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geopolitical

From May 14 to 15, U.S. President Donald Trump held a summit in Beijing with Chinese leader Xi Jinping. In addition to pageantry, the summit featured discussions about Iran and the Strait of Hormuz, Taiwan, and bilateral trade. Both Washington and Beijing emphasized a relationship based on “constructive strategic stability.”Many countries, particularly those in Asia, were watching closely to see how the two leaders got along, what they agreed on, and what divided them. We asked four experts to tell us about the reactions in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and the Philippines.Read more below.William Chou Senior Fellow and Deputy Director The post Asian Reactions to Trump’s Summit with Xi appeared first on War on the Rocks .

geopolitical

What if the next decisive intelligence advantage isn’t a recruited insider but a nation’s ability to model entire societies from its digital exhaust? Salt Typhoon’s multi-year cyber campaigns against U.S. telecommunications networks and critical infrastructure demonstrate China’s unparalleled focus on data-centric espionage: collect widely, analyze fast, and operationalize at scale — alongside continued investments in traditional intelligence disciplines. This approach reshapes how the United States has conventionally thought about intelligence advantage. From Exquisite to ExhaustFor decades, the U.S. intelligence community has prized what analysts call “exquisite” intelligence: narrowly sourced, high-confidence insight into adversary intent. That model depends on scarcity — secrets The post Machine Overmatch: What Salt Typhoon Reveals About China’s Data-Centric Intelligence Strategy appeared first on War on the Rocks .

geopolitical

In 2025, Choong-Koo Lee wrote, “Putting the Screws on the Partnership Between North Korea and Russia,” where he argued that the United States and South Korea should work together to weaken Pyongyang and Moscow’s military relationship. A year later, we asked him to revisit his arguments.Image: The Kremlin via Wikimedia CommonsIn your 2025 article, you argued that the United States and South Korea should work together to limit the deepening military relationship between Russia and North Korea. How has the U.S.-South Korean relationship evolved over the past year, and what does that mean for the prospects of any joint effort? Separately, The post A Check-In On North Korea and Russia’s Wartime Partnership appeared first on War on the Rocks .

geopolitical

Every time reports emerge about a potential reduction of U.S. forces or capabilities in Europe, the old continent falls into the same cycle of anxiety and panic. The same applies to announcements about delayed or suspended deployments, planned rotations, or broader force posture reviews.A brief historical reminder here is necessary. The 2014 Wales Defense Investment Pledge is still often misunderstood in Europe as little more than an American demand for higher defense spending. In reality, it reflected something broader already taking shape in Washington: the expectation that Europe would gradually assume far greater responsibility for conventional defense on its own continent. The post Europe’s Dangerous Hunger Games for American Troops appeared first on War on the Rocks .

geopolitical

Gaza did not have to look the way it looks. That is not a moral claim. It is an operational one.Claims of necessity are invoked to explain the scale of civilian harm, but they founder in the face of operational logic. Supporters of Israeli methods argue that Gaza’s urban battlefield — tunnels, rocket fire, extreme population density, hostages held underground — left no viable alternative to large-scale destruction. That argument rests on a false assumption: that large-scale fires were inevitable rather than chosen, and that the only tradeoff was between more fires and mission failure. That is a false choice, The post The Operational Case Against Israel’s Gaza Campaign appeared first on War on the Rocks .

geopolitical

China’s diplomats are on an “AI governance” offensive. At a May 5 United Nations meeting, China’s vice minister of science and technology championed China’s role in shaping U.N.-led frameworks that determine how the technology should be built and used. Just a week earlier, two top Chinese AI experts actively involved in Beijing’s governance efforts appeared by video on a Capitol Hill panel discussion hosted by Senator Bernie Sanders, touting China’s contributions to AI safety and cooperation.Norms and standards on AI development and applications are still being defined. Being a standards-setter rather than a standards-follower can simultaneously solidify a country’s technological The post China’s AI Governance Offensive Threatens U.S. Tech Leadership appeared first on War on the Rocks .

geopolitical

During Congressional testimony from Department of Defense leadership last week, Representative George Whitesides asked Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, “How does canceling a command-initiated review support a culture of accountability?” But before the secretary could answer, Whitesides instead decided to direct the question to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Dan Caine. Clearly uncomfortable with the question, Caine replied, “What you are alluding to … is a partisan question.” The exchange occupied only a few minutes amid days of acrimonious testimony focused primarily on the war with Iran, but reflected how partisan considerations have now extended to The post The Kid Rock Flyby Controversy and the Erosion of Military Professionalism appeared first on War on the Rocks .

geopolitical

The Department of Defense does not primarily have a cyber recruiting problem — it has a cyber talent management problem. The military already possesses serious qualification frameworks, scholarship programs, credentialing systems, and selection tools. What it still lacks is a system tying assessment, training, assignment, performance, and retention together across an entire cyber career.In March 2026, the department announced at its Cyber Workforce Summit 2.0 an effort to reinvent the cyber workforce. Called Cyber Command 2.0, this effort’s principal goal is improvement in talent management by focusing on identifying, recruiting, hiring, and retaining the right people. The effort also emphasizes The post The Pentagon Still Cannot Manage Cyber Talent at Scale. Here’s the Fix. appeared first on War on the Rocks .

geopolitical

This exclusive Cogs of War interview is with Catarina Buchatskiy, the co-founder and director of analytics at the Snake Island Institute, a Kyiv-based defense analytics center, and Viktoriia Honcharuk, the institute’s director of defense technologies. We asked them to share their views on how Ukraine’s military and defense firms turn battlefield feedback into rapid innovation, what Western investors and defense tech companies can learn from Ukraine, and what a future Ukraine-West defense industrial partnership might look like. Sign Up for Our Newsletter American and allied defense companies often speak about testing their products in Ukraine, but few have consistently done so. Why The post Inside Ukraine’s Battlefield Innovation Loop appeared first on War on the Rocks .

geopolitical

On this Memorial Day, American servicemembers remain deployed across the world. Many are in harm’s way. This simple fact makes the day less abstract, more real. Memorial Day is not only about wars filed away in history, but also about lives lost in service to the nation and the obligations those losses place on the living.For those who served in combat, the day is intensely personal. It is a day of names, missions, and memories that never fade away entirely. Three of the fallen return to me every year: Cpl. Andrew J. Kemple, 2nd Lt. Tracy Lynn Alger, and Sgt. The post The Lessons of Sacrifice appeared first on War on the Rocks .

geopolitical

Editor’s note: This is the ninth article in an 11-part series examining how the United States should organize, lead, and integrate economic statecraft into strategy, defense practice, and the broader national security ecosystem. The special series is brought to you by the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies and War on the Rocks. Prior installments can be found at the War by Other Ledgers page.In September 2010, after a Chinese fishing trawler captain was detained near the Senkaku Islands, Beijing halted rare-earth exports to Japan. The embargo lasted weeks. China showed, on a U.S. treaty ally, how a supply chain could be The post Rebuilding American Manufacturing: A Keystone for Economic Statecraft appeared first on War on the Rocks .

geopolitical

In 2004, I was a boot (translation: brand new) first lieutenant in 1st Battalion, 7th Marines at a retransmission site in the middle of nowhere, al-Qa’im, Iraq. I heard a sudden explosion and small-arms fire two kilometers away. The battalion radio net burst with chatter, with someone saying there were three casualties: two urgent surgicals (send help quickly!) and one routine (no rush to provide aid). Someone in the operating center asked about the status of the routine casualty, and the radio crackled with the kind of transmission that changes everything. “It’s Whiskey Six, he’s KIA [killed in action].” I The post The U.S. Military Lacks an Ethics Doctrine. Combat Effectiveness Suffers appeared first on War on the Rocks .

geopolitical

In 2019, the Missouri River flooded at historically high levels and damaged 137 facilities, destroyed 1.2 million square feet of workspace, and flooded 3,000 feet of runway at Offutt Air Force Base. Repairing the installation cost $1.2 billion. The Trump administration and Department of Defense justified $1.2 billion in budget reductions to the U.S. Geological Survey, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and Defense Department climate programs as cuts to “woke” climate or environmental initiatives, but a singular event caused sufficient damage to erase those savings.The lethality of American presence in the Pacific depends upon the resilience of bases, ports, and The post An Inconvenient Reality: Climate-Preparedness Cuts Are Lethality Cuts appeared first on War on the Rocks .

geopolitical

Welcome to The Ukraine Compass, a weekly digest of Ukrainian commentary and analysis from across the political spectrum only for War on the Rocks members. Each Monday, we bring you a curated selection of articles from Ukrainian media offering insight into how Ukrainians themselves debate the issues shaping their country.American coverage often narrows the view to the battlefield — these pieces widen it, revealing the texture of daily life, politics, and public argument in a nation at war. The perspectives gathered here are varied, candid, and often surprising, together forming a more complete picture of Ukraine as it really is.Frontline and StrategyЦензор.НЕТ — The post Understanding the Value of Ukrainian Railways appeared first on War on the Rocks .

geopolitical

We had been tracking the contact for six hours.The acoustic signature was ambiguous. The geometry was incomplete. The tactical picture had shifted twice in the preceding hour.I ordered battle stations anyway. Not because I was certain, I was not. I ordered it because the decision window was closing. Waiting for certainty was no longer a strategy, it was a risk. That moment — the space between incomplete knowledge and irreversible action — is where submarine command lives. It is where I spent 14 years.Modern militaries have spent decades trying to eliminate that space. Networked sensors, satellite surveillance, and instantaneous communications The post Leading in the Dark: How Submarine Commanders Think Under Uncertainty appeared first on War on the Rocks .

geopolitical

Why are there more antennas on Svalbard than anywhere else on Earth? Svalbard of all places, where cats and childbirth are banned and there are more polar bears than people? This cluster of islands in the Arctic, one thousand kilometers from Norway, is key to everything from your weather forecast to your car’s navigation. At 78 degrees north, Svalbard is the highest-latitude satellite ground station on Earth and is a crucial point in humanity’s growing dependence on space. In fact, the polar regions — the Arctic and Antarctic — are both crucial to space access.The polar regions are the only The post The Road to Space Runs through the Poles appeared first on War on the Rocks .

geopolitical

Is it too late to stop criminals and American adversaries from exploiting AI to conduct cyberattacks or design novel pathogens? Has regulation kept pace with the threat civilian drones pose to critical infrastructure? AI researcher Lennart Heim, Army drone strategist Paul Lushenko, and CEO of Sentinel Bio Claire Qureshi join Jonathan to discuss the trade-offs between protecting the public and letting the private sector forge ahead. The conversation gets into synthetic DNA, the risk of drones at the FIFA World Cup, and whether the U.S. government should get early access to Silicon Valley’s newest large language models.Image: T. T. Paris The post Synthetic Biology, Drones, and AI: The Risks of Dual-Use Technologies appeared first on War on the Rocks .

geopolitical

The 11th Review Conference of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) concluded on May 22. Held every five years, the conference offers an opportunity to evaluate the treaty’s implementation, respond to technological and geopolitical developments, and reinforce states’ commitment to the treaty. For the third time in a row, the conference failed to reach consensus on a final document.We asked five experts for their perspectives on what the conference achieved — or failed to achieve.Read more below.Ankit Panda Stanton Senior Fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Host of War on the Rocks’ Thinking the Unthinkable PodcastWhile the The post What Did the NPT Review Conference Achieve? appeared first on War on the Rocks .

geopolitical

When news broke that North Korea had revised its constitution, analysts in the West and across the Korean Peninsula rushed to declare it the formal death of Korean reunification as a policy objective. The changes were hard to ignore. Pyongyang stripped all references to a unified Korean nation, codified a territorial clause treating the Republic of Korea as a separate foreign state, vested direct nuclear weapons authority in Kim Jong-un personally, and concentrated near-absolute executive power in the supreme leader alone. On the surface, it looked like the official burial of seven decades of unification ideology.That reading is seductive. It’s The post What Everyone is Missing About North Korea’s Reunification Strategy appeared first on War on the Rocks .

geopolitical

Sea control has changed. In recent years, there has been a quiet revolution in maritime strategy that has seen navies increasingly expected to exert greater levels of control over more of the world’s oceans, more of the time. Whether it is NATO forces protecting critical maritime infrastructure in the Baltic, Pacific Island nations requiring maritime domain awareness to protect against illegal fishing, or Chinese coast guard and maritime militia vessels occupying features in the South China Sea, navies across the globe are confronting major challenges and are being forced to operate in new and novel ways. Behind all of this The post A Sea Control Revolution? appeared first on War on the Rocks .

geopolitical

In 2024, when Jiangsu Delong, the world’s second-largest stainless-steel producer, filed for bankruptcy, several Chinese firms and state-owned enterprises quietly absorbed its Indonesian assets. Among them was China First Heavy Industries, a state-owned enterprise founded in 1954 as one of China’s early Soviet-backed industrial projects. Today, China First Heavy Industries supplies military-grade metals to China’s military, including reactor vessels for nuclear submarines. For a manufacturer embedded deeply in China’s naval industrial base, securing nickel feedstock for specialty steels is crucial.The episode reveals China’s strategy for critical minerals: Incentivizing access to upstream assets for Chinese firms reduces the risk of supply The post Control Without Ownership: How China’s Party-Business Networks Dominate Indonesia’s Mineral Supply Chains appeared first on War on the Rocks .

geopolitical

Rose Gottemoeller joined Ryan in Washington. They discussed how the West might think about relations with Russia once the war with Ukraine ends, as well as nuclear diplomacy and other critical issues. Gottemoeller was the deputy secretary general of NATO and, before that, served as a senior State Department official. She is currently at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University and has a new book out called Security Through Cooperation: Space, Nuclear Weapons, and US-Russia Relations after the Cold War (Stanford University Press).Image: Kremlin.ru via Wikimedia Commons Image: Kremlin.ru via Wikimedia Commons The post What Would Relations with Post-War Russia Look Like? appeared first on War on the Rocks .

geopolitical

Welcome to The Adversarial. Every other week, we’ll provide you with expert analysis on America’s greatest challengers: China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and jihadists. Read more below.***IranThere has been increasing chatter that Washington and Tehran are nearing an agreement that might wind down the war launched by the United States and Israel on Feb. 28. The truce that took effect seven weeks ago has been a prickly affair, with occasional fire at Gulf states and tit-for-tats at sea — including in recent days, which have seen U.S. forces strike missile sites and vessels in southern Iran as well as shooting down The post Hollow Deals, Tricky Negotiations, and State Visits appeared first on War on the Rocks .

economic

A pair of children’s shoes is an odd place to look for the changing dynamics of American power. But stick with me because, after the past year, it is one of the clearest places to see them.Long before those shoes reach a store shelf, tariffs have raised the cost of materials, components, and importation. Oil touches nearly everything else: synthetic fabrics, foam, adhesives, packaging, and freight. When both shocks arrive together, companies cut margins, cut orders, cheapen materials, delay investment, and eventually pass the pain on to consumers. Now, multiply that across the economy, and you start to see the The post Glass Jaw? The New Economic Fragility Recasting American Power appeared first on War on the Rocks .

geopolitical

Among some nuclear strategists, military officers, and lawmakers, a belief bordering on the canonical has taken root that the United States is on the short end of a “deterrence gap” with Russia and China. Both countries, and especially Russia, possess theater-range nuclear weapons, whose comparatively small yield is thought to lower the threshold for their use. The relative dearth of these capabilities on the American side, so the thinking goes, denies Washington the ability to answer a limited regional nuclear strike with a comparable response and thus deter such an attack in the first place. Adversaries may therefore see an The post Contriving Imaginary Gaps in Nuclear Deterrence appeared first on War on the Rocks .

geopolitical

On April 15, technology podcaster Dwarkesh Patel published a two-hour interview with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. For roughly forty minutes, Patel asked one question six different ways. The question was this: If American-made compute trains AI models with the serious cyber-offensive capabilities Anthropic’s Mythos Preview demonstrated — and that compute is sold to a strategic adversary — what responsibility does the seller bear?Huang’s answers hovered a safe distance away from the question. AI is a “five-layer cake,” he told Patel, and ceding any layer to China would be industrial suicide. The Chinese, he argued, already have enough compute to do The post How America Lost Its Most Important Defense Tech Habit appeared first on War on the Rocks .

geopolitical

What would happen if you woke up one morning and the internet was gone — not from a software glitch, but because someone had simply cut the wire?Threats to critical undersea infrastructure are rapidly escalating. In 2023, the Balticonnector pipeline and several Baltic data cables were damaged. A year later, four Red Sea cables were cut, disrupting a quarter of data traffic between Asia and Europe, with further incidents across the Baltic. In total, between January 2024 and July 2025, roughly 44 incidents of cable damage were recorded. Not all were deliberate, but Russia’s activity has grown brazen. In 2025, The post Deterring Russia Beneath the Waves: Securing NATO’s Critical Undersea Infrastructure appeared first on War on the Rocks .

geopolitical

One of the most effective counter-drone systems in the largest drone war in history between Ukraine and Russia is a German anti-aircraft gun designed during the Cold War. The Gepard — a self-propelled 35 mm cannon that first entered service in 1976 — has earned recognition from Ukrainian military experts as the most effective weapon against Shahed-type drones, at a cost of a few thousand dollars per engagement. Meanwhile, one of the more novel counter-drone technologies amounts to a sharpened prong mounted on another drone that lances its target mid-flight — a 12th-century solution to a 21st-century problem.Then there is The post Fences Not F-35s: Drone Attacks and the Illogic of Gulf Procurement appeared first on War on the Rocks .

geopolitical

Welcome to The Ukraine Compass, a weekly digest of Ukrainian commentary and analysis from across the political spectrum only for War on the Rocks members. Each Monday, we bring you a curated selection of articles from Ukrainian media offering insight into how Ukrainians themselves debate the issues shaping their country.American coverage often narrows the view to the battlefield — these pieces widen it, revealing the texture of daily life, politics, and public argument in a nation at war. The perspectives gathered here are varied, candid, and often surprising, together forming a more complete picture of Ukraine as it really is.Frontline and StrategyГазета— Gazeta The post Building a Better Ukraine Requires Accessibility Reforms appeared first on War on the Rocks .

geopolitical

In late February 2026, Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz to foreign shipping. What began as a chaotic wartime closure has, in the past few days, hardened into something more consequential: an official sovereign toll regime, codified in Iranian law, and priced in cryptocurrency.On May 18, Iran operationally launched the Persian Gulf Strait Authority, a formal state bureaucracy with its own internet domain (pgsa.ir), account on X, and contact email. Since then, Tehran has delineated a “management supervision area” across the strait and announced a transit-permit scheme that converts Hormuz from an international waterway into a vetted toll plaza.Under the The post The Toll Booth at the Throat of World Trade appeared first on War on the Rocks .