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Thursday, October 15, 2026
Wednesday, October 14, 2026
[Salon] "Tower of Cower . . . THE EBBING OF U.S. POWER" (10/14/26) Guest Post
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The Bunker 600"THE EBBING OF U.S. POWER.
Because bullying never works in the long run."
For close to a century, the U.S. military has been the globe’s mightiest armed force. But ever since President Donald Trump invaded Iran over seven months ago, it has slid from an undisputed power into a retreating cower.
It’s pretty much all self-inflicted.
Like a flustered flock of ring-necked pheasants flushed from fallowing fields, a dozen U.S. B-1 bombers rushed back to the U.S. October 4 from their base in England. They had been launching bombing runs against Iran from the U.K., and intelligence reports suggested local Iranians might launch inexpensive drones to destroy the planes and kill their crews.
This embarrassment highlights how the U.S.-Iran war is changing military conflict. “A war that was intended to demonstrate the reach of American power has now done the opposite,” the New York Times noted. “It is a lesson in unintended consequences.” The same kind of cheap weaponry has driven U.S. troops from bases in Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, weakening the U.S. role in the region.
Changes in warfare — used against the U.S. — and changes in foreign relations — imposed by the U.S. — are conspiring to shrink the value of the U.S. investment in the Pentagon. U.S.-launched trade wars, the resulting tariffs, and threats to seize territory have the world viewing China more positively than the U.S. Some see the U.S. engaged in a “puzzling strategic retreat” from East Asia.
Trump’s repeated criticism of NATO nations — for not spending enough on their militaries, or failing to help the U.S. fight Iran after he began the war without consulting them — has left Europe leery of U.S. support, the keystone of the most powerful and successful military alliance in world history. The Trump administration has pulled out of dozens of international organizations, chilling civilian cooperation on issues ranging from health to the environment to population.
As the anti-Dale Carnegie might have said: This is no way to win friends and influence people. And that has translated into a diminished standing for the U.S. on the global stage. No matter how many trillions the nation pumps into its Department of Defense.
Military might means little when it is frittered away by angering long-friendly nations and launching wars with ill-defined objectives and no end in sight. The U.S. has spent decades tending to the care and feeding of its allies. Yes, sometimes that meant — especially among NATO members — that they didn’t fully share the burden of their own defense. But it represented a geographic Golden Dome, buffering the U.S., along with two oceans, from the troubles of the Olde World.
For too long, too many Americans have viewed national security and military spending as the same thing. In actuality, military strength is a vital part of national security — but only a part. Diplomacy and deference also play key roles in determining deterrence.
Now plans are underway for Trump’s Golden Dome aerial shield, which, if ever built, will offer only the illusion of invulnerability the president promises. Meanwhile, thanks to the explosion in drone technology, literal and otherwise, the protections once afforded by the Atlantic and Pacific are shrinking down to puddles.
But reluctance to relinquish the American Way of War® has sparked widespread discussion about protecting the Pentagon’s favorite kinds of weapons rather than retooling a 20th Century war machine for the new century, already a quarter gone. After all, if the Ukrainians can destroy Russian warplanes deep inside Russia, and the Iranians can drive U.S. warplanes out of Britain without firing a shot, why should we think U.S. warplanes — and U.S. warships, too, for that matter — at U.S. locations are any more secure?
Meanwhile, two days after the B-1s flew the Continent, the Air Force announced it is doubling down on plans to build more bombers, without knowing how to defend those it already has.
PECULIAR PENTAGON PUBLICITY
Airing an execution, but not a war
You can tell a lot about this nation’s leaders by how they play hide and seek. In February, they secretly launched the war with Iran, urged by Israel, and have kept it pretty much under wraps since then.
But occasionally news leaks out. An October 5 report from the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service raised eyebrows because it said that 81 U.S. aircraft have been lost or damaged in the war, 93% more than the 42 it tallied (PDF) on May 12. (Twenty-one U.S. troops have died in the campaign.)
An apparent U.S. missile strike in the war’s opening hours killed more than 150 Iranians, most of them schoolchildren. It remains unexplained by the Pentagon. The families of the six U.S. troops killed in an Iranian drone strike on their Kuwait base on March 1 — more than seven months ago — have not yet received a briefing from the Defense Department on their deaths. In Bahrain, Iran devastated the U.S. Navy’s key base in the region, home to the service’s 5th Fleet, crippling resupply efforts.
A CBS News broadcast leaked videos October 7 showing the destruction Iran has inflicted on a major U.S. military installation in Kuwait. The following day, Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) told reporters he was denied access to a Qatari base, home to the biggest U.S. post in the Middle East, to hide the damage Tehran has inflicted. “They are using every tool they can, including withholding information [PDF] about damages, slow walking the pace of reports about casualties and denying us access to see the damage as part of a campaign of cover-up, so as to mask the true cost of the war,” said Murphy, a member of both the foreign relations and defense appropriations committees.
Contrast that with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s bloodlust boast that the U.S. military will publicly stream the firing-squad execution of Nidal Hasan (PDF). He is the U.S. Army major who in 2009 murdered 13 of his fellow soldiers at Texas’ Fort Hood.
Pentagon regulations used to require that “military executions will be by lethal injection.” But in 2019, the U.S. military removed that mandate, saying that the Army’s top civilian “designates the method of execution” without specifying how. The summary page simply noted that the revised regulation “removes the term ‘lethal injection’ (throughout).” Apparently, “lethal” isn’t Hegseth’s favorite word after all. He endorsed the death-by-firing-squad recommendation of Acting Army Secretary Adam Telle, which Trump then approved. The last time the U.S. military executed a service member by firing squad was for desertion during World War II.
Lest we lose sight of what’s important here, these are the people Hasan killed
Army contractor Michael Grant Cahill, Major L. Eduardo Caraveo, Staff Sergeant Justin M. DeCrow, Captain John P. Gaffaney, Specialist Frederick Greene, Specialist Jason Dean Hunt, Staff Sergeant Amy Krueger, Private First Class Aaron Thomas Nemelka, Private First Class Michael Pearson, Captain Russell Seager, Private Francheska Velez, Lieutenant Colonel Juanita Warman, and Private First Class Kham Xiong.
Trump was initially supportive of the streaming. But after widespread outrage, he has voiced doubts about serving as the execution producer of a state-sponsored snuff film. The Bunker bets he’ll yell “Cut!” to the cameras before “Fire!” is uttered to the carbines.
But regardless of Trump’s final decision, Hegseth has shown his true colors. In our name, he is befouling U.S. values, morality, and human decency. How dare you compound Hasan’s treachery by exposing my grandchildren to your perverted patriotism, Mr. Secretary.
“We’ll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it’s public, because people need to understand that there’s serious consequences for these types of things,” Hegseth said of the public execution.
Too bad the U.S. government isn’t taking the same approach to the war it launched secretly against Iran nearly eight months ago. You know, the one that Trump predicted would be over in “four to five weeks.”
THE COMMON DEFENSE
The 1%, 2.0
The roughly 1% of the U.S. adult population wearing U.S. military uniforms are Americans who represent this country. Some Pentagon leaders think this makes them better than the rest of us. On October 3, Hegseth told Air Force Academy cadets that he had worked out “with the best Americans on the planet” earlier that day at their Colorado school. He said he invited reporters to tag along “because we want to showcase you, the real 1%, the best of our country.” The U.S. military, he continued, has always “required the absolute best.” These “elites,” he added, have “a perspective that 99% of Americans do not have” because they don’t wear the nation’s uniform. Hegseth went on to talk of his initiatives to groom future officers at conservative colleges and to bring U.S. troops back to U.S. soil and house them in well-appointed new quarters.
His words upset Eliot A. Cohen, a one-time Army Reserve intelligence officer who has cycled in and out of the Pentagon and State Department for decades. As Cohen wrote in The Atlantic,
What Hegseth is saying amounts to this: You are better than 99 percent of your fellow Americans. You are better physically and morally. You are crusaders, and they — particularly the media and the intellectuals — are not only uncomprehending of your merits but ready to subvert you. They are traitors. We want to select you from a specific slice of society: We want socially conservative young men and (very few) women from Liberty University and Hillsdale, not from liberal research universities and colleges. We want you to be isolated on bases from the rest of this corrupt society, which we despise, as should you.
It was only 15 years ago that another defense secretary pointed out the U.S. military’s true strength. Robert Gates didn’t care for an Army display along a Pentagon corridor that said the service embraces values like loyalty, respect, and honor that “distinguish American Soldiers from American society.” He spoke about it in 2011 while addressing other U.S. military cadets, at West Point, where future Army officers are forged. The Bunker wrote about it in a Time magazine cover story under the headline “The Other 1%.”
Gates said that “it is rather peculiar to suggest that attributes such as integrity, respect and courage are not valued in the United States of America writ large … It is off-putting to hear … comments that suggest that [the] military is to some degree separate and even superior from the society, the country, it is sworn to protect … There is a risk over time of developing a cadre of military leaders that politically, culturally and geographically have less and less in common with the majority of the people they have sworn to defend.”
He said, “Getting this relationship on a sound footing is so important because a civil-military divide can expose itself in an ugly way, especially during a protracted and frustrating war effort.”
Don’t look down now, but the “sound footing” that Gates wanted is crumbling beneath our feet.
Fr. Bob's Reflection for the Twenty-Eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Suppose your son is returning home after being out of the country for five years. He is scheduled to arrive sometime next week, but he isn’t sure whether he will be home Thursday or Friday. You call two of his closest friends and invite them to a welcome-home dinner.
You explain the situation and ask them to keep both Thursday and Friday open. They agree. Then you receive word that your son will arrive home on Friday. His friends call back and say, “Sorry. We have other plans that night.”
This is the kind of situation Jesus had in mind in today’s parable. His audience was the Jewish people. Years earlier, they had accepted God’s invitation to be His chosen people – to be special guests at the banquet in the Kingdom of God. But when Jesus announced that the banquet was ready, they turned down the invitation.
Now, they didn’t go off and indulge in evil ways. They simply decided they had other things to do. One went to work on his farm. Another tended to his business.
So, how does this parable apply to us today? What is the lesson for us?
We, too, have accepted God’s invitation. We said yes to Him at Baptism, through Holy Communion and Confirmation. We have accepted His invitation to be guests at His eternal banquet.
But saying “yes” to God is not a one-time commitment. It is an ongoing process that requires constant recommitment and renewal. It is easy to become distracted by the demands of daily life and lose sight of eternal life. We can fill ourselves with the junk food of this world and forget about the banquet that awaits us in the life to come.
Accepting God’s invitation is not a matter of saying yes once and then forgetting all about it. Rather, it is like saying “I do” at a wedding. Those words are not the end of a process, but the beginning of one. Our commitment to God must continue to grow, or it will begin to shrink, much like an unused muscle.
We can read the Bible as many times as possible. But what matters is not how many times we have been through the Bible – it is how many times the Bible has been through us.
My friends, today’s Gospel is an invitation to look deeply within ourselves. Ask yourself: Do I listen attentively to God’s Word? Am I putting that Word into practice in my life?
Or are we like the people in the parable, so caught up in the banquets and distractions of this life that we forget about the eternal banquet to come?
Think about those questions. How we answer them could make an eternal difference someday.
Yours in Christ,
Fr. Robert Warren, S.A.
Spiritual Director
Tuesday, October 13, 2026
[Salon] Saudi Arabia and the Yemen dilemma - Aab Digest.org Guest Post
Saudi Arabia and the Yemen dilemma
Summary: the Huthi offensive has heightened the challenge Saudi Arabia faces in its efforts to extricate the kingdom from the Yemen quagmire.
We thank James Spencer for today’s newsletter. James is a retired British infantry commander who specialised in low-intensity conflict. He is an independent analyst on political, security and economic issues of West Asia and North Africa and a specialist on Yemen.
The Saudis are on the horns of a dilemma: their conflict with the Huthis of Yemen has re-ignited, and their choices seem limited to continuing the war in pursuit of victory or buying off the Huthis. The problem with the former is that the Saudi-led Coalition has tried and failed while the problem with paying protection money is that the recipient almost always comes back for more.
It’s worth re-capping how and why the original situation arose: the UAE and Saudi Arabia intervened as part of their counter-Arab Spring strategy to prop up the late Abd Rabuh Mansur Hadi, the secular frontman they had installed. A twelve year-long war, pitting the Huthis against the anti-Huthi factions supported by Saudi and Emirati forces, saw heavy bombing resulting in the Huthis being pushed back to the mountains (apart from the Red Sea port of Hodeidah) while holding the capital Sana’a. The bombing campaign achieved little other than large numbers of civilian casualties and ruinous expense. (Reconstruction costs are estimated at US$ 20-25 billion.) The Huthis had also developed the strategy of firing UAVs and missiles at military and civilian targets in the UAE and and Saudi Arabia and using missiles, UAVs and naval drones against military and commercial ships in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden.
After Hamas’ attack on Israeli in October 2023, the Huthis fired missiles and long-range UAVs at Israel, causing some casualties and damage. In response, the US initiated Operation Rough Rider, aided by Britain and Israel, a 1000 target bombing campaign which despite Trump’s claims accomplished little at a cumulative cost of more than US$1 billion, bringing Washington only a non-aggression pact with the Huthis.
Saudi Arabia's energy minister has vowed a "serious" response to the deadly attacks on the kingdom's airports and oil and gas facilities by Yemen's Ansar Allah (Huthi) movement.
On 13 July this year, an Iranian flight tried to bring Huthi representatives attending Ayatollah Khamenei’s funeral back from Tehran to Sana’a. There were probably both Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps personnel and materiel on board as well. The Saudis bombed the runway to prevent the landing, although the plane landed safely in Hodeidah. Using this attack as an excuse, the Huthis declared a maritime blockade of Saudi Arabia and began to fire missiles at Saudi airfields and commercial targets. Subsequently, the Huthis stormed south along the Red Sea coast, routing the troops of the former president’s nephew (some of whom reputedly sold their weapons to the Huthis), and capturing first the port of Mokha then the island of Perim in the Bab al-Mandab straits, through which 12% of global trade passes.
While the West connects this to the US/Israeli conflict with Iran, the Huthis’ actions have a mostly domestic and economic purpose: the blockade is hurting them, as is the massive reduction in aid; opposition (and its repression) in Huthi areas has increased: an external enemy is always a politically useful distraction. They have taken advantage of schisms in the anti-Huthi coalition, the Riyadh - Abu Dhabi split and American and Saudi focus on Iran (and their greatly depleted stocks of interceptors) to gain territory in Yemen.
Like Afghanistan, Yemen is a graveyard of empires: the Romans lost an army there under Aelius Gallus in 24BC; an Ottoman governor remarked that he was "losing troops like salt dissolving in water"; the Sunni Wahhabis from what is now Saudi Arabia ran into trouble on several occasions; and the Egyptians still don't know exactly how many troops they lost there in the 1960s. That’s partly due to the the martial skills of the Huthi but also because geography is on the defenders’ side. The Coalition tried to invade the mountains (with a more powerful force than now), and the US heavily bombed Yemen, both in vain. Trump has recently rebuffed Saudi calls for help nor are the Pakistanis or Turks under the new Mecca Pact keen to get involved. History dictates that going down the kinetic road is unlikely to succeed. So the military option is probably not viable.
The Saudis’ suggested alternative option is to buy the Huthis off. While US$50m was reputedly the price after the 2009 campaign, the Huthis are in a far stronger position now and so the price will be vastly higher - at a time when Saudi coffers are less flush. And unless the problem is solved permanently the demand and threats of attack will return when the Huthis have spent whatever sum they manage to extract.
Therefore, the financial option is probably not viable either.
One stumbling block to addressing 'the Huthi problem' is that neither Saudi Arabia, the USA nor the Internationally Recognised Government has been prepared to accept a negotiated agreement, instead demanding an unconditional Huthi surrender and humiliating disarmament. Yet the IRG and their backers lack the military capability and/or the political will to defeat the Huthis and the financial cost of continuing the conflict keeps rising (particularly if the Huthis blockade Bab al-Mandab.) A negotiated agreement is unpalatable but probably necessary.
Do the initial drivers of the conflict remain or has the situation changed?
In 2015, Riyadh and Abu Dhabi’s main concern was to ensure the defeat of the Arab Spring was secure. In that they have succeeded and a battered Yemen is unlikely to see more uprisings until it is rehabilitated and its people can concentrate on more than survival. Saudi Arabia and the UAE are now more concerned with transforming their economies to a post-oil future (a future hastened by the closure of the Straits of Hormuz), and by the threat of Iran, which musters far larger armed forces than their Arab neighbours. They could probably accept an Arab-oriented, federal Yemen in which the Huthis have a role in government but do not rule outright.
The various factions of the IRG mostly wanted to continue Ali Abdullah Salih’s kleptocracy, differing mainly in who should rule. That originally involved keeping the Huthis from getting a share of the pie; but if the pie can be grown enough for all, the IRG can probably be persuaded to accept a deal.
That leaves the Huthis’ position. If the Saudis (and the Emiratis) undertake to stop interfering in Yemen, to allow a government in which the Huthis have meaningful participation and Riyadh agrees to pay reparations for the war damage, the Huthis can probably be persuaded to accept a peace in which they have international legitimacy.
The first step should be to reduce the leverage the Huthi have through their indirect fire capability: as seen in Ukraine, cheap air defence and counter-UAV systems provide at least some of the solution. Having evened the odds, a ceasefire, both domestically and internationally, would be easier to achieve. That should be followed by a conference involving all Yemeni factions, chaired by an impartial arbiter – perhaps Haitham, the Sultan of Oman. That should then be followed by general elections, with the government to be formed using the d’Hondt system, ensuring each faction gets influence but none dominates. The government’s first order of business should be distilling, developing and implementing the Outcomes of the National Dialogue Conference and the Peace and National Partnership Agreement. Simultaneously, there should be comprehensive security sector reform, a well-funded effort to rehabilitate Yemen under the aegis of the Aga Khan’s Development Network and an independent counter-corruption programme. Finally, a truth and reconciliation commission will be needed to gain closure, covering not just the recent conflict, but going back to the beginnings of the civil war era.
A tall order - and with the recent deadly attacks on Riyadh’s international airport reverberating one admittedly with only a thin hope of seeing the light of day - but that’s how Saudi Arabia escapes being further impaled on the horns of the Yemen dilemma.
[Salon] Guilty Men - Guest Post by Akbar Shahid Ahmed
Guilty Men
Akbar Shahid Ahmed
Interviewed by Jonathan Shainin
27.09.2026 https://www.equator.org/articles/biden-gaza-war-crimes-akbar-shahid-ahmed
A new book thoroughly documents America’s complicity in genocide
Antony Blinken and Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem, October 2024 / Alamy
In the long and sordid history of American foreign policy, there is nothing quite like the Gaza genocide. In the face of loud and insistent warnings, President Joe Biden and his team of best-and-brightest advisers wrapped Benjamin Netanyahu in a “bear hug,” as Palestinians were slaughtered by the thousands with American bombs, American diplomatic support and American intelligence.
But this moral and political catastrophe is not simply a tale of “death and destruction from the sky”, as Pete Hegseth memorably characterised a subsequent criminal enterprise. It is also a story of cowardice and complicity in Washington, where thousands of decisions made in the White House and State Department and Pentagon kept the Israeli-American war machine running at full speed – in defiance of domestic and international law.
Akbar Shahid Ahmed has covered America’s role in the Gaza war with a persistence and depth matched by few Washington reporters. His new book, Crossing the Red Line: Biden, His Advisors, and Israel’s War in Gaza, delivers an incriminating account of America’s foreign policy establishment, even as Biden’s top staffers are busy whitewashing their reputations elsewhere in the media.
While the President and his allies are desperate to spin this as a series of unfortunate events they were helpless to correct, Ahmed’s reporting leaves no doubt that Biden’s team repeatedly made the choice to aid and abet Netanyahu, that they ignored warnings and silenced dissenters, and even suppressed and manipulated information to circumvent legal accountability.
Jonathan Shainin spoke to Ahmed about the small circle of men who ran America’s Gaza policy, the culture of impunity in Washington that protected them, and whether they will ever be made to answer for what they did.
Jonathan Shainin: At the start of the book you write that “the Gaza war has always been an American war.”
Akbar Shahid Ahmed: Without American weaponry, without the American shielding of Israel on the world stage, and without the real choices made by hundreds of officials in the Pentagon, State Department, the White House – not just Joe Biden or the men closest to him – the Israelis would not have been able to destroy Gaza.
We’ve heard this from Israeli officials publicly; even Hamas leaders told me, ‘we didn’t expect this brutality from America’ – they thought Biden would stop it sooner. American officials eventually began to express worries about what Israel was doing, even some public discomfort, but they also tied their own strategic goals to Israel’s.
If this war is a collaborative enterprise, who was running the American side?
There was a small group of men around the president who ultimately determined what actions might be taken to stop Israel, or what was done to enable and support them.
These are people who were shaped by the arc of post-9/11 policy in the region, and frankly they didn’t look at it with any degree of introspection or reflection. The Biden administration’s preoccupation with a US-Israel-Saudi deal, for instance, was a personal fixation of Brett McGurk, the Middle East advisor, who saw it as a way to build his legacy after serving under four presidents, starting with George W Bush.
McGurk was tapped for his role by Jake Sullivan, the National Security Advisor, who was seen as a future secretary of state, a Democratic wunderkind. He served as national security advisor to Biden when he was vice president, ran policy planning for Hillary Clinton in the State department, won a Rhodes scholarship, graduated from Yale law, the whole shebang – and so inside the government there was a general sense: how can you question someone like Jake Sullivan? This is really important to understanding the culture that enabled the Biden administration to enable atrocities for 16 months.
Officials from larger systems – diplomatic, intelligence, humanitarian officials, military officials – take their signals from the top. That’s why it was so concerning when Sullivan and McGurk questioned whether Palestinians were truly starving. That’s why it was so concerning that no other cabinet member had the chance to confer with Biden on Gaza the way they did on Sudan, or Ukraine, or any number of other issues. It raises real questions about the judgment of these men.
Biden is, generationally, a Cold Warrior, but the men advising him, the ones shaping his Gaza discussions – they were all very much shaped by the War on Terror. Sullivan, for instance, was deeply involved in the Libya intervention, widely seen as a disaster. They all have War on Terror-levels of comfort with civilian casualties, and an executive hubris: you don’t rein in the power of a president, even if the letter of the law and the actual consequences of our policies suggest it’s time to do so.
Your reporting takes us inside a large and complicated bureaucracy. Obviously there were internal disagreements, but to what extent were the more junior staffers following the lead of figures like Sullivan, or did they not need to be told what to do?
I broke the story of Josh Paul, the first official to resign over Biden’s Gaza policy. On 8 October, when he wrote to colleagues saying ‘it’s shocking to me that we’re rushing arms transfers in, we could be enabling something very dangerous,’ he was met with pin-drop silence. Only two colleagues got back to him. One asked, ‘Are you going to be fired?’ And the other said, essentially, ‘There’s nothing we can do about this.’
Where there is dissent, it tends to be couched in terms of strategic expertise. In public, they don’t say ‘we’ve sowed the seeds of disaster’, but privately, if they recognise what’s happening, they can raise warnings. I reported at the time that officials were passing around an essay in Jewish Currents by the Israeli-American genocide scholar Raz Segal, who declared, within a week of October 7, that ‘this is going to be a genocide.’ Officials were actively sharing this with each other.
For members of the rank and file who wanted to express their concerns, there was a dissent channel, and meetings, particularly with Secretary of State Antony Blinken – who had worked with Biden for two decades – and sometimes with Jon Finer, Biden’s principal deputy national security advisor, rarely with Sullivan. They could attend, convey their points, and express their feelings. But they were facing a brick wall. Nothing they said was getting across, it did not affect outcomes.
Even the top human rights official at the State Department, Uzra Zeya, who now runs a group called Human Rights First, essentially said to people under her: if you want to make a difference in the world, focus on Myanmar, look at Congo, don’t try to do it in Gaza.
I was told by a senior State Department official that you have people up and down the government who are constantly dealing with the Israelis, whereas fewer than five were in regular contact with Palestinians. How does that shape the thinking of the decision makers?
How would you describe the ideology of people like Blinken, Sullivan, and McGurk? What, specifically, is their vision of America’s role in the world?
The UN General Assembly is occurring right now, and the hottest event of the week featured Brett McGurk – who, it is worth adding, was also associated with some of the worst policy errors in Iraq.
McGurk is coming out with a book soon – in fact, it will be released on 6 October – that presents the Biden administration as saviors of the Israeli hostages taken by Hamas-led fighters, when dozens of hostages were killed on the Biden administration’s watch. And several experts have argued that the atrocities of October 7 might not even have happened had the Biden administration taken a different approach to Israel and Palestine to begin with.
So that’s the culture and the ideology – one of impunity, of climbing the ladder without having to reckon with your choices.
In my book, I reveal that, when Sullivan was told that countries in the Global South were really concerned about the situation in Palestine, because they could see echoes of their own experience – and South Africa, specifically, was mentioned as a strategically important country whose population had begun to question the US role in Gaza – his response was ‘fuck South Africa’, because Pretoria had not supported the Libya intervention a decade earlier.
That, in a nutshell, is how they see America on the world stage. The message to other countries is: if you don’t get in line, you don’t matter. It is a bone-deep commitment to primacy.
Sullivan and Blinken were the architects of a grand strategy that was basically about competition with China – which entailed stitching up this post-Abraham Accords Saudi-UAE-Israeli alliance, so America could shift its attention from the Middle East. Was that the mission before October 7?
They were very much focused on China. That is why they needed American dominance to be entrenched, particularly in the Middle East. It’s worth stressing that his strategy was a bipartisan venture. Sullivan, for instance, saw Lindsey Graham as his biggest ally – because Graham could clinch Republican support for the US-Saudi-Israel deal, which was built upon Trump’s Abraham Accords.
There’s a real hubris there, as well as an abdication of liberal values and a real cynicism. Think of how Biden embraced the Saudis after previously saying, ‘I will treat them as a pariah’ for the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. Whatever they say publicly, they are guided, to a large degree, by what they see as the realism of hard power.
To your point about the Middle East not being the priority – Sullivan wrote, famously, “the Middle East is quieter than it’s ever been” just before October 7. He empowered McGurk, which was his way of saying: this guy knows the region, let him handle it, because my attention is elsewhere, and so is Blinken’s, we’re looking at Ukraine and China. So the region was dismissed, even though there was so much unfinished business there. They were blind to how that business could suck the US back in.
There seems to be a recurring pattern of contempt for outside voices – the answer to every criticism is basically, ‘if you don’t listen to us then you’ll get Trump and he’ll be worse than we are.’ Similarly, with Netanyahu, their attitude is ‘you better be glad we’re restraining Bibi, because we know what we’re doing, and you idiots have no idea what the consequences of imposing sanctions or withholding weapons will be.’
Yeah, their basic message is: ‘you don’t understand the consequences of your anti-war proposals – and we’ll tell you when it’s right to adopt such a position.’ In fact, in July 2025, Sullivan came out and said: actually now is the right time to halt arms sales to Israel, because Donald Trump is president. When people called for the same thing in 2023 and 2024, his response was ‘we’ll handle Netanyahu, don’t get involved’. Neither the public imperative, in terms of polling that showed Americans didn’t want to be part of what was by then widely seen as a genocide, nor the legal advice of their own experts, mattered.
When Trump took over from Biden, I noticed a very different tone from liberal institutions like the New York Times and the Guardian. Did you feel like things you’d been writing about for two years – including the failure to deliver aid to Gaza – were suddenly getting a lot more attention from the press and commentators?
Conditions were definitely getting worse on the ground, and that played a part. But the US government was aware that famine was occurring in Gaza in the spring of 2024; other outside experts said it had begun by October 2024. It didn’t start in 2025 – but the reason lawmakers and journalists came out under Trump and said ‘it’s time for a dramatic policy shift’ was that there was a formal declaration of famine, which the Biden people could now claim ‘didn’t happen on our watch.’
It feels insane that so many journalists ignored the famine confirmations in 2024. It’s hard not to read their denial as stemming from a belief – based on received ideas – that the Democrats were, at the end of the day, responsible professionals, unlike the Republicans, whose motivations had to be questioned, because of potential corruption scandals, like those surrounding Jared Kushner or Steve Witkoff, or simply because they had not been Rhodes scholars and Carnegie fellows.
After I appeared on NPR this week to talk about my book, Sullivan quietly reached out to several people to accuse me of lying about things he had said – though I’ve asked him to speak with me on the record for almost three years now. The colleagues who told me this found it funny – but I’m certain there are other people in the media who believe it.
At one point the White House basically accused you of lying.
Yes. This was January 2024, when upwards of 20,000 Palestinians had been killed, and there were hundreds of allegations of war crimes, particularly around the massive bombing of civilian areas.
By the end of 2023 there was real concern about whether the policy was going to shift, going to adapt – was the US going to take a different position? What happened instead was that McGurk took policy back to where it was on 6 October: we’re going to talk about a US-Israel-Saudi plan, which will serve as a magical way out of this conflict and into this imagined tremendous future. I revealed that there were classified documents outlining McGurk’s vision on this. I gave the White House extensive time to reply, as I did with every story. I even extended my deadline at their request.
Once the story came out – and started to go viral – the White House issued a statement saying I fabricated quotes. They slowly walked it back, after other journalists defended me. But they never retracted their initial claim that the entire story was false.
The Biden staffers who are trying to rehabilitate their reputations today have depicted this as a situation in which no other choices were available. Sullivan told David Kirkpatrick of the New Yorker, “When you look back at it in the cold light of day, the trap in that kind of thinking is easier to recognize. I will say straightforwardly, we should have put more pressure on Israel to take a different approach.” Another senior staffer in that same piece says, basically, we tried to stop Bibi but it was impossible, he wasn’t listening to us.
Your reporting shows the opposite: this disaster was a choice, or a series of choices. It didn’t have to happen this way.
Preventable mass killing isn’t just a stain on American foreign policy, it paves the way for a much more violent world. The Biden administration’s Gaza choices didn’t only enable the horrors in Israel-Palestine – they have helped normalize terrifying practices: gambling with the laws of war, regarding the treatment of medical workers and journalists, the provision of humanitarian aid, and so forth.
Activists are now campaigning to prevent future Democratic administrations from hiring some of these figures. I’m not here to tell you who to hire. But what I can tell you is that the failure of the Biden administration has made Gaza a litmus test for democracy across the West, particularly in the US. If you want to uphold human rights and values and sustain liberal democracy in the face of rising autocracy and fascism, a Gaza reckoning is key.
It’s also personally important to me – I grew up in Pakistan, a country defined by conspiracy theory, a fog around why things are so bad, accusations of hidden hands and foreign forces. Providing factual detail and specificity is how you empower people to actually change their circumstances. That’s why it is so important to report the details of how these decisions were made. This notion that ‘we should have done things differently, but that is evident only in hindsight’ – that insults the public’s intelligence. I talked to more than 150 people who worked with Jake Sullivan. Many of them told me, at the time, that the US could have done things differently, that there were other options.
You describe a series of specific episodes and general practices in which senior officials obstructed processes, manipulated reports and almost outright lied, in order to avoid triggering legal accountability mechanisms.
Yes – that vagueness was deliberately sustained. In April 2024, experts had finished a required report to Congress on Israel’s conduct in the war, known as NSM-20. Its conclusions were written by a very small coterie, at the final moment, essentially to make it possible for Blinken to permit the continued flow of weapons to Israel. He decided the conclusion he wanted, and then the top of the report was written by figures like Tom Sullivan – Jake’s brother and a senior advisor to Blinken – to match that. This is a systemic issue of impunity; it’s not just about the senior-most individuals.
There is a great line in the book, from someone in the State Department, that under Blinken there was a system of herd impunity, where “if everyone is responsible for the decision then no one is responsible”.
Yes. And that’s why it’s so alarming when officials come out now and say ‘in the cold light of day, we should have shifted our policy’. What I heard from lawyers and other experts who worked on these issues was that policymakers did not want to hear clear answers requiring a policy change. One lawyer told me: if they wanted us to find a war crime, we definitely could.
And that avoidance of responsbility continued right up until the moment Biden left office. Blinken had on his desk, approved by every relevant office in the State Department, a recommendation for sanctions on Israeli forces that he could have chosen to trigger before Trump returned to the White House.
There is a long-running argument, even among critics of US policy, about the influence of the Israel lobby. How does that look in your reporting? Are officials influenced ideologically by lobbying or is it more about a kind of careerism, where you are only taken seriously if you hold certain opinions?
It’s careerism and cynicism – influenced, certainly, by ardent Israel backers, who can derail people’s career prospects, slander them in the media and generally influence their political calculations. But the pressure is not immutable – which is what I wanted to emphasise in the book.
A big argument from Biden administration people remains: how could we have behaved differently? But even people who broadly backed Israel, like Nancy Pelosi, who called to cut off offensive weapons toTel Aviv in April 2024, were saying it was possible to go in a different direction. It’s important to understand why, for instance, the Conference of Presidents was brought into the White House so often – the heads of major Jewish American organisations, who are actually much more conservative than most Jewish Americans on these policies, were treated as representatives. Why were their voices privileged? That has something to do with how the pro-Israel lobby works. But it doesn’t take away the agency of Sullivan, McGurk, and other American policymakers.
That also raises a structural question. Jake Sullivan has to look out for his own career, but how did we create a system in which he also determines who lives and who dies in Rafah?
While his wife Maggie Goodlander is running for Congress, raising more than $100,000 from pro-Israel donors, I might add. I feel like I’m getting worked up in this interview, because you’re asking me to reflect on deep moral questions. There’s a recording people may have seen, in which Sullivan is asked: ‘how did you, in good conscience, allow Joe Biden, given his reduced cognitive capacity, to run for president in 2024, given the threat Trump posed to everything you claim to value?’ And Sullivan throws his hands up and says, ‘well, I just don’t think about politics, I’m a foreign policy guy’. That’s offensive to what we know to be true about how power works in this country. It muddies the waters, and it’s undemocratic to a degree that simply should not be tolerated.
Your book is about impunity, but it’s also about complicity. How do the people you’ve written about – whether dissenters or policymakers – think about complicity, American or European, in Gaza?
I come up against a consistent desire to avoid acknowledging the consequences of American policy. People told themselves: ‘this is Netanyahu’s doing, the Israelis’ doing, we’re not really part of it.’ They tried very hard to sustain that alienation. I reported that, in November 2024, there were new intelligence assessments that suggested – in greater detail than before – that the Israelis were knowingly committing war crimes in Gaza, discussing this among themselves. This was so serious that it went all the way up to Biden, because the lawyers and intelligence officials were saying this is more alarming than what we’d seen previously.
And it prompted new discussions, at the highest level – Biden, Blinken, McGurk, Sullivan, the US ambassador to Israel – about complicity, what in a legal sense is called ‘aiding and abetting’. Can American officials be held liable on a personal basis for what’s happened? But after extremely heated discussions, top officials walked away assured they would not be held personally liable, with a kind of clean legal chit.
McGurk told me, for the book, that he never received any confirmation of violations of American or international law. Blinken did receive these confirmations, so they were certainly circulating at McGurk’s level, even if he didn’t hear them.
If, as you write, the Gaza war is an American war, and if many, many scholars and human rights organisations and courts have described this war as a genocide, then who are the American officials that might stand to answer for their part in it? Who’s going to the Hague?
I’m very clear that I’m a chronicler and a journalist, not a prosecutor. But it is worth remembering that the assault on the International Criminal Court, which is escalating now under Trump, was blessed by the Biden administration, just as these discussions about US complicity were taking place. More recently, I have been hearing questions on the Hill about whether US officials could at some point be held liable, given that the ICC has now broken the seal on going after the West and its allies. That conversation is occurring with a candour that I haven’t heard before.
When Sullivan says ‘we should have done things differently’, don’t forget that he and his allies closed out the Biden presidency, in December 2024, by watching the fall of Bashar al-Assad – which John Kirby, the State Department spokesman, called evidence of the success of the president’s “assertive foreign policy.” They patted themselves on the back throughout 2023 and 2024, while Israel was escalating attacks against Iran, saying ’we’re defending Tel Aviv against Tehran’. Their fingerprints are very much on Trump’s war against Iran.
It is almost impossible to overstate their desire to avoid responsibility.
One last question: did this all make you angry? Was it overwhelming to report all this?
It’s made it a lot harder to live in Washington, frankly. On a personal level, I’m much less willing now to attend embassy receptions, the parties where such-and-such official is treated as a social equal, as though these decisions about life and death don’t matter.
I remember seeing Biden’s deputy national security advisor Jon Finer, a former journalist himself, at the Swiss Ambassador’s after-party for the White House Correspondents’ Weekend in 2024. He was surrounded by chattering, laughing journalists – people who were covering the death toll of the decisions he was making every day.
I think journalists have to look in the mirror and ask: why do we put ourselves in these situations? There are lots of other wonderful people in the world we could be friends with. People in positions of power – our role is to question and challenge them.
[Salon] How China and America Can Move from Competition to Stability - Guest Post by ichael D. Swaine
[Salon] How China and America Can Move from Competition to Stability - micheletkearney@gmail.com - Gmail
How China and America Can Move from Competition to Stability
Michael D. Swaine
October 12, 2026
How China and America Can Move from Competition to Stability
The American team thought it was signaling restraint. The Chinese team saw preparations for combat. In a closed-door Sino-American crisis simulation I helped organize in the 2010s — which the U.S. military funded as part of a long-term project — the Americans repositioned an aircraft carrier away from a maritime dispute between China and the Philippines, expecting the move to reassure Beijing. Instead, the Chinese participants became deeply alarmed. They believed the carrier was now ideally positioned to launch combat operations while remaining less vulnerable to attack. The episode revealed how suspicion could turn an intended reassurance into an apparent threat. This danger becomes more intense when each side views the other primarily through the lens of strategic competition.
For nearly a decade, strategic competition has framed the U.S. approach to China, shaping military planning and operations, alliance diplomacy, trade and technology relations, investment policy, and — increasingly — scientific, educational, and cultural exchanges.
While strengthening deterrence and inspiring improvements in America’s competitive capabilities, strategic competition has become an end in itself, encouraging dangerous policies often based on rigid, worst-case assumptions about Chinese intentions and abilities. And the same dynamic operates on the Chinese side. The framework fails to answer a central question: What kind of stable and beneficial U.S.-Chinese relationship is such competition intended to produce?
Both sides require greater reassurance, positive incentives to exercise restraint and cooperation, and recognition of the need for an enduring, stable balance supported by substantive, lasting agreements. Without these, stress on strategic competition is likely to produce recurring crises, accelerating arms competition, economic and technological fragmentation, and even a full-scale war, potentially involving nuclear weapons and most likely over Taiwan. Even without such a catastrophic outcome, strategic competition will almost certainly diminish cooperation on potentially existential, global threats such as climate change and the disruptive effects of emerging technologies like AI.
The 2026 National Defense Strategy states that the United States does not seek to “dominate,” “strangle,” or “humiliate” China. It also describes the American objective as an Indo-Pacific balance of power that allows a “decent peace,” and stresses homeland and Western Hemisphere security. It also does not mention Taiwan, a major potential source of conflict. Such wording suggests the Trump administration is moving away from intense strategic competition backed by American superiority.
And yet, the same document calls for a strong denial defense against China along the first island chain extending from the Korean Peninsula to Southeast Asia, as well as an overall “favorable balance of power” in the Asia-Pacific, implying a continued need to geographically contain China through superior military power, as opposed to a stable balance based on mutual denial capabilities. The strategy does not offer reciprocal political limits or an agreed end-state for the relationship. And U.S. force modernization, alliance cooperation, and technology restrictions remain heavily shaped by concerns about a threatening China.
Despite the positive rhetoric occurring in parts of the National Defense Strategy and during both of this year’s meetings between President Donald Trump and General Secretary Xi Jinping, U.S. policy remains a largely zero-sum competitive struggle requiring clearly superior, if not entirely dominant, military power to contain or constrain Beijing. The emphasis remains on “winning” a competition over creating a stable, beneficial outcome. As a result, the relationship still lacks an operational political framework for the “decent peace” called for by the United States.
Washington should pursue a strategy that bounds bilateral competition within a relationship that protects both countries’ vital interests while reducing conflict risks and expanding opportunities for positive-sum outcomes. This process is best described by the Chinese concept endorsed by both leaders during the Beijing summit: constructive strategic stability. In an attempt to define this concept, Beijing has articulated broad principles and both governments have announced specific cooperative initiatives, but neither has publicly set out a coherent, sequenced framework linking specific political assurances to verifiable reciprocal restraint measures and, ultimately, durable agreements.
The Illogic and the Limits of Strategic Competition
There are many reasons why a policy of strategic competition does not serve American (or Chinese) interests.
First, it offers no clear, stable, mutually beneficial political end-state. Instead, the United States largely measures success through stronger military deployments, tighter anti-China alliances, export and investment controls, tariffs, and other restrictions. Under this approach, competition becomes self-reinforcing, as Chinese trade and technological gains invite additional restrictions, military modernization justifies larger deployments and increased defense spending, and diplomatic or political advances prompt zero-sum counters. Much the same set of responses is seen on the Chinese side.
Second, as a result, this approach encourages both sides to securitize nearly every aspect of the relationship, from trade and technology to scientific exchanges. As a result, an increasing number of activities by either side become subject to intense restrictions or prohibitions for real and imagined “national security” reasons.
Third, this dynamic deepens mistrust and encourages worst-case planning. The trajectory points toward either a competition for predominance or an unstable balance in which both sides constantly seek leverage, increasing the danger of military confrontation and conflict. In such an environment, procedural “guardrails” will prove insufficient unless the two governments also reach substantive, reciprocal arrangements that reduce the underlying sources of conflict.
Fourth, while any lasting strategy requires realistic assessments of each side’s capabilities, strategic competition encourages inflated views of both the challenges each side poses and each side’s ability to counter them, producing unrealistic expectations.
China is a formidable economic, technological, and military power and at times uses its capabilities to counter U.S. interests, including by restricting critical-mineral exports to the United States and, according to U.S. intelligence and cybersecurity agencies, penetrating U.S. critical-infrastructure networks to prepare for disruption during a crisis or conflict. It also undermines U.S. interests by supporting both Russia and Iran with military and dual-use components in their respective conflicts with Ukraine and the United States. But such actions do not justify portraying Beijing as an existential threat in other than nuclear warfare terms, or assuming its growth and influence in every case come at America’s expense, necessitating a U.S. drive for dominance or clear superiority and zero-sum pushback on every front.
Despite efforts to reduce its vulnerability to outside pressure and its desire to stress state sovereignty and collective rights over liberal democratic ideas, China remains deeply integrated into the international economy, from which it has benefited and to which it has contributed significantly. Moreover, China faces structural constraints on its ability to achieve global normative and power dominance, such as adverse demographics, high debt and property sector weakness, and slowing productivity and growth. It also suffers under ideological constraints and a political system with limited international appeal.
While posing a military challenge to U.S. maritime predominance in the Western Pacific that requires sustained balancing, Beijing is highly unlikely to be able to assemble the capabilities needed for global military dominance in the foreseeable future — if ever — including extensive alliances, overseas bases, worldwide logistics, and broad international acceptance of Chinese leadership.
For its part, the United States is constrained in sustaining its historical predominance by steadily growing fiscal pressures, political polarization, public resistance to military escalation and prolonged wars (evident in polling on Iran), less-compliant allies, and a broader diffusion of global power.
Finally, open-ended strategic competition distorts American priorities and damages prosperity and long-term strength. The administration’s budget proposals prioritize defense spending while reducing overall funding for civilian programs, weakening investment in the domestic foundations of competitiveness and national well-being.
The Alternative: What Constructive Strategic Stability Means and Where It Came From
In rejecting strategic competition, America should not return to engagement and hedging. While producing decades of relative stability, mutually beneficial economic interaction, and normalized exchanges, that policy downplayed unavoidable competition and became associated with unrealistic expectations of Chinese political liberalization and near-complete acceptance of the U.S.-led international system. Alhough hedging was arguably a logical form of insurance against a more aggressive China, Washington never fully defined, delimited, and implemented the concept. Moreover, as with strategic competition, neither notion defined a sustainable end-state for the relationship.
The term “strategic stability” has its roots in Cold War efforts to limit the dangers of U.S.-Soviet nuclear competition. Its current usage is much broader, however, referring to the overall Sino-American relationship. American officials such as Secretary of State Marco Rubio have employed “strategic stability” in this broader sense. But the full term, “constructive strategic stability,” was apparently first used by Xi Jinping and other Chinese leaders. They defined a relationship marked by cooperation as the foundation, with moderate competition, manageable differences, and a durable peace. The American side then accepted the full term (not necessarily China’s definition), adding “…on the basis of fairness and reciprocity.”
The Chinese origin and definition of constructive strategic stability might make some observers cautious, but that is not a reason to reject it. The test should be whether Washington defines the term and accepts it in ways that protect and advance American interests and constrain dangerous behavior on both sides. Washington should resist any definition equating the concept to one-sided respect for Beijing’s red lines.
As I use the term, constructive strategic stability denotes both a political process and an outcome: a stable, mutually advantageous relationship and orientation to the international order. It assumes that neither the United States nor China is an existential threat to the other in every day-to-day circumstance outside the extreme case of a nuclear war, nor on a path to inevitable decline or dominance of one over the other. It recognizes that both, through their interaction, create dangerous, virtually unbounded competition. And it posits that global and national order and prosperity require extensive bilateral cooperation and mutual benefit, which necessitate substantive accommodation and reciprocal restraint.
Some level of rivalry and competition are unavoidable, given the two powers’ contrasting political systems and search for security and prosperity amid scarce resources. Nonetheless, Beijing and Washington should not allow rivalry to overshadow the obvious need to create lasting stability in their relationship and address those major, sometimes existential threats demanding cooperation, including climate warming, pandemics, AI governance, global financial stability, and nuclear conflict.
The Path to a More Stable, Beneficial Relationship
Building constructive strategic stability should not depend on a severe, restraint-inducing crisis or different, more restraint-oriented political leaders. The present administration has provided the political language needed to begin this process, including the National Defense Strategy’s call for strategic stability and a “decent peace” with China, the Beijing summit’s endorsement of a constructive relationship of strategic stability based on fairness and reciprocity, and similar comments made during Xi’s September 2026 visit to Washington.
The political constituency for this relationship, in both the United States and China, could begin with officials who favor strong deterrence but want to avoid an open-ended crisis and address common concerns, as well as military professionals interested in reducing the risk of accidental escalation and conflict. It could also include business and technology constituencies that favor a predictable, profitable relationship and resist its expanding securitization.
Constructive strategic stability cannot emerge through a single summit, a comprehensive “grand bargain,” or declarations of goodwill. Nor can it rest on unilateral concessions followed by expectations of reciprocity. It should develop gradually through concrete, mutually beneficial, verifiable interactions.
The purpose of such interactions is to test intentions through behavior, convert successful exchanges into lasting institutionalized commitments, and move from zero-sum strategic competition with guardrails toward reciprocal restraint, negotiated accommodation, and binding cooperation that does far more than just avoid war.
This effort thus moves beyond an argument I made in War on the Rocks in 2024 about the inadequacy of existing crisis-management mechanisms, and revisited after the May summit in June 2026. Improving crisis management should be only one step toward a basic shift in the relationship’s framework.
The process should move through four overlapping stages: political communication, operational reassurance, reciprocal restraint, and institutionalization. These stages should cover three main policy arenas: Taiwan and Asian security; economics and technology; and nuclear, cyber, and AI. Early measures are to be limited, verifiable, and generally reversible. More consequential steps should come only after less costly ones have shown their value. Failure in one area should not destroy cooperation elsewhere.
Communicate Clear Political Boundaries and Test Reciprocity
The August 2022 crisis following then-U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan illustrated the danger of contradictory U.S. policy signals without clearly understood political boundaries. Pelosi, a highly provocative figure in U.S.-Chinese relations, took what her office described as an “official visit” to Taiwan, despite the supposedly unofficial nature of the U.S. relationship with the island. The crisis demonstrated the need to communicate consistently and clearly what political actions are deemed intolerable and what assurances are expected.
The first step in building constructive strategic stability should thus be an authoritative (perhaps joint) statement by the two leaders defining the relationship they desire and the dangers they intend to avoid. It should clearly state that neither will seek the strategic subordination, economic collapse, or political weakening or disintegration of the other, and that both nations will remain to some significant extent mutually dependent to ensure mutual benefit.
Regarding Taiwan, Trump has moved partway toward these assurances. After the Beijing summit, he clearly reemphasized a longstanding U.S. policy by publicly cautioning against a Taiwan declaration of independence, while declining to say — in contrast to Biden’s remark — whether the United States would defend the island and stating that he had made no commitment to Xi regarding Taiwan. However, Trump also created concern in Taiwan and the United States by questioning the viability of defending the island and casting doubt on a pending arms sale package.
In place of this ambiguity, the president should consistently provide a balanced set of deterrence and assurance signals, such as: The United States will oppose any unilateral attempts by either side to change the status quo in fundamental ways, toward either independence or unification, as defined and interpreted by Washington. This would go beyond the existing “do not support” statement of U.S. policy regarding Taiwan’s independence, to convey Washington’s clear and strong resolve to actively oppose such an action when necessary. Such attempts could include a formal effort by Taipei to endorse or codify a One China, One Taiwan policy, or, regarding China and unification, a direct Chinese use of force (however limited) against Taiwan.
Equally important, the Trump administration should also clearly reverse efforts to undermine the One China policy and unambiguously reaffirm its commitment to that policy. Specifically, the president should state that he will not place combat units on the island or take other actions suggesting a military alliance with Taipei and will emphasize only defensive capabilities in U.S. assistance to Taiwan. He should also clearly assert, as the One China policy stipulates, that Washington remains open to any peaceful, uncoerced resolution of the Taiwan issue acceptable to people on both sides of the strait, and should press Taipei to stop undermining that policy by portraying Taiwan as a vital U.S. strategic asset that, by implication, must remain separate from China. Even Taiwan’s possession of high-technology semiconductor fabrication capabilities does not justify such a portrayal.
On the Chinese side, Xi Jinping should reiterate unambiguously that peaceful unification remains China’s preferred objective, state unequivocally that there is no fixed timetable for unification, and assert a willingness to significantly reduce military activities around Taiwan as part of a larger tension-reduction effort.
Although unlikely to end distrust, these baseline declarations would establish political benchmarks for behavior and test both sides’ willingness to engage in reciprocal assurances and accommodations.
Reinforce Political Assurances with Operational Activities
Political assurances have little value unless they shape the conduct of military and other instruments of state power.
On Oct. 24, 2023, a Chinese J-11 fighter intercepted an American B-52 over the South China Sea and, according to U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, passed within roughly 10 feet at night, creating a serious collision risk. This was not an isolated incident. Unsafe encounters have continued involving U.S. allies: According to Australia’s Department of Defence, a Chinese naval helicopter maneuvered dangerously close to an Australian helicopter over the Yellow Sea on March 4, 2026, forcing its crew to take evasive action. The 2023 incident showed the limitations of a 2014 memorandum and a 2015 air-to-air safety annex on safe U.S.-Chinese air and maritime encounters, whose rules have not consistently prevented unsafe encounters.
Washington could propose a 90-day trial period — following the authoritative presidential assurances outlined above and marked by immediate, reciprocal obligations that both militaries avoid unsafe encounters — in which the two sides would routinely employ designated emergency communications channels, investigate reported violations within an agreed period, and exchange advance notification of unusually large exercises and major missile tests.
During the same period, the Pentagon could conduct a classified review, without yet implementing its recommendations, of close-in reconnaissance missions to determine whether a significant number could be conducted at greater distance, lower frequency, or with different platforms without materially reducing intelligence collection.
None of these steps would require Washington to abandon deterrence, change its one-China policy, curtail lawful military operations, or concede a Chinese red line.
During the 90-day trial period, Chinese forces would have to consistently meet the above observable benchmarks before Washington proceeded to reconnaissance reductions. If Beijing persistently failed to meet these benchmarks while insisting that Washington alone must demonstrate “respect,” the initiative should stop at the reassurance stage, without the United States having altered its military posture.
In economics and technology, Washington and Beijing should work both independently and together to distinguish genuine security requirements from commercial competition. Each should explain the national-security rationale behind major technology and investment restrictions and consult, when feasible, before enacting new ones. Although dual-use capabilities present challenges, more can be done to reverse expanding securitization. Both sides should evaluate technologies with possible indirect applications against transparent, mutually understood criteria.
In addition, the two governments should establish regular, results-oriented dialogues on industrial subsidies, investment screening, intellectual-property protection, scientific cooperation, and AI, as well as cyber and nuclear operations. The latter three areas ought to include procedures for notifying one another of major incidents that appear accidental or unintended. These dialogues would identify red lines and opportunities for mutual assurances and sustained cooperation.
Finally, the two sides should strengthen crisis-prevention and management mechanisms through an official military and civilian Track One dialogue supported by unofficial Track Two discussions addressing both the political and military sources of crises and the guidelines and communication channels needed to manage them. My recently published crisis management manual addresses these and other issues in detail.
Move From Reassurance to Concrete Restraint Measures
The economic and technological relationship between Beijing and Washington demonstrates why reassurance should eventually produce concrete restraint. On Oct. 7, 2022, Washington announced sweeping controls on China’s access to advanced computing chips and semiconductor-manufacturing equipment, and subsequently expanded those restrictions. Beijing responded by requiring licenses for exports of materials important to semiconductor, defense, and battery supply chains.
Both governments invoked national security, but neither defined a mutually understood limiting principle, a process for consultation, or conditions under which they might narrow or remove restrictions. The result was a self-reinforcing cycle in which each side’s attempt to reduce vulnerability increased the other’s incentive to retaliate. Constructive strategic stability must therefore move beyond verbal reassurance and temporary “truces” to reciprocal, verifiable, and enduring restraints on the activities each side finds most destabilizing.
In security, after Beijing has demonstrated consistent compliance during the 90-day military-safety trial outlined above, Washington could implement the classified review’s recommendations to reduce close-in reconnaissance operations, especially those providing marginal intelligence value relative to their political and crisis-instability costs. These adjustments would preserve essential deterrent and intelligence capabilities and remain reversible.
Beijing would have to sustain safe intercept behavior and measurably reduce coercive military activities around Taiwan (including frequent median-line crossings, large-scale encirclement exercises, and simulated blockade operations) before further steps, such as reciprocal exercise observations, are taken. Washington could invite Chinese observers to selected military exercises, including the major multinational Rim of the Pacific exercise, subject to applicable statutory restrictions. Beijing could reciprocate U.S. invitations by inviting American observers to People’s Liberation Army exercises.
Economic and technology policies should reduce securitization, with Washington narrowing or removing those export controls whose demonstrated security benefits do not justify their costs to civilian production, research, and beneficial exchange. Restrictions affecting semiconductor manufacturing and biotechnology equipment deserve particular scrutiny, with controls tailored to specific security risks. Beijing should narrow politically motivated market access restrictions, strengthen protections against forced technology transfer, reduce critical mineral export controls, and provide more equal treatment for foreign companies in China.
In nuclear, cyber, and AI policy, Washington and Beijing should curtail, if not end, provocative operations that raise fears of nuclear escalation, removal of human control over nuclear use, or attacks on critical civilian infrastructure. As verification capabilities develop, they should negotiate a formal cyber noninterference declaration prohibiting peacetime attacks against nuclear command-and-control systems, civilian electrical grids, hospitals, and other critical civilian infrastructure, while establishing incident-notification and consultation procedures. And they should establish a clear link and protocol for the AI-incident communication channel created when Xi Jinping visited Washington.
Make Restraint Durable
The 2015 cyber agreement illustrates both the value and the fragility of institutionalized restraint. President Barack Obama and Xi agreed that neither government would conduct or knowingly support cyber-enabled theft of intellectual property for commercial advantage. Independent cybersecurity researchers reported a marked decline in intrusions attributed to China-based groups beginning in mid-2014, even before the agreement. But the improvement proved difficult to sustain as enforcement remained uncertain and the broader relationship deteriorated.
The episode suggests that restraint in any policy area becomes durable only when a commitment defines the prohibited behavior, establishes a baseline and reliable means of assessing compliance, requires regular review, and specifies proportionate consequences for violations without allowing one dispute to destroy the entire arrangement. The goal is not to make cheating impossible. It’s to make noncompliance visible enough that reciprocal restraint remains politically defensible.
In this entire process, verification would vary by issue. U.S. and allied surveillance, commercial satellite imagery, ship and aircraft tracking, and agreed exercise notifications can reveal military behavior around Taiwan. Published regulations, licensing data, customs data, and company experience can track export controls and critical-mineral restrictions. Because responsibility for cyber violations is harder to establish, initial arrangements should focus on incident consultation, protection of clearly defined categories of infrastructure, and patterns of behavior, rather than unverifiable prohibitions. These verifications can have a preceding 12-month baseline, involve a sustained level of compliance across successive review periods, and and draw on a U.S. interagency assessment on the American side, ideally involving American allies. Such a process should also exist on the Chinese side.
As confidence develops and tensions abate, both governments should eventually reach parallel, independently adopted restraints limiting particularly destabilizing military capabilities, including certain intermediate-range missile deployments, offensive antisatellite systems, large concentrations of missile forces opposite Taiwan, and U.S. defense assistance to the island. As always, American adjustments should occur only as Chinese restraint becomes substantial and verifiable.
A bilateral economic security agreement should define restricted technologies, specify a process of consultation before major restrictions, and codify regular reviews of export controls, sanctions, tariffs, investment screening, and critical-mineral policies. Each action should specify its objective, criteria for success, and conditions for lifting or escalating controls.
As suggested above, formal cyber and AI agreements should take place at this stage, establishing reliable consultation mechanisms and protections against attacks on nuclear command-and-control and critical civilian infrastructure. The two nations should also restore mutually beneficial scientific, educational, and technological exchanges and protect them from short-term political fluctuations.
In all of the above stages, close consultation with America’s allies and key partners should occur to the extent possible, including Taiwan. Washington should explain the need to move from open-ended strategic competition to a stability-centered, mutually beneficial relationship requiring clear agreements and understandings with Beijing, based in part on concessions and accommodations. Washington should make it clear that these agreements would not undermine the security of other countries. Indeed, a stable bilateral relationship of mutual benefit would bolster region-wide security.
Washington must also consult Congress from the outset and at each stage along the way. The executive branch could initiate the military-safety trial period under existing authority, but later measures — especially adjustments involving congressionally mandated economic restrictions or U.S. arms policy toward Taiwan — should not occur solely through executive action. Early and consistent consultation would make subsequent steps more politically defensible and durable, reducing the risk that commitments would collapse with a change of administration.
Agreements on reciprocal military restraint regarding Taiwan could appear to violate the Six Assurances and the Taiwan Relations Act. While the Taiwan Relations Act is a law, the Six Assurances are legally non-binding policy commitments. Neither rule out voluntary U.S.-Chinese understandings to reduce military tensions. That said, adjustments in arms assistance must meet the act’s requirements. The act requires defense articles and services sufficient to maintain Taiwan’s self-defense capability, with their nature and quantity determined by the president and Congress “based solely upon their judgment of the needs of Taiwan.” It also requires review of those needs by U.S. military authorities. Following this wording, verified reductions in the Chinese threat through the above-outlined mutual tension reduction process could lower Taiwan’s defense requirements and thus justify independently determined adjustments in U.S. assistance.
The Six Assurances state that the United States “Has not agreed to consult with the PRC on arms sales to Taiwan.” This wording does not literally prohibit future understandings. Moreover, the accompanying 1982 cables also contemplated reductions in arms sales conditioned on continued Chinese peaceful behavior, with Taiwan’s defense needs remaining the U.S. benchmark. Any adjustment should therefore be an independent, reversible American response to verified Chinese restraint, without instituting prior consultations with Beijing over specific arms sales or granting it control over Taiwan’s defenses.
Conclusion
Constructive strategic stability is not a call to blindly trust Beijing, abandon deterrence, or accept a Chinese sphere of influence. It is an attempt to embed competition and deterrence within a stability-centered political framework and test whether limited reassurance can produce reciprocal restraint and enduring agreements. If China refuses meaningful reciprocity, the United States loses little from low-cost, reversible measures and gains evidence about Beijing’s intentions. If China responds, both gain a basis for larger steps.
Building constructive strategic stability will require sustained political leadership in both countries and, to the fullest extent possible, support from U.S. allies. Neither Washington nor Beijing can create a stable relationship unilaterally. Each must demonstrate through repeated behavior that it can defend its own vital interests while recognizing that the other possesses legitimate interests that require accommodation.
The choice is therefore not whether the United States will compete with China. Competition is unavoidable. The choice is whether that competition becomes an increasingly self-sustaining struggle for predominance or operates within a broader political strategy designed to produce a stable, beneficial peace over the long term.
That distinction could determine far more than who wins the next round of U.S.-Chinese competition. It could determine whether the world’s two most powerful countries learn to live with one another at all.
Michael D. Swaine is a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. Formerly a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the RAND Corporation, Swaine is a specialist in Chinese defense and foreign policy, U.S.-Chinese relations, and East Asian international relations. His work has focused on Sino-American crisis management and the Taiwan issue. He has authored and edited more than a dozen books and monographs as well as many journal articles and book chapters in these areas. Swaine directs security-related projects with Chinese partners and advises the U.S. government on Asian security issues. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. in government from Harvard University.
Image: The White House via Wikimedia Commons
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