervention removed or reduced, Iran would simply forgo the nuclear option, so there is little to worry about. Either outcome is possible, but no American president is likely to bet on it, and for good reason. A nuclear Iran would know it could maintain or increase its support for proxy forces and its meddling in its neighbors’ affairs, or escalate its conflict with Israel, confident that its arsenal would deter any attempt to overthrow the regime in response.

And if Iran got the bomb its regional neighbors would likely try to do so, as well. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who signed a mutual defense pact with nuclear-armed Pakistan in 2025 and with Turkey and Pakistan in 2026, has said that if Iran gets a nuclear weapon, Saudi Arabia will also “have to get one.” Turkey’s foreign minister said earlier this year that his country would consider doing the same. A Middle East with multiple nuclear powers, many of them rivals, would be far more dangerous than it is today, with a higher risk of a nuclear accident or nuclear weapons use. The logic of U.S. disengagement from the region implies that Washington could live with an Iranian bomb, as it lives with Pakistan’s and North Korea’s, and perhaps it could. But most Americans would probably prefer never to find out.

The threat from terrorism, too, has diminished but not disappeared. Decades of intelligence work and military pressure have decimated al-Qaeda’s leadership and stripped ISIS of its territorial “caliphate.” No foreign terrorist group has carried out a mass-casualty attack on U.S. soil since 9/11. That means that Washington can and should devote far fewer resources to counterterrorism than it did during the “global war on terror.” But ISIS and its affiliates remain capable of mass-casualty attacks, as their 2024 assaults near Moscow and in Kerman, Iran, showed, and they continue to inspire terrorists such as the one who drove a truck into crowds on New Orleans’ Bourbon Street in January 2025 and those who killed 15 people at Bondi Beach in Australia later that year. Hundreds of ISIS members escaped or were freed from Syrian prisons amid the chaos of that country’s transition following the fall of the Assad regime in December 2024. At least a modest counterterrorism mission, and counterterrorism cooperation with regional partners, will remain necessary.

Finally, the United States has positive interests in the region, not just threats to avert. Gulf Cooperation Council states have sovereign wealth funds worth more than $5 trillion and hold up to $2 trillion in U.S. assets, including Treasury bonds that help keep American borrowing costs down. With a combined GDP of more than $2 trillion, GCC states are also spending hundreds of billions of dollars on data centers built with U.S. firms, anchoring themselves in the American technology ecosystem rather than China’s. As they expand their civil nuclear energy and other infrastructure programs, they will likely do so together with American firms—or at least Americans should hope they do. These economic ties do not by themselves justify a large U.S. military presence or extensive security or intelligence partnerships. But they raise the cost of regional instability and of a geopolitical realignment toward Beijing that a U.S. exit could encourage.

THE LIMITS OF LETTING GO

The case for disengagement from the Middle East rests on a series of hopeful assumptions. Without the United States, the theory goes, the region would settle into its own equilibrium. Gulf states would find ways to live with Iran rather than engage in competition or violent conflict. Iran, no longer threatened, would forgo nuclear weapons. Israel, lacking an American backstop, would become more cautious but not so weak that it might be subject to attack. Regional states’ self-interest would keep oil flowing, no new terrorist safe havens would emerge, and no outside power would fill the vacuum. Some of these may prove true. But together they amount to a gamble, based more on hope than on experience that the Middle East’s future will be more benign than its past, and that instability or conflict there would not impact the United States.

Consider how the countries most affected are likely to respond to U.S. disengagement. Gulf Arab states that could no longer count on U.S. protection would not simply accommodate Tehran. They would likely hedge—deepening defense ties with Pakistan, Turkey, and China and, in Saudi Arabia’s case, potentially moving closer to a nuclear option of its own. Israel, feeling more exposed, might become more inclined to strike preventively, and without the United States involved, Iran and its regional proxies might be more tempted to strike back. Iran might also conclude that the path to a bomb—via an enrichment program in which it has invested so much money and national pride for decades—was finally clear. Even if the United States were to no longer have military bases and forces in the region, it is likely that Americans would be affected by the consequences of the resulting arms races, security competitions, and possible conflicts.

There are also limits to the notion that U.S. withdrawal from the region would give Washington more influence on issues such as human rights. Ending security ties, arms sales, and intelligence cooperation with Middle Eastern states would free up the United States to publicly pressure them on such issues, but it might also diminish U.S. influence by leaving its former partners feeling that they have nothing left to lose. Washington might feel better about keeping its distance, but it might not care for what results.

History also suggests that withdrawal from the region can lead to unintended consequences. When the United States withdrew its forces from Iraq in 2011, the result was not stability but the rise of ISIS, which seized territory in Iraq and Syria nearly the size of Great Britain, murdered Americans and many others, and plotted attacks abroad, forcing Washington to return to the region to conduct a multiyear air and ground campaign. If a future administration were to dismantle the U.S. military posture in the region, end long-standing security and intelligence partnerships, and remove Middle East scenarios from the Pentagon’s contingency planning, it would not necessarily eliminate the need for U.S. involvement when the next crisis hit, but it would limit Washington’s options when the time came.

SMART ENGAGEMENT

The alternative to disengagement from the Middle East is not clinging harder to the failed approaches of the past. Some defenders of the Iran war argue that what is needed now is the resolve to “finish the job,” as Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton said in July. This line of thinking calls for reopening the Strait of Hormuz by force, continuing to strike Iran until the regime capitulates or falls, and maintaining U.S. bases in the region, financed by defense budgets on the scale of the Trump administration’s $1.5 trillion request. Such an approach would repeat the error at the root of so many past failures: the belief that military force can permanently solve the region’s problems if only the United States shows sufficient commitment. It also has little support among the public or in Congress. What is needed instead is a way to protect a less ambitious but more realistic set of interests at a cost that Americans are willing to bear.

That begins with abandoning the fantasy of transforming the region by force. There is a difference between using military power to deter aggression—as the United States did largely successfully for decades—and using it to pursue unrealistic goals such as regime change, as Washington attempted in Iraq in 2003 and again in Iran this year. If that lesson was not clear before, it should be now.

Second, the United States must overhaul its military posture in the region, which currently consists of more than 50,000 troops at more than a dozen large military bases—still far more than it had before the 1991 Gulf War. The Iran war has shown that these bases are so vulnerable to drones and missiles that they in some ways give Iran more leverage than they give the United States. Many were badly damaged in the first weeks of the war, and it makes little sense to spend billions of dollars rebuilding them as they were.

But the United States can fix its military posture without giving up the ability to act. Washington, for instance, could replace large, vulnerable installations with a network of smaller, more dispersed, and better-defended facilities farther from the likeliest sources of attack. It could harden those sites with underground shelters for personnel and fuel and ammunition storage, protect them with layered air and missile defenses, and pre-position equipment for rapid reinforcement—depriving Iran or any other adversaries of concentrated targets while maintaining an ability to conduct operations as needed. Washington could also consider moving some command and coordination functions to the United States or to safer overseas locations, including in Europe and Diego Garcia, and develop its capacity for replenishing naval operations at sea. And it could rely on base access agreements in countries like Jordan and the Arab Gulf states that could supplement its remaining facilities in the region during times of need. Technology has made large military facilities more vulnerable to attack, but it also allows the United States to transfer command functions from Bahrain or Qatar to South Carolina, launch airstrikes against Iran with strategic bombers from Missouri, and organize a naval blockade largely from aircraft carriers and other ships at sea.

To preserve its interests in the region without getting dragged into war, the United States should also return to diplomacy as the primary tool for preventing an Iranian bomb. Iran’s skepticism that Washington would honor any new agreement will make that difficult: Trump abandoned the 2015 nuclear deal and then twice attacked Iran while negotiations were underway. But after the war ends, a weakened, isolated regime that wants to rebuild its economy, avoid repeated wars, and forestall domestic unrest will eventually need a modus vivendi with its neighbors and Western powers, and that will require verifiable limits on its nuclear program. Those who say it is too late for coercive diplomacy—such as sanctions and incentives, backed by a broad coalition and a credible threat of force—should consider the alternatives: bombing Iran every few years or accepting an Iranian bomb. The 2015 deal, whatever its limits, was a more effective way to constrain and monitor Iran’s nuclear program than a war that left it with a greater incentive to pursue nuclear weapons, enough highly enriched uranium for a dozen such weapons, plenty of nuclear know-how, and no inspectors on the ground. A similar deal is unlikely any time soon, which is why deterrence must be maintained, but it will have to be part of any long-term solution.

A statue of Iranian military members in Bandar Abbas, Iran, August 2026 Majid Asgaripour / West Asia News Agency / Reuters

To further lessen the risk of future conflict, Washington should also work with its partners to reduce the world’s vulnerability to disruption in the Strait of Hormuz. The United States is currently managing to get significant amounts of crude oil (if not refined product) through the strait, but only by providing costly military protection to tankers that slip past Iran’s guns with their transponders off. Exporters are paying vastly elevated shipping and insurance fees and still incur a risk of attack. This is unsustainable, and the process of bypassing the strait is already underway: Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which have rerouted some five million barrels per day around the strait, are planning to add pipeline capacity for at least four million more, and U.S. and other energy companies are exploring other routes, including a pipeline from Iraq to Syria’s Mediterranean coast. Building and protecting those pipelines will be expensive—but far cheaper than trying to keep the strait open by force or coping with periodic shortages and price spikes.

The United States, meanwhile, should do more to reduce the oil intensity of its own economy—admittedly unlikely as long as Trump is president—as other countries are doing. Since the war began, numerous countries have fast-tracked renewable energy projects, and China has sharply cut its oil imports and surged its use of renewables, including by dramatically ramping up use of electric vehicles. If climate change has not been enough to build political support for that necessary shift, the Iran war should be.

Even as it remains engaged in the Middle East and committed to regional security, Washington must also cancel its blank check to Israel. The Israeli government’s confidence that the United States will back it no matter what it does, including launching a war against Iran, assassinating enemies in foreign capitals, and causing mass casualties and catastrophic conditions in Gaza, risks dragging the United States into wars it does not want. At a minimum, the United States should enforce existing U.S. laws that tie military assistance and arms sales to respect for human rights and humanitarian aid deliveries. On that basis, the United States could still sell weapons Israel needs to deter aggression and defend itself in case of attack but avoid complicity or involvement in conflicts or conduct it opposes. The same logic applies to Gulf partners who have fueled conflicts in Africa and Yemen. Conditionality works best when the United States remains engaged enough for its partners to care about losing it.

Finally, the United States should look to cooperate more with its global allies rather than drive them away by going it alone. European and Asian allies understandably declined to join an Iran war they thought unwise and on which they had not been consulted. This stands in sharp contrast to their roles in the 1991 Gulf War coalition, the post-2014 campaign against ISIS, the maritime coalition against the Houthis in the Red Sea in 2023–24, and the diplomacy that produced the 2015 nuclear deal. Those allies share U.S. interests in energy security, nonproliferation, and counterterrorism, and they can contribute investment, sanctions, diplomacy, arms sales, and military forces—if Washington treats them as partners rather than bystanders. Moreover, if the United States is going to rely less on permanent bases in the Middle East, it will likely have to rely more on its bases in Europe, which will not be easy to do if the United States is constantly bullying its European allies and threatening to reconsider its membership in NATO.

BREAKING THE CYCLE

Skeptics of the approach proposed here will ask why it should succeed when so many past presidents’ efforts to rebalance away from the region failed. It is a fair question, and there are no guarantees. A middle course could fail to spare the United States the costs and risks of engagement while also revealing the limits of restraint—the worst of all worlds.

But there are reasons to believe it could work. The Iran war has painfully demonstrated the limits of military force, the vulnerability of the old U.S. basing model, the cost of overreliance on the Strait of Hormuz, and the consequences of Washington’s unconditional alignment with Israel. Together these developments present an opportunity to start doing things differently, and the American public’s diminishing tolerance for another open-ended war in the Middle East will likely discipline future presidents from being pulled back in, tempted to use force to pursue unrealistic goals. The 2028 election cycle will offer a healthy opportunity to debate the right way forward.

Americans are right to be frustrated with the results of U.S. policy in the Middle East. Decades of effort and trillions of dollars have failed to bring stability, democracy, or peace to the region, and the latest war created a crisis in the Strait of Hormuz that did not exist before it began and exacerbated a nuclear proliferation risk it was designed to eliminate. But complete disengagement, tempting as it is, would be an unnecessary gamble. The U.S. goal should not be to let go of the Middle East but to pursue its interests there in a smarter and more realistic way.

Chinese Robots Could Decide the AI Race

Scott Singer, Pavlo Zvenyhorodskyi — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 08:00:00 GMT

The fastest track and field athlete is no longer the Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt. In fact, it is not a person at all: it is the Chinese humanoid robot Tiangong Ultra, which in August ran 100 meters in 9.39 seconds, nearly two-tenths of a second faster than Bolt’s world-record time and more than twice as fast as its own time a year ago. The race made global headlines and spread on social media in large part because of what it revealed robots still can’t do—in this case, slow down, as Tiangong Ultra ran right through the finish line and slammed into a safety wall. But it also showcased the incredible progress China’s robotics industry has made and the narrowing gap between human capabilities and new technology.

China’s robotics achievements have become central to its evolving national AI strategy. Whereas Washington and Silicon Valley focus primarily on scaling large language models and digital AI applications, Beijing is concentrating on combining its strengths in software and hardware to develop robots that incorporate the advanced cognition of AI with autonomous physical movement. These robots, often described in China as “embodied AI,” could eventually operate factories, perform manual labor, and even replace human soldiers on the battlefield. If AI-powered robots develop enough autonomy to carry out sophisticated tasks in the real world, they could become a general-purpose technology, like electricity or the Internet, that is able to transform physical work across broad swaths of the economy.

For Beijing, a powerful AI-driven robotics industry could serve several of its economic and strategic goals. It could ease demographic pressures from an aging population by reducing the need for workers and providing eldercare. It could also supercharge Beijing’s military capabilities by automating its reconnaissance, logistics, and combat operations. Most notably, some leading Chinese thinkers believe robotics could be the key to unlocking artificial general intelligence—systems capable of performing as well as or better than humans across most tasks. China’s investments in AI-powered robotics could be especially consequential if today’s leading AI companies in Silicon Valley, which are focused on scaling the data and computing power used to train large models, struggle to translate their digital gains into advancements in the physical world.

Skeptics might think that AI-powered robots are the stuff of science fiction. But as robotics technology rapidly develops, China is betting that some of the most consequential advances in AI will hinge on mastery of the physical world. If that bet is right, even only partially, the United States’ lead in frontier models would matter far less than many in Washington assume. What would matter instead is the capacity to build robots, deploy them in sectors such as manufacturing and logistics, and generate enough data to continuously train them—all areas in which the United States currently underinvests. To compete, Washington needs to expand its own manufacturing sector and work with partners around the world that have developed advantages in key parts of the robotics supply chain. As China sprints ahead, the United States needs to get serious about AI-powered robots or it risks getting left behind.

EMBODIED POSITIVITY

The Chinese government is determined to lead the transformation toward a world of AI-powered robots. Beijing has placed embodied AI among what it calls the “industries of the future,” alongside 6G and quantum technology, and named it a priority in the 15th Five-Year Plan—the country’s socioeconomic blueprint through 2030. Facing high youth unemployment, a property market still in crisis, sluggish domestic consumption, and an aging and shrinking population, Beijing sees embodied AI as a new growth engine that could offset these headwinds while also pushing technological frontiers.

Innovations aimed at addressing domestic challenges could quickly create a geoeconomic advantage. China already controls key chokepoints in the emerging supply chain for embodied AI. Chinese companies, for example, produce about 80 percent of the world’s LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) sensors—the technology that underpins three-dimensional mapping and autonomous navigation in self-driving vehicles, warehouse robots, and precision agricultural tools. If AI-powered robots become as foundational to the global economy as Beijing hopes, countries would be as dependent on Chinese robotics supply chains as they are today for critical minerals, which has given Beijing enormous leverage over the global economy.

The strategic benefits of AI-powered robots extend to the military. In February, the Chinese Institute of Command and Control, a state-connected national scientific society, assessed that embodied AI could enable networks of unmanned systems operating across air, land, sea, and space to share information, anticipate battlefield developments, and carry out precision strikes in real time. This could significantly enhance the ability of the People’s Liberation Army to coordinate joint operations across varied terrain, such as around the disputed islands and outcroppings in the South China Sea.

Beijing is combining its strengths in software and hardware.

Most important, a growing number of prominent scientists in China have argued that embodied AI could offer a potentially neglected pathway to building artificial general intelligence. Zhang Bo, the founding dean of Tsinghua University’s Institute for Artificial Intelligence and a pioneering AI researcher, has written that intelligence relies not only on cognition but also on the ability to learn from and make decisions in the physical world. Embodied AI, he argues, can overcome the shortcomings of traditional AI and accelerate progress toward AGI. Zhou Bowen, the director and chief scientist at Shanghai AI Lab, one of the country’s leading AI research institutes, has similarly argued that AI models need robotics to understand the physical world. China’s unmatched manufacturing base can become a training ground for artificial intelligence as real-world data feed back into AI systems. The more data these systems acquire on how to navigate complex real-world settings, the better they will perform in new environments and the quicker they can develop.

Beijing’s bet on embodied AI is not a turn away from software or a concession in the software race with Washington. China’s leading labs such as DeepSeek and Z.ai are scaling large language models as aggressively as their American counterparts. Many have begun using AI to automate AI research in the same way U.S. companies have, bringing them closer to what technology experts call “recursive self-improvement”—when highly capable AI is able to continuously build ever more capable AI, which could create a potential intelligence explosion. What sets Beijing apart from Washington is the simultaneous efforts it is making in developing AI in the physical world, where it is far outpacing everyone else.

FROM THE BOT UP

To accelerate the development of AI-powered robots, Beijing has directed local officials to experiment with ways to boost innovation and expand production. Provincial governments, adept at interpreting and carrying out the central leadership’s priorities, have responded rapidly. Wealthy provinces and cities with established high-tech ecosystems, including Beijing, Guangdong, Shanghai, and Zhejiang, have jockeyed aggressively to position themselves as national front-runners. They have established dedicated venture capital funds, introduced subsidy schemes, and set up specialized training facilities to support local AI-powered robotics companies.

This approach mirrors the strategy Beijing successfully used to develop technologies such as electric vehicles and solar energy. Acting on broad policy direction from Beijing, provincial and city officials offered companies generous subsidies, tax breaks, and preferential leases on land. These local governments’ efforts to outdo one another in carrying out Beijing’s strategy yielded widespread overcapacity and huge amounts of waste. Yet it also helped cultivate globally competitive firms, including BYD, which has emerged as the world’s leading electric carmaker.

Financing a boom for AI-powered robots, however, will be more difficult than it was to finance a boom for electric vehicles and solar panels. The property market downturn, which has now lasted five years, has strained local budgets. Governments can no longer rely on selling land-use rights to developers to fill their coffers, taking away one of their main sources of revenue and limiting the funds available to encourage the growth of new industries. Aside from the wealthiest areas, there is not much money available for robotics.

With government funding hard to come by, AI-powered robotics companies have turned to public markets. In August, Unitree, one of China’s largest producers of humanoid robots, went public on the Shanghai Stock Exchange. The company raised nearly $1 billion in its initial public offering, and shares were so oversubscribed that they jumped more than 450 percent on the first day of trading. But although public markets can help fill some of the gap left by shrinking state support, their reach is limited. Only a handful of robotics companies have gone public, and Chinese regulators are making it harder to do so by requiring firms to demonstrate stable revenue and commercial sales before they can list. Regulators are cautious in part because the technology is not yet commercially viable at scale.

Still, there are signs that the technology is becoming more appealing and could spread quickly. Although most of Unitree’s humanoid robot sales in the first nine months of 2025 were for education and research, more than two-thirds of the sales of its four-legged robots (essentially robotic dogs) were for consumer and industrial uses—patrolling industrial sites for safety hazards, for instance, or accompanying lonely seniors—up from less than one-third in 2022. If robotics companies channel the money they raise from government support, initial public offerings, and sales, more AI-powered robots will enter commercial use in the next few years. As that happens, manufacturers across China could begin to buy them for their production lines, generating the revenue and real-world data that embodied AI firms such as Unitree need to improve their products even faster.

GETTING PHYSICAL

Silicon Valley has largely concentrated on a single approach to developing AI: self-reinforcing improvements in software (especially AI agents) that complete increasingly sophisticated digital tasks. Improved coding has allowed large language models to act more autonomously and to solve harder problems, including seemingly impossible mathematical proofs. But despite enormous progress, there is limited investment in incorporating AI into the physical world. Instead, the assumption is that software advances will eventually translate into real-world capabilities.

That assumption may be mistaken. Even if AI models can perform the work of software engineers, accountants, consultants, and lawyers, they may not be able to easily perform tasks in the real economy. Digital systems alone cannot work production lines, harvest fields, extract minerals, or fight wars, nor can they easily capture data that reflect how these physical tasks are done. Automating these sectors likely requires both the most advanced software models and enormous quantities of data about physical interactions. Even if Washington continues to lead the world in software, therefore, China may be able to rapidly gain ground on or even surpass the United States by deploying AI across the physical economy and collecting greater amounts of real-world data.

The longer that Washington neglects its own robotics sector, the further behind it will fall. American firms lead the world in certain segments of the AI-powered robotics supply chain: Nvidia, for instance, designs the chips that serve as the “brains” of these systems. But compared with China, the United States has far fewer companies building complete robots, and these companies face higher production costs and more acute shortages of engineering talent. Fortunately, the investments Washington says it wants to make in the foundations of American manufacturing are essential to strengthening U.S. competitiveness in AI-powered robotics. The U.S. government could set up training programs in mechanical engineering, automation, and robotics to develop a talent pipeline, as well as offer tax incentives for manufacturers who produce in the United States.

China’s manufacturing base can become a training ground for AI.

The U.S. robotics industry is also growing increasingly reliant on Chinese hardware components, a problem that will become more severe over the long term. This dependence raises the risk that Chinese suppliers could gain access to U.S. users’ sensitive data, and it leaves Washington vulnerable to the weaponization of economic chokepoints. As AI-powered robots become more integrated into the American economy in the coming years, any Chinese restrictions on exports of key components could halt U.S. assembly lines and ripple across every industry that depends on these systems.

Policymakers are aware of the dangers of overreliance on Chinese supply chains. In July, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission banned the import of advanced foreign robots, hoping to create market space in which U.S. companies can compete with China. Notably, the FCC rule exempts imports of robots for U.S. product development and does not fully ban imports of Chinese components. This is a good start, but more challenging policy questions await, especially if Washington tries to more forcefully cut China out of the U.S. robotics industry. Any rapid decoupling from Chinese hardware could disrupt domestic robotics production in the United States by limiting access to some necessary components, including key sensors and batteries. A better solution is for Washington to selectively import essential Chinese components while developing alternatives and deepening cooperation with countries that have long-standing strengths in industrial robotics, such as Germany and Japan. Agreements could be connected to or modeled on Pax Silica, a U.S.-led initiative focused on cooperation in AI and semiconductor supply chains, which would ensure that American manufacturers can obtain their hardware on competitive terms from trusted sources.

The United States also needs its partners to help it increase its access to training data. Chinese companies can draw on real-world data from the country’s vast manufacturing base and widespread deployment of robots, giving them a data advantage that none of their competitors alone can match. But some U.S. partners hold unique datasets. Ukraine, for example, has amassed millions of annotated battlefield images and video frames from its war with Russia. Earlier this year, Kyiv signaled its willingness to share this data with its partners to help them train their AI systems. Washington could work with Kyiv on a framework for sharing this data with American companies, helping them accelerate the development of robots for national defense.

Integrating artificial intelligence into the physical world will likely unlock profound economic, technological, and military advantages for whichever country can best do so. As it stands, those advantages will accrue primarily to Beijing. If Washington wants to keep up, it will have to make leadership in this transformative technology a national priority rather than an afterthought. Otherwise, the United States may soon find itself developing the world’s best AI models while China reaps the benefits of bringing the models to life.

Iran’s Theory of Victory

Narges Bajoghli, Vali Nasr — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 08:00:00 GMT

When it comes to Iran, the Trump administration has a decidedly dismal record. It failed to wear down the Islamic Republic with months of intense bombings. It could not bend Iran’s will at the negotiating table. Yet despite seven months of setbacks, U.S. officials believe that they have turned the page. They have implemented fresh sanctions while maintaining the existing American blockade of the country’s southern coast, throttling its access to outside commerce. As a result, they have concluded that the Islamic Republic will soon either concede or be downed. “We are going to economically asphyxiate this regime,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent declared on September 1.

There is no doubt that Washington has dealt significant damage to Iran. But the Islamic Republic does not believe it is unraveling. In fact, Tehran thinks that it will defeat the United States—and it isn’t hard to see why. The Iranian government did not merely survive the U.S.-Israeli bombardment. It retaliated ferociously, damaging American military bases and obstructing the Strait of Hormuz. Its people are paying a hefty economic price thanks to damage caused by the war and Washington’s cutoffs, but much of the population has rallied around the flag and seems to accept that hardship is necessary if Iran is to defend itself. As a result, Tehran has been emboldened. Its officials may not see eye to eye on each tactic. But they share the same ambitions: evicting U.S. forces from the Persian Gulf, forcing Washington to remove all its sanctions, and getting the United States to accept that Iran is a great power.

This agenda might sound overly audacious, given that Iran has been materially weakened. But the Islamic Republic thinks its aims are within reach. It believes its military can drive U.S. troops from the Persian Gulf by continuing to strike American bases directly and by getting Arab countries to push the United States to leave. It thinks that by wreaking havoc on energy markets, it can force Washington to lift economic restrictions, as well. Tehran’s theory of victory, in other words, is that it can hold out and inflict enough pain that the United States will end its containment of Iran.

CLOSING RANKS

No one doubts that Iran has been battered by war. Months of American and Israeli bombs have damaged the country’s industries and infrastructure, spiking unemployment and pushing more Iranians into poverty. Washington’s sanctions and naval blockade have caused rampant inflation. And the American and Israeli militaries can count many tactical successes, including the assassination of former Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

But strategically, the conflict has been disastrous. U.S. officials believed that punishing aerial bombardments and sweeping efforts to degrade the Iranian economy would bring the Islamic Republic to its knees. They didn’t. Washington hoped that assassinating Khamenei would prompt a mass antigovernment uprising. That scheme also failed. Instead, Khamenei’s death brought out the Islamic Republic’s ardent supporters. They marched every night in the country’s main cities and were eventually joined by Iranians of other political hues, who rallied in support of their homeland. When the war started, Turkey planned to accommodate 70,000 Iranian refugees. But few people fled. In fact, as the war progressed, many Iranians living abroad returned home, including long-exiled cultural figures, journalists, and politicians, such as the singers Mohsen Namjoo and Bijan Mortazavi.

This surge in nationalism is not an endorsement of the Islamic Republic. Many Iranians remain deeply unhappy with the country’s leadership. But the anger at their government has been subsumed by their anger at Washington. Previously, most Iranians were skeptical of the Islamic Republic’s claim that the United States was bent on their country’s destruction and in fact hoped Tehran would seek better relations with Washington. But the bombings of Iranian cities and U.S. President Donald Trump’s repeated threats to annihilate the country’s civilization (saying, for example, that he might “blow the entire nation up” and drive it “into hell with no chance of survival”) have changed attitudes. Iranians across the political spectrum now do think that the United States wants to obliterate their country—or at least make it capitulate to every American demand.

Iranians do not see the U.S.-Israeli war as liberating.

This conclusion was apparent in our lengthy conversations with Iranians of all ideologies, which we started conducting when Washington first bombed Iran, in June 2025, and have continued to the present, tracing their political attitudes over that period. The vast majority expressed deep distress and anger at their government after the massacres that took place in response to January’s mass protests. But we found that political opinions have shifted drastically as the war has dragged on and as Trump has upped his annihilatory rhetoric. “We believed so much in the American promise,” Ali, a 45-year-old long-time dissident who has spent years in prison for his activism on social and political issues, told us. “Yet with this war and everything that Trump and his administration have said and done, it’s obvious the Americans sold us a false bill of goods. They want nothing but Iran’s total submission, and that’s not acceptable to us.” Mahsa, a writer and artist in her 30s, relayed similar sentiments. “Everything we believed the [United States] stood for, freedom and respect and democracy, I now see as lies,” she said. “As angry as I’ve been at our state over the years, this is our homeland, and no outside country has the right to kill our leaders and drop bombs on our children and attempt to destroy us.”

Little wonder, then, that Khamenei’s July funeral procession drew millions of mourners, even though the country was in the midst of conflict. At the event, people handed out red flags, symbolizing their desire for bloody vengeance. Shortly after, Iran attacked commercial vessels crossing the Strait of Hormuz, unraveling the precarious cease-fire the country had struck with the United States three months earlier.

Many U.S. officials seem to think that stiff economic pressure will ultimately prompt a shift in opinion—that if they suffer enough, Iranians will decide to try overthrowing their government or that the Islamic Republic, fearing for its survival, will submit to American demands. But this is magical thinking. Iran has spent the past 15 years developing an economy specifically designed to withstand American economic warfare. Iranian officials, for instance, have forged strong relations with neighboring traders and made the country nearly self-sufficient when it comes to food. As a result, even though Iran’s economy is hurting and inflation is high, cities and towns have had no shortages of important goods or services to date. “It’s incredible how well-run everything has been inside of the country,” Hamid Reza, an engineer who regularly travels between Isfahan and Tehran for work, said. “Things are expensive, but there have been no shortages whatsoever across the country. Everything has been managed internally with a lot of care.”

That is not to say that Iranians feel optimistic about their country. They are anxious about the future, and they yearn for a return to calm and economic relief. But they do not see the U.S.-Israeli war as liberating. Instead, they see it as gratuitous aggression, and the resulting nationalism has blurred the lines between political factions and diminished the likelihood of another political uprising. The war, then, has strengthened the Islamic Republic.

PAIN AND GAIN

Much like its population, the Iranian government has adopted a more hostile view of Washington since the conflict began. The country’s new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, has moved trusted lieutenants to key roles (even as he himself remains in hiding), and they are largely hard-line figures tied to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. These people, including Mohsen Rezaei, the national security adviser, and Hossein Taeb, the commander of Iran’s main domestic paramilitary forces, think deterring further attacks requires a decisive, aggressive response to any provocations. They are skeptical that Washington is serious about diplomacy. They point out that the United States has twice attacked Iran amid negotiations and then walked away from the memorandum of understanding it signed with Iran in June—and thus argue that it cannot be trusted. In fact, they believe that if the United States shows interest in talks, it might even be planning for renewed attacks, as it was in June 2025 and February 2026.

Iran’s relative moderates feel somewhat differently. These elites, which include Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, Speaker of Parliament Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, former President Hasan Rouhani, and former Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, have consistently argued that Tehran should keep looking for a diplomatic solution to the conflict. Pezeshkian and Ghalibaf have highlighted the economic hardships facing ordinary people. But the distance between them and the country’s hard-line leaders is not as great as it might seem. As one analyst familiar with these figures told us, “No one is saying Iran should surrender.” They may see economic relief as a top priority, yet their solution is to force the United States to implement the memorandum of understanding it signed in June. That deal, in Iran’s view, committed Washington to unfreezing all of Iran’s assets, lifting all sanctions, never striking the country again, and paying reparations in exchange for nothing more than a cease-fire and renewed commerce through the Strait of Hormuz (on which Iran could still charge fees). Since the end of summer, Rezaei and Ghalibaf have declared that diplomacy must start with the United States returning to the memorandum. As the same analyst told us after recent UN meetings in New York, these figures think that “Trump is not ready” for real talks. Instead, they believe that Trump will return to this deal only if he comes to terms with Iran’s victory, and that means increasing the war’s costs for the United States.

Iran’s behavior will therefore be unrestrained and disproportionate. If the war resumes, it will attack across the whole region, not just in the country’s immediate vicinity. The dominant view in Tehran is that prudence and predictability will only invite greater U.S. pressure and will do nothing to advance its main military goals: making Washington pull all its troops from the Persian Gulf and accept Iran’s primacy. Iran’s repeated attacks on American military bases and facilities in Jordan, Syria, and across the Persian Gulf are already aimed at this objective. To an extent, they have succeeded. The strikes have seriously damaged several U.S. assets, forcing the United States to move many of its operations and military resources to Israel and Jordan and rely on a base in the central Indian Ocean for logistical support. The threat of Iranian attacks has even pushed Washington to withdraw all its B-1 bombers from a base in the United Kingdom.

Iran believes it can coerce Washington into some kind of economic understanding.

Tehran is simultaneously trying to get Washington’s Gulf partners to close U.S. military bases in their countries. To do so, it has openly declared that peace and security in the Persian Gulf will depend on pushing out the American military and has repeatedly bombed Gulf states it suspects of aiding the U.S. war effort. Iran is ultimately unlikely to end the United States’ military presence in the Gulf region. But it has done enough to make Arab states think twice about relying on the American security umbrella, which could mean a smaller U.S. military footprint in the region.

Iran, of course, could force the American military out of its neighborhood without obtaining economic relief. In fact, the Trump administration announced “economic D-Day” in part because the military was fatigued and because Iranian attacks on the U.S. Navy have forced Washington’s ships farther away from Iranian shores. But Iran believes it can coerce its adversary into some kind of economic understanding by causing sufficient financial suffering. To that end, Tehran has worked to drive up the price of oil, gas, diesel, jet fuel, and other oil derivatives by attacking several energy facilities in the Gulf region, including Qatar’s Ras Laffan gas field (in retaliation for an Israeli attack on Iran’s South Pars gas field) and oil facilities in the United Arab Emirates’ Fujairah port. Iran is also striking tankers ferrying oil and natural gas. And it is trying to consolidate its control over the Strait of Hormuz, which it sees as sovereign Iranian territory. Washington has fought back hard against this effort, and has recently succeeded at helping tankers pass through the chokepoint. But these operations have required enormous naval resources, and the United States cannot sustain them forever.

Iran’s regional partners are also lending it a hand. Iranian-backed Iraqi forces have attacked a vital oil pipeline carrying Saudi Arabia’s oil to facilities on the Red Sea, which will markedly reduce global oil supplies for months. Its Houthi allies in Yemen have also consistently attacked Saudi oil facilities. The Houthis have even captured vast new territory and reached the Bab el Mandeb Strait, helping them menace the Red Sea—through which 12 percent of world trade passes. These attacks also showed that, although Iran’s network may be battered in Lebanon and Syria, it remains quite capable overall.

STEADY AS SHE GOES

The United States may think that it has cornered Iran. But Tehran disagrees. It does not see itself as on its heels or out of options. Instead, it believes that it has won great-power status. It is proud of its military performance and feels as if it commands newfound international respect. Officials in Tehran cheered images of Iran’s delegation being enthusiastically received by member states at the September meetings of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the non-Western BRICS consortium.

Iran is still facing monumental challenges, and it has not found a way to turn what it has won in the war into enduring, peacetime gains. But it is ready to fight on, if and when it needs to. The government believes, as one Iranian senior analyst close to the country’s policymakers put it, that the Iranian people “are willing to endure economic pain and the suffering, if it means that [they] are going to win.” And its elites have coalesced around a shared strategy. Tehran, in other words, is confident that it can prevail by staying the course. No compromises are necessary.

Trump Is Gutting America’s Core Geopolitical Advantage

Robert B. Zoellick — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 08:00:00 GMT

The Trump administration’s attack on Canada and Mexico is cracking the foundation of the United States’ global power. Friendly relations with neighbors enhance security, promote mutual economic gain, and make it easier to handle transnational challenges. Weak neighbors export trouble. Today, Canadians perceive U.S. President Donald Trump’s high tariffs and belittling of their country as the “51st state” as assaults on Canada’s economy and independence. In Mexico, Trump’s economic coercion and threats of military intervention have revived deep historical anxieties about gringo hegemony.

The North American partnership took generations to forge. During the nineteenth century, the United States’ foreign policy concentrated on its home continent, where it competed with France, Mexico, Russia, Spain, the United Kingdom, and indigenous peoples for dominance. As the United States became a global power in the twentieth century, U.S. strategists took North American relations for granted. Washington turned its attention to Europe, the Asia-Pacific, and the Middle East. Since the closing years of the Cold War, however, U.S. presidents have recognized the need to invest in North America. Ronald Reagan laid out the strategic rationale clearly when he launched his presidential campaign in 1979: “The key to our own future security may lie in both Canada and Mexico becoming much stronger than they are today,” he explained. “It is time we stopped treating our nearest neighbors as foreigners.”

Geopolitics begin with geography, and the United States’ geography gives it an enormous advantage over the world’s other major powers. China and Russia each have to manage relationships with 14 neighbors, many of which are unfriendly or carry resentments from histories of conflict. India must deal with six, including a nuclear-armed rival. All three powers’ access to the world’s seas depends on passage through maritime chokepoints. In contrast, the United States borders two benign neighbors and enjoys open sailing on two vast oceans. Close cooperation with Canada and Mexico enhances homeland security, attracts investment, promotes innovation, creates a huge market rich in resources and talent, and helps all three countries deal with criminal networks, illegal immigration, and threats to clean air, water, and wildlife.

A safe, resilient, and adaptive North America is the starting point of U.S. global strategy. Washington is best positioned to navigate an uncertain world when the United States, Canada, and Mexico present a common front. Yet Trump’s bullying is driving the United States’ natural partners away. The president is destroying a precious geopolitical asset: a strong continental base from which Washington projects power.

CONTINENTAL VISION

William Seward, who served as U.S. secretary of state from 1861 to 1869, first appreciated that good relations with the United States’ neighbors would boost the country’s global influence. He asserted that to have “control of this continent is to be . . . the controlling interest in the world.” When he was negotiating the U.S. purchase of Alaska in 1867, Seward observed that Alaska and the Aleutian Islands “extend[ed] a friendly hand to Asia.” He also tried to buy Greenland, Iceland, the Hawaiian Islands, and islands in the Caribbean, hoping that the purchases would help secure the United States’ oceanic approaches.

Seward recognized, however, that the United States could also boost its power by strengthening economic links, not just by adding territory. He abhorred European imperial conquests of foreign lands. He had also opposed the 1846–48 U.S. war with Mexico. At the end of the U.S. Civil War in 1865, Seward prevented Generals Ulysses S. Grant and Philip Sheridan from invading Mexico to depose the Habsburg archduke whom the French had installed as emperor. He reasoned that an invasion would arouse Mexican hostility and that the Mexicans could depose the interloper themselves—which they did, in 1867.

The United States’ geography gives it an enormous advantage.

Seward dealt diplomatically with the United States’ northern neighbor, too. In 1867, the British government united its North American colonies to form the Canadian Confederation, in part to deter Washington from invading Canada in retaliation for London’s assistance to the Confederacy during the Civil War. Seward responded by choosing the peaceful path of arbitration to resolve wartime claims against the United Kingdom.

Seward envisioned a North American union created through free choice, not coercion or conquest. He believed in the attractive power of the United States. Commerce, he maintained, would be the new “god of boundaries” that would redraw borders and pull countries together. Ernest Paolino, his biographer, termed this idea Seward’s “law of imperial gravity.”

The restoration of Mexican President Benito Juarez in 1867, the same year the Canadian Confederation was formed, offered the prospect of a democratic North America with closer economic ties. The neighbors did establish peaceful relations. But Seward’s vision faded in later decades as Americans focused their sights westward, paying less attention to their neighbors to the north and south.

A SEARCH FOR STABILITY

By the early twentieth century, the United States had come to take continental harmony for granted. The Mexican Revolution of 1910 ended that sense of security. In the decade of violent conflicts that followed, attacks on border towns and seizures of American property by revolutionaries and bandits prompted the United States to send two military expeditions into Mexico. Washington narrowly avoided a quagmire. U.S. President Woodrow Wilson’s reelection campaign slogan in 1916, “He kept us out of war,” referred as much to Mexico as Europe. Still, the instability on its doorstep made the United States vulnerable. In 1917, imperial Germany sent the new Mexican government a secret proposal of alliance—a message intercepted by the British—that promised German assistance in recovering Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas if Mexico were to side with Germany in the event the United States entered World War I.

The United States was able to stabilize relations with the one-party authoritarian state that consolidated control in Mexico in the 1920s. As the political scientist Pamela Starr explained, Washington accepted its neighbor’s autonomy, but “within limits.” As long as Mexico did not threaten U.S. security, the United States would not interfere. Mexico’s stability was more important than challenging its stunted democracy, prickly nationalism, and closed economy. This arrangement lasted about 50 years, during which the two countries found ways to cooperate. Between 1942 and 1964, for instance, the United States’ Bracero Program offered some 4.6 million Mexicans guest worker permits, filling labor gaps in the agriculture, railroad, and other industries.

The twentieth century also saw Canada transition from British dominion to sovereign North American partner and ally. During the 1920s and 1930s, the United States and Canada built bridges and tunnels to boost economic exchanges. U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull negotiated important reciprocal trade agreements with Canada in 1935 and 1938. After World War II, Canadians fought beside Americans in the Korean War and vigorously supported the establishment of NATO, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the United Nations, and other institutions that made up the postwar order. During the 1950s, the United States and Canada constructed the St. Lawrence Seaway. The two countries also established a vast radar system to monitor possible missile attacks over the Arctic. In 1965, they signed a pact creating a duty-free integrated automobile market.

TIES THAT BIND

The pace of North American integration picked up during the Reagan administration. Reagan’s outreach to his Canadian counterpart, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, encouraged Mulroney to propose an expansive free trade agreement in 1985. Mulroney ran a big risk: Canadians were wary of becoming economically dependent on or dominated by the United States, but they also wanted rules to discipline U.S. trade practices and encourage investment. The two countries concluded the agreement in 1987, and the U.S. Congress approved it the following year. The 1988 Canadian elections effectively became a referendum on the trade deal—one that Mulroney won.

Carlos Salinas, who assumed the Mexican presidency that year, recognized that a similar agreement would open up his country’s economy and attract investment. Mexico was struggling with debt crises, declining energy revenues, and the related breakdown of the ruling party’s half-century-old corporatist model, which had fostered a centralized, closed economy. Looking to escape stagnation and to spur reform, Salinas took the bold step of proposing a free trade agreement to President George H. W. Bush in 1990.

Trump is destroying a precious geopolitical asset.

Canada joined the negotiations in 1991, and together the three countries signed the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1992. For Washington, NAFTA was about much more than trade. It was a big step toward historical reconciliation with Mexico, which had remained wary of the United States since losing half its territory in the war ending in 1848. Mexico was now looking to the United States to help it accelerate an economic, social, and political transformation. Mexican negotiators hoped to import the rule of law through protections for investment, competition, and intellectual property. And reformers sought inspiration from U.S. and Canadian institutions as they built a multiparty democracy and a more open society.

Bush saw NAFTA as a cornerstone of U.S. post–Cold War strategy, explaining in 1992 that the agreement was “the beginning of a new era,” part of “a new world order” that would help let the United States “prepare for the challenges and opportunity of the next century.” His administration believed that the partnership could both deliver economic benefits and ease the way for continental cooperation on foreign policy, the environment, immigration, and drug smuggling. Unlike the European Union’s model of shared sovereignty, economic integration through NAFTA was supposed to respect national sensitivities about independence and sovereignty.

Bush’s successor, President Bill Clinton, faced the challenge of getting NAFTA approved by Congress, which Clinton accomplished with strong Republican support. Clinton deepened Washington’s commitment to the North American project, extending a large loan to Mexico during the 1995 peso crisis to prevent economic instability from spilling over into the United States. And after the 9/11 attacks, amid fears that terrorism would disrupt trade, President George W. Bush launched initiatives to ensure safe, fast transit for commercial vehicles across the Canadian and Mexican borders.

BETTER TOGETHER

Opponents of NAFTA asserted that Americans would lose many jobs to Mexican workers willing to accept lower wages, but these concerns were not borne out. The agreement was an economic and a strategic success. In 2000, six years after NAFTA came into effect, U.S. unemployment dipped to 3.8 percent, its lowest level in decades. Inflation fell, productivity rose, and real wages grew, with notable gains for low-wage workers. The pact encouraged investment in railroads, pipelines, electric grids, and border systems that made supply chains more efficient, especially in manufacturing. U.S.-Canadian trade in goods and services grew from $169 billion in 1988 to about $900 billion in 2024. U.S.-Mexican trade neared $1 trillion, up from less than $100 billion before NAFTA.

Cross-border investment has powered this growth. U.S. direct investment in Canada rose from $61 billion before NAFTA to about $750 billion, and Canada’s investment in the United States increased from $27 billion to about $500 billion. American direct investment in Mexico rose from $15 billion to around $130–150 billion, while Mexican enterprises’ investments in the United States jumped from $1 billion to $40–50 billion. The United States is the source of as much as 60 percent of Canada’s and roughly 40 percent of Mexico’s imports—so when their economies grow and their companies and households buy more, the U.S. economy gains, too. Growth in more distant economies does not boost U.S. sales as much. When China imports more, for example, the United States receives only six to seven cents of every additional dollar it spends.

NAFTA’s architects also hoped that the agreement would create economic opportunities within Mexico, enabling people to find jobs at home rather than moving north. Because of Mexico’s economic difficulties, the number of Mexican-born immigrants in the United States had risen from about 760,000 in 1970 to nine million in 2000. But by 2010, Mexican immigration had fallen to net zero; most people arriving at the southern border came from Central America and beyond, and Mexico became an essential partner in helping the United States enforce its immigration laws.

Trump wanted to scrap NAFTA during his first term, but by then it had become too valuable to abandon. His administration settled for a renegotiation, replacing NAFTA with the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement in 2020. The new accord modernized provisions for digital trade and added procedures for labor complaints, but its complex terms to protect regional auto producers undermined that sector’s global competitiveness. The agreement also reduced protections for foreign investors in Mexico, weakening confidence in the rule of law.

REPAIRING THE RIFT

The accord does not expire until 2036, but the North American idea is already on life support. The Trump administration declined this year to approve an extension of the trade pact to 2042, and uncertainty about its future now discourages investment in Canada and Mexico. An even bigger problem is that the Trump administration wants the freedom to ignore the agreement whenever it wishes. In 2025 and 2026, it placed high tariffs on Canadian autos, steel, aluminum, iron, metal-intensive equipment, lumber, and pharmaceuticals, claiming that these imports were a threat to U.S. national security. Given that the United States has supported the integration of those sectors for 70 years and that Canada has been a close military partner for more than a century, it is no surprise that the designation shocked and insulted Canadians.

The weakening or even breakup of U.S. ties with Canada and Mexico would be a strategic disaster. The three countries’ combined assets make North America a formidable global player. The continent stretches from the Arctic almost to the tropics. The three democracies together are home to almost a half billion people, and unlike most economies, their populations are still growing. They have a skilled labor force and an integrated infrastructure that fosters highly competitive agriculture, mining, manufacturing, and services. North Americans also have access to cutting-edge technologies, abundant financial capital, energy self-sufficiency, and the capacity to expand their production of oil, gas, and renewables.

NAFTA was an economic and a strategic success.

This is an enviable hand to play, not one that Trump should fold. Washington must stop antagonizing Ottawa and instead cooperate with its northern neighbor on Arctic and maritime security, mineral extraction and trade, and technological innovation. Canada’s artificial intelligence talent, research capabilities, and energy resources complement those of the United States, just as its resources and manufacturing did in the twentieth century.

Washington also needs to help Mexico realize its potential. NAFTA helped Mexico create world-class economic institutions and a freer society, but corruption still pervades its state and local governments, legal institutions, police forces, and schools. Many Mexicans are stuck working in the informal economy. Drug and other criminal enterprises have taken advantage of the government’s weaknesses. With U.S. intelligence and technological support, however, Mexico can improve security and the rule of law. Building stronger, more trustworthy institutions will boost growth and make the country a better partner.

From Seward to Reagan, the Bushes, and Clinton, U.S. leaders have recognized that a strong North America offers the United States a strategic anchor in an uncertain world. Trump’s need to dominate, his zero-sum approach to economics, and his transactional instincts cast him outside this circle of strategic leaders. But the next U.S. president will have an opportunity to change course. The United States needs to revive its powers of attraction and treat its neighbors with respect to restore and expand a constructive continental partnership.

The Case for Economic Espionage

David S. Cohen — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 08:00:00 GMT

For decades, both adversaries and allies of Washington have spied on American companies to gain insights into innovation in the United States. During the Cold War, KGB spies routinely sought to steal trade secrets from U.S. industries. In the 1980s, French intelligence stalked American technology firms. In recent years, China has been especially aggressive on this front. The Center for Strategic and International Studies recorded 224 incidents of Chinese-sponsored espionage against the United States that occurred between 2000 and 2023, of which more than half targeted commercial technologies. Invariably, the goal of this kind of espionage is to help key sectors in the spying country rapidly replicate or surpass American advances. As the former National Security Agency director Keith Alexander memorably put it, cybertheft of U.S. technologies amounts to “the greatest transfer of wealth in history.”

Yet amid this brazen robbery, the U.S. intelligence community has long maintained a policy against spying on foreign companies to provide a commercial advantage to U.S. businesses. That self-imposed ban on economic espionage was reaffirmed repeatedly throughout the Cold War and in the decades since, including by President Barack Obama, who codified it in 2014 and tried to get China and other countries to follow suit. At the time, this made sense. U.S. economic policy had long forsworn government intervention in the private market, and providing select firms with secret intelligence would unavoidably distort the economy. In any case, through much of the Cold War and early post–Cold War era, most technological innovation important to national security emerged under government auspices rather than in the commercial market. Moreover, its lead in many technologies meant that the United States had much more to lose than to gain by legitimizing commercial spying.

Today, these rationales no longer hold. To an ever-growing extent, U.S. national security now depends on private-sector innovations. In such disparate areas as artificial intelligence, semiconductors, quantum science, bioengineering, next-generation energy, and space, breakthroughs that are crucial to the country’s power and influence are emanating from private companies. At the same time, even as technological supremacy has become increasingly central to national security, the U.S. lead in many crucial advanced technologies is being contested or even erased by China. By abstaining from economic espionage, the United States has tilted the playing field against itself and magnified the Chinese threat.

To right the balance, the United States should allow U.S. intelligence agencies not only to collect commercial secrets from foreign companies but also to deliver that intelligence where it could have the greatest impact: to the firms producing the frontier technologies that will be vital to U.S. national security in the years to come. In September, the Trump administration appeared to take a step in this direction when it disclosed that the CIA and other intelligence agencies had begun to broaden their long-standing espionage efforts against China, including Chinese industry.

But a comprehensive strategy requires the United States to formally lift its existing prohibition on economic spying. The government must also establish robust rules and oversight to ensure that commercially valuable intelligence shared with the private sector serves the national interest, preserves competition, and, critically, is not used to advance partisan, political, or personal ambitions. Although economic espionage is not without risk, unilaterally renouncing the practice in the current global environment is far more dangerous.

PARIS IS LISTENING

Although the United States has generally avoided commercial spying, it is not without precedent in American history. During the founding period, both early states and the newly formed Republic paid bounties to private citizens to encourage the theft of crucial technology from Britain. To Alexander Hamilton, the first secretary of the treasury, obtaining pilfered industrial secrets was a crucial way to spur the country’s economic independence from its former colonial master. But as Hamilton’s economic interventionism gave way to Thomas Jefferson’s laissez-faire approach, the bounty programs faded away.

The first modern U.S. debates about economic espionage date to the Cold War. In the early 1970s, when Japanese manufacturers began to pose a threat to the American auto industry, the Nixon administration considered having the government provide intelligence to Detroit automakers to improve their commercial prospects. But the president’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board rejected the plan as “inappropriate.” During the Carter administration, Stansfield Turner, the director of the CIA, again broached the idea of economic espionage internally at the agency but also met with strong resistance. As Turner later recounted, CIA officers “did not see helping business as being part of their mission of promoting national security.”

At the end of the Cold War, as the national security community turned its focus away from ideological and military competition with the Soviet Union, economic security took on new importance. In a 1991 article in these pages, Turner, who had stepped down from the CIA at the end of the Carter administration, called on U.S. intelligence agencies to pursue “economic intelligence” to prevent the country from being surprised by technological breakthroughs elsewhere. “If economic strength should now be recognized as a vital component of national security, parallel with military power,” he asked, “why should America be concerned about stealing and employing economic secrets?”

In 1996, the CIA told the Senate Intelligence Committee that it had identified numerous foreign governments that were doing precisely this—not only rivals such as China, Cuba, Iran, and Russia but also allies such as France and Israel. According to news reports, French intelligence had installed microphones in the first-class seats of Air France jets to eavesdrop on American business executives’ conversations; Pierre Marion, who served as head of French intelligence in the early 1980s, acknowledged that French President François Mitterrand had expressly ordered the government spy agency to steal the secrets of U.S. tech companies.

Nonetheless, Washington continued its self-imposed refusal to engage in the practice. Having the government provide commercially valuable secret information to select companies ran counter to the country’s ingrained free-market orthodoxy. It also ran against the deep-rooted cultures of the agencies themselves. As a case officer told CIA Director Robert Gates in the early 1990s, “I’m prepared to give my life for my country, but not for a company.” In a 1996 review of U.S. intelligence practices, a nonpartisan commission called for improvements in the quality of economic intelligence, but it also “strongly” endorsed existing policies that barred “clandestinely collecting proprietary information of foreign commercial firms” to help American companies. Summing up the thinking at the time, the commission wrote, “The role of the Intelligence Community is to provide support to the Government, not to the private sector.”

THE CHINA PROBLEM

In the early twenty-first century, as China rapidly emerged as a global economic power, U.S. officials became concerned that Beijing was systematically stealing intellectual property from American companies. Under Obama, the FBI and other agencies stepped up efforts to crack down on Chinese espionage. But after the National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden leaked embarrassing disclosures from documents—which included information purporting to show that the NSA had collected signals intelligence on a variety of foreign businesses—in 2013, the Obama administration had no interest in reopening the debate on economic espionage. Instead, it sought to strengthen the U.S. prohibition by formally codifying it—and by trying to persuade the rest of the world to follow suit.

In a 2014 presidential policy directive known as PPD-28, the Obama administration established that collecting foreign trade secrets in order to “afford a competitive advantage to U.S. companies” was “not an authorized foreign intelligence or counterintelligence purpose.” Then, during a 2015 summit meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, Obama announced that the two countries had reached a “common understanding” not to “conduct or knowingly support” the “cyber-enabled theft of intellectual property, including trade secrets or other confidential business information for commercial advantage.”

Two months after the Xi summit, the administration also secured a G-20 communiqué that reaffirmed that prohibition, extending it to the world’s 20 largest economies. But these commitments did not change other countries’ behavior—certainly not China’s. Although there was a brief lull immediately after the 2015 summit meeting, Beijing resumed its spying on U.S. industries a few months later.

Despite negligible evidence that the Obama strategy had gained international traction, the first Trump administration endorsed the 2014 directive, and in 2022 the Biden administration formally reaffirmed it in an executive order. Today, despite the CIA’s announcement in September that it was focusing more of its intelligence gathering on Chinese companies, the second Trump administration has not rescinded the executive order, at least not publicly.

U.S. national security now depends on private-sector innovations.

One explanation for the survival of the norm is that it covers only a small sliver of intelligence activities. Although it forbids sharing intelligence with U.S. companies for the purpose of commercial advantage, it does not exclude doing so for security reasons. Thus, under current standards, the government can alert an AI company that Chinese spies might be seeking to steal the proprietary weights—the internal numeric parameters learned during training—of its latest frontier model or inform a bank that a weapons proliferator is seeking to open an account. U.S. spy agencies are also permitted to collect a broad array of economic intelligence to inform negotiations on trade and tax treaties, identify foreign firms that engage in bribery and kickbacks, track terrorist financing, enforce sanctions, and conduct counterproliferation operations. As I saw firsthand during my years at the CIA and the Treasury Department, this is all vital intelligence work that the existing norm does not restrict.

But the norm has also endured because economic espionage is difficult to put into practice. Which firms should receive commercial intelligence? How should the decision be made? Who gets to decide? What companies would be eligible? What standards would guide the decision? What could a company do with the intelligence? Regardless of how these questions are answered, some degree of favoritism would be unavoidable because not every company would benefit. Without neutral, well-defined, and clearly enforced rules, the practice could easily be politicized or slip into outright corruption, since public officials would be deciding which companies receive commercially valuable intelligence from the government.

Although these concerns need to be taken seriously, they no longer justify retaining the norm. U.S. national security increasingly depends on whether American frontier technology firms—companies whose dual-use products serve both commercial and government customers—can innovate faster than their Chinese competitors and field the results sooner. Warning these companies that their trade secrets are being stolen is necessary, but that alone will not protect U.S. technological leadership, nor will loosening collection rules so that the intelligence community can pursue a broader range of targets in China. To address the daunting tech-dependent national security challenges the country now faces, Washington needs to rewrite the rules on economic espionage with the explicit aim of helping U.S. frontier firms compete—even if doing so means handing some of them a commercial advantage.

SPY VS. SPY

A new approach to economic spying fits well with the government’s expanding use of industrial policy to further national security priorities. As early as 1999, the government founded In-Q-Tel as a CIA-linked venture capital firm, which was initially seeded, and remains partially funded, with federal money; the firm invests in companies that are developing cutting-edge, dual-use technologies such as precision navigation, quantum sensing and computing, and artificial intelligence deemed critical to defense and intelligence.

More recently, the government has used national security rationales in a far more ambitious effort to support key sectors of the U.S. commercial economy. Thus, the first Trump administration’s tariffs against China, as well as the legislative tightening of export controls and screening for inbound investment, were defended on national security grounds. The Biden administration’s signature legislation, the CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act, along with its “small yard, high fence” export-control policy, similarly cited national security imperatives to inhibit the free flow of commerce. The second Trump administration has taken this national security industrial policy further. Notably, the administration’s so-called Liberation Day tariffs, promoted as a key economic policy tool, relied entirely on a national security law as its statutory foundation. And the second Trump administration has invested $28 billion of taxpayer money in nearly 40 U.S. companies in the semiconductor, critical mineral, quantum technology, and energy sectors, among others.

At the same time, the way new security technologies are developed has changed. In the decades after World War II, most key innovations developed by government contractors—ballistic missiles, nuclear weapons, and stealth technology—had no commercial market. What is more, the new technologies that eventually reshaped the U.S. and global economies, including secure information systems, communications and reconnaissance satellites, jet engines, integrated circuits, and digital computers, were initially viable only because of government demand, not because of commercialization. As a result, U.S. intelligence agencies could and often did give contractors secret information to spur development, with little risk that they were enhancing the companies’ commercial prospects. Technical intelligence collected on Soviet antiballistic missile capabilities, for example, helped commercial contractors design U.S. ballistic missiles that were capable of defeating Soviet defenses. But these innovations had no commercial application.

Today, by contrast, defense and intelligence work is deeply dependent on dual-use technologies that are produced by commercial enterprises. This is true in such areas as quantum computing, biotechnology, semiconductors, next-generation energy, batteries, storage, 6G mobile communications, and high-performance computing. Consider the frontier AI models that have been developed by privately funded commercial labs. They are essential to national security for such purposes as target recognition, coordinating drone swarms, intelligence analysis, and cyberwarfare, but the same or similar models are already used by businesses and consumers across the general economy, enhancing efficiency and personal productivity. Quantum sensors provide atomic clocks and inertial tracking for submarines, aircraft, and satellites, while the same technology is used to find oil and gas deposits. And bioengineering innovations promise to provide localized biodefense—the ability to detect a biological threat and quickly deploy a custom-made countermeasure—even as they are used to produce new drugs, medical therapies, and drought-resistant crops.

An electronic board showing Shanghai stock indices, Shanghai, China, March 2026 Go Nakamura / Reuters

Recent studies have also found that China leads, or is catching up quickly, in many of these technologies. In June 2026, a Chinese lab announced that it had built the world’s most powerful supercomputer, taking the lead from a U.S. competitor. What was most surprising, however, was that the supercomputer achieved a 20 percent improvement over its closest American competitor while using a conventional architecture and traditional microprocessors rather than expensive and comparatively scarce advanced graphics processing units. In 2025, the Chinese battery maker CATL unveiled an automobile battery that relies on traditional chemistry to charge in just five minutes; the company also has perfected the mass production of next-generation sodium-ion batteries. American firms lag far behind in both.

What matters most in this competition is the performance of the American high-tech sector relative to its Chinese competitors. Beijing recognizes this. That is why, for many years, Chinese intelligence services have systematically stolen trade secrets from American and other Western companies and shared those secrets with Chinese companies. It is why in 2015, China’s State Council, building on the foundation laid by economic espionage, announced the “Made in China 2025” initiative, an extraordinarily well-resourced and deeply integrated industrial policy designed to catapult the country to global leadership in advanced manufacturing in ten key technologies by that year. And it is why, having made substantial progress on many of these goals, Beijing has carried forward the initiative in its 15th Five-Year Plan (2026–30).

U.S. leaders have also come to realize the strategic value of maintaining an edge in commercial innovation. The last several administrations have deployed an array of economic tools to protect and enhance critical U.S. tech industries while containing aggressive Chinese rivals. These include tariffs, financial backing of select U.S. companies, export and import restrictions, barriers to inbound and outbound investments, procurement bans, indictments, and financial sanctions. American diplomats have been dispatched to persuade allies and partners of the United States to work with Washington to restrict the spread of Chinese technology. Likewise, the U.S. intelligence community has devoted significant resources to understanding the nature and pace of new-technology adoption by the Chinese military.

Yet one instrument is conspicuously absent from this “all tools” approach: economic espionage. Although sharing intelligence on Chinese companies with the U.S. private sector would not, in itself, fundamentally alter the competitive landscape, neither would equity investments, export controls, or any of the other tools the government employs to enhance the relative position of American high-tech firms. The United States uses those tools because each helps incrementally. If economic spying were added to the mix, the cumulative impact of this effort would be significantly enhanced.

GET AND GIVE

The core question about economic espionage is not whether there is a strong enough national security rationale for it, but how to pursue it in a way that truly helps the United States’ frontier companies without doing more harm than good. The best way to approach the challenge is to establish formal protocols for economic espionage through both executive and congressional action. The president should issue an executive order authorizing intelligence sharing with the private sector, even if it provides the companies in question a commercial advantage; and Congress should enact complementary provisions in the annual Intelligence Authorization Act. The order and accompanying legislation must be designed so that collecting and disseminating foreign trade secrets advances defense and intelligence priorities and does not unduly distort the free market. They must also ensure that decisions about sharing sensitive intelligence are made on the merits and are not infected by partisan, political, or personal considerations.

Specifically, the executive order would need to set out which countries’ commercial sectors should be targeted for intelligence collection. Plainly, companies in China and other adversaries such as Iran, North Korea, and Russia should be fair game. And just as plainly, the companies of close allies should be off limits: the harm to our cooperative intelligence endeavors would outweigh the benefit from targeting allies’ companies for commercial espionage. Beyond these clear lines, determining the scope of economic spying would involve sensitive deliberation and discretion, which the executive order should leave to the intelligence community, with ongoing oversight from the congressional intelligence committees.

The executive order must also require that the fruits of economic espionage be shared only with specifically identified frontier tech sectors. To allow for shifting national security priorities in the years to come, the order should permit the administration, after consulting with the intelligence committees, to add new sectors, provided that they meet rigorous criteria. Although industrial policy that supports American companies’ global competitiveness may generally advance national security, recipients of economic espionage should be limited to companies in frontier tech sectors that have a clear and demonstrable national security purpose.

Commercial spying is not without precedent in U.S. history.

The executive order should state that any intelligence must be shared sufficiently broadly within the targeted industry sector—including with smaller, newer, and nonpublic companies, as well as companies that have not received other forms of special government support. This will help ensure that the competitive advantage conveyed does not entrench incumbents or impede lesser-resourced startups, whose innovations may prove crucial in the future. The specific criteria for inclusion in intelligence sharing will need to be flexible enough to account for the diversity of markets, sectors, and firms, but sufficiently objective and neutral so that the rationale for selecting a company to receive intelligence can be reliably assessed. It should also require that any firm receiving intelligence be able to use the information to advance U.S. national security and have adequate safeguards in place for personnel, cybersecurity, and other areas to protect the information it receives.

Relatedly, the executive order should determine whether to limit receipt of pilfered trade secrets and other economic intelligence to companies that are entirely American—that is, founded and operating in the United States with boards of directors made up of U.S. citizens only—or whether companies in allied or partner countries, particularly allies with which Washington routinely shares intelligence, should be included. If the decision is to allow non-American companies to benefit, deciding which countries’ companies are potential recipients should also be left to the discretion of the intelligence community to work out with the committees.

The executive order should provide specific oversight measures to ensure proper implementation. It should require the relevant intelligence agency to regularly brief congressional intelligence committee members and staff on commercial spying activities, including the intelligence shared, the recipients, and the basis for the decisions made on sharing. Congress should mirror this briefing requirement in its annual Intelligence Authorization Act and direct the inspectors general of the United States Intelligence Community, the CIA, and any other government intelligence agency involved to conduct an annual audit to verify whether the economic espionage program is advancing national security objectives and is not being used to further political or personal agendas. Again, this requirement should be codified by Congress in the legislation.

Traders at the New York Stock Exchange, New York City, September 2026 Jeenah Moon / Reuters

Congress and the administration should also agree that economic spying to help U.S. frontier industries be pursued principally through signals intelligence collected by the NSA rather than human intelligence collected by the CIA. This makes practical sense: the secrets to be harvested will be highly technical specifications, design details, and processes that principally reside on digital infrastructure, making them especially vulnerable to technical collection. Moreover, it may be easier to identify cutting-edge advancements by collecting at scale and then winnowing down the collection to locate a key insight, a process for which signals intelligence is much better feedstock than intelligence from recruited sources. Relying on remote technical collection could also avoid inflaming opposition by field officers who may not be prepared to take great personal risks to help the private sector.

Because collectors need to know what truly matters to the intelligence consumer for any collection program to deliver real value, Congress and the administration should also take steps to facilitate communication between the intelligence community and frontier tech companies in the sectors critical to national security. Put simply, targeting needs to be fairly specific—this is no less true for economic intelligence than for any other type of collection. Enabling this free flow of information and expertise will require continuing work to modernize and rationalize the security clearance process, including by accelerating efforts to lower barriers to the movement of personnel between advanced industries and the intelligence community.

Finally, while work is underway to build a formal framework for economic espionage, Congress must prevent any creeping erosion of the existing norm through the potentially corrupt dissemination of intelligence to favored companies. As a critical first step, the intelligence committees should initiate a thorough oversight investigation into how the norm has been implemented in practice and the current administration’s adherence to its prohibitions. Since the current administration has not publicly announced that it has departed from the norm, it is imperative that policymakers be fully briefed on the current situation before proceeding, particularly in light of questions about conflicts of interest in business ventures involving President Donald Trump, members of his administration, and their families.

SECURING THE FRONTIER

Crafting an exception to the United States’ unilateral self-prohibition on economic espionage will not be risk-free. Internationally, abandoning the norm against economic espionage may spur a spy race with other countries, China in particular. But there is no evidence that the Chinese intelligence services have been holding back until now because of U.S. self-restraint. And any moderation that may have existed has almost surely evaporated now that the Trump administration has publicly declared a redoubling of efforts to collect intelligence from Chinese companies.

Domestically, even with a carefully drafted executive order backed by reinforcing provisions in the Intelligence Authorization Act, an embrace of economic espionage is likely to have some distorting impact on the innovation ecosystem that has served the United States so well. And politicization and corruption are still possible, even with meticulous compliance by U.S. intelligence agencies overseen by watchful congressional committees. Still, instituting a deliberative process for sharing commercially valuable intelligence with the private sector is far better than drifting into the practice through a de facto loosening of existing norms combined with ad hoc exchanges of information.

The United States could reap crucial benefits from sharing foreign trade secrets with select tech firms. This is not to denigrate what pathbreaking American technology companies can accomplish on their own—their innovation is the envy of the world, and rightly so. But the technology problems they confront are difficult, the solutions elusive, the discoveries few and far between. That’s why what they work on are called frontier technologies. Given the ever-tightening link between national security and the commercial economy, the United States can no longer afford to withhold its most sophisticated intelligence from the companies that may well define the country’s security and power in the years to come.

The End of Gaza

Khaled Elgindy — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 08:00:00 GMT

A year after the Trump administration negotiated an agreement to end the war in Gaza, Palestinians are still waiting for the “day after” to arrive. The October 2025 cease-fire plan freed the last remaining Israeli hostages and ostensibly ended hostilities, but Israel continues to constantly strike targets in Gaza, often killing civilians, including some 300 children in the past year. The deal also envisioned a phased political process that would help reconstruct the devastated territory. Jared Kushner, U.S. President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and the point person for the Middle East, promised in January this year that restoration of core services and infrastructure—including water and sewage systems, electricity networks, hospitals, and bakeries—would begin within 100 days. And yet, nine months later, Gaza has seen no reconstruction, no restoration of basic services, or even an end to daily violence. Instead, the vast majority of its inhabitants remain packed into squalid and sprawling tent cities along a tiny—and ever-shrinking—strip of coastline, plagued by disease and rodent infestations, enduring extreme shortages of food, medicine, clean water, and access to basic sanitation.

Gazans may not be in the grip of famine as they were in prior years, but the humanitarian situation remains catastrophic—and it is not sustainable. The intolerable conditions could very well lead to a further explosion of violence. They are also enabling the endgame that many Israeli leaders want: the eventual eviction of Gaza’s over two million Palestinian residents.

Indeed, the status quo seems to suit the Israeli leadership. In a recent interview, Nikolay Mladenov, the Bulgarian diplomat serving as the high representative of Trump’s Board of Peace, which is overseeing the Gaza peace plan, revealed where the main obstacle to progress lies. On Israel’s commitments, Mladenov gently noted, is “where we are little bit stuck right now.” Kushner has also blamed Israel’s “crazy elections” later this month, which he says have made the Netanyahu government “a little irrational” in regard to Gaza.

Although electoral considerations are undoubtedly a factor—Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is locked in a tight and, for him, existential reelection campaign—the totality of Israeli words and actions point to something deeper and more alarming: ultimately, the Netanyahu government’s strategy has less to do with stabilizing Gaza or even disarming Hamas than with rendering the territory uninhabitable and ejecting its population.

Whether or not the Trump administration shares this goal, its extraordinary deference to Netanyahu’s far-right government and general indifference to the plight of Palestinians is facilitating just such an outcome. Unless the United States and its allies and partners are prepared to force Israel to abide by its commitments, it may only be a matter of time before Gaza is lost forever.

HELL ON EARTH

It is hard to overstate the scale of death, destruction, and suffering inflicted on Gaza and its roughly 2.2 million inhabitants over the past three years. In the wake of Hamas’s October 7, 2023, terrorist attack on Israel, Israeli military and political leaders vowed to “flatten” Gaza and turn it into a “city of tents,” promising that “Gaza will never go back to what it was.” They have delivered on those threats. The 223,000 tons of explosives dropped on Gaza—roughly equivalent to 15 times the power of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima—have killed more than 74,000 Palestinians, the vast majority of them civilians, and reduced most of Gaza to rubble. Israel’s assault, over which it is currently on trial for genocide at the International Court of Justice, has wiped out some 92 percent of Gaza’s housing stock, 95 percent of its farmland, all 12 of its universities, and nearly half of its 36 hospitals—in other words, the very institutions and infrastructure that sustain life.

After such devastation, last year’s cease-fire came as an undoubted relief. Under the first phase of Trump’s Gaza plan, the parties agreed to an immediate end to all military attacks, the exchange of hostages and prisoners, the restoration of basic services, and a massive surge in humanitarian aid. Apart from Hamas’s release of Israeli hostages, however, most of these commitments have been only partially fulfilled. Phase two, formally launched in January even though Israel had yet to meet its phase one obligations, envisioned the stabilization of Gaza through the deployment of an international force and the establishment of a Palestinian technocratic governing body, known as the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza, coupled with the gradual disarmament of Hamas and the phased withdrawal of Israeli forces. Those last steps together serve as prerequisites for the long-term reconstruction of the Gaza Strip as laid out in phase three.

A full year after the cease-fire was announced, Israel continues to block the entry of Palestinian governing and policing bodies that would allow Hamas to relinquish power and reconstruction to begin. Hamas and Israel are still at loggerheads about the sequencing of the group’s disarmament in relation to an Israeli withdrawal. Although the food situation has improved since last year’s famine, Israel continues to restrict humanitarian aid, allowing only a fraction of the daily 600 truckloads required in the cease-fire deal to enter the territory. More than 90 percent of Gaza’s inhabitants are internally displaced. Moreover, since the cease-fire, the Israeli army has unilaterally expanded its control from just over half of Gaza’s territory to around 65 percent of it. Frequent airstrikes by Israel have killed more than 1,400 Palestinians since the cease-fire was declared. That the death toll continues to mount during a cease-fire is a testament to the dystopian reality that has become Gaza’s new normal. As the UN’s Middle East envoy Sigrid Kaag put it, Gaza’s “living conditions are hell on earth with no prospect of significant change in sight.”

Palestinians are still waiting for the “day after” to arrive.

Israel is not solely responsible for the persistence of hellish conditions in Gaza. Hamas bears some of the blame. The Hamas leadership spent months stubbornly resisting calls for disarmament, as required by the Trump plan, ultimately agreeing to do so only under intense pressure from Egypt and other mediators. The Trump administration also bears significant blame. It has let the political process stall, gives Israel tremendous latitude, and is highly lopsided in its enforcement of the terms of the cease-fire. It has effectively allowed Israel to continue the war in Gaza, albeit on a smaller scale.

Only a few months ago, it seemed as if the impasse had been finally broken. In late July, Trump announced a breakthrough on implementing the second phase of his Gaza plan. After seven months of intense and highly fraught negotiations, Hamas and the Board of Peace reached a deal on the disarmament of the Palestinian militant group, paving the way—theoretically, at least—to start the desperately needed recovery and reconstruction work as well as the entry of new Palestinian governance and policing mechanisms. The plan’s success hinged on a carefully crafted sequence of events: Hamas would disarm in parallel with an Israeli military withdrawal, a scheme designed to ensure progress and prevent either side from exercising a “veto” over the process.

That Hamas, a group founded on armed resistance, had agreed to any form of disarmament was unprecedented and rightly hailed by Trump as a “historic” achievement. Even so, Netanyahu categorically rejected this road map, insisting that there could be no Israeli withdrawal until Hamas was fully disarmed and that Israel remained free to continue military operations in Gaza. In other words, Israel is insisting that Hamas meet all its phase two obligations even before Israel has met any of its phase one obligations—a position that renders the plan unworkable.

The process is once again stuck. Without progress on either Hamas’s disarmament or Israel’s withdrawal, the Palestinian governing committee (currently marooned in Cairo) and police force cannot enter Gaza; neither can any international force. The Trump administration and the Board of Peace have tried to fudge the issue of sequencing since the summer—publicly embracing the Israeli position that Hamas must be fully disarmed first while privately assuring Hamas and others that the road map has not changed. But ambiguity typically plays to the advantage of the stronger party; such hedging from Washington was as good as an explicit endorsement of the Israeli position. Having already given Israel an effective pass on most of its phase one obligations by refusing to condemn Israel’s near-daily cease-fire violations, the Trump administration was now effectively relieving it of second phase obligations as well. Gaza’s reconstruction and rehabilitation remain on hold indefinitely.

GONE FOR GOOD

The dangers of the current impasse were best outlined by Mladenov in an interview in September. He warned that the absence of any meaningful progress in Gaza was foreclosing the future of the territory and the possibility of a two-state solution, with grave consequences for the wider region. “If we allow for Gaza to continue in the situation that we have now,” Mladenov cautioned, “Gaza will be gone. It will be gone for good.” He continued: “If the international community does not focus on the situation in Gaza, where you have two million Palestinians who live in terrible conditions, we will not be able to find our way back to a credible path to resolving the Israeli-Palestinian question.” At the same time, “we are putting the seeds of a next security, military crisis that is going to emerge.”

Left unsaid by Mladenov, however, is that Netanyahu is quite content for the process to remain stuck in this way. Israel’s prime minister, who only reluctantly acceded to Trump’s 2025 Gaza cease-fire, has managed to continue waging war in Gaza without incurring significant costs. The ongoing military operations and the humanitarian crisis in Gaza don’t incite meaningful outrage in Israel, while even Netanyahu’s main election rivals have felt compelled to trash the U.S.-backed Gaza road map. International outrage over the carnage in Gaza, meanwhile, has largely subsided, with many countries preferring a failing peace process to none at all.

For Netanyahu, ongoing violence at this level—just enough to prevent Gaza’s meaningful recovery and reconstruction but not enough to trigger a major international outcry—has become an end unto itself. Much as he insisted on the implausible goal of “total victory” during the first two years of war, he insists now on the equally unachievable objective of Hamas’s “total disarmament.” It is one thing for Hamas to give up its rockets, missiles, mortars, and other heavy weapons, but it is unrealistic to imagine that the group will surrender every last rifle or handgun, particularly when Israeli forces continue to operate in the territory. Netanyahu’s uncompromising stance helps placate his extremist coalition partners, justify permanent Israeli military control over Gaza, and indefinitely forestall any political accommodation with the Palestinians.

The status quo seems to suit the Israeli leadership.

More crucially, keeping Gaza in a kind of political, military, and humanitarian limbo—with neither a real cease-fire nor a return to full-scale war, limited short-term relief but no long-term reconstruction, and a population consumed with the imperatives of survival but lacking any real hope for the future—serves the broader vision harbored by many Israeli hard-liners: making Gaza uninhabitable to the point that its residents are forced to leave. For Netanyahu and his far-right government, the immiseration of Gaza is not ancillary but central to Israel’s strategy. Israeli leaders, including Defense Minister Israel Katz, have vowed to remain in Gaza indefinitely and not withdraw. More tellingly, in the two-thirds of Gaza now under direct Israeli control, the Israeli army has wiped out virtually all traces of Palestinian life, systematically razing thousands of structures and flattening entire neighborhoods and agricultural lands, while erecting military bases and other permanent infrastructure.

Members of the Netanyahu government have made no secret of their desire to remove Gaza’s population and allow the territory’s eventual settlement by Israeli Jews. Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, among the most vocal and notorious proponents of expelling Palestinians, recently unveiled a seven-year plan for the “voluntary emigration” of Palestinians from Gaza, including moving 250,000 Palestinians out of Gaza in the first year. Ben-Gvir is not the only government member to say the quiet part out loud. Katz has called for facilitating the emigration of Gazans “by any means,” adding that “there is no real solution for Gaza in the end without this migration.” Netanyahu himself has advocated for the same, privately confirming in 2025 to a group of lawmakers that Israel has been “destroying more and more houses” in Gaza so that Palestinians “have nowhere to return.” “The only obvious result will be Gazans choosing to emigrate outside of the strip,” observed Netanyahu.

The Trump administration may not be averse to such an outcome. In January 2025, Trump proposed that the United States “take control” of Gaza and “clean out” its more than two million inhabitants as part of an ill-conceived vision of turning a depopulated Gaza into a “Riviera of the Middle East.” Although Trump backed off the idea following an immense international outcry, the administration’s laissez-faire attitude toward Israeli violations suggests it can tolerate prolonged Palestinian suffering.

LOSING GAZA

The consequences of perpetuating Gaza’s misery are dreadful. As Mladenov has warned, continuing along the current path is likely to produce two outcomes: inducing growing numbers of Palestinians to leave the Gaza Strip and increasing the likelihood of violent escalation, including a return to full-scale war. In both cases, once again, the costs would be borne overwhelmingly by Palestinians in Gaza, although others would also pay a price, as the wider region grows more unstable and as Israel’s and the United States’ international standing further erodes.

As life in Gaza does not meaningfully improve and as deadly Israeli attacks continue, the likelihood of an explosion grows. Hamas, which has been decimated but not yet unseated, has so far shown relative restraint and a willingness to absorb regular hits, including a series of assassinations of its members and regular airstrikes by Israel. Its current pragmatism will probably not hold forever. Netanyahu, who thinks that keeping Israel on a constant war footing will allow him to retain power, may welcome the opportunity to wage what is in effect a forever war in Gaza. A prolonged occupation in Gaza, however, is unlikely to produce tangible military benefits while sapping Israeli resources and public morale, deepening Israel’s international isolation and foreclosing the possibility of normalizing ties with more Arab states. Likewise, the prospect of a Palestinian exodus from Gaza might fuel the fantasies of those in Israel who want to see the creation of a “Greater Israel,” but it would also confirm Israel’s pariah status and condemn Israelis and Palestinians to further decades of conflict.

For the United States, meanwhile, continued violence and an increasingly farcical peace process could lead to the unraveling of one of Trump’s few concrete foreign policy achievements while keeping the region in a state of perpetual turmoil. With the Iran war casting the United States as unreliable and encouraging Washington’s regional allies to pursue alternatives to a collapsing U.S. security umbrella, failure in Gaza would cement the impression of the United States as a superpower has-been.

SALVAGE JOB

There is little doubt that both Trump’s Gaza plan and the mechanisms created to oversee it, including the Board of Peace, are deeply flawed. The process they outlined is intensely lopsided in Israel’s favor, does not demand any accountability for past (and ongoing) atrocities, denies Palestinian agency and self-determination, and for several reasons, including its bypassing of the stipulations of the Geneva Conventions, is inconsistent with international law. But in the absence of a more serious and equitable peace process, the current road map for Gaza offers the best chance for bringing desperately needed relief and recovery to the territory’s suffering population—as long as it is implemented fairly.

Assuming the Trump administration genuinely supports the plan and wants to see its fruition, a way forward through the current impasse still exists. The United States and its partners must do three things. The first is to recognize that Israel’s interests in Gaza are not the same as, and in many ways run directly counter to, those espoused by the Trump administration and the broader international community. Whereas the latter is focused on the long-term stabilization and the rehabilitation of Gaza, the former seems bent on making it impossible for Palestinians to continue living in the territory. Second, improvements in the daily lives of ordinary people in Gaza should be insulated, if not totally delinked, from the political process. The safety and dignity of more than two million civilians cannot continue to be held hostage to the decisions of Hamas, much less the machinations of internal Israeli politics. The well-being of Palestinians should not be a bargaining chip used by Israel, or for that matter the Board of Peace, to extract political or military concessions from Hamas.

Finally, the United States and the other mediators must work to ensure that both sides abide by their obligations under the October 2025 cease-fire and should be prepared to impose consequences for noncompliance. This includes ending armed attacks by both sides, allowing a massive influx of unconditional humanitarian aid, and restoring basic services, clearing debris, and helping revive local livelihoods as required in phase one of the Trump plan. Likewise, Hamas’s disarmament, Israeli withdrawal, the installation of a new administration in Gaza, and the territory’s reconstruction are not separate issues but parallel ones. They must be pursued in parallel, as laid out in the Board of Peace’s original road map, for the process to work. Finally, for any of these to be possible, the United States and the Board of Peace must press Israel to allow Palestinian technocrats and the newly trained Palestinian police force to enter Gaza as soon as possible.

These measures will be a tough sell in Washington, particularly given Trump’s close alignment with Netanyahu and the latter’s commitment to his extremist coalition partners. But there is no way around them, regardless of the outcome of October’s election in Israel. Although many observers expect a Netanyahu victory would give the prime minister the space to move ahead with Trump’s Gaza plan and the road map, the evidence of the last three years and the nature of the current government suggest he will not. A radical coalition under Netanyahu with a renewed mandate will likely spend the next four years working to finish destroying Palestinian life in Gaza, to say nothing of the West Bank, where Israel’s de facto annexation is proceeding at a breakneck pace.

Trump may well want to consider whether it is worth sacrificing his Gaza peace plan, on which he has staked considerable political capital, for an Israeli government that may be on its way out. The fallout from Gaza’s destruction and the suffering of its people will be felt for generations. Only Israel and its chief enabler in the White House can determine whether the years to come will be a time of rebuilding and healing or one of perpetual violence and instability.

Russia’s Hybrid War Has Entered a Dangerous New Phase

Julianne Smith — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 08:00:00 GMT

For the first few years of the war in Ukraine, Russia’s hybrid warfare attacks in Europe remained just below the threshold that might trigger a collective response. As the United States’ permanent representative to NATO from 2021 to 2024, I watched the campaign develop: undersea cables cut, incendiary devices hidden in cargo packages, and arson attacks on weapons factories and depots across Europe. To address the threat, allies reinforced critical infrastructure, increased patrols in the Baltic Sea, and expanded intelligence sharing. But NATO’s approach remained largely defensive: these attacks were scattered, small in scale, and just deniable enough that Moscow could wave them away.

Today, that is no longer the case. In late July, a Russian cruise missile crashed into Polish territory. Days later, three explosive-laden drones were found at and near an airport in Leipzig, Germany. Two weeks after that, Romanian F-16s scrambled to intercept three Russian drones over Romanian airspace, and a Spanish jet shot down a fourth near the Moldovan border. If someone had described this state of affairs two years ago as where NATO would be now—drones over allied airspace, a Russian cruise missile in Polish territory, explosives at a German airport—without any meaningful collective response from the alliance, it would have sounded unbelievable.

There is little ambiguity about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s aims. These attacks are designed to fracture the alliance’s unity, test the strength of members’ commitment to Article 5—the principle that an attack on one member is an attack on all—and raise the cost of supporting Ukraine. Less expected, however, has been the speed with which his deniable campaign has become undeniable.

NATO has not looked away. The alliance tracks these incidents, investigates them, and sometimes intercepts attacks. But a response built incident by incident is not deterrence, and Putin knows the difference. As long as each provocation costs Moscow nothing more than a downed drone, Putin has every reason to keep escalating. And every escalation in turn increases the risk that one of these incidents will end in catastrophic loss of life. Mobilizing collective action to impose costs is the best chance the alliance has of preventing such a scenario.

MASK OFF

For Russia, hybrid tactics are far from a new tradecraft. As early as the 1920s and continuing throughout the Cold War, the Soviets relied on what they called “active measures”: the use of local proxies, front groups, and irregular forces to achieve political aims. Today, Putin follows essentially the same model, seeking to erode allies’ confidence in NATO’s Article 5 by relying on tactics that fall below the threshold of a conventional warfare and leave unaffected members hesitant to respond. Plausible deniability has always been a critical part of these operations. Whatever the method, whether it be severing undersea fiber-optic cables in the Baltic Sea, a coordinated cyberattack, or an explosion at a plant in eastern Europe that produces artillery shells for Ukraine, Russia is quick to deny its direct involvement. Often, it flips the script, accusing NATO members of “Russophobia” and directing blame at Ukrainian or rogue actors.

NATO members have long been familiar with this Russian playbook. Most European members have experienced multiple hybrid attacks over the past two decades. But since its 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Russia has changed its strategy in two meaningful ways. First, it has significantly increased the frequency of attacks; during the first year of the war, the number of Russian incursions in Europe quadrupled, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies. It has also diversified its tactics. In addition to familiar disinformation campaigns, airspace violations, and cyberattacks, actors linked to Moscow have sabotaged railways, placed incendiary packages on cargo planes, and paid criminal networks inside Europe to burn down weapons depots.

By early 2023, in response to these trends, NATO stepped up the seriousness and urgency of its discussions on Russian hybrid activity. The 2023 NATO summit’s communiqué, which sets out the alliance’s shared positions and priorities, stated that Russia had “intensified” its attacks against allies and mentioned Russia’s use of proxies for the first time. The alliance also rolled out an array of new initiatives to counter hybrid activity: heads of state adopted new goals for protecting critical infrastructure and supply chains from strategic shocks across alliance territory. They also agreed to establish the NATO Maritime Centre for the Security of Critical Undersea Infrastructure and the Virtual Cyber Incident Support Capability, a coordination platform to help members respond to cyberattacks. What was missing was any measure to impose costs on Russia. Although NATO condemned Moscow’s hybrid warfare, it was not prepared to talk explicitly about consequences, such as targeted sanctions, a crackdown on Russia’s shadow fleet (the unmarked vessels Russia uses to bypass sanctions), offensive cyber-activities, or information operations.

In late 2025, Putin put his hybrid war into overdrive.

Part of the problem is structural. NATO was established and designed, in 1949, for collective defense against attributable armed attacks. It was not designed to impose costs after deniable acts. As a defensive military alliance, it lacks the authority to impose sanctions or expel Russian operatives from member countries. That power sits with individual member states and the European Union. Since its 2014 summit, NATO has maintained that a cyber or hybrid attack could trigger Article 5 on a “case by case basis,” but the alliance has never defined the threshold for action. Even in cases in which the alliance could act collectively, such as through offensive cyber-operations, doing so requires consensus among 32 countries that have very different histories, domestic politics, and appetites for risk.

In the year after the 2023 NATO summit, Russia continued to turn up the heat, tripling its hybrid attacks in Europe and testing new ways to target NATO territory, such as interference with European railway systems. Consequently, the alliance improved its detection, forensics, and response options. NATO members shared best practices, participated in tabletop exercises designed to test those options, and crafted a new strategy to counter disinformation. Many countries, such as Estonia, Germany, Poland, and the United Kingdom, independently opened investigations into, sought prosecutions of, and expelled Russian diplomats and suspected intelligence officers. These steps were important. But they were not enough to deter Russia.

In 2025, hopes for further NATO action stalled. When President Donald Trump returned to the White House, he was so intent on getting NATO members to spend more on defense that virtually every engagement with allies began and ended with that single issue. Such ruthless prioritization produced some admirable results. At the 2025 NATO summit at The Hague, all allies committed to spend five percent of GDP on defense by 2035. But instead of taking the win and directing the alliance’s attention back toward Russia’s hybrid warfare, the administration continued to badger allies to spend more and faster. When I visited NATO headquarters in November 2025 and asked former colleagues how they were spending their time, one country’s permanent representative answered, “We spend most of our time managing you.” Amid this upheaval, the alliance’s momentum on hybrid warfare slowed to a crawl. Despite an agreement among allies in 2024 to deliver a new Russia strategy at the 2025 summit at The Hague, it never materialized. The summit declaration didn’t even mention Russia’s hybrid war.

FROG IN A POT

The summer of 2025 seemed to mark a high point for Putin’s confidence. In addition to NATO’s waning focus on hybrid activity, Russia’s summer offensive in Ukraine was showing signs of success, NATO allies were bickering over tariffs and whether Europe was facing what Vice President JD Vance called “civilizational suicide,” and Putin was being courted by Trump, a dynamic on public display in a U.S.-Russian summit in Alaska in August.

By September 2025, Putin no longer seemed to care as much about plausible deniability, and Russia’s hybrid war campaign became increasingly brazen. That month, around 20 Russian drones entered Polish airspace, and three Russian fighter jets crossed into Estonian airspace before being shot down and chased out, respectively, by NATO forces. After each instance, NATO convened for Article 4 consultations, which, according to the treaty, take place when “the territorial integrity, political independence or security of any of the Parties is threatened.” NATO launched “Eastern Sentry,” an initiative to increase NATO’s vigilance over the alliance’s eastern flank with no set end date. The initiative placed additional allied air and counterdrone assets under NATO command to reinforce its existing integrated air and missile defense along that border. Although a much-needed addition to NATO’s efforts to combat hybrid warfare, this step also failed to deter Russian attacks.

NATO needs to mount a more forceful response to Moscow’s escalation.

In late 2025, as Russia’s battlefield momentum started to decline and Ukraine ramped up its drone and missile attacks against Russian oil infrastructure, Putin put his hybrid war into overdrive. In December, as temperatures dropped, Russian-backed hackers deployed “wiper” malware, which is designed to destroy data and disable operating systems, against 30 energy facilities in Poland. This past spring, Russian submarines were caught near Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago, testing a new weapon designed to disable undersea cables without detection. In May, a Russian drone struck a residential apartment building in Romania, the first time such an attack had injured civilians.

The tempo of these incursions accelerated further during the summer months. In August, groups almost certainly linked to Russia launched arson attacks in Bulgaria, Estonia, Italy, and Poland, all likely designed to slow the flow of assistance to Ukraine. One of the most audacious cases was the attack on the Leipzig airport in early August: one drone found near a Ukrainian cargo plane was carrying explosives. In September, a Russian frigate off the coast of Denmark fired two flares at a Danish military helicopter, one of which came dangerously close to hitting the aircraft.

One would have expected such a series of events to produce an urgent, collective NATO response. But Russia’s gradual intensification of these attacks has allowed it to get away with ever more dangerous actions without paying much of a price. Allies have reviewed these incidents, debating and responding to each in some way, but they have continued to follow the case-by-case approach set out in 2014. Although that provision was meant to preserve the alliance’s flexibility, it has instead kept NATO members from looking at these attacks in the aggregate and making the case for collective action.

RALLYING THE ALLIES

There is no question that NATO needs to mount a more forceful response to Moscow’s escalation. Any new strategy, however, must start with the alliance’s most powerful member: the United States. But the Trump administration has sent mixed signals about the attacks, sometimes ignoring them, sometimes accepting Russia’s public excuses, and occasionally advocating for responses that include the use of force. After the September 2025 drone incursion into Poland, Trump said it “could have been a mistake,” an assertion that the Polish government adamantly disputed. Days later, during a press conference with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump said he believed allies should shoot down Russian aircraft that entered their airspace. When asked about the drone discovery in Leipzig, Trump responded that “Putin is not looking to attack NATO territory.” Such conflicted messaging is undermining the alliance’s ability to deter Russia. Convincing Putin to halt his hybrid war will require an unambiguous signal from NATO’s strongest member that future attacks will come at a cost.

The United States should treat Russian hybrid warfare as forcefully as it did Russia’s threat to use tactical nuclear weapons in the fall of 2022. At the time, Washington issued a direct and public warning to Moscow about the “catastrophic consequences” that would follow such action. According to some reports, CIA Director John Ratcliffe’s August 2026 trip to Moscow was intended to serve such a purpose for hybrid attacks, but the White House downplayed the trip, calling it “semi-routine.” Even if Ratcliffe did issue an ultimatum, Putin is likely to take such a threat seriously only if it comes from Trump himself.

Signaling resolve is just half the equation. Allies also need to make the costs of continued aggression tangible. Norway’s seizure of a Russian vessel in Svalbard, in September, as punishment for Moscow’s refusal to pay damages to a Ukrainian energy company it had seized in Crimea, is one model. France’s repeated boardings of Russian sanctioned tankers is another. NATO allies should look for more such steps. The United States could, for example, announce that it is restarting planning for offensive cyber and information operations against Russia, which Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth suspended in March 2025. NATO could also merge allies’ surveillance of Russia’s shadow fleet to create a common database of ships that are falsely flagged, uninsured, or linked to cable-cutting incidents. It could then share that data with individual capitals and the EU so they could implement more effective sanctions.

Washington’s NATO allies should continue building their defensive capabilities and calling out Moscow for its attacks, but they must stop reviewing each hybrid attack in isolation and instead identify patterns of Russian aggression that will trigger a NATO response. They should also extend the pre-designated authorities of the supreme allied commander for Europe, the head of NATO military operations. His responsibilities were recently expanded to cover policing of the Baltic states’ airspace, but they should also include the maritime domain, where Russia is escalating. Moscow has a standing patrol of armed vessels in the Gulf of Finland to escort shadow fleet tankers, making any attempt by an ally to stop a suspected tanker a possible direct confrontation with the Russian navy.

Finally, every Russian hybrid attack should drive allies to increase their support for Ukraine. Since 2022, Putin has used every tool imaginable to stop the flow of assistance to Kyiv. The steady stream of military and economic support, although still flowing, has thinned out considerably since the early months of the war. Returning to this shared project will demonstrate to Putin that burning down warehouses and drone factories will not break NATO’s resolve. NATO has been fortunate that none of Russia’s hybrid attacks has led to a catastrophic loss of life. But as Putin’s risk tolerance continues to rise, it’s not hard to imagine that luck finally running out.

The Two Africas

Jared Cohen — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 08:00:00 GMT

Last year, U.S. President Donald Trump told a group of African leaders that the United States would be “shifting from aid to trade.” Washington had already begun to close USAID, the world’s biggest development agency, and many U.S. allies followed suit, cutting their own aid programs in Africa.

Amid the humanitarian cuts, however, international business interest in Africa is growing. The continent possesses huge reserves of the critical minerals the world needs. Foreign investors are eyeing Africa’s young workforce, growing consumer base, and ports located along vital global trade routes. And competition among China, the United States, Europe, India, and the Gulf states is bringing a wider array of investors than ever before. This year, roughly half of the world’s 20 fastest-growing economies are likely to be African.

Yet these gains won’t be distributed evenly across the continent. Many countries are too unstable, underdeveloped, or corrupt to attract foreign capital and will likely stay trapped in stagnation. But the ones that attract sustained outside investment and cultivate their domestic economies could see tremendous growth—and have a chance to follow the industrialization models that turned Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan into leading markets in the twentieth century. Those African countries that undertake sustained reforms might prosper long enough to provide vast new opportunities for their people and accrue real geopolitical power.

AFTER AID

Africa remains a relatively small player in the global economy. It makes up about 20 percent of the world’s population but accounts for just three percent of GDP and three percent of global trade. Over the past quarter century, foreign direct investment across sub-Saharan Africa has remained relatively flat—around two to three percent as a share of GDP—and most of it has gone to extracting oil, diamonds, and gold and other minerals.

But certain countries and regions are growing quickly. Take southern Africa, which has relatively good interstate infrastructure and low barriers to trade, although many nontariff barriers still exist. Twelve countries in southern Africa have a power pool that connects their grids and allows them to buy and sell electricity among one another, leading to greater efficiency and reliability. The region is also home to the world’s oldest running customs union—made up of Botswana, Eswatini, Lesotho, Namibia, and South Africa. The five countries coordinate trade policy, share customs revenue, and implement a common external tariff. Mature freight and logistics networks increasingly connect the mineral belts in the continent’s southern center to ports on both African coasts. These institutions do not fully eliminate the difficulties of doing business across borders, but they allow investors to think in terms of regional rather than merely national markets. Reforms and efforts to connect are paying off in this part of the continent: Botswana and Zambia are set to grow by 4.7 and 4.3 percent this year, respectively.

Further north, Nigeria, with its vast entrepreneurial ecosystem and growing interest from investors, gives West Africa huge market scale. Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda form an increasingly valuable East African commercial core. Some smaller African states are thriving: the island nation of Mauritius has developed into an international financial center. Botswana and Rwanda have attracted investment by providing stable policymaking environments, making up for limited scale.

The continent as a whole also has enormous opportunities on its horizon. Favorable demography gives many African countries a potential advantage. As advanced economies grow old in the coming decades, African countries will see much of their population mature into working age. As the demographer Nicholas Eberstadt noted in these pages in 2024, “By 2040, national cohorts of people between the ages of 15 and 49 will decrease more or less everywhere outside sub-Saharan Africa.” Urbanization presents a similar opportunity. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, nearly two out of every three Africans will be living in cities by 2050. A richer, more urban African population would attract investment well beyond the extractive industries that have typically dominated foreign capital inflows; Africa’s young population has already made enormous advances in areas such as financial technology and the democratization of financial services.

Foreign governments are racing to gain access to African harbors.

Africa also still has many of the resources that the rest of the world needs. Sub-Saharan Africa is home to 30 percent of the known reserves of critical minerals. China recognized the strategic significance of these resources early and has spent decades building a near monopoly over the critical mineral industry in many parts of Africa. Nearly all sub-Saharan African countries have signed on to Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative, the biggest global infrastructure project in modern history, which has funded African trade corridors such as the Addis Ababa–Djibouti and Mombasa-Nairobi railways. China’s overall investment in the continent over the last 20 years has exceeded $350 billion, and Beijing has recently transitioned from a chief lender to a top debt collector in the developing world.

Now the United States and its partners are hoping to make more inroads. Last year, the Trump administration announced deals to secure American access to minerals in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda at the same time as it unveiled a deal meant to secure peace between the two countries. The United States and other G-7 countries have backed projects such as the Lobito Corridor, a rail line linking the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Zambia to Angola’s Atlantic coast. When complete, these new lines will transport vast quantities of copper, a metal used in solar panels, heat pumps, batteries, and electric vehicles. The United States also recently extended the African Growth and Opportunity Act, which grants sub-Saharan countries duty-free access to American markets through 2028.

Africa’s geography also puts it in a position to compete in global trade networks. Two of the world’s most strategic maritime chokepoints, the Suez Canal and the Bab el Mandeb Strait, are bordered by African shores. Attacks by the Houthis, the Yemeni rebel group, on commercial shipping in the Red Sea over the last three years have pushed major carriers around the Cape of Good Hope, boosting traffic at ports along Africa’s southern and western coasts. Foreign governments are also racing to gain access to African harbors. Chinese state-owned enterprises have built, financed, or operated at least 78 ports across 32 African countries. Turkey manages the one in Mogadishu and has opened up the largest overseas Turkish military base nearby, where it trains Somali forces. Emirati companies operate ports in more than a dozen countries.

Perhaps the most underappreciated commercial development in Africa has been the recent influx of Gulf capital. Gulf states look to the continent for arable land, critical minerals, political influence, and diversified trade routes. The United Arab Emirates has become, by some measures, Africa’s single largest source of new foreign direct investment, committing nearly $110 billion between 2019 and 2023—even outspending China in some years. Similarly, Saudi Arabia and Qatar deploy sovereign capital into real estate, mining, and digital infrastructure. Gulf sovereign wealth funds, with patient capital and the capacity to move quickly on commercial timelines, are appealing partners. At a time when Chinese lending is dwindling in many places, Gulf states are filling the void. And many African governments prefer the Gulf model, in which investors tend to take equity in a project rather than saddling the borrowing state with debt.

A TALE OF TWO CONTINENTS

This outside interest, however, does not mean that every African country can benefit from it. For African governments, the question is whether they can convert this new race for minerals into durable economic growth and material gains for ordinary people. Continental statistics obscure enormous variation. Over 80 percent of foreign direct investment in Africa is concentrated in just 15 countries, according to the United Nations.

Investors can tolerate many kinds of difficulties. They have less tolerance for uncertainty about whether contracts, regulations, or governments will remain stable long enough for an investment to pay off. Military governments that came to power in coups in Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger between 2020 and 2023 have drastically changed their countries’ economic landscapes and, worse, created enormous instability and hardship for local populations. Madagascar’s coup last year halted oversight of and reforms to the economy. In many jurisdictions, such as Egypt and Mozambique, sovereign debt distress or the risk of it leaves little fiscal room for other government spending.

A similar distinction applies to Africa’s urbanization and its demographic potential. Currently, big cities including Abidjan, Dar es Salaam, Johannesburg, Lagos, and Nairobi punch below their weight economically because they are cut off from one another by inefficient customs regimes, poor infrastructure, and incompatible payment systems. Population growth by itself cannot generate economic returns at a continental scale. And as the South African writer Jakkie Cilliers argued in these pages, Africa’s youth bulge will only be an asset if young people in the coming decades have access to education, formal employment, and functioning institutions. Otherwise, unemployed young people can become a source of instability. Governments across the continent, therefore, will diverge based on their ability to educate tomorrow’s workers and match their citizens with productive jobs. In sub-Saharan Africa, only 75 percent of people between the ages of 15 and 24 are literate, and much of the continent suffers from brain drain. There are, however, bright spots. Almost all children in Rwanda are enrolled in primary school.

Over 80 percent of foreign direct investment in Africa is concentrated in just 15 countries.

Stable governance and trusted institutions separate those countries that can capitalize on oil, gas, or mineral deposits from those that suffer from resource curses. Zambia and its larger neighbor, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, both have vast mineral reserves. But Zambia’s systematic reforms since its 2020 debt default, such as changes to its tax structure, have helped restore stability and drawn in renewed investor interest, while the Democratic Republic of the Congo, with its continued conflict, presents much higher political and security risks.

In some parts of Africa, the obstacles to foreign investment are more acute. Since 2020, the continent has seen at least nine successful coups. Roughly 40 percent of the world’s conflicts are now in sub-Saharan Africa, especially in the Sahel and in Sudan, which is experiencing what may be the world’s worst ongoing humanitarian crisis. In places where the United States and France have withdrawn their forces, jihadist groups and Russian paramilitaries have moved to fill the vacuum. Even where there are stable governments, corruption and abuse remain endemic. In 2025, Freedom House documented a decline in political rights and civil liberties in 18 African countries, with improvement in just 11.

The questions investors ask in Africa are the same they ask everywhere else: Do governments protect property rights, enforce contracts, allow capital to move in and out, and invest in their people? Can businesses rely on basic infrastructure? Can goods move across borders efficiently? Do laws and regulations survive political change? How African governments answer these questions, rather than the existence of minerals or other potential advantages, will determine whether they can benefit from the current moment.

IT’S ELECTRIC

Among these constraints, perhaps none is more important than electricity. Nearly 600 million people in sub-Saharan Africa still lack access to electricity. No country in the modern era has industrialized without affordable, reliable power.

Africa possesses enormous energy resources, including offshore oil and gas fields along the coasts of Namibia and South Africa and copper—which is used in electric grids—in central Africa. Some governments have made remarkable progress in electrification. In 2009, just six percent of Rwandan households had electricity. By 2024, that figure had jumped to 75 percent, enabling Rwandans to start businesses, connect to the digital world, refrigerate goods, and keep schools running. Kenya and Uganda have made similar pushes.

Electrification will help unlock continental scale. Africa’s cities can grow rapidly but may not produce markets large enough to justify major investments if their factories lack reliable power to scale production and if barriers to trade—including the spoilage of goods—and undeveloped infrastructure continue to fragment consumer markets, supply chains, and capital. Something as simple as electricity that keeps more businesses and markets open at night can promote intra-African connections and commercial opportunities. To electrify their countries, governments will need to invest in power generation, transmission lines, and transformers.

Another way to overcome fragmentation and boost growth is to develop the African Continental Free Trade Area, a pact ratified by 50 of Africa’s countries aimed at creating one of the world’s biggest duty-free zones. Trade under its new terms is progressing, but governments still have a long way to go to implement it fully, including by harmonizing trade rules, tariffs, and customs procedures. Linking markets across African countries will be key to diversification, moving up the value chain, and generating long-term economic transformation.

There is unlikely to be a single African economic story. The same forces that are making the continent more important may also widen the differences among its countries and regions. But African leaders have a great deal of agency over which path their people take. The countries that open themselves up, to both intracontinental trade and outside money, are the ones that will likely fare best.

The New Red Sea Wars

Alan Boswell — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 08:00:00 GMT

On June 3, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told the U.S. Congress that the fighting that had raged for three years in Sudan was now a “proxy war” and blamed Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) for frustrating American efforts to bring the conflict to an end. Rubio was saying out loud what many observers already knew: what started as a domestic power struggle has morphed into a wider regional war, drawing in outside powers and spilling across Sudan’s borders.

The spread of the conflict in Sudan is part of a larger geopolitical transformation. For much of the past century, policymakers have treated the Horn of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula as separate strategic regions divided by the Red Sea. That distinction is now evaporating. Wars on one side of the sea increasingly alter the military calculations on the other. This entanglement is only deepening in the wake of the United States’ and Israel’s decision in February to launch a war on Iran, driving a deeper wedge between Abu Dhabi and Riyadh (which were already at odds), weakening the American-anchored security order in the region, and underscoring the importance of securing the Red Sea for shipping.

For the past decade, the UAE has been the most aggressive outside player in the Horn of Africa, establishing ports and military bases, offering large financial packages to key allies, and involving itself extensively in Sudan’s civil war. But the recent war in Iran, along with the breakdown of the Emirati-Saudi security partnership in Yemen last December, made Riyadh less confident of Washington’s protection, more anxious about the UAE’s security ties to Israel, and more intent on controlling the Red Sea’s security picture. And so as Saudi Arabia has leaned into an alignment with Egypt, Turkey, and Pakistan, it has also brought that alignment to bear to strengthen key partnerships in the Horn. It is trying to counter factions in the Horn that are backed by the UAE or Israel even as it struggles to manage threats from Iran and its allies—including the Houthis, who have seized control of Yemen’s Red Sea coast.

At the same time, the risk of conflict is increasing between the Sudanese armed forces (SAF), backed by Saudi Arabia and its allies, and Ethiopia, an ally of the emirates, as well as the chance that another direct war could erupt between Ethiopia and Eritrea. A new war between Ethiopia and Eritrea on the Red Sea would likely turn into a regional conflict that overlaps with the one in Sudan. And it would not only be aggravated by the existing Emirati-Saudi rift—it might well deepen that divide.

Some Middle Eastern governments once saw the Horn of Africa as a low-stakes theater in which they could compete for leverage at relatively little cost. But as wars in the Middle East and the Horn become inextricably linked, a single security sphere is coalescing. Unless leaders in both the Middle East and the Horn recognize how interconnected their security dilemmas have become, instability will continue to ricochet in both directions, and the overlapping conflicts and disputes will become harder to resolve.

separation of powers

In some respects, the growing entanglement between the Horn of Africa and the Middle East is a return to a historical norm. Over millennia, the sea connected present-day Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Yemen, and people, goods, and cultural trends moved regularly among them. Amharic, Ethiopia’s dominant language, and Tigrinya, widely spoken in Eritrea and northern Ethiopia, are both Semitic tongues. Christianity spread early to what is now northern Ethiopia, making it home to one of the world’s oldest Christian Orthodox traditions.

In the sixth century, an Aksumite ruler based in modern-day Ethiopia briefly conquered parts of Yemen. Not long afterward, the Prophet Muhammad sent some of his earliest followers across the Red Sea to take refuge with a Christian Aksumite king there. Islam later spread across the sea and along Africa’s Indian Ocean coast. From the sixteenth to the twentieth century, the Ottoman Empire ruled territory on both sides of the Red Sea, and Omani rulers built an empire tying the Arabian Peninsula to much of East Africa’s coastline, eventually moving their capital from Muscat to Zanzibar. These links persisted into the modern age. When the Saudi kingdom conquered the Hejaz region on the western Arabian Peninsula in the early twentieth century, elites in the port city of Jeddah sent their families across the Red Sea to Port Sudan for safety. And in April 2023, when war erupted in Khartoum, many Sudanese took refuge in Jeddah.

Starting in the twentieth century, however, a separation began to harden between the two sides of the Red Sea as European colonialism and nationalist movements severed governance links crisscrossing the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. Connections remained—for instance, Persian Gulf wealth flowed to nearby African countries and African labor and exports flowed the other way after a 1970s oil boom transformed the Gulf economies, and Middle East countries played a substantial role in a war during that decade between Ethiopia and Somalia. But the political gulf between the Arabian and African Red Sea shores widened further after the end of the Cold War. The first Gulf War, in 1990-91, upended the Middle East and expanded the U.S. military footprint there, giving Gulf states a reprieve from managing their near abroad. Around the same time, polities in the Horn began to fragment. Somalia’s collapse drove Somaliland, a former British colony along the Gulf of Aden, to claim independence in 1991. Regime change in Ethiopia led to the 1993 secession of Eritrea, and an intensified civil war in Sudan eventually prompted South Sudan’s 2011 secession.

The United States made fraught and often counterproductive efforts to try to manage these convulsions in the Horn of Africa. Yet it rarely saw the Horn and the Middle East, or its role in each region, as linked. While Gulf states focused on threats emanating from Iran and the Levant, the Horn turned inward.

Regional leaders in these areas also did not view them as intimately connected. East African leaders such as Ethiopian President Meles Zenawi primarily sought influence across the African continent rather than across the Red Sea, championing institutions such as the African Union. Influential Christian elites in both Ethiopia and Kenya, the Horn region’s two strongest countries, have little attachment to the Arab world. Political power in the Persian Gulf region was concentrated in Riyadh and around the Persian Gulf capitals of Abu Dhabi and Doha, not the Red Sea shore. When Sudan partitioned, the process was led by the African Union with backing from the United States and Europe; the Arab world was on the sidelines.

THE HORN CIRCLES BACK

During the turmoil of the Arab Spring, the Horn began to draw back into the Middle East’s sphere of influence. In a key turning point in 2011, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan became the first non-African leader to visit Mogadishu, Somalia’s capital, in almost 20 years as he sought to expand Turkish influence in the region. The uprisings also destabilized Yemen and led to the Houthis’ takeover of much of the country in 2014. The decision by Saudi Arabia and the UAE to intervene militarily against the Houthis in 2015 increased the Horn’s strategic importance because Gulf states needed new military bases and personnel to sustain their campaign against the rebel group. The emirates opened a military base on the Eritrean coastline while Omar al-Bashir’s regime in Sudan sent tens of thousands of troops from the country’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces into Yemen to support the Saudi and Emirati efforts there.

At the same time, Middle Eastern countries had begun to doubt U.S. security commitments to the region amid the Obama administration’s widely publicized “pivot to Asia” and diplomacy with Iran, which accelerated their scramble to secure their own interests in a wider area. Middle Eastern governments became more anxious and competition among them grew more intense. A 2017 intra-Gulf crisis culminating in the blockade of Qatar by neighboring countries spilled directly into Africa, as loose blocs of patrons competed for influence and Saudi Arabia and the UAE pushed Horn leaders to choose a side. The UAE began to make increasingly ambitious political interventions in the Horn: for instance, it placed a major bet on the Ethiopian leader Abiy Ahmed, who rose to power in 2018, by backing his regime with an early infusion of $3 billion and providing critical military support when he faced a rebellion in the Tigray region.

The catastrophic war in Sudan further fused the Horn of Africa to the Middle East. When mass protests in 2019 threatened to topple Bashir’s regime in Khartoum, Abu Dhabi and Riyadh backed a military junta that seized power. After the junta’s two leaders turned on each other in 2023, the UAE emerged as the major patron of Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces, although Abu Dhabi formally denies the extent of its interventions. Saudi Arabia also had historic ties to the RSF and at first tried to mediate between the two sides, but the scope of the UAE’s intervention eventually led Riyadh to more firmly back the SAF. Saud Arabia has become the Sudanese army’s most important ally.

Saudi Arabia has deepened its involvement in both Sudanese and Somali affairs.

Over the past year, those disputes in the Horn of Africa began to spill back across the Red Sea. Tensions between Abu Dhabi and Riyadh over the war in Sudan appeared to contribute to the breakup of the Emirati-Saudi partnership to counter the Houthis. In December 2025, Saudi Arabia and the Yemeni government demanded that the UAE pull out of the country after a sudden offensive near the Saudi border by separatist forces backed by the emirates. The same month, Israel became the first country to recognize the independence of Somaliland. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and others in Africa and the Middle East fiercely opposed this move, but the UAE remained silent, deepening the tensions within the Gulf.

The Emirati-Saudi rift, exacerbated by Horn politics, hindered a collective Gulf response after the United States and Israel declared war on Iran in February. The war itself entangled the Horn and the Middle East only more tightly. Saudi Arabia sought to safeguard itself through new regional security pacts and diplomatic alignments, while the UAE strengthened its security partnerships with the United States and Israel. Although both sides try to downplay the extent of this rift in public, its effects are evident on the other side of the Red Sea, too.

Saudi Arabia has deepened its involvement in both Sudanese and Somali affairs, in coordination with Egypt and Turkey: such support appears to have driven the SAF’s recent gains on the battlefield and emboldened SAF leaders to continue to reject U.S. truce proposals. Meanwhile, the Somali government is expanding its partnerships with key Saudi allies, including Pakistan. Saudi Arabia and Egypt also oppose Ethiopia’s quest to regain a sovereign coastal port and naval presence on the Red Sea, and are bolstering their ties to Ethiopia’s coastal neighbors. (Saudi Arabia’s wish to control maritime security in the Red Sea has only grown since the U.S.-Israeli attack led Iran to throttle the Strait of Hormuz, forcing Riyadh to divert the bulk of its oil exports through the Bab el Mandeb Strait.)

Middle Eastern countries’ expanding involvement in the Horn increases the risk that internal conflicts in Ethiopia and Sudan will merge into a larger regional war zone. An infusion of Emirati military support for the RSF through Ethiopia has helped stoke distrust between Khartoum and Addis Ababa. Ethiopia, meanwhile, accuses the SAF of giving safe harbor to thousands of fighters loyal to the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, which in April effectively annulled a 2022 peace deal and retook power over Ethiopia’s Tigray region. In late September, with quiet backing from Eritrea, the TPLF launched large-scale offensives against the Ethiopian army, pushing the region back into war. By early October, the Ethiopian army had retaken Tigray’s regional capital, a move that may only force the fighting north toward the Eritrean-Ethiopian border. A new Eritrean-Ethiopian war would, in effect, pit Egypt and Saudi Arabia against the UAE.

In Somalia, meanwhile, long-standing political struggles are becoming increasingly entangled with the Middle East’s widening security conflicts. Israel’s recognition of Somaliland, which sits near the Bab el Mandeb Strait in the Gulf of Aden, caused deep alarm in Egypt, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia. In response, in early 2026, Mogadishu signed a formal defense cooperation agreement with Riyadh and canceled their existing security and economic deals with Abu Dhabi.

The UAE had already aligned with Somaliland by establishing key military infrastructure there and revamping a major port in Berbera; it also created a military outpost and took over a port, Bosaso, in the nearby semiautonomous Puntland region, which has been at odds with Somalia’s federal government for years. As the Houthis in Yemen have expanded their operations around the Bab el Mandeb Strait and refreshed their attacks on Saudi Arabia, they have also reportedly sought to develop their own inroads into the Horn, especially with the Islamist insurgent group al-Shabab, which controls swaths of southern Somalia. The Yemeni group has threatened to attack Somaliland should Israel establish a presence there, and U.S. officials have asserted that it is already sending al-Shabab weapons.

A MORE PERFECT UNION

To some extent, the Middle East’s expansion into the Horn of Africa is filling a vacuum left by others. The United States’ general retrenchment from African diplomacy and aid has encouraged Horn leaders to look elsewhere for partnerships. They need to make up for specific exits: for more than 15 years, for instance, the United Nations provided logistical support for an African Union military deployment in Somalia to counter al-Shabab. The mission succeeding in helping take and hold territory. But in July, the Trump administration vowed to block the UN from giving logistical support to the mission. This move is likely to prompt even greater involvement by Turkey, the Somali government’s top backer, and other allied countries.

The Horn’s renewed integration with the greater Middle East is not inherently a negative trend. Horn leaders are right to want diverse allies. Investments by the Gulf’s state-directed economies have given Horn countries an economic lifeline, particularly when it comes to infrastructure. Middle East capitals can also serve as crucial hubs for mediating conflicts: in 2024, for instance, Erdogan mediated a détente between Ethiopia and Somalia.

But for now, those upsides are outweighed by the fact that integration of the two regions is occurring substantially through proxy warfare and arms. It was always unlikely that the Horn of Africa and the Middle East would remain as separate as they were during the twentieth century. Throughout much of history, the Red Sea connected societies on both shores, and today, geography is reasserting itself. The biggest danger arises if some Middle East governments continue to act as if they can back various warring factions in the Horn without absorbing the consequences, and if Horn governments seek Middle Eastern patronage mainly to arm themselves against local rivals.

Arresting this trajectory will require Saudi Arabia and the UAE to agree to work together to de-escalate conflict in the Horn before a new regional war erupts. As for Sudan, the two should step back from maximalist demands and press the respective belligerents to agree to a cease-fire and a transitional government. Saudi Arabia and the UAE also need to coordinate to prevent a new cross-border war involving Ethiopia: Abu Dhabi needs to discourage any push by Ethiopia to expand its war with the TPLF into Eritrea and all the way to the Red Sea coastline, while Riyadh should discourage its key allies Egypt, Eritrea, and Sudan from meddling inside Ethiopia. The two could work together to restart quiet talks between the Somali government in Mogadishu and Somaliland’s administration in Hargeisa about their long-running dispute. Leaders in the Horn itself, meanwhile, have experience managing hostile interstate relations so they simmer rather than explode into outright regional conflict. They should immediately call a regional summit among Horn heads of state and should also encourage a more collective approach toward regional security from their Middle East allies.

An alternative, darker version of integration is also visible. The Emiratis and Saudis could entrench their respective positions in the Horn even if the two capitals patch up some of their differences. Other rivalries among various Middle East powers—for instance, between Turkey and Qatar on the one side and Israel and the UAE on the other—could also exacerbate the Horn’s internal fault lines. One way or the other, the Horn of Africa’s return to the Middle East theater is likely irreversible. The question now is whether the various powers can find a way to manage their different interests to defuse conflict—or whether, conflict by conflict, they will continue to discover that wars launched on one side of the Red Sea no longer remain contained there, forcing millions of civilians throughout the Horn to pay the price.

The Myth of Military Victory

Stephen Biddle, Sam Winter-Levy, Yuri Zhukov — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 08:00:00 GMT

Military victory is an alluring idea. A short, violent campaign that defeats the enemy promises payoffs at a tolerable price. The Trump administration expected such an outcome in Iran in February 2026. The Netanyahu government sought it in Gaza in October 2023, then in Lebanon and Iran. Russian President Vladimir Putin assumed his 2022 invasion of Ukraine would deliver it. Many critics of U.S. policy in Afghanistan and Iraq decry a failure to achieve military victory, contrasting such wars with the decisive battlefield outcomes they believe were achieved in the 1990–91 Gulf War and World War II. And until recently, the debate over U.S. aid to Ukraine featured widespread calls to help the country win a military victory, dismissing negotiations as appeasement.

Yet those who invoke the term rarely define it. “Victory” means achieving the political aims for which one went to war. But “military victory” implies more. The adjective signals that those aims are secured through combat rather than at the bargaining table. Negotiation requires compromise and invites stalling that can exhaust political will. Battlefield victory, by contrast, promises a prostrate enemy with no meaningful choice but to accept the victor’s terms on the victor’s timetable. That promise is what makes the idea so attractive and so ubiquitous.

But the notion of military victory is a dangerous myth. All modern wars end in negotiated settlements; talks are not a second-best fallback. To end a war, both sides must choose to stop fighting, and those choices always require nontrivial bargaining. Destruction matters, of course. It is what distinguishes war from peacetime politics. But its role is to shape the bargain, not to annihilate the enemy, which almost never happens.

The myth of military victory has repeatedly led governments to start or prolong wars on false premises about how those wars would end. The Trump administration believed force could compel Iran’s unconditional surrender; instead, the United States finds itself in a stalemate. The Netanyahu government’s conviction that it can defeat Hamas militarily has lengthened the Gaza war in pursuit of an unattainable goal. Putin’s expectation of battlefield victory in Ukraine has mired both countries in a war with no apparent endgame.

If Chinese leader Xi Jinping makes the same mistake, an attack on Taiwan could ensnare Beijing in a conflict that is easier to start than to stop, with stakes far beyond the Taiwan Strait. And if the United States assumes that it could secure a military victory in a war with China, then it, too, could find itself exhausted in a fight it cannot easily end.

Muddled thinking about how wars conclude also breeds prewar errors in intelligence, modernization, and force design. And misunderstanding the relationship between bargaining and fighting produces a systematic failure to integrate negotiating strategy with campaign planning. As long as policymakers do not grasp that wars end only when both sides are ready to lay down their arms, they will continue to be frustrated by the inability of military force to achieve their political goals.

CARTHAGE WAS THE EXCEPTION

No modern war has destroyed an enemy’s ability to resist. Combatants can always keep fighting if they choose, even after enemies sweep their military from the field or capture their capital. Such persistence can reverse fortunes and decide wars. Winning a war requires offering surviving (and potential) fighters a deal they prefer to continued resistance. These deals can be one-sided. But terms and bargaining always matter: no war ends unless both sides choose to accept a settlement and stop.

The only alternative is to physically annihilate one’s enemies. Rome succeeded in doing so when it ended the Third Punic War by enslaving Carthage’s surviving citizens and, according to legend, salting the city’s ruins so nothing would grow there again. But no war in the modern era has met this criterion, and few have come close. Since the Napoleonic Wars ended, in 1815, the defeated parties in interstate wars have lost a median of eight percent of their forces. In two-thirds of those cases, that figure was under ten percent. The only country to lose more than 90 percent of its forces was Paraguay, in the Triple Alliance War (1864–70). Most belligerents accept defeat—settlement on unfavorable terms—long before their capacity to resist runs out.

War-ending settlements can be explicit or tacit. Explicit negotiations involve direct communication, offers, and counteroffers; examples include the Korean War armistice and the 1995 Dayton accords that concluded the Bosnian war. Tacit bargaining uses actions, threats, or declarations to signal acceptance or rejection of terms without formal talks.

The 1990–91 Gulf War, for example, ended when the U.S.-led coalition announced a unilateral cease-fire, and the Iraqis stopped fighting, too, without diplomatic exchanges. Combat had shown Iraqi President Saddam Hussein that continued resistance would bring further coalition advances, potentially to Baghdad; the cease-fire signaled that U.S. and allied forces would hold their positions if the Iraqis did the same. Saddam understood and reciprocated. General Norman Schwarzkopf, the coalition commander, then instructed Baghdad to send a military delegation to Safwan airfield to negotiate disengagement. The result heavily favored the United States and its allies. They liberated Kuwait, their central aim. Saddam preserved his regime but lost his conquests and faced postwar restrictions, leaving him worse off than he was before his invasion.

All modern wars end in negotiated settlements.

This was an unambiguous victory, but it was not achieved by destroying Iraq’s capacity to resist. At the cease-fire, the Iraqi army retained most of its prewar strength. Up to 50,000 Iraqi soldiers had been killed and 75,000 wounded out of a force exceeding a million—under 15 percent. Over 800,000 troops survived and could have kept fighting. Days later, Iraqi forces crushed Shiite uprisings in the south.

Saddam’s decision to stop in 1991 was not a mere acceptance of reality. Iraq’s experience in its next war with the United States shows why. In 2003, the Iraqi military disintegrated after just seven weeks of fighting, its soldiers abandoning posts, weapons, and commanders and shedding their uniforms. By mid-May, Saddam could bring far less military power to bear than at Safwan in 1991. If a country could ever end a war by disarming the enemy, the United States should have done so in Iraq by May 2003. It did not.

The Iraqi military could no longer hold ground or resist coalition advances, but many of its soldiers carried on, even after Baghdad fell and their only option was to resort to irregular tactics. Sunni Baathists understood the implicit terms on offer: life under a U.S.-installed Shiite government. They preferred to fight on. The U.S. military suffered fewer than 3,000 casualties in 2003 but more than 33,000 in the next eight years. The insurgents failed to restore Saddam’s regime, but the war did not end in 2003, when Baghdad fell and its uniformed military evaporated.

Afghanistan offers a similar example. By mid-2002, the U.S. invasion had disarmed the Taliban’s military, occupied Kabul, and driven the group’s leaders from the country. Like Iraqi Baathists a year later, the Taliban faced a dominant enemy controlling their homeland, with no immediate prospect of retaking the capital. If “military victory” can terminate a war, then Afghanistan, too, should have been a decisive U.S. success. It was not. Taliban survivors rejected the terms on offer—an Afghan government that excluded them—even though their situation was far bleaker than Saddam’s in 1991. They kept fighting as irregulars, and by 2021 they had recaptured Kabul, driven out U.S. forces, and restored their rule.

The elusiveness of military victory does not make battlefield effectiveness irrelevant. But the purpose of fighting is to shape the two sides’ bargaining leverage by shifting their expectations of future costs, not to annihilate the enemy. Success in combat enables productive talks, but it is no substitute for them.

TERMS OF SURRENDER

Perhaps the most frequently cited example of military victory—the imposition of a brute-force triumph on a prostrate enemy—is the Allied conquest of Nazi Germany and imperial Japan in World War II. In conflicts from Afghanistan to Ukraine to Gaza, policymakers and pundits invoke Germany’s and Japan’s ostensible military destruction in direct contrast to wars that ended with negotiated outcomes. Yet World War II did not end because the vanquished had no choice but surrender. The fighting did not disarm Germany or Japan. Both retained the capacity to inflict enormous casualties on the Allies, and neither surrendered unconditionally. The victors offered explicit terms—conditions—to both. These concessions were small, and the Allies unambiguously won. But even World War II ended in bargains between actors with options.

Imperial Japan fielded nearly eight million troops during the war. Fewer than two million died in combat. When Japan surrendered, in August 1945, more than six million armed, equipped, uniformed, and commanded soldiers remained in the field. These forces could not reclaim Japan’s conquests, which the Allies had steadily reversed since mid-1942. By the summer of 1945, the United States had driven the Japanese navy into port and severed Tokyo’s control of airspace and sea-lanes, leaving the Allies poised to invade Japan and depose Emperor Hirohito.

Yet Japan continued to resist—not because it expected to destroy the Allied militaries, or reconquer lost territory, or throw an invasion force into the sea, but because it sought to secure more tolerable settlement terms by threatening to kill more servicemen than the Allies were willing to sacrifice. Japan retained significant leverage. At Okinawa, which fell in June 1945, Japanese forces inflicted 50,000 casualties on U.S. troops. In August, the U.S. War Department estimated that invading Japan would cost hundreds of thousands more. Japanese leaders understood this and hoped the prospect would persuade the Americans to soften their terms. It did.

The Allies had demanded “unconditional surrender” at the Casablanca conference in January 1943 but never defined what that meant. Officials in Tokyo assumed it included dismantling the imperial system and imprisoning the emperor. For over two years, Japan fought on rather than accept such an outcome.

On July 26, 1945, ahead of the planned November invasion of Japan, the Allies issued the Potsdam Declaration. Although it again called for “unconditional” surrender, the document offered multiple explicit conditions. Japan would retain sovereignty over its four main islands. Its military personnel would return home without internment. The country would keep its industry, and its people would not be subject to forced labor. It would also gain access to raw materials and trade. The declaration did not, in fact, demand unconditional surrender; instead, it articulated conditions for surrender.

A Ukrainian soldier near the frontline, Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine, October 2026 Reuters

Most important, the declaration was silent on the emperor’s status, reflecting extensive debate among U.S. government officials. Some, such as Secretary of State James Byrnes, advocated an explicit demand that Hirohito be prosecuted for war crimes. Others, such as Secretary of War Henry Stimson, argued that this would prolong the war and favored letting Hirohito remain on the throne. The final document compromised by saying nothing on the subject. Stimson hoped Japan would understand this omission as an implicit offer to preserve the monarchy, and he was right. Tokyo interpreted this silence as a signal that the emperor could remain. Hirohito served as emperor until his death, in 1989.

This concession was modest but not trivial. Regime change remained the Allies’ central goal, but it was never the only one. The entire U.S. war cabinet valued prosecuting the emperor. Some members would sacrifice this aim to end the conflict; others would not. Sparing Hirohito meant giving up an objective that mattered less than regime change, but one that still mattered.

Holding out for this concession cost Japan dearly. Accepting the pre-Potsdam terms a few months earlier would have saved hundreds of thousands of lives and averted the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yet Tokyo did manage to coerce a change in the Allies’ offer, and as a result, its surrender was not unconditional. The defeat of Japan was a one-sided bargain, not a military victory imposed on an opponent without agency.

Germany presents a similar case. When it surrendered, in May 1945, the Wehrmacht still fielded more than three million armed and actively resisting soldiers. German forces had been losing ground since the Battle of Stalingrad, in 1943, and by early 1945, the Allies were advancing deep into the Reich. Yet the German army kept fighting, inflicting severe casualties until the very end. In the Battle of Berlin, waged in April and May, more than 360,000 Soviet troops were killed, wounded, or reported missing.

The Wehrmacht’s millions of surviving troops could have melted into the countryside, turned to insurgency, and fought on after Berlin fell—as the Afghan Taliban and Iraqi Baathists would do decades later. Hitler’s inner circle had considered doing just that and developed written plans for guerrilla resistance. Yet his successors chose to stop the war and signed the instrument of surrender on May 7. As with Japan, this was a choice, and the Germans could have chosen differently. Instead, their leaders decided that the terms on offer were preferable to the cost of a protracted struggle that Germany was fully capable of conducting.

No modern war has destroyed an enemy’s ability to resist.

Although highly one-sided, the terms Germany accepted did not amount to unconditional surrender. The Allies offered explicit conditions, which they softened in early 1945 to persuade the Germans to lay down their arms. That autumn, U.S. policymakers had proposed the Morgenthau Plan for postwar Germany. Originally outlined by Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, it sought to render the country incapable of future aggression by deindustrializing it, disarming it, and dividing it into impoverished rump states. The plan would strip the country of its factories, internationalize the industrial Ruhr Valley, resettle the region’s workforce elsewhere, destroy its mines, force German civilians into labor abroad, and expropriate German assets.

When the plan leaked in September 1944, the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels seized on it to rally the German public. If this was what the Allies would do, he argued, then Germans had to resist to the last cartridge. He instructed German forces in the city of Aachen, then under American attack, to make “every house . . . a fortress.” Blaming the city’s fanatical resistance on the Morgenthau Plan, Allied officials publicly repudiated it and softened their position. At Yalta in February 1945, U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt declared, “It is not our purpose to destroy the people of Germany.” The eventual surrender terms omitted deindustrialization, forced labor, and permanent economic destruction. In the war’s final weeks, the Allies added explicit conditions: Germany would avoid annexation, remain independent (although not sovereign or unitary), and rely on armed German citizens for policing.

These conditions were modest. The Allies clearly won. Germany forfeited all its war aims, suffered occupation, and remained partitioned for 45 years. Yet the terms on which the war ended were not trivial. The Allies wanted the Nazi regime gone, but that was not all they wanted. The status of post-Nazi Germany mattered greatly to Germans and Americans alike.

Roosevelt preferred a punitive peace that would humble and permanently weaken Germany; he settled for a more generous outcome because his first-choice model was apparently unacceptable to the Germans. Intense deliberation produced this decision, reflecting a conscious effort to ease conditions that Allied leaders judged to be too harsh. Germany accepted terms that offered at least some postwar guarantees, once the signatories understood that the Allies no longer intended to cripple Germany forever. The result was a one-sided and tacit coercive bargain, but a bargain all the same.

NO DEAL, NO PEACE

No war can end without an offer the enemy can accept, no matter how powerful one’s armed forces or how one-sided the fighting. Belligerents can almost always fight on, as the Taliban did in 2002 and as Iraqi Baathists did in 2003, even after losing their capitals and their conventional militaries, and as the Germans and the Japanese could have done in 1945. This continued resistance can sometimes reverse fortunes dramatically, as it did for the Taliban by 2021. The choice to continue may be costly, but it is not necessarily futile.

This is more than semantics. Misconceptions about military victory matter profoundly. Policymakers who see negotiation as a second-best alternative to military victory may reject diplomatic feelers that could shorten wars or even reverse their ultimate outcomes. After Kabul fell, representatives of the former regime approached the United States, seeking a deal that would give them legal status and a role in a new Afghanistan. The George W. Bush administration, believing it had won a military victory and had no need to bargain with a defeated enemy, rejected these overtures and established a government that excluded the Taliban and their supporters. The result was two decades of war, tens of thousands of deaths, trillions of dollars in costs, and an eventual Taliban restoration far less compatible with U.S. interests than a compromise settlement in 2002 would have been.

This problem is not limited to Afghanistan. During World War II, an anti-Hitler resistance within Germany sought to topple the Nazi government and negotiate an early end to the war. The movement nearly assassinated Hitler in 1944. But Allied insistence on unconditional surrender hamstrung this opposition. Its members could hardly persuade other German elites to risk their lives in a coup conspiracy when success would just yield Germany’s destruction by the merciless Allies. Even had the 1945 terms been offered sooner, the plotters might have failed anyway, or a coup might have succeeded without producing an earlier settlement. Yet the Allied pursuit of military victory did not improve the odds.

On the flight deck of the USS George Washington in the Arabian Sea, September 2026 Ed Ou / Reuters

The Trump administration’s war with Iran offers another example. The White House outlined various aims but designed its campaign from the start to compel what President Donald Trump described as Iran’s unconditional surrender, not to create leverage at the bargaining table. Breaking earlier deals, launching surprise attacks amid ongoing talks, and killing officials that Washington had identified as more willing to negotiate—all of which the United States did in the war’s opening weeks—are not tactics meant to foster agreement. The expectation of military victory has left the administration without a theory of how to end the fighting, even as the costs mount: billions of dollars in expenditures, strained weapons supplies, and broader economic disruption.

The war in Ukraine presents the same error. Putin began a war he had no feasible way to end quickly or cheaply. When Russia’s gambit failed by April 2022, he did not return to the bargaining track that had briefly opened in March. Instead, he escalated. That September, Russia annexed four Ukrainian regions that it did not fully control, a step that has narrowed Moscow’s own room to compromise ever since.

Rather than negotiate seriously, the Kremlin has widened the war again and again: bombing Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure, mobilizing additional forces, and striking at European industry in a thinly veiled sabotage campaign. All wars eventually end at the bargaining table, but no belligerent can summon a deal on demand. Both sides have to be ready to settle, and Russia is not.

Nor could any feasible strategy pursued by the United States and Europe have ended Russia’s war without Putin’s acquiescence. Even with significant U.S. and European assistance, Ukraine could no more achieve a military victory than Russia could, and Moscow’s maximalist terms amounted to the end of Ukrainian sovereignty. From the start, U.S. and European policymakers should have recognized that they faced a long war with no easy exit—one that called for a sustained industrial mobilization, not a series of short-term aid packages. Those packages signaled nothing credible about allied commitment, either to defense contractors or to the Kremlin. The purpose of combat is to open a bargaining space; Putin’s choices have opened none, and only a great deal more hard fighting will produce one.

AN EXPENSIVE HABIT

Misunderstanding how wars end can yield ill-designed military operations. Because all wars end with a bargain, the only rational purpose of fighting is to shift the terms of that bargain in one’s favor. Yet U.S. policymakers rarely integrate negotiating strategy with campaign planning. American war plans for Afghanistan from 2009 to 2013, including those Washington pursued after talks with the Taliban began in 2011, excluded State Department officials responsible for political settlement and never explained how continued military operations would create leverage. Instead, U.S. troops largely remained tied to fixed locations to provide security for the population. This weakened Washington’s hand by limiting its ability to redeploy forces and credibly threaten or reward different Taliban factions based on their willingness to negotiate.

A fixation on military victory can also distort peacetime defense planning. Today’s U.S. military structures itself around assumptions of short, decisive wars. Munitions stockpiles are limited. Preparation for reconstituting a highly skilled professional force is minimal. Maintenance of reserve weapons and equipment is poor. These policies trade long-term staying power for short-term lethality and presuppose that the United States can end a conflict quickly by destroying the opposing military. But if ending a war is a matter of coercive bargaining, in which enemies can almost always keep fighting, then Washington cannot create short wars by fiat. Prudence dictates reconsidering choices that assume the opposite.

U.S. planners are not alone in facing this problem. Short-war assumptions premised on military victory are dangerous for everyone. The Chinese Communist Party, for example, should not assume that a swift campaign can end a war over Taiwan. How long such a war lasts would depend on choices in Taipei and Washington that Beijing can influence but not control. Starting a war that pays off only if the enemy gives in quickly is a gamble, and one that can easily lead to a long, grinding conflict whose ultimate cost exceeds the value of the stakes.

No war can end without an offer the enemy can accept.

Nor can the United States assume that a small stockpile of sophisticated weapons would quickly defeat the Chinese military. If China fought on, the war would not be short, no matter how much firepower the United States brought. If Taiwan accepted unfavorable terms rather than fighting on, the settlement would be a poor one, no matter how much assistance Washington provided. U.S. military power can shape the bargaining space. But it cannot win a war without an agreement in which all parties accept terms that preserve U.S. interests.

Planning for such a conflict therefore demands more than tallying ships, missiles, and aircraft. The outcome of a war over Taiwan would depend on Taiwan’s willingness to endure bombardment and blockade, on Xi’s calculus about the political costs of a protracted fight versus the risks of backing down, and on the motivation of Chinese forces facing large-scale conflict for the first time in half a century. These variables are harder to assess than comparisons of hardware, but they are just as likely to determine how such a war ends.

Military force can never eliminate an adversary’s agency entirely. Policymakers who ignore this fact will continue to launch wars that they cannot end successfully, and their plans and forces will be poorly adapted to the conflicts they wind up fighting. Clinging to the myth of military victory is an expensive habit.

The Triumph of Tech-Fueled Propaganda

Renée DiResta, Josh A. Goldstein — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 08:00:00 GMT

In April and May, hundreds of users of the social media platform Bluesky discovered that their accounts had been hijacked and used to spread content about Ukraine. Researchers at Clemson University later attributed the campaign to the Social Design Agency, a Russian consulting firm sanctioned by the U.S. Department of Treasury for running Kremlin-directed malign influence campaigns. The Bluesky effort turned out to be only one piece of the SDA’s much larger portfolio of recent operations: leaked documents obtained by the news portal Delfi Estonia and shared with the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project revealed plans for real-world acts of vandalism, intimidation, and election interference.

Most discussions of online influence and disinformation campaigns assume that attacks such as the one on Bluesky are discrete efforts. But as the SDA’s operations show, influence operations are increasingly interconnected and part of propaganda strategies that transcend traditional boundaries. Sophisticated states such as China, Iran, and Russia routinely combine overt public messaging with covert influence and mix broadcast channels with social media platforms. State media outlets, official government accounts, paid influencers, fake personas, hacked accounts, and bot armies are parts of the same system. This integrated approach, which we call “full-spectrum propaganda,” is now the norm for U.S. adversaries trying to spread their message abroad.

In full-spectrum propaganda, as we outlined in a recent Security Studies article, the many channels that states can use reinforce each other, making narratives seem more credible and allowing them to proliferate more widely. A story publicized on a state-backed broadcast channel may reach one audience, while social media accounts catch the attention of another. Official outlets can quote from posts on fake accounts whose creators masquerade as ordinary members of the public, making a fringe claim seem normal. Paid influencers can tailor messages in a style that resonates with niche audiences. The rapid expansion of artificial intelligence is making this strategy even more powerful: states are increasingly integrating AI into every level of their propaganda operations, allowing small groups or individuals to conduct propaganda campaigns that would previously have required far greater resources.

Strategies that merely address discrete foreign influence campaigns will fail to meet the challenges presented by full-spectrum propaganda. The United States needs to be able to understand, assess, and counter influence operations holistically, yet as the threat grows, the United States has been undercutting the capacity that would allow it to do so. Politicians have been dismantling the government agencies designed to track foreign influence, and social media companies are raising barriers to research on their platforms, leaving the country unprepared. As AI accelerates the spread and expands the reach of global propaganda, Washington is blinding itself to the challenge.

EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE

For much of the last decade, politicians and the public understood foreign influence operations on social media through the parts that first became visible. Most often, this would be a network of fake accounts discovered by social media companies as part of their efforts to eliminate bots, scams, and online deception on their platforms. After taking down such accounts, companies would write reports and researchers (including us) would publish analyses to explain the evolving tactics, techniques, and procedures of online influence campaigns. The focus on the specifics of each individual operation led people to think of the threats as narrow, distinct incidents.

But the fragment of what is visible is not the whole story. State-backed propagandists do not have to choose between state media and fake accounts, between covert personas and overt broadcasters, or between a spoofed media outlet or a Telegram channel. They can use all of them together—and they are increasingly doing so.

The SDA, for instance, documented its own work in the style of a consultancy reporting to a client. That client, the leaked documents suggest, was the administration of Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose officials appear in the agency’s internal communications overseeing its work. The consulting firm’s covert operations are just one component of a much broader Russian propaganda apparatus that also includes state media networks, official government channels, and fake personas. Moscow and its proxies use all of these tools in tandem to amplify propaganda messages and reach many types of audiences.

Looking at foreign influence campaigns as a social media problem is too limited.

As the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project and other news outlets explained, the SDA was behind a fake video in June 2025, branded to appear as if it were made by the Saudi media outlet Al Arabiya, which claimed that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky purchased a luxury apartment in Burj Khalifa, a skyscraper in Dubai. An internal report estimated that this false story could have logged as many as 86 million views globally; a similar SDA effort targeting Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan likely racked up over ten million views. In some cases, rather than mimicking an existing outlet such as Al Arabiya, SDA conjures fully branded fake news outlets: one leaked document described plans to use an outlet tied to the SDA in Armenia’s June parliamentary elections.

When more distance is required, SDA turns to paid influencers. Earlier this year, for example, the Kremlin wanted to support the reelection bid of Viktor Orban, then Hungary’s prime minister. According to the Financial Times, the SDA, recognizing that overt support from Russia could be interpreted as foreign meddling and hurt Orban’s campaign, proposed contacting local influencers via go-betweens to make the Russian content appear homegrown.

The SDA even bridges the gap between the real world and online information by staging controversial or threatening events to generate attention. In September 2025, severed pig heads, including several marked “Macron” for the French president, were left outside mosques and Islamic centers in and around Paris. The leaked SDA files reveal the meticulous plans behind the effort, along with similar vandalism plots elsewhere in France and in Germany. Mainstream broadcast and social media covered these events, generating real-world concern about xenophobia and Islamophobia in Europe. The SDA calls these “cognitive strikes”: the point is securing visibility, shaping perceptions, and creating emotional responses that can be exploited.

Such covert activity complements Moscow’s efforts to continue to develop its broadcast propaganda apparatus worldwide. In 2025, the Kremlin allocated 31 billion rubles ($367 million) to RT, the Russian state broadcaster. RT and Sputnik, the state news agency and radio service, have expanded across Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia, according to the BBC, including by taking over local media channels. RT Academy, the broadcaster’s educational arm, ran a journalism program in Jakarta, the Indonesian capital, to train a new generation of reporters; its programming included “fact checking” and “applying ethical standards” in storytelling. RT is not only broadcasting on its own stations but is also funding and operating sympathetic proxy channels. In 2024, for example, the U.S. Department of Justice indicted two RT employees for funneling nearly $10 million to Tenet Media, a right-wing U.S. media outlet. Even influencers working for Tenet Media were unaware of the source of that funding.

A CONFLUENCE OF INFLUENCE

Full-spectrum propaganda presents a distinct challenge because it exploits the way modern information systems confer legitimacy. As research in psychology has shown, repetition reinforces belief, and a narrative may seem more believable when it appears in multiple distinct places or when many seemingly unconnected people start talking about it. A claim looks more credible when an outlet, a few influencers, and some individuals in a Telegram channel seem to arrive at the same conclusion independently.

Integrated propaganda campaigns can also more easily evade existing crackdown efforts by individual platforms. Because social media companies differ in how they regulate content, when fake accounts on one site get removed, they may simply respawn or migrate to platforms with more permissible policies or weaker enforcement capacity. When Russian officials and state media outlets portrayed the bombing of a Ukrainian maternity hospital in March 2022 as a faked event and claimed that the victims were paid actors, social media platforms such as Twitter took down the deceptive content. But anonymous Telegram channels claiming to be fact-checking organizations gained popularity and spread the false narrative there. Some of these efforts may have been genuine attempts to investigate the charges, but many others appeared to be the work of state-backed propaganda groups seeking new places to share their message.

In a world of full-spectrum propaganda, then, looking at foreign influence campaigns on a platform-by-platform basis or simply as a social media problem is too limited. Merely analyzing posts on Bluesky, for instance, overlooks the way the message they are promoting connects to simultaneous efforts on Facebook and X, articles in state media, and public broadcasts around the world. Understanding a modern propaganda campaign requires examining where else a narrative may have appeared, whether fake outlets were quoted by influencers, whether ostensibly independent sources were connected, and how those different parts of the system reinforce one another.

AI is further transforming propaganda strategies and making the challenge of countering it harder. An investigation by The New York Times revealed that China and Iran have used Chinese open-source models to run propaganda campaigns through AI agents with limited human supervision. The agents created fake accounts on a variety of social media networks, posted false stories, and coordinated their messaging. Although these examples were limited in reach, they are likely harbingers of what is to come. State media channels are also using AI to expand their reach: Anthropic found that the Russian state media had used its AI model, Claude, to turn Romanian and Moldovan news into Russian-language articles, showing how states can easily translate content without needing linguistic expertise. Propagandists are even targeting the AI systems themselves to try to shape the answers that chatbots provide. They are creating fake websites and publishing content designed to come to the surface when AI models retrieve information and to influence the data that trains AI models on how to respond.

CAPACITY COLLAPSE

Because U.S. adversaries are pursuing a full-spectrum, AI-optimized approach to propaganda, Washington needs as much capacity as it can get to assess the threat holistically and expose or combat it. Unfortunately, social media platforms and the U.S. government have spent the past several years dismantling exactly that capacity, leaving the United States unaware of its vulnerabilities.

In Silicon Valley, companies have made it harder to access data about their platforms, limiting the visibility of propaganda campaigns. Social media platforms have walked back platform integrity and transparency commitments and dissolved collaborations with researchers. In May, Meta laid off ten percent of its workforce, including members of its investigations team, which had been instrumental in combating online influence operations. In 2024, Meta eliminated CrowdTangle, a transparency tool that researchers could use to gain access to public posts, and in 2023, Twitter, now known as X, ended free access to its API for researchers, who had used it to study public posts on the platform. X now charges them $5 for access to every 1,000 tweets, or at least $42,000 per month for an enterprise subscription, making it far too costly for many academics to conduct research on the platform at scale.

These barriers have limited independent checks on statements from the platforms and the government about foreign influence, making it harder to identify the severity of such campaigns and draw useful lessons from them. When in August, X announced the removal of 200,000 accounts from a suspected Chinese bot farm—200 of which it claimed posted information about AI data centers—the company did not make data about the operation available to researchers. Politicians seized on the news to blame Chinese covert influence for the backlash to data centers in the United States, but an analysis conducted by Clemson University professor Darren Linvill revealed that posts from the accounts that could be identified had received virtually no engagement and were not a source of significant influence.

Influence operations will increasingly involve AI-enhanced systems.

In Washington, a focus on fighting domestic censorship has led to the dissolution of institutions leading U.S. efforts to track foreign influence campaigns. U.S. President Donald Trump’s executive order on ending censorship, signed on his first day in office in January 2025, was framed as an attempt to prevent the government from infringing on constitutionally protected speech. But the result has been to stifle federal efforts to mitigate foreign influence, and claims of censorship have been used to shut down or weaken essential institutions. In 2024, Congress failed to extend the mandate for the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, an office set up in 2016 with bipartisan support and a goal of tracking propaganda from China, Iran, Russia, and other foreign actors. The organization created to replace it, the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference hub, was then shut down by the State Department. Republican lawmakers and other critics who campaigned against these offices claimed that they were trying to censor Americans, but no courts ultimately found that they had.

Then, in August 2025, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard closed the Foreign Malign Influence Center, which coordinated the intelligence community’s analysis of foreign interference and methods for countering it. The Justice Department also shut down the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, which sought to expose illegal foreign interference on U.S. soil and aligned investigations and intelligence sharing within and across agencies. Taken together, the destruction of these institutions has created a huge gap in the knowledge available to people in Washington about what China, Iran, and Russia are doing, especially the entire spectrum of influence activities they are undertaking. As Senator Mark Warner, vice chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence, warned this spring, too little capacity remains to track or disrupt covert campaigns run by adversaries of the United States. At the same time that foreign influence operations are becoming more integrated, the U.S. government is losing the coordination needed to understand them.

As the United States blinds itself, foreign adversaries are expanding their efforts. Influence operations will increasingly involve AI-enhanced systems and organizations that can autonomously create fake news outlets, generate articles and videos, disseminate them through hijacked or inauthentic accounts, seed them among influencers, quote them in official state media, and trick AI answer engines into thinking that fallacies or outright lies represent the truth or mainstream opinion. As China, Iran, and Russia operate across the full spectrum of propaganda, the United States is getting stuck in narrow silos. Without the capacity to even understand the nature of the threat, Washington cannot begin to counter it.

China’s Long Twilight

Carl Minzner — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 08:00:00 GMT

During the boom years of the reform era, from 1978 to the early 2000s, China was a country of productive workers. The working-age population (those aged 15 to 64) rose from 57 percent of the population in 1978 to a peak of nearly 75 percent in 2010. They built the roads, factories, apartment complexes, and firms that powered three decades of close to ten percent annual growth—a 20-fold economic expansion.

But over the past decade, this tide has turned. Beijing’s one-child policy, plus the same social forces that have dragged East Asian fertility to historic lows, have produced below-replacement birth rates for three decades in China—draining the fuel that powered China’s rise. China’s total population peaked at 1.4 billion in 2021 and is now falling by three to four million people per year—roughly equivalent to losing one Los Angeles each year. By the 2040s, if China continues to follow East Asia’s descent to ultralow fertility rates, it will shed around one percent of its population annually—roughly ten million people, more than the population of New York City. At the same time, the proportion of China’s population aged 65 and older will surge, doubling from 15 percent today to around 30 percent in the 2040s, and then rising to well over 40 percent by the late twenty-first century. The size of that cohort in the United States, by contrast, is projected to rise far more gradually, from around 19 percent of the population today to just over 23 percent in 2060.

Put simply, China is entering a century of demographic decline. This change will remake the country’s economy and politics just as dramatically as the last century’s demographic boom did. Back in the mid-twentieth century, improvements in health and falling infant mortality rates led to a burgeoning youth population, which Mao Zedong channeled into revolutionary social change, overturning entrenched hierarchies and remaking society from the bottom up. By 1978, China had a swelling population of working-age adults, and Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping’s pragmatic policies of “reform and opening up” astutely plugged them into the global economy, allowing China to emerge as the world’s factory.

Today, as the population rapidly grays, China’s political system is becoming increasingly regressive and rigid. As the Chinese Communist Party pivots back toward one-man rule, its vaunted institutions of technocratic rule are not what they once were. Instead of creatively addressing emerging challenges, the CCP is relying on repression and reflexively following central mandates—no matter the risks. Economically, for instance, policymakers continue to pursue Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s preferred export-driven industrial policy despite the obvious need to boost domestic consumption and strengthen the social security net for the poor.

The story of twenty-first-century China, then, is not just one of demographic decline but also one of political paralysis—and what happens when those two intersect. It is this combination that makes China’s future especially bleak. As China ages, the social pressures bearing down on its political system will only intensify. Mid-twenty-first-century China could end up looking a lot like the sixteenth-century Ming dynasty, a sclerotic political regime rendered increasingly brittle by worsening social, gender, and generational divides. Lest observers in Washington gloat about this fate, however, China’s trajectory is ultimately a warning: demographic decline and political erosion can hollow out any great power—including the United States.

The Politics of Paralysis

As the journalist Li Yuan has observed, the United States suffers from China envy. Tech investors fawn over its latest AI models. Energy specialists are awestruck by its industrial dominance in batteries and solar power. And journalists and analysts often return from visits offering rosy-eyed panegyrics about China’s gleaming transit systems and engineering capacity. Politicians and pundits, meanwhile, often fuse China’s expanding navy and missile tests with Xi’s speeches on “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” to form a single image: a strong state successfully executing a grand strategy for its twenty-first-century rise.

Compared with the political circus in Washington and the malaise in the rest of America, such surface-level manifestations of China’s wealth and power often lead to sweeping conclusions about relative national trajectories. But on closer inspection, Beijing is also undergoing profound political erosion—it just doesn’t look like the process playing out in Washington. Because China’s system is tightly controlled, its descent into personalistic one-man rule does not play out in divisive confrontations on television or erratic social media rants by the top leader. Beijing’s transformation is instead happening quietly but just as consequentially. Over the past two decades, the CCP has come to revolve ever more tightly around a single man. Xi successfully lifted the constitutional term limits on his rule as state president in 2018 and swept clean the top ranks of the party itself at the 20th Party Congress, in 2022, packing them with his own supporters and yes men. Similar purges have regularly rocked the top ranks of China’s military, culminating in 2026, with the removal of Zhang Youxia, Xi’s own handpicked top general, leaving Xi virtually alone at the helm of China’s armed services.

Xi is now set to assume a fourth five-year term as party general secretary in 2027 and has given no sign as to who might take his place in 2032, when he will be 79 years old. An aged, isolated leader increases the risks of policy missteps in China, just as it does in the United States. But China’s slide from an efficient technocratic state into lifetime rule under an aging autocrat underscores a fundamental reality about the two countries’ trajectories: unlike China, the United States can still choose differently—in the midterm elections, in 2028, and every few years thereafter. China’s politics, by contrast, are far more stagnant.

By the 2040s, China could lose ten million people a year.

Most critically, the stifling political atmosphere Xi has created is draining Beijing’s ability to respond to emerging problems as earlier generations once did. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, Chinese leaders under Deng were able to kickstart China’s era of rapid growth through rural reforms that completely reworked Maoist economic orthodoxy. As Zhao Shukai, a key party official involved in those reforms, has noted, Beijing’s ability to do so depended on a degree of “openness in the political structure, both in top-level power relations and in the ideological sphere.” That same era of flexibility saw party leaders empower competent and efficient officials to boldly address other pressing economic challenges, such as when General Secretary Jiang Zemin charged Premier Zhu Rongji with overhauling the tax system in 1994 to put China’s central finances on a firmer footing.

As Chinese politics regress, such flexible problem solving is giving way to rigid orthodoxy. Cadres now find themselves pressed to dogmatically pursue Xi’s signature policies regardless of the consequences. Back in 2022, for instance, Shanghai officials under Li Qiang, then municipal party secretary, abandoned their tentative efforts at a lighter, targeted approach to handling the spreading Omicron variant of COVID-19 when it became clear that such a policy would conflict with the “zero COVID” policies on which Xi had staked his personal legitimacy. The result was a brutal, two-month lockdown of Shanghai that left many without reliable access to food and medicine, and which became the template for lockdowns throughout China later that year. Rather than being censured for the debacle, however, Li was elevated by Xi to the top ranks of the Politburo Standing Committee in 2022 and made state premier in 2023. He now loyally leads Chinese officials on Xi’s push for industrial manufacturing and an export-driven growth strategy, despite concerns from economists about deflation, mounting overcapacity, and declining consumption.

Xi is not solely responsible for the stultifying inertia that is spreading in China’s society and state. Ever since the “color revolutions” of the early 2000s in post-Soviet states and the Arab Spring in 2010, party elites have grown more fearful of social unrest. Chinese authorities have tightened their grip on the media, the legal profession, and civil society, limiting the space for Chinese citizens to discuss mounting social woes and extinguishing emerging calls for deeper political reform. Space within the ranks of the CCP itself has similarly constricted, with few now willing to consider reforms that might seriously affect the vested interests of entrenched social groups. Back in the 1990s, by contrast, Zhu pushed through the wrenching restructuring of state-owned enterprises to secure China’s 2001 entry into the World Trade Organization—even though it threw tens of millions out of work and fueled massive labor protests. Accepting such short-term pain in pursuit of long-term gain was once considered one of China’s defining advantages, but Beijing today shows little comparable appetite for such measures.

Consider the party’s hesitancy in addressing the financial ramifications of China’s demographic decline. For decades, China’s retirement ages were among the lowest in the world: 60 years old for men, 55 for white-collar women, and 50 for blue-collar women. Unsurprisingly, Chinese researchers have predicted that the main urban pension fund covering some 500 million urban workers, retirees, and cadres will be exhausted by the mid-2030s. Raising the retirement age has thus been on Beijing’s to-do list for well over a decade. Yet authorities have moved extraordinarily slowly and timidly. Even though a phased increase was finally announced in 2024, it will not be fully implemented until 2040 and will still leave China with among the lowest retirement ages in the world: 63 for men, 58 for white-collar women, and 55 for blue-collar women.

Similarly, the CCP has put off addressing the stark inequality in benefits between urban and rural residents. Xi’s much-touted “common prosperity” campaign did little to narrow the gap between China’s rich and poor, nor did it address the wide discrepancies in state pension and health-care systems. In 2022, some 138 million urban retirees drew an average pension of $6,080 per year, roughly 18 times more than the meager $345 received by China’s 175 million rural and migrant retirees. Chinese scholars and officials regularly call for improving the benefits provided to rural residents as a means to stimulate domestic demand. But the reason genuinely redistributive measures have not been implemented is simple: party officials fear alienating the urban beneficiaries of the current system—civil servants, state employees, and middle-class urbanites, many with direct ties to the party itself—far more than the marginalized rural and migrant communities, which have limited capacity to mobilize.

These twin trends—an aging Leninist system sliding toward one-man rule and mounting political inertia in the face of anything that might trigger social unrest—have eroded China’s governance capacity. Even as the country heads toward a demographic cliff, Beijing seems incapable of preparing for the social challenges it will face in the decades ahead. China can build new high-speed rail lines or aircraft carriers but not, it seems, a sustainable social safety net for its rapidly graying countryside.

GO FORTH AND MULTIPLY

Political paralysis is only part of the story. Beijing is also actively steering China toward a reactionary version of itself that will worsen its demographic woes rather than help address them. With Xi’s dire warnings of foreign cultural infiltration, his demands that officials look to China’s “excellent traditional culture” in fusing Marxism with Confucian norms, and his praise for “women’s special role” as “virtuous wives and good mothers,” Beijing is stoking a nativist, neotraditionalist revival and reasserting patriarchal gender norms.

Beijing’s emerging worldview echoes that of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644). After a century of Mongol rule, the Ming dynasty began with a brief excursion into the outside world in the form of the famed treasure fleets of the early fifteenth century. But then the Ming pivoted toward an insular and reflexively conservative vision of China. Mongol rule had been deeply humiliating, and Ming leaders grew suspicious of foreign influence. They worked to restore what they saw as authentic Chinese civilization.

The parallels with today aren’t hard to find. In the Ming era, for instance, foreign beliefs such as Manichaeism, a Persian faith that had flourished under Mongol rule, were suppressed. Similarly, since 2010, Beijing has steadily departed from the more relaxed policies of the reform era and pursued the Sinicization of faiths such as Christianity and Islam. And ethnic minorities during the Ming dynasty were pressured into intermarriage, just as the 2026 Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress codifies Beijing’s new policies on forcible ethnic assimilation.

The Ming dynasty also saw a pivot back toward neo-Confucianism and its restrictive views of women’s roles in the family—views similar to the talking points currently being handed down by central authorities to the official All-China Women’s Federation: “Do a good job in family work and give full play to the unique role of women in promoting the family virtues of the Chinese nation and establishing good family customs, which is an important task assigned to the Women’s Federation by the Party Central Committee in the new era.”

At the welcome ceremony for U.S. President Donald Trump in Beijing, May 2026 Maxim Shemetov / Reuters

This Ming dynasty redux will exacerbate China’s demographic problems. Plunging marriage and fertility rates across East Asia reflect deep tensions between women’s aspirations and society’s calcified gender norms. Between 2013 and 2024, new marriages in China fell by roughly 55 percent, as women and men alike backed away from family formation. Yet the all-male Politburo, one of China’s top party institutions, seems to think that addressing this trend is merely a question of finding the right incentives to push citizens toward marriage and children. In 2021, it launched a new slate of pro-natalist initiatives including baby bonuses and parental leave policies while restricting access to divorce, abortion, and vasectomies. It also reworked stamps, textbooks, and public art to showcase multichild families as ideal. Unsurprisingly, the tone-deaf and regressive nature of Beijing’s policies and language not only has had little impact but is also worsening China’s gender relations.

If Beijing can’t persuade its own citizens to have children, it might use a lever that other graying societies have used to address the challenges posed by rapid aging: immigration. Throughout the world, rapidly aging countries have resorted to foreign labor to fill jobs left vacant by shrinking workforces and to care for surging elderly populations. Even once insular South Korea is welcoming more migrant workers to make up for its low birthrate. Foreign residents now make up roughly five percent of its population, up from near zero in the early 1990s.

The CCP’s embrace of nativism, however, makes this option difficult. Census results in both 2010 and 2020 revealed that foreign residents made up 0.1 percent of China’s total population—roughly the same percentage as Taiwan or South Korea in 1990. But whereas those two societies turned toward greater openness in the following decades, China is heading down an increasingly ethnocentric path. Over the past decade, Chinese authorities have cracked down on foreign cultural products such as films, and since 2016 they have designated April 15 as National Security Day, which is marked by propaganda banners, school activities, and TV programs warning citizens to be on the watch for foreign spies. This messaging will not only make it harder to attract the foreign workers that China needs in the years ahead, such as eldercare workers. It is also priming the Chinese population to resist them.

In August 2025, authorities announced a new visa aimed at attracting young, talented foreigners working in STEM fields. This was consistent with Xi’s stated goals of making China a world leader in manufacturing and technology and competing with developed countries for global talent. But the popular backlash was immediate and furious. China’s youth unemployment rate stood at 18.9 percent that same month, and young people took to social media to rail against the government for selling out their interests. Posts on the topic racked up tens of millions of views in mere days. Some commentators who defended the government were called “race traitors.” Others speculated that Indian tech workers might surge into China and compete for jobs or marriage partners. More than a year later, there have been no reports of any such visa having been issued.

Domestic resentment toward “outsiders” presents yet another dangerous divide emerging in twenty-first-century China. China is not simply aging; it is likely to approach the centennial of its founding in 2049 with core social cleavages—between men and women, Chinese people and foreigners, urban and rural residents—deepened and embittered by decades of stagnant governance and backward-looking values. By midcentury, Beijing will be chronically short of the workers it needs, and it will likely end up on the wrong side of a new kind of populist discontent.

THE TIME BOMB

For some American policymakers, the top risk of these trends is war. In their 2022 book Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict With China, Hal Brands and Michael Beckley warn that demographic decline could push a “peaking China” to roll the dice and try to seize Taiwan before rising social pressures and economic constraints begin to bite in earnest. Such a fear is not absurd. A more apt framing, however, is not a rational, calculated gamble, but a severe miscalculation by an aging, isolated leader. As with Russian President Vladimir Putin before he decided to invade Ukraine in 2022, or with U.S. President Donald Trump before he launched a war with Iran in 2026, an elderly Xi could very well find himself insulated from reality, surrounded by cowed subordinates, and stumbling into catastrophe.

But the deeper risk for China is internal. In the near term, as current trend lines continue, China is poised for political stasis. It will likely make no serious efforts to address the woes of rural areas or to cut the benefits of privileged groups. A generation of youth will experience anemic economic growth and weaker job prospects compared with those of their parents, amid a stagnant political climate that is increasingly hostile to women in particular, all of which will result in people further opting out of marriage and family formation. As China ages, such trends will produce rising discontent, and China’s state apparatus will be steadily drawn into using comprehensive surveillance and “grid management” techniques—methods developed to contain ethnic minorities in Xinjiang and disgruntled petitioners throughout China—to handle it.

Indeed, Chinese authorities have already begun refashioning the tools of their security state in response. In 2023, Beijing created the Central Social Work Department and charged it with monitoring those suffering from any of the “four lacks” (no spouse or children, no job or stable income, no normal social interactions, or no financial assets, such as a house or car) or any of the “five losses” (failed investments, career or life setbacks, emotional imbalances, mental illness, or failed personal relationships). Beijing views such individuals as potential security threats capable of mass attacks, such as the November 2024 rampage in which a 62-year-old man, dissatisfied with the property settlement after his divorce, drove his car into a crowd and killed dozens.

The coming decades will see Beijing steadily “securitize” all the social problems arising from China’s demographic shifts. In the 2030s, aging party leaders living in rarefied Zhongnanhai compounds may look out and see superficial stability. Chinese tech billionaires may convince themselves that they, too, are immune from the concerns of the rabble. But increased repression and surveillance are not a long-term solution. These privileged few will be sitting on a time bomb of their own making, similar to that faced by political and economic elites during the waning years of the Ming dynasty.

Between 2013 and 2024, new marriages in China fell by 55 percent.

By the late 1500s, the once vigorous Ming was severely eroding. Decades of fiscal profligacy, including the costs of an extended conflict with Japan in Korea, had drained the imperial treasury. Reformist officials such as Zhang Juzheng attempted to plug the hole in state finances, pushing through a series of reforms in an effort to broaden the tax base and force the gentry and landed elites to shoulder a larger share of the mounting fiscal burden. But the gentry fought back. After Zhang’s death, in 1582, they successfully unwound his reforms, posthumously disgracing him as a warning to others who might seek to target their privileges and wealth. The financial burden of an empire in distress fell instead on ordinary peasants.

Simultaneously, the Ming court slid into political paralysis. The Wanli emperor (1572–1620) spent two decades of his reign locked in an extended standoff with his own bureaucracy over the question of who would succeed him. The result: a political vacuum at the top. With the throne disengaged from governance, petitions and reports from officials piled up unread, crucial state posts went unfilled, and the imperial bureaucracy splintered amid poisonous factional infighting.

On its current trajectory, China risks repeating this arc. Beijing will likely suffer from a lengthy period of political inertia under Xi, coupled with a hollowing out of bureaucratic capacity—and then see a succession crisis in the 2030s or 2040s. With its boom years in the rearview mirror, signs already abound that China is facing financial constraints, as well. Local governments are running deficits, with many struggling to pay teachers and civil servants their salaries and benefits on time. The burden is falling, once again, on society’s weakest. Rural and migrant residents enrolled in the state health-care program have seen their insurance premiums soar—20 percent annually over the past two decades. Unable to keep up with the costs, some 83 million have simply decided to drop their coverage in recent years.

Taken in isolation, none of these developments spell disaster. But together, they point to a midcentury China in which every major social fault line will have been widened by decades of state policy. Leadership turmoil and a weakened state, as seen with the enfeebled late Ming, could well fuse with latent social tensions to produce an existential crisis. In the 1620s, a wave of Ming budget cuts drove Li Zicheng, a cashiered postal clerk, into banditry before he rose to lead the rebellion that brought down the dynasty in 1644. Cuts to pensions or benefits of China’s own state employees in the coming years might produce a modern equivalent. In the 1630s, it was an influx of drought- and famine-stricken peasants that resulted in the expansion of Li’s ragtag forces to challenge the imperial throne. Perhaps water scarcity across northern China in the 2030s or 2040s—made worse by climate change—or a rural and migrant population left without adequate health care for themselves or their aging parents, might supply the same combustible material that the starving Shaanxi peasantry did four centuries earlier.

All this may be hard to imagine in the gleaming China of today. But the internal, incendiary forces that burn great powers rarely appear dangerous until the moment they ignite. Twenty years before their respective nations hit their own crisis points, it would have been equally hard to identify the kindling that would bring an obscure Austrian painter, an unremarkable Soviet KGB officer, or a brash American real estate developer to the center of world events.

America’s Choice

For Washington, there is still a very real need to respond to the threats China poses with its specific policies—its escalating military pressure on Taiwan, for instance, or its state-subsidized industrial overcapacity now flooding global markets. But some U.S. policymakers may be tempted to frame this response in the sweeping language of existential struggle, as a “generational challenge” to prevent a “Chinese century.” Washington should not hand Beijing this gift. The reality is that Beijing’s own choices are undermining China’s future. As internal discontent mounts, Chinese leaders will look to deflect it, framing the root cause as America’s civilizational rejection of China’s rise. Embracing that framing does Beijing’s scapegoating work for it.

Moreover, this framing feeds the kind of internal overreaction that tears apart the U.S. social fabric. Such narratives fuel panics like the Second Red Scare in the 1950s, which drove the brilliant scientist Qian Xuesen back to China, where he emerged as the father of China’s rocket program. A similar dynamic is unfolding today: a hardening climate of suspicion in the United States, marked by ever-tightening visa policies and dozens of state laws barring Chinese citizens from owning land, is pushing ethnic Chinese scientists out of American labs and contributing to a huge drop in international student enrollment (down 17 percent in 2025).

Americans have long thought of themselves as belonging to a young, vibrant country, regularly refreshed by immigrant flows that put it on an utterly different demographic trajectory from an aging Europe, Japan, and now, China. But the United States is facing its own challenges. Its fertility rate fell below replacement level in 2008 and has been sinking since. Meanwhile, the country is turning against immigration, which has accounted for the vast majority of population growth in the United States in recent years. Thanks to the current administration’s crackdown on immigration, data due out in 2027 could well reveal a U.S. population that is now declining for the first time in its history.

Washington must avoid worsening its own demographic problems through the kind of self-defeating policies that are deepening China’s struggle. Politically, the United States is still very different from China. But it, too, is showing unmistakable signs of political sclerosis. Congress, whose members are collectively the third-oldest on record by average age, has not funded the federal government on time since the late 1990s. Government shutdowns, meanwhile, have become routine in American governance. The United States also suffers from wealth and income inequality that is comparable to China’s—a gap that likewise makes it difficult to undertake reforms that threaten entrenched elites. Zoning regulations, for example, protect the property values of homes owned by aging residents while hampering young people as they try to buy homes, build careers, and start families.

All this points to a United States that will soon experience the same kind of reckoning that China is undergoing today. But demographic crisis is not destiny. It is the accumulation of choices—whether to support families or dictate to them, welcome immigrants or wall them out, lift up the young or protect entrenched privilege. Under Xi’s rule, China no longer has the luxury of choice: it is walking into a dead-end, closed version of itself that will worsen its demographic decline. The United States, however, can still choose differently.