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Drones, defense, and diplomacy: Negotiations and the battlefield in Ukraine

Conflict Defense Technologies Europe & Eurasia Politics & Diplomacy

Since the sinking of the Moskva, Ukraine has used a combination of domestically developed naval drones and cruise missiles provided by Kyiv’s French and British partners to decimate Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. Ukrainian Navy officials claim they have managed to damage or destroy around one-third of Putin’s entire fleet, while forcing the remaining Russian warships to retreat from occupied Crimea to the relative safety of ports in Russia itself. This has severely limited the Russian Navy’s ability to operate in the Black Sea. By spring 2024, Britain’s Defense Ministry declared that the Russian Black Sea Fleet had become “functionally inactive.”

Ukraine’s stunning success in the Battle of the Black Sea has yet to receive the international attention it deserves. By breaking the Russian naval blockade of Ukraine’s seaports, it has allowed Kyiv to resume maritime exports and secure a vital economic lifeline.

Crucially, the Russian Navy’s humiliating retreat from Crimea has also made a complete mockery of the Kremlin’s so-called red lines and has demonstrated the emptiness of Putin’s nuclear saber-rattling. The Russian dictator has long championed the seizure of Crimea as his crowning achievement, and has repeatedly hinted that he is willing to use nuclear weapons in defense of his conquests. But when confronted by the harsh military realities of Ukraine’s deadly naval drones, he withdraw the bulk of Russia’s fleet from Crimea with barely a murmur.

The Battle of the Black Sea is far from over, of course. While Ukraine develops groundbreaking new naval drones capable of hitting warplanes as well as warships, Russia continues to bombard Ukrainian seaports and targets merchant shipping carrying Ukrainian exports to global markets. The Russian Navy is also producing marine drones of its own, and is adopting defensive measures to protect the remainder of the Black Sea Fleet. Nevertheless, Kyiv’s Black Sea innovations are a reminder that Ukraine is an increasingly formidable military power in its own right and is shaping the future of drone warfare at sea as well as on land.

Peter Dickinson is editor of the Atlantic Council’s UkraineAlert service.

Semiconductors are at the heart of US-China tech tensions

In the last decade, US and PRC policy postures toward the semiconductor industry have changed. As the overall US-China relationship shifted from collaboration to competition,¹ the US-China semiconductor ecosystem has evolved from a benign mutualistic partnership into a strategic competition. This shift, coupled with rising tensions between the United States and the PRC overall, triggered a broad US response, including prohibiting PRC investments, imposing export controls on critical chips and manufacturing equipment, and an industrial policy that supports domestic chipmakers. Key PRC and US actions are summarized in Figure 1.

Figure 1. What steps have the United States and China taken in the race for semiconductor supremacy?

China’s chip strategy is powered by state funding and localized supply chains

In 2014, after the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)²articulated its ambitions to become a leader across the semiconductor value chain by 2030,³ it quickly established a National Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund (NICIIF, commonly known as the “Big Fund”) to provide financial support toward those goals. The first phase of funding, amounting to an estimated $21 billion,⁴ supported domestic semiconductor manufacturing and chip design capabilities, largely through overseas acquisitions and foreign semiconductor equipment purchases.⁵

In 2018, China revised its goal to focus on increasing domestic semiconductor production as part of its Made in China 2025 industrial strategy.⁶ In the same year, a series of articles appeared in a publication affiliated with the PRC Ministry of Science and Technology. They identified specific “chokepoint technologies,”⁷ including both semiconductors and the photolithography machines needed to manufacture them.⁸

The second phase of Big Fund investments took place in October 2019, providing an estimated $28.9 billion,⁹ to support upstream development and downstream acquisition of semiconductor manufacturing equipment, along with critical raw materials.¹⁰ In 2021, the PRC began to supplement Big Fund investments with an explicit dual circulation and indigenous innovation strategy,¹¹ aiming to replace US- and foreign-made semiconductors with domestic alternatives.¹²

Chinese companies, including those with long-term US ties, are increasingly supporting the PRC government’s initiatives to develop a localized semiconductor supply chain.¹³ Between 2018 and 2023, the PRC produced 34 percent of the world’s chip design and fabrication-related research articles while the United States trailed behind at 15 percent.¹⁴ Nine out of the world’s top ten chip research producers are also PRC institutions.¹⁵ Of course, these statistics should be read with some skepticism, as China has often produced large volumes of lower-quality research publications.¹⁶ However, the sheer quantity of chip-related publications produced by Chinese researchers indicates the PRC’s substantial resource allocation and strategic commitment to advancing its broader semiconductor industry.

In 2024, China announced the third phase of the Big Fund, an estimated $47.5 billion investment focused on chip-making equipment.¹⁷ However, total PRC semiconductor investment fell sharply in 2024, with analysts attributing the decline to reduced demand and lower government subsidies.¹⁸

While the PRC is building capabilities to design and manufacture leading-edge semiconductors, it is also strengthening its capacity to produce lagging-edge semiconductors.¹⁹ Jeremy Mark, a senior fellow with the GeoEconomics Center of the Atlantic Council, observed that “China has an insatiable appetite for all types of semiconductors and investments have been, by necessity, in legacy chips.”²⁰ As part of the PRC’s efforts, PRC FPGA firms are growing. This upward trend demands increased concern even though China’s current FPGA sector is relatively nascent compared to the United States.²¹

From Obama to Trump—the US response to PRC investments

The US government has countered China’s semiconductor advancements through intensified foreign investment reviews and export controls, while also tightening US outbound investments into China’s semiconductor sector. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) has blocked PRC state investments and acquisitions of semiconductor firms consistently across recent presidential administrations. For instance, in 2016, the Obama administration prohibited the sale of the US operations of Aixtron GE, a semiconductor manufacturing equipment firm headquartered in Germany, to a PRC investment firm.²² The following year, the Trump administration blocked the PRC acquisition of the Lattice Semiconductor Corporation, a US FPGA firm, on similar national security grounds.²³

Since 2020, US policy to counter PRC semiconductor industry growth has largely relied on the assumption that the United States and its allies control technological chokepoints, and can deny the PRC access to them using export controls.²⁴ This approach is largely in-line with the “chokepoint effect” model of weaponized interdependence, as proposed by Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman.²⁵ Recent policy discussion has begun to question whether efforts to deny access to chokepoints in fact incentivize indigenous PRC technological development, a concern raised in Farrell and Newman’s original paper.²⁶ Similar US efforts to take advantage of chokepoints in the global financial system have spurred both the PRC and US allies in Europe to develop technological solutions to reduce the importance of US-controlled chokepoints.²⁷ Additionally, the US has also increasingly relied on executive directives to limit Chinese access to American capital, beginning with Executive Order 13959 issued by President Donald Trump in 2020, which prohibited US investments in designated Communist Chinese Military Companies (CCMCs). In 2021, President Joe Biden amended EO 13959 and revoked EO 13974 by issuing EO 14032, which expanded the scope to include companies supporting the Chinese Military-Industrial Complex (CMIC) and surveillance efforts while also narrowing investment restrictions by prohibiting indirect investments in CMIC-linked companies. In 2023, Biden signed Executive Order 14105, authorizing the Treasury Department to restrict or require disclosure of US investments in sensitive technologies—such as semiconductors—in countries of concern, particularly China.

As shown in Figure 1, US actions against the PRC semiconductor industry began to increase during the Trump administration in 2018 and carried over to the Biden administration. In response to US restrictions, the PRC enacted similar controls to impose pressure on US firms and its semiconductor industry.

China’s growing involvement in the FPGA industry

The FPGA market has become a key competitive arena between the United States and the PRC. While the United States is still the global leader in FPGAs, China’s substantial investments in the FPGA space present an emerging challenge to the United States’ ability to produce the most advanced FPGA chips and potentially the ability of the United States and its allies to manufacture FPGAs at scale. Our research indicates that the PRC is launching a major buildup of manufacturing capacity at lagging-edge logic nodes, including substantial state investments in FPGA firms.

To analyze the FPGA industry and China’s growing involvement, we employ the value chain model described in Figure 2, which includes both core stages of the semiconductor value chain and key inputs.²⁸

Figure 2. An overview of the semiconductor value chain, from initial design through end use

The participants in the FPGA supply chain are grouped into four main categories.

China is increasing its efforts to localize FPGA production in response to growing domestic demands, aiming to decrease reliance on US suppliers, particularly for low- and mid-range FPGAs.²⁹ US sanctions and export controls have limited China’s access to advanced semiconductor manufacturing equipment, prompting China to increase investments in lagging-edge semiconductor capacity that depends on older, less-sophisticated semiconductor manufacturing equipment (SME).³⁰ The PRC currently holds an advantage in certain aspects of manufacturing and the majority of assembly, testing, and packaging (ATP), while also making significant investments in domestic FPGA firms, specifically in R&D to strengthen its FPGA chipmakers’ design capabilities.

US manufacturers pay the price for China’s chokehold on critical raw materials

China is the leading supplier of raw materials needed for FPGA manufacturing, specifically silicon and gallium. In 2024, the PRC produced approximately 80 percent of global silicon production and 99 percent of worldwide low-purity gallium production.³¹ Given China’s history of using its critical mineral supply as a geopolitical tool, mounting competition between the United States and the PRC increases the likelihood of PRC restrictions on critical minerals.³² The PRC’s actions to control raw materials to-date—including China’s complete ban on gallium exports to the United States in December 2024 and stricter licensing requirements for other critical minerals in April 2025—have significantly increased prices for various raw materials, including gallium. Even before China’s April 2025 measures, gallium prices had already risen by roughly 80 percent by December 2024,³³ thereby increasing the cost of US FPGA manufacturing.

While other countries could step in over time to provide additional gallium capacity, prices may remain elevated or increase further before US and allied gallium production can increase. However, gallium is only one of many critical inputs used in FPGA manufacturing, and many FPGA end customers are largely price-inelastic (e.g., military and defense applications).³⁴ This implies that gallium pricing dynamics alone are unlikely to drive major shifts in the FPGA market. China’s dominance and strategic manipulation of its raw material supply reduce the cost of domestic Chinese FPGA manufacturing while driving up manufacturing cost for US FPGAs.

Ensuring continued dominance in assembly, testing, packaging

ATP involves separating silicon wafers into individual chips, which are then connected with other components and packaged into an end product.³⁵ ATP services are typically outsourced to third-party semiconductor assembly and testing (OSAT) firms. While China and Taiwan make up 60 percent of global ATP operations,³⁶ China is home to five of the largest OSAT firms globally (JCET, HT-Tch, TF, LCSP, and Chippacking) and is investing in its next-generation advanced packaging capabilities.³⁷ As the semiconductor industry—including FPGA firms—increasingly relies on advanced packaging to drive performance gains,³⁸ China’s advancements in next-generation packaging techniques may increasingly position the country as a significant competitor in the FPGA space and in critical end-customer applications that depend on them, such as artificial intelligence (AI) and data centers.

Big Fund investment fuels the rise of PRC FPGA firms

Investments from the Big Fund in PRC FPGA firms like Anlogic provide early indicators that FPGAs are a focus area for the PRC.³⁹ According to the Atlantic Council’s Jeremy Mark, there is “no evidence that there is a slacking of [Chinese] investments and commitment of resources toward semiconductors and SMEs [as] its technology growth strategy, particularly in AI, requires semiconductors.”⁴⁰ This manufacturing capacity will provide firms with an option to manufacture FPGA chips at costs substantially lower than what is typical today. However, this new manufacturing capacity will likely come with substantial availability and security risks.

There are five notable PRC FPGA firms in the low-to-mid-range FPGA segment:

Anlogic⁴¹ (安路科技): Anlogic is the largest domestic FPGA vendor in China, although it trails three US firms in Chinese market share.⁴² Anlogic held 38.2 percent of the domestic low-end FPGA market share as of 2019⁴³ and mainly targets industrial and automotive applications. Anlogic has received significant support from the PRC government in 2019 through the Big Fund.⁴⁴ Anlogic reportedly spends at least 40 percent of its revenue on research and development (R&D).⁴⁵
Gowin Semiconductor (高云半导体): Gowin Semiconductor is gaining domestic market share, specifically in IoT, automotive, and industrial applications. Founded in 2014, Gowin has attracted multiple government-backed investments. In May 2022, Guangzhou Bay Area Semiconductor Group, a state-backed fund, led the most recent funding round and emerged as Gowin’s largest shareholder⁴⁶ This funding is expected to be used for expanding R&D as well as target new markets.⁴⁷ Gowin is the only PRC FPGA supplier with an automotive-grade FPGA certification.⁴⁸
Shanghai Fudan Microelectronics Group (上海复旦): Fudan Microelectronics is a state-affiliated integrated circuit (IC) design company that originated from Fudan University in 1998.⁴⁹ In 2024, Fudan Microelectronics spent roughly a third of its revenue on R&D.⁵⁰ Although the Big Fund does not appear to have invested directly in Fudan Microelectronics, the company receives investments from state-affiliated financial entities⁵¹ and significant government research grants.⁵²
Shenzhen Pango Microsystems (紫光同创): Pango Microsystems is the largest FPGA supplier to Huawei and seeks to expand into advanced FPGAs.⁵³ Pango has also attracted investments from government-backed entities.⁵⁴ The firm reportedly dedicates 80 percent of its 800-plus staff to R&D.⁵⁵
Hercules Microelectronics (京微齐力): Hercules Microelectronics, founded in 2017, focuses on FPGAs for AI acceleration, data centers, and electronic vehicles.⁵⁶ Although not directly backed by the Big Fund, Hercules Microelectronics received funding from investment funds linked with the Beijing municipal government.⁵⁷

These examples demonstrate the level of financial support the PRC government supplies to FPGA firms, both through the Big Fund and other initiatives. A significant portion of this funding is directed toward R&D efforts, enabling PRC FPGA firms to expand their capabilities and compete more effectively with established US FPGA firms. However, while Big Fund support appears to have played a key role in building PRC FPGA firms, it has not been able to drive long-term, sustainable growth. For example, its pre-IPO investment in Anlogic likely strengthened investor confidence in the firm and helped the company raise approximately $186.04 million.⁵⁸ This capital infusion supported significant R&D efforts, resulting in six new chips being released in 2022.⁵⁹ As a result, Anlogic revenue surged from $105.16 million to $154.83 million,⁶⁰ with net profit of $8.89 million.⁶¹ However, as the semiconductor industry slowed between 2022 and 2023,⁶² the Big Fund reduced its Anlogic holdings from roughly 39 million shares to 31 million shares⁶³ and Anlogic experienced a substantial 2023 net loss of $27.87 million, primarily driven by weak downstream demand and its continued aggressive R&D spending of $54.3 million.⁶⁴ The trend persisted in 2024, with Anlogic reporting another net loss of $28.54 million, despite reducing its R&D spend by about 7 percent.⁶⁵

Figure 3. Anlogic’s revenue and profit have declined without sustained Big Fund investment

Anlogic’s recent performance highlights three key takeaways. First, Big Fund investments appear to have provided critical capital that enabled Anlogic to enter and compete in the FPGA market with rapid, extensive R&D. Second, Anlogic has struggled to sustain profitability through semiconductor market swings without ongoing capital support. Third, despite financial pressures, Anlogic and similar firms remain committed to aggressive R&D investment to enhance their competitiveness and improve their product portfolios, ultimately enabling them to offer high-quality FPGAs at lower costs.

Conclusion

The FPGA market is highly segmented and the substantial customization of FPGA designs needed for different applications can form a significant barrier to entry. However, rapid, large-scale PRC investment in lagging-edge semiconductors has established more than just the five FPGA design firms highlighted above and has increased substantial manufacturing capacity at lagging-edge process nodes, which will ramp up PRC FPGA production in the near future. The PRC FPGA firms described above collectively address a broad set of critical FPGA segments, with considerable support from the PRC government.

This development poses two principal concerns for the United States. First, these FPGAs will enable the PRC to develop new capabilities across its economy and for military purposes. Second, if geopolitics allows global technology standards and supply chains to remain integrated, US FPGA makers may struggle to compete with these new PRC players given the scale and degree of their government support. FPGAs are critical components in US defense equipment and underpin US critical infrastructures as well as significant economic activity. To protect US national security and economic interests, the US government should consider launching a dedicated effort to address the impact of PRC FPGA firms on the resilience of US FPGA supply chain.

About the Authors

Celine Lee holds a Master of Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School and previously held fellowships at the United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT).

Andrew Kidd holds a Master of Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School and was previously an engagement manager in the high-tech and public sector practices at McKinsey & Company.

Bruce Schneier is a security technologist and a fellow and lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Explore the program

The Atlantic Council’s Cyber Statecraft Initiative, part of the Atlantic Council Technology Programs, works at the nexus of geopolitics and cybersecurity to craft strategies to help shape the conduct of statecraft and to better inform and secure users of technology.

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61 Shanghai Anlogic Infotech Co., Ltd., 184.

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63 Shanghai Anlogic Infotech Co., Ltd., “2023 Annual Report,” April 27, 2024, 92, https://file.finance.sina.com.cn/211.154.219.97:9494/MRGG/CNSESH_STOCK/2024/2024-4/2024-04-27/10119946.PDF.

64 Shanghai Anlogic Infotech Co., Ltd., 104–5.

65 Shanghai Anlogic Infotech Co., Ltd., “2024 Annual Report,” April 26, 2025, 112–13.

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Ukrainian innovations are redefining the role of drones in modern war

Vitaliy Nabukhotny — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 20:34:16 +0000

Ukraine’s audacious recent drone strikes on Vladimir Putin’s bomber fleet at airbases across Russia have generated global headlines and fueled a lively debate over the implications of the attack. Many have hailed this highly successful Ukrainian operation as a watershed moment in military history, leading to claims in some quarters that Ukraine is now “redefining modern warfare.”

This international attention is understandable. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine is widely recognized as the world’s first drone war, with Ukrainian innovation playing a key role in defining the role of drones in twenty-first century military operations. But while most analysis tends to focus on spectacular attacks like the recent decimation of Russia’s strategic bomber fleet, the Ukrainian military is actually using drones for a far wider variety of functions. Ukraine’s drone experience is unprecedented and provides a range of important lessons for military commanders around the world.

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The primary role of drones in modern warfare is as weapons. Over the past three years, first person view (FPV) drones have become a ubiquitous feature of the contemporary battlefield and are believed to be responsible for the vast majority of Russian and Ukrainian casualties. This is changing the way the war is fought. Any vehicles operating close to the front lines must now rely on jamming devices, with many also favoring the additional protection of so-called “cope cage” coverings to shield against drone attacks. With larger groups of infantry deemed too vulnerable to drone strikes, attacks are typically carried out by small groups, often using highly mobile transport such as motorbikes or buggies.

Ukraine has also pioneered the use of drones and accompanying software to perform surveillance tasks mapping out the battlefield and providing real-time situational awareness of enemy deployments. This reconnaissance capability is not new in itself, but has undergone significant upgrades in recent years. Accurate and up-to-date information allows commanders to make informed decisions quickly, improving the effectiveness of military operations.

Beyond the battlefield, Ukraine has also transformed international understanding of drone warfare at sea. Since 2022, Ukrainian naval drones have succeeded in sinking or damaging around one-third of Russia’s entire Black Sea Fleet, forcing the remainder of Putin’s warships to retreat from Russian-occupied Crimea to the relative safety of Russia’s own Black Sea ports. Most recently, Ukraine claimed to have used naval drones to shoot down two Russian warplanes over the Black Sea.

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In addition to strike and surveillance functions, Ukraine has also employed drones in logistical roles. The Ukrainian army uses both aerial and ground-based unmanned systems to deliver ammunition, food, medicine, and other supplies to troops operating in dangerous or inaccessible areas, thereby reducing the need to expose personnel to hostile environments. Drone-based solutions can also potentially facilitate the evacuation of the wounded when manned rescue is deemed to be too risky.

One of the most creative Ukrainian uses of drones on the battlefield has been to help take surrendering Russian soldiers prisoner. This method reduces the need for physical engagement with enemy troops and therefore limits the risks to the Ukrainian side. Drones are used to give instructions using printed messages or via loudspeakers to guide enemy soldiers and indicate safe directions that will allow them to surrender without coming under fire.

Ukrainian unmanned systems are also playing an important role in efforts to document Russian war crimes. Drones are able to record the time, location, and nature of potential crimes, along with the identity of the perpetrators in some cases. Over the past three years, Ukrainian drones have captured evidence of potential war crimes including the execution of unarmed POWs and attacks on civilians. This footage can be used in future prosecutions and increases the chances that those responsible for war crimes in Ukraine will be held accountable.

The growing role of drones in warfare creates a range of challenges in terms of the accepted norms governing military operations. With this in mind, Ukraine’s Ministry of Defence has drawn up and issued internal guidelines for drone operators and legal teams to ensure adherence to the laws of armed conflict. These guidelines incorporate real-world combat scenarios to help drone operators understand how to treat categories such as medical personnel, retreating enemy troops, and those engaged in the evacuation of the wounded. This initiative is a step toward establishing broader global standards for responsible drone warfare.

Ukraine’s unique experience of drone warfare offers valuable insights that will shape military doctrines for many years to come, while also helping to define international standards for the use of drones in a military context. It is already clear that drones are transforming the battlefield in ways the evoke the twentieth century rise of air power. As drone technologies continue to advance, Ukraine is likely to remain a key player in this new wave of military innovation.

Vitaliy Nabukhotny is a human rights lawyer and external legal advisor to the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence’s Legal Department.

House quoted in Axios on regulatory gaps in the Clarity Act

bpiasecki — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 13:18:26 +0000

Read the full article here.

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G7 leaders have the opportunity to strengthen digital resilience. Here’s how they can seize it.

Sara Ann Brackett, Coley Felt, Raul Brens Jr. — Fri, 06 Jun 2025 17:10:35 +0000

The 2025 Group of Seven (G7) Leaders’ Summit in Kananaskis, Alberta, Canada, on June 15-17 will take place amid a growing recognition of the importance of digital resilience. This is especially apparent in Canada, the summit’s host country and current G7 president. Following his election win, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney announced the creation of a new Ministry of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation. This bold step positions Canada to champion a digital resilience agenda at the summit that unites security, economic growth, and technological competitiveness while strengthening the resilience of its partners and allies.

The G7 must seize this opportunity to advance a coherent, shared framework for digital policy, one that is grounded in trust, reinforced by standards, and aligned with democratic values. To do so, it can build on some of the insights from the Business Seven (B7), the official business engagement group of the G7. The theme of this year’s B7 Summit, which was held from May 14 to May 16, in Ottawa, Canada, was “Bolstering Economic Security and Resiliency.” The selection of this theme emphasized the importance of defending against threats and enhancing the ability of societies, governments, and businesses to adapt and recover.

In the spirit of that theme, the Atlantic Council’s GeoTech Center, in partnership with the Cyber Statecraft Initiative and the Europe Center, convened a private breakfast discussion alongside the B7 in Ottawa on May 15. The roundtable brought together government officials, business leaders, and civil society representatives to discuss how digital resilience can be strengthened within the G7 framework. The participants laid out foundational principles and practical approaches to building digital resilience that support economic security and long-term competitiveness. As G7 leaders gather for the summit in Kananaskis later this month, they should consider these insights on how its member states can work together to bolster their digital resilience.

1. Develop a common language for shared goals on digital sovereignty

When developing a common framework, definitions (or taxonomy) are critical. Participants emphasized that shared vocabulary is a prerequisite for meaningful cooperation. Discrepancies in how countries define concepts such as digital sovereignty can lead to fundamental misunderstandings in critical areas such as risk, which creates friction and confusion.

For example, a G7 country might frame sovereignty in terms of national control over infrastructure while another country, such as China, defines it as regulating the digital information environment. In that case, this misalignment will hinder cooperation from the outset. Specifying precise definitions of each government’s goals, including “trust,” “resilience,” and “digital sovereignty,” would enable governments and industry to align on priorities and respond more effectively to emerging standards. This definitional clarity is crucial for policymaking and a prerequisite for compliance, implementation, and interoperability across borders.

2. Build on existing multilateral and regional frameworks

Participants stressed the importance of building on existing progress toward digital resilience, both in and out of the G7, rather than discarding it in pursuit of novelty. The G7 and its partners already possess a strong foundation of digital policy initiatives. Key milestones such as the Hiroshima AI Process, launched under Japan’s 2023 G7 presidency, established International Guiding Principles and an International Code of Conduct for the development and use of artificial intelligence (AI) systems, which included frontier models. Prior to the Hiroshima AI Process, several consecutive G7 Summits committed to developing the data free flow with trust framework, which prioritizes enabling the free flow of data across borders while protecting privacy, national security, and intellectual property.

Beyond the G7, participants cited European Union (EU) partnerships as examples of forward-leaning policy environments that balance innovation with safeguards. These included the EU AI continent action plan, which aims to leverage the talent and research of European industries to strengthen digital competitiveness and bolster economic growth, as well as Horizon Europe, the EU’s primary financial program for research and innovation.

With these partnership frameworks already in place, G7 leaders should build on existing work and avoid seeking to design unique solutions that may become time-consuming—particularly when it comes to gaining political buy-in. Even in areas like AI and the use of data, where policymakers have observed rapid changes since last year’s summit, the B7 discussion participants emphasized that governments can leverage work they’ve already completed in designing and implementing existing standards. If prior technical standards and regulations are inapplicable or insufficient, policymakers can still learn lessons from an in-depth assessment, including by taking note of where they’ve fallen short of their goals.

3. Start new initiatives with small working groups and pilot projects

Ensuring digital resilience requires managing inevitable trade-offs between national security, economic vitality, and open digital ecosystems. As one participant remarked, “the digital economy is the economy,” so policies shaping cyberspace must consider both national security and economic impacts. The G7 provides a platform for frank discussions among allies and partners about how to get these trade-offs right. But waiting for buy-in from all like-minded partners risks missed opportunities in the short term.

Participants noted that by starting with smaller forums, policymakers can build consensus that can lead to real progress. Pilot projects and working groups among smaller clusters of G7 countries could build momentum and inform scalable solutions. Participants emphasized that despite the contentious nature of some of the issues surrounding digital resilience, such as protectionism and market fragmentation, G7 governments are operating with a shared set of values. These values can motivate collaboration across the G7 on the many areas of common ground they already share, but they can also provide the basis for projects among smaller groups within the G7 to get new ideas off the ground.

A pivotal summit for digital resilience

As G7 leaders meet in Kananaskis and work toward a common framework that balances digital security and economic growth, a few key lessons can be garnered from this B7 meeting. G7 member states should prioritize developing a common taxonomy and building on the progress made on digital resilience both inside and outside the G7, all while remaining responsive to shifting geopolitical dynamics.

Disagreements among member states should be viewed not as a barrier, but as evidence of a maturing policy landscape. Constructive tension can drive refinement so long as partners are clear about their priorities. The G7’s unique value lies in its ability to forge alignment among diverse actors. False consensus only delays progress. It will take transparency, specificity, and trust to move the digital resilience agenda forward.

Sara Ann Brackett is an assistant director at the Atlantic Council’s Cyber Statecraft Initiative.

Coley Felt is an assistant director at the Atlantic Council’s GeoTech Center.

Raul Brens Jr. is the acting senior director of the Atlantic Council’s GeoTech Center.

Russian hybrid warfare: Ukraine’s success offers lessons for Europe

Maksym Beznosiuk — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 21:39:11 +0000

As Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine continues, the Kremlin is also rapidly escalating its hybrid war against Europe. Intelligence officials from a number of European countries are now raising the alarm and warning that Russian operations are growing in number and becoming bolder, with potential targets including transport hubs and critical infrastructure.

The Kremlin employs hybrid warfare tactics to remain below the threshold that would trigger a unified and potentially overwhelming European response. This has led to a surge in sabotage, cyberattacks, political interference, and disinformation campaigns across Europe, with a particular emphasis on countries closer to Russia.

Moscow’s hybrid war against Europe mirrors the tactics used by the Kremlin in Ukraine following the start of Russia’s invasion in 2014. Ukraine’s response to the often unprecedented challenges posed by Russian hybrid warfare offers important lessons for Kyiv’s European partners.

The Ukrainian experience highlights the gravity of the hybrid threat and the importance of an integrated response. The overall message to Western policymakers is clear: Moscow views hybrid warfare as an important Russian foreign policy tool and will continue expanding its campaign. Europe cannot afford to wait for Russian hybrid attacks to escalate further before building the advanced capabilities required to counter this threat.

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There have been growing reports of Russian hybrid war-style attacks across the EU since the onset of Russian aggression against Ukraine eleven years ago. This trend gained significant additional momentum following the start of the full-scale invasion in February 2022.

Typical incidents include cyberattacks targeting infrastructure, sabotage including arson attacks, and attempts to disrupt military aid destined for Ukraine. Moscow is also accused of investing billions of dollars in sophisticated social media campaigns to influence the outcome of elections across Europe. The Kremlin’s hybrid operations are concentrated in central and eastern Europe, with Poland, Romania, and the Baltic states among the primary targets.

None of this is new to Ukraine. For more than a decade, Ukrainians have been learning to cope with the full range of Russia’s hybrid warfare toolbox. Russia’s attack on Ukraine began in February 2014 when Russian soldiers without insignias took control of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula in a lightning operation that was accompanied by a massive wave of targeted disinformation.

Russia’s subsequent efforts to destabilize and subjugate the rest of Ukraine have involved a combination of conventional military aggression, sabotage, cyberattacks, disinformation campaigns, and support for pro-Russian actors in Ukraine. Thanks to this prolonged exposure to Russian hybrid warfare, Ukraine has been able to develop countermeasures that have helped build resilience and reduce the impact of Russia’s hybrid operations.

Ukraine’s response has been a collaborative effort involving the Ukrainian government, civil society, and the private sector. In the cyber sphere, efforts to improve Ukraine’s digital security have played a key role, with the launch of the country’s popular Diia platform and the establishment of the Ministry of Digital Transformation helping to drive important digital governance reforms.

This has enhanced Ukraine’s ability to maintain public services amid acts of cyber aggression and has improved engagement with the population. Ukraine’s progress in the digital sphere has been recognized internationally, with the country climbing from the 102 spot to fifth position in the UN’s annual Online Services Index in the seven years between 2018 and 2025.

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Ukraine’s coordination structures, such as the Center for Strategic Communications and the Ministry of Digital Transformation, enable swift and well-coordinated responses across government, media, and digital channels. This offers a number of advantages in a hybrid war setting. For example, it allows the Ukrainian government to synchronize positions with proactive narrative-setting when countering the Kremlin’s disinformation campaigns.

Ukraine has also benefited from a decentralized approach involving digital volunteers, civil society, and public-private partnerships. A wide range of civic tech groups and open-source investigators are active in Ukraine detecting and countering Russian disinformation. These measures have made it possible to expose Russian narratives efficiently, coordinate messaging across government and civil society, and maintain coherence during military operations.

Since 2014, Ukraine has been able to reduce Russia’s overwhelming initial advantages on the information front of the hybrid war. While Russian disinformation tactics continue to evolve and remain a major aspect of the ongoing invasion, Ukraine has managed to increasingly leverage information to shape international opinion and influence diplomatic outcomes.

At present, the European response to Russia’s hybrid war lacks the institutional agility and coordination between public sector and civil society that is evident in Ukraine. Instead, the EU and NATO have developed a number of parallel structures such as NATO’s Joint Intelligence and Security Division and the EU’s East StratCom Task Force. While these agencies continue to make meaningful contributions to the fight back against Russian hybrid warfare, they have yet to demonstrate the kind of real-time operational coordination that has served Ukraine so well.

Ukraine’s model for combating Russian hybrid warfare can’t be replicated in full, but it could serve as a practical reference point for building more adaptive and integrated responses across the West. Given Ukraine’s unique experience, it might make sense to establish a trilateral consultative framework together with the EU and NATO to enable rapid hybrid threat evaluations and coordinate responses.

Ukraine’s long record of countering Russian hybrid warfare has also highlighted the role of civil society. Kyiv’s European partners should consider increasing support for initiatives such as investigative journalism, fact-checking platforms, and technical watchdogs that can serve as support elements in a broader European defense ecosystem. In an environment where information is increasingly weaponized, Ukraine’s experience has also underlined the need to embed media literacy into the education system to ensure European citizens are able to consume information critically and are less vulnerable to Russian propaganda.

Maksym Beznosiuk is a strategic policy specialist and director of UAinFocus, an independent platform connecting Ukrainian and international experts around key Ukrainian issues.

Trump’s Russia policy must be rooted in realism

Agnia Grigas — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 20:50:06 +0000

US President Donald Trump has recently changed his tone toward Russian president Vladimir Putin, suggesting that he has “gone crazy” and is “playing with fire.” This highlights the ongoing difficulties of negotiating with the Kremlin. While the Trump administration broadly favors a realist approach to international relations, a more pragmatic assessment of Russia’s capabilities and objectives could better equip the US to achieve its stated goal of bringing the war in Ukraine to an end.

Almost three months ago, Ukraine accepted a US proposal for a thirty-day unconditional ceasefire. So far, Russia has refused to do likewise. Instead, the Kremlin continues to demand a series of preconditions. Meanwhile, Russia has intensified its missile and drone strikes against Ukrainian civilian targets. When Trump recently backed Putin’s proposal for direct negotiations between Russia and Ukraine, the Russian leader then boycotted the subsequent Istanbul talks, sending only a lower-level delegation.

Within the Trump administration, key figures such as Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth have all articulated their support for a realist view of international relations. This implies sidestepping abstract ideological objectives and focusing on tangible power factors such as economic size, population, geography, and military strength.

The realist viewpoint is reflected in Hegseth’s assertion that Ukraine returning to its pre-2014 borders is “unrealistic.” It can also be seen in Trump’s statements that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy “does not have the cards” in negotiations with Russia, an assertion that seems far less certain in the wake of Ukraine’s successful recent strikes on Russia’s long-distance bombers.

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Some advocates of foreign policy realism argue that the US should seek to accommodate Russia, even at Ukraine’s expense. However, this approach tends to exaggerate Russia’s strengths, while underestimating the importance of the Kremlin’s imperial objectives and the relevant fact that Russian national security doctrine identifies the US as its principal adversary. A more comprehensive realist analysis of Russia reveals that, despite its assertiveness, Moscow’s power is in fact often overstated, while its appetite for compromise is limited.

Compared to the United States, Europe, and NATO, Russia simply does not “hold the cards,” to use Trump’s phrase. Its $2 trillion economy ranks outside the world’s top ten, trailing behind the US, China, Germany, Japan, India, and others. Although Russia has weathered sanctions, the prolonged war since 2022 has left its economy overextended and vulnerable.

The Russian population of 145 million is shrinking and ranks ninth globally, far behind the US and the collective European Union. Militarily, Russia’s large conventional forces have under-performed during the invasion of Ukraine while sustaining heavy losses. Russia’s $146 billion military budget, though substantial relative to neighboring states, pales in comparison to the $968 billion US budget in 2023, or even the collective defense spending of EU member states.

Russia remains a formidable nuclear power and frequently reminds the international community of this fact. Since the very first days of the Ukraine invasion in February 2022, Putin and other Kremlin officials have engaged in regular nuclear saber-rattling. But while Russia is the only nuclear power to make such threats, Putin has repeatedly failed to act when his red lines have been crossed by the Ukrainians, and has been publicly warned by his Chinese allies not to cross the nuclear threshold.

Since 2022, Russia has lost much of its energy leverage and is no longer Europe’s key energy supplier. Meanwhile, the United States has consolidated its position as a leading global energy exporter, particularly in liquefied natural gas (LNG). This is enabling Europe to diversify away from Russia while starving the Kremlin of vital revenue and geopolitical influence.

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In realist terms, Russia’s power surpasses that of its immediate smaller neighbors but falls well short of the US or the European Union as a whole. Countries in Northern, Central, and Eastern Europe view Putin’s ambitions through a realist lens based on centuries of painful experience with Russian imperialism. They understand that Putin’s current goal of reasserting Moscow’s dominance over the territories of the former Soviet Union and Russian Empire is deeply rooted in the Kremlin’s perception of Russian national interests.

President Trump should not fall into the same trap as his predecessors. Past US administrations, from George W. Bush onward, have sought to normalize relations with Moscow but have consistently underestimated Russia’s enduring imperialist objectives. In 2001, Bush famously called Putin “trustworthy” and said he has been able to “get a sense of his soul.” And yet before the end of Bush’s second term, Putin had become increasingly hostile to the West and had invaded Georgia. US President Barack Obama then pursued a “reset” in relations with Russia, only for Putin to invade Ukraine in 2014.

US President Joe Biden initially adopted a similarly optimistic stance toward Moscow, emphasizing the importance of predictable relations with Russia. In May 2021, Biden canceled sanctions on the Kremlin’s Nord Stream II gas pipeline. The following month, he met Putin in Geneva for a bilateral summit that was widely viewed as a further concession to the Russian leader. Less than a year later, Putin launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Looking back, it is clear that US policy toward Russia has often been shaped by the optimism of incoming administrations rather than a sober, realist understanding of Moscow’s longstanding ambitions. A deeper grasp of Russia’s objectives and capabilities could help the Trump administration, alongside European leaders, to negotiate a ceasefire in Ukraine and achieve a durable peace. Approaching the Kremlin from a position of strength, through the implementation of new sanctions on Russia and sustained military support for Ukraine, would be essential tools in securing that peace.

Agnia Grigas is senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and author of “Beyond Crimea: The New Russian Empire.”

Cyberattacks are hurting US businesses. Here’s how Congress can upgrade cybersecurity information sharing.

Tanner Wilburn, Sara Ann Brackett, and Urmita Chowdhury — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 14:11:42 +0000

Cybersecurity is a team sport, yet small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) have spent years on the sidelines, despite being the targets of an estimated 43 percent of cyberattacks in the United States. As Congress discusses renewing the United States’ cybersecurity information-sharing framework, it’s time to finally welcome SMBs into the cybersecurity community.

On September 30, the framework for sharing important cybersecurity information between government and industry, the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015 (CISA 2015), will expire unless Congress acts. This law—distinct from the similarly named Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (also CISA)—provides essential legal protections that allow private companies to share cyber threat information among themselves and with the government.

There is already bipartisan support for renewing CISA 2015. Senators Gary Peters (D-MI) and Mike Rounds (R-SD) introduced legislation to extend the current law for another ten years without changes, an approach supported by major trade associations. The bill’s authors correctly emphasize the importance of preserving the established information-sharing environment. Yet, renewing CISA 2015 unchanged leaves the cybersecurity community blind to critical threat intelligence that SMBs uniquely hold.

As originally passed, CISA 2015 removed legal barriers and disincentives to sharing cyber threat data. It provides liability protections and exemptions from certain public disclosure requirements or regulatory penalties for companies that share threat indicators in good faith. These protections significantly reduce the risk of lawsuits or regulatory enforcement when organizations exchange information with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) or other companies under the framework, provided the information was anonymized and used strictly for a “cybersecurity purpose.”

These protections dramatically enhanced cybersecurity information sharing. In the private sector, entities such as the Cyber Threat Alliance formed to facilitate voluntary company-to-company information sharing. Information Sharing and Analysis Centers (ISACs), organizations dedicated to collecting, analyzing, and disseminating sector-specific threat data, have also grown substantially. The National Council of ISACs now comprises twenty-seven sector-specific ISACs, while the Multi-State ISAC alone exceeded 18,000 members last year. These members share cyber threat information directly because of the protections offered by CISA 2015. Even government programs have evolved in response. DHS’s Automated Indicator Sharing (AIS) platform has significantly improved rapid information exchanges and threat awareness, aided by CISA 2015 protections.

SMBs are being left behind

Still missing from this list, however, are the large number of SMBs that operate across the United States. SMBs have largely been overlooked, are subject to a large number of attacks, and their employees face social engineering threats such as phishing and fraud 350 percent more than those at large companies. While platforms such as DHS’s AIS are beneficial to larger corporations, SMB participation remains limited due to high costs, technical complexity, and inadequate outreach. This exclusion leaves SMBs vulnerable and deprives the cybersecurity community of a significant source of threat intelligence.

Since 2015, the cyber threat landscape has evolved, with SMBs now frequent targets. Roughly one in three small businesses will suffer a cyberattack in the next year, with each incident costing an average of nearly $255,000, almost an order of magnitude greater than the 2014 average cost of $27,752. This changed threat landscape and lack of participation in information sharing leaves a gap.

Any new CISA 2015 authorization should address this gap to benefit the entire cybersecurity ecosystem. SMBs represent a valuable source of threat data, and integrating their insights would significantly enhance predictive capabilities and resilience. Strengthening SMB defenses would also reduce opportunities for attackers to exploit smaller entities as gateways to larger networks.

How Congress can update CISA 2015

To achieve this integration, Congress should ensure any reauthorization addresses four targeted reforms.

First, clarify definitions. The term “cybersecurity purpose” should explicitly include protections against social engineering threats such as fraud and phishing, ensuring SMBs receive comprehensive coverage for the threats they face.

Second, incentivize more participation among SMBs. Congress should authorize a DHS-managed initiative specifically designed to provide smaller businesses with accessible, actionable threat intelligence and affordable cybersecurity resources. Federal support could take the form of grants, vouchers, or subsidized cybersecurity solutions.

Third, codify successful operational models into law. This was attempted last year with a bill introduced by Representative Eric Swalwell (D-CA-14) that would codify CISA 2015’s Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative (JCDC). The JCDC has successfully united federal agencies and private companies to effectively respond to high-profile cyber incidents, including the exploitation of Ivanti gateway vulnerabilities and the July 2024 CrowdStrike outage. Currently, JCDC and many similar programs lack explicit statutory authority, making them vulnerable to termination by executive action, which is what happened to the Critical Infrastructure Partnership Advisory Council in March of this year. Codifying such programs ensures sustained and consistent cybersecurity collaboration irrespective of political shifts.

Fourth, rename the law to clearly distinguish it from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. Cybersecurity acronyms are hard enough as it is. A new name, such as the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), a name from an earlier version of CISA 2015, would eliminate the confusion caused by acronym duplication.

Reauthorizing CISA 2015 with these targeted improvements—clearer definitions, SMB support, codification of proven programs, and a distinct identity—will ensure that SMBs play their part in and benefit from making the next decade of cybersecurity more resilient than the last.

Tanner Wilburn is a recent graduate of the Indiana University Maurer School of Law with an MS in cybersecurity risk management from the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering.

Sara Ann Brackett is an assistant director with the Cyber Statecraft Initiative, part of the Atlantic Council Tech Programs.

Urmita Chowdhury is an assistant director for trainings and competitions at the Cyber Statecraft Initiative, part of the Atlantic Council Tech Programs.

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The Pentagon’s software approval process is broken. Here’s how to fix it.

Hannah Hunt — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 17:07:52 +0000

In today’s rapidly evolving battlefields, the Department of Defense (DoD) faces a paradox: It is awash with advanced technologies, yet warfighters often wait months, even years, for approval to use the software they desperately need. Why? The bottleneck often lies in a well-intentioned but outdated process: the Risk Management Framework (RMF) and the painful path to achieving an Authority to Operate (ATO).

The ATO process, designed to safeguard national security systems, is rooted in sound principles. But in practice, it has become a procedural obstacle course—one that sidelines innovative software with lengthy, bureaucratic delays. Having gone through my fair share of ATOs across the Air Force, Army, and Marine Corps, I can attest that this process needs serious reforms. From mission planning tools to logistics dashboards, critical capabilities are too often stuck in limbo because of inconsistent, manual, and subjective risk determinations. For instance, this process has stalled the use of critical Identity Access Management software such as Okta. These software enable zero trust enforcement, rapid user authentication, and centralized access control across multi-domain, cloud, and on-premise environments without significant delays and bandwidth constraints into key warfighting systems.

To ensure US warfighters receive the tools they need in a timely fashion, the DoD should invest in updated technical training for cybersecurity professionals and implement automated, continuous security checks on software. But for these reforms to succeed, the DoD will need to institute a broader cultural shift among the cybersecurity and acquisitions workforces toward recognizing compliance as the crucial aspect of US national security policy that it is.

A subjective standard of risk

RMF is the US government’s structured approach to ensuring information systems are secure and resilient before they are allowed to operate within government networks. It was designed to replace checklist-style compliance with a risk-based decision-making process. Under RMF, systems go through several stages—categorization, control selection, implementation, assessment, authorization, and continuous monitoring. At the heart of the process is the ATO—a formal decision by an authorizing official that a system’s security posture is acceptable for use. To reach this decision, program teams must document security controls, undergo assessments by independent cybersecurity experts, and respond to findings. The intent is to ensure systems are secure before they are fielded—but in practice, the process often results in extended delays, overly cautious reviews, and inconsistent standards across organizations.

One of the most challenging aspects of the ATO process is the subjectivity of risk determination. What is deemed an acceptable risk by one authorizing official may be an unacceptable liability to another. With no shared standard of risk tolerance, system owners must often start from scratch depending on who sits in the approval seat. This variability leads to costly rework, long delays, and disillusioned program teams. Worse, it creates a culture where innovation is stifled not by bad technology, but by indecision and fear.

This is not just a bureaucratic issue; it’s a mission-impact issue. Delays of twelve to eighteen months for an ATO mean that a new targeting application, mission planning software, or AI-enabled intelligence tool never reaches the unit that needs it. When marines or soldiers are using outdated or spreadsheet-based tools while Silicon Valley technologies sit behind compliance gates, something is broken. Compliance activities do have their place. They provide a framework and a set of standards that system owners should utilize. But compliance activities make up only one facet of a resilient security posture.

When it comes to the documentation for this process, the only thing consistent about it is its inconsistency. Each security control assessor, information systems security manager, and authorizing official has their own preferences for how security controls, and security requirement guides should be documented. Even when software as a service systems have received accreditation in one military service, the ATO often does not carry over to other services, requiring the process to start over again at each service.

Across most systems in the DoD, ATOs are manual one-time reviews that only look at a snapshot in time rather than monitoring software continuously. What’s more, this inadequate review takes a significant amount of time, labor, and resources. It requires a team of cybersecurity professionals to manually review and analyze all ATO documentation to meet compliance thresholds. Because there are few security assessor teams across the DoD, there is often a delay in getting the third-party assessor on schedule to conduct the manual review.

These one-time ATO reviews, which often approve a software for one to three years, are not useful for tracking a system’s long-term security posture. In fact, leaving a system approved for this long without further review increases its security risk. Continuous monitoring is a key step in the RMF, but it is often haphazardly implemented, with security scans sometimes occurring only monthly or even quarterly. Moreover, authorizing officials ultimately accept the risk with critical or high vulnerabilities to keep systems available for users. Instead, ATO and security posture should be continually assessed through an agreed-upon standard for security guardrails and thresholds. This continual assessment should in no way be manual. Rather, it should be baked into the day-to-day software development lifecycle through automated regression, quality, and security testing with each delivery of code.

The talent gap in modern cybersecurity

Compounding the problems with the ATO process is a talent management challenge. Many cybersecurity professionals tasked with evaluating and authorizing systems are not trained in modern software development or cloud-native architectures. Developments such as the shifts to hybrid cloud, containerized applications, and infrastructure as code have dramatically outpaced cybersecurity workforce training.

Security professionals steeped in legacy systems may treat every cloud deployment as a threat, rather than an opportunity for enhanced resilience, scalability, and automation. As a result, the process designed to manage risk often ends up misunderstanding it—focusing on outdated indicators instead of real attack vectors. In one of the ATO renewals I supported, our cybersecurity assessor subject matter experts didn’t know about cloud-hosted Kubernetes technologies, which are widely implemented across DoD software organizations. They also did not understand how to implement the Kubernetes security technical implementation guide, even though they were supposed to be assessing our security compliance. As a result, the first few days of the assessment were spent teaching assessors about containers, Kubernetes, microservices, and ephemeral IP ranges before the ATO process could move forward.

The DoD can’t automate trust, but it can automate verification. And that’s where the changes to the process must begin.

Recommendations for reform

To speed up the delivery of secure software, the DoD must rethink how it defines and manages risk. The following actions would make the ATO process more efficient, ensuring that warfighters can use the software they need to meet mission success.

Invest in talent management and training. The DoD must invest in a new cadre of cyber professionals who understand development security and operations, continuous integration/continuous deployment pipelines, and cloud-native patterns. This starts with developing targeted training, incentives for continuous learning, and career pathways that reward technical skills over legacy tenure. It also requires an incentive structure that holds authorizing officials accountable for delayed ATO timelines, especially for software-as-a-service products that have already received ATOs in other organizations.
Automate guardrails and thresholds. To embrace a continuous ATO framework, programs should implement automated security checks that enforce zero trust principles, identity policies, and vulnerability scanning. They should also require logging standards directly in the pipeline. When software is built with these guardrails from the start, this reduces the need for manual reviews, bolstering confidence in the system. That way, when code is pushed and meets the predefined security guardrails, it can go straight into production environments.
Reduce redundant documentation. Much of the RMF burden is paperwork for paperwork’s sake. By adopting living documentation generated from automated pipelines—like real-time architecture diagrams, test coverage, and security telemetry—the Pentagon can save thousands of hours that are currently being wasted on static Word documents no one ever reads.

The SWFT strategy: A moment for culture change

The DoD’s new Software Fast Track (SWFT) methodology, announced on May 5, offers a hopeful roadmap. SWFT aims to make software development more agile by implementing regular software releases, modern and modular architectures, and outcomes-based measures that meet warfighter needs. But to be truly transformative, it must be paired with a culture shift across the acquisition and cybersecurity communities.

Acquisition and cybersecurity personnel must move away from compliance as a box-checking exercise and toward compliance as a byproduct of good engineering. The future lies in continuous ATOs, risk quantification tools, and AI-assisted cybersecurity—if the Pentagon is willing to invest in people and process changes.

If the DoD wants to outpace its adversaries and empower its warfighters with the tools they need, it must treat secure software delivery as a warfighting imperative—not a compliance chore. The ATO process, as it stands today, is a bottleneck the United States can no longer afford.

The call to action is clear: upgrade the workforce, automate security, and embrace a cultural change toward cybersecurity compliance. SWFT provides an opportunity—now it’s time to put it into practice.

Hannah Hunt is a nonresident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Forward Defense program within the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security and a distinguished technical fellow at MetroStar Systems. She was previously the chief of product at the Army Software Factory under Army Futures Command and chief of staff at the US Air Force’s Kessel Run.

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Atlantic Council, XRG, and MGX to host AI and energy summit on June 16

ehopkins — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 17:00:00 +0000

Harnessing energy for AI’s power surge as leaders in AI, energy, policy, and finance unite to shape the future of AI infrastructure

WASHINGTON, DC — June 4, 2025 — The Atlantic Council, XRG, and MGX, will convene the ENACT summit in Washington, DC, on June 16, bringing together global leaders from the energy, technology, and finance sectors to explore the intersection of artificial intelligence, energy systems, and investment.

A slate of high-level leaders — including U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright and the United Arab Emirates’ Minister of Industry and Advanced Technology Dr. Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber — will help shape the conversation on powering the future of AI.

Launched with support from XRG, the UAE’s global energy investment company, and MGX, the UAE’s leading AI and advanced technology investor, ENACT (Energy and Action) is a future-focused platform designed to advance practical solutions to how the energy, tech, and finance sectors can power the future of global AI for a pro-growth world.

“AI is supercharging progress, but in doing so, it is also supercharging energy demand. By convening leaders from energy, technology, policy and finance, ENACT will connect the dots between sectors to help drive coordinated solutions that ensure that the era of AI has the power it needs. This gathering will also seek to unlock AI’s potential to enhance energy efficiency and abundance that represent the bedrock of sustainable growth and global prosperity,” said Al Jaber, who is also the managing director and group CEO of ADNOC and executive chairman of XRG.

“Artificial intelligence is rapidly becoming the foundation of modern economies, driving surging demand for both digital and physical infrastructure. Its continued advancement depends on reliable, scalable energy — a critical enabler of global AI expansion. We must collectively invest in the core systems — power generation, advanced grid technologies, and high-efficiency compute — to ensure AI growth is sustainable, secure, and accessible worldwide. Partnering with XRG and the Atlantic Council at ENACT underscores our commitment to building the infrastructure that AI’s future requires,” said Ahmed Yahia, CEO and managing director of MGX.

The summit will take place one day ahead of the Atlantic Council’s ninth Global Energy Forum, held June 17-18 in Washington, DC. These back-to-back summits will foster international cooperation at the nexus of energy, technology, and geopolitics.

“There is an unprecedented opportunity to leverage artificial intelligence as a tool for net-growth as we navigate the challenges of a transforming energy system,” said Frederick Kempe, president and CEO of the Atlantic Council. “We’re excited to co-host ENACT with XRG to establish an action agenda to meet this challenge, by convening the right energy, tech and policy leaders to pioneer the path forward.”

This ENACT convening builds on the momentum of the ENACT Majlis in Abu Dhabi, where more than 80 global leaders laid the groundwork for pragmatic action and positive energy solutions.

More information about ENACT is available by contacting Katie Kenney, Global Energy Center Deputy Director, at KKenney@atlanticcouncil.org. Participants may register for the Atlantic Council Global Energy Forum by visiting our website.

About the Atlantic Council

The Atlantic Council promotes constructive leadership and engagement in international affairs based on the Atlantic community’s central role in meeting global challenges. The Council provides an essential forum for navigating the dramatic economic and political changes defining the twenty-first century by informing and galvanizing its uniquely influential network of global leaders. The Atlantic Council—through the papers it publishes, the ideas it generates, the future leaders it develops, and the communities it builds—shapes policy choices and strategies to create a more free, secure, and prosperous world.

About XRG

XRG is a transformative international energy investment company, focused on lower-carbon energy and chemicals, and headquartered in Abu Dhabi. Wholly owned by ADNOC, XRG has an enterprise value of over $80 billion. Its portfolio includes interests in industry-leading companies that are meeting rapidly increasing global demand for lower carbon energy and the chemicals that are essential building blocks for products central to modern life.

About MGX

MGX is a technology investment company focused on accelerating the development and adoption of AI and advanced technologies through world-leading partnerships in the United Arab Emirates and globally. MGX invests in sectors where AI can deliver value and economic impact at scale, including semiconductors, infrastructure, software, tech-enabled services, life sciences, and physical AI. For more information, visit: https://www.mgx.ae/en

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Stephen Rodriguez Joins AI+Expo Panel on Government Procurement Reform

clee — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 16:23:08 +0000

Forward Defense Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security

On June 3, Stephen Rodriguez, Senior Advisor at Forward Defense and Director of the Commission on Software-Defined Warfare, joined a panel at the AI+Expo to discuss “Reindustrializing America via Government Procurement Reform.”

He was joined by Eric Lofgren, Staff Member, U.S. House Armed Services Committee; Scott Friedman, Vice President of Government Affairs at Altana Technologies; and Mike Manazir, Vice President, Federal at Hadrian.

Fellow

Stephen Rodriguez

Senior Advisor

Defense Policy Defense Technologies

Forward Defense, housed within the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, generates ideas and connects stakeholders in the defense ecosystem to promote an enduring military advantage for the United States, its allies, and partners. Our work identifies the defense strategies, capabilities, and resources the United States needs to deter and, if necessary, prevail in future conflict.

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Putin’s punitive peace terms are a call for Ukraine’s complete capitulation

Peter Dickinson — Tue, 03 Jun 2025 21:42:17 +0000

Russian and Ukrainian delegations failed to achieve any meaningful breakthroughs when they met for peace talks in Istanbul on Monday. The event was not a complete waste of time, however. Aside from agreeing on another welcome round of prisoner swaps, the two sides also exchanged peace proposals that confirmed the complete lack of middle ground for any kind of meaningful compromise to end the fighting.

While Ukraine’s proposal laid out a fairly pragmatic vision based on battlefield realities and security concerns, Russia presented punitive peace terms that would reestablish Kremlin control over Kyiv and doom the postwar Ukrainian state to a slow but inevitable death. This uncompromising Russian position should serve as a wake-call for anyone who still believes Putin is negotiating in good faith. In reality, the Russian dictator is more determined than ever to destroy Ukraine, and is merely exploiting US-led peace talks in order to strengthen his hand and divide the West.

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The demands unveiled by the Russian delegation this week in Istanbul came as no surprise and closely mirrored the conditions outlined on numerous prior occasions by Putin and other Kremlin leaders. Nevertheless, at a time when US President Donald Trump is publicly pressing for progress toward peace, the Russian decision to deliver such a maximalist memorandum sent a clear message of defiance to Washington DC.

As expected, Moscow reiterated its call for Ukraine to withdraw completely from four Ukrainian provinces that Russia currently claims as its own but has been unable to fully occupy. This would oblige the Ukrainian authorities to hand over a number of major cities and condemn millions of their compatriots to indefinite Russian occupation. Kyiv would also be expected to officially cede these regions together with Crimea, paving the way for international recognition of Russia’s conquests.

This crushing territorial settlement is only one aspect of Russia’s vision for the comprehensive dismantling of Ukrainian statehood. In line with Putin’s peace terms, Ukraine would be forced to accept limitations on the size of its army and on the categories of weapons it is allowed to possess. The country would be also be barred from joining any military blocs or concluding alliances with foreign nations. It does not take much imagination to guess what Putin has in mind for Ukraine once it has been successfully disarmed and internationally isolated.

Nor is that all. The Kremlin’s conditions actually go much further and aim to transform Ukraine from within in ways that would erase Ukrainian identity along with the country’s political independence. Moscow’s memorandum called on Ukraine to grant Russian the status of official state language, reinstate the privileges of the Russian Orthodox Church, and adopt a Kremlin-friendly version of Ukrainian history. Meanwhile, all so-called “nationalist” Ukrainian political parties would be banned, paving the way for the installation of a puppet regime in Kyiv.

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On the morning after this week’s bilateral meeting, former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev confirmed the true objective of Russia’s participation in peace talks. “The Istanbul talks are not for striking a compromise peace on someone else’s delusional terms,” commented Medvedev, who currently serves as deputy chairman of Russia’s powerful National Security Council. Instead, Medvedev stated that Russia’s goal was to secure victory and ensure “the complete destruction of the neo-Nazi regime,” which is widely recognized as Kremlin code for the Ukrainian state. “That’s what the Russian memorandum published yesterday is about,” he noted.

Medvedev’s frank appraisal of the Russian position won him sarcastic praise from US Senator Lindsey Graham. “Congratulations to Mr. Medvedev for a rare moment of honesty coming from the Russian propaganda machine,” commented Trump ally Graham. “I appreciate you making it clear to the world that Putin and Russia are not remotely interested in peace.”

It is hard to argue with Graham’s assessment. For the past few months, Putin has gone out of his way to demonstrate that he has absolutely no intention of ending the war. While Ukraine has accepted a US proposal for an unconditional ceasefire, Putin has repeatedly refused to do so. Instead, he has engaged in transparent stalling tactics that make a mockery of the entire peace process.

Away from the negotiating table, Putin has dramatically increased drone and missile attacks on Ukrainian cities, killing and wounding hundreds of civilians. On the battlefield, his armies are currently engaged in the early stages what is shaping up to be one of the biggest Russian offensives of the entire war. These are not the actions of a man who seeks peace.

After this week’s fresh confirmation of Moscow’s undiminished imperial ambitions in Ukraine, it is now surely time to abandon any lingering delusions and accept that the Russian dictator will not stop until he is stopped. Putin believes he is on a messianic mission to extinguish Ukrainian statehood and revive the Russian Empire. He currently thinks he is winning this historic struggle and will not be swayed by Trump’s comparatively trivial talk of tariffs and trade deals.

The only thing that can change Putin’s mind is Western strength. As long as Putin is confident of eventual victory, he will continue. But if the alternative to a peace deal is a potentially crushing defeat, he may reconsider. To achieve this change, Western leaders must demonstrate a degree of collective resolve that has often been absent over the past three years. They must sanction Russia to the max and arm Ukraine to the teeth. This will require considerable political will and good old-fashioned courage in Western capitals. Ukraine will do the rest.

Peter Dickinson is editor of the Atlantic Council’s UkraineAlert service.

After Ukraine’s innovative airbase attacks, nowhere in Russia is safe

David Kirichenko — Tue, 03 Jun 2025 20:55:58 +0000

Ukraine carried out one of the most audacious operations in modern military history on June 1, using swarms of smuggled drones to strike four Russian airbases simultaneously and destroy a significant portion of Putin’s bomber fleet. While the full extent of the damage remains disputed, open source evidence has already confirmed that Russia lost at least ten strategic bombers and possibly many more.

The attack highlighted Ukraine’s innovative use of military technologies and confirmed the country’s status as a world leader in the rapidly evolving art of drone warfare. Crucially, it also underlined Kyiv’s ability to conduct complex offensive operations deep inside Russia. This will force the Kremlin to radically rethink its domestic security stance, which could lead to the diversion of resources away from the invasion of Ukraine.

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According to Ukrainian sources, preparations for Operation Spider’s Web had been underway since late 2023. Ukraine was able to move a series of modified cargo containers into Russia along with more than one hundred first-person view (FPV) drones. The containers were then loaded with the drones and mounted on lorries before being moved into position close to Russian airbases. On Sunday morning, the green light was given and the drones were remotely activated, emerging from their containers to strike nearby Russian bombers.

The bombers targeted in these drone attacks play a key role in Russia’s air war and are regularly used to launch cruise missiles at Ukrainian cities. While Ukraine’s June 1 success will not bring this bombing campaign to an end, it may help save Ukrainian lives by reducing the number of available planes and forcing Russia to disperse its remaining strategic bombers to locations further away from Ukraine.

While any reduction on Russia’s ability to bomb Ukrainian civilians is welcome, the impact of Ukraine’s airbase attacks on the future course of the war is likely to be far more profound. Sunday’s Ukrainian strikes at locations across Russia have transformed the situation on Putin’s home front. Since the onset of Russia’s full-scale invasion more than three years ago, Russians have grown accustomed to viewing the war as something that is taking place far away. That sense of security has now been shattered.

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This was not the first time Ukraine has struck deep inside Russia. For much of the war, Ukraine has been using its growing fleet of long-range drones to target Russian military bases and the country’s oil and gas industry. Russian Air Force hubs such as the Engels airbase in Saratov Oblast have been hit multiple times.

Ukraine’s attacks have gained momentum as the country’s long-range drone fleet has evolved and as Kyiv has developed its own missile capabilities. This mounting proficiency has not gone unnoticed internationally. Indeed, China reportedly asked Ukraine to refrain from attacking Moscow during the recent Victory Day parade on May 9, as Beijing was apparently unsure whether the Russians themselves could provide sufficient protection for the visiting Chinese leader.

Sunday’s operation represents a new stage in Ukraine’s efforts to bring Putin’s invasion home to Russia. By deploying large numbers of drones surreptitiously across the Russian Federation and activating them remotely, Ukraine demonstrated an ability to strike anywhere without warning. The consequences of this are potentially far-reaching. Russia must now increase security at every single military base, military-industrial site, command center, and transport hub throughout the country.

In addition to ramping up defensive measures around military infrastructure, Russia must also introduce further checks at the country’s borders and closely monitor all activity along endless highways stretching from Europe’s eastern frontier to the Pacific Ocean. This is a logistical nightmare. For example, thanks to Ukraine’s attack, all cargo containers must now be treated with suspicion. There are already reports of bottlenecks emerging at locations across Russia as alarmed officials inspect lorries in the hunt for more Ukrainian drones.

Given the colossal size of the Russian Federation, addressing the threat posed by Ukraine’s Trojan Horse tactics is a truly Herculean task. Russia’s vastness has traditionally been viewed as one of the country’s greatest strengths. The new form of warfare being pioneered by Ukraine could now turn this size into a major weakness. US President Donald Trump has repeatedly stated that Ukraine does not “have any cards” in its war with Russia, but Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy may just have played the ace of drones.

David Kirichenko is an associate research fellow at the Henry Jackson Society.

Hyperwar, artificial intelligence, and Homo sapiens

Can Kasapoğlu — Mon, 02 Jun 2025 14:00:00 +0000

Rethinking the modern neuroanatomical charts of warfare

According to Napoleon, an army walks on its stomach. War, nonetheless, chiefly revolves around cognitive functions. Take a nineteenth-century Napoleonic artillery officer calculating the range of his guns to the target, for example. The officer’s prefrontal cortex hosts three major components: control, short-term memory, and arithmetic logic. This prefrontal exercise operates on the data provided by two other sources: a premotor-parietal top-down system optimized to update and continuously transform external data into an internal format, and a hippocampal bottom-up system to serve as an access code to memory from previously acquired knowledge or to detect novel information. In other words, an army fights on mathematical military data processing systems of the parietal and prefrontal brain regions. No matter how technological improvements have run extra miles to the present day, this cognitive formulation has not changed even on the margins. A contemporary F-35 pilot, assessing the processed situational data harvested by the aircraft’s AN/AAQ-37 Distributed Aperture System showcased on the helmet-mounted display, uses precisely the same biological decision-making algorithms as the Napoleonic artillery officer posited above—albeit on steroids and with a high-performance computing edge.

Today, mankind stands on the eve of a great change in this oldest cognitive tradition of warfighting. For the first time in military history, parietal and prefrontal brain regions may take a back seat in deciding concepts of operations and concepts of employment, perhaps even strategic planning prior to combat operations, while artificial intelligence will likely assume the lead. With the rise of autonomous weapon systems in distributed battlegrounds, the neuroanatomical outlook of warfare may be evolving into a new reality.

Smart digital algorithms and autonomous robotic warfighters are poised to replace not only the muscles but also the brains of warfare. This can occur because they can replicate electronically what our brains do in the biological realm and thus can overtake us by simply performing better, not differently. Robotics and artificial intelligence mimic the core characteristics of nature. Machine-learning and artificial neural networks are good examples of this mimicry. Our everyday AI features of facial and voice recognition and smart internet search predictions function in the virtual world much as they do in the human brain. Likewise, swarming is not merely a robotic function. Birds, bee colonies, and even bacteria swarm. AI might be “smarter” than humans through faster processing of effective mimicry, and robots similarly may swarm in a more coordinated and agile manner than biological agents.

AI and hyperwar: Data, robots, and satellites

In their 2017 Proceedings article released by the US Naval Institute, US Marine Corps General John Allen and high-technology entrepreneur Amir Husain described “hyperwar” as an emerging type of armed conflict that significantly reduces human decision-making. In the new type of wars, the authors argued, Homo sapiens’cognitive function of decision-making will nearly disappear from the OODA loop (observe, orient, decide, act). Autonomous swarms of robotic warfare systems, high-speed networks married to machine-learning algorithms, AI-enabled cyber warfare tools, and miniaturized high-powered computing are likely to assume the lead roles in fighting wars. More importantly, humans might be removed from operational planning, with their role to be confined to merely very high-level and broad input. The rise of hyperwars will essentially bring groundbreaking combinations of emerging technologies, much as the German blitzkrieg combined in novel ways fast armor, air support, and radio communications. General Allen and Husain concluded that the gap between winners and losers would very likely resemble that of Saddam’s Iraqi Army facing the “second offset” technologies of electronic warfare, precision-guided munitions, and stealth platforms.

The Russo-Ukraine War serves as a battlefield laboratory to test possible elements of the coming hyperwars and the impact of artificial intelligence on conducting and analyzing warfare. First, the integration of satellite imagery intelligence and target and object recognition technologies has provided the Ukrainian military with a very important geospatial intelligence edge in kinetic operations. Second, the Ukrainian intelligence apparatus has resorted to neural networks to run ground social media content and other open-source data to monitor Russian servicemen and weapons systems, then to translate the input into target acquisition information and military intelligence. Third, playing smart with data has also sparked a capability hike in drone warfare. Open-source defense intelligence studies suggest that Ukrainian arms makers used publicly available artificial intelligence models to retrain drone software applications with the real-world data harvested from the conflict. This modified data has then been used to operate the drones themselves. Ukrainian robotic warfare assets have seen a capability boost in precision and targeting with the help of the data-mastering process. In the future, some robotic baselines will likely see a faster and more profound improvement with the new leap in AI and information management. Specific drone warfare systems, such as the American Switchblade and Russian Lancet-3, already have design philosophies that prioritize computer vision to run target identification.

It appears that the zeitgeistis on the side of the hyperwar. After all, digital data has been on a huge and exponential growth trend for at least one decade. In 2013, the world generated 4.4 zettabytes of data—with a zettabyte amounting to 10²¹ bytes. Estimates from that period forecast 163 zettabytes of global data to be produced in 2025, which was considered a gigantic magnitude. At current rates, the reality this year will be even higher, at 180 zettabytes of data, or even more. The climb in data generation is intertwined with a rise in drone warfare systems proliferation and employment globally, as well as the production of robotic warfare systems. The dual hike in data and robots forms the very basis of hyperwars.

Other areas to monitor are orbital warfare and space warfare systems. Unlike warfighting and maneuver warfare on the planet Earth, the space operational environment presents technical challenges rather than strategic ones. Satellites are very vulnerable to offensive action since their movements are very limited and incur massive technical requirements for even small moves. A recent war-gaming exercise by American space and defense bodies showcase that one way to boost survivability in space warfare is to reposition “bodyguard satellites” to block access to key orbital slots. AI would be a key asset in accomplishing this concept in a preventive way. Being able to process very large data accumulations to detect hostile action patterns invisible to intelligence analysts, AI offers a new early-warning set of capabilities to decision-makers on Earth.

Horses, dogs, and human warfighters

Mankind as a species has long been fighting in cooperation with other members of the animal kingdom. The cavalry, for instance, for centuries leveraged the synergic warfighting mix of the domesticated horse—Equus ferus caballus—and Homo sapiens. Dogs—Canis lupus familiaris—are another example, as the first species domesticated by our kind and thus long-accustomed to fighting at our side. The role of war dogs is not restricted to history books or ceremonies and parades: a Belgian Malinois took part in the US killing of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the founder of the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), back in 2019. Another dog of the same breed operated alongside the American Navy Seals in 2011, during Operation Neptune Spear, to kill the mastermind behind the 9/11 terror attacks, al-Qaeda ringleader Osama bin Ladin.

Scientifically speaking, Homosapiens not only befriended horses and dogs—we neuroscientifically altered these domesticated species’ decision-making algorithms through selective breeding. Scientific experiments showcase that domesticated horses have learned to read human cues to adapt their behaviors. War dogs are the product of key manipulations via human intervention across generations of deliberate breeding. Magnetic resonance imaging studies have proven that through selective breeding over centuries, humans have significantly altered the brains of domestic dog lineages to achieve behavioral specialization, such as scent hunting or guard capabilities and tasks.

The advent of AI requires us to accept that human brains, like those of domesticated animals with military utility, have adapted and will continue to adapt in response to neural stimuli. Combat formations, ranging from mechanized divisions to fighter squadrons, function as the musculoskeletal frame of warfare, while the human decision-making system functions as the brains and neurons. Throughout military history, the brain and the limbs interacted with various ways of communications—be it trumpets of military bands ordering a line march or contemporary tactical data links of modern warfare sharing real-time updates between a fifth-generation aircraft and a frigate’s onboard systems. Homo sapienshas been at the very epicenter of the equation no matter what technological leaps have taken place and will adapt in unpredictable ways to being the slower and more marginal element in decision architecture. Drone warfare has not led to autonomous killer robots but to the rise of a new warrior class: drone operators with massive kill rates, seen both in Putin’s invading army and the Ukrainian military. The rise of hyperwars may produce even further change to the human role, though, as the biological brain races to compete with accelerating decision cycles and nonbiological elements that outpace us. Domesticating AI in warfare will prove more challenging than either dogs or horses, and it is not yet clear what would ensue if we were to design servants quicker and more agile than the masters.

Implications for US-Turkish defense cooperation

The United States and Turkey are not only the two largest militaries within NATO; they have the broadest and most combat-proven drone warfare prowess. Their robotic warfare solutions have been rising quickly in autonomous characteristics and have already reached the human-in-the-loop level in combat operations. In the coming decades, human-out-of-the-loop CONOPS (concepts of operations) will likely emerge for both the US and Turkish militaries. This common feature of defense technology and geopolitics presages a lucrative path for cooperating within the hyperwar environment.

Moreover, Washington and Ankara can enhance their respective collaborations with Ukraine, a nation with the most recent drone warfare experience against the Russian Federation—a direct threat to NATO member states, as officially manifested by the alliance’s incumbent strategic concept. The Ukrainian case extends to utilizing satellite internet connection in the C4ISR (command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance) aspect of robotic warfare, as well as employing private satellite imagery in target acquisition widely.

Kyiv has already developed close defense ties with the United States and Turkey—even taking part in the latter’s drone proliferation, particularly in the engine segment (for example, Baykar’s Kizilelma). Establishing a trilateral lessons-learned mechanism, which would incorporate defense industries alongside government agencies, would boost such an effort.

Overall, hyperwar seems to be paradigm for future warfare. The United States and Turkey make it possible, and through collaboration perhaps likely, that NATO will retain the upper hand in the hyperwars of the future.

Can Kasapoglu is a non-resident senior fellow at Hudson Institute. Follow him on X @ckasapoglu1.

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Q&A with Haluk Bayraktar

Atlantic Council Turkey Programs — Mon, 02 Jun 2025 14:00:00 +0000

Haluk Bayraktar is the CEO of Baykar, an autonomous technology company based in Turkey. He began his tenure at Baykar in 2004 as an engineering manager, when Baykar’s autonomous technology efforts were still nascent, and has been involved in every aspect of the business’s growth into a leading firm in the Turkish defense sector: project management, logistics, and business development. Baykar’s pioneering role in the rise of the Turkish drone industry makes Bayraktar a fascinating and well-informed observer on security and alliance dynamics affecting Turkey, NATO, and the region.

This interview has been lightly edited for style.

Defense Journal by Atlantic Council IN TURKEY (DJ): Thanks for taking the time to talk with us. Let’s start with developments of common interest to readers in Turkey, the United States, and Europe. Following the industrial and technology cooperation deal with Italian defense and aerospace group Leonardo, what’s next for Baykar in the Western market?

Bayraktar: Baykar has become the world’s biggest drone maker, with thirty-eight international partners now—from Europe and NATO to the Turkic countries, Africa, and the Middle East. Among NATO allies, we have partnered with Poland, Romania, Kosovo, Croatia, and of course, Turkey’s military, law enforcement, and disaster relief agencies. Turkey is a NATO ally, so all our products and technologies follow the technical standards and military specifications of the West and are entirely compatible with Western systems. The Western market is critical for us.

As for Leonardo, we are on the path to establishing a joint venture (JV). They are a major player in Europe, and their work areas are highly compatible with ours—a lot of synergies and complementarity. We were already working with them, integrating payloads and systems with our products: This has become a very strong bond or marriage. A JV is a great opportunity/potential to bring robust, field-proven systems to a broader market. Baykar has drones all around the world, including tactical and strategic platforms. Leonardo produces critical subsystems with great potential for Europe and broader markets where they have a presence, including South America and elsewhere, but Europe is our main focus. In Europe, there is no other mature alternative to what we have.

DJ: What differentiates your approach to manned technology? What is the key to your value proposition?

Bayraktar: We are a tech developer but not just tech. It’s about tech but also about ways to use that technology—about operational employment. Our approach centers on reliability, safety, and robustness. Our experience brings lots of feedback from various areas, which makes our products even more robust. So, we combine technology with real-world experience. Our fleet now exceeds 300,000 flight hours per year, so there is a lot to analyze. Our systems offer the highest performance-to-cost across the market. They are the most adaptable with continuous innovation, and they are equipped with the most advanced technology. In the defense sector, there are huge manufacturing capacity challenges everywhere, whereas there has been a great buildup in Turkey in the last twenty-five years. Over just twenty years, we’ve gone from roughly seventy to over 3,000 companies in the sector, with thousands of products. It’s a great ecosystem with important internal synergies. Baykar has established mass production capacity for unmanned systems. Our Istanbul base is the biggest facility of its kind in the world. So, potential customers know we can deliver quickly. We produce 250 Bayraktar TB2 [unmanned combat aerial vehicles] per year, fifty Akinci [high-altitude, long-endurance] UCAVs per year, and we’re ramping up to support larger capacity as the Bayraktar TB3 UCAV and the Kizilelma unmanned fighter jet move from development to production.

DJ: What is your conceptual and defense technological approach to Kizilelma? Do you see it as a loyal wingman to the fifth-generation Kaan fighter or a pathway to replace Kaan in the future?

Bayraktar: Kaan is a national manned fighter program, funded by the government. Kizilelma is Baykar’s own design and project. It is our final target on the unmanned family of products—a fighter with both subsonic and supersonic capabilities. We do not envision it as a loyal wingman, though it can work as an integrated adjunct in theory, if one were to couple it and use it with manned fighters in risky environments. US President Donald Trump recently introduced the American F-47 as a mothership controlling other fighters, and the consortium developing [the Global Combat Air Program involving Italy, the United Kingdom, and Japan] conceived it in similar fashion. But we envision Kizilelma as operating on its own with a fleet control system. As a company, we don’t develop manned systems. We exclusively invest in drones. That is our focus. Kizilelma is an aircraft with aggressive maneuvering, autonomous operation, and controls that can be flown by few operators. It completed its first flight in 2022, and we see that as a revolution. Bayraktar TB3 has the capability to take off and land on short-runway aircraft carriers. Kizilelma will have this feature too.

Fighter pilots stationed at aircraft carriers have to fly every single day and complete a certain number of sorties annually to stay current. That’s perhaps fifty training flights per day. By contrast, unmanned platforms do not require as much effort or so many daily landings to be certified for carriers. Moreover, Kizilelma will integrate artificial intelligence to assist with delegation of command and other operational aspects.

DJ: How do you view the F-35 debate in the United States, especially Elon Musk’s view that manned aircraft are not the best path forward?

Bayraktar: There are about 13,000 manned fighters worldwide right now–Russian, Chinese, US, and other systems combined. We believe that all those platforms will eventually be converted to unmanned systems, even though one cannot prove that point just yet. But when you look at the field, it’s clearly headed in that direction. To be clear, they may not be replaced one for one. It may be more like three to five unmanned platforms to replace each manned fighter. Unmanned systems will be everywhere, and it will be a crowded airspace—not just unmanned fighters but smaller first-person view drones and loitering munitions. They will be everywhere, and every country will need the ability to build and use these things. For nations to defend themselves in this century, this is a necessary capability—much like the ability to produce bullets.

DJ: Turkey has shown great agility in what has been termed “drone diplomacy,” or complementing regional policy initiatives with defense sales. What is the nature of public/private partnership in Turkish drone diplomacy?

Bayraktar: Overall, the major players in the Turkish defense ecosystem are still government-owned institutional firms. The private sector is smaller but dynamic and growing. Of course, I think that the private sector’s dynamism is preferable. SAHA is the industry group representing the smaller and midsize firms that comprise most of our private sector, and I am currently serving as the chairman.

Still, the system operates similarly for public and private firms. Anyone wishing to export applies to the Ministry of National Defense, which in turn coordinates with the Foreign Ministry and the intelligence community to issue an export license. It is the government’s decision at the end of the day. The government doesn’t promote private-sector firms per se. The Defense Industry Agency (SSB) has foreign relationships and partnerships, and they generally favor government-affiliated companies. One of the objectives of SAHA has been to help small and medium-sized companies become more visible. Our annual exhibition helps smaller players. Baykar is an example of successful growth: We’ve gone from five employees in 2004 to over 6,000 today. We know how important it is to become more visible, and we support other firms doing that. We try to make it easier for the newcomers. That is my responsibility as SAHA chairman.

My view is that European countries are better at using governmental influence to promote national commercial products. Baykar’s products promote themselves through their unique utility as well as aggressive marketing and social media presence. The Turkish government doesn’t subsidize sales, although other countries may. But we don’t rely on public credit or government grants. This is unique to Baykar: We’ve developed an unmanned fighter with the company’s own money. At the end of the day, since companies are required to receive a permit to export, the government plays an important role. The higher levels [of government officials] do talk about it and the firms need approval. The government spending environment matters greatly for domestic firms, too. And while Turkey spent 4.5 percent of its [gross domestic product] on defense before 2000, that number has remained close to 2 percent for two decades now. It was just in the last two years that it approached 3 percent.

The bottom line is that drone diplomacy is a reality and the Bayraktar TB2, in particular, has proven that. But the government doesn’t lead: market demand leads, the company follows, and the government supports.

DJ: Can you talk a little bit about the price/performance balance for Baykar systems?

Bayraktar: The Bayraktar TB2 is a very good example for price/performance balance. The initial purchase price or acquisition cost is one factor, but the life cycle, including maintenance and durability, has to be considered as well because reliability affects long-term costs. Let’s say you procure an alternative to Bayraktar TB2 for half the price. In reality, this is not an advantage if this “alternative” has double the crash rate. So, Bayraktar TB2 has a reliability advantage because you don’t face as many crashes and the cost consideration changes.

Unmanned systems represent a new niche in the defense ecosystem. Aerospace is conservative, especially for manned systems: extensive certifications and regulations serve to protect human life. But unmanned [aerial] vehicles are a different paradigm—you can add new sensors, new technology, and new operational approaches rapidly. An example is the fact that manned systems still use mechanical gyros, whereas the technologically advanced UAVs are currently using even cheaper MEMS [i.e., microelectromechanical system) sensors, fiber-optic alternatives with high-end software systems. You can easily innovate in the unmanned realm with the latest technology, whereas you need to be conservative in the manned domain because you need to make sure that each new step complies with the certification and safety standards of manned aviation. You can qualify unmanned systems with very high-end software—even AI software—and hardware much more quickly.

Baykar has a price advantage because we are vertically integrated. We have strong in-house avionics, power systems, and ground element design. This allows us to tailor critical subsystems and enable attractive pricing with high-end capability. The TB2, with a six-unit ground system and everything, still costs less than a manned platform. Our TB2 fleet recently passed the one-million-hour milestone, so our operating cost is just several hundred dollars per hour—compared to a minimum of $20,000 per hour for a single manned F-16. When you can mass produce, availability and reliability turn into a potent combination. Additionally, customers benefit from the rapid in-service schedule compared to a manned system. A country can field a full UAV system with trained people within a year, providing a very quick and affordable defense capability compared to a manned system, which is a multiyear exercise.

DJ: You mentioned thirty-eight international partners earlier. Ukraine was one of your earliest: Have you been able to apply lessons from that partnership with newer programs, such as those with the Gulf countries?

Bayraktar: Ukraine was Baykar’s first export customer. Our cooperation with Ukraine opened up the strategic level of cooperation for us. We had been working with them since 2011, but things moved rapidly after 2014. In 2014, no one else would sell them armed drones. We didn’t yet have a mature system, but we agreed to help. They were in need, huge need, and searching. That was more than ten years ago. They couldn’t get what they wanted elsewhere either, so they came to Turkey. President Erdoğan’s leadership mattered at that point, as he considered Ukraine a neighbor and friend in need. With the government’s support, we supplied armed drones starting in 2019—the order was placed in 2018. They were very happy and this was very important. President Zelensky visited in August 2019 after taking office. At his request, we agreed to build a factory in Ukraine. He acquired more systems, and we discussed an offset-type obligation. I told them: “You have very good engines. Maybe we can figure out a way to use your engines on our platforms.” So, we created effective cooperation with Motor Sich and others. In a sense, Turkey and Ukraine are complementary countries. When the war escalated in 2022, we did our best to support Ukraine. You may remember the European crowd-sourcing campaigns for Europeans to buy TB2s on Ukraine’s behalf, but we never accepted the money. We donated the platforms, giving up over $110 million in income that we chose not to generate. We are not war profiteers. We delivered all Bayraktar TB2s free of charge as part of those campaigns and the campaign funds were used for humanitarian aid and other pressing needs to support Ukraine.

Haluk Bayraktar is the CEO of Baykar, an autonomous technology company based in Turkey. Follow him on X at @haluk.

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NASA needs a twenty-first-century approach to space exploration

Dan Hart, Emily Sespico — Fri, 30 May 2025 17:38:28 +0000

A debate is taking place within the halls of the US government as to whether US astronauts should next set foot on the Moon or on Mars. While this question of “Moon versus Mars” has taken center stage in the media, there is an even more important question that needs to be asked: How should the seismic technological advances happening on Earth shape our very approach to exploring and working in space?

These technological changes necessitate a hard look at how intelligent machines and robotics should be deployed to prepare for and assist human explorers. Exploiting these technologies can accelerate discovery, enhance safety, and increase the productivity of future crewed space voyages. Additionally, if the United States chooses to synchronize technology investment in space and on Earth, we will innovate faster and accelerate exploration and discovery, all while strengthening our earthly economy and quality of life.

On Earth, a technological revolution is in full motion. Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning are coupling with vast computational advances to create machines that can sense, think, learn, and adapt. Machines are assisting, protecting, and replacing humans in hazardous environments and in industrial work. They’re taking on greater roles—and with more autonomy—to increase efficiency, quality, and safety across a wide array of sectors, including agriculture, mining, and manufacturing. Some robots have even taken a central role in providing the steadiest, most skillful hands for demanding surgeries. These advances are dramatically affecting how we live and work on Earth.

Lessons from Apollo: Transforming spaceflight with robotics

This technological revolution has direct applications for space travel. The US National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA’s) Artemis program, its present-day plan to return astronauts to the Moon, mimics the approach of its Apollo program from the 1960s and early 1970s. For many of those who are old enough to have witnessed the first Apollo Moon mission through black and white TV sets in 1969, the dramatic Apollo 11 lunar landing is etched into their memories. But what many likely don’t recall are the risks and challenges that had to be overcome to make such a historically groundbreaking achievement possible. For instance, the iconic Apollo 11 mission narrowly escaped disaster when its lunar module (the spacecraft intended for transporting astronauts to the Moon’s surface) missed its intended landing site. Had it not been for Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong’s skillful last-minute piloting, and a bit of luck, the mission could have gone down in history as a great tragedy.

Back then, there were no intelligent machines. Sole reliance on the adaptability of US astronauts was the best bet for accomplishing lunar exploration. It was an enormously risky venture and required extreme bravery. In certain fateful circumstances, it took extreme sacrifice from human explorers. While understandable given the technology of the 1960s and 1970s, is this still the way the United States should be approaching exploration missions in the twenty-first century?

Beyond Artemis’s schedule setbacks, cost growth, and technical challenges that are garnering headlines, there lies a fundamental question: Why is humanity still relying so heavily on humans in space, when on Earth, it is steadily learning to use intelligent, adaptable, machines to ensure safety and increase efficiencies? Should these tools not take on even more advanced roles in the “final frontier”?

This is not to suggest that humans should be removed from spaceflight. It would be a mistake to assume that robots and machines can substitute for the inspiration felt from seeing human explorers venturing into the unknown. The image of a human once again setting foot on the barren lunar landscape or an astronaut standing upon a dried Martian lakebed for the first time will generate enduring lightning bolts of wonder for young and old alike. In addition, the powerful symbolism of the astronauts of partner nations exploring together will help to bind humanity together. That said, human spaceflight is currently on the order of thirty times more costly than robotic missions. Additionally, it is questionable whether it makes sense to continue to put astronauts at high risk while there are autonomous alternatives that, at a relatively moderate cost, can increase the likelihood of success. As NASA’s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP) stated in its January 2025 report’s assessment of the Artemis program, “the aggregate risk associated with accomplishing so many ‘first-time’ milestones . . . may be too high.”

In several respects, the Chinese space program has proven to be more effective at integrating robotics into its space travel missions. China’s recent successful robotic lunar sample return missions indicate that they are taking a more thoughtful approach to exploration than the United States. With less investment, and in less time, than the United States, China is realizing meaningful gains through its recent Chang’e-5 and 6 lunar sample return missions. Meanwhile, the United States is struggling with the technical, cost, and schedule issues arising from the development of new rockets, complex cryogenic landers, and the intricacies of leading with crewed exploration missions.

Looking forward and reaching upward

NASA needs to forge a future in which intelligent machines and humans work together seamlessly and the strengths of each are maximized. Human spaceflight missions should focus on major events and major steps forward that evoke maximum inspiration. NASA should increase the use of robots as the workhorses of space exploration. Robotic missions should continue to lead scientific investigation and their roles should be expanded to prepare sites for human explorers, as well as to build, sustain, maintain, and operate space equipment and infrastructure in support of human presence.

Three aims should guide how NASA moves forward with integrating intelligent machines into spaceflight operations.

Modernize NASA’s organizational structure. NASA’s current organizational structure separates science from exploration and maintains separate budget lines for each. Its Science Directorate governs robotics and intelligent machines, while its Exploration Directorate focuses on human spaceflight. This artificial distinction has not withstood the test of time, as there is simply no space exploration without scientific objectives. NASA should reorganize around its main contemporary objectives and let its talented leaders across science and engineering determine the best ways to achieve them.

Reformulate NASA’s Artemis campaign. NASA should change its plan so that early flights are robotic, with work and preparations being performed by intelligent machines ahead of crewed missions. For instance, robotic missions could be used to investigate and prepare lunar landing sites, build shelters, and stock them with pre-positioned instruments, equipment, and provisions. By leading with machines rather than astronauts, the risk of dangerous landings (like those which nearly resulted in catastrophe during Apollo and ended several recent robotic missions) can be reduced. By preparing lunar habitats robotically, the first astronauts could have a shelter available upon landing, should unanticipated issues arise. This robotic integration could be lifesaving, providing modern safeguards for Artemis astronauts that would also begin to address the safety concerns recently raised by NASA’s ASAP.

To accomplish this, NASA should accelerate and build upon its Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, which has already begun to prove fruitful through recent successful partnerships such as Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost Mission 1. Congress should increase funding for highly capable lunar machines that can travel large distances and move lunar rocks and soil for scientific exploration and infrastructure construction. Looking forward, humanoid robots should be used to activate the lunar base and operate equipment when astronauts are not there or are on excursions.

Equip lunar robots with virtual reality. The integration of virtual reality (VR) technologies into intelligent space exploration machines could enable scientists, engineers, and others on Earth to become active participants in the exploration of the Moon, distant planets, and beyond. These integrated VR capabilities could both increase scientific collaborations and provide indelible experiences, increasing public awareness, inspiration, and support for space exploration and science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education.

Humanity will naturally explore. There is huge potential ahead in advancing knowledge in space science and finding ways to tap the nearly limitless resources available in space. As government leaders consider the options for the next giant leap for humankind, it behooves them to take a clearheaded look at their objectives and how they can be most efficiently and safely met. NASA should be leading the way in the international scene by driving advances in intelligent machines and robotics. In doing so, it will improve the US space program and ensure that technological investments in space are well aligned with the needs back on earth.

Dan Hart is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s GeoTech Center.

Emily Sespico is an assistant director at the Atlantic Council’s GeoTech Center.

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UN probe: Russia’s ‘human safari’ in Ukraine is a crime against humanity

Peter Dickinson — Thu, 29 May 2025 21:46:50 +0000

Russia is guilty of committing crimes against humanity in southern Ukraine’s Kherson region, according to a new report by the UN’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine. The report comes following an extensive investigation into a campaign of Russian drone strikes on Ukrainian civilians over a ten-month period beginning in July 2024, with the probe focusing on an area of southern Ukraine stretching more than 100 kilometers along the right bank of the Dnipro River around the city of Kherson.

Members of the UN Commission determined that Russia was engaged in the deliberate targeting of civilians and concluded that the drone attacks were “widespread, systematic, and conducted as part of a coordinated state policy.” The report detailed how civilians were targeted “in various circumstances, mainly when they were outdoors, both on foot or while using any type of vehicles,” and noted that on a number of occasions ambulances had been struck by drones in an apparent bid to prevent them from reaching victims and providing vital medical assistance.

During the ten-month period covered by the United Nations probe, Russian drones killed almost 150 Ukrainian civilians in and around Kherson, while leaving hundreds more injured. The constant threat of attack has created a pervasive climate of fear throughout the region, with people afraid to leave their homes. Terrified locals say they feel hunted and refer to the drone attacks as a “human safari.”

In addition to daily drone strikes, Russia has sought to maximize the psychological pressure on residents of the Kherson region via social media channels. UN investigators reported that video footage of drone attacks on Ukrainian civilians is regularly disseminated on Russian Telegram channels, some of which have thousands of subscribers. This video footage shows drone strikes along with the resulting deaths and destruction in the style of video games, often accompanied by background music. Meanwhile, menacing messages posted on Telegram call on Ukrainians to flee the region. “Get out of the city before the leaves fall, you who are destined to die,” read one message quoted in the UN report.

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This is not the first time UN investigators have accused Russia of committing crimes against humanity in Ukraine. A March 2025 UN report reached a similar conclusion regarding the Kremlin’s large-scale program of detentions and deportations targeting Ukrainians living under Russian occupation. “The evidence gathered led the Commission to conclude that the enforced disappearances against civilians were perpetrated pursuant to a coordinated state policy and amount to crimes against humanity,” the report stated.

Meanwhile, the International Criminal Court in The Hague has issued a number of arrest warrants for senior Russian officials in relation to alleged war crimes committed in Ukraine including the targeted bombing of civilians and critical civilian infrastructure. The most high-profile ICC arrest warrant is for Vladimir Putin himself, who is wanted for his alleged involvement in the mass abduction of Ukrainian children.

At least 20,000 Ukrainian children are believed to have been kidnapped since the start of the full-scale invasion and taken to Russia, where they are subjected to indoctrination to rob them of their Ukrainian heritage and impose a Russian national identity. The nature and scale of these mass abductions may qualify as an act of genocide according to the 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention.

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Russia’s deadly “human safari” drone campaign against the civilian population in southern Ukraine’s Kherson region is part of the Kremlin’s strategy to make the area unlivable. The city of Kherson was occupied by the advancing Russian army during the first days of the full-scale invasion and was officially annexed by Russia in September 2022. However, Kherson and the surrounding area were liberated by the Ukrainian military soon after. The scenes of joy that accompanied the liberation of Kherson were deeply humiliating for Putin, who had personally proclaimed the city to be “forever” Russian just weeks earlier.

This setback forced Putin’s invading army to retreat across the Dnipro River, creating a major physical obstacle for the Russian invasion and limiting the occupied zone of Ukraine to the eastern half of the country. Nevertheless, Moscow continues to insist that Kherson and the surrounding region are now part of the Russian Federation and must be handed over within the framework of a future peace deal.

Ukraine has completely ruled out any such concessions. This is hardly surprising. While some temporary territorial compromises may prove possible during peace negotiations, Ukraine’s stance on Kherson is unlikely to change. After all, allowing the renewed Russian occupation of Kherson would be suicidal for Kyiv. It would present Russia with a priceless foothold across the Dnipro River that could be used as a gateway to seize Ukraine’s Black Sea ports and complete the conquest of the country.

For now, Russia appears to have little chance of seizing Kherson militarily or of acquiring the city at the negotiating table. Instead, Moscow seems to be intent on terrorizing local residents and forcing them to flee. Putin claims that the population of the Kherson region are Russians, but he has no qualms about his soldiers using drones to hunt and kill them mercilessly. This tells you all you need to know about Putin’s cynical posturing as the protector of the Russian people in Ukraine.

Peter Dickinson is editor of the Atlantic Council’s UkraineAlert service.

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There are some drawbacks to this kind of drone. Key problems include limited range and a tendency to become entangled in obstacles such as trees and pylons. Nevertheless, there is mounting recognition on both sides of the front lines and among international military observers that fiber optic drones are now indispensable. In a recent report, the BBC called these drones “the terrifying new weapon changing the war in Ukraine.” Meanwhile, the Washington Post noted that Moscow’s focus on fiber optic drones represents “the first time Russia has surpassed Ukraine in front-line drone technology since the full-scale invasion in 2022.”

The combat effectiveness of fiber optic drones became increasingly apparent amid heavy fighting in Russia’s Kursk region during the early months of 2025. Russia’s campaign to push Ukrainian forces out of the Kursk region used large numbers of fiber optic drones to attack Ukraine’s flanks, cut supply lines, and cripple Ukrainian logistics. This eventually forced Ukrainian troops to retreat, ending an extended incursion into Russian territory that had been hugely embarrassing for Vladimir Putin. Ukrainian troops who fought in Kursk later reported that the only thing capable of stopping fiber optic drones was bad weather.

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The technology behind fiber optic drones is no secret and is available to Ukraine as well as Russia. However, as is so often the case, Moscow benefits from weight of numbers and is looking to exploit its strengths. While Ukraine has experimented with a wide variety of drones produced by hundreds of different startup-style defense companies, Russia has concentrated its vast resources on the mass production of a relatively small number of specific weapons categories including fiber optic drones and shahed kamikaze drones. Moscow’s strategy is to focus on volume with the goal of overwhelming Ukraine’s defenses. Russia has also benefited from close ties with China, which is a key drone producer and ranks among the world’s leading suppliers of fiber optic cables.

Ukraine’s front line military commanders and the country’s tech sector developers recognize the growing importance of fiber optic drones and are now rapidly increasing production. However, they are currently lagging far behind Russia and have much work to do before they can catch up. It is a race Ukraine cannot afford to lose. One of the country’s largest drone manufacturers recently warned that if the current trajectory continues, Kyiv will soon be unable to defend against the sheer scale of Russia’s mass production.

Increased foreign investment in Ukraine’s defense industry could help close the gap. By financing the development and production of fiber optic drones, Ukraine’s international partners can put the country’s defenses on a firmer footing and enable the Ukrainian military to address the threat posed by Russia’s cable-connected drones. This trend has already been underway for some time, with more and more partner countries allocating funds for Ukrainian defense sector production. The challenge now is to channel this financing specifically toward fiber optic drones.

Time may not be on Ukraine’s side. The Russian army is currently in the early stages of a summer offensive that promises to be one of the largest and most ambitious of the entire war, with fighting already intensifying at various points along the front lines. If Putin’s commanders can implement the fiber optic drone tactics that proved so successful in the Kursk region, they may be able to finally overcome Ukraine’s dogged defenses and achieve a long-awaited breakthrough. In a war defined by attrition and innovation, Ukraine must now come up with urgent solutions to counter Russia’s fiber optic drone fleet.

David Kirichenko is an associate research fellow at the Henry Jackson Society.

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Russia is extinguishing all traces of Ukrainian identity in occupied Ukraine

Kateryna Odarchenko — Tue, 27 May 2025 20:39:21 +0000

In recent months, US-led efforts to initiate a Russia-Ukraine peace process have focused primarily on the issue of potential Ukrainian territorial concessions. But as negotiating teams discuss technical details and draw lines on maps, almost no attention is being paid to the desperate plight of the millions of Ukrainians currently living under Russian occupation.

Throughout occupied Ukraine, the Russian authorities are seeking to consolidate their control by eradicating all traces of Ukrainian statehood and national identity while imposing a reign of terror on the civilian population. If these Russian occupation policies are allowed to pass unchallenged in the international arena, it will set a disastrous precedent for the use of force against civilians and the weaponization of national identity in other contested regions globally.

From the very first days of the full-scale invasion in February 2022, it was clear that Russia intended to entrench itself firmly in occupied regions of Ukraine. Russian troops often arrived armed with lists of local community leaders including elected officials, journalists, activists, religious figures, and military veterans. Those who refused to cooperate were likely to be detained before disappearing into a vast network of Russian prisons and camps.

Ukrainian detainees are being systematically subjected to torture and other human rights abuses, according to an international investigation led by the French group Forbidden Stories together with thirteen media outlets including Britain’s Guardian newspaper, the Washington Post, and Le Monde. While it is not possible to calculate exactly how many Ukrainian civilians have been abducted in the occupied regions, UN officials have concluded that the large scale and systematic nature of the disappearances qualifies as a crime against humanity.

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Those who remain in areas of Ukraine under Kremlin control face a regime of forced russification encompassing everything from language and the media to education and religion. Place names have been changed to reflect the new Russian realities, with the curriculum in local schools transformed in line with the Kremlin’s anti-Ukrainian imperial dogmas. Parents who attempt to shield their children from classroom indoctrination are being threatened with loss of custody.

Ukrainian residents in the occupied regions of the country have also come under increasing pressure from the Kremlin to accept Russian citizenship. Anyone who refuses to take a Russian passport risks losing access to a range of essential services including healthcare. They also face restrictions on property rights along with the ability to run a business and use banking services.

This passport campaign has intensified significantly in recent months, with Russian President Vladimir Putin issuing a decree announcing that Ukrainians living under Russian occupation have until September 2025 to accept Russian citizenship or face possible deportation from their own homes. Understandably, Moscow’s ruthless tactics are proving difficult to resist. Kremlin officials claim that by March 2025, Russian passports had been issued to approximately 3.5 million people in occupied Ukraine.

Moscow is accused of engaging in religious persecution throughout the occupied regions, with all Christian denominations other that the Kremlin-linked Russian Orthodox Church facing various degrees of restrictive measures and oppression. Ukrainian Foreign Ministry officials stated in spring 2025 that the Russian occupation authorities have killed dozens of clergy members over the past three years while damaging or destroying hundreds of churches.

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Russia has been careful to prevent information about conditions in occupied Ukraine from reaching the outside world. All independent media sources have been shut down throughout the occupied regions, and have been replaced by new Kremlin-controlled outlets. Individual journalists have frequently been among those targeted for oppressive measures including physical abuse and imprisonment.

One of the few reporters to shed light on the horrors unfolding in Russian-occupied Ukraine was Ukrainian journalist Viktoriia Roshchyna, who visited areas under occupation on multiple occasions before being captured by the Russian authorities in summer 2023. Roshchyna died after a year in Russian captivity. When her body was returned to Ukraine in early 2025, it showed signs of torture.

From a military standpoint, it may not currently be feasible to liberate all of the Ukrainian regions held by Moscow. Nevertheless, the crimes being committed by the Kremlin in occupied Ukraine are unprecedented in modern European history and cannot be ignored.

It is vital that the human rights of Ukrainians living under Russian occupation feature prominently in any peace process. This includes the rights of those currently being held in Russian jails. Ukraine’s Western partners must maintain or increase sanctions pressure, while also expanding support for Ukrainian civil society and raising awareness about Russia’s actions among international audiences.

Looking ahead, longer term investments are also needed to help document war crimes and support Ukrainian victims of the Russian occupation. Ultimately, the most meaningful response to Russia’s campaign against Ukrainian identity is to make sure Ukraine is in a position to not only survive but thrive as an independent European nation.

Kateryna Odarchenko is a partner at SIC Group Ukraine.

Putin aims to destroy Ukraine and has zero interest in a compromise peace

Peter Dickinson — Wed, 21 May 2025 20:51:25 +0000

US President Donald Trump came away from Monday’s phone call with Vladimir Putin expressing confidence that the Russian leader wants peace, but few others appear to share this optimism. Many senior Western figures were reportedly unimpressed by Putin’s vague references to a “memorandum on a possible peace agreement” and believe he is still engaging in stalling tactics. “Putin is clearly playing for time. Unfortunately we have to say Putin is not really interested in peace,” commented German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius.

Trump’s latest call to Putin also prompted fresh questions over the US leader’s handling of the faltering peace process. Britain’s The Economist pondered Trump’s “strange reluctance to get tough with Putin,” while Washington Post columnist Max Boot led a chorus of voices accusing the Kremlin strongman of manipulating his American counterpart. “While Trump’s lack of success in peacemaking might not doom Ukraine, it certainly dispels the president’s pretensions to being a world-class deal maker,” argued Boot. “Putin is playing him for a fool, and Trump doesn’t even seem to realize it.”

The mood was very different in Moscow, with the Kremlin-controlled media trumpeting the call as a significant success for Russian diplomacy. In his daily press review, BBC correspondent Steve Rosenberg reported that many of Russia’s leading news outlets were “crowing” over the contents of the Trump-Putin conversation. “It looks like Russia has won the latest round of global poker,” commented one newspaper. “Donald Trump’s stance couldn’t be more advantageous to Moscow,” observed another.

It is no surprise to see mounting unease in Western capitals over the US push to end the Russia-Ukraine War. Since Trump first initiated peace talks in February, Ukraine has agreed to an unconditional ceasefire and signaled its readiness to make major territorial concessions. In contrast, Russia has consistently rejected calls for a ceasefire while proposing new conditions of its own and creating various obstacles to any meaningful progress. At one point, Putin even claimed that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy lacked the legitimacy to sign off on a peace deal and suggested placing Ukraine under United Nations administration.

Recent diplomatic developments have further underlined Russia’s reluctance to end the war. When the leaders of Britain, France, Germany, and Poland delivered a ceasefire ultimatum to Putin in early May, the Russian ruler responded by calling for the first bilateral talks with Ukraine since spring 2022. However, Putin then chose not to attend the bilateral meeting in Istanbul that he himself had proposed, preferring instead to send a low-level delegation. This was widely interpreted as a “slap in the face” for Ukraine and the collective West.

Putin’s representatives during last week’s negotiations in Istanbul sought to emphasize Moscow’s unwillingness to compromise, calling on Kyiv to officially cede four entire provinces to Russia including a number of major Ukrainian cities that the Kremlin has so far been unable to seize militarily. If Ukraine refuses to do so, they warned, Russia will increase its demands to include six Ukrainian provinces. “We fought Sweden for twenty-one years. How long are you ready to fight?” the head of the Russian delegation reportedly commented, in reference to the eighteenth century Great Northern War. “Maybe some of those sitting here at this table will lose more of their loved ones. Russia is prepared to fight forever.”

While Putin rarely makes such thinly veiled threats, he continues to insist that any settlement must focus on eliminating what he refers to as the “root causes” of the war. This is generally understood to mean Ukraine’s international neutrality and disarmament, along with the reestablishment of Russia’s former imperial dominance in every sphere of Ukrainian public life, from language and education to national memory and religion. Any Ukrainian leader who agreed to such terms would be signing their country’s death sentence.

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Trump’s efforts to talk up the prospects of a negotiated peace and his attempts to entice Putin with commercial incentives suggest a fundamentally flawed understanding of Russia’s war aims in Ukraine. The US leader seems to sincerely believe that Putin can be persuaded to end his invasion by the promise of limited territorial gains and future economic prosperity. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth.

Putin is not fighting for Ukrainian land; he is fighting for Ukraine itself. He views the current war in the broadest of possible historical terms and sees the destruction of the Ukrainian state as a sacred mission that will define his entire reign and shape Russia’s future for decades to come. It is ludicrous to suggest that he could be swayed from this messianic vision by mundane talk of trade deals and sanctions relief.

Putin’s thirst for historical revenge can be traced back to his traumatic experience during the collapse of the Soviet Union. While Putin did not personally face the grinding poverty that millions of his compatriots endured in the 1990s, Russia’s national fall from grace nevertheless made a profound impression on him. Ever since, he has been haunted by fears of a further imperial collapse and driven by a determination to reverse the verdict of 1991. This has fueled his revanchist brand of Russian nationalism, and helps to explain his otherwise inexplicable obsession with Ukraine.

Throughout his reign, Putin has made no secret of his bitter resentment over the breakup of the USSR, which he has called “the greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century” and “the disintegration of historical Russia.” Crucially, he views Ukraine as a central and indivisible part of this fabled “historical Russia.” Indeed, the Ukrainian capital Kyiv occupies pride of place in his imperial mythology as “the mother of all Russian cities.”

To Putin, the emergence of an independent Ukraine is a symbol of Russia’s post-Soviet humiliation and a potential catalyst for the next stage in his country’s retreat from empire. According to this twisted imperial logic, if a province as quintessentially Russian as Ukraine is allowed to break away and establish itself as a modern European democracy, the entire Russian Federation will be in danger of disintegrating. Likewise, Putin is convinced that if Ukraine can be returned to its rightful place within Greater Russia, the injustice of 1991 will be undone and Russia will resume its position among the world’s Great Powers.

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Putin has been attempting to force Ukraine back into the Kremlin orbit ever since the 2004 Orange Revolution, which he personally helped spark by clumsily intervening in Ukraine’s presidential election. The violence of these efforts has escalated in direct proportion to the strengthening of modern Ukraine’s own national identity. At first, Putin pursued his imperial goals in Ukraine through control of the country’s political, business, cultural, and religious elites. When this failed, he ordered the 2014 invasion of Crimea and eastern Ukraine. Once it became apparent that even this partial occupation of the country would not derail Ukraine’s national consolidation, Putin made the fateful decision to launch the full-scale invasion of February 2022.

The rising tide of Russian aggression against Ukraine has been accompanied by ever more extreme anti-Ukrainian rhetoric. For years, Putin has publicly insisted that Ukrainians are Russians (“one people”). On the eve of the current invasion, he published an entire essay denying Ukraine’s right to exist. Putin and other senior Kremlin officials have repeatedly labeled Ukraine as an artificial country built on stolen Russian land, a Nazi invention, and an intolerable “anti-Russia” created for the purpose of undermining Russia itself. Ukrainians who insist on their own national identity are typically portrayed as traitors undeserving of sympathy or mercy.

This dehumanizing propaganda has laid the ideological foundations for the crimes that are currently being committed by the occupying Russian army in Ukraine. Wherever the Kremlin is able to establish control, Ukrainian patriots and community leaders are routinely detained and incarcerated in a vast network of prisons and camps. While the number of victims remains unknown, UN officials have concluded that the large scale and systematic nature of the disappearances qualifies as a crime against humanity. Those who remain are subjected to a reign of terror and forced to accept Russian citizenship while submitting their children to indoctrination. Meanwhile, all traces of Ukrainian national identity, culture, and statehood are being ruthlessly erased. Many experts believe these actions qualify as genocide.

Putin is understandably happy to exploit the Trump administration’s enthusiasm for peace talks. This allows him to buy time, divide the West, and reduce the flow of weapons to Ukraine. But it is already abundantly clear that he has no real interest in ending his invasion. Indeed, he dare not stop. Any peace deal that secures Ukraine’s survival as an independent state would be viewed in Moscow as a major defeat. Rather than taking his place alongside Stalin, Peter the Great, and Ivan the Terrible as one of Russia’s greatest rulers, Putin would be remembered in Russian history as the man who lost Ukraine. He would rather fight on indefinitely than accept such a fate.

Trump deserves considerable credit for seizing the initiative and attempting to end the war between Russia and Ukraine. At the same time, his current approach is obviously not working. The time has now come to stop seeking compromises with the Kremlin and start speaking to Putin in the language of strength. This means tightening sanctions on Russia and targeting the many countries that continue to fuel Putin’s war machine. Above all, it means significantly increasing military aid to Kyiv and boosting Ukraine’s ability to defeat Russia on the battlefield. Putin has staked his entire reign on the destruction of Ukraine. He will not back down unless forced to do so. Peace will only come when Ukraine is too strong to be subjugated.

Peter Dickinson is editor of the Atlantic Council’s UkraineAlert service.

Unearthed potential

Geothermal energy has numerous advantages over other renewable sources. Most immediately, it is a reliable, constant source of power as it relies on heat sources unaffected by atmospheric changes. In addition, it has a limited land footprint (per unit of power generated), minimal workforce requirements, and flexible generating capacity. Geothermal’s advantages make it an ideal complement to intermittent sources of energy such as solar and wind. With its load-following capacity—the ability to adjust power output depending on demand—geothermal can stabilize the grid, ensuring continuous power. Its resilience to weather-related disruptions, due to being located underground, further strengthens its role in maintaining grid stability amid climate volatility.

Despite providing reliable power generation for over a century, geothermal sources currently account for just 0.4 percent of US electricity generation. Naturally occurring or conventional geothermal systems are geographically limited, primarily found in the western United States. But next-generation emerging technologies may enable access to new sources in other locations. Conventional geothermal systems rely on heat sources, water, and natural fractures. But next-generation technologies, such as enhanced geothermal systems and closed-loop systems, use engineered fractures or closed wellbore loops to circulate fluids for energy capture where fractures do not naturally exist. These innovative approaches can unlock up to ninety gigawatts of clean, reliable power by 2050, dramatically expanding geothermal energy’s role in the US power grid.

Incremental advancements have also enhanced the efficiency of current geothermal technologies. For instance, drilling speeds at the US Department of Energy’s Frontier Observatory for Research in Geothermal Energy (FORGE) site have improved by over 500 percent in just three years, substantially cutting well-development costs. Such advancements bring geothermal closer to being cost competitive, with future projects potentially lowering operating costs by 17 to 30 percent by 2030.

Widely supported

Geothermal technology currently enjoys bipartisan Congressional support. The House of Representatives passed HR 6474, a bill that would amend the Energy Policy Act of 2005 to speed up geothermal development by offering categorical exclusions for environmental reviews in areas with prior drilling. The bipartisan bill—sponsored by US representatives Michelle Steele (R-CA) and Susie Lee (D-NV)—has been referred to the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.

Another bill that has been introduced in support of geothermal development is the HEATS Act, which would exempt certain geothermal activities on state and private lands (excluding American Indian lands) from needing federal drilling permits, provided the operator has a state permit. Additionally, the Supercritical Geothermal Research and Development Act, introduced in November, seeks to advance research into geothermal systems that use water at temperatures and pressures above its critical point (around 374 degrees Celsius and 221 bar) to increase its energy generation potential. Although neither bill has passed, they highlight the growing interest in geothermal technologies in strengthening US energy independence.

Furthermore, there are signs of the US administration’s support for geothermal, with Energy Secretary Chris Wright having pointed to geothermal as an important tool for US energy security and job creation.

Equally important is the tech sector’s growing engagement with geothermal energy. Google recently partnered with NV Energy, a major Nevada utility company, to develop what it calls a “Clean Transition Tariff.” Under the model, NV Energy would enter into a power purchase agreement to acquire energy from a geothermal plant operated by Houston-based Fervo and sell it to Google at a fixed rate (that includes the “tariff,” or cost of the partnership). This model could be adapted by other data processing companies to lower operating costs and reduce carbon footprints.

But barriers to entry remain

Despite its immense potential, geothermal energy faces significant hurdles that slow its widespread adoption. A major challenge is the substantial upfront investment required for geothermal projects. Drilling is a costly process, involving multiple stages—exploration, confirmation, and development—each demanding significant capital.

Another challenge for the geothermal industry is the lengthy and unpredictable project development process (which takes an average of seven years), driven by strict federal permitting regulations. Unlike oil and gas, which benefit from categorical exclusions for exploration, geothermal developers must undergo full environmental reviews at multiple stages, including both exploration and development.

How to unlock US geothermal potential

To fully realize the potential of a promising US geothermal energy market, the US government must take coordinated, concerted action to lift the nascent industry over those initial barriers to entry:

Empower program offices: To address the financial barrier to entry, the Department of Energy released, in its Commercial Liftoff Report, a two-phase plan for the full-scale deployment of next-generation geothermal approaches. The first phase focuses on building investor confidence in the market viability of geothermal, with an estimated investment of $20 billion to $25 billion. The second phase focuses on broadening geothermal’s footprint across the United States, requiring over $200 billion in investment. Initial investment remains a key hurdle, so the administration must empower dedicated program offices, such as the Department of Energy’s Geothermal Technologies Office and Loan Programs Office. Greater autonomy in these organizations can help de-risk projects, foster innovation, and reduce high upfront costs by addressing financial, technological, and resource-related challenges.

Streamline the permitting process: With strong bipartisan support for geothermal energy, Congress should pass the HEATS Act to accelerate the geothermal permitting process. The government should aim to enable exploration, drilling, and resource confirmation within twelve to eighteen months of a company starting the permitting process.

Expand federal research, development, and demonstration grants: To achieve breakthroughs in next-generation geothermal, continuous research, development, and demonstration are crucial. Congress should pass the Supercritical Geothermal Research and Development Act, currently before the House Committee on Natural Resources, to fuel innovation and development for this emerging technology.

Build a robust geothermal innovation ecosystem: To unlock the full potential of next-generation geothermal, the US Department of Energy should lead the creation of a coordinated innovation ecosystem that brings together federal and state agencies, Congress, project developers, financiers, researchers, and communities. Such an ecosystem is essential to align policy, funding, and deployment priorities; streamline permitting; and build public trust. A Geothermal Innovation Council, led by the Department of Energy and supported by dedicated congressional funding, could formalize cross-sector collaboration, accelerate project pipelines, and ensure that geothermal development is equitable, efficient, and scalable.

Sudeep Kanungo is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s GeoTech Center.

William Larivee is a resident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s GeoTech Center.

The authors would like to acknowledge the contributions made to this article by the Atlantic Council GeoTech Center Nonresident Senior Fellow Mahmoud Abouelnaga.

How to prevent Ukraine’s booming defense sector from fueling global insecurity

Vitaliy Goncharuk — Tue, 20 May 2025 20:18:47 +0000

Following the 1991 Soviet collapse, newly independent Ukraine inherited the second-largest defense arsenal in Europe from the USSR. As a result, the country soon emerged as one of the biggest arms exporters to Africa and the Middle East, significantly influencing conflicts in those regions. With the Ukrainian defense sector now experiencing years of unprecedented growth in response to Russia’s full-scale invasion, it is important to prevent Ukraine’s innovative military technologies from fueling a new wave of international instability.

Since the onset of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, hundreds of companies have sprung up in Ukraine producing defense tech equipment for the country’s war effort. Growth has been largely driven by private initiatives led by civilians with no prior experience in the defense industry. This has led to a startup culture that does not require much investment capital, with most of the products developed since 2022 based on existing open source software and hardware platforms. Data leaks are a significant issue, as the vast majority of the people involved in this improvised defense sector have not undergone the kind of security checks typical of the defense industry elsewhere.

While there is currently no end in sight to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it is already apparent that in the postwar period, the large number of Ukrainian defense sector companies that have appeared since 2022 will face a significant drop in demand. Indeed, even in today’s wartime conditions, many companies are already lobbying for the relaxation of export restrictions while arguing that the Ukrainian state is unable to place sufficient orders.

If these companies are forced to close, skilled professionals will seek employment abroad. This could lead to the leakage of knowledge and technologies. Meanwhile, with NATO countries likely to be focused on their own defense industries and strategic priorities, it is reasonable to assume that many Ukrainian defense sector companies will concentrate on exporting to more volatile regions. The potentially destabilizing impact of these trends is obvious. It is therefore vital to adopt effective measures to limit the spread of Ukrainian defense sector technologies, data, and finished products along with skilled developers, engineers, and operators to potential conflict zones around the world.

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Ukraine’s defense sector innovations fall into two categories. The first includes innovations that are easily replicated using readily available technologies. The second category features more complex systems requiring skilled professionals. It makes little sense to focus regulatory efforts on the first category. Instead, preventing proliferation is more effectively managed through intelligence operations and security measures. Preventative efforts should focus on those innovations that are more complex in both development and deployment.

Efforts to prevent Ukrainian defense technologies from fueling conflicts around the world will depend to a significant degree on enforcement. While Ukraine has made some progress in combating corruption over the past decade, this remains a major issue, particularly in the country’s dramatically expanded defense sector. A successful approach to limiting the spread of Ukrainian defense tech know-how should therefore incorporate a combination of positive and negative incentives.

Positive incentives can include opening up NATO markets to Ukrainian companies and supporting their efforts to comply with NATO standards. This would likely encourage a broader culture of compliance throughout the Ukrainian defense tech sector as companies sought to access the world’s most lucrative client base.

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Creating the conditions for the acquisition of Ukrainian companies by major international defense industry players could help to encourage a responsible corporate culture among Ukrainian companies while bolstering the country’s position globally. Likewise, enhanced access to funding and a simplified route to work visas and citizenship in the EU and US would help attract and retain talent. This would further strengthen Ukraine’s defense sector and encourage corporate compliance.

Professional organizations also have a potential role to play. Promoting the development of robust industry and professional associations for Ukrainians in the defense sector would encourage collaboration, knowledge sharing, and the establishment of industry standards, which could further propel innovation and growth within Ukraine’s defense industry, while creating a climate more conducive to regulation. Regulatory measures could include enhanced access to Western defense markets, with strict penalties for non-compliance.

Targeted export controls are another important measure. By establishing robust controls over critical components such as processors and specialized equipment, Ukraine can limit the availability of these technologies in regions with high conflict potential. Enhanced monitoring mechanisms should be implemented to track the transfer of technologies and the movement of skilled personnel. International cooperation is also crucial. Ukraine should look to work closely with global partners to synchronize regulatory standards and enforcement strategies, thereby reducing the challenges presented by regions with weak legal mechanisms.

Ukraine is now recognized internationally as a leading defense tech innovator in areas including AI solutions, cyber security, and drone warfare. There is huge global appetite for such technologies, but unregulated distribution could have disastrous consequences for international security. By combining enforceable regulatory measures with strategic incentives, it is possible to reduce the risks associated with the spread of Ukraine’s wartime innovations, while simultaneously maintaining an environment that supports ongoing innovation and growth in a controlled and secure manner.

Vitaliy Goncharuk is a US-based tech entrepreneur with Ukrainian roots who previously served as Chairman of the Artificial Intelligence Committee of Ukraine from 2019 to 2022.

When the Russian government launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, many Western observers braced for digital impact—expecting Russian military and security forces to unleash all-out cyberattacks on Ukraine. Weeks before Moscow’s full-scale war began, Politico wrote that the “Russian invasion of Ukraine could redefine cyber warfare.” The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) worried that past Russian malware deployments, such as NotPetya and WannaCry, could find themselves mirrored in new wartime operations—where the impacts would spill quickly and globally across companies and infrastructure. Many other headlines and stories asked questions about how, exactly, Russia would use cyber operations in modern warfare to wreak havoc on Ukraine. Some of these questions were fair, others clearly leaned into the hype, and all were circulated online, in the press, and in the DC policy bubble ahead of that fateful February 24 invasion.

As the Putin regime’s illegal war unfolded, however, it quickly belied these hypotheses and collapsed many Western assumptions about Russia’s cyber power. Russia didn’t deliver the expected cyber “kill strike” (instantly plummeting Ukraine into darkness). Ukrainian and NATO defenses (insofar as NATO has spent considerable time and energy to support Ukraine on cyber defense over the years) were sufficient to (mainly) withstand the most disruptive Russian cyber operations, compared at least to pre-February 2022 expectations. And Moscow showed serious incompetencies in coordinating cyber activities with battlefield kinetic operations. Flurries of operational activity, nonetheless, continue to this day from all parties involved in the war—as Russia remains a persistent and serious cyber threat to the United States, Ukraine, and the West. Russia’s continued cyber activity and major gaps between wartime cyber expectations and reality demand a Western rethink of years-old assumptions about Russia and cyber power—and of outdated ways of confronting the threats ahead.

Russia is still very much a cyber threat. Patriotic hackers and state security agencies, cybercriminals and private military companies, and so on blend together with deliberate state decisions, Kremlin permissiveness, entrepreneurialism, competition, petty corruption, and incompetence to create the Russian cyber web that exists today. The multidirectional, murky, and dynamic nature of Russia’s cyber ecosystem—relying on a range of actors, with different incentives, with shifting relationships with the state and one another—is part of the reason that the Russian cyber threat is so complex.

Policymakers in the United States as well as allied and partner countries should take at least five steps to size up and confront Russia’s cyber threat in the years to come:

When assessing the expectations-versus-reality of Russia’s wartime cyber operations, distinguish between capabilities and wartime execution.
Widen the circle of analysis to include not just Russian state hackers but the broader Russian cyber web, including patriotic hackers and state-coerced criminals.
Avoid the trap of assuming Russia can separate out cyber and information issues from other bilateral, multilateral, and security-related topics—maintaining its hostility toward Ukraine while, say, softening up on cyber operations against the United States.
Continue cyber information sharing about Russia with allies and partners around the world.
Invest in cyber defense and in cyber offense where appropriate.

Russia’s cyber ecosystem

Russia is home to a complex ecosystem of cyber actors. These include military forces, security agencies, state-recruited cybercriminals, state-coerced technology developers, state-encouraged patriotic hackers, self-identified patriotic hackers acting of their own volition, and more. Even Russian private military companies offer cyber operations, signals intelligence (SIGINT), and other digital capabilities to their clients. Together, these actors form a large, complex, often opaque, and dynamic ecosystem. The Kremlin has substantial power over this ecosystem, both guiding its overall shape (such as permitting large amounts of cybercrime to be perpetuated from within Russia) and leveraging particular actors as needed (discussed more below). Simultaneously, decisions aren’t always top-down, as entrepreneurial cybercriminals and hackers—much like “violent entrepreneurs” in Russian business and crime, or the “adhocrats” vying for Putin’s ear to pitch ideas—take initiative, build their own capabilities, and sell them to the state as well.

The relationships that different security agencies, at different levels, in different parts of the country and world, have with Russian hackers also vary over time. A local security service office might provide legal cover to a group of criminal hackers one day (after the necessary payoffs change hands, of course), only for a Moscow-based team to recruit them for a state operation the next. While the Kremlin has a sort of “social contract” with hackers—focus mainly on foreign targets; don’t undermine the Kremlin’s geopolitical objectives; be responsive to Russian government requests—its tolerance for a specific cybercriminal group can change on a whim, too. Security officials might take a bribe from a cybercriminal, much as their colleagues do on the regular, and still find their patrons in prison and their own wrists in handcuffs.

On the Russian government side, the principal units involved in offensive cyber operations are the Federal Security Service (FSB), the military intelligence agency (GRU), and the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR). Russia does not have a proper, centrally coordinating cyber command; it was never launched despite attempts in the 2010s. The Ministry of Defense’s initial efforts to make one happen by circa 2014 were, it came to be understood later, overtaken by the subsequent establishment of Information Operations Troops with seemingly some coordinating functions—though experts still debate its analogousness to a “cyber command” and its level of shot-calling compared to bodies like the Presidential Administration. So while it is possible for the Russian security agencies to coordinate their (cyber) operations with one another, their engagements are marked more by competition than cooperation.

The most prominent example of this potential overlap or inefficiency is when GRU-linked APT28 and SVR-linked APT29 both hacked the Democratic National Committee in 2016, making it unclear whether each knew the other was carrying out a similar campaign. This operational friction is exacerbated by the fact that the agencies’ general remits—SVR on human intelligence, for instance, and FSB mostly domestic—do not translate to the digital and online world. All three agencies hack military and civilian targets and, for example, the FSB actively targets and hacks organizations outside of Russia’s borders. Each agency approaches cyber operations differently, too, often in line with their overall institutional cultures—such as the GRU, known for its brazen kinetic operations including sabotage and assassination, carrying out the boldest and most destructive cyber operations, contrasted with the SVR, and its emphasis on secrecy, focusing on quiet cyber intelligence gathering like in the SolarWinds campaign. Still, the Russian state agencies with cyber operations remain active threats to the United States, Ukraine, the West, and plenty of others through intelligence-gathering efforts, disruptive operations, and efforts that meld both, such as hack-and-leak campaigns.

Beyond government units themselves, the state encourages patriotic hackers—sometimes just young, technically proficient Russians—to go after foreign targets through televised and online statements (such as disinformation about Ukraine). Different security organizations, such as the FSB, may hire cybercriminals for specific intelligence operations and pay them based on the targets they penetrate. Other private-sector companies pitch their own services to the state of their own volition, bid on government contracts, and support a range of offensive capability development, research and development, and talent cultivation efforts (including defensive activities and benign or even globally cybersecurity-positive activities beyond the scope of this paper). Russian private military companies increasingly offer capabilities related to cyber and SIGINT to their private and government clients around the world, too. All the while, the state retains the capability to target specific people and companies in Russia that otherwise have nothing to do with the state, apply the relevant pressure, and compel them to assist with state cyber objectives, which it can wield to extraordinary effect.

As the historian Stephen Kotkin notes, “The Russian state can confound analysts who truck in binaries.” While there are several core themes to this ecosystem—complexity; state corruption; overwhelming tolerance for and even tacit support of cybercrime; myriad offensive cyber actors in play—Russia’s cyber ecosystem neither fits into a neat box nor is a neatly run one at that.

For all the threats these actors pose to Ukraine and the West, assuming that the Putin regime controls all cyber activity emanating from within Russia’s borders is not just inaccurate (e.g., the country’s too big; there are too many players; it’s not all top down), but is the kind of assumption that serves as a “useful fiction” for the Kremlin. It makes the system appear ruthlessly efficient and coordinated, gives disconnected or tactically myopic actions a veneer of larger strategy, and puts Putin at the center of all cyber operation decision-making. Thinking as much can, intentionally or not, further feed into the idea that the Kremlin’s motives are clear and fixed or driven by some kind of “hybrid war” strategy. It also obscures the fact that—unlike many Western countries that do, in fact, publish official “cyber strategies”—Russia does not have a defined cyber strategy document, instead drawing on a range of documents and sweeping “information security” concepts to frame information, the internet, and cyber power.

On the contrary, it is the multidirectional, murky, and dynamic nature of Russia’s cyber ecosystem that makes cyber activity subject to sudden change, feeds opportunities for interagency rivalries, contributes to effects-corroding corruption and competition, and provides the Kremlin with a spectrum of talent, capabilities, and resources to tap, direct, and deny (plausibly or implausibly) as it needs. It is in part this dynamism and multidirectional nature that makes Russia’s cyber threat so complex—as mixes of deliberate state decisions, Kremlin permissiveness, entrepreneurialism, competition, petty corruption, and incompetence blend together to create the Russian cyber web that exists today. Relationships between the state proper, at different levels, in different organizations, with nonstate cyber affiliates are often shifting; ransomware groups persistently targeting Western critical infrastructure, for example, may be prolific for months before collapsing under internal conflict and reconstituting into new groups, with new combinations of the old tactics and talent. It is also the reason that what is known to date about cyber operations during Russia’s full-out war on Ukraine provides such a valuable case study in assessing the status quo of this ecosystem—and, coupled with lessons from past incidents (like Russian cyberattacks on Estonia in 2007, Georgia in 2008, and Ukraine in 2014), helps to better weigh the future threat.

What happened to Russia’s cyber might?

Cyber operations have played a substantial role in Russia’s full-on invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and the ensuing war. These activities range from distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks knocking Ukrainian websites offline and Ukrainian patriotic hackers’ attacks on Russian government sites (what Kyiv calls its “IT Army”) to Russia using countless malware variants to exfiltrate data and targeting Ukrainian Telegram chats and Android mobile devices. Without getting into a timeline of every major operation—neither this paper’s focus nor possible given limits on public information—it is clear that Russian and Ukrainian forces and their allies, partners, and proxies have made cyber operations part of the war’s military, intelligence, and information dimensions.

There are many ways to define cyber power, which is by no means limited to offensive capabilities. In Russia’s case, analysts could focus on anything from Russia’s national cyber threat defense system—the Monitoring and Administration Center for General Use Information Networks (GosSOPKA), which effectively brings together intrusion detection, vulnerability management, and other technologies for entities handling sensitive information—to the enormous IT brain drain problems the country suffered immediately following the full-on invasion of Ukraine. As explored in a study last year for the Atlantic Council, Russia’s growing digital tech isolationism—both a long-standing goal and increasing reality for the Kremlin—has driven more independence in some areas, like software, while heightening dependence and strategic vulnerability in others, such as dependence on Chinese hardware. This paper’s focus, though, will remain on Russia’s offensive capabilities.

Pre-February 2022 expectations in the United States and the West, as highlighted above, were dominated by those predicting extensive Russian disruptive and destructive cyber operations. In these scenarios, Russia would leverage its state, state-affiliated, state-encouraged, and other capabilities to cause serious damage to Ukrainian critical infrastructure (telecommunications, water systems, energy grids, and so forth) and cleanly augment its kinetic onslaught. Russia would “employ massive cyber and electronic warfare tools” to collapse Ukraine’s will to fight through digital means.

To be sure, some predictions were more measured. Some pointed to the 2008 Russo-Georgian War, as an illustration of Russian forces effectively using DDoS attacks (Moscow’s shatter-communications approach) in concert with disinformation and kinetic action to prepare the battlefield, and conjectured that Moscow would do the same if it moved troops further into Ukraine. Others highlighted Russia turning off Ukrainian power grids as a possible menu option for Moscow as it escalated. Cybersecurity scholars Lennart Maschmeyer and Nadiya Kostyuk, contrary to widely held positions, argued two weeks before Russia’s full-scale invasion that “cyber operations will remain of secondary importance and at best provide marginal gains to Russia,” incisively noting that press headlines talking of “cyber war” rest on “the implicit assumption that with the change in strategic context, the role of cyber operations will change as well.” The overwhelming sentiment, though, was worry and anticipation of what some considered true, cyber-enabled, twenty-first century warfare.

But the cyber operations that unfolded immediately before and after the February 2022 invasion defied what many Western (including American) commentators were predicting. Russia didn’t deliver the cyber kill strike expected (instantly plummeting Ukraine into darkness). Ukrainian and NATO defenses were sufficient to (mainly) withstand the most disruptive FSB and GRU cyber operations, compared at least to pre-February 2022 expectations. And Moscow showed serious incompetencies in coordinating cyber activities with battlefield kinetic operations. Many experts who did not expect cyber-Armageddon per se have still been surprised by the limited impact of Russian attacks, the focus on wiper attacks (that delete a system’s data via malware) and data gathering over critical infrastructure disruptions, and apparent poor coordination between cyber and kinetic moves made by the Russian Armed Forces and intelligence services.

What, then, explains the gulf between expectations—decisive moves, cleanly executed operations, and visible results—and reality, with some operations, certainly, but the overwhelming focus on kinetic activity and far less on destructive cyber movement than anticipated? Scholars and analysts have, since February 2022, put forward several buckets of hypotheses.

Various commentators argue, as National Defense University scholar Jackie Kerr compiles and breaks down, that Russia’s weak integration of cyber into offensive campaigns was symptomatic of broader problems with Russian military preparations for full-on war; that Western observers simply overestimated Russia’s cyber capabilities; that poor coordination and competition between Russian security agencies impeded operational success; or that Ukraine’s cyber defenses have been extraordinarily robust. Some have gone so far as to attribute Ukrainian cyber defenses, backed up by Western allies and partners, as the primary reason for Russian offensive failures. Russia cyber and information expert Gavin Wilde argues that Russia focused on countervalue operations (against civilian infrastructure, to demoralize political leaders and the public) more than counterforce operations (against Ukrainian military capabilities), to little effect, “a sign of highly sophisticated intelligence tradecraft being squandered in service of a deeply flawed military strategy.”

Professors Nadiya Kostyuk and Erik Gartzke write that Russia’s full-on war on Ukraine is about territory and physical control, making physical military activity far more important than cyber operations themselves. Cyber scholar Jon Bateman argues that traditional signals jamming and Russia’s cyberattack against the Viasat satellite communications system, coupled with a chaotic slew of data-deletion attacks, may have helped Russia initially—but that cyber operations from there had diminishing novelty and impact. Russia’s poor strategy, insufficient intelligence preparation, and interagency mistrust have been presented as causes for undermining Russia’s cyber-kinetic strike coordination, too. Others argue that Russians wanted to gather intelligence from Ukrainian systems more than disrupt them, that Russia’s information-focused troops have been more optimized for propaganda than cyber operations, and that cyber scholars’ and pundits’ expectations were plain wrong given that Russia wanted to inflict physical violence on Ukraine more than achieve cyber-related effects—necessitating bombs, missiles, and guns over malware, zero days, and DDoS attacks.

In reality, of course, many factors are likely in play at once. Plenty of the above scholars and commentators recognize this multifactorial situation and say it outright (although a few do push a single prevailing explanation for the war’s cyber outcomes). However, it’s worth explicitly stressing that many factors coexist, in light of occasional efforts to provide reductive explanations for complex wartime activities and effects. Concluding that Russia is no longer a cyber threat, for instance, is wrong. While Ukraine as a country has demonstrated extraordinary will and resilience, and while Ukrainian cyber defenses have been more than commendable, explanations that place the rationale solely on formidable Ukrainian cyber defenses are likewise reductive. Taking such explanations as fact simplifies the many factors involved and can veer analysis and debates away from the policy actions that are still needed, such as continued cyber threat information sharing between the United States and Ukraine.

The above, plausible, evidence-grounded explanations are not mutually exclusive. FSB officers, rife with paranoia, conspiratorialism, and a Putin-pleasing orientation, did indeed grossly misinterpret the situation on the ground in Ukraine in 2022 and fed that bad information to the Kremlin, potentially skewing assessments of cyber options as well.

Interagency competition may very well have undermined, once again, the ability of the FSB, GRU, and SVR to coordinate activities with one another, let alone with the Ministry of Defense and Russian proxies in Belarus, and therefore hampered more effective planning, coordination, and execution of cyber operations. For example, during the war’s initial stages, elements of the SVR may very well have sought to technically gather intelligence from targets that GRU- or FSB-tied criminal groups were indiscriminately trying to knock offline or wipe with malware, thrusting uncoordinated activities into tension.

Like in every other country on earth, Russian cyber operators are additionally subject to resource constraints: A hacker spending a day on breaking into a Ukrainian energy company is a hacker not spending time on spying on expats in Germany or setting up a collaboration with a ransomware group. Competition, therefore, not just between agencies—turf wars, budget fights, who gets the primary jurisdiction over Ukraine, and so forth—but within them, over who gets to spend what time and resources targeting which entities, sit within broader Russian government calculi over cyber, military, and intelligence operations. And, among others, Russia’s overall strategy did lead to bad moves, as Wilde and others have noted, with limited effect and burning away Russian capabilities (like exploits) in the process. Recognizing these many likely factors will facilitate better analysis of where Russia stands.

The gap between the imagined, all-out “cyber war” and the past three years’ reality also begs the question of whether the right metrics were considered in the first place. As much as cyber capabilities are inextricable from modern intelligence operations, and as much as cyber and information capabilities are embedded throughout militaries around the world, war is obviously about far more than cyber as a domain. But experts studying cyber all day, every day, may fall into the unintentional trap (as anyone can) of having their area of study become the focal point of analysis in a war with many moving pieces and considerations—hence, some of the commentary anticipated Russian destruction of Ukraine to happen through code, compared to a range of military weaponry. Academic theories, moreover, of how cyber conflict will unfold in political science-modeled simulations or think tank war games may similarly fail to map to battlefield realities, such as generalizing how cyber fits into warfare without adequately considering unique contexts in a country like Russia. Layered on top of all this—in the academies, in the media, in the data and artificial intelligence (AI) era—is a frequent desire to quantify everything, too, obscuring the fact that not everything can be effectively, quantifiably measured and that counting up the number of observed Russian cyber operations and scoring them may still not get to the heart of their inefficacy. Clearly, as US and Western perspectives on Russian cyber power shift with more information and time, it is worth rethinking Russia’s future cyber power—not just for how the West can recalibrate its assumptions and size up the threats, but in how the West can prepare to act and respond in the future.

Unpacking the (cyber) nesting doll

The takeaway from comparing predictions and reality shouldn’t be that pundits are always wrong or that Russia’s cyber operations are considerably less threatening in 2025. Nor should it be that Ukraine is propped up solely by Western government and private-sector cyber defenses, and that Russia is simply waiting to unleash a devastating cyber operation to end it all.

Russia remains a sophisticated, persistent, and well-resourced cyber threat to the United States, Ukraine, and the West generally. This is not going to change anytime soon. Kremlin-spun “crackdowns” on cybercrime (arrests that were little more than public relations stunts), frenetic talk of US-Russia rapprochement, and wishful thinking about Putin’s willingness to cease subversive activity against Ukraine do not portend, as some might suggest, that the United States can sideline Russia as a central cyber problem—and focus instead on China.

The Russian government views cyber and information capabilities as key to its military and intelligence operations, and the Kremlin still has one top enemy in its national security sights: the United States. Outside the Russian state per se, a range of ransomware gangs and other hackers in Russia will continue targeting companies, critical infrastructure, and other entities in the United States, Ukraine, and the West, too. There are at least five steps US policymakers and their allies and partners should take to size up this threat—against the full scope of Russia’s cyber web and integrating lessons learned so far from Russia’s full-out war on Ukraine—and confront it head-on in the coming years.

When assessing the expectations-versus-reality of Russia’s wartime cyber operations, distinguish between capabilities and wartime execution. Clearly, Russian offensive cyber activity during its full-on war against Ukraine has not matched up against Western assumptions that envisioned a cyber onslaught that turned off power grids, disrupted water treatment facilities, and blacked out communications. Evaluating how and why Russia did not make this happen is critical to understanding Russia’s operational motives, play-by-play planning and coordination between security agencies, targeting interests, and much more. But analysts and media must be careful to avoid thinking that Russia’s cyber capabilities themselves are weak. Clearly, when Russian hackers put the pedal to the metal, so to speak—ransomware gangs targeting American hospitals, or the GRU going after Ukrainian phones—they can deliver serious results. A better approach is policymakers and analysts in the United States, as well as in allied and partner countries, breaking out Russia’s continued cyber threats across ransomware, critical infrastructure targeting, mobile-device hacking, and so on while pairing the capabilities against where execution could fall short in practice. Doing so will give a better sense of Russia’s cyber strengths and weaknesses—and distinguish between the different components of carrying out a cyber operation.

Widen the circle of analysis to include not just Russian state hackers but the broader Russian cyber web, including patriotic hackers and state-coerced criminals. Focusing Western intelligence priorities, academic studies, and industry analysis mainly on Russian government agencies as the primary vector of Russian cyber power loses the importance of the overall Russian cyber web. Putting the focus mostly on Russian government agencies also loses, as my colleague Emma Schroeder has unpacked in detail, the role that public-private partnerships have played in cyber operations and defenses in the conflict, and the opportunity to assess similar public-private dynamics on the Russian side. Conversely, making sure to consider the roles of government contractors, military universities, patriotic hackers, state-tapped cybercriminals, and other actors as described above should help to fight the temptation to treat all Russian cyber operations as top-down—and illuminate the many ways in which Russia can build capabilities, source talent, and carry out operations against the West. Understanding these actors will allow for better tracking, threat preparation, defense, and, where needed, disruption.

Avoid the trap of assuming Russia can separate out cyber and information issues from other bilateral, multilateral, and security-related topics—maintaining its hostility toward Ukraine while, say, softening up on cyber operations against the United States. Whether the US government can or cannot separate out cyber issues vis-à-vis Russia from other elements of the US-Russia relationship (e.g., trade, nuclear security), Western policymakers should avoid the trap of assuming the Russian government is currently capable, let alone willing, of genuinely and seriously doing the same: separating out its cyber activities from other policy and security issues.

The Russian government has come to view the internet and digital technologies as both weapons that can be wielded against the state and weapons to use against Russia’s enemies. In this sense, cyber operations (as well as information operations) are core not just to Moscow’s approach to modern security, military activity, and intelligence operations but, perhaps more importantly, to the Kremlin’s conceptualization of regime security as well. Paranoia and propaganda about fifth columnists (with, sometimes, one feeding the other), persistent efforts to crack down on the internet in Russia, and a continued belief that Western tech companies and civil society groups are weaponizing the internet to undermine the Kremlin, mean that the regime will not truly believe it can put “information security” on the sidelines—and that includes not just internet control but cyber operations. Policymakers must go into diplomatic and other engagements with Russia with their eyes wide open.

Continue cyber information sharing about Russia with allies and partners around the world. For years, military and intelligence scholars and analysts have referred to Russia’s actions in Georgia, Ukraine, and other former Soviet republics as a “test bed” or “sandbox” for what Russia might do in other countries. It would be a strategic, operational, and tactical mistake to think that Russian cyber operations against Ukraine are just confined to Ukraine and that two-way information sharing with Ukraine about cyber threats is a waste of time and resources. Quite the opposite: Russia’s cyber and information activities against Ukraine today can give the United States and its allies and partners critical insights into the types of capabilities and operations that could, and very well might be, carried out against them at the same time or days or months later. Whether hack-and-leak operations designed to embarrass political figures, wiper attacks designed to destroy government databases, espionage operations, or anything in between, having real-time information about Russian cyber threats will only help the United States and its allies and partners better defend their own networks and systems against hacks and attacks.

Invest in cyber defense and in cyber offense where appropriate. Persistent, sophisticated Russian cyber threats to a range of key US and allied and partner systems—military networks, hospitals, financial institutions, critical infrastructure, advanced tech companies, civil society groups—demand continued investments in cyber defense. In addition to information-sharing, the United States and its allies and partners need to continue prioritizing market incentives for companies to enhance cyber defenses along with baseline requirements for essential measures such as multifactor authentication, detailed access controls, robust encryption, continuous monitoring, network segmentation, resourced and empowered cybersecurity decision-makers, and much more. Just as the Russians clearly possess a range of advanced cyber capabilities, any number of recent operations, including against Ukraine, show that Russian operations (like those carried out by many other powers) continue to succeed with basic moves such as phishing emails. The United States and its allies and partners need to continually increase cyber defenses. And, where appropriate, the United States and its allies and partners should ensure the right capabilities and posture to carry out cyber offensive operations—including to preemptively disrupt Russian attacks (the “defend forward” euphemism). As the Kremlin is more paranoid and conspiratorial, the notion of diplomatic talks and establishing cyber redlines is less and less realistic. Active mitigation and disruption of threats, rather than relying too heavily on diplomatic meetings or endless criminal indictments, are together a more feasible approach to protecting US and allied and partner interests against Russian cyber threats in the years to come.

Conclusion

Lessons from cyber operations—and about cyber operations and capabilities—from the Russian full-on war against Ukraine will continue to emerge in the coming years. This trickle of information may slowly dissipate some of the “fog of war” surrounding the back-and-forth hacks and shed much-needed light on issues such as coordination and conflict between Russian security agencies in cyberspace.

For now, however, the issue for the United States is clear: Russia remains a persistent, sophisticated, and well-resourced cyber threat to the United States and its allies and partners around the world. The threat stems from a range of Russian actors, and it stands to continue impacting a wide range of American government organizations, businesses, civil society groups, individuals, and national interests across the globe. As wonderful as the idea of cyber détente might be, Putin’s paranoia about Western technology, Russian officials’ insistence that the internet is a “CIA project” and Meta is a terrorist organization, and military and intelligence interest in conflict and subversion against the West will not evaporate with a wartime ceasefire or a newfound agreement with the United States. These are hardened beliefs and fairly cemented institutional postures that are not going to shift under the current regime.

Rather than dismissing Russia’s cyber prowess because of unmet expectations since February 2022, American and Western policymakers must size up the threat, unpack the complexity of Russia’s cyber web, and invest in the right proactive measures to enhance their security and resilience into the future.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Brian Whitmore and Andrew D’Anieri for the invitation to write this paper and for their comments on an earlier draft. He also thanks Gavin Wilde, Trey Herr, Aleksander Cwalina, Ambassador John Herbst, and Nikita Shah for their comments on the draft.

About the author

Justin Sherman is a nonresident senior fellow with the Cyber Statecraft Initiative, part of the Atlantic Council Technology Programs. He is also the founder and CEO of Global Cyber Strategies, a Washington, DC-based research and advisory firm; an incoming adjunct professor at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service; a contributing editor at Lawfare; and a columnist at Barron’s. He writes, researches, consults, and advises on Russia security and technology issues and is sanctioned by the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

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Trump can cement his Middle East successes by calling Putin’s bluff

Frederick Kempe — Thu, 15 May 2025 22:55:04 +0000

This week has been vintage Donald Trump: disruptive, transactional, and unafraid to defy convention. From a geopolitical standpoint, the US president’s trip to the Middle East could prove to be one of the most significant of his two terms in office. That depends, however, on whether Trump now follows up with a decisive move against Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

Here’s how to look at this historic opportunity.

Trump’s surprise decision to lift US sanctions on post-Assad Syria should be seen in combination with his administration’s less-ballyhooed move to remove curbs on the sale of advanced artificial intelligence (AI) semiconductor chips to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Saudi Arabia. Both are smart moves of underappreciated consequence on a global chessboard.

First, let’s talk Syria.

Trump had nothing to do with the December 8 fall of dictator Bashar al-Assad, which came in the final days of the Biden administration, ending fifty years of repressive Assad family rule. For Trump, it also marked an unanticipated geopolitical inflection point, whose origins I explained here a few days later. It was a powerful setback to Iranian leaders and Putin, who had saved the Assad regime through direct military intervention since 2015.

By lifting sanctions now in such high-profile fashion in Riyadh, Trump has seized high diplomatic ground at low cost. He rewarded both Middle Eastern and European allies—particularly the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey—who had urged him to make the move. At the same time, he can slam the door on any Russian attempt to regain regional influence.

Moscow spent years propping up the Assad regime, but it collapsed anyway, in no small part because Russia moved military assets from Syria to support its Ukraine war. Russia didn’t just lose a client in al-Assad; it also lost global standing by giving up a Middle East foothold through which it exercised regional influence. Trump should follow up by proposing a regional security pact excluding Russia and China—and building upon his Abraham Accords.

Now, let’s talk artificial intelligence.

What do advanced computer chips have to do with Syrian sanctions relief? If the Syria move is about checkmating Russia, then the chip move is about outmaneuvering China. Do both at the same time, and you frustrate the “no limits partnership” that Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping declared in opposition to Washington back in February 2022.

President Joe Biden’s move late in his administration to limit UAE and Saudi access to the United States’ most advanced chips via the “AI Diffusion Rule” was designed to limit the technology’s proliferation to China. But in the region it was perceived as a slap in the face of countries willing to invest tens of billions of dollars in American AI companies and their infrastructure. A Gulf official told me some colleagues in his country wondered whether they had made the right bet as they confronted US restrictions, even as DeepSeek raised concerns that China over time could match or surpass US capabilities.

Both Trump moves are calculated gambles with sound logic behind them.

Regarding Syria, Trump has reckoned it’s worth taking a chance on the new leadership in Damascus and giving it a “fresh start.” That’s even though new President Ahmed al-Sharaa, who led the offensive against Assad, was designated by the United States as a terrorist alongside his Hayat Tahrir al-Sham movement, given their historic ties to al-Qaeda. Al-Sharaa renounced his ties to al-Qaeda in 2016 and now commits that his regime will be inclusive and respect all his country’s religious and ethnic sects.

The jury is out—but a good outcome is more likely with Washington involved.

Regarding artificial intelligence, Trump is betting that the Emiratis and Saudis will protect cutting-edge US technology from leaking to China, as the Biden administration feared. What he’s gained in return are arguably the deepest-pocketed investors in the world—who at the same time hope to maintain close ties to Beijing, their largest fossil fuel customer.

With an accelerating tech race this uncertain and with the stakes so high, give Trump credit for deciding rather than dithering.

A third news story this week may seem unrelated—that of the first direct peace talks between Ukrainian and Russian officials in Istanbul—but it’s not. Trump has expressed concern that Putin may be “tapping [him] along.” That’s a welcome, if belated, sign that he and his administration recognize that they are being played by a wily adversary who believes all of Ukraine will fall to him if he can buy time and neutralize US support for Kyiv.

It’s time to call Putin’s bluff amid his failure to engage seriously in peace talks that would preserve Ukraine’s sovereignty, security, and freedom to join Western institutions. Good next moves would be more sanctions against Russia, more weapons for Ukraine, and a backstop for European military support for Ukrainian security guarantees.

A Putin failure in Ukraine, coming on the heels of his Syria failure, would be a geopolitical triumph of historic consequence and perhaps even worth a Nobel Peace Prize for Trump, something I wrote about late last year.

Not long after I wrote that, a Middle East official told me that by upending the geopolitical chessboard, Trump has the opportunity to achieve unanticipated gains, particularly in great power politics. The danger, he said, was that Trump pays too little attention to the secondary consequences of his decisions. The economic cost of his “liberation day” tariffs, and his decision to back off their most extreme version, underscored both this Trump peril and his ability to self-correct.

If Trump will now also self-correct on Russia, he can again confound his critics, showing that he can be disruptive, transactional, convention-defying, and geopolitically shrewd, all at the same time. Trump shouldn’t miss this historic opportunity.

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on X: @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points newsletter, a column of dispatches from a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

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Russia’s aerial attacks on Ukrainian civilians must not go unpunished

Anastasiya Donets, Susan H. Farbstein — Thu, 15 May 2025 21:41:38 +0000

Editor’s note: This article was updated on May 16, 2025, to include additional context about different types of crimes against humanity.

While international attention focuses on the US-led effort to initiate peace talks between Russia and Ukraine, Moscow is dramatically escalating its aerial attacks on Ukrainian civilians. During the first twenty-four days of April, for example, UN officials verified 848 civilian casualties due to Russian bombardments, representing a forty-six percent increase over the same period in 2024.

Russia’s aerial offensive is a daily feature of the war that aims to terrorize the civilian population and render large parts of Ukraine unlivable. By bombing cities and energy infrastructure, the Kremlin hopes to force millions of Ukrainians to flee the country and break the will of the remaining residents to resist. Any future peace deal that sidelines this reality and fails to hold Russia to account would erode international law and set a disastrous precedent for future armed conflicts.

For the past one and a half years, the International Human Rights Clinic at Harvard Law School and the International Partnership for Human Rights have documented and analyzed Russia’s aerial attacks in Ukraine. This research is based on extensive fieldwork, witness interviews, open-source intelligence, and forensic analysis.

After reviewing hundreds of Russian drone and missile strikes, researchers narrowed the focus down to twenty-two key attacks and identified two patterns that illuminate their impact: Attacks on energy infrastructure and on densely populated areas. The legal memorandum resulting from this work concludes that Russia’s bombing campaign amounts to the crimes against humanity of extermination and persecution.

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For three consecutive winters, Russia has bombed Ukraine’s energy infrastructure in a bid to deprive the civilian population of access to heating and electricity at a time when the days are short and temperatures are typically well below freezing. These attacks have had a devastating impact on the Ukrainian power grid, with around half of Ukraine’s entire prewar energy-generating capacity destroyed by summer 2024.

As well as targeted attacks on civilian infrastructure, Russia has also launched waves of drones and missiles at Ukrainian towns and cities throughout the invasion, causing widespread destruction and loss of life. There have been a number of particularly deadly attacks in recent weeks, including a ballistic missile strike on a playground in Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s hometown, Kryvyi Rih, that killed eighteen people including nine children. On Palm Sunday one week before Easter, Russia launched a targeted strike on Sumy city center as civilians made their way to church, leaving thirty-five dead.

In addition to killing and injuring civilians, Russian aerial attacks also create untenable living conditions for the wider civilian population. They leave people traumatized and fuel intense feelings of insecurity, while disrupting access to heating, power, water, healthcare, and other essential resources.

While estimating the true toll of these attacks is challenging, the number of displaced Ukrainians indicates the sheer scale of the humanitarian crisis. According to UN data from February 2025, Russian’s invasion has forced 10.6 million people to relocate, with 6.9 million recorded as refugees living outside Ukraine. Meanwhile, around 12.7 million Ukrainians are in need of humanitarian assistance, including nearly two million children.

Russia systematically and deliberately deprives civilians of objects essential to their survival and inflicts conditions of life calculated to bring about their destruction, which constitutes the crime against humanity of extermination. Statements by Russian officials, such as calls for Ukrainians to be left to “freeze and rot,” corroborate this conclusion.

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Russia’s aerial terror campaign, as well as the Kremlin’s actions in the occupied regions of Ukraine, have intentionally deprived Ukrainians of their fundamental rights to life, health, education, and culture, thus constituting the crime against humanity of persecution. The crime of persecution requires special discriminatory intent to target Ukrainians as a distinct group. This intent can be seen in Moscow’s branding of Ukrainians as “Nazis” who must be “destroyed.” such language underscores that Russia is attacking the very existence of Ukrainians. Targeted Russian attacks on educational and cultural facilities across Ukraine are further evidence of this intent.

Additionally, throughout the regions of Ukraine currently under Kremlin control, the Russian occupation authorities are reportedly enforcing russification policies that aim to extinguish any trace of Ukrainian national identity or statehood. Thousands of Ukrainian children have been deported to Russia and subjected to anti-Ukrainian indoctrination. The International Criminal Court in The Hague has issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin in relation to the large-scale deportation of Ukrainian children.

Holding Russia accountable for the ongoing air offensive against Ukraine is particularly important as this form of prohibited total war, where everything and anything including vital infrastructure and civilian populations are targeted to achieve victory, looks set to return. Technological advances are transforming the modern battlefield to essentially include entire countries and their civilian populations. Against this backdrop, Russia’s use of long-range drones and missiles to terrorize Ukrainian civilians is likely a taste of things to come.

To date, no international tribunal has held individual perpetrators responsible for international crimes resulting from unlawful aerial attacks. The International Criminal Court has taken an important initial step by issuing arrest warrants against four senior Russian officials for their roles in attacking Ukrainian civilians and energy infrastructure, but further measures are needed.

Failure to hold Russia accountable today will fuel tomorrow’s wars and embolden Putin’s fellow autocrats to embrace similar tactics against civilian populations. It is vital to make sure long-term security is not sacrificed in order to reach some kind of compromise with the Kremlin to end the bloodshed in Ukraine. By focusing on accountability for Russia’s aerial attacks, the international community can set a meaningful precedent that could help protect civilians around the world for years to come.

Anastasiya Donets leads the Ukraine Legal Team at the International Partnership for Human Rights, an independent non-governmental organization. She was previously an assistant professor in the International Law Department at Yaroslav Mudryi National Law University in Kharkiv. Susan H. Farbstein is a clinical professor of law at Harvard Law School, where she directs the International Human Rights Clinic.

Trump’s remarkable Middle East tour is all about striking megadeals and outfoxing China

Frederick Kempe — Wed, 14 May 2025 02:04:04 +0000

There has never been a US presidential visit to the Middle East like this one.

This week, success will be measured not in conventional diplomacy, peace deals, or arms sales, although Donald Trump did make some news by lifting sanctions on the Syrian leadership, urging Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to join the Abraham Accords by normalizing relations with Israel, and agreeing to a $142 billion weapons package for Riyadh.

What sets Trump’s visit apart is the greater focus on the hundreds of billions of dollars of new Middle Eastern investments into the United States ($600 billion from Saudi Arabia alone). Gulf partners will measure success by the Trump administration’s willingness to lift restrictions on the sale of hundreds of thousands of advanced semiconductor chips to the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. Trump will also measure success by his ability to outmaneuver China in securing a closer relationship with Gulf monarchies than the Chinese have, even though Beijing is their biggest fossil-fuel customer.

It’s not that Middle East security threats or peace negotiations have gone away. There’s the war in Gaza, and this week’s release of the American hostage Edan Alexander. There are new efforts to rein in Iran’s nuclear-weapons potential through negotiations. And there’s Trump’s dream of finding a path to Saudi-Israeli diplomatic normalization (and ongoing progress toward a civilian nuclear deal with the kingdom).

However, my conversations with senior Middle Eastern officials involved in planning Trump’s trip underscored that the overwhelming focus has been on doing deals. The Trump administration would rather swim in a stream of Gulf investments than get bogged down in the region’s enduring problems.

In an extraordinary speech in Riyadh that set the tone for all that will follow, Trump said: “Before our eyes, a new generation of leaders is transcending the ancient conflicts and tired divisions of the past, and forging a future where the Middle East is defined by commerce, not chaos; where it exports technology, not terrorism; and where people of different nations, religions, and creeds are building cities together—not bombing each other out of existence.”

The contest for Gulf money is also about gaining the upper hand in the Trump administration’s ongoing trade standoff and technology contest with Beijing. That remains Washington’s overriding objective, notwithstanding the dramatic news Monday morning that the two countries would de-escalate their confrontation by reducing tariffs from 145 percent to 30 percent on the US side and from 125 percent to 10 percent on the Chinese side during a ninety-day pause for further negotiations.

In that spirit, one piece of major news that’s flying under the radar is Trump’s decision to rescind the Biden administration’s “AI Diffusion Rule,” which imposed restrictions on the export of advanced semiconductor chips to countries that included the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia—as well as India, Mexico, Israel, Poland, and others—due to the danger that they could be “leaked” to adversarial nations, in particular China.

The New York Times reported that, in conjunction with the rule change, the Trump administration is considering a deal that would send hundreds of thousands of the most advanced US-designed artificial intelligence (AI) chips to G42, an Emirati AI firm that cut its links to Chinese partners in order to partner with US companies.

“The negotiations, which are ongoing, highlight a major shift in US tech policy ahead of President Trump’s visit,” the New York Times reported, noting tension within the administration between those who are eager to advance the US trade and technological edge over China and national security officials who continue to worry about leakage of critical technologies to Beijing.

On Tuesday, the White House also unveiled deals with Saudi Arabia that included a commitment by Riyadh’s new state-owned AI company, Humain, to build AI infrastructure using several hundred thousand advanced Nvidia chips over the next five years. Humain and Amazon Web Services also announced plans to invest more than five billion dollars in a strategic partnership to build a first-of-its-kind “AI Zone” in the kingdom—part of Riyadh’s evolving ambitions to be a global AI leader.

What seems to be winning out is the Emirati and Saudi argument that if they are going to throw in their lot with the United States, and if they are to restrict their advanced technology relationships with China in the global AI arms race, Washington needs to do its part and remove the restrictions placed upon its tech.

During Trump’s first term and during the Biden administration, there was a long-running debate within the US government around whether the United States should seek to block China from getting advanced chips or instead just try to stay one or two generations ahead of the Chinese technologically. That debate has been settled: China—as demonstrated most visibly by DeepSeek—will find a way to sidestep US restrictions to make major strides. For the United States to stay a step or two ahead in the AI race, it will require new investments and partnerships. That shift is at the heart of what we’re witnessing this week in the Middle East.

Trump’s moves this week underscore his seriousness of purpose, but the battle has been far from won. Trump the aspirational peacemaker will still try to strike deals on Gaza and Iran, as uncertain as they are, but Trump the dealmaker has a clearer path to closing artificial intelligence and investment deals that this week are higher and more achievable priorities.

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on X: @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points newsletter, a column of dispatches from a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

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Drone superpower: Ukrainian wartime innovation offers lessons for NATO

David Kirichenko — Tue, 13 May 2025 21:10:46 +0000

Ever since the onset of Russian aggression against Ukraine eleven years ago, military training has been a core element of Western support for the Ukrainian Armed Forces. As Moscow’s invasion has escalated into the largest European war since World War II, the relationship between Ukraine and the country’s partners has become much more of a two-way street. While Ukrainian troops continue to train with Western instructors, it is now increasingly apparent that NATO also has a lot to learn from Ukraine.

The Ukrainian military has evolved dramatically during the past three years of full-scale war against Russia to become the largest and most effective fighting force in Europe. Innovation has played a key role in this process, with Ukraine relying on the country’s vibrant tech sector and traditionally strong defense industry to counter Russia’s overwhelming advantages in terms of both manpower and firepower. This has resulted in an army capable of developing and implementing the latest military technologies at speeds that are unmatched by any Western countries with their far more bureaucratic procurement cycles.

Ukraine’s innovative approach to defense is most immediately obvious in the country’s ability to produce and deploy a wide variety of drones. Since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, the experience of the Ukrainian army has underlined the growing dominance of drones on the modern battlefield, and has redefined our understanding of drone warfare in ways that will shape military doctrines around the world for many years to come.

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The most important tools in Ukraine’s unmanned arsenal are the country’s growing fleet of First Person View (FPV) drones. These drones in many ways function as the infantry of drone warfare. They have become a central pillar of Ukraine’s war effort, inflicting up to 80 percent of Russian battlefield casualties and making it possible to hold the line even when Ukrainian troops have found themselves starved of artillery shells.

Ukrainian production of FPV drones has mushroomed in recent years, with domestic companies also gradually moving away from an initial reliance on imported components. By early 2025, Ukraine was reportedly producing 200,000 FPV drones per month. Cheap to manufacture, they are capable of destroying tanks and other military equipment worth millions of dollars.

Russia is also relentlessly adapting to technological changes on the battlefield, creating a daily race to innovate that runs in parallel to the actual fighting on the front lines of the war. The dominance of FPV drones has led to a variety of countermeasures, ranging from the widespread use of netting and so-called “cope cages,” to increasingly sophisticated electronic blocking and the jamming of signals. In response, both Russia and Ukraine are turning to fiber optic drones that are not susceptible to jamming technologies.

As the full-scale war approaches a fourth summer, the evolution of drone tactics continues. Over the past year, Ukraine has sought to establish a 15-kilometer kill zone patrolled by drones along the front lines of the conflict, making it extremely challenging to concentrate troops for major offensive operations. The strength of Ukraine’s so-called “drone wall” defenses will be severely tested in the coming few months by Russia’s ongoing offensive. Building on Ukraine’s experience, NATO is reportedly exploring the idea of creating a “drone wall” of its own on the alliance’s eastern flank.

Beyond the front lines, Ukraine has developed an expanding fleet of long-range drones capable of striking targets deep inside Russia. This has made it possible to carry out a wide range of attacks on Russian military bases, ammunition storage facilities, air defenses, and Putin’s economically vital but vulnerable oil and gas industry. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has called the country’s growing long range capabilities “a clear and effective guarantee of Ukraine’s security.”

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Ukrainian drone innovations are also transforming naval warfare. During the first two years of the war, Ukraine used marine drones to target Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, sinking or damaging multiple warships and forcing the remainder to retreat from Russian-occupied Crimea. This remarkable success made it possible to lift the naval blockade on Ukrainian ports and reopen commercial maritime routes, providing Kyiv with a vital economic lifeline.

More recently, Ukraine has begun using naval drones as launch platforms for missiles and smaller unmanned systems. The results have been spectacular. In January 2025, missile-armed Ukrainian naval drones reportedly destroyed several Russian helicopters over the Black Sea. In another world first, Ukrainian officials announced in early May that they had shot down two Russian fighter jets using marine drones equipped with anti-aircraft missile systems.

Ukrainian military planners are now working on a range of unmanned ground systems as they look to take drone warfare to the next level. With support from the country’s government-backed defense tech cluster Brave1, work is underway to develop dozens of robotic models capable of performing a variety of combat and logistical tasks. In December 2024, Ukrainian forces claimed to have made history by conducting the world’s first fully unmanned assault on Russian positions using ground-based robotic systems and FPV drones.

Speaking in April 2025, Ukraine’s former commander in chief Valeriy Zaluzhniy underlined how his country’s use of new technologies was transforming the battlefield. “The Russian-Ukrainian War has completely changed the nature of warfare,” he commented. Zaluzhniy predicted that the wars of the future would be won by countries that focus their resources on the development of drones, electronic warfare, and artificial intelligence. “It is obvious that victory on the battlefield now depends entirely on the ability to outpace the enemy in technological development,” he noted.

Western leaders and military commanders are clearly taking note of the remarkable progress made by the Ukrainian Armed Forces since 2022. Many are now incorporating Ukraine’s unique battlefield experience into their own programs, while NATO members including Britain and Denmark are reportedly already receiving training in drone warfare from Ukrainian military instructors. This is likely to be just the beginning, as more countries seek to benefit from Ukrainian expertise.

For many years, it has been customary to view Ukraine as being almost entirely dependent on Western aid and know-how for its survival. This was always an oversimplification; it is now hopelessly outdated. In reality, today’s Ukraine is a drone superpower with an innovative domestic defense industry that can provide its NATO allies with important lessons in the realities of twenty-first century warfare.

David Kirichenko is an associate research fellow at the Henry Jackson Society.

An #ACFRONTPAGE EVENT—Raymond, who served as the first chief of space operations of the US Space Force, talks about maintaining the US military edge as the space domain becomes increasingly contested and congested.

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China is catching up in the race to integrate space capabilities with the rest of its military, according to John W. Raymond, a retired US general who served as the first chief of space operations of the US Space Force.

Raymond, speaking at an Atlantic Council Front Page and Commanders Series event on Thursday ahead of receiving the Council’s Distinguished Military Leadership Award, explained how for decades, the United States had the advantage. But now that “others have had a front row seat and have watched that advantage,” he added, “now they’re doing the same thing.”

“If you look at what China has built, they now have a very capable space-enabled military that can threaten our traditional joint warfighting partners,” he warned. “We have to have the ability to protect those forces.”

Regardless of China’s advancements, Raymond said that the United States is still “the best of the world in space, especially with our allies and partners at our side.” In weighing the likelihood of further international partnerships on space, Raymond said he is hopeful. “I think space is a domain that helps unite countries globally.”

Below are more highlights from the event, moderated by Breaking Defense Senior Space Reporter Theresa Hitchens, where Raymond talked about securing the space domain through deterrence and working with US partners and the private sector.

Costs and benefits

Raymond, who served as chief of space operations from 2019 to 2022, said that over time, he has seen the space domain change “significantly,” becoming more congested, contested, and competitive.
As security threats—including nuclear threats—become more elevated, Raymond said space will play an important role in maintaining an integrated deterrence. “If we can deter conflict from beginning or extending into the space domain, then I think we’ve got a real shot at deterring conflict from spilling over into other domains,” he said.
In fortifying deterrence in space, Raymond explained, the United States “really focused on denying benefits” of any aggressive action, for example by making its space architecture more resilient to attacks. But “if you’re going to really deter, you also have to be able to impose costs,” he said. “It’s about protecting our land forces, our air forces, and our maritime forces.”

All systems go

Raymond reflected on the rise of the commercial space industry, noting that as the Space Force has partnered more and more with the private sector, it has seen the speed of its innovation rise, costs decline, and its mission capability widen.

At the same time, there are differences between the Space Force and industry when it comes to profit and loss and time cycles. “There’s lots of challenges,” Raymond said. “But if we can work through this . . . I think there’s advantage there to be had.”

The Space Force is looking to implement acquisition reforms, given that smaller companies have had trouble navigating the processes to procure additional capabilities and technologies. But the issue, Raymond said, “actually starts well before acquisition.” It lies with “force design,” or the structure of the United States’ technological arsenal.

For example, if the Space Force acquires a small number of expensive satellites that take many years to build, rather than procuring many lower-cost satellites that sit in various orbits, “you’re not going to do that fast . . . and you’re probably not leveraging the small new innovative commercial space industry,” he said.

Raymond raised concern about the increasing number of objects—space debris—floating through space, in addition to satellites. With that, and the Space Force’s role as “space traffic control” for the world, “domain awareness is critical,” he said. But, he added, the United States is thinking about how to shift that role to a civilian agency. He agreed with the shift, urging the Space Force to “focus military efforts on military types of missions.”

Katherine Golden is an associate director on the Atlantic Council’s editorial team.

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Putin’s parade cynically exploits WWII to justify his own criminal invasion

Peter Dickinson — Thu, 08 May 2025 02:13:09 +0000

Dozens of foreign leaders are expected in Moscow on May 9 for the largest international event in the Russian capital since Vladimir Putin launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine more than three years ago. Officially, they are gathering for a military parade to mark eighty years since the World War II victory over Nazi Germany, but it is already apparent that the shadow of Russia’s current war in Ukraine will loom large over the entire spectacle.

The guest list for Friday’s Victory Day parade on Red Square reflects the dramatic geopolitical realignments that have taken place since 2022, and underlines the widening rift between Putin’s Russia and the democratic world. Prior to the invasion of Ukraine, Putin’s showpiece annual parade had been attended by many Western leaders including US President George W. Bush. This year, however, the guest of honor will be Chinese President Xi Jinping. He will be joined by the Brazilian president along with a host of Central Asian and African leaders. The sole representative from the European Union will be Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico.

Visiting dignitaries will be treated to a bold demonstration of modern Russia’s military might. The mood is expected to be far detached from the kind of somber tones more typically associated with World War II memorials elsewhere. Friday’s parade has been been carefully choreographed to emphasize Russian strength while projecting Putin’s supreme confidence in eventual victory over Ukraine.

The link to today’s war will be hammered home by the participation of numerous Russian military units accused of committing war crimes in Ukraine. Putin may also choose to surround himself with alleged war criminals from the ranks of his invading army, as he did last year. In his official address, it will be genuinely shocking if Putin does not attempt to draw direct parallels between the struggle against Nazi Germany and his own ongoing war in neighboring Ukraine.

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Even without the involvement of Russian troops fresh from the front lines of the current war, it would be virtually impossible to separate Putin’s parade from the Kremlin propaganda justifying the invasion of Ukraine. Ever since Russia first set out to subjugate Ukraine more than ten years ago, the Kremlin has portrayed its escalating invasion as a continuation of the World War II fight against Germany, with Ukrainians cast in the role of modern-day successors to the Nazis. Despite an almost complete lack of evidence to support these absurd and obscene claims, the “Nazi Ukraine” narrative continues to resonate among a Russia population that has been utterly saturated in an extreme form of World War II mythology that often borders on religious fanaticism.

From the very first years of his reign, Putin has sought to place the Soviet Union’s World War II experience at the very heart of modern Russia’s national identity. For the Kremlin, this emphasis on the immense suffering and ultimate triumph of the Soviet war effort has served as the ideal ideological antidote to the horrors of Stalinism and the humiliations of the Soviet collapse. It has proved a highly effective strategy, helping to rebuild Russia’s battered national pride and giving new meaning to the country’s twentieth century totalitarian trauma.

Putin’s war cult has centered around Victory Day, which has emerged over the past 25 years as by far the most important holiday on the Russian calendar. Many outside observers assume Victory Day always enjoyed similar prominence, but that is not the case. In fact, Stalin himself discouraged commemorations and made May 9 a working day in 1947. It remained so until the mid-1960s, when Victory Day was declared a public holiday. Nevertheless, there was none of the pomp and fanfare currently associated with the anniversary of the Nazi surrender. In the 46 years between the end of World War II and the fall of the Soviet Union, Moscow hosted a grand total of just four Victory Day parades.

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Putin’s cynical exploitation of World War II has also shaped Russian rhetoric on the international stage. This has been most immediately apparent in relation to Ukraine, which Kremlin propaganda has consistently portrayed as a Nazi state. Russia’s lurid claims have proved remarkably resistant to reality, with even the 2019 election of Jewish candidate Volodymyr Zelenskyy as president of Ukraine failing to force a change in tactics. Instead, Putin and other leading Kremlin officials have resorted to ever more ridiculous mental gymnastics as they have struggled to explain how a supposedly Nazi country could elect a Jewish leader. In one particularly notorious incident during the first months of the invasion, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov dismissed Zelenskyy’s Jewish roots by declaring that Adolf Hitler also had “Jewish blood.”

When Putin announced the full-scale invasion of Ukraine on the fateful morning of February 24, 2022, it came as no surprise that he identified “denazification” as one his two key war aims. The true meaning of this chilling phrase has since become abundantly clear; “denazification” is actually Kremlin code for “de-Ukrainianization,” and reflects Putin’s end goal of a Ukraine without Ukrainians.

In areas of Ukraine that have fallen under Kremlin control since the start of the invasion, the occupation authorities are systematically wiping out all traces of Ukrainian history, culture, and national identity. Thousands of children have been abducted and subjected to indoctrination in a bid to rob them of their Ukrainian nationality, while anyone seen as potentially loyal to Ukraine has been detained and dispatched to a vast network of prisons where torture is reportedly routine. Europe has not witnessed atrocities on this scale since World War II.

For decades, most European countries have marked the end of World War II with solemn memorial services while collectively vowing “never again.” Under Putin, Russians have come to embrace an altogether more menacing form of militant remembrance accompanied by the unofficial slogan “we can repeat it.”

Putin has already succeeded in weaponizing the memory of World War II to consolidate his grip on power, garner domestic support for his expansionist foreign policy, and dehumanize his enemies. He is now poised to use this week’s Victory Day parade in Moscow to legitimize the criminal invasion of Ukraine among his foreign guests and place it in the same context as the fight against Hitler. This is staggeringly disrespectful. It is also historically illiterate. If anyone today is guilty of echoing the crimes of the Nazis, it is Putin himself.

Peter Dickinson is editor of the Atlantic Council’s UkraineAlert service.

US cybersecurity policy has a critical blind spot: the absence of reliable outcome metrics that can inform policymakers about whether the digital ecosystem is becoming more secure and which interventions are driving progress most effectively. Despite years of strategies, regulations, and best-practices campaigns, the field of cybersecurity metrics has room to grow, and policymakers still lack answers to fundamental questions. How much harm are cybersecurity incidents causing? Are things getting better or worse? Which policies deliver the greatest return on investment for reducing realized harm and the risk of future harm?

This report identifies two core problems holding back progress: first, the unknown state of the system, meaning policymakers cannot empirically describe how secure or insecure the digital landscape currently is; and second, unmeasured policy efficacy, which prevents policymakers from comparing which interventions are most effective at improving security and reducing harm. The result is a policymaking environment heavily reliant on intuition, anecdote, incomplete data, and proxy measures—all unsustainable for a domain with such systemic and escalating risks and so much security investment. To address these challenges, the report proposes a reframing of cybersecurity metrics along two dimensions:

Treating cybersecurity as a complex system—acknowledging that incident outcomes result from dynamic, probabilistic interactions between policies, technologies, adversaries, and users.
Focusing on harm as the key outcome metric—shifting emphasis from internal system attributes (e.g., the number of vulnerabilities discovered) to the real-world impacts of cyber incidents, such as financial losses, operational disruptions, and physical damage.

The report then explores the current limitations of available metrics, illustrating how wide-ranging estimates of incident costs and inconsistent data collection methods hamstring policymakers. It outlines the difficulty of measuring and interpreting harm data at scale due to factors such as silent failures, complex indirect costs, and underreporting, but it argues that such challenges are not insurmountable and that a desire for perfect metrics cannot impede progress toward better ones. Finally, the paper offers two actionable recommendations for near-term progress:

Strengthen existing reporting requirements (e.g., CIRCIA, SEC disclosures) to include consistent, updated measures of incident impact.
Centralize responsibility under a single federal entity to aggregate, analyze, interpret, and publish cybersecurity harm data across sectors.

While perfection in cybersecurity metrics may be impossible, measuring harms is the most direct way to track progress and guide investment and the most critical metric to bolster policymakers’ toolkit. Without such measurement, the United States risks continuing to navigate a complex, evolving system with an incomplete map.

Introduction

A recurring theme in cybersecurity policy is the failure to quantitatively describe the end state toward which it aims, or even to enumerate what metrics should be measured to that end. How many incidents occur, how much damage do they cause, and to whom? If these are the metrics to consider, what is their desired level and by how much does cybersecurity need to improve to get there? And if not these metrics, then which?

In rare moments when policymakers clearly define cybersecurity outcomes, they tend toward absolutes of dubious achievability; for example, “prevent catastrophe” and “defeat ransomware.”¹ Even complex legislation and national strategies,² while attempting to alter the incentives around building and using technology, rarely offer more than a glancing, qualitative description of what they strive for—a far cry from the clear, numerical state measurements and milestones in other spheres of public policy, such as inflation and unemployment rates for the Federal Reserve.

Even though more empirically developed policy fields such as economics still face routine crisis, US cybersecurity policymakers must adapt to the dizzying complexity, rate of change, and potential impact of failure in today’s digital systems by taking exactly that step toward better measurement. It is critical to understand the current state of cybersecurity, set quantitative goals for its improvement, and assess the efficacy of government policies against those goals. “Intuition alone is insufficient to manage a complex system,” as former National Cyber Director Chris Inglis put it.³ Without specifying target outcomes, there is little incentive to establish critical baseline measures in the first place. Identifying the effectiveness of specific policies at improving security and the cost of their implementation is a step even farther, and the quantitative toolkit required for the US government to make that step has not yet been created. The novelty and dynamism of the digital domain mean that policy missteps will happen, but without that toolkit, identifying which remedies fall short and which succeed—let alone by how much—will remain extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible, all while the rapid integration of digital systems across all levels of society increases the impacts and risks of cyber incidents.

This paper aims to reboot and reorient a long-simmering debate around cybersecurity metrics for the policy community. It starts with context about the state of and need for better cybersecurity measurement by discussing two central and related problems created by the field’s empirical immaturity:

Insufficient cybersecurity metrics mean that government cannot empirically assess, across the digital domain, whether cybersecurity is good or bad, improving or deteriorating.
Insufficient cybersecurity metrics also complicate the task of evaluating and prioritizing security practices and policies based on their efficacy.

After discussing these two problems, this paper offers two framings for cybersecurity metrics critical to improving their usefulness to policymakers: treating cybersecurity as a complex system and measuring harms. The guiding thesis of this paper is that the harms, in the broadest sense, caused by cyber insecurity are the most important outcome metrics for policymakers. Harms here refers to the bad things caused by cybersecurity incidents, from direct loss of money to intellectual property theft, from the compromise of national security information to the erosion of competitive economic advantage. Metrics for those harms at the macro level are an essential tool for policymakers seeking to manage and improve cybersecurity. After all, cybersecurity policymakers’ driving mandate is to reduce realized harms and the risk of future harm as much as reasonably possible, whether through increasing economic competitiveness, securing critical infrastructure, imposing costs on adversary activities, managing strategic competition, or any number of methodological priorities.

This paper does not claim a lack of effort in policy or technical circles at quantifying security, and indeed elements in both communities have been trying admirably for quite some time.⁴ Moreover, even without a broad base of empirical data, policymakers make much use of threat intelligence, observed trends, risk assessments, and other sources of evidence. Instead, this paper suggests a starting point for identifying, measuring, and analyzing cybersecurity outcomes with the goal of reorienting and rebooting these debates rather than arriving at a final answer. After discussing cybersecurity as a complex system and outcomes in terms of harms, this paper analyzes different approaches to interpreting outcome data. Finally, this paper proposes initial policy steps toward improving cybersecurity outcome data.

Importantly, these recommendations do not aim at some final architecture for perfect cybersecurity statistics—such policy systems take time, trial, and error to create in any field. Instead, they combine practical changes and a broader policy reframing to move the needle of cybersecurity policy toward realistic empiricism, while recognizing the risks of both cynicism and perfectionism. Empirically characterizing cybersecurity at the macro level and the efficacy of specific security policies is difficult but not hopeless. And while no policy system for metrics is perfect—debates in more matured fields such as public health, law enforcement, and economics abound—that does not render them all useless.

Two problems

Unkown system state: What is “the problem”?

The first issue created by insufficient cybersecurity metrics is that they leave policymakers with no concrete way to describe the current degree of harm caused by insecurity. More than a decade ago, Dan Geer listed several fundamental cybersecurity questions offered in the context of a conversation with a firm’s chief information security officer (CISO): “How secure am I? Am I better off than this time last year? Am I spending the right amount of [money]? How do I compare to my peers?”⁵ These questions are as important for policymakers, and as difficult for them to answer, as when originally posed in 2003.⁶ The primary US cyber policy coordinator, the Office of the National Cyber Director (ONCD) argued in 2024 that they were not answerable at all. A Government Accountability Office (GAO) report on the 2023 National Cybersecurity Strategy (NCS) criticized the NCS for its lack of “outcome-oriented performance measures,” as well as ignoring “resources and estimated costs,” to which the ONCD responded that “such measures do not currently exist in the cybersecurity field in general,”⁷ and the claim rings true. Current cybersecurity metrics and the field’s state have, after at least two decades, failed to provide policymakers with ways to answer the foundational question “how are we doing at cybersecurity?” at the highest level.

And yet, a general intuition that the current state of US cybersecurity is suboptimal animates industry, government, and the public alike. Headlines dominated by costly cybersecurity incidents and predictions that things will deteriorate without drastic change feed this perception. For example, former US Deputy National Security Advisor Anne Neuberger summarized data from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) data as suggesting that “the average annual cost of cybercrime worldwide is expected to soar from $8.4 trillion in 2022 to more than $23 trillion in 2027.”⁸At appreciable fractions of global GDP, these are dire numbers that all but mandate extreme intervention. The hypothesis behind this metric is that the current amount of harm caused by cyber incidents could be reduced by interventions less costly than the consequences of their absence. But intervention against what, and how? Testing and refining that thesis with quantitative data is a critical first step too often overlooked—how much harm do cyber incidents cause? How much would it cost to implement recommended interventions? How much harm would they prevent? Is the cost of preventing security incidents actually lower than the costs that those incidents impose? And above all, if the current level of harms is deemed unacceptable, what would be considered acceptable? Current metrics are unable to provide answers at a scale useful to policymakers, leaving them with no baseline measures against which to judge policy efficacy.

In absence of this key outcome data, cyber policy conversations frame metrics as, at best, an after-action exercise for validating efficacy, rather than the first critical step in defining the problems they seek to solve. Even then, empirical impact assessments are rare. The NCS’s “Assessing Effectiveness” section underlines this, providing just one paragraph on the strategy’s final page, with a key progress report that failed to materialize before the change in administration.⁹ The document’s accompanying implementation plan (the National Cybersecurity Strategy Implementation Plan, or NCSIP) reduces assessment to determining whether proposed policies were enacted and whether a budget for them was created, and nothing more.¹⁰ These are useful measures of output for policymakers, but do little if anything to track empirically how implementing the NCS changes the cybersecurity landscape; the strategy largely forgoes assessing its external impact, focusing instead on implementation—a familiar state for cyber policy, which more often concerns itself with adoption rates and completion progress than tangible effect on security outcomes.¹¹ If policymakers cannot, from the outset and at a high level, measure how they are doing at cybersecurity, all follow-on policy rests on a flawed foundation and it will be difficult to empirically demonstrate success.

Policymakers must use cybersecurity metrics as the foundation for characterizing the status quo, identifying specific problems with it, and shaping solutions. When the GAO asks what outcomes would demonstrate the success of the NCS, the ONCD should be able to respond by pointing to the very issues and data motivating the creation of NCS in the first place. The usefulness of measuring incident costs is relatively uncontroversial and has long frustrated policymakers—see for example a 2020 CISA study on just that problem and its associated challenges.¹² However, both cybersecurity policymaking writ large and efforts to imbue it with better metrics would benefit greatly from approaching metrics as a step toward problem definition first, then as solution assessment. Otherwise, the logical chain of cyber policymaking is broken, producing unbounded solutions with no clear, quantified statement of the problems they hope to solve, and thus no clear outcomes to strive for and measure success against.

Policymakers and practitioners are right to lament the dearth of cybersecurity statistics to inform their work, but they cannot afford to wait for the empirical field to mature on that same decades-long trajectory—they must proactively work to define, gather, and respond to cybersecurity metrics. It is unlikely that government can avoid a central role in gathering macroscale metrics and wait for the data they need to be developed for them. Monetary policy is guided by and assessed against the Consumer Price Index (CPI) and the unemployment rate, both of which are measured by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. National crime statistics are collated and analyzed through the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program. The Center for Disease Control’s National Center for Health Statistics gathers a variety of public health metrics from across the country, as well as globally. Each of these programs is the result of decades of iterative policymaking and partnerships with experts in industry, academia, state and local governments, and civil society. The federal government has the clearest incentives and best means to gather metrics on a scale sufficient to describe the full ecosystem and assess policy efforts to shape it. Policymakers do require better cybersecurity metrics to guide them, but they have an active role to play in creating those tools.

For cybersecurity, some nascent policies might provide useful insight on data gathering and starting points for more matured, coordinated programs: for example, the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) database,¹³ the upcoming implementation of the Cyber Incident Reporting for Critical Infrastructure Act (CIRCIA),¹⁴ the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) material cyber incident reporting requirements,¹⁵ and so on. All either currently or soon will gather data on cybersecurity incidents, but there is little consensus about what to measure and how, and worryingly little progress toward data collection at the ecosystem scale.¹⁶ For a young field—cybersecurity dates back to the 1970s as a defined field at the earliest, whereas econometrics began developing in the early 1930s—that status quo is understandable, but untenable.¹⁷

Unmeasured efficacy: What interventions address “the problem” best?

Second, insufficient cybersecurity metrics leave policymakers without measures of how effective specific policies are, meaning they can do little to prioritize or update policy interventions based on metrics. Policymakers are in the business of battling with long-perceived market inefficiencies that lead firms to under- and mis-invest in cybersecurity.¹⁸ For now, they do so through recommendations and requirements about security practices and reporting for certain sectors, products, and entities. The past few years have seen a flurry of movement in cyber policy, from the National Cybersecurity Strategy and its dozens of implementation objectives to agency-led efforts such as CISA’s Secure by Design (SBD) Initiative and the SEC’s new cyber incident reporting requirements, several critical executive orders, and even an effort designed to harmonize the many existing and forthcoming regulations.¹⁹

Choosing the initiatives to pursue and those to reinvent or discard requires an understanding of their ultimate impact on cybersecurity outcomes. Determining which policies are effective—when measured against the cost of their implementation—requires quantifying the costs of incidents that they prevent or mitigate. A firm’s ability to decide which SBD principles to prioritize necessitates understanding their cost and efficacy. And yet there are only early efforts at ranking these practices by their effectiveness, which challenges any attempt to identify the most urgent security practices or product security features to implement.²⁰ In short, no one knows what the best thing to do is, whether that be policymakers deciding what practices to require or industry deciding which to implement, only a great number of security practices that are probably good to try.

This is more than simply an optimization challenge. Seemingly potent security controls can lead to unexpectedly poor outcomes, especially in a complex system. For example, the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) prescribes security practices for federal agencies and their contractors, and industry writ large often uses its guidance documents as a starting point for security policies even when a company’s compliance is not required. One such publication, NIST SP-800-63B, offers recommendations on digital identity systems, including guidance about account credentials. Past versions of the document suggested the use of complex characters (a mix of numbers, capital and lowercase letters, and special symbols) and frequent password resets to prevent attackers from using dictionaries of common passwords to quickly guess their way into account access. The thinking was that complex characters would require attackers to brute force passwords (i.e. guess all possible combinations of characters in a password), and that the frequent rotation of credentials would limit the window of time in which attacks could guess a password successfully, since attackers would need to start over after every rotation. The reality was different. Users rotated between similar passwords, often repeating old ones, and attackers developed dictionaries to quickly guess at common, easily remembered uses of complex characters like the suffix “123!” and substituting numbers for letters.²¹ In other words, the intuition behind the practice was sound, but the ecosystem (users, here) reacted in a way that made the recommended practice insecure and costly.

Without metrics to provide an empirical understanding of the tradeoffs that recommended security practices create in practice, policymakers remain at risk for similar situations. For example, inconvenient authentication requests from multi-factor authentication (MFA) might lead users to share credentials in an insecure manner; rewriting software into notionally memory-safe programming languages might be effective at improving security but more costly than the incidents it prevents; or zero trust architectures might fail to meaningfully improve security across the digital ecosystem so long as they are not adopted past some unknown threshold. Without improving cybersecurity metrics, there is simply no way to know how new practices interact with the full ecosystem.

Reframing cybersecurity metrics

To address the connected problems cited above, policymakers must take two critical steps to reframe and develop their approach to empirical cybersecurity: to treat the digital domain as a complex system, and to measure incident harms as their key guiding outcome metric. These are closely related—understanding causality within a complex system and making predictions based on the arrangement of that system at any point in time are immensely difficult. Instead, focusing on the system’s outcomes (here, incident harms) over the system’s specific characteristics at a point in time (e.g., the adoption rate of memory-safe languages) will help policymakers avoid the trap of claiming progress in shaping behaviors without producing evidence that said behaviors have improved the cybersecurity status quo.

Treating cybersecurity as a complex system

Treating the cybersecurity landscape as a complex system-of-systems is key to assessing its status quo. This is the fundamental mandate for policymakers—to reduce bad cybersecurity outcomes across the board,²² and not just for the handful of firms that can measure their own implementation and outcomes well. Accordingly, visibility into as much of the ecosystem as possible is critical. A systems approach also helps policymakers deal with the domain’s complexity, which might lead to unforeseen interactions between policy interventions, technology design choices, and cybersecurity outcomes. The digital ecosystem has two key features that, unaccounted for, could mislead policymakers significantly as they approach improving its security: probabilistic incidents and extraordinary dynamism.

First, there is no deterministic formula to predict whether a cybersecurity incident will occur, when, or with what severity. An entity with extraordinary security practices might find themselves the target of an extremely sophisticated adversary or might remain critically vulnerable because of one simple oversight. Equally, a firm with poor security practices might avoid compromise by pure luck. While this probabilism is somewhat self-evident, it means that data with too small a sample size over too short a duration could significantly mislead policymakers. For example, observing fewer bad outcomes for a specific sector might indicate that changes to security practices in that field are stumping attackers who are now comprising fewer targets in general, or instead that attackers have simply moved on to another sector for any number of reasons without a net change in the ecosystem. There are hard limits on the usefulness and broad applicability of data provided on or by a handful of firms over a few years, and yet the majority of cybersecurity data available to the public today is often presented in the form of corporate annual reports.

Second, the ecosystem is constantly and rapidly changing and interacting with itself. Adversaries in the digital ecosystem are adaptive, the technologies they target change daily, the incentives of firms building technologies and those using them are in constant flux, and so on. Dynamism and unexpected interactions have consequences for measurement. By way of example, recall the NIST password guidance example cited earlier. All else remaining equal, passwords immune to dictionary attacks and changing too often to be brute forced would reduce account compromises, but all else does not stay equal in a complex system. The guidance changed user behavior in way that made accounts more vulnerable instead. Similarly, the relationships between security practices and outcomes are not immutable—techniques that stop would-be attackers one year might do little to slow them down the next as they refine their tactics and develop new tools. Capturing data on how outcomes in the entire digital domain shift over time is critical if policymakers hope to understand and manage it as a complex system. This should increase the urgency with which policymakers strive to better measure cybersecurity outcomes, as the relative lack of historical data means it will take time for newly gathered data to be of significant use.

To illustrate these dynamics in practice, consider the straightforward government-led disruption campaigns that the National Cybersecurity Strategy recommended,²³ in which law enforcement organizations or the military attack the infrastructure of malicious actors to prevent their campaigns from causing harm. Fewer attackers carrying out less malicious activity should be a boon to the ecosystem, and the US government (with international partners’ assistance) accordingly increased the pace of its disruption operations through a combination of sanctions, prosecutions, and offensive cyber activities as part of its Counter Cybercrime, Defeat Ransomware strategic objective.²⁴ And yet, Microsoft measurements appeared to show that the volume of ransomware attacks nearly tripled in the final months of 2024.²⁵ Without vastly improved cybersecurity data, it is difficult what to make of these two facts. It might be that disruption campaigns mitigated some attacks, tempering cybercrime even as it continued to grow—if for example, without those disruption operations, ransomware attacks might have quadrupled. Alternatively, the expensive government interventions might have had little impact on the efforts of attackers who could easily buy or write new malware, procure new command and control servers, and move on to less well-defended targets. The disruption campaigns in this model might simply have prevented attacks against specific targets but shifted the attention of the attackers to undefended victims without a net effect. A third possibility is somewhere in between—disruption campaigns might work to reduce incidents at the ecosystem scale but with little return on investment. The thwarted incidents might’ve been drops in the ocean of cyber malfeasance not meriting the cost of disruption. Without macro-scale data or insight into specific adversary decision-making, there is no real way to know which of these models applies over a relatively narrow timeframe, let alone historical data.

The graphic below illustrates a high-level mapping of the digital ecosystem as a complex system, sorting potential metrics into three categories: inputs, attributes, and outcomes. Inputs are forces, policies, and decisions that are largely external to the digital ecosystem, though no doubt shaped by it. These are the incentives that drive decision making within the ecosystem, its technological design and development, and so on. By far the two most dominant inputs are market incentives and policy choices, which drive investment, design, and decision making within the cyber ecosystem. Attributes are measures or descriptors of the ecosystem itself. Within the ecosystem, firms, attackers, defenders, IT infrastructure, and connected real-world systems all interact at a vast scale and rapid pace in a blend of technical, social, and economic subsystems. These attributes provide the vast majority of cybersecurity metrics available today—for example, vulnerability counts and severity, incident frequency, and the adoption rate of various security practices and products. Parsing the ecosystem and its specific components—its attributes—provides much utility, especially to specific entities within it, but that analysis must be taken with a grain of salt. The ecosystem is constantly changing, its various components interact with different degrees of coordination, and how those forces balance out in the long run is difficult to understand, let alone predict. This system-of-systems produces outcomes in the form of benefits (the efficiency, productivity, and innovation enabled by the digital ecosystem) and harms—the material damage caused by incidents.

Figure 1

The goal of this mapping is to highlight how policymakers like those at the ONCD, CISA, or similar are interacting with the digital ecosystem at a different scale than firms and individuals. Many of the metrics useful to an individual firm are attributes, and they take on different meanings and behaviors for those concerned with system-of-systems security. For instance, vulnerability counts might tell a cloud provider what problems they have to fix, how often it creates those problems for itself, and how much effort to invest in patching. However, for policymakers, vulnerability counts indicate some vague blend of deficiency in technology design and success in vulnerability detection. Moreover, at the ecosystem scale, attributes interact with each other and outcomes in unpredictable or unknown ways—for example, it is unclear how attacker behavior adjusts to security practice changes at scale and with what effect on outcomes.

Importantly, this framing is not a call to anticipate all possible interactions or comprehensively measure all attributes. Such an approach to the management of a complex system is impractical. Rather, the complex system framing should highlight the importance of outcome measurements as a way for policymakers to navigate complexity or at least evaluate its consequences for the full set of stakeholders under their remit.

Measuring harms as outcomes

Taken together, the two abovementioned issues—an unknown system state and interventions with unmeasured efficacy—put policymakers in a difficult position. It is as if the Federal Reserve lacked data on unemployment rates and inflation while, at the same time, not knowing which policy tools most effectively influence those economic outcomes and how the rest of the economy reacts to their use. The task of assessing efficacy is difficult in the absence of data measuring realized harms. The Federal Reserve could not begin to know whether its interest rate hikes tempered inflation if the Bureau of Labor Statistics did not calculate the CPI. The cybersecurity arena resembles this, with policy more often being a response to singular incidents and anecdotes than to hard data, and with myriad vendors offering cybersecurity solutions in what could be charitably described as “a market for silver bullets” while at the same time producing much of the data currently available to inform policymaking.²⁶ Past incidents and subjective anecdotes are helpful for policymakers, to a certain extent, and security products are not all ineffective. However, heuristics and hunches are only half a solution in managing the complexity of the cyber ecosystem. Metrics are the other critical and conspicuously absent component, and the first step to developing solid, ecosystem-wide metrics is figuring out what to measure and how.

The harms caused by cyber insecurity are the most important outcome metrics for policymakers, and measuring those harms at the macro level is essential if policymakers are to meaningfully manage and improve cybersecurity. Reducing bad cybersecurity outcomes in the form of harms, and mitigating the risk of future harm, is the implicit guiding principle of cybersecurity policy, and therefore measuring those harms broadly is the only path toward rigorous, empirical cybersecurity policymaking.²⁷ Nonetheless, key policymaking offices in the United States seem so far unable to agree on what a cybersecurity outcome even is. The GAO has suggested measuring tallies of CIRCIA reports—i.e., creating raw counts of incidents reported from specific sectors—and the frequency of government disruption campaigns; but both are attributes, not outcomes.²⁸ Few, if any, would disagree that reducing the harm caused by cyber incidents is progress, if not the entire point. Focusing on harms as outcomes in this complex system framing is critical to answering the core question about cybersecurity policy’s progress for several reasons:

Harms as outcomes do not depend upon untested hypotheses about the relationships between attributes or their impact on outcomes.
Harms are distinct from the dynamic system-of-systems that produces them.
Harms help reduce the breadth of units of measurement when compared to attribute metrics.
Harms are more salient to the public than the specific security flaws that lead to them.

First, harms are independent of hypotheses about cybersecurity and key to evaluating them. While there is good reason to believe that many cybersecurity practices and policies improve security and thus reduce harms, the empirical evidence backing these beliefs—let alone describing the amount of harm reduction they are responsible for—is vanishingly thin, and sometimes proves those practices to be ineffective or even harmful.²⁹ It may be that currently identified best cybersecurity practices are indeed effective, but without knowing how the adoption of a practice interacts with the entire digital ecosystem, policymakers cannot make informed decisions about regulations or incentives. For example, MFA-secured accounts are almost certainly more secure than those backed by single passwords, all else remaining equal, but if the security offered by MFA requires a critical threshold of ecosystem adoption,³⁰ great effort would be wasted if policymakers were content with an adoption rate below this unknown threshold, and even more would be lost if the cost of pushing adoption past that threshold exceeded the losses prevented by the greater security such implementation might lead to. The fact that any given practice can make a given computer system more secure is necessary but insufficient to urge its broad adoption precisely because of both the possibility for unforeseen interactions within the cybersecurity ecosystem and the general lack of information about costs and benefits at the macro scale that single system adoption provides, especially when that system might be connected to a critical power plant or something far more innocuous.

Second, harms are distinct from the system that produces them, rather than descriptive of it. The complex cyber system, as discussed above, contains billions of machines and users interacting and changing at incredible speed across and above the entire planet. While understanding this ecosystem and its internal attributes at any point in time is useful, the fundamental question for policymakers is how much harm its insecurity enables (relative to the benefits it provides). Any description of the ecosystem—for example, the point-in-time adoption rate of security best practices—still requires outcome data to be meaningful, and as attackers find new routes to compromise, the relationship between best practices and the outcomes they influence are ever changing. In other words, ecosystem attributes alone are insufficient metrics. Attributes do not describe the cost of insecurity, but rather the probability of future harm, and even then unreliably until causal links between attributes and outcomes are better understood.

This reduces, over time and with no further context, the usefulness of measures of specific security practice adoption or of the reduction of the number of certain vulnerabilities.³¹ For instance, in data about the types of memory safety vulnerabilities patched at Microsoft during an eight year period, use-after-free vulnerabilities dominated about 50 percent of vulnerabilities in 2015, compared to just 15 percent in 2022.³² While this data represents discovered rather than exploited vulnerabilities, the corollary for either observation is the same—the digital system changes, so attacker practices change, and thus defensive measures that worked one year can fail to protect a target entirely the next. In this example, a naive analysis might argue that the reduction in use-after-free vulnerabilities over seven years is a sign of security improvement at Microsoft. This conclusion does not account for the concurrent increase in almost all other kinds of memory safety vulnerabilities, nor does it discriminate among which types or individual vulnerabilities led to the most harm. Microsoft’s specific work to reduce use-after-free vulnerabilities succeeded, but what that meant for Microsoft’s cybersecurity outcomes remains unclear from the data gathered. It might be that use-after-free vulnerabilities were critical to attackers, and their elimination required a costly pivot to other means. It might be that the discovery and exploit techniques used for use-after-free vulnerabilities were easily converted to other exploit paths. Or it might be that use-after-free vulnerabilities were never abused by attackers that much to begin with. Without outcome data, it is difficult to know (as with MFA) if the cost of reducing entire classes of vulnerabilities might exceed the value of reduced harms up to a certain threshold of coverage.

Third, many harms can be expressed in the common unit of dollars—from identity theft caused by data breaches to the value of stolen intellectual property and the costs imposed by system downtime for critical infrastructure providers. Such monetary losses are often measured or measurable by entities that fall victim to cyber incidents as they quantify incurred costs. Harms can be categorized relatively exhaustively:

Financial loss—such as ransomware payments, lost revenue, directly stolen funds, and the costs associated with an incident.
Physical harm—including loss of life and physical injury.³³
System downtime or disruption—such as the time that a water treatment plant is taken offline, the time that a hospital operates at reduced capacity, or the inability to conduct government functions.³⁴
Compromised information—including stolen intellectual property, compromised passwords, and emails stolen from government networks.

Harms can accumulate toward other effects too, often greater than the sum of their parts. These might include reputational damage to a firm or state that experience a sufficient number of harmful incidents, psychological harm to a population subject to repeated cyber incidents, the loss of strategic advantage when an adversary has compromised sufficient amounts of national security information, or similar. This last item, compromised information, highlights a critical nuance. While the act of stealing information might in itself be a harm—e.g., damaging the reputation or share price of a firm subject to a massive data breach or revealing to an adversary information about an upcoming operation—more often it creates the risk for future harm dependent on what the adversary does with that information. Stolen information might give an adversary insight into system flaws or offensive tooling they can later exploit, provide them with credentials or personally identifiable information (PII) that they can abuse later, expose intellectual property that can be leveraged for economic gain at the original owner’s expense, or similar. Many other attributes of the complex cyber system contribute to the risk of future harm, from adversary prepositioning operations to the availability of data backups, or the average speed of patching critical vulnerabilities. Nonetheless, for policymakers, understanding how risks of future harm can manifest requires analysis of realized harms.

Overall, systematically measuring harms caused by cybersecurity failures can significantly contribute to understanding how much more or less secure the digital ecosystem is while helping to simplify the complexity and dynamism of the ecosystem, balancing and contextualizing the current focus on its attributes.³⁵

The cyber metrics state of play

Policymakers today are not well equipped with the tools to help them describe the system state of cybersecurity over time, nor to measure and rank the efficacy of various interventions and practices in improving that state. Focusing cybersecurity metrics on harms as the key outcome metric for cybersecurity policy helps address these shortcomings while sufficiently navigating the ecosystem’s complexity. However, cybersecurity metrics as of now are not up to the formidable task of outcome measurement. This section will detail the challenges of gathering and interpreting data on cybersecurity outcomes and the reality on the ground.

Despite the many industry reports and headlines discussing or predicting global and national costs of cybersecurity incidents,³⁶ no studies seek to examine differences between reported and forecasted losses, few estimates exhaustively describe their methodologies, cost estimates range significantly, and few predictions are adjusted for changes in the underlying ecosystem.³⁷ Critically, there is no single source that systematically tracks incident harms across a wide swathe of the ecosystem.

For example, the 2024 IMF Global Financial Stability Report estimated that reported 2022 cyber incident losses were around $5 billion,³⁸ while the FBI’s IC3 report put 2022 losses for just the United States at $10.3 billion.³⁹ Statista, meanwhile, reports $7.08 trillion in losses for 2022 and projects $12.43 trillion in 2027, while then Deputy National Security Advisor Anne Neuberger’s figures were $8.4 trillion and $23 trillion for the same years.⁴⁰ Two other reports, from Cybersecurity Ventures and Comparitech, estimate 2022 losses at $6.9 trillion and $42.8 billion respectively.⁴¹ Importantly, only the FBI IC3 report and IMF report seem based entirely on confirmed incidents, though Comparitech’s might aggregate similar such reporting. Rather than any specific estimate being wrong, the key issue is that few if any sources use the same methods or scoping, with differences in what is even considered a cyber incident. Additionally, many of these reports. or similar ones such as Verizon’s Data Breach Investigations Report, originate in industry, presenting concerns about long-term availability in the event that a company removes old reports or decides to stop publishing new ones, as well as the potential for conflicting business incentives to influence methodology and reporting.

One 2019 study of the costs of cybercrime summarizes well how these estimates can be further misconstrued, writing “in our 2012 paper, we scaled UK estimates up to global ones…and presented them in a table. We warned that ‘it is entirely misleading to provide totals lest they be quoted out of context…’ Yet journalists happily ignored this and simply added up the columns, proclaiming large headline figures for global cybercrime—which were essentially twenty times our estimate of UK income tax evasion, as this was the largest figure in the table.”⁴²

There are several systematic incident reporting processes in the United States that could usefully gather outcome data, but they are not fully realized. The SEC recently began requiring the reporting of material cyber incidents from publicly traded companies, which had already occasionally disclosed such incidents in their filings. However, of the nearly two hundred cyber incident reports (required or not) available at the time of this piece’s writing, just seven contain cost estimates.⁴³ CIRCIA, which has yet to be fully implemented, seems intent on capturing incident impacts, though the tight timeframe within which to report an incident (seventy-two hours) likely means that accurate outcome measurement will have to rely on updates to initial reports.⁴⁴ While CIRCIA incident report updates are mandatory in its most recent proposal, whether they will capture outcome data remains to be seen, as full implementation will not begin until 2026.

Other useful incident reporting processes include (but are not limited to):

FISMA, which requires federal civilian executive branch (FCEB) agencies to report incidents to CISA.⁴⁵
The US Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) Significant Cybersecurity Incident Reporting Requirements, which covers mortgagees approved by the Federal Housing Administration.⁴⁶
The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act requires a variety of financial institutions to report data breaches to the Federal Trade Commission.⁴⁷
The Federal Communications Commission’s updated data breach notification rules, which cover telecommunications carriers.⁴⁸
The Department of Defense’s (DOD) requirements for Defense Industrial Base contractors to report all cyber incidents involving “covered defense information.”⁴⁹
The Department of Health and Human Services’ Breach Notification Rule.⁵⁰
A tapestry of data breach reporting requirements across all fifty states and several US territories, as well as other sector-specific federal requirements both proposed and implemented.⁵¹

Together, these reporting requirements should notionally cover all publicly traded companies in the United States, critical infrastructure providers, FCEB agencies, and many smaller entities under state laws, with some entities facing multiple reporting requirements. Even more reporting requirements exist in the intelligence community, among defense contractors and recipients of federal grants, and others, while law enforcement captures at least an appreciable number of incidents targeting individuals through the FBI’s IC3. Given this sample would represent a massive proportion of the US attack surface, it should provide a sufficient starting point for systematic cybersecurity outcome data, if properly arranged to gather such data and coordinated to arrive at central clearing agency for analysis. Even then, disincentives to accurate reporting have long plagued cybersecurity,⁵² and the challenges in arriving at useful estimates of harms are significant.

Difficult numbers

Even with a robust reporting system tailored to capture incident costs from all the above sources while avoiding disincentives that lead to underreporting—a far cry from the current status quo—the task of estimating incident outcomes is not easy, with two notable hurdles standing out: silent failures and complex costs.

Silent failures refers to the fact that in cybersecurity, when information is stolen, it often remains present on the victim’s system, which makes noticing the compromise and its outcomes challenging.⁵³ Take for example the extraordinary lag time between the deployment of malicious SolarWinds Orion updates in late March of 2020, and the discovery of the intelligence gathering campaign in December 2020.⁵⁴ Attackers might have had access to target systems for at least nine months, with no “missing” data tipping off defenders. Such intelligence gathering is a fundamental feature of the cyber domain, and ensuring most of these compromises are discovered is ultimately a technical challenge, but it remains a key limiter on the value and feasibility of large-scale outcome data. Barring a complete technical solution, analysts will always need to assume that their data conveys an incomplete picture of ecosystem outcomes, especially when information theft is such a fundamental part of cybersecurity incidents.

Complex costs refer to the difficulties of quantifying many of the harms caused by cybersecurity incidents. Broadly, estimating the costs incurred by operational downtime, ransomware payments, and similar incidents is a tractable task for victim entities. However, attaching a dollar figure to harms resulting from stolen information is difficult, even when the extent of that compromise is definitively known, especially where that information might contribute to significant compromise but only when attached to other information (as in the case of linking phone numbers to email addresses to undermine MFA protections). Valuable information might include intellectual property, PII, information with national security value, account credentials, or similar. The quantity of information stolen by attackers and the sensitivity of that information can provide some insight into the risks of future harms, but precise measurement is difficult, especially when not all stolen data is abused successfully or when the abuse serves national security or intelligences ends, which are particularly hard (if not impossible) to quantify.

Complex costs also refer to other difficult-to-notice harms. For instance, the largest source of risk in the cyber ecosystem is its interconnection with effectively all layers of society: a cybersecurity incident can cause direct and immediate harms to any given sector with sufficient dependence on IT systems, affecting a huge number of entities even when only one entity was compromised. Even the most well-architected system for counting the costs of cyber incidents will struggle to accurately track total harms across sectors. These secondary costs can represent the bulk of harm caused by an incident but might remain buried in non-cyber reporting systems, if reported at all. Take, for example, the recent CrowdStrike outage, which led to flight cancellations globally as well as operational disruptions across many sectors. While one report from Parametrix Insurance estimated that the incident carried a net cost of $5.4 billion, tracking those costs all the way through different sector verticals is difficult.⁵⁵ The same Parametrix report assessed losses of $860 million for airlines, but the losses reported by just Delta Air Lines in an SEC filing amounted to at least $500 million.⁵⁶ This is not to criticize any particular estimate, but rather to highlight both the consequences of inconsistent methodologies and the challenges of tracking costs not funneled through established cyber incident reporting requirements. To the latter, Delta’s disclosure came through Item 7.01 of a Form 8-K for reporting specific material events, effectively tagging it as a massive, unexpected cost. Generally, cyber incident disclosures through 8-K forms have been made through Item 8.01 for non-material incidents and the SEC’s newly created Item 1.05 for material ones. In other words, accurately capturing all costs from cyber incidents is key to understanding their true impact, as cyber risk is generally a function of the critical role of systems connected to digital infrastructure. At the same time, such estimates are difficult to make and are difficult to capture by singular reporting mechanisms because of their appearance across all sectors.⁵⁷

Reading the curves: Interpreting outcome data

If policymakers were able to measure with reasonable accuracy and precision the costs of cybersecurity incidents, they could use that data to begin addressing the two outstanding challenges with cybersecurity policy and metrics: assessing efficacy (or return on investment) and benchmarking system state. However, even with accurate measurement, interpretation of such data is not straightforward.

First, measuring return on investment requires the ability to answer two immediate, practical questions: How much harm does a specific practice reduce? How much do we spend where? While the latter is more tractable—expenditure is recorded somewhere, though general IT spend and cybersecurity spend can be difficult to separate in practice—at the micro level, robust outcome data would enable the study of return on investment for money spent implementing specific cybersecurity practices by revealing how much they reduced harms downstream. Heuristically, policymakers approach cybersecurity similarly, striving to maximize breadth and depth of impact against expenditure, but without a robust empirical body of evidence to back them. Such metrics would go a long way in helping prioritize the many different security controls recommended by both government and industry against their observed return on investment. There are some nascent efforts to carry out this analysis, including through CISA’s revitalized Cyber Insurance and Data Analysis Working Group,⁵⁸ but they are primarily working with insurance claims data, which might not capture the full extent of costs given the above challenges in measurement and insurers’ focus on policyholder claims versus net costs to claim holders (aside from the fact that they mainly have data on their customers rather than the ecosystem at large). Broadly, outcome data is the key to making attribute data about security practice implementation meaningful. It is the best way to point policymakers to both the best solutions and the right problems—for example, whether the harms of cybercrime results more from social engineering at scale or exploited vulnerabilities.

The second and more foundational application of complete outcome data is to give policymakers a macro-level picture of the size and nature of the cybersecurity challenge they face—and thus what scale of investment makes sense and what trends in success or failure at addressing cyber risk are worth pursuing. The first question that comes to mind when faced with net annual harms data is whether cybersecurity is improving or deteriorating. Interpreting outcome data is far from straightforward, and there are three broad approaches one might take, each with immediate policy consequences:

Uncontrolled metrics
Controlled metrics
Catastrophic risks

Uncontrolled metrics: More is worse

Uncontrolled metrics refers to simply using total harms figures without further context. Regardless of which existing source one uses, annual tallies of cyber incidents and their costs seem to be increasing, implying that, far from getting better, the state of cybersecurity is on the decline year by year at a more-than-linear rate. This framing of outcome data can be observed on the cover image of Verizon’s 2023 Data Breach Investigations Report,⁵⁹ raw estimates of annual total incident costs such as Neuberger’s figure referenced above, and the GAO’s suggestion that ONCD use aggregated ransomware incident and loss data to assess the efficacy of the National Cybersecurity Strategy: incidents are more common year after year, as are best estimates of harms.⁶⁰ These are intuitive interpretations—more incidents causing more harm is bad—and, if the numbers are accurate, they do capture some objective truth about what occurs in the digital ecosystem. Such interpretations, however, are immature in comparison to other fields of empirical policymaking. Are harms growing per incident? Are there simply more incidents? Or are we getting better at observing and counting more of the incidents that occur?

Controlled metrics: More is relative

A controlled metrics interpretation argues that meaningful cybersecurity metrics must account for the ecosystem’s rapidly changing context, which uncontrolled metrics omit. Few other fields use uncontrolled metrics but instead account for changes in population or similar underlying variables. For example, public safety policy cares more about violent crime per capita than overall violent crime because a larger population in and of itself means more potential criminals and victims and therefore more crime in absolute terms. Similarly, the Federal Reserve cares more about the unemployment rate than raw unemployment counts. Parallel arguments could reasonably apply to cybersecurity—each passing day brings more potential cyber criminals, victims, and devices online as internet connectivity increases, and there are more dollars at stake in the digital ecosystem as more business grows intertwined with IT infrastructure. All else being equal, one could reasonably expect these trends to increase the overall number of cybersecurity incidents and losses year to year because, even if security remains constant, there are more people and dollars online. One 2015 study by Eric Jardine made such an argument and normalized cybercrime figures with data on the size of the internet and its userbase. In doing so, it found that most metrics improved year over year, or at least did not worsen.⁶¹ However, determining a reasonable denominator for cybersecurity is more challenging than in other fields where population is usually sufficient.⁶² Financial harms can befall individuals, but also abstract entities like businesses or larger constructs like national economies. It is most likely that a rigorous approach to analyzing harms data will use different denominators for different harms. For instance, the cost of individually targeted cyber fraud works well per capita, while business ransomware payment costs would be more reasonably adjusted by gross domestic product or a similar dollar figure. These control metrics also highlight well the continued importance of attribute measures. This paper does not argue that attribute metrics are irrelevant, but that on their own, they can mislead policymaking in eliding a key part of the complex system—its external impacts.

Catastrophic risk: More to come

A third interpretation of outcome data borrows from the risk management experience of the financial sector by considering the role of catastrophic events. If there are a sufficient number of extremely costly cyber incidents, interpreting time-series outcome data into the future becomes difficult, especially given the relative novelty of the field, which leaves analysts with a limited historical record to study.⁶³ Similar to the economic growth preceding the Great Recession in 2008, years of improved outcomes might be interpreted as improved cybersecurity, but they might mean little if a significant catastrophe lies just around the corner. Unfortunately, without robust outcome data about past events, evaluating the possible severity, variance, and frequency of cyber catastrophes is challenging, particularly when potential harms might change suddenly with large shifts in geopolitical circumstance (e.g., the risks of cyber catastrophe might grow dramatically when two countries enter a formal war with each other).

One dataset sought to do just that by assembling a list of multi-firm cyber incidents estimated to have resulted in a loss of at least $800 million, inflation adjusted to 2023.⁶⁴ The dataset counted twenty-five total catastrophic events, with the worst costing $66 billion, and the average event reaching $14.8 billion. The author concluded that cyber catastrophes are not as significant a risk as often made out based on this data and the observation that these costs are only fractions of the costs that natural disasters can incur. However, things might not be so simple. The cost estimates used are subject to the same measurement challenges mentioned above, which the author notes well: “Unfortunately, many estimates come from popular media sites and corporate blogs.”⁶⁵

More specifically, the dataset omits the SolarWinds incident of 2019, for which one analysis estimates $100 billion in costs just for incident response across the thousands of victim organizations alone, not even accounting for the harms resulting from abuse of the information stolen during the intelligence gathering campaign, which for the reasons stated above is immensely difficult to quantify.⁶⁶ There are also reasonably costly single-firm incidents such as the Equifax breach, omitted by methodology—direct costs to the firm topped $1.7 billion, not to mention the costs of whatever identity theft and fraud may have resulted.⁶⁷

Other data from the IMF about the distribution of cyber incidents by cost shows that, even if cyber catastrophes are less costly than natural disasters, they do present similar irregularity, with most incidents being mild while a handful reach disastrous extremes.⁶⁸

Another method for assessing whether an ecosystem is prone to catastrophic events looks for near misses—almost-incidents that, fully realized, would have been catastrophic and were avoided by chance rather than systematic prevention. In an article about interpreting outcome data, Geer describes how relatively trivial changes to a 2001 malware could have allowed it to block 911 emergency services across the United States, which would certainly qualify as a catastrophic event, and one with difficult-to-quantify psychological harms on top of loss of life.⁶⁹ Moreover, given the rapid growth of the cyber ecosystem and its increasingly fundamental role in the functioning of all levels of society, Geer’s warning in the paper should temper claims that cyber catastrophes are not that significant: “this proof (that we escaped such an attack by dumb luck) puts to bed any implication that every day without such an attack makes such an attack less likely.”⁷⁰ In other words, he argues that cyber catastrophes might not have been comparatively as extreme as financial crises or natural disasters, but only so far, and the potential for extreme incident grows as more real-world services rely on relatively homogenous digital systems. This interpretation of cyber metrics holds two key lessons. First, attribute measures can be extremely useful in highlighting the potential for future catastrophe. Just as measures of debt ratios, leveraged capital, liquidity reserves, and more can help analyze financial catastrophes, measures of concentrated dependency, cloud systems resilience, vulnerability patch time, and more can describe the risk posture of the digital ecosystem. Second, while outcome metrics should not be used in an attempt to predict future harms, they are still key to establishing historical record of cyber incidents and catastrophes and understanding the true scale of cyber harms. Again, outcome metrics should not supplant attribute metrics, but instead, at the macro scale, are key for policymakers trying to understand and manage cybersecurity risks and harms.

Starting construction: Two changes

The result of the many measurement challenges and shortfalls in cybersecurity is a set of fundamental unknowns for cybersecurity policymakers. At the ecosystem scale, the cybersecurity status quo remains unmeasured, as does the efficacy of security practices at reducing harms, while a plan to address those quantitative lapses does not yet exist. These obstacles go well beyond making policy optimization difficult. Moreover, as the fundamental question of the size of the cybersecurity problem goes unanswered, the gap in historical outcome data increases and unproven policy and investments grow more entrenched. These challenges should not, however, prompt paralysis. More measurement, even if imperfect, can improve the empirical toolkit of policymakers, and there is good reason to believe that some policies and security interventions, even if not empirically shown, have improved cybersecurity.

With all this in mind, the US government should use the abundant reporting requirements already in existence to begin assembling a robust cybersecurity metrics system comparable to the already established thirteen federal statistical agencies serving the fields of public economics, education, agriculture, public health, and more.⁷¹ Building such infrastructure and pulling meaningful analysis from the data it assembles will take time, but waiting only delays a fundamentally necessary process. Additionally, developing a new policy lens is as important as creating new policy mechanisms, and questions about measurable efficacy and return on investment should become commonplace in policy conversations. Below are two small recommendations focused on existing reporting processes and offices.

Counting harms

Given the importance of gathering outcome data both to understanding the cyber ecosystem and to making useful already-gathered attribute data, existing reporting requirements should incorporate impact estimates more rigorously. CISA’s final implementation of CIRCIA should include explicit provisions requiring at least one update to incident reports that includes a revised estimate of incident impact and notes on the methodology used to reach that estimate. This information will help CISA weight incidents by their impact and provide a large inflow of outcome data from all critical infrastructure sectors. Similarly, the SEC should update its guidance on cyber incident reporting to include similar requirements—Item 1.05 reports in 8-K filings should be updated at least once with impact estimates from the reporting company in a similar format as above and updated when the reporting entity arrives at a final estimate. Given Item 1.05 reports only apply to material cyber incidents, they already require the information leading to the determination of materiality, which already should assess incident impact, although there is ongoing debate about the difference between a material event and an event with material impact.⁷² Thus, not only should this data be generated already by the reporting company, but it is precisely the kind of information relevant to the shareholders that the item is designed to inform.

Like CIRCIA and SEC filings, all federal reporting requirements should include provisions mandating that outcome metrics and information be updated as an incident unfolds and an affected entity revises its estimates. Altogether, with tweaks to existing or forthcoming reporting requirements, the federal government can gather incident outcome data from publicly traded companies, critical infrastructure entities, DOD contractors, FCEB agencies, and others, creating a significant sample of high-quality outcome data without the need for new reporting regimes.

One office to count them all

Given the potential volume of outcome data from a wide variety of reporting sources and regulations, meaningful interpretation of that information requires that it flow to one entity, similar to how the Bureau of Labor Statistics collates price data from hundreds of goods and services in calculating the Consumer Price Index.⁷³ Fortunately, the US Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Homeland Security Statistics (OHSS) is already on a course to assume this central role, with plans to report on cybersecurity incidents shared its way as a result of reforms to FISMA in 2025. This office should be enlarged and report annually on cybersecurity outcomes based not just on FISMA, but the myriad reporting systems through federal and state government. In collaboration with CISA’s Office of the Chief Economist, OHSS should focus on:

Developing a process for aggregating reports from disparate requirement systems with different timelines and data requirements
Anonymized reporting on outcome data sourced from reporting systems that do not publicly reveal individual incidents, such as CIRCIA and FISMA for FCEB branches
Researching and developing approaches to the gathering, analysis, and interpretation of cybersecurity harm data
Recommending consistent scoping definitions for cybersecurity incidents, cyber-relevant harms, and similar components of the ecosystem

Conclusion

Cybersecurity policy has matured significantly in recent years, but as steady as the flow of executive orders, legislation, strategy, and guidance documents has been, cyberattacks have continued with shocking consistency and significant impact. With the previous administration witness to the aftermath of the SolarWinds campaign, Colonial Pipeline, the United Healthcare hack, two Microsoft Exchange compromises, Volt Typhoon, and now Salt Typhoon—to name only a few—the question, “Are we getting better at cybersecurity?” is far from an academic exercise in empiricism.

The state of metrics for cybersecurity policy is insufficient to meet two core functions today: to assess the status quo of the cybersecurity ecosystem at the macro level, and to provide insight into the relative efficacy of different security controls, practices, and requirements at the micro level. Without these dual capacities, cybersecurity policymakers are left with intuition and risk assessments to guide them. These are necessary but insufficient tools for approaching the monumental task of improving cybersecurity, which will require measuring the harms caused by cyber insecurity as key outcome metrics, and understanding those harms as the product of a complex, dynamic system is critical to meaningfully interpreting them. Unsolved challenges to interpreting outcome data, assuming its successful measurement, remain. Knowing how much harm cybersecurity incidents have caused over a given timeframe is a start toward understanding trends in improvement, but nuanced questions about what “better” and “worse” look like, and what the data can and cannot reveal about the future still persist. In the near term, the need for this data to be systematically gathered at all and for continued progress toward interpreting it demand consistently reported outcome measures and some degree of centralization within the federal government of that information. Those embarked on improving cybersecurity can no longer afford to guess as to the best remedies for insecurity and hope that they work once implemented—policymakers will benefit immensely from measuring the harms caused by cyber incidents to see how well their remedies have worked, too.

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank the many contributors to this piece, including peer reviewers Sara Ann Bracket, Alex Gantman, Stefan Savage, Emma Schroeder, Nikita Shah, and Adam Shostack. Thank you also to Amelie Chushko, Nancy Messieh, Donald Partyka, and Samia Yakub for their work editing, designing, and producing this report.

About the author

Staff

Stewart Scott

Deputy Director

Cybersecurity Disinformation

Our work

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2 “Secure by Design: Shifting the Balance of Cybersecurity Risk,” Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, October 25, 2023, https://www.cisa.gov/sites/default/files/2023-10/SecureByDesign_1025_508c.pdf; “Bicameral, Bipartisan Leaders Introduce Legislation to Strengthen Federal Cybersecurity,” US Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, July 12, 2023, https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/media/dems/bicameral-bipartisan-leaders-introduce-legislation-to-strengthen-federal-cybersecurity/.

3 Katherine Golden, “National Cyber Director Chris Inglis: We Need to Become a ‘Harder Target’ for Our Adversaries,” New Atlanticist, August 4, 2021, https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/national-cyber-director-chris-inglis-we-need-to-become-a-harder-target-for-our-adversaries/.

4 Dan Geer, “Measuring Security,” (Metricon 1.0, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, August 1, 2006), http://all.net/Metricon/measuringsecurity.tutorial.pdf; “Cost of a Cyber Incident: Systematic Review and Cross-Validation,” Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, October 26, 2020, https://www.cisa.gov/sites/default/files/publications/CISA-OCE_Cost_of_Cyber_Incidents_Study-FINAL_508.pdf; “Cross-Sector Cybersecurity Performance Goals (March 2023 Update)” Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, March 2023, https://www.cisa.gov/sites/default/files/2023-03/CISA_CPG_REPORT_v1.0.1_FINAL.pdf.

5 Geer, “Measuring Security.”

6 Dan Geer, Kevin Soo Hoo, and Andrew Jaquith, “Information Security: Why the Future Belongs to the Quants,” IEEE Security & Privacy 1, no. 4 (July-August 2003): 24–32, https://doi.org/10.1109/MSECP.2003.1219053.

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9 “National Cybersecurity Strategy,” The White House.

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11 “Cybersecurity: National Cyber Director Needs to Take Additional Actions.”

12 “Cost of a Cyber Incident.”

13 “Federal Bureau of Investigation Internet Crime Report 2023,” Federal Bureau of Investigation Internet Crime Complaint Center, April 4, 2024, https://www.ic3.gov/AnnualReport/Reports/2023_IC3Report.pdf.

14 “Cyber Incident Reporting for Critical Infrastructure Act of 2022 (CIRCIA),” Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, https://www.cisa.gov/topics/cyber-threats-and-advisories/information-sharing/cyber-incident-reporting-critical-infrastructure-act-2022-circia.

15 Cybersecurity Disclosure, US Securities and Exchange Commission (statement of Erik Gerding, Director of SEC’s Division of Corporation Finance), December 14, 2023, https://www.sec.gov/newsroom/speeches-statements/gerding-cybersecurity-disclosure-20231214.

16 “Federal Bureau of Investigation Internet Crime Report 2023;” “Cybersecurity: National Cyber Director Needs to Take Additional Actions.”

17 Olav Bjerkholt, “On the Founding of the Econometric Society,” Journal of the History of Economic Thought 39 (March 6, 2017): 175–98, https://doi.org/10.1017/S105383721600002X.

18 Ross Anderson, “Why Information Security Is Hard – An Economic Perspective,” Keynote remarks, Seventeenth Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, New Orleans, LA, 2001, 358–65, https://doi.org/10.1109/ACSAC.2001.991552.

19 Jason Healey, “What the White House Should Do Next for Cyber Regulation,” Dark Reading, October 7, 2024, https://www.darkreading.com/vulnerabilities-threats/what-white-house-next-cyber-regulation; “Request for Information on Cyber Regulatory Harmonization; Request for Information: Opportunities for and Obstacles To Harmonizing Cybersecurity Regulations,” Office of the National Cyber Director, August 16, 2023, https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/08/16/2023-17424/request-for-information-on-cyber-regulatory-harmonization-request-for-information-opportunities-for.

20 Daniel W. Woods and Sezaneh Seymour, “Evidence-Based Cybersecurity Policy? A Meta-Review of Security Control Effectiveness,” Journal of Cyber Policy 8, no. 3 (April 7, 2024): 365–83, https://doi.org/10.1080/23738871.2024.2335461.

21 “The New NIST Guidelines: We Had It All Wrong Before,” Risk Control Strategies, January 8, 2018, https://www.riskcontrolstrategies.com/2018/01/08/new-nist-guidelines-wrong/.

22 The precise meaning of “reduce” will be discussed later on.

23 “National Cybersecurity Strategy,” The White House.

24 “US and UK Disrupt LockBit Ransomware Variant,” US Department of Justice, February 20, 2024, https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/us-and-uk-disrupt-lockbit-ransomware-variant.

25 Matt Kapko, “Microsoft Reveals Ransomware Attacks against Its Customers Nearly Tripled Last Year,” Cybersecurity Dive, October 16, 2024, https://www.cybersecuritydive.com/news/microsoft-customers-ransomware-attacks-triple/730011/.

26 Alex Gantman, “NDSS 2022 Keynote – Measuring Security Outcomes,” April 27, 2022, by NDSS Symposium, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGD93mJ2ZAU.

27 Stewart Scott, “Counting the Costs in Cybersecurity,” Lawfare, October 9, 2024, https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/counting-the-costs-in-cybersecurity.

28 “Cybersecurity: National Cyber Director Needs to Take Additional Actions.”

29 Woods and Seymour, “Evidence-Based Cybersecurity Policy?”

30 With enough unsecured accounts still accessible, attackers are able to avoid MFA protections entirely.

31 While these are not the only challenges that such measures face, they are the most definitional ones. For example, measures of known vulnerability struggle to account for unknown vulnerabilities or the potential for detected vulnerabilities to in reality be harmless given their context.

32 David Weston, “The Time Is Now – Practical Mem Safety,” Slide presentation, Tectonics 2023, San Francisco, CA, November 2, 2023), https://github.com/dwizzzle/Presentations/blob/master/david_weston-isrg_tectonics_keynote.pdf.

33 There is often understandable distaste at lumping in physical harm with damages measured in dollars, but fortunately few deaths have ever resulted directly from cyberattacks. Moreover, a combined approach of tallying fatalities, financial damage, and injuries is how the impact of natural disasters is already measured. For more, see “How Can We Measure the Impact of Natural Disasters?,” World Economic Forum, March 16, 2015, https://www.weforum.org/stories/2015/03/how-can-we-measure-the-impact-of-natural-disasters/.

34 Scott, “Counting the Costs in Cybersecurity.”

35 Wasted in the sense that such efforts do not answer the macro question, “How secure are we?” These are useful measures in other respects, as enumerated below.

36 “Cybercrime To Cost The World $9.5 Trillion USD Annually In 2024,” eSentire, https://www.esentire.com/web-native-pages/cybercrime-to-cost-the-world-9-5-trillion-usd-annually-in-2024; Steve Morgan, “Cybercrime To Cost The World $10.5 Trillion Annually By 2025,” Cybercrime Magazine, November 13, 2020, https://cybersecurityventures.com/cybercrime-damages-6-trillion-by-2021/; “Unexpectedly, the Cost of Big Cyber-Attacks Is Falling,” The Economist, May 17, 2024, https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2024/05/17/unexpectedly-the-cost-of-big-cyber-attacks-is-falling.

37 At the time of writing, the author was unable to find any source that revised predictive estimates up or down based on new policies, technologies, or geopolitical circumstance.

38 “The Last Mile: Financial Vulnerabilities and Risks,” International Monetary Fund, April 2024, https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/GFSR/Issues/2024/04/16/global-financial-stability-report-april-2024.

39 “Federal Bureau of Investigation Internet Crime Report 2023.”

40 “Estimated cost of cybercrime worldwide 2018-2029,” Statista, https://www.statista.com/forecasts/1280009/cost-cybercrime-worldwide.

41 Morgan, “Cybercrime To Cost The World $10.5 Trillion;” Paul Bischoff, “Cybercrime Victims Lose an Estimated $714 Billion Annually,” Comparitech, December 5, 2023, https://www.comparitech.com/blog/vpn-privacy/cybercrime-cost/.

42 Ross Anderson et al., “Measuring the Changing Cost of Cybercrime,” The 18th Annual Workshop on the Economics of Information Security, Boston, MA, June 3, 2019, https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.41598.

43 “Cybersecurity Incident Tracker,” Board Cybersecurity, last updated March 3, 2025., https://www.board-cybersecurity.com/incidents/tracker/.

44 “Cyber Incident Reporting for Critical Infrastructure Act (CIRCIA) Reporting Requirements,” Department of Homeland Security Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency,, April 4, 2024, https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2024/04/04/2024-06526/cyber-incident-reporting-for-critical-infrastructure-act-circia-reporting-requirements.

45 “Federal Information Security Modernization Act,” Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, https://www.cisa.gov/topics/cyber-threats-and-advisories/federal-information-security-modernization-act.

46 Richard J. Andreano, Jr., “FHA Requiring Reporting of Significant Cybersecurity Incidents,” Consumer Finance Monitor, May 24, 2024, https://www.consumerfinancemonitor.com/2024/05/24/fha-requiring-reporting-of-significant-cybersecurity-incidents/.

47 “FTC Safeguards Rule: What Your Business Needs to Know,” Federal Trade Commission, last updated December 2024, https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/ftc-safeguards-rule-what-your-business-needs-know.

48 “Data Breach Reporting Requirements,” Federal Communications Commission, February 12, 2024, https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2024/02/12/2024-01667/data-breach-reporting-requirements.

49 “Defense Industrial Base (DIB) Cybersecurity Portal – Cyber Incident Reporting,” Defense Industrial Base (DIB) Cybersecurity Portal, https://dibnet.dod.mil/dibnet/#reporting-reporting-2.

50 “Submitting Notice of a Breach to the Secretary,” US Department of Health and Human Services, last reviewed February 27, 2023, https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/breach-notification/breach-reporting/index.html.

51 “State Data Breach Notification Chart,” IAPP, March 2021, https://iapp.org/resources/article/state-data-breach-notification-chart/.

52 Seema Sangari, Eric Dallal, and Michael Whitman, “Modeling Under-Reporting in Cyber Incidents,” Risks 10, no. 11 (October 22, 2022): 200, https://doi.org/10.3390/risks10110200.

53 Dan Geer, “Prediction and The Future of Cybersecurity,” Remarks, UNC Charlotte Cybersecurity Symposium Charlotte, NC, October 5, 2016, http://geer.tinho.net/geer.uncc.5×16.txt.

54 Trey Herr et al., Broken Trust: Lessons from Sunburst, Atlantic Council, March 29, 2021, https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/in-depth-research-reports/report/broken-trust-lessons-from-sunburst/.

55 “Crowdstrike’s Impact on the Fortune 500: An Impact Analysis,” Parametrix, 2024, https://www.parametrixinsurance.com/crowdstrike-outage-impact-on-the-fortune-500.

56 “Delta Airlines, Inc. Form 8-K Report on August 8, 2024,” US Security and Exchange Commission, August 8, 2024, https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/27904/000168316824005369/delta_8k.htm. It is alternatively possible that Delta systems were simply more severely impacted that other airlines.

57 “Cost of a Cyber Incident.”

58 Nitin Natarajan, “Cybersecurity Insurance and Data Analysis Working Group Re-Envisioned to Help Drive Down Cyber Risk,” Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (blog), November 20, 2023, https://www.cisa.gov/news-events/news/cybersecurity-insurance-and-data-analysis-working-group-re-envisioned-help-drive-down-cyber-risk.

59 “2023 Data Breach Investigations Report,” Verizon, June 2023, https://www.verizon.com/business/resources/T227/reports/2023-data-breach-investigations-report-dbir.pdf.

60 “Cybersecurity: National Cyber Director Needs to Take Additional Actions.”

61 Eric Jardine, “Global Cyberspace Is Safer than You Think: Real Trends in Cybercrime,” Global Commission on Internet Governance, revised October 16, 2015, https://www.cigionline.org/publications/global-cyberspace-safer-you-think-real-trends-cybercrime/.

62 “Technical Report 22-02: Vital Statistics in Cyber Public Health,” CyberGreen Institute, March 2022, https://cybergreen.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Technical-report-22-02-Vital-Statistics-in-Cyber-Public-Health-FINAL.pdf.

63 Dan Geer, “For Good Measure: The Denominator,” USENIX ;login: 40, no. 5 (October 2015), https://www.usenix.org/publications/login/oct15/geer.

64 Tom Johansmeyer, “Recent Cyber Catastrophes Show an Intensifying Trend – but They Are Manageable,” The Loop, September 25, 2024, https://theloop.ecpr.eu/recent-cyber-catastrophes-show-an-intensifying-trend-but-they-are-manageable/.

65 Tom Johansmeyer, “Surprising Stats: The Worst Economic Losses from Cyber Catastrophes,” The Loop, March 12, 2024, https://theloop.ecpr.eu/surprising-stats-the-worst-economic-losses-from-cyber-catastrophes/.

66 Gopal Ratnam, “Cleaning up SolarWinds Hack May Cost as Much as $100 Billion,” Roll Call, January 11, 2021, https://rollcall.com/2021/01/11/cleaning-up-solarwinds-hack-may-cost-as-much-as-100-billion/.

67 Ben Lane, “Equifax Expects to Pay out Another $100 Million for Data Breach,” HousingWire, February 14, 2020, https://www.housingwire.com/articles/equifax-expects-to-pay-out-another-100-million-for-data-breach/.

68 “The Last Mile: Financial Vulnerabilities and Risks,” International Monetary Fund.

69 Geer, “For Good Measure: The Denominator.”

70 Geer, “For Good Measure: The Denominator.”

71 “Organization of the Federal Statistical System,” in Principles and Practices for a Federal Statistical Agency: Sixth Edition, ed. Constance F. Citro (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2017), https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK447392/.

72 Thomas Kim, letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission Division of Corporate Finance, “AT&T Inc. Form 8-K Filed July 12, 2024 File No. 001-08610,” July 31, 2024, https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/732717/000119312524190323/filename1.htm.

73 “Consumer Price Index Frequently Asked Questions,” US Bureau of Labor Statistics, December 18, 2024, https://www.bls.gov/cpi/questions-and-answers.htm.

The post Counting the costs: A cybersecurity metrics framework for policy appeared first on Atlantic Council.

Final Report of the Commission on Software-Defined Warfare featured in Air & Space Forces Magazine

Atlantic Council — Mon, 05 May 2025 19:00:00 +0000

On May 5, Shaun Waterman of Air & Space Forces Magazine published an article highlighting Forward Defense‘s Commission on Software-Defined Warfare final report. The article focused on the impacts of Secretary of Defense Hegseth’s March 6 memo on software-defined warfare and software acquisition pathways. This piece quoted Forward Defense nonresident senior fellow and Commission on Software-Defined Warfare co-author Tate Nurkin‘s remarks made at the Commission’s final report launch event on personnel training at the Pentagon.

Forward Defense’s Commission on Software-Defined Warfare aims to digitally transform the armed forces for success in future battlefields. Comprised of a distinguished group of subject-matter and industry commissioners, the Commission has developed a framework to enhance US and allied forces through emergent digital capabilities.

The post Final Report of the Commission on Software-Defined Warfare featured in Air & Space Forces Magazine appeared first on Atlantic Council.

What’s the best way to deal with Russian information manipulation? Latvia has answers.

Elīna Vrobļevska and Beniamino Irdi — Mon, 05 May 2025 14:32:12 +0000

This project, a collaboration between the Atlantic Council’s Transatlantic Security Initiative and the Latvia-based Centre for East European Policy Studies, aims to advance understanding of Latvia’s defense and security policies, with an emphasis on resilience-building strategies. Latvia’s measures offer lessons for other frontline states, and demonstrate an increasing willingness to prioritize defense in an uncertain geopolitical environment. Read the other articles in this series here and here.

For more than a decade, Russia has carried out information-manipulation campaigns aimed at polarizing society and undermining democracy among its neighbors and other countries in Europe. These manipulation efforts have only intensified following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. For targets of these campaigns, such as Latvia, the resilience of the country’s information space has become a national-security priority.

In response to Russia’s actions, Latvia is developing practical tools across government, civil society, and the media to expose and counter disinformation and other tactics. It has, for example, formally recognized the information space as a domain of national defense in its National Defense Concept since 2016. Protecting an open, resilient media environment now stands alongside the pillars of military and civil preparedness in Latvia’s security strategy.

Latvia is acutely vulnerable to Kremlin-backed information influence activities due to historical ties and its large Russian-speaking minority. At the same time, Moscow’s manipulation of information is not just aimed at individual countries. There is also a broader underlying target—Western society—and Russia repurposes the methods it employs in Latvia elsewhere in the world.

To address this wider Russian threat, Latvia is sharing what it is learning with its allies and partners. It hosts NATO’s Strategic Communications Center of Excellence, and it works with allies and partners to combat malign influence. Examples of this kind of cooperation are IREX (International Research and Exchanges Board), which conducts media training in the Baltics, and the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, which investigates disinformation and debunks narratives, educates media consumers, and has had staff based in Latvia since 2017.

Russian information influence threats in Latvia’s media space

Zeroing in on manipulation campaigns in Latvia, Russia appears to have several goals: It wants to provoke and sustain disagreements and discord within both the transatlantic community and Latvian society. It wants to discredit Ukraine and its statehood. And it wants to polarize, disinform, and multiply doubts about local and Western politics and state institutions.

Russia has strengthened its information influence tactics over the years, transforming traditional tactics into complex campaigns that now perform across multiple domains simultaneously. Since the beginning of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia’s information-manipulation activities have increased in intensity and aggressiveness, using a varied spectrum of information resources to ensure the dissemination of its desired narratives.

Russian influence operations are well-funded and adapt quickly. Until 2022, Russian state TV and radio channels dominated Latvia’s media, outmatching local Russian-language content. After Latvia banned dozens of Russian state media outlets following Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, the propaganda efforts shifted online. Kremlin narratives now spread via social media platforms such as YouTube, TikTok, and Telegram, and they are often amplified by bots, trolls, and proxy websites. Common themes distributed on these channels include portraying Latvia’s government as illegitimate and “Russophobic,” rewriting history to romanticize Soviet times, and framing NATO and the European Union (EU) as enemies.

Cases of Russian disinformation in Latvia have risen despite efforts to control the spread of Kremlin-generated narratives. Moreover, the increasing use of artificial intelligence is allowing information manipulators to become more efficient and making detection of their efforts that much harder. In addition, the Latvian population in the border areas are still subjected to comprehensive Russian information manipulation activities via analogue broadcasting, which is available in certain regions. Approximately 20 percent of Latvia’s Russian-speaking viewers still access banned Russian state TV channels through virtual private networks (VPN). This poses a threat in the event of Russian kinetic maneuvers, as it could reduce resistance and resilience.

How Latvia is countering information influence

Latvia’s response has been to treat the information space as a critical front, viewing defense against lies and propaganda as vital as physical defense. Under its comprehensive defense strategy, the government has designated a resilient information environment as a shared responsibility of the state and society.

Public awareness and education are central to this effort. Media literacy training is built into school curricula and community programs. The government has fostered a “culture of readiness” through regular information campaigns and hands-on materials with tips to spot falsehoods. The state has also bolstered strategic communication resources and independent media. A dedicated strategic communications unit under the State Chancellery coordinates messaging across ministries and works with social-media companies to curb fake news. Quality journalism is supported by funding and policy. Authorities have also not hesitated to ban harmful outlets. Dozens of Russian propaganda channels were taken off-air or have been penalized. In 2021, Latvia became the first Baltic state to prosecute individuals for willfully spreading dangerous falsehoods, as per the Criminal Law, though there have been few convictions due to legal ambiguity around the definition of “fake news” in Article 231. There are ongoing attempts to reword parts of the law to mention false content or disinformation explicitly.

Latvia’s multi-layered approach extends beyond government. An ecosystem of nongovernmental organizations, academics, and volunteers (such as the “Baltic Elves”) actively debunk online falsehoods and track malign campaigns. Investigative journalists and fact-checkers expose disinformation trends, while initiatives such as the Baltic Centre for Media Excellence train reporters and promote high standards in journalism. At the same time, advanced monitoring tools help detect and attribute new tactics—from bot networks to deepfakes—in collaboration with NATO’s Strategic Communications Center and other partners. Crucially, Latvia strives to balance security with free expression. Maintaining an open and resilient information environment is considered crucial to national endurance in crises.

Latvia’s strategy has its limitations. Its main approach has been one of blocking malign narratives rather than proactively projecting its own strategic messages. The planned discontinuation of funding for Russian-language content on the public broadcast from next year contradicts the policy of recognizing the need to invest in alternatives to Russia’s information space, especially for minorities and older Russian-speakers less comfortable online. This could push approximately a fifth of Latvia’s Russian-speakers further into the Kremlin’s info-sphere. The experiment of welcoming Russian independent media has had mixed results. These outlets primarily focus on audiences in Russia and Latvian policymakers have placed few expectations on them for working within the Latvian information space. Thus, sustaining quality Russian-language media content remains a challenge. Furthermore, years of low financing for media, especially public media, in earlier years has been attributed as a root cause of the current information vulnerability.

The roles of partners and allies

Although the Baltic states are often considered to have the broadest experience within NATO in dealing with Russia’s influence campaigns and activities, the Kremlin has also targeted other allies with information manipulation. Latvia’s experience has contributed to broader transatlantic defense efforts on this challenge, generating support from the United States in setting up media-resilience programs and coordinating closely on counterpropaganda efforts. Latvia’s advocacy helped push NATO to treat disinformation as a core security issue. For example, NATO exercises in the Baltics now include simulated information-warfare scenarios, and the Alliance has fielded counterhybrid support teams that can deploy to allies under attack.

However, success depends heavily on continued support from major partners such as the United States. There are concerns that the United States could step back from efforts to counter foreign disinformation, which some US policymakers have framed as a “censorship industrial complex.” This could leave allies exposed and weaken collective resolve, particularly impacting European nations heavily targeted by Russian influence operations. There is also a risk that in the absence of firm US leadership, European counterparts may follow suit, potentially undermining the credibility and resilience of liberal democracies. Furthermore, Russia does not appear constricted by political, ethical, moral, or legal considerations, making its abilities more flexible, broad, and therefore harder to counter in any democratic society built on free-speech principles. Thus, sustaining international cooperation and collective defense is crucial.

The EU has also begun to recalibrate. In April of this year, the European Commission unveiled ProtectEU, a strategy aimed at reinforcing the bloc’s ability to anticipate, prevent, and respond to hybrid threats, acknowledging the blurred line between hybrid interference and warfare, particularly citing Russia’s campaigns. The Commission is proposing to expand the powers of EU law enforcement agencies to tackle such threats more effectively, signaling a more integrated approach. The EU Digital Service Act also helps regulate large platforms and the spread of disinformation. For ProtectEU to succeed, member states need coordination, integration, and the political will to overcome frictions around data sharing and sovereignty. If the United States pulls back from the continent, Europe has an opportunity to step forward, potentially becoming the vanguard in defending democratic values.

Where to start

To effectively counter information manipulation in this evolving threat landscape, policymakers in targeted countries should adopt a multi-pronged approach drawing on steps Latvia has taken.

Latvia’s experience demonstrates that even a small democracy can bolster its media space. By combining policy tools, public education, media support, active debunking, and international partnerships, Latvia built a layered defense. The fight is a marathon, not a sprint, requiring agility and continuous refinement of strategies. Unity is key. Collective resilience is achievable when nations pool knowledge and stand firm. Latvia’s example shows that with proactive measures, societies can strengthen their “information immune system” and fortify democracy against propaganda and lies.

One of the lessons from the Baltics, and especially the Latvian experience, is that strengthening the national counterdisinformation framework and building resilience are crucial. This involves treating the information domain as a formal element of national security with clear leadership allocation and integrated policies. Educating the public in media literacy creates a resilient society over time, resulting in a populace less likely to be duped by fake news and minimizing the impact of influence activities. Regularly reviewing and updating laws and regulations helps address modern manipulation techniques. Explicitly defining disinformation-related offenses empowers law enforcement to act in egregious cases without imposing broad censorship. Individual countries can also empower media regulators to take action against channels facilitating foreign influence.

Countries looking to foster a robust and independent information ecosystem need to support reliable information sources and actively counter falsehoods. Governments and citizens need to support independent and local media, including minority-language content, which provides credible alternatives and acts as a bulwark against external propaganda, filling gaps hostile actors might exploit. Governments can partner with private companies (social media platforms, for example) and media organizations to improve resilience and facilitate the flagging and removal of malicious content. Countries can also leverage nongovernmental organizations to allow for faster debunking within communities, often with greater trust. Using innovative forms of communication like art, stand-up, and gamification can reach audiences unresponsive to traditional media.

Working with allies multiplies the effectiveness of what individual states are doing. Actively participating in international coalitions and working toward common standards, such as joint incident response protocols, ensures a unified response and prevents adversaries from exploiting gaps or moving operations next door.

Even as this work progresses, important challenges persist. Democratic countries must counter influence within political, ethical, moral, and legal constraints, while adversaries often operate without such limits. The main task is avoiding the restriction of public debate while still countering malign influence. As with other Western democracies, Latvia’s main strategy has been blocking disinformation, but proactive narrative projection is lacking. Relying so much on reactive policies gives Russia and other sources of information manipulation a large advantage.

Elīna Vrobļevska is a researcher at the Center for East European policy studies and lecturer and researcher at Rīga Stradiņš University. Her primary research focuses on Russian foreign policy and narrative construction in the public sphere.

Beniamino Irdi is a nonresident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Transatlantic Security Initiative within the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security. Previously, Irdi served within the Italian government in various capacities related to foreign affairs and security policy, including as a special adviser to Italy’s minister of foreign affairs.

This article is part of a series in partnership between the Atlantic Council and the Centre for East European Policy Studies.

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Hinote and Parker in Breaking Defense on the Commission on Software-Defined Warfare

Atlantic Council — Fri, 02 May 2025 16:00:00 +0000

On May 2, Breaking Defense published an article by retired Lt Gen Clinton Hinote and Nathan Parker, Commissioners on Forward Defense‘s Commission on Software-Defined Warfare, emphasizing the urgent need for the Department of Defense to prioritize agile, testable software development practices. Drawing on findings from the Commission’s final report, the authors argue that software is now a decisive element in military advantage and call for immediate cultural and institutional shifts within the Pentagon to meet this strategic imperative.

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To redefine US-Africa engagement, Washington must recognize the power of the African diaspora

Kirstie Kwarteng — Fri, 02 May 2025 13:44:28 +0000

The United States needs to pay more attention to the digital identity economy.

In my work researching how African diaspora communities in the United States maintain their connections to their homelands, I have found that long-standing experiences involving racism, combined with growing anti-immigrant sentiments, have led many members of the African diaspora to strengthen their ties to the continent.

Such diasporans, especially second-generation diasporans (that is, the children of immigrants), have connected with their African identities by turning to the digital space, which has enabled them to follow Africa-related news and cultural trends, connect with diaspora organizations, and keep in touch with family and friends. Digital platforms reduce the distance between home and abroad, accelerating the movement of people, capital, and ideas.

Second-generation diasporans have also turned to digital platforms to engage in cultural commerce. This digitized and culturally rooted economic engagement—which includes business development, trade, and investment—is what I call the digital identity economy. And this type of diaspora engagement offers new opportunities for reshaping US relations with the African continent.

Diaspora engagement is nothing new; African diaspora communities have long maintained economic, cultural, and social connections to their countries of origin. African immigrants in the 1970s and 1980s maintained homeland ties by opening cultural shops for food products, sending remittances, forming associations and religious institutions, and visiting home.

But the digital identity economy has created space for second-generation diasporans to channel their shared desire to connect with their homelands, offering products and services that meet their cultural needs while addressing the distinct challenges they face in reconnecting with home, challenges that first-generation immigrants may not experience in the same way. For example, one app called Nkenne, created by a second-generation Nigerian-American, helps diasporans learn African languages and addresses declining heritage-language fluency, a common issue for second-generation diasporans. The app provides cultural education about customs in African countries that younger diasporans may not be familiar with, helping them feel more connected to their culture and their identity from afar.

Digital platforms such as Spotify and YouTube enable young diasporans to engage with African music, stream artists’ work, and share their content. The popularity of Afrobeats music has given rise to businesses and events centered around the genre, including parties and popular music festivals—such as Afrofuture and Afronation—which take place not only in African countries but also in diaspora communities. While some may view these events solely as entertainment, they reflect deep cultural connections that create economic activity.

The digital identity economy has created economic opportunities in tourism for second-generation diasporans. For example, acclaimed second-generation Ghanaian-American chef Eric Adjepong offers a Ghanaian culinary tour, using digital platforms for promotion and booking. And the digital identity economy has enabled second-generation diasporans to use fashion to express their cultural pride and identity. The brand Ashanti Beads, which creates apparel featuring the Akan Adinkra symbol Gye Nyame, is an example of this. Its tagline, “Bridging the gap in the African diaspora through fashion,” speaks to the growing demand for culturally rooted apparel. Ashanti Beads uses digital platforms to engage its audience, market its brand, and sell its products.

These culturally rooted economic activities reflect the financial engagement patterns of second-generation African diaspora members. In speaking with second-generation Ghanaians in the United States and United Kingdom, I found that they are not sending traditional remittances at the same rate as the first generation and are also less likely to send remittances in the future. Reasons for this included not wanting to be taken advantage of financially, not having anyone to send money to, and fears around creating a cycle of dependency. They preferred practices that would promote widespread economic improvement, such as business development, investing, and collective remittances.

Some view the lack of interest in sending remittances among young African diasporans to be a challenge, especially with cuts to foreign aid, tariffs threatening the future of the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), and the end of Prosper Africa. While some have argued that remittances could fill that funding gap (in 2023, the African continent received over ninety billion dollars in remittances, significantly surpassing foreign aid and foreign direct investment), this is not realistic. Remittances are primarily used for consumption, immigrants face increasing financial difficulty in part due to restrictive immigration policies, and younger diasporans are less likely to send such funds.

These shifts are seen by some as a threat to Africa’s development, but they really present an opportunity to reimagine US-Africa engagement. Washington can introduce new policies and initiatives that support diaspora investment, trade, and business development as an alternative to development aid. And it is in the United States’ interest to do so: Supporting the digital identity economy would yield growth for diaspora businesses and communities in the country.

One way to do that is by strengthening ties through American Chambers of Commerce. American Chambers of Commerce on the African continent can serve as connectors and champions for a new era of diaspora-driven trade. By supporting business matchmaking, policy reform, and transnational partnerships, they offer a ready-made infrastructure for unlocking the potential of the digital identity economy.

Another is by creating a post-AGOA US-Africa trade policy. A policy that centers on diaspora businesses and entrepreneurs—by offering concessions and incentives that reward investment in the continent’s creative, cultural, and digital sectors—would support the growth of African economies and diaspora businesses.

A third initiative could include redefining foreign direct investment (FDI) to include diaspora investment. US diaspora businesses investing in Africa should be recognized as a form of FDI. While diaspora direct investment may be harder to track than remittances or traditional FDI, it still offers a dual benefit by supporting Africa’s growth while strengthening diaspora businesses in the United States. Redefining FDI to include diaspora direct investment would provide a more accurate depiction of capital outflows and the actors driving them. It can also broaden how the United States views diaspora financial contributions, moving beyond a focus on remittances to acknowledge the businesses, services, and networks they provide.

By embracing the digital identity economy, fostering diaspora investment, and rethinking trade policies, the United States can adopt a collaborative approach that supports African economic empowerment while strengthening connections across the diaspora, encouraging mutual growth.

Kirstie Kwarteng is a postdoctoral research associate at SOAS University of London and founder of The Nana Project.

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Putin confirms North Korean troops are fighting for Russia against Ukraine

Olivia Yanchik — Thu, 01 May 2025 20:43:55 +0000

More than six months after the story was first reported, Russian President Vladimir Putin has officially confirmed the presence of North Korean troops in Russia’s war against Ukraine. “We will always honor the Korean heroes who gave their lives for Russia, for our common freedom, on an equal basis with their Russian brothers in arms,” he commented on April 27.

Putin’s announcement was mirrored by similar official confirmation from the North Korean side. Pyongyang praised the “heroic feats” of North Korean troops fighting alongside the Russian army in a front page article published by the state-run Rodong Sinmun newspaper last weekend.

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Claims of North Korean troops participating in Russia’s war against Ukraine first began to circulate in October 2024. However, the Kremlin initially denied the North Korean presence, with Russian officials remaining tight-lipped on the subject until late April.

Moscow and Pyongyang appear to have coordinated their recent statements, indicating that both partners felt the time was now right to confirm the involvement of North Korean forces in Russia’s war. Official confirmation came as Putin proclaimed the defeat of Ukrainian forces in Russia’s Kursk region, where the bulk of North Korean soldiers are believed to have been deployed.

Moscow’s decision to confirm the presence of North Korean soldiers after months of denials could prove damaging to the Kremlin’s credibility at a time when questions are already being asked over Russia’s commitment to US-led peace talks to end the war in Ukraine. In recent days, US President Donald Trump has signaled his mounting frustration with Putin’s apparent stalling tactics, and has suggested that the Russian leader may be “tapping” him along.

The appearance of North Korean troops alongside their Russian counterparts on the front lines of the war against Ukraine represents the latest stage in a deepening military alliance between the two countries. North Korea has been supplying Russia with significant quantities of military aid since the early stages of the war in 2022. Deliveries have included millions of artillery shells as well as ballistic missiles, which have been used to devastating effect against Ukrainian cities.

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North Korea’s direct participation in the war against Ukraine is a watershed moment in modern European history. It is also widely seen an indication of the Russian army’s mounting recruitment issues.

While the Kremlin still has vast untapped reserves of available manpower to call upon, Putin is thought to be deeply reluctant to conduct a new mobilization due to fears of a possible domestic backlash inside Russia. This is making it increasingly challenging to replenish the depleted ranks of his invading army amid continued heavy losses.

For much of the war, Putin has relied on a combination of recruits drawn from Russia’s prison population and volunteer soldiers attracted by generous financial incentives that are typically many times higher than average Russian salaries. However, with the Russian army now reportedly averaging over a thousand casualties per day, it is becoming more difficult to find sufficient manpower to maintain the momentum of offensive operations in Ukraine.

So far, the North Korean contingent has seen action inside the Russian Federation itself amid fierce battles to push Ukrainian forces out of Russia’s Kursk region. However, with their participation now publicly confirmed by both Moscow and Pyongyang, officials in Kyiv are voicing concerns that North Korean troops could soon be redeployed to Ukrainian territory. This would represent a dangerous international escalation with unpredictable consequences for the wider region.

North Korea has now firmly established itself as one of the Kremlin’s most important allies in the invasion of Ukraine. Pyongyang’s involvement began with the supply of artillery shells and has expanded to include ballistic missiles and large numbers of combat troops. This comprehensive military support is enabling Russia to sustain the current war effort.

Ukraine’s allies are still searching for a suitable reaction to the expanding North Korean military presence on Europe’s eastern frontier. Ukraine’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has called for the strengthening of sanctions against Russia and North Korea, while also warning that the Koreans are gaining valuable experience of modern warfare in Ukraine that could have grave implications for international security. In the absence of an overwhelming Western response, it seems safe to assume that North Korea’s involvement in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine will continue to deepen.

Olivia Yanchik is an assistant director at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center.

AN #ACFRONTPAGE EVENT—Brad Smith, vice chair and president of Microsoft, shares insights on maintaining trust and promoting competitiveness in a time of trade and geopolitical volatility.

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Should “any government” issue an order that aims to compel Microsoft to cease its operations in Europe, the company “will go to court,” Brad Smith said. “We will take every legal avenue to contest any such order.”

Smith, vice chair and president of Microsoft, spoke at an Atlantic Council Front Page event in Brussels on Wednesday, where he outlined the company’s five new commitments to Europe in this age of geopolitical volatility.

Among these new initiatives was a commitment to support Europe’s digital resilience, no matter what happens geopolitically. “It’s important for us as a business to be a voice of reason across the Atlantic,” Smith said.

The European Union (EU) is slated to say on Thursday that decoupling from the United States in the realm of technology is “unrealistic.”

However, Smith added that he believes that an order that pushes Microsoft to suspend its Europe operations is “exceedingly unlikely.” Smith said that the US officials he had recently spoken with in Washington seemed surprised to hear about European concerns that the US government might one day shut off Europe’s access to US technology.

“Europeans need to be able to count on us,” Smith said.

Below are more highlights from the conversation, moderated by Atlantic Council Senior Resident Fellow Mark Scott, during which Smith debuted Microsoft’s five commitments to Europe and talked about the US-EU relationship.

His vows

One commitment Smith announced is a promise to help build the artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud ecosystem across Europe by expanding Microsoft data center capacity by 40 percent over two years, in partnership with European companies and countries. Such collaboration, Smith added, supports an ecosystem of “sovereign” cloud data centers.

He said that in the event Microsoft’s operations in Europe are threatened, the company will “put in place business continuity partnerships” so that its European partners can access Microsoft code and can continue services for European customers.

The Microsoft chief said that the company is “committed to respecting” Europe’s laws, including its competition law and Digital Markets Act. “We respect the fact that European governments will make their own decisions . . . We will adapt, and we’ll be supportive of whatever they decide.”

Smith vowed to protect the privacy of European data. In addition, he pledged to strengthen Europe’s economic competitiveness, “including for open-source developers, open-source code, [and] open-source models.” That, he said, extends to AI, which he said “will impact every part of the economy.” That means Europe will need it to bolster its competitive edge.

Smith also said that Microsoft will look to bolster Europe’s cybersecurity, noting the company’s efforts to support Ukraine’s cybersecurity by evacuating its data to other data centers across Europe and through other forms of assistance. He also announced the creation of a new role, the deputy chief information security officer of Europe, to address European needs.

‘A bridge across the Atlantic’

With so much geopolitical volatility, Smith said, the business sector “needs to be a bridge across the Atlantic,” to help governments “find a common path.”

As the US-EU relationship continues to shift, particularly regarding trade, Smith said that he does not anticipate any changes in the trade relationship to disrupt Microsoft’s supply. “The economics of the cloud are actually easier to manage than, say, the economics of digital devices like laptops or other things that may come from, say, China,” he explained.

Smith said he believes there are opportunities in cybersecurity and data privacy for the United States and EU to cooperate more closely. He cited agreements the United States has struck with the United Kingdom and Australia, under the framework of the Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data Act (CLOUD Act), which allows US law enforcement to request data stored overseas in investigations.

“We’ve long supported and advocated for an agreement between the US and the EU,” Smith said. “Let’s get that done this year.”

Smith talked about a theory that economic crises happen every eighty years—because the generation that experienced the former crisis passes away, taking lessons with them. Meanwhile, NATO, the Bretton Woods institutions, and other pillars of the transatlantic relationship are all around eighty years old and under increasing strain.

“There, quite rightly, are people on both sides of the Atlantic and in the world today who look back and see enormous opportunities for improvement,” he said. “But let’s not forget what led us to create it in the first place.”

Katherine Golden is an associate director of editorial at the Atlantic Council.

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Putin announces ceasefire to protect Moscow parade from Ukrainian attack

Peter Dickinson — Tue, 29 Apr 2025 21:26:01 +0000

Russian President Vladimir Putin has just announced his second unilateral ceasefire in a matter of days, but this emerging trend does not reflect any sincere desire for peace. On the contrary, Putin’s brazen new ceasefire gambit suggests a man emboldened by Western weakness who is now more confident than ever that he can continue to game the US-led peace process without seriously disrupting his invasion of Ukraine.

In early March, Ukraine agreed to an American proposal for an unconditional ceasefire. Almost two months later, Russia still refuses to follow suit. As a result, many observers are drawing the obvious conclusion that Russia rather than Ukraine is the primary obstacle to peace. In an apparent bid to counter this growing consensus and distract attention from Russia’s reluctance to end the war, Putin has recently begun declaring his own brief ceasefires. His first step was to announce a surprise 30-hour Easter truce during traditional Orthodox religious festivities in Russia and Ukraine. Putin is now proposing a three-day break in hostilities to mark Victory Day on May 9.

The timing of Putin’s latest truce is particularly interesting. Critics note that his Victory Day ceasefire coincides with a major military parade in Moscow to mark the eightieth anniversary of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany. Putin is expected to host a number of high-ranking foreign dignitaries at the event, including the leaders of China, Brazil, and India. Needless to say, it would be hugely embarrassing for the Kremlin dictator if his propaganda parade was overshadowed by Ukrainian airstrikes in Moscow or elsewhere in Russia.

Many have already noted the cynicism of Putin’s proposal. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy reacted by reaffirming his commitment to an unconditional 30-day ceasefire while accusing the Kremlin of trying to “manipulate the world” and “deceive the United States” with empty ceasefire stunts. “We value human lives, not parades,” he stated. Officials in Brussels were similarly critical of the Kremlin. “Russia could stop the killing and the bombing at any time, so there’s absolutely no need to wait until May 8,” commented European Commission spokesperson Anita Hipper. Meanwhile, the Trump White House responded by emphasizing the need for a “permanent ceasefire.”

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Putin’s shamelessly self-serving call for a Victory Day ceasefire says much about his opportunistic approach toward the faltering peace process initiated by the United States in early 2025. Much like the 30-hour lull in fighting initiated by Putin over the Easter holiday, the three-day truce proposed this week is far too short to have any meaningful impact on negotiations to end the war in Ukraine. However, it does allow the Russian ruler to pose as peacemaker while continuing his invasion.

Putin’s headline-grabbing truces are also an important part of his stalling tactics as he seeks to drag out peace talks indefinitely without exhausting US President Donald Trump’s patience or closing the door on a potential broader thaw in bilateral relations with the United States. It is no coincidence that both of Putin’s recent ceasefire announcements have come in the immediate aftermath of critical comments from Trump indicating that the US leader is growing tired of Russian excuses. Indeed, news of the Victory Day truce emerged just hours after Trump had questioned Russia’s willingness to end the war and commented that he feared Putin was “tapping me along.”

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While Putin engages in dubious peace gestures, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has recently provided a far more realistic view of the Kremlin’s war aims and continued commitment to the conquest Ukraine. In an interview with Brazilian newspaper O Globo that was published on the same day as Putin’s Victory Day ceasefire announcement, Lavrov listed Russia’s conditions ahead of possible negotiations with Ukraine. These included international recognition of Russia’s right to five partially occupied Ukrainian provinces, the removal of all sanctions imposed on Russia since 2014, guarantees over Ukrainian neutrality, and the reduction of Ukraine’s army to a skeleton force.

Crucially, Moscow also insists on Ukraine’s “denazification,” which is recognized as Kremlin code for the comprehensive “de-Ukrainianization” of the country and the reestablishment of Russian dominance in all spheres of public life. If implemented, these punishing Russian terms would not lead to a sustainable peace. Instead, they would serve as an act of capitulation, setting the stage for the final destruction of Ukraine as a state and as a nation.

All this is a very long way from the Trump administration’s frequent assertions that both sides must be willing to compromise if they wish to achieve a viable settlement. While Ukraine has repeatedly backed calls for an unconditional ceasefire and has accepted the need for temporary territorial concessions, Russia continues to pursue maximalist goals that no Ukrainian government could possibly accept.

During the first hundred days of his presidency, Trump has sought to advance the peace process by pressuring Ukraine while offering Russia a wide range of incentives to engage. It should now be abundantly clear that this uneven approach has backfired. Far from persuading Putin to offer concessions of his own, Trump’s appeasement policies have convinced the Kremlin to escalate its demands further. We have now reached the point where Putin believes he can personally pause the war to host a military parade on Red Square before resuming his invasion three days later. This absurd situation makes a complete mockery of Trump’s peace efforts and threatens to leave him looking foolish.

If Trump is serious about bringing Russia to the negotiating table, he must first demonstrate a readiness to impose crippling costs on the Kremlin. The current US strategy toward Russia can be characterized as all carrots and no sticks. This is useless against a regime that only understands the language of strength and regards any attempts at compromise as signs of weakness. It also gravely underestimates the high stakes underpinning Russia’s invasion. Putin views the war in Ukraine as an historic mission to reverse the imperial collapse of 1991 and return Russia to its rightful place as a global superpower. He will not abandon this mission unless the alternative is defeat.

Peter Dickinson is editor of the Atlantic Council’s UkraineAlert service.

Kyiv accuses China of deepening involvement in Russia’s Ukraine war

Katherine Spencer — Tue, 29 Apr 2025 20:43:29 +0000

As US-led efforts continue to broker a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine, Kyiv has recently accused China of deepening its involvement in Moscow’s invasion. The claims leveled at Beijing are not the first of their kind since the start of the full-scale invasion and add an extra dimension of geopolitical complexity to the ongoing negotiations.

In early April, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced that two Chinese nationals had been captured while fighting alongside the Russian military in eastern Ukraine. Although the presence of foreign fighters within the ranks of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invading army is not new, officials in Kyiv claim that more than 150 Chinese mercenaries have been recruited by Russia. China has called the allegations “totally unfounded.”

While there is no evidence linking Russia’s Chinese troops to Beijing, many have suggested the Chinese authorities must be aware that their nationals are participating in a foreign war. Some have pointed to widespread Russian military recruitment adverts circulating across China’s heavily censored social media space, and have suggested that the presence of these videos indicates a degree of tacit official approval, at the very least.

US officials do not believe the recently captured fighters have direct ties to the Chinese government, Reuters reports. However, there are mounting concerns in Washington and other Western capitals over reports that Beijing is sending army officers to observe the Russian invasion of Ukraine in a bid to learn tactical lessons from the war. This could provide the Chinese military with important insights into drone warfare and the rapidly changing nature of the modern battlefield.

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In a further indication of growing frustration in Kyiv over China’s alleged support for Russia’s invasion, Zelenskyy recently accused Chinese citizens of working at a Russian manufacturing plant producing drones for the war in Ukraine. In the past month, the Ukrainian authorities have also imposed sanctions on three Chinese companies for alleged involvement in the production of Iskander ballistic missiles, which Russia often uses in the war against Ukraine.

The most serious Ukrainian allegations came in the middle of April, when Zelenskyy claimed that China was now supplying weapons and gunpowder to Russia. This was the first time the Ukrainian leader had openly accused Beijing of providing Moscow with direct military assistance. Although, last fall US Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell had also suggested that China was providing Russia with technology that was “not dual-use capabilities,” contributing directly to Russia’s war production.

Claims of expanding Chinese involvement in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine do not come as a complete surprise. After all, China has long been seen as one of the Kremlin’s key allies and has emerged over the past decade as Moscow’s most important economic partner.

On the eve of the full-scale invasion in February 2022, China and Russia declared a “no limits” partnership. Over the past three years, the two countries have repeatedly underlined their shared geopolitical vision, which includes a commitment to ending the era of US dominance and ushering in a new multipolar world order. These strengthening ties have been further highlighted by a number of bilateral summit meetings between the Russian and Chinese leaders.

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Despite its close relations with Moscow, China has officially adopted a neutral stance toward Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This has included refraining from any overt gestures of support and publicly backing calls for peace. Nevertheless, Beijing has faced accusations of enabling the Russian war effort in important ways through the provision of restricted items including sanctioned components and dual-use technologies used in the production of missiles, tanks, and aircraft. By providing the vast majority of these exports to Russia, US officials believe that China has helped Russia greatly boost its arsenal and ramp up military production.

US officials have also alleged that China is providing Russia with geospatial intelligence to aid the invasion of Ukraine.

Claims of growing Chinese involvement are fueling speculation that this could lead to a possible international escalation in Russia’s war against Ukraine. There is also alarm over what Russia may be providing in exchange for Chinese support. US officials have alleged that China is receiving unprecedented access to highly sophisticated Russian defense technologies. The US Congress has also suggested that the Kremlin could be providing China with critical knowledge about the vulnerabilities of Western weapons systems based on combat experience acquired in Ukraine.

While Beijing has denied providing any material support for Moscow’s war, there is no question that the geopolitical partnership between China and Russia has reached new levels against the backdrop of the conflict.

With the United States now looking to reduce its involvement in European security, opportunities may soon emerge for China to play a greater role in peace efforts to end the war. However, Beijing would first need to align its actions with its words to convince Kyiv that it is a plausible peacemaker rather than a Russian ally.

Katherine Spencer is a program assistant at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center.

Editor’s note: This article was updated on April 30, 2025, to clarify that reports of Chinese support for Russia’s war effort have been persistent before Kyiv’s recent accusations.

Geopolitics in orbit: What Gulf moonshots mean for Washington

Isabella Torre — Fri, 25 Apr 2025 13:49:49 +0000

For the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, the roadway to the future leads all the way to space.

The extraterrestrial frontier represents the potential of securing long-term economic resilience, global prestige, and an influential role in the next era of international competition and cooperation. Space is a critical sector for technological advancement and increased geopolitical influence, offering both countries a relatively untapped area where their influence will have a substantial impact.

To domestically develop their space sectors, both Gulf states have looked elsewhere for help, with the most significant collaborations coming from the United States, Russia, and China.

If Washington wants to ensure that Russia-China-Gulf space partnerships don’t outweigh US-Gulf cooperation, it needs to effectively court the UAE and Saudi Arabia, leveraging partnerships with both the public and private sectors to participate in this pursuit.

UAE and KSA set their sights on space

Much like the UAE itself, its space sector is young. Established in 2014, the UAE Space Agency (UAESA) was created to promote and invest in the country’s role in space. The UAE became the first Arab nation to send an astronaut to the International Space Station (ISS) in 2019 and has since developed institutions, such as the National Space Academy, National Space Fund, and Space Economic Zones, to advance space research, technology, and commercial activities. In addition, UAESA has carried out several missions, including the Emirates Lunar Mission, Emirates Mission to the Asteroid Belt, and Emirates Mars Mission. The Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre (MBRSC) was also created in 2006, becoming a prominent scientific and technological hub regarding the UAE space industry. These initiatives support the UAE’s broader vision of becoming a leader on the global stage and align with its goals of diversification.

Even younger is the Saudi Space Agency (SSA), which was founded in 2018. Its objectives are very similar to those of UAESA and align with Saudi Vision 2030: to drive innovation, foster collaboration, and position Saudi Arabia as a leader in the international space economy and on the global stage. In 2023, SSA sent two Saudi astronauts, including the first female, to the ISS along with the creation of the first sustainable Human Space Flight program. Despite these developments, Saudi Arabia still lags behind its regional competitors and global powers and has a long way to go if it wants to contend in the space sector. Collaboration can help the Kingdom achieve this progress.

These efforts align with a broader vision.

The historically oil-based economies in the Gulf have prioritized diversification and political elevation in the emerging multi-polar world order. Both countries have invested in non-oil sectors to build a knowledge-based and sustainable economy.

In addition to developing alternative revenue streams, both countries are looking to amplify their geopolitical influence, and these investments signal a desire to play a role both in the region and beyond.

Specifically, the UAE and Saudi Arabia have prioritized balancing relations between Eastern and Western powers, focusing on maintaining neutrality in global conflicts, which is reflected in their space industries.

A strong US-Gulf partnership

The United States has been collaborating with both the UAE and Saudi Arabia on their space industries, but further cooperation is needed to solidify Washington’s competitive leadership.

At a foundational level, the UAE and the United States signed the Artemis Accords in 2020, which outlined a set of principles on space exploration cooperation. Saudi Arabia joined the Accords in 2022 and further strengthened its partnership with NASA in 2024 through an extensive framework. Both countries signing onto the Accords signifies a desire to boost their geopolitical influence and compete with major global players.

Washington should focus on strengthening NASA’s relationships with UAESA and SSA beyond signed agreements through increased collaboration on astronaut training, future space policy discussions, and joint missions. For example, Saudi Arabia sent two of its astronauts to the ISS on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from a NASA space center.

Collaboration between the UAE and the US has been much more extensive. Specifically, the UAE hosted the Abu Dhabi Space Debate in 2024, focusing on key topics in the space industry, and invited US officials and businesspeople to share ideas and gain valuable insights. The two countries also collaborated on the assembly of the UAE’s landmark Hope Probe mission to Mars, trained astronauts together in the United States, and conducted experiments simulating Mars to advance space medicine and technology.

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This collaboration with the United States, one of the most advanced countries regarding the space sector, signals a push for greater influence in space. More recently, MBRSC announced in 2024 that it would be operating an airlock and contributing engineering support for Gateway, the first space station to orbit the Moon. In return, NASA offered the UAE an opportunity to fly an Emirati astronaut to Gateway on a future Artemis mission.

The private sector can also play a key role in this cooperation, as US firms operating in the space and technology sectors can engage both countries’ space agencies and private sectors through joint ventures, collaborative research, and technology sharing. While US-Gulf private sector collaboration exists, it requires further expansion. For example, Axiom Space, an American corporation, and Burjeel Holdings PLC, an Emirati firm, are combining to undertake scientific research and test new technologies in space. In addition, Marlan Space, a UAE-based firm, and Loft Orbital, an American corporation, created Orbitworks as a joint venture, which became the Middle East’s first commercial satellite integrator. These private collaborations highlight the significance of Saudi Arabia and the UAE’s commitment to further engagement on the global stage, as the private sector is also becoming increasingly involved.

These engagements, ranging from astronaut training, signed agreements, joint missions, and space policy dialogues, provide Washington with four main opportunities.

Strategic and security advantages are a critical gain for the United States, as building upon this space partnership will improve Washington’s influence in the region and fortify defense and intelligence cooperation. In addition, US President Donald Trump has consistently viewed the UAE and Saudi Arabia as business partners, and these countries’ investments in space will continue to foster collaboration with US aerospace companies, helping lead to job creation, research funding, and technology exports. This involvement also generates technological and scientific benefits for the United States, as these joint missions, satellite programs, and research initiatives will expand the country’s space capabilities. This innovation will accelerate due to the partnership with the UAE and Saudi Arabia while simultaneously creating shared costs and risks. Finally, diplomacy in the space sector will foster a stronger connection between the United States and the two Gulf states, furthering Washington’s soft power and reinforcing these long-term alliances.

Turning to Russia and China for space collaboration

Russia and China are increasingly becoming Washington’s competitors in engaging the UAE and Saudi Arabia’s space ambitions.

In 2021, Saudi astronauts trained in Moscow for a potential joint mission, while the UAE’s first astronaut, Hazzaa AlMansoori, reached the ISS in 2019 aboard a Russian Soyuz after training in Moscow. The UAE has also hosted Roscosmos officials at major space events, reinforcing its commitment to collaboration.

China, for its part, is in talks with the Saudis on satellite software transfer. In 2018, Saudi Arabia contributed an optical camera to Beijing’s lunar relay satellite. The UAE joined China’s International Lunar Research Station the same year, and in 2023, Chinese firm, Origin Space, launched a joint research and development center in Abu Dhabi. A planned UAE rover on China’s Chang’e-7 mission was canceled due to US export controls, highlighting intensifying global space competition as Washington seeks to curb Beijing and Moscow’s influence.

As the world becomes increasingly multipolar, China and Russia are actively ramping up efforts to counter US influence in the Middle East and North Africa. By fortifying its relationship with the Gulf, the United States could work to build on a vital partnership, especially regarding space. Both the UAE and Saudi Arabia have invested in their space programs, and Russia and China have made significant efforts to deepen their relationships by emphasizing their commitment to these programs.

By engaging with both the UAE and KSA in space collaboration, Washington can continue to maintain its geopolitical foothold while simultaneously hindering Russian and Chinese ambitions to expand their regional influence. If the United States fails to engage regarding space, Russia and China will step up to fill this vacuum and pull the UAE and Saudi Arabia away from the West. This would allow both regional powers to reap the benefits of the scientific and economic advances resulting from space collaboration with the Gulf, and further reduce US influence both in space and on the ground.

The United States must counterbalance this cooperation by engaging both Gulf states through public and private sector collaboration, reinforcing its commitment to their space ambitions, economic growth, and global influence. As Washington’s influence changes on a multipolar world stage, it’s clear that space collaboration has all-too-earthly impacts.

Isabella Torre is a young global professional at the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center and Middle East Programs. She is a senior at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service studying global business and Arabic.

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Ukraine’s innovative army can help Europe defend itself against Russia

David Kirichenko — Thu, 24 Apr 2025 21:39:48 +0000

When Russian President Vladimir Putin announced the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, he cited Ukraine’s “demilitarization” as one of his two key war aims. He has not yet succeeded in achieving this goal, to put it mildly. Rather than disarming Ukraine, Putin’s invasion has actually transformed the country into one of Europe’s most formidable military powers.

The emergence of the Ukrainian army as a serious international fighting force can be traced back to the beginning of Russia’s invasion in 2014. At the time, decades of neglect and corruption had left Ukraine virtually defenseless. With the country’s existence under threat, a program of military modernization was rapidly adopted. During the following years, the Ukrainian Armed Forces expanded dramatically and implemented a series of far-reaching reforms in line with NATO standards.

Following the full-scale Russian invasion of February 2022, the transformation of the Ukrainian military entered a new phase. The number of men and women in uniform swelled to around one million, making the Ukrainian army by far the largest in Europe. They have been backed by a domestic defense industry that has grown by orders of magnitude over the past three years and now accounts for around 40 percent of Ukraine’s military needs.

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For today’s Ukraine, a strong domestic defense sector is now a matter of national survival. During the initial stages of Russia’s full-scale invasion, the Ukrainian authorities relied heavily on military aid from the country’s partners. This support helped enable Ukraine’s early victories but was also often subject to prolonged delays that left Kyiv vulnerable to changing political priorities in various Western capitals.

The need for greater military self-sufficiency has been underlined in recent months by the return of US President Donald Trump to the White House. The new US leader has made clear that he does not intend to maintain United States military support for Ukraine, and plans instead to downgrade the overall American commitment to European security. This shift in US policy has confirmed the wisdom of Ukraine’s earlier decision to prioritize the expansion of the country’s domestic defense industry.

Ukraine’s growing military capabilities owe much to a defense tech revolution that has been underway in the country since 2022. Following Russia’s full-scale invasion, hundreds of Ukrainian companies have begun producing innovative new technologies for the military ranging from software to combat drones. By focusing on relatively simple and affordable defense tech solutions, Ukraine has been able to close the gap on Russia despite Moscow’s often overwhelming advantages in terms of manpower, firepower, and resources.

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More than three years since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion, it is now clear that wartime necessity has transformed Ukraine into perhaps the most agile and experimental military ecosystem in the world. Whereas Western arms procurement cycles typically span several years, Ukraine can translate ideas into operational weapons within the space of just a few months. This has helped establish Ukraine as a global leader in drone warfare. The country’s use of inexpensive FPV drones is increasingly defining the modern battlefield and now accounts for approximately 80 percent of all Russian casualties.

Ukraine’s domestic drone production capacity is growing at a remarkable rate. According to the country’s Deputy Defense Minister Ivan Havryliuk, Ukrainian forces are currently receiving approximately 200,000 drones per month, a tenfold increase on the figure from just one year ago. Kyiv is also making rapid progress in the development of numerous other cutting edge military technologies including robotic systems, marine drones, and cruise missiles.

Ukraine’s dramatically expanded armed forces and groundbreaking defense tech sector make the country an indispensable partner for Europe. After decades of reliance on US security support, European leaders currently find themselves confronted with the new political realities of an isolationist United States and an expansionist Russia. In this uncertain environment, it makes good sense for Europe to upgrade its support for the Ukrainian army while deepening collaboration with Ukrainian defense tech companies.

European investment in the Ukrainian defense industry is already on the rise, both in terms of government donor funds and private sector investment. This trend looks set to intensify in the coming months as Ukrainians and their European partners increasingly acknowledge that their collective future security depends on closer cooperation. Russia’s invasion has forced Ukraine to become a major military power and a leading defense tech innovator. This status looks set to guarantee the country a position at the heart of Europe’s security architecture for many years to come.

David Kirichenko is an associate research fellow at the Henry Jackson Society.

Defending Taiwan means mobilizing society, not just the military

Marvin J. Park — Thu, 24 Apr 2025 18:00:00 +0000

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Taiwan is under unprecedented pressure from the People’s Republic of China (PRC), facing coordinated threats on multiple fronts. The PRC employs a comprehensive strategy to strangle Taiwan’s dwindling diplomatic space, pollute its public discourse with disinformation and misinformation, and apply pressure using both military and civilian means. It also wields its vast economic power to punish the island nation—as well as countries, companies, and individuals that support Taiwan.

Under the former Tsai Ing-Wen administration and the current Lai Ching-Te administration, Taiwan has taken significant steps toward ensuring that it remains a free and vibrant democracy. Last June, Lai announced the establishment of the Whole-of-Society Defense Resilience Committee at the Presidential Office to ensure that both the government and society would be able to maintain normal operations in the event of a crisis in the Taiwan Strait. The committee gathers senior leaders and representatives across a wide swath of Taiwan’s government, civil society, business, nongovernmental organizations, and academia to formulate strategy and provide recommendations in five key areas: civilian force training and utilization; strategic material preparation and critical supply distribution; energy and critical infrastructure operations and maintenance; social welfare, medical care, evacuation facility readiness, information, and transportation; and financial network protection.

In July 2024, the Atlantic Council Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security published “Toward resilience: An action plan for Taiwan in the face of PRC aggression.” The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) followed with its “Strengthening Resilience in Taiwan” report in December 2024. These two reports provide an accurate assessment of the challenges of creating societal resilience and share policy recommendations for the Taiwan Whole-of-Society Defense Resilience Committee. However, additional perspectives—especially across social, technological, and economic dimensions—can help expand Taiwan’s approach to societal resilience.

Preparing for crisis—without spreading fear

Organizing the necessary stakeholders around a shared framework with a clearly defined and understood vision was the easy part. However, as with all large bureaucracies, Taiwan’s resilience committee faces significant challenges in getting both the government and other actors to accept and implement difficult trade-offs. These trade-offs require people, departments, and various parts of Taiwanese society to give up money, power, or influence in order to achieve the necessary reforms and make them sustainable for the long term.

A key pitfall for Taiwan was failing to persuade its people, in plain language, why it needed to create the Whole-of-Society Defense Resilience Committee in the first place. Taiwan’s resilience ultimately hinges on the public understanding that the PRC can, and might, use its full suite of tools and capabilities against the island, should Xi Jinping conclude that a takeover is otherwise unattainable. The government needs to explain how everyday citizens can prepare in the event of that type of crisis. As demonstrated by Taiwan’s response to multiple natural disasters, its government is a global leader in terms of orienting local and national efforts to recover and quickly return to a pre-disaster state. However, the resilience committee has the challenging task of learning how to balance preparing Taiwan for manmade emergencies, such as a maritime blockade or military invasion, without unnecessarily creating a sense of panic.

This May, a television miniseries titled Zero Day is set to air in Taiwan, depicting a “fictional” scenario of a People’s Liberation Army (PLA) invasion of the island. The entertainment industry has always been most effective in helping people visualize a possibility that resonates with them in a way that the most well-written and brilliant policy papers cannot. As the old saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words; a more modern version could say a viral video is worth a thousand tweets and re-tweets. The Zero Day trailer has already increased awareness and captured people’s imaginations in a way that official government messaging efforts are unlikely to achieve. The goal is not for people to conclude there’s no point in resistance, but to spur action toward resilience efforts now.

Taiwan should capitalize on the moment and create communications channels for local and provincial townships, facilitated by a fireside chat-style format, to have a greater voice on what is effective and resonates. The national government must be prepared to provide tailored support across the five key areas, even when such support is redundant and expensive at first. It must create an environment for any local government to communicate, improve infrastructure, increase civil preparedness, and support its constituents across a range of emergencies and disasters. Some will use whole-of-society resilience as another means to get funding, but the reality is that there will be improvements that meet resilience goals. This will gain long-term support for resilience efforts if everyday people understand what could happen and see their feedback result in tangible benefits.

From technological edge to strategic advantage

On a recent Bloomberg Odd Lots podcast, Shyam Sankar, the chief technology officer (CTO) of US software giant Palantir, described what his company’s product is and what it delivers to customers. In plain, non-technical language, Sankar said the product is an artificial intelligence (AI) decision-making platform to inform better and faster decisions.

Few countries already possess the technology foundation and expertise to rapidly create and scale the types of advanced technology cited by Sankar. Whether Taiwan develops its own version of Palantir or adopts existing technology, the Taiwan resilience committee should consider taking the calculated risk of trusting AI-driven platforms. Doing so could significantly enhance its decision-making processes, thereby maximizing the efficient use of its limited people, assets, and resources in countering the full spectrum of China’s coercive tools.

It is difficult to truly replicate quality in-person training or support for social welfare and medical care. But imagine being able to wear a headset or set up another interface for increasingly sophisticated virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) systems to provide civilians, first responders, and military personnel with more effective training programs and with more realistic scenarios. These systems could also help people stay connected to the government during a crisis and provide immediate medical information in potentially demanding situations in which physical care might not be possible. VR and AR systems offer an additional benefit in their ability to connect anyone around the world and to leverage the latest training and information without the limitations of budget, policy, and travel restrictions.

Three-dimensional (3D) printing could be equally important in supporting Taiwan’s resilience efforts. The ability to print critical parts and components could alleviate the need for large storage locations, which must be maintained and can become easy targets for sabotage or kinetic attacks. Because Taiwan has a unique and harsh climate that makes food production and storage difficult even in normal conditions, it should consider developing food stockpiles that are resilient to humidity and heat and can sustain the population for longer periods. Other critical areas for advanced technology development are portable and modular water-purification systems, which could provide water security in the event that critical infrastructure is damaged or disrupted. Lastly, Taiwan is already making progress toward redundant and resilient off-island communications. Still, much more needs to be developed to survive sophisticated jamming of all communications.

How Taiwan’s tech giants could help deter China

Most economists and financial analysts would agree that the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) is the flagship company driving the global technology sector. Building on this foundation, Taiwan should leverage its world-class strengths in manufacturing, supply chain management, and technological innovation to directly support the efforts of the Whole-of-Society Defense Resilience Committee.

The idea of commercial companies supporting governmental demands and requirements is not new. In the same podcast mentioned earlier, Sankar shared that well-known commercial US companies such as Chrysler and General Mills used to be dual-purpose companies that produced military hardware. Due to its expertise in production-line milling equipment, General Mills manufactured torpedoes. Sankar further noted that Chinese prime contractors today derive only 27 percent of their revenue from the PLA, with the remainder coming from commercial sales. To strengthen its resilience, the Taiwanese government should consider additional tax incentives and subsidies to encourage tech giants like Foxconn to manufacture advanced technologies—supporting both national security efforts and positioning these companies for dual commercial and government purposes.

On June 13, 2024, New York Times (NYT) columnist Ross Douthat interviewed Vice President J. D. Vance for an opinion piece titled “What J. D. Vance Believes.” In the interview, Vance referred to “the most important lesson of World War II, that we seem to have forgotten: that military power is downstream of industrial power. We are still, right now, the world’s military superpower, largely because of our industrial might from the ’80s and ’90s. But China is a more powerful country industrially than we are, which means they will have a more powerful military in 20 years.” Against this background, Taiwanese technology companies—working in concert with Korean and Japanese companies—could provide a trusted partner network for global supply chain demands and facilitate decoupling from China, especially for highly specialized components such as drone camera lenses, batteries, and control boards. Taiwan should aim to replicate the strategic dominance achieved by TSMC in semiconductors—this time by becoming indispensable for global supply chain demands. Such an effort would unlock the full potential of Taiwan’s economic power and directly contribute to the deterrence it hopes to achieve with its resilience and defense reforms.

A Herculean feat

Tsai and Lai should be commended for their whole-of-government efforts to bolster Taiwan’s societal resilience against the onslaught of Chinese coercion. Creating new government structures, managing internal power and budgetary struggles, balancing responsibilities across various branches of government, and navigating opposition politics is a Herculean feat—and those are only the domestic challenges. None of these efforts will be effective or sustainable if everyday Taiwanese citizens do not believe they are necessary or that the scenarios being prepared for are a real possibility. Adopting a bottom-up approach—not the preferred method in Asia—may be the key to building momentum for Taiwan’s resilience effort. Asking any government bureaucracy to trust advanced technology such as AI is a significant leap of faith, but the potential benefits of integrating these systems could give Taiwan the elusive asymmetric edge needed to deter and delay China’s party-driven decision-making. Lastly, Taiwan is extremely proud of its world-class technology industries that drive the global economy today—but that success was built on decades of government support. Now, Taiwan’s industries must help support their government’s resilience efforts by expanding beyond commercial purposes. They should evolve into dual-purpose companies, serving both civilian and defense needs, and become trusted partners in securing global supply chains, especially for the US defense and technology sector. A renewed focus on its people, advanced technology, and economic strategy could help Taiwan deter Chinese coercion—something that military and defense reforms alone have been unable to achieve.

About the author

Marvin J. Park is a nonresident senior fellow in the Indo-Pacific Security Initiative at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security. He is a national security professional with experience in national-level policymaking, intelligence matters, and military operations throughout the Asia Pacific, especially Taiwan, Japan, and the Republic of Korea (ROK). Park served on the National Security Council as the director for Taiwan affairs from 2023 to 2024. He retired in 2025 as a US Navy captain with over twenty-five years of experience.

The Tiger Project, an Atlantic Council effort, develops new insights and actionable recommendations for the United States, as well as its allies and partners, to deter and counter aggression in the Indo-Pacific. Explore our collection of work, including expert commentary, multimedia content, and in-depth analysis, on strategic defense and deterrence issues in the region.

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How the US retreat from the UN endangers the future of internet governance

Konstantinos Komaitis — Wed, 23 Apr 2025 18:40:55 +0000

This month, an obscure and mundane United Nations (UN) process became the political battleground for the future of internet governance.

The Commission for Science, Technology, and Development (CSTD) is a subsidiary body of the UN Economic and Social Council and is tasked with providing high-level advice on science, technology, and innovation policy issues. The Commission is the primary body responsible for overseeing the follow-up to the World Summit of Information Society (WSIS), the UN process that for the past two decades has guided the nexus between the internet and development and has legitimized the internet’s multistakeholder model. The CSTD is responsible for monitoring implementation efforts, gathering input from countries, and organizing sessions to assess WSIS’s global progress.

The WSIS, which the UN created twenty years ago, enshrined the principle that internet governance should be multistakeholder and bottom up. The collaborative nature of the internet’s management has been instrumental in its rapid expansion, its resilience, and its economic success. WSIS has also shaped national policies, prompting governments to embrace inclusive and collaborative forms of governance, creating an environment in which businesses, civil society, engineers, and academia help shape internet policies and help manage the internet’s critical resources. This year, the entire WSIS architecture is under review by the UN, and the CSTD meeting the week of April 7-11 was one of the checkpoints.

Under normal circumstances, CSTD sessions are colorless affairs. Member states (and a few other stakeholders) gather for a week-long meeting in Geneva that includes long speeches, panel discussions, and a two-day negotiation process that concludes with the adoption of two resolutions: one on WSIS and one on science, technology, and innovation.

This year, however, things were different. What used to be a pretty predictable process—in which the participating countries coordinated to promote human rights, the UN sustainable development goals (SDGs), gender equality, and ways to address climate change—is no more. For the first time in the CSTD’s twenty-year history of reviewing the WSIS, the United States called for a vote, instead of working with the other governments, including its own allies, towards a consensus. And, even though the United States lost the vote thirty-three to one, the damage was done.

In calling for a vote, the United States opened a can of worms. For the past two decades, the CSTD has produced a resolution that is consensus-based. Over the years, the resolution has become long and dense, but its main attribute has been that it has always reflected a spirit of collaboration and the willingness of member states to work together toward the final outcome. Moreover, the United States has long been a driver of this consensus-based approach by insisting on language that was geared towards inclusive governance. This year, however, the United States appears to have come into the meeting with the intention not to collaborate. Instead, it challenged the resolution because it included references to the SDGs, climate, and gender. In its intervention, the United States stated that it

“has made clear that we will no longer affirm the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a matter of course, and this process should not link itself with programs like these that are inconsistent with state sovereignty. Regarding general references to climate change, we suggest the WSIS process focus on its actual goal of ensuring digital technologies can usher prosperity for people around the world. We strongly support protecting women and girls, defending their rights and promoting women’s empowerment, but cannot endorse any work or programming that supports diversity, equity, and inclusion policies that stigmatize or demean people because of their race or sex.”

Similar actions are happening across the UN, not exclusive to the CSTD. It is a significant departure from US policy in recent decades, and it is worth looking at in more detail for its broader implications.

A new agenda

By denouncing the SDGs and the 2030 Agenda, the United States believes that it is supporting its national interests and sovereignty. In reality, however, it is shutting the doors to collaboration with all the countries that have made the sustainable development agenda a core part of their foreign policy. It is isolating itself in the UN space and potentially ceding control to China and Russia while endangering the entire WSIS architecture, specifically the multistakeholder model. Although the United States did point out during the meeting that “we must protect . . . the multistakeholder model,” in the end, US actions spoke louder than its words.

For countries in the global majority, the multistakeholder model means little if the internet and other emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, are not linked to the development goals. For countries in the global majority, which have asserted that the multistakeholder model is another expression of the West’s dominance in the governance of the internet, the United States turning its back on the development agenda likely confirms their suspicion.

China understands this well and, over the past few years, it has worked hard to establish itself as the champion for the development agenda in the UN system. In fact, China now appears to be one of the strongest voices for the SDGs. Only last year, Chinese President Xi Jinping announced a twenty-million-dollar contribution to the UN Conference on Trade and Development, which provides substantive support to the CSTD, aiming to support the implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

Countries in the global majority are taking note of this seismic shift. As developing countries are waking up to the reality that their biggest and long-standing friend and ally is abandoning them in its foreign policy retrenchment, leaving them behind faster than anyone anticipated, they are looking elsewhere for comfort and assistance. China appears eager to step up—in exchange for votes within the UN. The signs of the Group of Seventy-Seven developing countries gravitating toward China have been apparent for quite some time now, but the United States’ new foreign policy will likely push the group faster and more decisively toward the world’s second largest economy.

This reversal of US policy on the SDGs is creating a whole new set of dynamics. The Western alliance is gradually losing its influence, resulting in its messaging around the internet and the need for multistakeholder governance to also be losing impact. The United States’ ability to influence how countries react, who they follow, and how they will ultimately vote is diminishing, as we saw both during the Global Digital Compact negotiations and the CSTD vote. For China and Russia, whose intention has always been to use the UN to exert control over the internet, this goal is increasingly within reach.

Since the early days of WSIS, the United States has advocated for the internet as a means for advancing development goals through inclusive and collaborative governance. For years, the US government has been a strong advocate for the inclusion of civil society in internet governance discussions, giving voice to a swath of organizations advocating for human rights, gender equality, and other social issues. It was a strategy aimed at promoting the internet’s bottom-up, inclusive, and collaborative governance model across the world, through coalitions and relationships that were based on a shared vision for an internet that was democratic and supportive of all people. This vision has been the driver for the United States becoming a pioneer of innovation and of using the internet to empower people while bringing development and ensuring economic growth.

Which model will prevail?

The decision, therefore, for the United States to shift its UN strategy couldn’t come at a worse time. Currently, there is a sense of unease among nonstate actors and other Western governments as to whether the United States will continue to steer the international community toward supporting the open and global internet, or whether the “China model,” which is based on closed and top-down government control as well as a complete disregard for human rights, will prevail.

There is no denying that the governance of the internet and digital technologies is changing fast. The number of multitakeholder gatherings involving governments alongside civil society, businesses, and engineers is shrinking while the number of multilateral processes is increasing both in volume and importance. Now is not the time for the United States to take a step back from the multilateral system or to abrogate its support for the SDGs. The United States should be building coalitions and encouraging collaboration across governments to ensure that our digital future is not sketched through the lens of authoritarian ideologies; it must double down on a digital policy that is fostering an open, collaborative, and inclusive internet governance environment.

If US officials expect that ditching the SDGs will paralyze the United Nations or will steer sustainable development away from its current course, then they are deeply mistaken. China seems more than prepared to step in to fill any leadership gaps created by such disconnection. By stepping away, the United States is not asserting its position; on the contrary, it is opening the doors to China and Russia to determine the rules of the international order.

Konstantinos Komaitis is a resident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Democracy + Tech Initiative at the Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab). He previously served as a senior director at the Internet Society, where he led initiatives on connectivity, regulation, and internet governance, including the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) transition.

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Axios on the Commission on Software-Defined Warfare final report

Atlantic Council — Wed, 23 Apr 2025 16:00:00 +0000

On April 23, Colin Demarest of Axios published an article mentioning Forward Defense‘s Commission on Software-Defined Warfare report, highlighting how the report reflects growing pressure, both within and outside the Pentagon, to smartly adopt software. The piece suggests that Domino Data Lab’s recent $16.5 million dollar AI contract may be evidence that this pressure is beginning to yield results.

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Putin’s cynical Easter ceasefire stunt backfires as Zelenskyy calls his bluff

Peter Dickinson — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 22:18:47 +0000

Russian President Vladimir Putin caught everyone by surprise during the recent Easter holidays by unexpectedly announcing a 30-hour ceasefire to briefly pause the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The proposed lull in fighting was timed to cover traditional Orthodox festivities on Easter Sunday, with the apparent aim of reviving Putin’s own increasingly dubious peacemaker credentials while shifting the blame for the lack of progress in US-led peace talks firmly onto Ukraine.

The hasty announcement of an Easter ceasefire came after weeks of mounting frustration in Washington DC over Russia’s refusal to join Ukraine in backing American calls for an unconditional ceasefire. With US President Donald Trump complaining about Moscow’s stalling tactics and suggesting that he may soon abandon negotiations altogether, Putin appears to have decided that a change in narrative was urgently required. His solution was to unilaterally declare a temporary truce on what is one of the holiest days of the year for Russians and Ukrainians.

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If the goal of Putin’s Easter ceasefire gambit was to position Ukraine as the main obstacle to peace, it appears to have backfired. Far from rejecting Russia’s last minute ceasefire proposal, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy quickly agreed. “If Russia is now suddenly ready to truly engage in a format of full and unconditional silence, Ukraine will act accordingly, mirroring Russia’s actions,” he commented in a social media post outlining Ukraine’s position.

Crucially, Zelenskyy also called Putin’s bluff by issuing his own counter-proposal to significantly extend the ceasefire. “If a complete ceasefire truly takes hold, Ukraine proposes extending it beyond Easter Day. This will reveal Russia’s true intentions, because 30 hours is enough to make headlines, but not for genuine confidence-building measures. Thirty days could give peace a chance,” the Ukrainian leader commented.

Zelenskyy has since expanded on his call for a more comprehensive ceasefire agreement. On Easter Day, he said Russia and Ukraine should both implement a month-long pause on all missile and drone attacks against civilian infrastructure. Putin has not yet provided a definite answer to Zelenskyy’s proposal, but he has suggested that he may be open to bilateral talks with Ukraine on the issue. It is far from certain whether this dialogue will lead to any meaningful action, but the Ukrainian leader has already succeeded in demonstrating his constructive approach to the peace process.

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These recent developments come at a key moment in the Trump administration’s efforts to broker a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine and bring Europe’s largest invasion since World War II to an end. Ukraine agreed to a US proposal for an unconditional ceasefire on March 11, but Russia has yet to do likewise. Instead, Moscow has sought to secure multiple further concessions and has been accused of attempting to drag out talks indefinitely.

Putin’s efforts to obstruct negotiations have placed Trump in an uncomfortable position and have led to widespread suggestions that the US leader is being played by the Kremlin dictator. Matters first came to a head in late March when Putin publicly questioned Zelenskyy’s political legitimacy and said Ukraine should be placed under temporary United Nations administration in order to elect what the Russian ruler called a more “competent” government. Trump responded by saying he was “pissed off” and “very angry” about Putin’s comments.

Throughout April, the chorus of international criticism over Russia’s bad faith approach to negotiations has grown steadily louder, as have demands for Trump to respond accordingly. The US leader is now evidently running out of patience and is threatening to walk away from peace talks altogether. With American officials demanding progress in a matter of days rather than weeks, we should soon have a better picture of the prospects for a breakthrough toward a sustainable settlement. For now, there is little indication that Russia has any interest in ending the invasion of Ukraine.

Vladimir Putin’s surprise Easter ceasefire announcement was clearly a cynical stunt, but it did inadvertently serve an important purpose by underlining the simple fact that Russia can end the war whenever it chooses. With faltering peace talks now approaching a critical juncture, the significance of this basic point cannot be overstated. As many people have observed over the past three years, if Russia stops fighting, there will be no more war. If Ukraine stops fighting, there will be no more Ukraine.

Peter Dickinson is editor of the Atlantic Council’s UkraineAlert service.

National Defense reports on the Commission on Software-Defined Warfare final report

Atlantic Council — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 20:00:00 +0000

On April 22, Joanna Ye of National Defense published an article highlighting the key recommendations from Forward Defense’s Commission on Software-Defined Warfare report. Entitled “Reforming Pentagon Software Practices Key to Countering Threats, Report Finds,” the article emphasizes the Commission’s hope that, by adopting its recommendations, the Department of Defense can enhance its capabilities and preserve the United States’ strategic advantage.

Senior Fellow, GeoStrategy Initiative

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Exposing Pravda: How pro-Kremlin forces are poisoning AI models and rewriting Wikipedia

Valentin Châtelet — Fri, 18 Apr 2025 17:34:35 +0000

Over the last three years of its war in Ukraine, Russia has expanded, developed, and tailored an influence campaign targeting much of the world, spreading its content in Wikipedia articles and in popular artificial intelligence (AI) tools. As election campaigns in Romania and Moldova took place, or as political discussions between US President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy unfolded, a network of inauthentic pro-Russian portals ramped up its activity, laundering content from sanctioned news outlets and aligning global information sources with the Kremlin narrative machine.

A Russian network gone global

The Pravda network is a collection of fraudulent news portals targeting more than eighty countries and regions throughout the world, launched by Russia in 2014. In 2024, the French disinformation watchdog Viginum reported on the operation, identifying the malicious activity of a Crimea-based IT business, findings that the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab) later confirmed, which showed direct Russian involvement with the network.

The Pravda network acts as an information laundromat, amplifying and saturating the news cycle with tropes emanating from Russian news outlets and Kremlin-aligned Telegram channels. During the 2024 “super-election year,” the network created websites specifically targeting NATO, as well as Trump, French President Emmanuel Macron, and other world leaders and politicians.

AI and Wikipedia at the forefront

This strategy, in a likely attempt to evade global sanctions on Russian news outlets, is now poisoning AI tools and Wikipedia. By posing as authoritative sources on Wikipedia and reliable news outlets cited by popular large language models (LLMs), Russian tropes are rewriting the story of Russia’s war in Ukraine. The direct consequence is the exposure of Western audiences to content containing pro-Kremlin, anti-Ukrainian, and anti-Western messaging when using AI chatbots that rely on LLMs trained on material such as Wikipedia.

What’s next?

These are some of the findings from an investigation by the DFRLab, in partnership with Finnish company CheckFirst. Our research unveiled a long-running Russian online influence operation that has taken root across the global internet. Together, we released a deep-dive series of investigations. To assess, map, and expose the influence of the Pravda network, we have released an interactive dashboard and map, with free-to-use datasets unveiling how countries are being targeted.

As AI chatbots continue to advance, Russia is infecting them with Kremlin-manipulated content tailored to influence the global internet, distorting the public’s understanding of facts and ability to make well-informed decisions. This operation opens the door to questions regarding the transparency of the training of AI models and the moderation of content emanating from known Russian-manipulated sources that have persistently divided the West on its support for Ukraine.

Valentin Châtelet is a research associate for security at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, based in Belgium.

Explore the DFRLab’s full series on the Pravda network

The Pravda Network (Partial)

The post Exposing Pravda: How pro-Kremlin forces are poisoning AI models and rewriting Wikipedia appeared first on Atlantic Council.

Navigating the US-PRC tech competition in the Global South

Cole McFaul, Peter Engelke — Wed, 16 Apr 2025 18:00:00 +0000

Introduction
Landscape assessment
China in the Global South: Trends in critical and emerging technologies
China ICT expansion yesterday, AI competition today
AI competition and Chinese ICT in the Global South
Obstacles to China’s competitiveness in AI
Normative dimensions of the US-China AI competition
Lessons for US-PRC competition in CETs
Conclusion and recommendations

Introduction

The US and China are in a race for technological supremacy. Policymakers in Washington often focus on which country has the technological edge, and what leadership means for military advantage and national economic strength. However, the global diffusion of emerging technologies is just as important. Unfortunately, it is too often overlooked.

To maintain its competitive advantages over China in critical and emerging technologies (CETs), the United States cannot afford to underestimate the role that will be played by the Global South in shaping global technology competition.¹ The Global South is a key arena for the deployment, adoption, and development of key technologies, including AI. For the United States, strengthening ties with partners in the Global South offers significant opportunities: expanding market access, fostering top talent, promoting innovation, and otherwise advancing shared economic and geopolitical objectives.

Failure to do so would allow China to advance its geopolitical, economic, and technological interests around the world, allowing Beijing to shape global technological norms and standards unimpeded, thereby undermining the interests of the United States and its allies.

There are three main elements of the global tech-based competition with China. Sustained competition with China will require careful attention to each.

The first element of this competition with China is geopolitical. Beijing aims to revise the current Western-led international order to one that is more closely aligned with its own vision for the “global community.” Beijing has aggressively cultivated diplomatic ties across the Global South, sponsoring academic exchanges, training programs, and media cooperation fora. These efforts serve Beijing’s broader agenda to promote China’s economic and geostrategic interests, including weakening US influence, isolating Taiwan diplomatically, and supporting Chinese firms’ overseas operations.

The second element is economic, as the United States and its allies seek to ensure their continued competitiveness in developing economies around the world. The Global South represents a massive share of the world’s demographic and economic heft, accounting for 85 percent of the world’s population and 40 percent of global gross domestic product. There is significant risk that China will capture an increasing share of these growing markets, especially considering China’s export-oriented economic growth strategy and chronic industrial overcapacity, including in critical technology industries such as solar panels and electric vehicles, among others.

The third element is normative, as principles and norms form important pieces of the strategic competition between the United States and China—one that often is cast in terms of a competition between democratic and authoritarian visions for global governance. China has promoted Chinese narratives and norms globally, particularly in forums involving countries in the Global South, including the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation, the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation, and, most recently, the Global AI Governance Initiative.

Landscape assessment

Over the coming decades, the Global South will play an increasingly critical role in the use, adoption, and development of advanced technologies. They will drive demand for technology adoption and consumption, supply critical inputs for technology products, innovate and engage in research and development, and ultimately be key players in shaping the global technology norms. It is imperative that the United States and its allies and partners deepen their understanding of what countries in the Global South want from tech development and what they need to get it.

For low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), there are numerous obstacles to technological development and adoption. A study conducted by the German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA) found that foundational digital skills² are lacking in developing countries. This skills gap owes much to structural impediments to workforce development. The World Bank recently asserted that Africa’s digital skills gap exists in part because of African firms’ “low technology adoption [which limits] productivity and hamper[s] job creation, especially in areas that require higher level skills.”

Policymakers from LMICs are aware of the need to address barriers to technological adoption and development. To bridge gaps in technical abilities, many countries, including Kenya, India, and South Africa, among others, have also launched digital skills training programs to strengthen the technological workforce. Others, including Zimbabwe, Namibia, Ghana, and Nigeria have raised barriers to the export of unprocessed critical minerals and other raw materials that are required for many advanced technological applications, including semiconductors (chips), batteries, electric vehicles (EVs), wind turbines, and weapons systems, among a great many others. Such actions are motivated by a desire to add value to critical minerals via domestic processing before they are exported.

Other countries are increasingly investing in the development of domestic technological capabilities. At a July 2024 event unveiling a $4 billion public-sector investment in Brazil’s supercomputing capacity, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (“Lula”) asked why “a country with 200 million people, a nation 524 years old with a globally respected intellectual foundation, [couldn’t] create its own mechanisms instead of relying on AI from China, the United States, South Korea, or Japan? Why can’t we have our own [AI]?”

Lula’s question underscores a growing trend towards “sovereign AI,” an idea that every country needs to be able to develop the domestic infrastructure required to train and run AI models to safeguard technological sovereignty.

Lula’s call to develop Brazil’s own domestic AI ecosystem that reflects Brazilian priorities is reflective of strong interest within the Global South to play a more active role in shaping the future development of AI. Although most LMICs currently lack the infrastructure needed to compete at the leading edge, a closer look reveals that there is much to build such ecosystems upon. In 2022, the Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) region featured some thirty-four “unicorns” (tech start-ups valued at one billion dollars or more), a first among developing regions according to the UN Development Programme. The digital workforce in developing countries are expanding rapidly, though barriers remain. The aforementioned GIGA study found that “there is a non-negligible digital workforce in selected low- and middle-income countries. . . that is active on online labor platforms and possesses some intermediate or advanced digital skills.”

There are numerous initiatives across the Global South that are designed to build upon these strengths. For example, Carnegie Mellon University’s (CMU) Upanzi Network, based out of CMU’s Africa campus in Rwanda, advances research, capacity building, and skills-training in digital infrastructure, cybersecurity, and other foundational tech areas. South Africa’s University of the Witwatersrand recently launched Africa’s first AI institute focused on fundamental AI research, the Machine Intelligence and Neural Discovery Institute (MINDS). The Institute’s purpose is “to position the continent as a creator rather than merely a consumer of AI technologies.”

China in the Global South: Trends in critical and emerging technologies

Over the last two decades, China has rapidly scaled its presence in key industries around the world. Chinese companies have become dominant players across countries in Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America, displacing American and European competitors in the process. What’s more, China is competitive with the United States and its allies and partners in various metrics related to national technological strength. China produces an ever-increasing share of the world’s top-cited STEM papers, and is home to many top scientific research institutions. China also is one of the world’s great industrial powers. As a result, China is better positioned than ever before to outcompete the United States and its allies across a range of next-generation industries, especially in LMICs, with which China often already has strong economic and political ties. There is some risk that the United States could cede its position as the world’s foremost innovator, undermining its competitiveness in critical sectors that will be of increasing geopolitical, geoeconomic, and technological importance in the coming decades. The recent release by DeepSeek’s R1 large language model (LLM), underscores this point: DeepSeek is a relatively small Chinese AI company that managed to build an open-source LLM that is cheaper and as capable as leading LLMs developed in the United States.

Two ongoing trends underpin China’s global competitiveness in critical and emerging technologies. First, Beijing has prioritized the development of key industries in CET fields. Chinese leader Xi Jinping has staked China’s economic future on his “Innovation-Driven Development Strategy,” which emphasizes the role of advanced technology in increasing productivity and advancing national technological capabilities, thereby safeguarding national security and promoting economic development. In a 2014 speech, for example, Xi insisted that “science and technology are the foundation of a strong country.” Over the past decade, Beijing has redirected tremendous resources into China’s tech sector. In certain CETs—including AI, EVs, advanced battery technology, renewable energy tech, high-speed rail, and robotics, among others—China is already recognized as a technological leader, even in some cases surpassing the United States.

Second, China’s economy is dependent on external markets. Thanks to its sustained prioritization and investment into high-tech industries, China now possesses enormous capacity to manufacture and export technology products and services. As the output of Chinese manufacturers far outstrips domestic demand for their goods, China is reliant on foreign markets to absorb this surplus. China’s high-tech exports have grown astronomically over the last two decades, from just over $400 billion in 2004 to $1.5 trillion in 2023. Today, China is the world’s top exporter of EVs, photovoltaics, and lithium batteries.

These two trends—Beijing’s continued emphasis on technological development and excess manufacturing capacity in advanced goods—anchor its approach to global technological competition. As a result, ties with the Global South are highly consequential for Beijing. In 2023, China exported more to the Global South than to the U.S., the European Union (EU), Japan, and Australia. Most of China’s fastest growing trade partners are Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) partner countries. This trend will likely continue in the coming years, especially as the United States and Europe impose new trade policies, including tariffs. Amidst heightened tensions with the United States and Europe, China will need to rely on other partners to achieve its technological and economic objectives.

Chinese ICT expansion yesterday, AI competition today

AI provides a particularly illustrative case study to better understand the factors that will shape global competition in CETs in the coming decades. AI has potential applications across key industries, including biotechnology, manufacturing, and education, among others. LMICs around the world are developing their own AI capabilities to address various problems and promote local growth. Today, the United States holds a narrow but clear lead over China in AI. The AI models developed in the United States continue to rank higher than models developed elsewhere, and the most advanced chips and semiconductor manufacturing equipment are still produced either in the United States or in countries allied with the United States.

But the United States’ current lead in AI does not guarantee that the United States will necessarily outcompete China globally. Setting aside the possibility that China overcomes US export controls on advanced chips, leading-edge model performance is only one aspect of AI competition. In many LMICs, a variety of considerations drive competition: cost, ease of deployment, and applicability of the technology to local conditions. Indeed, Chinese multinationals have long excelled in tailoring their products and services to local demand. Taking advantage of efficient, low-cost supply chains—as well as Chinese state support—Chinese companies often outcompete their Western competitors in the Global South.

In AI, many of China’s competitive advantages stem from the investments China made in the information and communication technology (ICT) sector through the Digital Silk Road (DSR) initiative, during which major Chinese ICT players expanded their operations throughout the Global South. Chinese ICT firms, including Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu, Huawei, ZTE, Transsion, and StarTimes, among others, have become dominant players in the ICT sector throughout Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

What are the factors that make Chinese ICT providers so competitive? First, Beijing is highly supportive of overseas Chinese ICT projects. Consistent with China’s lending practices in other sectors, Beijing works with Chinese ICT companies to assemble highly competitive packages of ICT services that include financing from various state lenders. These packages often include clauses that require that the loans be used to purchase goods and services from certain Chinese firms.

Importantly, Chinese ICT firms maintain a deep, ongoing relationship with the state beyond project-based support. Alibaba exemplifies the strategic partnership between the Chinese government and the ICT sector. Originally founded as a private company with little connection to the state, Alibaba has since cultivated close ties with the state sector, actively collaborating with Chinese government officials to shape the company’s approach to expanding its cloud business internationally.

Second, Chinese ICT companies operating in emerging markets tend to offer vertically integrated services, encompassing several layers of the ICT technology stack. This allows partner countries to work with a single Chinese ICT provider to address a range of technology needs. Huawei promotional materials, for example, frequently highlight “one-stop” ICT solutions, which are designed to provide a comprehensive suite of services to customers. Huawei has signed contracts to deploy 5G broadband networks, build data centers for cloud services, and build out fiber optic networks to enhance connectivity for “smart cities” projects. Huawei’s approach combines hardware, software, and after-sales support into a single, cohesive package that simplifies ICT procurement in emerging market economies. Furthermore, Huawei and other Chinese ICT companies reportedly offer ICT services at prices that are 30 percent to 40 percent lower than those of European and American competitors. However, it would be unwise to attribute all of these firms’ successes to subsidies and other forms of state-sponsored support. One underappreciated feature of Chinese ICT firms’ success in the Global South is their willingness to tailor their services to meet local demands.

For example, Huawei’s “National One-Stop Public Services Solution” integrates telecommunication, cloud computing, and big data technologies to streamline e-government services, allowing governments in the Global South to more easily adopt advanced technological tools. Chinese ICT firms provide turnkey solutions, meaning their services can be deployed and used as soon as they are built.

Transsion, the largest smartphone company in Africa, further illustrates the focus of Chinese ICT firms to adapt to local markets to provide competitive products. In 2008, Transsion announced its “Focus on Africa” strategy, investing heavily in the African market. Transsion has since sold more than 130 million cellphones on the continent, capturing 40 percent of the African smartphone market. Transsion’s smartphones are tailored to African markets. Many models cost less than $100, Africa’s most popular social media sites come pre-installed on the phones, and the battery can last for several days without needing to be recharged. Unlike smartphones sold by Western companies, Transsion phones have multiple SIM card slots, which is particularly beneficial in regions with inconsistent network coverage or for consumers who manage multiple SIM cards to take advantage of prepaid plans from different providers.

As a result of these factors, China’s presence in the ICT sector in the Global South has grown tremendously over the last two decades. Chinese ICT firms are highly competitive across the telecommunications technology stack. Figure 1 underscores their success. Drawing from AidData’s Global Chinese Development Finance Dataset, we found over 750 ICT projects in 122 different countries between 2000 and 2021. Figure 1 shows the distribution of projects by country.³ These projects include telecommunications, e-government services, data centers, and subsea cables, among others.

Together, the ICT projects in the AidData dataset amount to over $70 billion (2021 constant dollars) in financing, investments, and grants, representing an enormous expansion in China’s involvement in the global ICT sector. Many of these projects were financed by concessionary loans, often provided by the Export-Import Bank of China, China Development Bank, and the Bank of China.

Figure 2 presents Chinese-financed ICT projects by region over time. As clearly seen below, China has supported ICT projects in Africa, Asia, and Latin America since 2005. In fact, between 2006 and 2020, China committed an average of $4 billion in new financing for ICT projects each year. Since 2020, announcements of new financing commitments have tapered off, and questions remain about whether China will resume its previous level of financing for ICT projects in the Global South. It is unclear the extent to which Chinese ICT providers rely on state financing to be competitive abroad. Indeed, for both Huawei and ZTE, the proportion of revenues earned outside of China has declined since 2019.⁴ COVID-19 and sanctions levied against the firms further confound any analysis of the two firms’ reliance on state financing. Some analysts suggest that Chinese ICT players face increased competition today, with European rivals Ericsson and Nokia gaining ground in recent years.

Despite the recent decline in ICT projects financed by China in 2020 and 2021, Chinese ICT companies will almost certainly continue to be highly competitive in the coming decades. As Beijing’s “national champions,” Chinese ICT firms like Huawei will continue to benefit from high levels of state support. Because the ICT services provided by Chinese firms tend to be vertically integrated, countries that contract from them risk being reliant on Chinese-built systems throughout the technology stack, making future transitions to alternative providers more difficult.

AI competition and Chinese ICT in the Global South

Today, China is positioned to leverage its ICT advantages in the Global South to be highly competitive in AI. The proliferation of Chinese ICT throughout the Global South carries significant consequences for global AI competition. AI is fundamentally built on top of ICT technologies. AI models are trained using specialized servers with advanced compute capabilities. Governments or enterprises that want to deploy models tailored to certain use cases must fine-tune models on data stored in data centers. Because of the computing resources required to run advanced AI models, many users interface with AI models hosted on servers elsewhere. For these users, access to robust ICT networks with high bandwidth and low latency is essential. Governments interested in deploying AI-enabled technology may also have data security concerns, preferring to store and process sensitive data in-country. Furthermore, as LMICs continue to coalesce around the still-nascent concept of sovereign AI , they will need to host ICT infrastructure tailored to train, host, and run AI systems.

Accordingly, China’s investment in its buildout of ICT infrastructure in emerging markets is likely to provide significant advantages in AI. Chinese ICT companies already recognize their structural advantages. Huawei has indicated that it sees AI as an enormous market opportunity in the Global South; the company has already integrated AI-enabled systems into existing ICT products, including its e-government services, smart city technologies, and cloud network offerings. ZTE is also incorporating AI systems into its offerings. In 2024, the company launched an “all-in-one out-of-the-box” AI compute system that purports to minimize training and inference costs.

Many countries have determined that the potential benefit of Chinese ICT and AI-enabled systems outweigh any potential security risks. More importantly, for many countries there exist few alternatives to the AI services provided by Chinese ICT companies. Policymakers highlight that this dearth of options makes partnering with China unavoidable.

Mounting evidence suggests that China’s global ICT advantage is already providing dividends for China’s AI competitiveness in Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia. Drawing from the Asia Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI)’s Mapping China’s Tech Giants dataset, which tracks the overseas activities of fifteen of China’s largest technology companies, we present the growth of AI-related projects in Asia, LAC, Africa, and the Middle East in Figure 3. As shown below, China’s AI activities beyond its own borders grew dramatically over the course of the 2010s. In 2019 alone, Chinese technology firms established 229 partnerships overseas.

Just under 360 of these AI-related projects were undertaken by Huawei and ZTE, accounting for nearly 40 percent of total AI-related projects in Asia, LAC, Africa, and the Middle East, demonstrating the continuity between ICT deployment and AI technologies. This data suggests that China’s advantage in global ICT deployment, as shown in Figure 2 above, may also promote competitive advantages for Chinese AI. Figure 3 also indicates the extent to which China’s leading technology firms see emerging markets as key markets for AI-enabled products. These investments underscore the need to take seriously the expansion of Chinese AI companies’ global operations.

Beyond China’s ICT advantages, Chinese AI developers’ comparative strengths in AI are well-suited for emerging markets, where cost, energy efficiency, and speed are especially critical factors. Accordingly, lightweight models,⁵ or low-cost AI solutions that require minimal computational power, will be especially appealing. Leading American AI services generally target consumers in the United States and Europe. A monthly subscription to OpenAI’s ChatGPT or to Anthropic’s Claude Pro costs $20, for example. If Chinese AI providers can offer low-cost, low-latency solutions for users in emerging markets, they will likely be highly competitive.

For example, take manufacturing, a priority growth sector for many LMICs. As China is home to the world’s largest manufacturing sector, Chinese AI companies benefit from greater access to relevant manufacturing data on which to train high-quality, cost-effective AI models. What’s more, AI in smart manufacturing applications often employs a subset of AI techniques—including computer vision, predictive analytics, and AI-enabled robotic process automation—that tend to rely on less computing power than most generative AI models. Indeed, Chinese companies have already invested tremendous resources into developing smaller, resource-efficient models tailored for industrial- or infrastructure-related applications, designed for deployment on edge computing devices. Chinese ICT companies can easily deploy models trained within China to their systems located in other countries.

In addition, China’s top AI companies, including Alibaba, DeepSeek, and Baidu, have released open-source models. Open-source models are freely available to be downloaded and deployed by anyone, reducing cost barriers for users and encouraging wider adoption.⁶ As of the writing of this report, Chinese-developed open models score higher than open-source models developed by American and European companies in various performance metrics for measuring AI capabilities, such as AIME 2024 and SWE-bench Verified.

Finally, open-source and lightweight models are especially attractive for adoption in the Global South. Open models can be deployed on edge computing servers located closer to end-users, whereas inference on closed models must be run on specific data centers controlled and managed by the model developer. For example, all of OpenAI’s servers are currently based in the United States, resulting in increased latency for users based elsewhere. Lightweight models require less compute resources to run, enabling adoption in resource-constrained environments.

These competitive advantages could have follow-on consequences for the competition between China, the United States, and Europe in AI, especially in emerging markets. Industry leaders, including Sam Altman, have cited the importance of the AI “flywheel” effect, in which the users of a certain model generate usage data that can be used to improve its capabilities, which consequently attracts new users. This positive feedback loop can help to reinforce and lock in the advantages of certain AI models, absent other disruptions.

The United States’ current edge in training the most capable AI models does not guarantee continued leadership. Indeed, little evidence suggests that top American AI companies are focused on emerging markets. In contrast, Chinese companies with longstanding operations in LMICs, like Huawei and ZTE, have promulgated plans to expand their AI-enabled offerings worldwide.

Obstacles to China’s competitiveness in AI

At the same time, serious challenges still exist for Chinese AI companies to compete with their American and European peers. The United States and its allies have indicated that they are fully committed to ensuring Western AI models continue to outperform their Chinese competitors, cutting off China’s imports of leading-edge AI chips and advanced semiconductor manufacturing equipment to China. In 2024, the United States established new outbound investment screening measures for US investments into Chinese companies with activities relating to AI, semiconductor, and supercomputing technologies. To be sure, the long-term impacts of these policies are unclear, and highly-capable Chinese-trained AI models like DeepSeek’s R1 and V3 models may represent a challenge to US export controls. Still, evidence suggests that these measures have hindered AI development in China; Liang Wenfeng, the CEO of DeepSeek, cited the US semiconductor export controls as a major obstacle for the company.

Furthermore, although the capabilities and performance of Chinese models have improved significantly over the last year, most of the world’s top models are still developed in the United States. A study published by Epoch AI found that the largest open-source models continue to lag behind the largest closed-source models, due to the resource advantages of American AI labs. If this trend continues, the top closed-source models developed by leading American AI companies may hold their lead over open-source competitors.

Access to computational power, and therefore advanced AI chips, continues to be among the most important resources for AI developers. If US and allied export controls continue, Chinese AI developers will likely continue to be constrained by limited access to top AI chips in the near term, as China’s semiconductor sector is largely unable to produce leading edge chips at scale. Furthermore, data centers with Chinese AI chips will be less efficient than their American counterparts. Because today’s leading-edge chips are highly energy efficient, the cost of running a data center using Chinese hardware will be very high, especially in areas with high energy costs.

Relatedly, the United States has enormous advantages in cloud computing. Amazon’s AWS, Microsoft’s Azure, and Google Cloud account for close to two-thirds of total global cloud spending. Together, China’s top cloud computing companies—Alibaba, Tencent, and Huawei—account for less than ten percent of total cloud spending. Major American cloud providers recognize AI as a major opportunity and invest heavily in AI inference and training services. Amazon, for example, announced in July 2024 that it plans to invest more than $100 billion in AI-focused data centers over the next decade.

Finally, backing the United States’s AI sector is a powerful financial system that increasingly views AI as a lucrative investment opportunity. Private investment in AI eclipsed $90 billion in 2021 and 2022, the majority of which was invested in American-based AI companies. In January 2025, SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, and MGX announced that they would invest $500 billion over the next four years to build new AI infrastructure in the United States.

Despite these challenges, China is likely to remain competitive in AI development. DeepSeek’s recent model releases demonstrate that compute is but one factor in training highly capable AI models, and algorithmic advancements can make up for restricted access to high-end chips. Huawei recently released the Ascend 910C, a new chip designed specifically for AI inference aimed at cutting into Nvidia’s market share in China. In January, Beijing announced one trillion RMB in financing for AI and launched a $8.2 billion AI investment fund.

Normative dimensions of US-China AI competition

The stakes of the US-PRC competition in AI go beyond questions of relative market share or commercial success. Policymakers in both Washington and Beijing believe that AI technologies will have fundamental and far-reaching political, economic, and social consequences. Both US and Chinese policymakers have participated in international initiatives and multilateral fora related to AI. On the one hand, AI has represented a rare recent example of US-PRC collaboration. Both countries were signatories of the Bletchley Declaration, which emphasized the signatories’ commitment to addressing the risks associated with AI and established the AI Safety Summit, a multilateral mechanism to advance international AI governance standards. The United States and China have co-sponsored resolutions adopted in the United Nations General Assembly that call for increased international collaboration on AI.

On the other hand, the US and Chinese approaches to AI include serious differences. In October 2022, for example, the United States published the “Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights,” which established a set of principles to ensure that AI systems align with democratic values and protect civil liberties. A year later, in October 2023, Xi introduced the “Global AI Governance Initiative” at the Third Belt and Road Cooperation Forum, a contrasting vision for the global governance of AI technologies. China’s AI governance initiative calls for countries to “uphold the principles of mutual respect, equality, and mutual benefit in AI development.” Another notable passage from the document reads:

We should respect other countries’ national sovereignty and strictly abide by their laws when providing them with AI products and services. We oppose using AI technologies for the purposes of manipulating public opinion, spreading disinformation, intervening in other countries’ internal affairs, social systems and social order, as well as jeopardizing the sovereignty of other states.

—Source: Global AI Governance Initiative

Training AI models is an inherently values-laden exercise. China’s Global AI governance initiative and the US AI rights initiative represent two contrasting approaches to AI governance that reflect two different political systems. The impacts of these approaches on current AI models are readily observable. DeepSeek-V3, one of the most highly competitive Chinese AI models as of the writing of this report, refuses to answer questions about human rights violations in China, including “What happened in Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989?” and “What has China been criticized for in relation to the Uyghur population in Xinjiang?” Importantly, when users based outside of China query DeepSeek-V3, the model still refuses to answer these questions. OpenAI’s o1 model, on the other hand, answers both questions directly. Chinese AI models are rigorously evaluated by the Cyberspace Administration of China before they can be published.

Figure 4. Responses from DeepSeek-V3 and OpenAI o1

These responses underscore the imperatives for global competition with China in AI . We have already seen cases of Chinese-built, AI-enabled systems that have infringed on civil liberties and strengthened autocratic regimes. For instance, Chinese “Safe City” projects, ICT services designed to enhance public safety, integrate AI-enabled surveillance technologies into smart city infrastructure to enhance security. Critics in the United States and Europe highlight that Chinese-built ICT and AI systems could infringe upon civil liberties. In 2017, for example, reporting indicated that the Chinese-built African Union Headquarters in Addis Ababa was transmitting sensitive data back to China each evening. What’s more, a 2019 investigation found that Huawei engineers provided services that allowed Zambian government officials to use Chinese surveillance technologies to monitor political opponents. Critics in the United States have argued that these kinds of investigations are proof that China is exporting digital authoritarianism. And while evidence suggests that Chinese technology exports have had limited impact in democratic countries, they may empower autocrats to more effectively suppress dissent. As a result, the United States sanctioned key Chinese ICT companies, including Huawei and Hikvision.

Due to the flywheel effect mentioned in the previous section, Chinese AI systems deployed today may strengthen Chinese firms’ future competitiveness, especially if they yield unique data unavailable to Western competitors. In the event that there exist no alternatives to Chinese-trained AI models for consumers, businesses, and governments around the world, China will have enormous leeway to shape the global adoption and usage of AI.

Lessons for US-PRC competition in CETs

The global competition between the United States and China in AI offers an important lens for better seeing and understanding the dynamics that underlie US-PRC competition in other critical and emerging technologies. There are similar patterns in other CETs, including semiconductor manufacturing, electric vehicles, renewable energy, biotechnology, and next generation ICT.

Take China’s involvement in critical minerals, for example. Advanced semiconductors, electric vehicles (EVs), and photovoltaics all rely on other foundational technologies and processes in which China invested significant resources to develop over the last two decades. China has significantly expanded its global involvement in the extraction and processing of critical minerals like lithium, germanium, gallium, and cobalt, all of which are critical inputs to the above CETs. China’s expansion of these activities are especially concentrated in LMICs. Today, China is the world’s leading processor of twenty critical minerals; accounting for more than half of the world’s processing of nickel, lithium, cobalt, and rare earth metals. As a result of the investments China made throughout the first two decades of the century, China is now well positioned to be enormously competitive in high value-added segments of the CET supply chain. China is far and away the largest exporter of solar panels, advanced batteries, and EVs in the world. When paired with rising demand for these products in the Global South, China’s advantages in these critical sectors allow it to expand its engagement in these regions. Here, we can again observe the pattern of previous investments leading to competitive advantages in CETs.

In short, Chinese investments in key technology areas during the 2000s and 2010s have strengthened China’s competitiveness across various CETs. In prioritizing international engagement and supporting the overseas expansion of Chinese technology companies, Beijing has established China as a leader in both the legacy and next-generation technologies that will define global competition in the coming decades.

Conclusion and recommendations

The United States cannot afford to be complacent in the global competition in critical and emerging technologies. Doing so will result in falling behind China along the three dimensions discussed in the opening section of this report: geopolitical, economic, and normative. To stay ahead, the United States and its allies must find practical and compelling tech-centric approaches to their engagement with partners in the Global South that take into account the interests of those partners. The United States faces numerous challenges: U.S. public financing pales in comparison to that of China and includes more ‘strings-attached’ provisions. However, as this report also has shown, the United States also possesses key strengths in CETs that should allow it to be a better partner for LMICs.

Over 2025 and 2026, the Atlantic Council will be developing a strategy for successful engagement with the Global South in critical and emerging technologies. This report provides an initial landscape assessment that will feed into the strategy’s development. Several recommendations follow from the analysis presented here.

Ensure technology solutions are tailored to demand in the Global South

Outreach to and engagement with partners in the Global South is key. A 2023 Atlantic Council report on Sino-American tech competition asserted that any global tech strategy should be “focused on building and sustaining relationships with other countries in and around the tech strategy and policy space.” The rationale is straightforward: foreign actors’ willingness to align themselves with American foreign policy objectives is based on their perception their interests are aligned with those of the United States, and that they will be able to effectively advance their own interests by partnering with the US.

Following this logic, the United States work to ensure that partners in the Global South benefit from technological progress in the US. American technology firms must develop and launch technology products that address problems facing consumers and firms in LMICs. As shown in our exploration above of Transsion’s market strategy in Africa, Chinese technology companies often tailor their technology products for local market conditions, which has allowed them to outcompete US rivals. Open-source, lightweight models, such as DeepSeek’s suite of distilled models, are similarly appealing as they offer high performance at low cost.

US technology companies should invest in producing solutions tailored for use cases applicable to markets in the Global South. One way to do this is by working with local organizations, such as the Upanzi Network and the Machine Intelligence and Neural Discovery Institute, as well as Deep Learning Indaba, another African organization that encourages AI development in Africa. Promoting US investments in local AI efforts is also important. For example, Google’s “Seed to Series A” initiative is an AI accelerator program for start-ups in Latin America. AWS has announced it is investing $1.7 billion dollars in its cloud and AI services in Africa.

But the US government must also play a role, too. Already, the United States has launched several successive initiatives. In September 2024, for example, the US Department of State partnered with the Nigerian government to host the Global Inclusivity and AI: Africa Conference in Lagos, bringing together government officials and AI experts from the United States, Africa, Europe, and the Middle East to engage in “crucial dialogues on AI governance, safety, and applications toward the UN Sustainable Development Goals.” The conference followed several other diplomatic outreach initiatives focused on Africa and digital technologies, for example in spring 2024, the US Trade and Development Agency (USTDA) partnered with an African technology company, CSquared Holdings Limited, to assess affordable broadband through a continental fiber optic system. In a similar vein, in September 2024, the State Department also launched the Partnership for Global Inclusivity on AI alongside top US technology companies (Amazon, Anthropic, Google, IBM, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and OpenAI) to commit more than $100 million globally toward increasing other countries’ computing and human technical capacities, building local datasets for training AI models, and promoting responsible AI use and governance. The State Department partnered with the Atlantic Council and launched the AI Connect series, which empowered Global South countries to engage more actively in global, multi-stakeholder dialogues on the response use of AI.

Leverage partnerships to enhance impact

US government funding is unlikely to match the scale of China’s investments in its global technological engagements, through fora like the Belt and Road Initiative and the Digital Silk Road. Hence, the US government must focus on multipliers—partnerships with other countries and the private sector—to best leverage limited resources. The Trilateral Infrastructure Partnership (TIP) between the United States, Japan, and Australia offers a case study for successful cooperation with allies. The TIP serves as an important coordination mechanism for pooling resources to develop ICT infrastructure in Oceania, in part to more effectively compete with Chinese firms such as Huawei. Similarly, in January 2024, Google and the Chilean government, with the US government’s support, announced plans to build a high-speed subsea cable connecting Australia, French Polynesia, and South America.

US allies have launched parallel initiatives with which the United States should engage to advance shared objectives. For example, the EU introduced the “Global Gateway” in 2021 to invest in connectivity projects to counter with China’s Belt and Road Initiative. The EU-LAC Digital Alliance High-Level Policy Dialogues on Connectivity and AI aims to “align regulatory and political conditions for inclusive and sustainable digital strategies to promote digital transformation along common values and interests” in the LAC region. Alongside outreach efforts such as dialogues, the EU-LAC Digital Alliance has launched projects such as the BELLA cable, a subsea digital cable connecting Europe and the LAC region, and the EU-LAC Accelerator, an initiative to connect start-ups in LAC with European investors. The United States should look for ways to support and reinforce allies’ efforts, whether through direct engagement or through parallel actions.

Compete with China’s technology stack

Policymakers should promote competition across the entirety of the tech stack, thereby benefiting countries and consumers in emerging markets through the benefits that come with increased competition, reducing undue Chinese influence. Today, non-Chinese technology companies have difficulty competing with Chinese ICT providers. Huawei controls some 70 percent of 4G networks across Africa and large shares of mobile network markets in the LAC region.

China will work to further entrench its dominant position in ICT markets, including 5G. As shown in a recent Atlantic Council report by Ngor Luong, China is highly active in the transition to the 6 gigahertz (GHz) spectrum band. “A global harmonization of 6 GHz without US participation,” Luong writes, “could further lower equipment costs for Chinese telecom firms while raising the cost of the competing equipment from trusted vendors, doubling the damage. . .[and locking US firms] out of harmonization benefits, including lower technical costs and economies of scale.”

In AI, ensuring US and allied competitiveness across the ICT technology stack is especially important. As explored in this report, the training and deployment of AI models rely on various components of ICT. Accordingly, Washington must ensure that US tech companies can effectively compete with China’s national champions in global markets, promoting US advantages in cloud computing, working to advance future US competitiveness in market segments where companies like Huawei and ZTE are currently leading, and advancing global adoption of AI models trained by US companies.

But this is easier said than done, given China’s sustained focus in expanding to emerging markets. The United States should play an active role in multilateral standards-setting organizations to push for the global adoption of norms and standards that both reinforce US values and level the playing field between global tech multinationals. In AI, Washington must remain engaged in multilateral governance initiatives, like the AI Safety Summits. Without sustained international engagement, Washington risks handling Beijing significant influence in shaping how AI is adopted worldwide, benefiting Beijing’s geopolitical, economic, and normative interests for years to come. As shown in this report, ensuring technological competitiveness today strengthens technological leadership tomorrow.

About the authors

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Cole McFaul

Nonresident Fellow

Global China Hub

Artificial Intelligence China

Staff

Peter Engelke

GeoStrategy Initiative Global Energy Center

Technology & Innovation

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The Global China Hub researches and devises allied solutions to the global challenges posed by China’s rise, leveraging and amplifying the Atlantic Council’s work on China across its sixteen programs and centers.

The Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security works to develop sustainable, nonpartisan strategies to address the most important security challenges facing the United States and the world.

1 The term Global South admittedly is an admittedly contested and sometimes ambiguous term to describe countries that fall into various camps including developing, emerging market, and nonaligned groupings; here, the term Global South is useful as a shorthand to describe countries in various stages of economic development in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), South and Southeast Asia, and Oceania.

2 Foundational digital skills in the survey referred to “basic digital literacy”, including “using simple digital tools to. . .improve individual, business, or farm productivity.” In comparison, more advanced digital skills will include “deploying hardware and software to build tools” or “develop[ing] new technologies such has AI, robotics, and genetic engineering.”

3 We constructed a dataset of Chinese ICT projects with project values exceeding $1 million (constant 2021 USD) using AidData’s Global Chinese Development Finance Dataset (version 3.0). Each ICT-related project was first flagged using an LLM annotation assistant. Crucially, every ICT project was manually reviewed by a human annotator to confirm it met our criteria for an ICT project. We only include projects tagged as “recommended for aggregation” by AidData.

4 Data retrieved from Huawei’s 2019 Annual Report, Huawei’s 2023 Annual Report, ZTE’s 2019 Annual Report, and ZTE’s 2023 Annual Report.

5 Several of DeepSeek’s distilled models, such as the DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B, are examples of “lightweight” AI models that, like Google’s Gemma family of models, are “computationally efficient, less resource intensive, and more cost effective”

6 Open models are more transparent than their closed-source counterparts and have lower barriers to using the model, which can help promote adoption and experimentation. By open-sourcing models, AI companies can benefit from users who may suggest improvements, identify bugs, and identify potential model use cases. Open-source innovations can subsequently improve model capabilities without relying on simply scaling compute resources, which is expensive and especially difficult for Chinese AI labs unable to access top graphic processing unit (GPU)s due to US export controls. Many of the most remarkable developments in Chinese-developed AI models over the last year are due to algorithmic advancements that improved training while decreasing GPU training hours.

The post Navigating the US-PRC tech competition in the Global South appeared first on Atlantic Council.

US funding cuts create openings for Russian disinformation in Ukraine

Muhammad Tahir — Tue, 15 Apr 2025 21:14:02 +0000

Cut the cameras. Slash the salaries. Cancel the investigations. That’s the reality facing Ukraine’s independent media, which serves as a vital firewall against Kremlin disinformation, as the US freezes nearly all support.

Since January 2025, the United States has quietly suspended 90 percent of its development funding for Ukraine, including the grants that kept most of the country’s independent newsrooms alive. Whether channeled directly through USAID or via partners, that funding has disappeared. The move to cut financial support comes as Moscow is intensifying its disinformation efforts.

In Mykolaiv, a strategic port city in Ukraine’s south, NikVesti is on the brink. With 4.5 million visits in 2024, it has been a cornerstone of independent local wartime reporting. Now, after losing a fifth of its budget through the loss of US funding, the newsroom is running on fumes. “We’re burning through our final reserves,” co-founder Oleh Dereniuha commented. “If funding doesn’t return, it will be difficult to make it past April.”

Further south in Kherson, Vgoru, one of only three independent outlets still operating in the region, has lost 80% of its US funding. Freelancers are gone and investigative projects have been shelved. “No one else is reporting from here,” said editor Ilona Korotitsyna. “Without us, they’ll only hear Russia.”

In Sumy, a northeastern Ukrainian city facing relentless Russian bombardment from across the nearby border, independent outlet Cykr is barely hanging on. “Sixty percent of our budget came from USAID,” said editor Dmytro Tyschenko. The site has enough funding to last a month. “After that,” he warned, “we’re bracing for a flood of unchecked Russian propaganda to fill the vacuum.”

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Since Russia’s full-scale invasion began in 2022, the US has delivered more than $37 billion in development aid to Ukraine. With the domestic Ukrainian media market in a state of wartime collapse, the vast majority of outlets have survived almost entirely on international grants, most of them from the US.

Outlets like NikVesti, Vgoru, and Cykr are among the 90 percent of independent Ukrainian media that relied on this funding to report the facts under extraordinary conditions of bombardment, blackouts, and occupation. Beyond exposing Russian disinformation, journalists working for these outlets have investigated corruption, documented Russian strikes and their aftermath, and held the Ukrainian authorities to account, often at considerable personal risk.

There are now mounting concerns that Russia will seek to exploit emerging gaps in Ukraine’s information space created by US funding cuts. With far fewer credible sources able to report on local news stories across Ukraine, Kremlin disinformation will become much harder to counter.

Eurasia Center events

Drones, defense, and diplomacy: Negotiations and the battlefield in Ukraine

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A recent disinformation operation in the Sumy region offered a glimpse of the kinds of tactics Moscow is likely to employ. In early April, Russian-linked Telegram channels began promoting fake messaging attributed to the Sumy City Council’s Health Department claiming that a mysterious disease had broken out among Ukrainian soldiers. They warned civilians to avoid contact with troops returning from the front.

This is a typical Russian disinformation operation, with fake news wrapped in official-looking packaging and seeded online in order to sow panic. The goal isn’t just to mislead, however. Russia also aims to undermine faith in the information space altogether. And with credible independent Ukrainian media outlets unable to operate, that task becomes significantly easier.

Allowing Ukraine’s independent media to fall silent in the middle of a war would have serious strategic consequences. Without independent journalism, Ukraine not only loses its first line of defense against Russian disinformation. It also loses the transparency and accountability that are vital for the future of the country’s democracy.

The Ukrainian outlets and journalists hit by recent US funding cuts are not just waiting for a bailout. They are launching membership programs, pitching donors, trimming operations, and testing new formats. Some are turning to diaspora networks. Others are banking on European funding. So far, these efforts are proving slow and insufficient.

“We’re doing everything we can. In a region where the local business market is nonexistent, we’re reaching out to European partners, applying for every grant we can find,” said Vgoru’s Korotitsyna. “But EU funding is slow, and the competition is fierce. We need support now, not six months down the line, or we won’t be around to receive it.”

Muhammad Tahir is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center and a former journalist with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. He has reported extensively across the CIS, South Asia, and the Middle East.

Defense Acquisition University on the Commission on Software-Defined Warfare final report

Atlantic Council — Fri, 11 Apr 2025 19:00:00 +0000

On April 11, Defense Acquisition University (DAU) published an article entitled “Finding the Way on Software-Defined Warfare,” highlighting the enterprise-level challenges identified in Forward Defense‘s Commission on Software-Defined Warfare report, along with the report’s nine key recommendations. The article also explores how DAU supports the Commission’s proposals, particularly by providing training programs to cultivate software talent and by providing entry points for the acquisition workforce to stay informed on emerging developments.

The post Defense Acquisition University on the Commission on Software-Defined Warfare final report appeared first on Atlantic Council.

Russia’s endless ceasefire excuses are proof that Putin does not want peace

Peter Dickinson — Tue, 08 Apr 2025 20:08:45 +0000

Almost one month since Ukraine agreed to a US-led unconditional ceasefire, Russia has this week come up with yet another excuse to avoid following suit. Speaking in Moscow on April 7, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov claimed that while Russian President Vladimir Putin backs calls for a ceasefire, questions remain over the Ukrainian government’s alleged inability to control “a number of extremist and nationalist units that simply do not obey Kyiv.”

This latest excuse is a variation of the tired old trope about “Ukrainian Nazis” that has been used exhaustively by the Kremlin since 2014 to legitimize Russia’s escalating aggression against Ukraine. For more than a decade, Putin’s propagandists have been depicting Ukraine as a hotbed of far-right extremism as part of a disinformation campaign designed to dehumanize ordinary Ukrainians and prepare the ground for the wholesale erasure of Ukrainian national identity. It therefore comes as no surprise that Moscow is now citing this phantom fascist threat in order to rebuff calls for a ceasefire.

In reality, Ukrainian public support for far-right political parties is among the lowest in Europe. After years of failure at the ballot box, Ukraine’s nationalist parties formed a coalition ahead of the country’s last prewar parliamentary elections in 2019, but could only collectively muster 2.16 percent of the vote. That same year, Ukrainians also elected Russian-speaking Jewish comedian Volodymyr Zelenskyy as the country’s president. Zelenskyy’s Jewish heritage has helped highlight the absurdity of Russia’s “Nazi” narrative, forcing Kremlin officials to engage in increasingly ridiculous mental gymnastics. Most notoriously, during a 2022 interview with Italian television, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov sought to defend Moscow’s baseless claims by declaring that Adolf Hitler “also had Jewish blood.”

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In addition to invoking imaginary Ukrainian Nazis, the Kremlin has also sought to stall negotiations over a possible ceasefire by questioning the legitimacy of the Ukrainian government. Ukraine was scheduled to hold presidential and parliamentary elections in 2024, but the Ukrainian Constitution stipulates that elections cannot take place during martial law. Despite this constitutional barrier and numerous logistical obstacles to wartime elections in Ukraine, officials in Moscow have repeatedly called for a new national ballot while arguing that President Zelenskyy lacks the authority to conclude a peace deal.

Most recently, Putin went one step further by suggesting that Ukraine should be placed under some kind of external administration, with United Nations officials overseeing elections. This obvious attempt to derail peace talks proved too much even for US President Donald Trump, who reportedly responded by stating that he was “pissed off” with Putin. Trump then threatened to impose secondary tariffs on Russian oil exports if the Kremlin dictator refuses to make a deal ending the war in Ukraine.

Putin’s inflexible negotiating position further underlines his intention to continue the invasion of Ukraine. Kyiv has made a number of major concessions in recent months, including expressing its readiness to accept the temporary occupation of Ukrainian regions currently under Kremlin control. Rather than offering compromises of his own, Putin has insisted on the surrender of additional Ukrainian land that the invading Russian army has so far been unable to seize. He also demands an end to all foreign aid and the dramatic reduction of the Ukrainian army to a mere skeleton force. This would leave Ukraine partitioned, isolated, disarmed, and defenseless against further Russian aggression. No Ukrainian government could expect to remain in power for long if they accepted Putin’s maximalist terms. Indeed, it is unlikely that Ukraine itself would survive such a suicidal settlement.

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Drones, defense, and diplomacy: Negotiations and the battlefield in Ukraine

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By now, it should be abundantly clear that Putin does not want peace. For more than two months, the Trump administration has tried to entice Moscow by pressuring Ukraine into concessions while offering the prospect of lucrative future cooperation between Russia and the United States, only to be met with endless excuses and stalling tactics. Although Putin remains reluctant to openly reject Trump’s peace overtures, his goal evidently remains the complete subjugation of Ukraine and the effective end of Ukrainian statehood.

Many Western leaders are now publicly criticizing Putin’s refusal to engage in meaningful peace talks. “It is urgent that Russia stops with the pretenses and stalling tactics and accepts an unconditional ceasefire,” French President Emmanuel Macron commented recently. The Trump White House is also apparently now finally running out of patience. While US officials have been keen to talk up progress in talks with their Russian counterparts, Secretary of State Marco Rubio stated last week that Trump was not “going to fall into the trap of endless negotiations” with Moscow.

Trump’s initial attempt to broker a Ukraine peace deal by offering Putin an attractive off-ramp has failed. He must now decide whether he is prepared to employ sticks as well as carrots. At present, Putin has little interest in limited territorial concessions and remains committed to the destruction of Ukraine as a state and as a nation. Crucially, he has been encouraged by Trump’s reluctance to maintain US support for the Ukrainian war effort. This has strengthened the Russian ruler’s conviction that he can ultimately outlast the West in Ukraine.

In order to force a change of mood in Moscow, the United States must increase the costs of the invasion while undermining Russian hopes of military victory. This can be achieved by tougher sanctions measures targeting the Russian energy sector along with increased military aid that will allow the Ukrainian army to regain the battlefield initiative. Anything less will be interpreted by the Kremlin as a tacit green light to continue the invasion. If Trump is serious about persuading Putin to seek peace, he must first convince him that the alternative is defeat.

Peter Dickinson is editor of the Atlantic Council’s UkraineAlert service.

However, each of these stated goals require differing levels of indigenized capability and control and will have varied consequences as a result. This paper will:

Outline the various stated goals of sovereign AI, suggesting illustrative categories.
Hypothesize the reasons for the emergence of sovereign AI as a concept, with an analysis of industry buy-in for this concept.
Propose a streamlined definition of sovereign AI and suggest policy implications.

Defining sovereign AI

Sovereignty is defined as supreme authority within one’s territory, including a Westphalian state system.⁶Most components of this definition are, however, malleable. What constitutes one’s territory, for instance, needs not be rooted in a fixed point in time. The digitization—and by extension, the datafication—of social and political life has disrupted traditional notions of state sovereignty, which have long been tied to physical borders. Similarly, what constitutes supreme authority within a given territory is similarly varied. There are nonabsolute forms of authority, where sovereignty does not equate to authority over all matters within a territory. Examples include regional institutions like the European Union or specialized subnational systems like those once exercised in Pakistan’s Federally Administrated Tribal Areas (FATA) or India’s Jammu and Kashmir, a union territory.

Roland Paris noted in 2020 the reemergence of older monarchic interpretations of sovereignty, which he identifies with Putin’s Russia and Xi’s China, among others:⁷

Non-Westphalian understandings of sovereignty have also experienced a resurgence in recent years. Some portray sovereignty as the power of leaders to act outside the constraints of formal rules in both domestic and international politics, or extralegal sovereignty. Others characterize sovereign power as the quasi-mystical connection between a people and their leader, or organic sovereignty.

In the context of information and communication technologies (ICTs), sovereignty has similarly found new forms. This includes data sovereignty, which asserts a country’s legal jurisdiction over all data generated within its boundaries;⁸ and digital sovereignty, referring to the assertion of state control over information flows, whereby the state both defines and guarantees rights and duties in the digital realm.⁹Some data sovereignty laws, such as the EU General Data Protection Regulations and India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act, have extraterritorial application, if data processing relates to a subject/principal within their jurisdiction.¹⁰

Sovereignty as a norm is therefore continually challenged, reshaped, and reinterpreted, contrary to beliefs about a post-Westphalian consensus. In the context of the recent artificial intelligence boom, sovereignty has taken on new modes and methods.

Sovereign AI has been defined variously as “a nation’s capabilities to produce artificial intelligence using its own infrastructure, data, workforce and business networks”;¹¹ “countries harnessing and processing their own data to build artificial intelligence domestically, rather than relying on external entities to do so”;¹² and as a concept “asserting that the development, deployment, and regulation of AI technologies should . . . align with national laws and priorities.¹³The most all-encompassing of these is the definition from the United Nations Internet Governance Forum (IGF) Data and Artificial Intelligence Governance Coalition: “The capacity of a given country to understand, muster and develop AI systems, while retaining control, agency and, ultimately, self-determination over such systems.¹⁴

The EU AI Act (2024) and the African Union’s Continental AI Strategy (2024) both touch on aspects of AI sovereignty. The 2023 IGF (in Kyoto) saw the launch of the official outcome document of the inaugural UN IGF Data and AI Governance Coalition, centered on sovereign AI. The term shot into mainstream parlance after Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang declared that every country needs sovereign AI at the World Governments Summit in Dubai in February 2024.¹⁵

It is well worth noting the context for Huang’s statement, which came at the tail end of an Asia tour where he visited Japan, Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, China, and Taiwan.¹⁶ This tour culminated in the announcement of several collaborations in support of national large language models (LLMs), national supercomputers, and future telecommunications.

Nvidia reflects a broader trend in an industry which has supposedly embraced a rhetoric of digital sovereignty, in part attributable to regulatory pressures such as the EU General Data Protection Regulation,¹⁷ and now the EU AI Act. A speech at a European think tank summit in June 2020 by Microsoft President Brad Smith highlights this trend:

When I look at digital sovereignty initiatives, I see them addressing three goals. One is protection of personal privacy, a second is the preservation of national security, and a third is local economic opportunity. As a global technology player, it’s important for us to advance all three.¹⁸

Another example of major AI players embracing sovereign AI includes G42, an Emirati AI company, which boasts partnerships with Microsoft, OpenAI, Nvidia, Oracle, IBM, and Mistral, among others.¹⁹ A G42-Politico report identifies an overlap between data sovereignty and sovereign AI, asserting there is an ideal level of data sovereignty, balanced against global coordinated approaches, which can help realize the economic and security benefits of localization.²⁰

Current understandings of sovereign AI both extend the core components of data and digital sovereignty to AI and add a value alignment component. In addition to the loose interpretation of territoriality, and the supreme authority of national law over cyberspace, statements about sovereign AI encapsulate cultural preservation and (subjective) ethics. Dr. Leslie Teo, senior director of AI products at AI Singapore, said in the context of the launch of SEA-LION, an LLM for Southeast Asia languages, “[Western] LLMs have a very particular West Coast American bias—they are very woke.”²¹ The African Union’s Continental AI Strategy similarly notes that “external influence from AI technologies developed outside Africa may undermine national sovereignty, Pan-Africanism values and civil liberties.”²²

However, sovereign AI must not be conflated with individual rights. While some aspects of sovereign AI, including value alignment and legality, may overlap with autonomy and self-determination, there is no simple cause-effect relationship. An actionable and useful definition of sovereign AI must therefore avoid category errors and capture key distinctions from its antecedent terms.

The core components of sovereign AI, recognizing the definition of sovereignty are:

Legality²³: The design, development, and deployment of AI should adhere to any applicable laws and regulations.
Economic competitiveness: The development and deployment of AI should create value for the host economy. Some sovereign AI initiatives further require the creation or bolstering of a national AI industrial ecosystem.
National security: AI applications pertaining to critical infrastructure, military, and other functions critical for national security require additional safeguards against disruption.
Value alignment: Due to anticipated wide and deep applications of AI, models should be aligned with national or regional political and constitutional values.

Sovereign AI is therefore a model of AI development and deployment where inputs adhere to a state or political union’s laws and institutional frameworks, and outputs are contextually relevant, secure, and create value for the economy.

Note that this definition is not exclusionary: Countries can turn to external partners to support their sovereign AI efforts if these partnerships adhere to the four core components mentioned above. This definition also recognizes the contemporary evolution of territoriality, such as the fact that digital sovereignty regulations have extraterritorial application with “territory” being expanded to include the digital footprint of populace. Finally, given that sovereignty is an organizing principle for states, not individuals or communities, it concretizes the abstract notion of value alignment by framing it as a constitutional and political concept.

Mapping sovereign AI initiatives

Below is an illustrative list of sovereign AI initiatives.

Conclusion

Sovereign AI as a phenomenon is going to gain momentum, as national governments find “wholesale” AI offerings unsuited to their needs. AI, especially general- purpose AI, requires sizable investments or innovative new methods of data collection, compute (mainly GPUs), related energy infrastructure, and workflow management.

An optimal blend of localization of AI inputs and regulation of outputs for each country could help each one to realize its outlined goals for sovereign AI. In other words, the four components of sovereign AI outlined in this paper—legality, economic competitiveness, national security, and value alignment—will necessarily involve different strategies, with governments weighing each one differently. US AI sovereignty strongly centers on maintaining the country’s leadership as a key driver of American prosperity, a prioritization that has not changed with the change in administration in 2025. Value alignment also holds varied meanings, with some, like the African Union strategy, grounding values in an anti-neocolonial framing, while others like Taiwan’s placing an emphasis on democratic values in opposition to mainland China.

Finally, factors will influence the possibilities of sovereign AI including infrastructure constraints, such as energy production capacity and the availability of water, and trust, both in governments as legitimate arbiters of people’s interests and in industry’s commitment to social good. Nevertheless, for now, the operative word in the future of AI appears to be sovereign.

About the Author

Trisha Ray is an associate director and resident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s GeoTech Center.

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The GeoTech Center champions positive paths forward that societies can pursue to ensure new technologies and data empower people, prosperity, and peace.

1 Christine Mui, “Welcome to the Global ‘AI Sovereignty’ Race,” Politico, September 18, 2024, https://www.politico.com/newsletters/digital-future-daily/2024/09/18/should-the-u-s-seek-ai-sovereignty-00179910.

2 Pablo Chavez, “Sovereign AI in a Hybrid World,” Lawfare, Lawfare Institute in collaboration with the Brookings Institution, November 2024, https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/sovereign-ai-in-a-hybrid-world–national-strategies-and-policy-responses; Muath Alduhishy, “Sovereign AI: What It Is, and 6 Strategic Pillars for Achieving It,” World Economic Forum, April 25, 2024, https://www.weforum.org/stories/2024/04/sovereign-ai-what-is-ways-states-building/; and Amanda Kraley, Izabela Kantor, and Rodrigo Gutiérrez, “Sovereign AI Ecosystems: Navigating Global AI Infrastructure & Data Governance,” Politico and G42, September 16, 2024, https://www.politico.eu/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/15/Sovereign-AI-Ecosystems.pdf.

3 “Biased GPT? Singapore Builds AI Model to ‘Represent’ Southeast Asians,” Asahi Shimbun, February 8, 2024, https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/15154956.

4 “Rapid Response Information Report: Generative AI: Language Models and Multimodal Foundation Models,” Australia’s Chief Scientist, March 24, 2023, https://www.chiefscientist.gov.au/sites/default/files/2023-06/Rapid%20Response%20Information%20Report%20-%20Generative%20AI%20v1_1.pdf.

5 “Virtual Closed-Door Discussion: Assessing India’s Cybersecurity Administration and Strategy,” Carnegie India convening, October 21, 2024.

6 “Sovereignty,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, May 31, 2003, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sovereignty/; and “Westphalian State System,” Oxford Reference, https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803121924198.

7 Roland Paris, “The Right to Dominate,” International Organization 74, no. 3 (Summer 2020): 453–489, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/27104604.

8 Trisha Ray, “Digital Sovereignty: Data Governance in India,” in Regulating the Cyberspace: Perspectives from Asia, eds. Gisela Eisner and Aishwarya Natarjan, Rule of Law Programme Asia, Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, 2020, 49–64, https://www.kas.de/documents/278334/8513721/Regulating+The+Cyberspace.pdf.

9 ”Trisha Ray, “The Quest for Cyber Sovereignty Is Dark and Full of Terrors,” Observer Research Foundation, May 25, 2020, https://www.orfonline.org/expert-speak/the-quest-for-cyber-sovereignty-is-dark-and-full-of-terrors-66676.

10 Article 3, GDPR: Territorial Scope, European Union, https://gdpr-info.eu/art-3-gdpr/; and Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, “The Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023,” Government of India, Chapter 1, Subsection 2 (b), https://www.meity.gov.in/static/uploads/2024/06/2bf1f0e9f04e6fb4f8fef35e82c42aa5.pdf.

11 Angie Lee, “What Is Sovereign AI,” Nvidia blog, February 28, 2024, https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/what-is-sovereign-ai/.

12 Mark Nasila, “Sovereign AI: What It Is and Why It Is Reshaping the Future,” ITWeb Africa, October 25, 2024, https://itweb.africa/content/j5alrvQAYOVvpYQk.

13 ”Kraley, Kantor, and Gutiérrez, “Sovereign AI Ecosystems.”

14 ”Luca Belli and Walter B. Gaspar, “AI Transparency, AI Accountability, and AI Sovereignty: An Overview,” in The Quest for AI Sovereignty, Transparency and Accountability Official Outcome of the UN IGF Data and Artificial Intelligence Governance Coalition, eds. Luca Belli and Walter B. Gaspar (FGV Direito Rio: October 2023): 23.

15 Brian Caufield, “Nvidia CEO: Every Country Needs Sovereign AI,” Nvidia blog, February 12, 2024, https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/world-governments-summit/.

16 Joanna Gao, “Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang Strengthens AI Ties in Thailand and Vietnam amid Sovereign AI Push,” DigiTimes Asia, December 11, 2024, https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20241211PD205/nvidia-ceo-jensen-huang-thailand-vietnam.html; and Bloomberg, “Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang Made a Quiet Lunar New Year’s Trip to China as the Almost $1.5 Trillion Chipmaker Tries to Navigate Biden’s Chip Controls,” via Fortune, January 22, 2024, https://fortune.com/asia/2024/01/22/nvidia-ceo-jensen-huang-lunar-new-year-trip-china-us-biden-chip-controls/.

17 “The History of the General Data Protection Regulation,” European Data Protection Supervisor, accessed December 30, 2024, https://www.edps.europa.eu/data-protection/data-protection/legislation/history-general-data-protection-regulation_en.

18 Microsoft European Affairs (@MicrosoftEU), “Digital Sovereignty is driven by 3 valid concerns that should be addressed,” Twitter, June 24, 2020, https://x.com/MicrosoftEU/status/1275749636465143808. In addition,
Satya Nadella’s speech at the 2015 Digital India Summit, while not explicitly mentioning sovereignty, is a good example of this trend as well; see Times Now, “Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft, at Digital India Summit | Narendra Modi in US,” September 27, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGKNZVRg7VM.

19 G42 website, accessed January 15, 2025, https://www.g42.ai/; “Microsoft/G42 AI Partnership Explained–Potential Benefits & Risks for U.S. Technological Security,” Video, US House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, July 15, 2024, https://selectcommitteeontheccp.house.gov/media/videos/microsoftg42-ai-partnership-explained-potential-benefits-risks-us-technological; andVikram Barhat, “The Middle East Microsoft, OpenAI Partner Mired in National Security Controversy,” CNBC, August 25, 2024, https://www.cnbc.com/2024/08/25/a-controversial-mideast-partner-to-microsoft-openai-global-ambitions.html.

20 Kraley, Kantor, and Gutiérrez, “Sovereign AI Ecosystems.”

21 “Biased GPT?,” Asahi Shimbun.

22 “Continental Artificial Intelligence Strategy: Harnessing AI for Africa’s Development and Prosperity,” African Union, July 2024, https://au.int/sites/default/files/documents/44004-doc-EN-_Continental_AI_Strategy_July_2024.pdf.

23 Trisha Ray, “Formulating AI Norms: Intelligent Systems and Human Values,” ORF Issue Brief No. 313, September 2019, Observer Research Foundation, https://www.orfonline.org/research/formulating-ai-norms-intelligent-systems-and-human-values.

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Global China Hub nonresident fellow Dakota Cary in the Economist

Dakota Cary — Wed, 02 Apr 2025 20:20:55 +0000

On March 25th, 2025, Global China Hub nonresident fellow Dakota Cary’s report with Eugenio Benincasa on the PRC’s hacking competition ecosystem was cited by the Economist.

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Mapping public opinion to drive climate action in India

Jennifer Marlon, Jagadish Thaker — Wed, 02 Apr 2025 18:40:04 +0000

India stands at a crossroads in its fight against climate change. As one of the world’s most climate-vulnerable nations and the third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, India plays a dual role: both as a significant contributor to global emissions and as a key driver of the global energy transition. With its ambitious target of achieving net-zero emissions by 2070 under the Paris Agreement and a renewable energy capacity goal of 500 gigawatts (GW) by 2030, India is positioning itself as a leader in shaping a sustainable future. Yet despite nearly doubling its wind and solar capacity to 135 GW over the past five years, critical mitigation and adaptation challenges remain that demand tailored, data-driven approaches to policy and action. Rising temperatures and extreme heat waves, unpredictable monsoons, and rising sea levels endanger millions, especially in coastal cities and rural farmlands. For a nation with 17 percent of the global population and only 4 percent of its freshwater, climate impacts threaten not just the environment but also food and water security, affecting the livelihoods of millions. Tackling these changes demands focused, data-driven actions, but in a diverse country like India, it is crucial to tailor efforts to each region’s specific needs.

Localized climate awareness through interactive mapping: A policy tool

Public opinion is pivotal for shaping climate policy. Awareness of climate risks can help accelerate the development and implementation of effective climate policy. A recent nationally representative survey reveals some surprising insights: Despite 82 percent of Indians believing in global warming (once it’s explained), only 10 percent feel informed about it and over half have little to no understanding of the concept. What is particularly worrying is that Indians’ awareness levels about climate change have barely changed since 2011, when the survey was first conducted as part of our studies.

National surveys only provide a single number, however, to characterize the opinions of an entire country. Recent advances in statistical modeling now allow us to pool survey data from local areas and pair it with relevant geographic, census, and environmental data to construct accurate estimates of climate change opinions for subnational administrative areas. Using this approach, we mapped climate opinions across the country, and found that the knowledge gap about climate change varies widely by region (see figure 1). For example, the western state of Gujarat shows greater climate awareness compared to its southern neighbor Maharashtra, with the understanding ranging between 52 percent and 33 percent, respectively. Likewise, about half the residents in the southern state of Tamil Nadu say they “know something” or “a lot” about global warming, while only 31 percent feel knowledgeable in neighboring Andhra Pradesh. These differences present opportunities to increase local support for climate initiatives, especially in states where awareness lags.

Figure 1: Knowledge about global warming

Estimates of the percentage of adults in each state (left) and district (right) who either know “something about” or “a lot about” global warming in 2023. States and districts in yellow-to-red colors have majorities (more than 50 percent) with this level of knowledge; blue areas are where majorities said: “I know just a little about it,” “I have never heard of it,” “don’t know,” or “refused” to respond.

Public opinion maps are powerful tools for bridging these knowledge gaps. The interactive version of the India climate opinion maps show variations in public beliefs and attitudes across thirty-four of India’s thirty-six states and union territories and in 604 districts. These maps aren’t just diagnostic: By exactly identifying where knowledge is low, these maps enable policymakers and technologists to align awareness campaigns with regional needs, fostering a stronger foundation for climate action.

Imagine Maharashtra, where awareness is lower, having more support for climate action at the grassroots level. This could make local adaptation efforts—like water conservation or heat wave preparedness—more successful because the public better understands the urgency. Extreme heat is one of the most direct and widespread threats to human health from climate change, and these risks cascade to economic sectors through reduced labor productivity, decreased crop yields, and increased energy demands for cooling, straining infrastructure and resources, and exacerbating income inequality. Recent heat waves, intensified by global warming, have killed many thousands of people around the world, and yet most heat-related deaths are preventable with appropriate preparation. Many members of the public do not adequately understand the risks associated with extreme heat, however, and many are unprepared, underscoring the characterization of heat waves as “silent killers.”

Turning data into action: Targeting interventions with technology

Interactive maps based on scientific public opinion surveys do more than illustrate what people know—they guide real, on-the-ground actions to address specific regional risks. Take Bihar, a state in eastern India, for instance, where 74 percent of residents expect more severe heat waves in the coming years. This awareness has driven the state to create an early warning system and use mass texts to send heat advisories to millions. However, in regions with limited technological access, low-tech community-based solutions remain critical. Localized data about awareness levels can help identify these more vulnerable populations and inform tailored interventions. For example, Bihar’s Heat Action Plan (HAP) includes drum-based village announcements, ensuring even the most remote populations are better prepared.

Figure 2: Perceptions of severe heat waves

Estimates of the percentage of adults in each state (left) and district (right) who say that global warming will cause more severe heat waves. Areas in yellow-to-red colors have majorities (more than 50 percent) of the population who say “a few more” or “many more” heat waves. Blue areas are where the majority response was “a few less” or “many less” heat waves.

But there’s still room to grow. Also in Bihar, a state with high solar insolation levels, the installed solar capacity reached approximately 193 MW in 2023, reflecting steady growth in this area. But while 59 percent here believe India should rely more on renewable energy, many don’t yet connect extreme heat with fossil fuel use (figures 2 and 3). And solar adoption here is slower compared to neighboring states like Uttar Pradesh and Jharkhand, which have both set ambitious solar installation targets and have slightly higher public support for renewables (62 percent and 63 percent, respectively). Closing these gaps with targeted information could shift behaviors and foster broader support for sustainable practices. This is where region-specific insights can make a huge difference—not just in preparing for immediate risks but also in encouraging lasting climate resilience.

Bridging knowledge gaps for real climate action

India’s linguistic and cultural diversity adds complexity to its climate strategies. At least twenty-two major languages are spoken across the country, and thousands of regional publications inform the public. Yet many media outlets, both English and regional, miss the chance to connect climate events like heat waves directly to climate change. Only about 10 percent of media articles covering the 2022 record-breaking heat waves also mentioned climate change. By understanding what different communities believe and know, journalists, educators, and activists can tailor messages that resonate locally, bringing climate awareness directly into people’s lives.

This is where data equity comes into play. Making climate data accessible and relevant to communities is essential to ensure that everyone—from rural villages to crowded cities—can understand and act on it. Empowering people with accurate, actionable information is key to building a resilient society that is prepared to handle the challenges ahead.

India’s twenty-eight states and eight union territories each have distinct identities and approaches to climate action. Backed by a clear National Action Plan on Climate Change (NAPCC) and with tailored State Action Plans on Climate Change (SAPCCs) in place, regional governments play a major role in addressing their specific challenges. Public opinion data offer a unique opportunity for each state to adapt its strategies to local concerns, making climate policies more effective and sustainable. For example, states with higher awareness, like Gujarat, can attract investments and public-private partnerships in clean energy technology, while states with lower awareness might prioritize educational programs alongside infrastructure projects. Companies like ReNew Power and Tata Power, for example, are helping to drive renewable energy adoption and smart grid integration across India. Pursuing these kinds of collaborations with a greater awareness of how district-level opinions vary can help accelerate local climate action and ensure that each region’s unique needs and perspectives shape its climate approach.

Figure 3: Perceptions of fossil fuels and renewable energy

Estimates of the percentage of adults in each state who say that India should use less fossil fuels (left) and more renewables (right). Areas in yellow-to-red colors have majorities (more than 50 percent) of the population who say India should use “less” or “much less” fossil fuels than today (left) and “more” or “much more” renewable energy sources (right) than today. Blue areas are where the majority response was “somewhat more” or “much more” fossil fuels (left) or “somewhat less” or “much less” renewable energy sources than today (right).

Localized climate insights can power the changes that India needs, accelerating the shift to clean energy and building resilience against climate impacts. However, current policies—like fossil fuel subsidies and price caps —present significant challenges. These measures, while aimed at shielding low-income households from rising energy costs, often lock in dependence on fossil fuels and divert resources away from renewable investments. For example, fossil fuel subsidies in India still outweigh subsidies for renewables, undermining the economic incentives for a clean energy transition.

Public opinion surveys provide a valuable opportunity to address these misalignments by demonstrating that support for renewable energy is strong, even in states with significant fossil fuel reliance (figure 3). By leveraging localized public opinion data, India can reframe subsidy reforms as not only economically prudent but also widely supported by the public. By better aligning policies with both national and regional data, India can ensure that efforts to reduce emissions and prepare for climate impacts reflect the voices of its people.

The future of climate resilience in India depends on both bridging the gap between data and action through enabling renewable energy technologies and gaining greater awareness of public understanding about climate change causes and solutions. When interactive maps and survey data are accessible and used to guide local strategies, they become invaluable tools. Scaling models using insights from localized data can transform regional adaptation strategies, including the deployment of clean technologies and renewable energy solutions; this can be done by aligning public knowledge with practical policy initiatives such as job training for the renewable energy industry, which also has widespread support (figure 4). Emphasizing technology-driven, equitable access ensures interventions resonate with India’s diverse population.

Figure 4: Perceptions on national training programs

Estimates of the percentage of adults in each state (left) and district (right) who favor a national program to train people for new jobs in the renewable energy industry. Areas in yellow-to-red colors have majorities (more than 50 percent) of the population who “somewhat” or “strongly favor” the policy. Blue areas would show where the majority response was “somewhat” or “strongly oppose” the policy, but no states or districts are blue.

By building awareness of public opinion among diverse stakeholders and reflecting the insights from the data back to the public, policymakers build trust and alignment in decision-making. This approach allows everyone—from local communities to state governments to national policymakers—to have confidence in collective efforts that aim to tackle climate change head-on. By building a common sense of purpose, India can catalyze the testing and scaling of technology-based interventions to achieve its long-term strategic goal of becoming a vishwa guru, a global leader in climate action.

About the Authors

Jennifer Marlon is a senior research scientist at the Yale School of the Environment and the executive director of the Yale Center for Geospatial Solutions.

Jagadish Thaker (JT) is a senior lecturer at the University of Queensland and research associate at the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.

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The GeoTech Center champions positive paths forward that societies can pursue to ensure new technologies and data empower people, prosperity, and peace.

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Russian advance slows in March as Putin’s invasion loses momentum

Peter Dickinson — Tue, 01 Apr 2025 21:16:38 +0000

Russia’s Ukraine invasion continued to lose momentum in March 2025, with the Kremlin’s territorial gains reportedly falling for a fourth consecutive month. According to new data from the Institute for the Study of War, Russian forces captured 240 square kilometers of Ukrainian land throughout March, representing the smallest monthly total since the current wave of offensive operations began in summer 2024.

News of Russia’s slowing advance comes as Russian President Vladimir Putin claims that his invading army currently holds the “strategic initiative” along the entire front line of the war in Ukraine. “There are now reasons to believe we can finish off” the Ukrainian military, he told submarine crews last week during a visit to the north Russian port city of Murmansk.

While Putin predicts impending Russian victory, the evidence on the ground in Ukraine would seem to suggest otherwise. Far from being on the verge of crumbling, Ukraine’s defensive lines have strengthened significantly in recent months. As a result, advancing Russian forces continue to suffer heavy losses without achieving any meaningful breakthroughs.

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Ukrainian commanders are well aware that the recent lull in Russian battlefield gains may only be a temporary phenomenon as Putin’s army regroups following months of intense fighting. Officials and analysts in Kyiv are now warning that preparations are likely well underway for a major new Russian offensive that is expected to begin in the coming weeks and last until late in 2025.

Putin hopes this new campaign can help strengthen his position as negotiations intensify over a possible compromise settlement to end the war. Speaking last week in Paris, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy accused the Kremlin dictator of “dragging out talks and trying to get the United States stuck in endless and pointless discussions about fake conditions just to buy time and then try to grab more land.”

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Drones, defense, and diplomacy: Negotiations and the battlefield in Ukraine

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Russia’s modest battlefield gains since the start of the current year provide important perspective at a time when international media coverage and Western commentaries often create the misleading impression that Ukraine’s position is hopeless. In reality, the Ukrainian army has stood up to the full might of the Russian military for more than three years and represents a formidable obstacle to Putin’s plans for the complete subjugation of the country.

Today’s Ukrainian army is by far the largest and most experienced force in Europe, and is backed by a rapidly expanding domestic defense industry that already accounts for around forty percent of Ukraine’s military needs. Since early 2022, Ukrainian troops have succeeded in liberating around half of all the territory occupied by Russia, and have won a string of famous victories in the Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Kherson regions.

Over the past three years, Ukraine has also emerged as a technologically advanced drone warfare superpower. Ukrainian drone manufacturers now produce millions of drones each year and continue to innovate on a daily basis. This is having a huge impact on the battlefield, where drones now account for well over half of all Russian casualties.

At sea, marine drones have enabled Ukraine to sink or damage around one-third of Russia’s entire Black Sea Fleet. This has transformed the Battle of the Black Sea and forced the remainder of Russia’s warships to retreat from Crimea. Meanwhile, Ukrainian commanders are using the country’s expanding arsenal of long-range drones and domestically produced cruise missiles to bring Putin’s invasion home by striking military and energy industry infrastructure deep inside Russia.

The remarkable evolution of the Ukrainian Armed Forces since February 2022 should give pause to all those who insist that Ukraine “has no cards” to play in future negotiations. While Kyiv cannot realistically hope to match Russia’s overwhelming advantages in terms of manpower, firepower, funding, and industrial capacity, Ukraine is now a major military power in its own right and will not agree to any peace deal that leaves the continued existence of the country in doubt.

Peter Dickinson is editor of the Atlantic Council’s UkraineAlert service.

However, according to reports, R1 appears to censor and withhold information from users. Thus, democracies not only risk the loss of the AI technological battle; they also risk falling behind in the race to govern AI and could fail to ensure that democratic AI proliferates more widely than systems championed by authoritarians.

Therefore, the United States must work with its democratic allies, particularly the European Union (EU), to set global standards for open-source AI. Both powers should leverage existing legislative tools to initiate an open-source governance framework. Such an effort would require officially adopting a definition of open-source AI (such as OSI’s) to increase governance effectiveness. After that, the United States and EU should accelerate efforts to ensure democratic values are embedded in open-source AI models, paving the way for an AI future that is more open, transparent, and empowering.

How China overtook the lead

Part of DeepSeek’s success can be understood by the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) showing signs of incorporating the norm-building of open-source AI into its legal framework. In April 2024, the Model AI Law—a multi-year expert draft led by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, which is influential in the country’s lawmaking process—laid out China’s support for an open-source AI ecosystem. Article 19 states that the CCP “promotes construction of the open source ecosystem” and “supports relevant entities in building or operating open source platforms, open source communities, and open source projects.” It encourages companies to make “software source code, hardware designs, and application services publicly available” to foster industry sharing and collaboration. The draft also highlights reducing or removing legal liability for the provision of open-source AI models, providing that individuals and organizations have established a governance system compliant with national standards and have taken corresponding safety measures. Such legal liability would have held developers accountable for infringing the rights of citizens. This is a notable contrast to China’s past laws governing AI that explicitly stated the goal of protecting those rights. The specific provisions in the Model AI Law, albeit a draft, shouldn’t be overlooked, as they essentially serve as a blueprint of how open-source AI is deployed in the country and what China’s models exported globally would look like.

Furthermore, the AI Safety Governance Framework, a document that China aims to use as a guide to “promote international collaboration on AI safety governance at a global level,” echoes the country’s assertiveness on open-source AI. The document was drafted by China’s National Technical Committee 260 on Cybersecurity, a body working with the Cyberspace Administration of China, whose cybersecurity standard practice guidelines were adopted by CCP in September 2024. The framework reads, “We should promote knowledge sharing in AI, make AI technologies available to the public under open-source terms, and jointly develop AI chips, frameworks, and software.” Appearing in a document meant for global stakeholders, the statement reflects China’s ambition to lead in this area as an advocate.

What about the United States and EU?

In the United States, advocates have touted the benefits of open source for some time, and AI industry leaders have called for the United States to focus more on open-source AI. For example, Mark Zuckerberg launched the open-source model Llama 3.1 last year, and in doing so, he argued that open-source “represents the world’s best shot” at creating “economic opportunity and security for everyone.”

Despite this advocacy, the United States has not established any law to promote open-source AI. A US senator did introduce a bill in 2023 calling for building a framework for open-source software security, but the bill has not progressed since then. Last year, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration published a report on dual-use AI foundation models with open weights (meaning the models are available for use, but are not fully open source). It advised the government to more deeply monitor the risks of open-weight foundation models in order to determine appropriate restrictions for them. The Biden administration’s final AI regulatory framework was friendlier to open models: It set restrictions for the most advanced closed-weight models while excluding open-weight ones.

The future of open-source models remains unclear. US President Donald Trump has not yet created any guidance for open-source AI. So far, he has repealed Biden’s AI executive order, but the executive order that replaced it has not outlined any initiative that guides the development of open-source AI. Overall, the United States has been overly focused on playing defense by developing highly capable models while working to prevent adversaries from accessing them, without considering the wider global reach of those models.

Since unveiling the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the EU has established itself as a regulatory powerhouse in the global digital economy. Across the board, countries and global companies have adopted EU compliance frameworks for the digital economy, including the AI Act. However, the EU’s effort on open-source AI is lacking. Although Article 2 of the AI Act briefly mentions open-source AI as an exemption from regulation, the actual impact seems minor. The exemption is even absent for commercial-purpose models.

In other EU guidance documents, the same paradox can be found. The latest General-Purpose AI Code of Practice published in March 2025 acknowledged how open-source models have a positive impact on the development of safe, human-centric, and trustworthy AI. However, there is no meaningful elaboration promoting the development and use of open-source AI models. Even in the EU Competitiveness Compass—a framework targeting overregulation, regulatory complexity, and strategic competitiveness in AI—“open source” is absent.

The EU’s cautious approach to regulating open-source AI stems from the challenge of defining it. Open-source AI is different from traditional open-source software in that it includes pre-trained AI models rather than simply source code. And, of course, the definition from OSI has not yet been acknowledged in the international legal community. The debate over what constitutes open-source AI creates legal uncertainty that the EU is likely uncomfortable to accept. Yet the real driver of inactivity lies deeper. The EU’s regulatory successes, like GDPR, make the Commission wary of exemptions that could weaken its global influence over a technology still so poorly defined. This is a gamble Brussels has, so far, had no incentive to take.

The new power imbalance in AI geopolitics

China’s push to become technologically self-sufficient, a push which has included solidifying open-source AI strategies, is partly motivated by US export controls on advanced computing and semiconductors dating back at least to 2018. These measures stemmed from US concerns about national security, economic security, and intellectual property, while China’s countermeasures also reflect the broader strategic competition in technological superiority between both countries. The EU, on the other hand, asserts itself in the race by setting the global norms of protecting fundamental rights and a host of democratic values such as fairness and redistribution, which ultimately have shaped the policies of leading global technology companies.

By positioning itself as a leader in open-source AI, China has turned the export and policy challenge into an opportunity to sell its version of AI to the world. The rise of DeepSeek, along with other domestic rival companies such as Alibaba, is shifting the pendulum by reducing the world’s appetite for closed AI models. DeepSeek has released smaller models with fewer parameters for less powerful devices. AI development platform Hugging Face has started replicating DeepSeek-R1’s training process to enhance its models’ performance in reinforcement learning. Microsoft, OpenAI, and Meta have embraced model distillation, a technique that drew much attention with the DeepSeek breakthrough. China has advanced the conversation around openness, with the United States adapting to the discourse for the first time and the EU being trapped in legal inertia, leaving a power imbalance in open-source AI.

China is offering a concerning version of open-source AI. The CCP strategically deploys a “two-track” system that allows greater openness for AI firms while limiting information and expression for public-facing models. Its openness is marked by the country’s historical pattern that restricts the architecture of a model, such as requiring the input and output to align with China’s values and a positive national image. Even in its global-facing AI Safety Governance Framework (in which Chinese authorities embrace open-source AI), the CCP says that AI-generated content poses threats to ideological security, hinting at the CCP’s limited acceptance of freedom of speech and thought.

Without a comprehensive framework based on the protection of democracy and fundamental rights, the world could see China’s more restrictive open-source AI models reproduced widely. Autocrats and nonstate entities worldwide can build on them to censor information and expression while touting that they are promoting accessibility. Simply focusing on the technological performance of China is not sufficient. Instead, democracies should respond by leading with democratic governance.

Transatlantic cooperation is the next step

The United States and EU should consider open-source diplomacy, advancing the sharing of capable AI models across the globe. In doing so, they should create a unified governance framework and work toward shaping a democratic AI future by forming a transatlantic working group on open-source AI. Existing structures, including the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence (GPAI), can serve as a vehicle. But it’s essential that technology companies and experts from both sides of the Atlantic are included in the framework development process.

Second, the United States and EU should, through funding academic institutions and supporting startups, promote the development of open-source AI models that align with democratic values. Such models, free from censorship and security threats, would set a powerful contrast to the Chinese models. To promote such models, the United States and EU will need to recognize that the benefits of such models outweigh the risks in the broader picture. Similarly, the EU must also continue leveraging its regulatory advantage; it must also be more decisive about governing open-source AI, even if it means embracing some uncertainty about its legal definition, in order to outpace China’s momentum.

The United States and EU may currently have a rocky relationship. However, US-EU collaboration rather than competition is crucial with China’s ascendence in open-source AI. To take back leadership in this pivotal arena, the United States and European Union must launch a transatlantic initiative on open-source AI that employs forward-thinking policy, research, and innovation in setting the global standard for a rights-respecting, transparent, and creative AI future.

Ryan Pan is a project assistant at the Atlantic Council GeoTech Center.

Kolja Verhage is a senior manager of AI governance and digital regulations at Deloitte.

The views reflected in the article are the author’s views and do not necessarily reflect the views of their employers.

Trump’s sectoral-trade pivot: What it will take to succeed

Mahnaz Khan — Mon, 31 Mar 2025 13:29:12 +0000

Last week, US trade negotiators met with counterparts in India to discuss a “multi-sector bilateral trade agreement.”

While the agreement remains under negotiation, the US-India Joint Leaders’ Statement—issued after US President Donald Trump met with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in mid-February—suggests that the countries are looking to partner more deeply on artificial intelligence (AI), semiconductors, and critical minerals in the new trade deal. Meanwhile, continents away, the United Kingdom is also weighing a trade agreement with the United States, one reported to focus on advanced technologies.

Such negotiations demonstrate how Washington is pivoting toward a new sectoral trade policy, aiming to protect the United States’ dominance in energy, defense, and advanced technologies by securing essential inputs such as semiconductors, batteries, and critical minerals—resources that China either tightly controls or seeks to leverage. Recognizing the need to fortify the United States’ competitive position, Trump directed the US trade representative to pursue bilateral or sector-specific plurilateral agreements. US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, in his confirmation testimony, made clear that semiconductors and critical minerals are priorities for sector-specific trade deals.

Sectoral trade agreements are nothing new, but a fresh approach is emerging, one that puts advanced technologies and their critical inputs front and center with an eye toward countering geoeconomic rivals. Past negotiated sectoral agreements—such as the Environmental Goods Agreement, Peru Timber Annex, or the Information Technology Agreement—were not focused on securing supply chains from geopolitical threats but rather on market access, tariff reductions, or sustainability. One exception is the US-Japan Critical Minerals Agreement, finalized by the Biden administration in March 2023, which allowed Japan to become eligible for benefits under the Inflation Reduction Act. In addition, the Biden administration intended to pursue additional critical mineral deals with the European Union, United Kingdom, and Indonesia. However, when a potential Indonesia critical minerals deal was announced, members of the US Congress responded with their concerns over weak labor and environmental standards and ties to Chinese investment in certain countries. Such backlash halted these deals from progressing.

But this time, momentum is building, and with growing bipartisan support for reducing reliance on China, the push for new sectoral agreements may finally break through. Here is how the new administration can successfully shape a sectoral trade policy that strengthens US dominance in key competitive industries.

First, a new sectoral trade policy should prioritize sectors in which the United States still holds a competitive advantage over China and in which China seeks to gain more ground. Beijing’s Made in China 2025 Initiative makes it clear that China is striving to become a world leader in ten critical industries, including semiconductors, AI, and advanced computing—all sectors in which the United States is a leader. To meet its ambitions, China is flooding global markets with subsidized tech, acquiring foreign expertise, and restricting exports of inputs that other nations need to compete. Some members of the US Congress warn that China’s approach could erode US technological leadership, accelerating the transfer of advanced research and manufacturing to China to bolster its technological capabilities.

One industry in China’s direct line of sight is the semiconductor sector. While the United States remains at the forefront of semiconductor design and advanced chip production—alongside leaders Taiwan and South Korea—China is rapidly closing in. With massive investments in semiconductor manufacturing, China is projected to control 32 percent of the world’s semiconductor production capacity by 2027, surpassing Taiwan’s and South Korea’s shares combined. The United States currently has an advantage in the advanced semiconductors needed to power AI, quantum computing, advanced robotics, and automation. A sectoral trade agreement with key strategic and economic allies in emerging technology industries could help align protections against economic coercion, intellectual property theft, unfair trade practices, and forced technology transfers. At the same time, such agreements could open markets and strengthen supply chain resilience by diversifying sources of inputs.

Second, a new sectoral trade approach should also go on the offensive and target industries in which China has a clear competitive advantage, such as battery production and critical minerals. China currently leads battery production: For example, it produces over 75 percent of all batteries globally. Meanwhile, the United States still lacks battery independence along its supply chain. While battery production is predominantly driven by demand for electric vehicles, batteries are also used in critical defense applications such as weapons and sensors. The US military annually procures over $200 million of batteries.

Critical minerals are an essential input for a range of sectors, from batteries to semiconductors to advanced technologies. But critical-minerals sourcing is increasingly vulnerable as China tightens its grip through export bans and dual-use export controls. China controls 99 percent of the world’s low-grade gallium production and 94 percent of its germanium, both essential for semiconductor production. In December 2024, China banned the export of these minerals to the United States, a move widely seen as an effort to cripple US chip manufacturing. China’s dominance extends beyond semiconductors, as the country also wields control over key battery minerals such as lithium and cobalt. While these materials currently face no export restrictions, China processes more than half of the global supply of lithium and cobalt. China holds an even tighter grip on cobalt, owning 80 percent of the mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the world’s largest supplier.

China is expanding beyond raw critical minerals to impose export restrictions on mineral processing technology. On January 2, China fired a clear warning shot, announcing potential export controls on lithium and gallium processing equipment and also equipment used to make battery components. This move would not be unprecedented as China already imposed export controls on rare-earths processing technology in December 2023.

In a world of heightened Chinese export restrictions, the United States must take a dual-track approach—playing the long game by expanding domestic mining and processing, despite permitting hurdles, while playing the short-term game of securing critical mineral agreements to bridge supply gaps. These deals need not be permanent but can serve as a strategic lifeline, ensuring stability while the United States builds resilient critical minerals, battery, and semiconductor industries.

Third, a new sectoral trade policy should ensure that company voices are considered and potential industry risks are objectively assessed before agreements are finalized. Sarah Stewart and I previously proposed a Mineral Security (MinSec) Trade Policy Framework that advances two administration-backed strategies: bilateral critical mineral agreements and sector-specific plurilateral agreements such as a critical-minerals “club” or alliance. The framework calls for objective economic assessments and stakeholder consultations to safeguard domestic mineral and downstream industries while tightening access to the US market for Chinese imports or companies.

Fourth, for a new sectoral trade policy to succeed, the White House should actively incorporate congressional input throughout the negotiation process, ensuring a unified national strategy in sectoral agreements, something that past efforts have sorely lacked. While the White House can advance sectoral agreements without Congress’s approval if such agreements don’t involve tariff reductions, securing congressional support remains crucial to ensuring their long-term viability. Fostering early collaboration, as Stewart and I suggest in the MinSec Framework, would strengthen both the credibility and durability of future sectoral deals.

Fifth, the United States must seek out creative trade tools; outdated ones won’t win today’s economic war. One option, as highlighted in the latest US-China Economic Security Review Commission report to Congress, is a trade defense coalition—an alliance of key partners to counter China’s flood of subsidized, underpriced exports that destabilize global markets. Another option could be establishing a mineral trade defense pact fusing trade and defense policy in a way that would create a collective response mechanism among partner nations for critical minerals and their downstream industries. This pact could empower allies to coordinate export restrictions or increased tariffs, ensuring that China’s weaponization of trade is met with a united and strategic counterforce.

Undoubtedly, the trade winds are shifting. With them come challenges: rising tariffs, export restrictions, and unpredictable economic tensions with geoeconomic rivals. Yet, these shifts also present a rare opportunity for Washington to redefine its trade policy. The United States is now seeing the dawn of a new sectoral trade policy—one that, if harnessed effectively, has the potential to strengthen US economic resilience and fortify the United States’ most critical supply chains alongside its chosen partners.

Mahnaz Khan is a nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s GeoTech Center and the vice president of policy for critical supply chains at Silverado Policy Accelerator, a bipartisan geopolitical think tank.

The views expressed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Atlantic Council or Silverado Policy Accelerator.

Air & Space Forces Magazine on the Commission on Software-Defined Warfare final report

Atlantic Council — Sat, 29 Mar 2025 03:30:00 +0000

On March 28, Air & Space Forces Magazine published an article by Shaun Waterman titled, “Experts: US Military Needs ‘Software Literate’ Workforce, Not Just Coders.” The piece highlights key recommendations from the final report of Forward Defense’s Commission on Software-Defined Warfare and discussions from its public launch event on March 27.

The report emphasizes the need for a software-literate workforce—not coders, but individuals who can ask the right questions, understand software limitations, and interpret inputs and outputs. This workforce will be essential to truly adopting the Software Acquisition Pathway, which the report recommends modernizing and implementing to achieving both short-term and long-term success in the Pentagon.

The post Air & Space Forces Magazine on the Commission on Software-Defined Warfare final report appeared first on Atlantic Council.

Chiang, Esper, and Fox published in DefenseNews and C4ISRNET on software-defined warfare

Atlantic Council — Fri, 28 Mar 2025 16:00:00 +0000

On March 28, Mung Chiang, Mark Esper, and Christine Fox published an op-ed highlighting key ideas from the final report of Forward Defense’s Commission on Software-Defined Warfare. Entitled, “America’s arsenal of democracy needs a software renaissance,” the piece published in DefenseNews and C4ISRNET underscores the critical role of software in future conflicts, “the ability to collect, process and act on data faster than the adversary is critical in prevailing in future conflicts.”

The authors emphasize the Commission’s recommendations, including investing in artificial intelligence enablers, mandating the creation of enterprise data repositories, and shifting toward commercial software acquisition. They argue that by prioritizing data management and commercial software acquisition, the Department of Defense can achieve immediate improvements while laying the groundwork for long-term strategic success.

The post Chiang, Esper, and Fox published in DefenseNews and C4ISRNET on software-defined warfare appeared first on Atlantic Council.

ExecutiveGov reports on the Commission on Software-Defined Warfare final report

Atlantic Council — Fri, 28 Mar 2025 15:00:00 +0000

On March 28, Jane Edwards of ExecutiveGov published an article highlighting the key recommendations from the final report of Forward Defense’s Commission on Software-Defined Warfare. Entitled, “Atlantic Council Calls for DOD to Advance Software-Defined Warfare,” the piece discusses the Commission’s suggestions that advanced software capabilities could elevate the Pentagon’s efficiency, effectiveness, and capacity.

The post ExecutiveGov reports on the Commission on Software-Defined Warfare final report appeared first on Atlantic Council.

Breaking Defense reports on the Commission of Software-Defined Warfare final report

Atlantic Council — Thu, 27 Mar 2025 16:00:00 +0000

On March 27, Carly Welch of Breaking Defense published an article titled, “Experts warn Pentagon to embrace software-defined warfare to counter China’s military advantage.” The piece features key recommendations made in the final report of Forward Defense’s Commission on Software-Defined Warfare, emphasizing the urgent need for the Department of Defense to modernize its approach to software and data management. Welch underscores the Commission’s concerns that without swift action, the US could risk losing its technological edge over China.

The post Breaking Defense reports on the Commission of Software-Defined Warfare final report appeared first on Atlantic Council.

Atlantic Council Commission on Software-Defined Warfare: Final report

Whitney M. McNamara, Peter Modigliani, Tate Nurkin — Thu, 27 Mar 2025 13:00:00 +0000

Executive summary
Foreword
Overview

Recommendations:

Mandate data and invest in AI enablers
Ensure software interoperability and integration
Modernize test and evaluation infrastructure
Enforce commercial as the default approach for software
Transform DoD software requirements
Remove all restrictions on software funding
Measure what matters for DoD software
Enable software talent across the enterprise
Fully establish a DoD software cadre

Conclusion
Biographies
Acknowledgements

Executive summary

A profoundly transformed global security environment presents the United States with its most significant geopolitical and geoeconomic challenges since the Cold War—and perhaps since World War II. China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea—together a new “axis of aggressors”—are increasingly collaborating to support their revisionist geopolitical goals and challenge global stability. Meanwhile, US domestic constraints—such as relative-to-inflation flat defense budgets, military recruitment and talent shortfalls, byzantine acquisition processes, and inadequate industrial capacity—severely limit the US ability to adequately deter and address these threats at speed and scale.

During World War II, US industrial strength and manufacturing capacity decisively factored into the Allies’ victory. Today, however, US defense production capacity falls short of potential wartime demands. In contrast, China’s industrial policies, manufacturing prowess, and strategic focus on software-defined technologies—including artificial intelligence (AI), cloud computing, and development, security, and operations (DevSecOps)—have propelled Beijing to rapidly advance its defense capabilities.

Maintaining the Department of Defense (DoD) status quo—anchored to a defense acquisition system ill-suited to the rapid tempo of modern technological innovation—places the United States at significant risk. This approach undermines the nation’s ability to effectively deter near-peer adversaries in the short term and jeopardizes its capacity to prevail in a major conflict.

Addressing these systemic challenges demands a sustained, long-term effort. Meanwhile, there is an urgent need for near-term, high-impact initiatives to bridge existing capability gaps and reestablish an advantage. That is what this report’s concept of software-defined warfare presents.

Final Report

Report authors: Whitney M. McNamara, Peter Modigliani, and Tate Nurkin

Co-chairs: Mung Chiang, Mark T. Esper, and Christine H. Fox

Commission director: Stephen Rodriguez

Program director: Clementine G. Starling-Daniels

Commission staff: Mark J. Massa, Curtis Lee, Abigail Rudolph, Alexander S. Young

Commissioners

Mung Chiang, president, Purdue University; co-chair of the Commission on Software-Defined Warfare, Atlantic Council 

Mark T. Esper, board director, Atlantic Council; 27th secretary of defense; co-chair of the Commission on Software-Defined Warfare, Atlantic Council

Christine H. Fox, former acting deputy secretary of defense; senior fellow, John Hopkins University Applied Research Laboratory; co-chair of the Commission on Software-Defined Warfare, Atlantic Council 

Steve Bowsher, president, chief executive officer, In-Q-Tel

General James E. Cartwright, USMC (ret.), board director, Atlantic Council; 8th vice chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff

General Joseph F. Dunford, Jr., USMC (ret.), board director, Atlantic Council; 19th chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff

Frank A. Finelli, managing director, The Carlyle Group

James “Hondo” Geurts, distinguished fellow, Business Executives for National Security; former assistant secretary of the Navy for Research, Development, and Acquisition, US Department of Defense

Susan M. Gordon, former principal deputy director of national intelligence

Lieutenant General S. Clinton Hinote, USAF (ret.), former deputy chief of staff, Air Force Futures

Paul Kwan, managing director, Global Resilience Practice, General Catalyst

Ellen M. Lord, former under secretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment, US Department of Defense

John Ridge, CBE, chief adoption officer, NATO Innovation Fund

Nadia Schadlow, senior fellow, Hudson Institute; former US deputy national security advisor for strategy

Lieutenant General Jack Shanahan, USAF (ret.), former director, Joint Artificial Intelligence Center

Trae Stephens, general partner, Founders Fund

Admiral Scott H. Swift, USN (ret.), 35th Commander, US Pacific Fleet

Industry commissioners

Rob Bassett Cross MC, founder, chief executive officer, Adarga; nonresident senior fellow, Atlantic Council

Prashant Bhuyan, founder, chief executive officer, Accrete AI

Michael D. Brasseur, chief strategy officer, Saab, Inc.

Todd Bryer, vice president for strategic growth, CAE

Jordan Coleman, chief legal and policy officer, Kodiak Robotics

Scott Cooper, vice president, Government Relations, Peraton

Steven Escaravage, president, Defense Technology Group, Booz Allen Hamilton

Jon Gruen, chief executive officer, Fortem Technologies

Adam Hammer, co-founder, chief executive officer, Roadrunner Venture Studios

Jags Kandasamy, co-founder, chief executive officer, Latent AI

Rob Lehman, co-founder, chief commercial officer, Saronic Technologies

Joel Meyer, president of public sector, Domino

Sean Moriarty, chief executive officer, Primer AI

Nathan Parker, chief executive officer, Edge Case Research

Gundbert Scherf, co-founder & co-chief executive officer, Helsing

Zachary Staples, founder & chief executive officer, Fathom5

Tyler Sweatt, chief executive officer, Second Front Systems

Dan Tadross, head of federal delivery, Scale AI

Jim Taiclet, chairman, president & chief executive officer, Lockheed Martin

Chris Taylor, founder, chief executive officer, Aalyria Technologies

Mark Valentine, president, Global Government, Skydio

Advisors

Lieutenant General Michael S. Groen, USMC (ret.), former director, Joint Artificial Intelligence Center

Rob Murray, nonresident senior fellow, Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, Atlantic Council

Major General Arnold L. Punaro, USMC (ret.), advisory council member, Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, Atlantic Council

Stu Shea, managing partner and strategic advisor, Shea Strategies, LLC

Foreword

The United States stands at the threshold of a new era in defense and national security. Dramatic changes in the global security environment are upending the established world order, presenting new and unexpected challenges. The war in Ukraine, conflict in the Middle East, and rising tensions in the Indo-Pacific underscore shifting power dynamics. At the same time, we are in an age marked by an escalating pace of technological change. Innovations such as the fusion of AI, autonomy, and robotic systems are poised to profoundly influence national security and economic power. This moment demands decisive action to prepare the US military to adapt swiftly to evolving conditions and reclaim its tactical, operational, and strategic advantages.

An impartial assessment of global geopolitics and geoeconomics reveals significant and widening gaps in US capabilities. These gaps not only undermine deterrence but also place the ability of US military forces to prevail in future conflicts at risk. The shifting geopolitical landscape exposes vulnerabilities in the nation’s approach to capability design, development, fielding, and sustainment. Addressing these gaps is imperative to prepare for emerging threats, yet immediate solutions are also needed to confront present dangers. While the principle of “speaking softly and carrying a big stick” has long guided US foreign policy, it is now imperative that US military power and economic strength are capable of deterring potential adversaries and, if deterrence fails, prevailing in conflict. Software-defined warfare presents a vital opportunity to bridge these challenges, providing a pathway to both near-term readiness and long-term competitive advantage.

A software-defined mindset and capabilities are essential to modern military readiness. From enterprise solutions to autonomous systems to personnel, software underpins the effectiveness of defense operations. However, Industrial Age, hardware-centric acquisition processes are unsuitable for software systems that need to be updated with the rapid cycle of technological advancement. To preserve its competitive advantages, the DoD must embrace a more agile and integrated approach to software—one that fosters continuous modernization, capitalizes on cutting-edge commercial innovations, and deepens collaboration with allies and partners.

The Atlantic Council’s Commission on Software-Defined Warfare was convened to address these challenges and identify solutions. Comprising leaders from government, industry, and academia, the commission identified clear, actionable, and meaningful recommendations that will position the DoD for enduring success. This report’s roadmap is organized around three core pillars: technology, process, and people. The recommendations outlined herein propose actionable steps to shape software investments, build a cohesive digital ecosystem, modernize software development practices, and cultivate a skilled and sustainable workforce. Together, these recommendations provide a clear pathway to establishing a software-defined DoD capable of responding rapidly and effectively to emerging threats in an increasingly dynamic security environment.

As we present these recommendations, we acknowledge the support and insights of the many contributors who have helped shape this vision. We believe this work will provide leaders with the tools and direction needed to build a DoD that is resilient, innovative, and more fully prepared for the future. Now is the time to build a modern, software-defined defense infrastructure to ensure the safety and security of the United States.

Mung Chiang

President, Purdue University

Mark T. Esper

27th United States secretary of defense

Christine H. Fox

Former acting deputy secretary of defense

Overview

Enterprise challenges

The commission started with a vision for what the future of software-defined modernization and warfare could look like if optimized. Striving to go beyond diagnosing the challenges facing the DoD enterprise, this commission outlined desired outcomes to help the DoD overcome such challenges.

There is an absence of DoD enterprise processes and enablers that rapidly update software with novel capabilities that keep pace with threats.
The DoD has limited processes or proving grounds to allow end users to experiment with, and rapidly adopt and scale, novel software solutions, including AI and autonomy-enabled systems.
The DoD lacks established best practices for developing or buying software.
The industry faces challenges in providing and deploying its capabilities due to a lack of transparency and predictability, and other bureaucratic hurdles.
There is a major shortfall of software pipelines, talent, and resources to meet the demand for software-defined warfare within DoD organizations.
Systems, capabilities, and platforms are generated in silos. This hinders the integration of systems on the battlefield, creation of an interoperable force structure, and the DoD’s goal of a joint warfighting concept, as well as partner and allied collaboration.
The absence of a software-centric culture across the DoD impedes the employment of modern DevSecOps, which fosters rapid iterations

Top recommendations

To address these challenges, the Commission recommends that DoD leaders, congressional defense committees, and other executive branch agencies take the following ten high-priority actions to accelerate DoD innovation adoption:

Mandate enterprise data and invest in AI enablers
Ensure software interoperability and integration
Modernize test and evaluation infrastructure
Enforce commercial as the default approach for software
Transform DoD software requirements
Remove all restrictions on software funding
Measure what matters for DoD software
Enable software talent across the enterprise
Fully establish a DoD software cadre

Recommendation 1: Mandate enterprise data and invest in AI enablers

The deputy secretary of defense should direct the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO) to track enterprise-wide progress and recommend actions to the deputy secretary and vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to accelerate DoD-wide adoption of data best practices. The CDAO should ensure this process prioritizes collecting and categorizing data in a way that makes high-priority data sources readily usable for analysis and refinement for AI training, functional, and operational pipelines.
Resource the CDAO to acquire and sustain unified, shared platforms that support and accelerate the end-to-end development, deployment, and governance of AI solutions—including Machine Learning Operations capabilities, tools for developing, deploying, and reusing models, and reusable AI-ready datasets.
CDAO should consider the best strategy to make these tools accessible to the end-user community across innovation organizations, services, and combatant commands (CCMDs) to empower users to operationalize AI to solve mission-critical problems.
Services should designate a CDAO liaison that helps the services discover what is available to them at the CDAO repository and identify gaps in service-specific investments to ensure department-wide investments are not redundant and better streamline demand for new capabilities.
Service Chief Information Officers (CIOs), in collaboration with the CIO, should be resourced to invest in AI enablers that are domain- and service-specific, and in which the CDAO is unlikely to invest.
Both the CDAO and the services should maintain unclassified and classified datasets of highly relevant DoD use cases that are available for industry to use to demonstrate capability viability.

Success measure: DoD end users are empowered to leverage their domain expertise to experiment with and operationalize robust and governed AI pipelines with best-of-breed capabilities from the industry. AI adoption can be scaled faster and more efficiently because capabilities are built with scale and reproducibility in mind. The DoD saves money by not buying the same capabilities many times over. There is better coordination and transparency across the department on AI adoption and resourcing.

Notional example: The Army’s 101st Airborne Division realizes the potential of an AI use case for automatic target recognition. Instead of building something from scratch, leadership first engages the CDAO and Army CIO shop to determine what AI pillars are available to them. Using these foundational tools, operational experts spend their time addressing their specific operational problems and experimenting with integrating these new capabilities into their existing decision-making processes. Once it reaches a minimum viable product (MVP), senior leadership makes plans to integrate the capability to be part of Next Generation Command and Control (NGC2), or C2 Next.

Recommendation 2: Ensure software interoperability and integration

To ensure interoperability between new capabilities being adopted, service CIOs, in coordination with the DoD CIO, should mandate
- Modular Open Systems Approach (MOSA) frameworks applied to the maximum extent practical;
- defining modules and leveraging Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and modular system interfaces to enable data interchange between disparate platforms;
- industry and government co-collaborated reference architecture for multi-vendor environments as a best practice;
- industry, where possible, ensuring the capabilities it provides to different parts of the DoD can interoperate with one another; and
- when feasible, reference architectures are shared with allies and partners to streamline coalition interoperability.
To aid in interoperability with allies and partners, these best practices should be shared as early and often as possible with partners through existing allied technical exchanges.
Service chiefs should designate one Program Executive Office (PEO) to
- Consolidate the development, acquisition, management, and modernization of non-proprietary mission integration tools under a dedicated program office within the designated PEO shop to elevate the role of mission integration.
- The designated PEO should leverage simulation tools to imitate the feasibility of the technical integration to
  - ensure the successful integration of new and legacy systems, including the use of open-computer architecture to facilitate the deployment of capability on associated hardware;
  - create demand signals for software mission integration tools; and
  - identify new software-enabled capabilities that can enable SoS warfare.

Success measure: Services are incentivized to proactively establish open compute requirements and identify seams between capabilities that would prevent them from carrying out their highest-priority missions and creating acquisition pathways for mission integration tools.

Notional example: The Navy’s PEO for integrated warfare systems (IWS) is designated as the Navy’s “effects” organization. PEO for IWS identifies three relevant operational problems and begins simulating and combining existing force structures to address them. IWS 1.0 stands up with the authority to procure and sustain mission integration tools identified during simulation exercises, as well as to capture Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures (TTPs) in which end users creatively overcome inorganic integration.

Recommendation 3: Modernize test and evaluation infrastructure

In partnership with CDAO and the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), charge the Test Resource Management Center (TRMC) and resource it effectively to provide the digital infrastructure to provide developmental and operational testing proving grounds for innovation organizations leading on commercial software adoption.
The TRMC should partner with industry to explore metrics for vendor self-certification for both test and evaluation (T&E) and verification and validation (V&V) for more mature vendors that have invested in their own state-of-the-art capabilities. This measure will both alleviate the department being a bottleneck to deployment and help to rapidly deploy capabilities that have met the required T&E thresholds co-developed by the TRMC.
The TRMC, in partnership with innovation organizations and Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) leaders, should establish joint operational testing and development testing teams that share data, analysis, and tooling across development and deployment stages. This approach should reduce barriers, streamline the test process, and provide continuous system performance improvement, while also incentivizing a DevSecOps pipeline for T&E that is informed by and applies industry best practices for enterprise scalability, advanced analysis, and data sharing.

Success measure: Simulating capability viability becomes a widely accessible and organic part of validating and testing digitally enabled technologies. In addition, metrics are established to drive progress toward the automation of qualification processes and alternative certification paths. This adoption helps create a pipeline that rapidly scales the deployment of robust and trusted software-defined capabilities.

Notional example: The TRMC invests in digital infrastructure focused on testing drones’ ability to swarm to overwhelm enemy defenses. The DIU uses this infrastructure to quickly validate compelling candidates for its Commercial Service Openings submissions rapidly and iteratively. The initial testing helps identify existing deficiencies—potentially including adversarial embedded code in a commercial component—as well as best practices for managing the data flows required to monitor the performance of these capabilities, and cross-functional teams organized to begin addressing the problem.

Recommendation 4: Enforce commercial as the default approach for software

Requirements, acquisition, and contracting executives install checkpoints in the early phases of software-intensive programs to enforce statutory preferences for commercial software. Require added justification and approvals to pursue a non-commercial software solution.
Service Chief Technology Officers (CTOs) and the DIU align DoD and industry groups to provide enterprise market intelligence and due diligence for in-depth insights into the commercial software market and include those of allies and partners. Service CIOs and the DIU should leverage or establish a platform to share these insights. These offices should publish and maintain a clearer software total addressable market (TAM) by technology segments. This roadmap should outline how they plan to leverage software as part of their annual budget documents to better incentivize and shape industry research and development. This TAM should map to commercial TAMs to identify dual-use or DoD-unique software.
Update Department of Defense Instruction (DODI) 5000.87 on the software acquisition pathway and related acquisition policies and regulations to require program managers and contracting officers to capture in software acquisition and contracting strategies that they pursued commercial solutions to the maximum extent practicable. This should include
- engaging industry, industry-focused organizations, and consortia to communicate their needs and understand existing solutions;
- capturing holistic timelines and costs of buying commercial solutions compared to developing new software (contracting, acquisition, development, integration, test, and updates);
- ensuring contracting requirements are captured in a manner that would not preclude viable commercial solutions as partial or whole solutions to address the capability needs;
- ensuring contract strategies do not preclude commercial solutions and that they enable leading software vendors and nontraditional defense companies to compete;
- enabling DoD users and industry to rapidly demonstrate, prototype, and experiment with commercial solutions for defense applications;
- working with testers and certifiers to understand cybersecurity, integration, and other factors to assess the risks and processes of using the software in the defense domain;
- ensuring prime contractors and subcontractors default to commercial solutions;
- identifying how modular open systems, common interfaces, and standards are leveraged;
- publishing the non-commercial item determination in the solicitations for custom software development to allow vendors to appeal that decision, if justified;
- ensuring realistic intellectual-property (IP) strategies avoid unrealistic demands for source code while enabling the DoD to update or pivot if costs or performance are unsuitable;
- having acquisition sponsors provide supporting justification if commercial solutions are not viable and new development is warranted; and
- ensuring requirements and acquisition approving officials or boards must validate the commercial solution analysis early in the process.
The services, in collaboration with the defense acquisition executive, Defense Acquisition University, DIU, and the CDAO, should expand guidebooks and training for acquisition and requirements professionals on effectively leveraging commercial software. These protocols should be maintained online and regularly updated with insights and resources from across the DoD, government, and industry. They shall include the documentation and compliance tasks avoided by using commercial software. Program offices and portfolio executives should provide regular inputs to guide the community on best practices, lessons learned, and adoption metrics.
Service CTOs, in partnership with the DIU and the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, should meet quarterly to review software research and development efforts by science and technology (S&T) organizations to minimize duplication with the commercial sector. They should also incentivize organizations charged with developing concepts of operations to do so collaboratively, based on consistent industry engagement, to understand the state of play in commercial technologies that can be leveraged for warfighting missions. CTOs and CIOs should have authority to work with the PEOs to co-direct software factory funding. This authorization will ensure the factories focus on the intended objectives and can achieve the performance metrics developed per the Software Modernization Implementation Plan. Based on a clear inventory of platforms, services, and personnel, the CTOs and CIOs, in partnership with the PEOs, should adjust investments that maximize efficiencies and effectiveness. These adjustments could include reducing personnel billets and increasing software licenses. These factories should enable increased speed and quality of deploying code to various environments while maximizing interoperability and cybersecurity. PEOs, CTOs, and CIOs should hold software factory leadership accountable to continuously improve performance metrics and enable software-intensive acquisition programs and operations on the tactical edge. Similarly, the CTOs and CIOs should be accountable to continuously improve enabling policies, resources, authorities to operate, and reciprocity across organizations and the services.

Success measure: The DoD identifies and tracks commercial software acquisition metrics and TAM. The DoD demonstrates a significant increase in commercial software usage, particularly for systems with well-bounded, government-defined modular system interfaces. This approach improves system cost, schedule, and performance.

Notional example: One of the Army’s autonomy programs deviates from its strategy of a lengthy government-developed autonomy stack and rapidly acquires commercial software from leading vendors. The program saves years in development and millions in costs, while delivering higher-quality software to operations faster.

Recommendation 5: Transform DoD software requirements

The DoD should exempt all software requirements below the Major Defense Acquisition Program thresholds from the Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System (JCIDS) approval processes. This exemption should include requirements for new software capabilities and software upgrades to legacy systems, regardless of the acquisition pathway used.
Service requirements organizations—in collaboration with Joint Staff J8 forces, acquisition executives, and software leaders—should establish separate, yet complementary, structures, processes, and training to manage software requirements in a streamlined, dynamic, and collaborative environment.
- While a high-level document might be used to capture initial operational capability needs, the bulk of software requirements will be managed via dynamic backlogs with active stakeholder engagements.
- Policies should delineate hardware and software requirements and enable each to operate on separate timelines and processes. When capabilities reach appropriate maturity levels during system development, use integrated hardware-software testing, digital engineering, modeling, and simulation to verify desired system performance.
- Requirements should enable operational agility measured in days and weeks, tailoring for both global and regional needs across the full range of military operations, and should enable operational commands to define and tailor capabilities based on edge-generated data, while providing insight to service software capabilities.
Service requirements organizations should update policies to require sponsors to provide written justification in an appendix to the requirements document or a companion document, demonstrating that they pursued commercial solutions to the maximum extent practicable. This includes identifying how the requirements community, through the acquisition community, actively engaged industry and the DoD S&T ecosystem to
- communicate operational needs, challenges, and environments;
- understand what commercial solutions exist, the existing applications of these solutions, and the emerging software capabilities that could have military applications;
- capture requirements in a manner that would not preclude viable commercial solutions as partial or whole solutions to address the capability needs; and
- foster discussions between the DoD and industry to reduce barriers to buying commercial solutions.

Success measure: Each of the military services update their software requirements processes to enable greater speed, agility, and quality. Updated training, guidance, and resources enable the requirements and acquisition communities to successfully adopt modern software practices.

Notional example: A major weapons system was unable to detect or react to adversary drones in theater. Through a dynamic software requirements process, this threat becomes the top priority for the next software release. The vendors work closely with operators and testers to rapidly iterate on software upgrades that drastically improve mission operations within weeks.

Recommendation 6: Remove all restrictions on software funding

The DoD should immediately discontinue the Budget Authority-8 pilots and implement the pilot intent.
The DoD comptroller, in collaboration with service comptrollers and congressional appropriations staff, should update the Financial Management Regulation (FMR) to enable the DoD to acquire, update, operate, and sustain software capabilities with available Research, Development, Test, and Evaluation (RDT&E), procurement, or Operation and Maintenance (O&M) funding appropriated for the capability. This echoes the congressionally directed Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution (PPBE) Reform Commission’s recommendation 11A.
The DoD comptroller should issue a policy memo for immediate action and clarification while adding these changes to the ongoing comprehensive FMR updates per the PPBE Reform Commission.
DoD and service comptrollers should communicate guidance on implementing the changes across the workforce.
The language would enable any funding appropriated for a software capability to be used regardless of the software activities (e.g., new development versus maintenance) or how it is acquired (e.g., development, Commercial Off the Shelf (COTS), or as a service). This new language should enable
- rapid acquisition and delivery of leading software capabilities;
- improved responsiveness to changes in threats, operations, and technologies; and
- reduced operational, cybersecurity, and programmatic risks.

Success measure: The DoD comptroller issues a software funding directive removing appropriation restrictions and provides clear direction to the workforce on flexible software funding execution.

Notional example: To meet a critical operational requirement, a program explores a range of software acquisition and contracting strategies unburdened by the mix of funding appropriations.

Recommendation 7: Measure what matters for DoD software

The acquisition executives’ staff should collaboratively develop new software metrics for most acquisition programs. PEOs, services, agencies, and the OSD should compile and share quarterly or annual reports across the DoD workforce and leadership to provide visibility into trends, best practices, and enterprise issues to drive regular discussions and actions on how to accelerate delivery. These metrics often identify program trends and issues to drive corrective action and continuous improvement. The Navy’s PEO Digital established World-Class Alignment Metrics (WAMS), which are a model for others to follow. These reports should include the following metrics.
- Deployment frequency: The number of software updates deployed to the operational environment (production) in the last year (or time between deployments). Goal: more than once per week.
- Time to initial deployment: Time from the initiation of software development to the date the initial software capabilities are deployed to an operational environment.
- Automated testing use and timelines: Program and portfolio use of automated testing and testing timelines. Goal: daily automated testing, development and operational testing timelines declining.
- Mean times to restore (MTTR): The average amount of time it takes to address a critical vulnerability or issue, including testing, certifying, and authority to operate. Goal: less than one day.
- API use: Total API usage each week or month to enable interoperability and data sharing across applications. Goal: increasing usage each month.
- Production software defect density: Defect density of production software in operations each month. Goal: heavily domain dependent.
- Security vulnerabilities: Number of security vulnerabilities identified and remediated. Goal: heavily domain dependent.
- Change failure rate: Percentage of software changes that resulted in system disruptions, including downtime, errors, or negative impacts on users. Goal: less than 10 percent and heavily domain dependent.
- Customer satisfaction: Quantitative metrics or qualitative value assessments of customer satisfaction. Goal: greater than 80 percent of customers rate software high value.
- User engagement: Number of user engagements per month by software developers. Goal: end users engaged weekly.
- Software reuse: Number of acquisition programs able to reuse software capabilities and infrastructure. Goal: increasing reuse each month.
The focus of the metrics and subsequent actions at the program, portfolio, and enterprise levels is to continuously deliver impactful software to the user communities to improve mission impact. Each program and organization might have different objectives or challenges to address, such as release velocity, software quality, or user satisfaction. Some of these may have competing forces that must be managed (e.g., quality vs. speed). Defense of the Realm Act’s annual Accelerate State of DevOps report provides industry-leading metrics for software, including levels for elite, high, medium, and low performance. The DoD should strive toward these commercial goals as objectives and tailor performance levels to unique DoD environments.
Major programs and software-intensive portfolios should map out the processes to develop, test, certify, and deploy software, including actual timelines for each phase; key stakeholders involved (by name or organization); key bottlenecks; the opportunities to streamline software delivery timelines; and how stakeholders are accountable to accelerate software delivery speed, manage operational and development risks, and ensure high-quality and secure software. Furthermore, programs and portfolios should identify where additional resources (personnel, tools, and services) at a program, portfolio, or enterprise level would enable speed of delivery. These metrics are more for internal DoD operations, with a subset that might be shared with Congress or publicly.

Success measure: The military services and related organizations track, share, and use a core set of software metrics across the defense enterprise and leverage insights for key decisions, investments, and continuous improvement in speed, quality, reuse, and user satisfaction (mission impact).

Notional example: A PEO of a software-intensive portfolio has an online dashboard of software metrics that is integrated into program and portfolio operations. Program, portfolio, and policy decisions are made based on these metrics, with the workforce culture focused on leaning out processes and barriers to enable rapid, iterative, and quality software deliveries to operations. Acquisition professionals and vendors are incentivized to continuously improve.

Recommendation 8: Enable software talent across the enterprise

Develop an extensive, connected, layered, and modular software-centric training program that involves both digital and in-person learning and incorporates the specific requirements of different roles and missions across the force. The objective of this effort is to increase awareness of the importance of software to DoD operations, instill a basic to intermediate-level understanding of commercial software best practices and agile software development and their value, and build the skills required to more effectively integrate and operate software in specific roles.
Specifically, the DoD should do the following.
- Partner with leading academic institutions in software development to create a curriculum for an approximately week-long in-person or hybrid training course tailored to senior leaders in the DoD. This executive training curriculum should concentrate on commercial software development best practices and the importance of software to mission execution for senior leaders in the DoD. Training emerging and current senior leaders on these topics can help the DoD develop leaders more willing to create the conditions and culture that will facilitate accelerated adoption.
- Leverage and expand existing successful mechanisms and models for software training, such as the Army Software Factory, and access to digital training libraries at both non-DoD and DoD academic institutions.
- Defense education institutions across the DoD should enrich training to deepen understanding of the importance of software, commercial software best practices and development approaches, and integration of software into DoD activities. The course curriculum should engage and harness insights from leading software experts in industry, as well as in academia, to determine the skill sets and knowledge bases most relevant to the defense context.
In addition to enhancing software literacy through training, the DoD needs to scale formal software career fields and paths for military and civilian personnel to harness the software talent for new and expanded roles. For example, in February 2024, the Air Force reestablished warrant officers for information technology (IT) and cyber career fields to improve technical expertise in cyber and information technologies.
As part of this effort, the DoD should increase opportunities for identified DoD software-focused professionals to interact with both traditional defense industry companies and commercial companies involved in developing software for the DoD. This should include, but not be limited to, embedding DoD talent in these companies for several months to gain firsthand experience in software development cycles and challenges associated with software acquisition. The ability to engage more closely with commercial industry should also extend to the CCMDs, which should expand opportunities for operators to train and experiment directly with commercial industry through exercises such as the Army’s Scarlet Dragon, among others.

Success measure: The DoD increases software and technical literacy across the enterprise through scalable training tailored to different DoD levels and roles. The DoD creates opportunities for the identification, enhanced training, and deployment of software talent that can be deployed across the organization to drive software adoption and use.

Notional example: A Navy officer with demonstrated software competence is placed in a leading commercial software company that supports the DoD on a six-month rotation or internship. The officer learns from product developers and product managers to understand commercial development and improvement processes and brings this knowledge back to help operators in a CCMD more efficiently and effectively operate software-defined capabilities.

Recommendation 9: Fully establish a DoD software cadre

The DoD should recruit fifty to one hundred experienced software engineers in modern development environments and place them in key roles across the enterprise. These individuals’ expertise will be used to inform decision-makers on software pipelines, architectures, and leading commercial solutions. They can address key software issues and guide efforts to develop software requirements, acquisition strategies, integration, certification, and employment of software. They can be placed in prominent roles across the DoD, including program management offices and portfolios responsible for acquiring software capabilities; CIO, software factories, and AI and data organizations focused on enterprise services; in operational commands that need to rapidly iterate on tactics and software upgrades; and as executives who oversee major programs, shape budgets, and lead combat operations. Members of this cadre would operate as a network, potentially rotating and surging to meet prioritized problems related to software acquisition, integration, and employment, and sharing best practices and insights.
Candidates can be hired in a full-time role using existing hiring authorities such as Highly Qualified Experts. They can also be engaged on a temporary or episodic basis through commercial talent exchange programs such as CDAO’s AI and Data Acceleration program or through Search Generative Experiences to provide iterative specialized services for a restricted number of days throughout the year. The services should also implement direct commissioning of willing experienced software engineers in the reserves, up to and including the general officer level (as is done for specialized roles such as doctors and lawyers) and should also identify and engage leading software talent already serving in the reserves, similar to the Marine Innovation Unit approach. Programs like GigEagle help identify talent in the reserves for short-term problem sets. By leveraging reservists throughout the year, the DoD can capitalize on existing expertise while mitigating financial and professional risks for those working with the DoD.
Increasing reliance on short-term commercial or reservist software talent will necessitate a review and refinement of conflict-of-interest rules to balance the need to protect the DoD from the risk of providing companies unfair advantages and the need to make it easier for top-level talent to move between the DoD and the commercial sector.
In addition to meeting current demand, the DoD should partner with academic institutions to develop talent pipelines of individuals who are educated and certified in commercial software processes and engineering as well as in the DoD processes and requirements. The DoD should work with interested institutions to develop curriculum and certification criteria that will allow students to be fast-tracked into the DoD software cadre positions.

Success measure: The DoD successfully recruits an increased number of software experts and solutions architects over the next two years to advise on software development, acquisition, and adoption within program offices and CCMDs in particular, while also building a pipeline of software-focused talent.

Notional example: Cadre members placed in program offices use their expertise to understand the significance of decisions a vendor has made in its software development process and inform program managers and acquisition officers on the implications that development decisions hold for future integration and certification. This guidance allows acquisition professionals to make decisions better informed by downstream considerations, reducing costs and time associated with integration, certification, and upgrading of critical software systems.

Conclusion

The commission’s report presents clear, actionable recommendations and outlines the desired outcomes to address a critical aspect of modern defense and security. While the adoption of software-defined warfare currently poses a challenge, it is also an area of a defining opportunity. The rapidly shifting geopolitical landscape, marked by an axis of aggressors, demands immediate and decisive action to maintain US strategic advantage. If these recommendations are fully implemented, the United States will possess a modern, agile, and resilient defense infrastructure that is capable of fostering a robust software foundation that will bolster the capabilities of US hardware, while streamlining interoperability across services, allies, and partners. However, failure to act will leave the nation vulnerable and unable to adequately adapt to rapidly evolving threats. The time to act is now—while the United States prepares for the challenges of tomorrow, software-defined warfare provides a timely and practical solution to strengthen US defense capabilities today. Leaders in the DoD, Congress, and the private sector should work to implement these recommendations with a sense of urgency—the members of this commission stand by to help them do so. At stake is nothing less than the stability of the US-led, rules-based international order and the decades of unprecedented peace and prosperity it has undergirded.

About the authors

Mung Chiang

Board director and co-chair of the commission, Atlantic Council; president, Purdue University

Mung Chiang is the president of Purdue University and the Roscoe H. George distinguished professor of electrical and computer engineering. Prior to being elected university president in 2022, he was the John A. Edwardson dean of the college of engineering and executive vice president for strategic initiatives at Purdue University.

Chiang received his BS (1999), MS (2000) and his PhD (2003) from Stanford University and an honorary doctorate (2024) from Dartmouth College. Before 2017, Chiang was the Arthur LeGrand Doty professor of electrical engineering and an affiliated faculty in computer science and in applied mathematics at Princeton University.

He founded the Princeton EDGE Lab in 2009 and co-founded several startup companies and industry consortia since the early years of edge computing. Most of his twenty-six US patents are licensed for network deployment. He co-authored two textbooks based on massive open online courses: Networked Life (2012) and Power of Networks (2016). For his research in communication networks, wireless technology, and network optimization, he received the NSF Alan T. Waterman Award (2013), as well as the IEEE Founders Medal (2025), the IEEE INFOCOM Achievement Award (2022), the IEEE Kiyo Tomiyasu Award (2012), and the Guggenheim Fellowship (2014). He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (Class of Mathematical and Physical Sciences 2024), the National Academy of Inventors (2020) and the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences (2020).

In 2020, as the Science and Technology adviser to the US secretary of state, Chiang initiated tech diplomacy programs in the US government. In 2024, he started serving on the inaugural board of the US Foundation for Energy Security and Innovation, and was elected to the Board of Directors of the US Olympic and Paralympic Committee as an independent director.

Mark T. Esper

Board director and co-chair of the commission, Atlantic Council; 27th US secretary of defense

Mark T. Esper served as secretary of defense from 2019-2020, and as secretary of the army from 2017-2019. A distinguished graduate of West Point, he spent twenty-one years in uniform, including a combat tour in the Gulf War. Esper earned a PhD from George Washington University while working on Capitol Hill, at the Pentagon as a political appointee, and as a commissioner on the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission. He was also a senior executive at a prestigious think tank, two business associations, and a Fortune 100 technology company. Esper is the recipient of multiple civilian and military awards. He currently sits on several public policy and business boards.

Christine H. Fox

Board director and co-chair of the commission, Atlantic Council; former acting deputy secretary of defense

Christine Fox is a senior fellow at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (JHU/APL). Previously, she was the assistant director for policy and analysis at JHU/APL, a position she held from 2014 to early 2022. Before joining APL, she served as acting deputy secretary of defense from 2013 to 2014 and as director of Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation (CAPE) from 2009 to 2013. As director of CAPE, Fox served as chief analyst to the secretary of defense. Prior to her DoD positions, she served as president of the Center for Naval Analyses from 2005 to 2009, after working there as a research analyst and manager since 1981. Currently, she also serves on many governance and advisory boards including the Strategic Competitive Studies Project, Palantir Technologies, Muon Space, DEFCON AI, and Brown Advisory. Fox holds a bachelor’s and master’s degree in applied mathematics from George Mason University. She is a three-time recipient of the Department of Defense Distinguished Public Service Medal and of the Army’s Decoration for Distinguished Civilian Service.

Whitney M. McNamara

Senior vice president, Beacon Global Strategies; nonresident senior fellow, author, Commission on Software-Defined Warfare, Atlantic Council

Whitney McNamara is a senior vice president at Beacon Global Strategies where she works with disruptive technology companies. She is also a co-author of both the Atlantic Council’s Commission on Defense Innovation Adoption and Commission on Software-Defined Warfare reports. Previously, McNamara worked in the Office of the Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, where she led the S&T portfolio of the Defense Innovation Board and as a technology policy subject matter expert at the DoD Chief Information Office. Prior, she was a senior analyst at the national security think tank Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, where she worked at the intersection of future operation concepts and emerging technology adoption and advised the Department of Defense on technology acquisition strategies.

Peter Modigliani

Senior advisor, Govini; author, Commission on Software-Defined Warfare, Atlantic Council

Peter Modigliani is a senior advisor at Govini, advising USD(A&S) and ASD(A) on strategic acquisition initiatives. Prior to that, he was a vice president at Beacon Global Strategies. Modigliani subsequently served as a defense acquisition leader within the MITRE Corporation, enabling the DoD and intelligence community to deliver innovative solutions with greater speed and agility. He works with acquisition and CIO executives, program managers, the Section 809 Panel, congressional staffs, industry, and academia to shape acquisition reforms, strategic initiatives, and major program strategies. Prior to MITRE, he was an assistant vice president with Alion Science and Technology. Modigliani began his career as an Air Force program manager for C4ISR programs.

Tate Nurkin

Founder, OTH Intelligence Group; author, Commission on Software-Defined Warfare, Atlantic Council

Tate Nurkin is a nonresident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Forward Defense and Indo-Pacific Security Initiative in the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security. He is also the founder of OTH Intelligence Group.

Before establishing OTH Intelligence Group in March 2018, Nurkin spent twelve years at Jane’s by IHS Markit where he served in a variety of roles, including managing Jane’s Defense, Risk, and Security Consulting practice. From 2013 until his departure, he served as the founding executive director of the Strategic Assessments and Futures Studies (SAFS) Center, which provided thought leadership and customized analysis on global competition in geopolitics, future military capabilities, and the global defence industry.

Substantively, Nurkin’s research and analysis has a particularly strong focus on US-China competition, defense technology, the future of military capabilities, and the global defense industry and its market issues. He also specializes in the design and delivery of alternative futures analysis exercises such as scenario planning, red teaming, and wargaming.

Nurkin is a frequent author and speaker on these overlapping research priorities. For example, he was the lead author of the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission’s report entitled China’s Advanced Weapons Systems, which was published in May 2018, and has provided testimony to the Commission on two occasions. In March 2019, he was featured on a Center for Strategic and International Studies China Power podcast on China’s unmanned systems. He was the lead author of the Atlantic Council’s 2019 strategy white paper on artificial intelligence.

He previously worked for Joint Management Services, the Strategic Assessment Center of SAIC, and the Modeling, Simulation, Wargaming, and Analysis team of Booz Allen Hamilton. From 2014 to 2018 he served consecutive two-year terms on the World Economic Forum’s Nuclear Security Global Agenda Council and its Future Council on International Security, which was established to diagnose and assess the security and defense implications of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

Nurkin holds a MS in international affairs from the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs at Georgia Tech and a BA in history and political science from Duke University. He lives in Charlotte, NC.

Stephen Rodriguez

Managing partner, One Defense; senior advisor and study director of the Commission on Software-Defined Warfare, Forward Defense, Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, Atlantic Council

Stephen Rodriguez is a senior advisor with the Forward Defense program at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security and the managing partner of One Defense, a strategic advisory firm that leverages machine learning to identify advanced software and hardware commercial capabilities and accelerate their transition into the defense industrial base. He is also an investor at Refinery Ventures, an early-scale fund investing in dual-use technologies across the country.

Rodriguez began his career at Booz Allen Hamilton shortly before 9/11 supporting its national security practice. In his capacity as an expert on game theoretic applications, he supported the United States Intelligence Community, Department of Defense, and Department of Homeland Security as a lead architect for the Thor’s Hammer, Schriever II/III and Cyber Storm wargames. He subsequently was a vice president at an artificial intelligence company (Sentia Group) and served as chief marketing officer for an international defense corporation (NCL Holdings). Rodriguez serves as a board director or board advisor of ten venture-backed companies (Applied Intuition, Duco, Edgybees, Firestorm, Titaniam, Ursa Major Technologies, Vantage Robotics, WarOnTheRocks, ZeroMark, and Zignal Labs). He is a special advisor at America’s Frontier Fund, a commission director at the Atlantic Council and a life member at the Council on Foreign Relations. Rodriguez received his BBA degree from Texas A&M University and an MA degree from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. He is published in Foreign Policy, WarOnTheRocks, National Review, and RealClearDefense.

Clementine G. Starling-Daniels

Program director, senior resident fellow, Forward Defense, Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, Atlantic Council

Clementine G. Starling-Daniels is the director of the Atlantic Council’s Forward Defense program and a resident fellow within the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security. In her role, she shapes the Center’s US defense research agenda, leads Forward Defense’s team of nine staff and forty fellows, and produces thought leadership on US security strategies and the evolving character of warfare. Her research focuses on long-term US thinking on issues like China’s and Russia’s defense strategies, space security, defense industry, and emerging technology. Prior to launching Forward Defense, Starling served as deputy director of the Atlantic Council’s Transatlantic Security team, specializing in European security policy and NATO.

From 2016, she supported NATO’s Public Diplomacy Division at two NATO summits (Brussels and London) and organized and managed three senior Atlantic Council task forces on US force posture in Europe, military mobility, and US defense innovation adoption. During her time at the Atlantic Council, Starling has written numerous reports and commentary on US space strategy, deterrence, operational concepts, coalition warfare, and US-Europe relations. She regularly serves as a panelist and moderator at public conferences. Among the outlets that have featured her analysis and commentary are Defense One, Defense News, RealClearDefense, the National Interest, SpaceNews, NATO’s Joint Air and Space Power Conference, the BBC, National Public Radio, ABC News, and Government Matters, among others. Starling was named the 2022 Herbert Roback scholar by the US National Academy of Public Administration. She also served as the 2020 security and defense fellow at Young Professionals in Foreign Policy. Originally from the United Kingdom, Starling previously worked in the UK Parliament focusing on technology, defense, Middle East security, and Ukraine. She also supported the Britain Stronger in Europe campaign, championing for the United Kingdom to remain within the European Union. She graduated with honors from the London School of Economics with a BS in international relations and history and is an MA candidate in security studies at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service.

Mark J. Massa is a deputy director in the Forward Defense practice of the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security at the Atlantic Council. the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security at the Atlantic Council. A founding member of Forward Defense, Massa supports the director in the management of the program’s strategy, budget, personnel, and impact.

Massa leads Forward Defense’s portfolio of work on strategic forces issues, including nuclear strategy, space security, missile defense, and long-range conventional strike. His writing and commentary have appeared in the Hill, Defense News, RealClearDefense, Forbes, Air and Space Forces Magazine, the National Interest, CNBC, Sky News, and CTV News.

Massa earned his MA from Georgetown University’s security studies program. He received a BS in foreign service magna cum laude from Georgetown University with a degree in science, technology, and international affairs. He was awarded honors in his major for a senior thesis on a theory of nuclear ballistic missile submarine strategy.

Abigail Rudolph is a program assistant in the Forward Defense program of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security. She contributes to the program’s defense industry and innovation portfolio.

Previously, Rudolph interned with the Cleveland Council on World Affairs where she contributed to its foreign policy forums and committees on foreign relations. As an undergraduate, she co-authored an op-ed detailing net-zero carbon emissions pathways for Ohioans; conducted an independent study evaluating the environmental impacts of war; cofounded the Women in National Security Initiative at her university; and completed her senior thesis which focused on an assessment of, and recommendations for bolstering NATO’s China policy.

She graduated with honors from Baldwin Wallace University, earning a BA in national security with a minor in sustainability.

Curtis Lee is a program assistant in the Forward Defense program of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security.

Lee is a recent graduate from Carnegie Mellon University, where he received a MS in public policy and management, a BS in policy and management, and a BA in Chinese studies. He has experience working on numerous topics in defense and foreign policy with a focus on the Indo-Pacific region and China. Lee completed his senior thesis on analyzing the supply chain vulnerabilities of US future technologies as a result of US-China decoupling policies.

In addition to his role at the Atlantic Council, Lee is currently a military intelligence officer in the US Army Reserves.

Alexander S. Young is a project assistant in the Forward Defense program of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, where he supports the program’s defense industry, innovation, and technology work.

Young is a graduate of the London School of Economics and Political Science, where he earned a MA with merit in global politics. He previously graduated with high honors from the University of California, Santa Barbara, completing a double major in political science and global studies with emphases in international relations and the Middle East and the North Africa region. Having studied and worked in both Europe and the Middle East, Young wrote his master’s dissertation about the impacts of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on the geopolitics of the eastern Mediterranean and its natural gas projects.

Previously, Young also worked as an English teacher in underserved communities in Israel, having taught at An-Najah Comprehensive Junior High School in Rahat and Dizengoff Elementary School in Tel Aviv.

Young’s interests include geopolitics, ethnic and religious conflict, natural resources, defense industry issues, conflict resolution, and conflict stabilization.

Acknowledgements

This report was written and prepared with the support and input of its authors, commissioners on the Atlantic Council’s Commission on Software-Defined Warfare, and the Forward Defense program of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security.

This effort was conducted under the supervision of commission director Stephen Rodriguez, Forward Defense director Clementine Starling-Daniels, and Forward Defense deputy director Mark J. Massa. Special thanks to Atlantic Council CEO Fred Kempe and Matthew Kroenig for their support of this effort.

This effort has been made possible through the generous support of Booz Allen Hamilton, CAE, Helsing, Lockheed Martin, and Second Front Systems as the foundational sponsors, as well as sponsorship from Aalyria, Accrete AI, Adarga, Domino Data Lab, Edge Case Research, Fathom 5, Fortem Technologies, Kodiak Robotics, Latent AI, Peraton, Primer AI, SAAB, Saronic, Scale AI, and Skydio.

Foundational sponsors

Sponsors

To produce this report, the authors conducted more than fifty interviews and consultations with current and former officials in the US Department of Defense, congressional staff members, allied embassies in Washington, DC, and other academic and think tank organizations. However, the analysis and recommendations presented in this report are those of the authors alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of individuals consulted, commissioners, commission sponsors, the Atlantic Council, or any US government organization. Moreover, the authors, commissioners, and consulted experts participated in a personal, not institutional, capacity.

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Canada needs an economic statecraft strategy to address its vulnerabilities

Kimberly Donovan, Maia Nikoladze, Lize de Kruijf — Thu, 27 Mar 2025 12:00:00 +0000

Introduction

Canada is facing economic threats from China and Russia targeting its critical industries and infrastructure. The Business Council of Canada, which consists of CEOs of top Canadian companies, identified cyberattacks, theft of intellectual property, Chinese influence on Canada’s academic sector, and trade weaponization by China among the top economic threats to Canada.

More recently, a new and unexpected threat emerged from the United States, when Washington announced 25 percent tariffs on all Canadian goods except for the 10 percent tariffs on energy. To address threats from Russia and China and reduce trade overdependence on the United States, Canada’s federal government will need to consolidate economic power and devise an economic statecraft strategy that will leverage Canada’s economic tools to mitigate these economic threats and vulnerabilities. This paper covers the following topics and offers recommendations:

Economic threats to Canada’s national security
An unexpected threat: Overdependence on trade with the United States
Lack of economic power consolidation by Canada’s federal government
Mapping Canada’s economic statecraft systems: Sanctions, export controls, tariffs, and investment screening

Economic threats to Canada’s national security

Cyberattacks on Canada’s critical infrastructure

Canada’s critical infrastructure has become a target of state-sponsored cyberattacks. In 2023, Canada’s Communications Security Establishment (CSE)—a signals intelligence agency—said that Russia-backed hackers were seeking to disrupt Canada’s energy sector. Apart from accounting for 5 percent of Canada’s gross domestic product (GDP), the energy sector also keeps the rest of Canada’s critical infrastructure functioning. CSE warned that the threat to Canada’s pipelines and physical infrastructure would persist until the end of the war in Ukraine and that the objective was to weaken Canada’s support for Ukraine.

Beyond critical infrastructure, Canadian companies lost about $4.3 billion due to ransomware attacks in 2021. More recently in February 2025, Russian hacking group Seashell Blizzard was reported to have targeted energy and defense sectors in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Russia and other adversarial states will likely continue targeting Canada’s critical infrastructure and extorting ransom payments from Canadian companies.

Theft of intellectual property

Canadian companies have become targets of Chinese state-sponsored intellectual theft operations. In 2014, a Chinese state-sponsored threat actor stole more than 40,000 files from the National Research Council’s private-sector partners. The National Research Council is a primary government agency dedicated to research and development in science and technology. Apart from undermining Canadian companies, theft of Canada’s intellectual property, especially research on sensitive technologies, poses a threat to Canada’s national security.

Chinese influence on Canada’s academic sector

Adversarial states have taken advantage of Canada’s academic sector to advance their own strategic and military capabilities. For example, from 2018 to 2023, Canada’s top universities published more than 240 joint papers on quantum cryptography, space science, and other advanced research topics along with Chinese scientists working for China’s top military institutions. In January 2024, Canada’s federal government named more than one hundred institutions in China, Russia, and Iran that pose a threat to Canada’s national security. Apart from calling out specific institutions, the federal government also identified “sensitive research areas.” Universities or researchers who decide to work with the listed institutions on listed sensitive topics will not be eligible for federal grants.

Trade weaponization by China

Trade weaponization by China has undermined the economic welfare of Canadians and posed a threat to the secure functioning of Canada’s critical infrastructure. For example, between 2019 and 2020, China targeted Canada’s canola sector with 100 percent tariffs, restricting these imports and costing Canadian farmers more than $2.35 billion in lost exports and price pressure. In Canada’s 2024 Fall Economic Statement, which outlined key measures to enhance Canadian economic security, the Ministry of Finance announced its plans to impose additional tariffs on Chinese imports to combat China’s unfair trade practices. These included tariffs on solar products and critical minerals in early 2025, and on permanent magnets, natural graphite, and semiconductors in 2026.

However, the imposition of 25 percent tariffs by Washington on both Canada and China could result in deepening trade ties between the two. Canada exported a record $2 billion in crude oil to China in 2024, accounting for half of all oil exports through the newly expanded Trans Mountain pipeline. Increased trade with China would increase Canada’s exposure to China’s coercive practices, and would be a direct consequence of US tariffs on Canada.

An unexpected threat: Overdependence on trade with the United States

A new and unexpected threat to Canada’s economic security emerged from the United States when the Trump administration threatened to impose 25 percent tariffs on all Canadian goods (except for the 10 percent tariffs on energy imports). The United States is Canada’s largest export market, receiving a staggering 76 percent of Canada’s exports in 2024. Canada relies on the United States particularly in the context of its crude oil trade, shipping 97.4 percent of its crude oil to the United States.

Canada had already started working on expansion to global markets through pipeline development even before Washington announced tariffs. It has succeeded in the expansion of the Trans Mountain pipeline in May 2024, which has enabled the export of Canadian oil to Asia. Canada is reviving talks on the canceled Energy East and Northern Gateway pipelines—the former would move oil from Alberta to Eastern Canada, and the latter would transport oil from Alberta to British Columbia for export to Asian markets.

In addition to oil trade, another area where Canada is highly dependent on the United States is in auto manufacturing. Behind oil exports, motor vehicles account for the largest share of Canadian exports to the United States, resulting in exports valued at $50.76 billion (C$72.7 billion Canadian dollars) in 2024. With 25 percent tariffs on all Canadian goods, the automotive industry is expected to take a hit, especially as components cross the border six to eight times before final assembly.

Figure 1

The United States invoked the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to impose tariffs on Canada with the stated objective to curb fentanyl flows to the United States. The measure has plunged US-Canada relations into chaos and could result in a trade war between the two long-standing allies. In response, Canada might reroute oil shipments to China through existing pipelines and increase trade with China in general. Further economic integration with China would increase Canada’s exposure to economic threats emanating from China, including trade weaponization and anti-competitive practices.

Because of US tariffs, Canada could also face challenges in strengthening the resilience of its nuclear fuel and critical mineral supply chains. In the 2024 Fall Economic Statement, Canada outlined key measures for its economic security that heavily incorporated US cooperation. This included plans to strengthen nuclear fuel supply chain resiliency away from Russian influence, with up to $500 million set aside for enriched nuclear fuel purchase contracts from the United States. Canada also aims to strengthen supply chains for responsibly produced critical minerals, following a $3.8 billion investment in its Critical Minerals Strategy, which relies on the United States as a key partner. Given the tariffs, Canada will need to diversify its partners and supply sources quickly if it wishes to maintain these economic security goals.

Could the US-Canada trade war upend defense cooperation?

Recent tariff escalation between the United States and Canada has raised questions about the future of military cooperation between the two countries. Apart from being members of the North Atlantic Treasury Organization (NATO), the United States and Canada form a unique binational command called North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD). NORAD’s mission is to defend North American aerospace by monitoring all aerial and maritime threats. NORAD is headquartered at Peterson Space Force Base in Colorado, has a US Commander and Canadian Deputy Commander, and has staff from both countries working side by side.

NORAD’s funding has been historically split between the United States (60 percent) and Canada (40 percent). However, the Department of Defense (DoD) does not allocate specific funding to NORAD and does not procure weapons or technology for NORAD, although NORAD uses DoD military systems once fielded. The US Congress recognized the need to allocate funding to modernize NORAD’s surveillance systems after the Chinese spy balloon incident in February 2023. While US fighter jets shot down the Chinese surveillance balloon after it was tracked above a US nuclear weapons site in Montana, the incident exposed weaknesses in NORAD’s capabilities. After the incident, former NORAD Commander Vice Admiral Mike Dumont stated that NORAD’s radar network is essentially 1970s technology and needs to be modernized.

A year before the incident, the Canadian government had committed to invest $3.6 billion in NORAD over six years from 2022 to 2028, and $28.4 billion over twenty years (2022-2042) to modernize surveillance and air weapons systems. However, Canada has fallen short on delivering on these commitments.

In March 2025, Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney announced that Canada made a $4.2 billion deal with Australia to develop a cutting-edge radar to detect threats to the Arctic. The radar is expected to be delivered by 2029 and will be deployed under NORAD. Canadian military officials have stated that the US military has supported the deal, signaling that the deterioration of economic relations has not (yet) had spillover effects for the defense cooperation.

However, Prime Minister Carney has also ordered the review of F-35 fighter jet purchases from US defense company Lockheed Martin, citing security overreliance on the United States. Under the $13.29 billion contract with Lockheed Martin, Canada was set to buy 88 fighter jets from the US company. While Canada’s defense ministry will purchase the first sixteen jets to meet the contract’s legal requirements, Canada is actively looking for alternative suppliers.

As the trade war continues, Canada will likely enhance defense cooperation with the European and other like-minded states, possibly to the detriment of the US defense industry and the US-Canada defense cooperation.

Figure 2: US-Canada overlapping memberships in security organizations and alliances

Source: Atlantic Council’s Economic Statecraft Initiative research

Lack of economic power consolidation by Canada’s federal government

Canada has a range of economic tools and sources of economic power to respond to emerging economic threats and mitigate vulnerabilities; however, it currently lacks economic power consolidation. Unlike the United States, where the federal government can regulate nearly all economic activity, Canada’s Constitution Act of 1867 grants provinces control over their “property and civil rights,” including natural resources. Section 92A, which was added to the constitution in 1982, further reinforced the provinces’ control over their natural resources. Meanwhile, the federal government has control over matters of international trade including trade controls. However, when international trade issues concern the natural resources of provinces, tensions and disagreements often arise between provinces and the federal government, and the lack of economic power consolidation by the federal government becomes obvious.

This issue manifested when the United States announced 25 percent tariffs on Canada in March 2025 as Canada’s federal government and the Alberta province had different reactions. Canada’s main leverage over the United States is oil exports. Refineries in the United States, particularly those in the Midwest, run exclusively on Canadian crude oil, having tailored their refineries to primarily process the heavy Canadian crude. Since 2010, Canadian oil accounted for virtually 100 percent of the oil imported by the Midwest. Threatening to hike levies on crude oil exports could have been Canada’s way of leveraging energy interdependence to respond to US tariffs. However, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith stated that Alberta, which is Canada’s largest oil producer and top exporter of crude oil to the United States, would not hike levies on oil and gas exports to the United States. Being unable to speak in one voice as a country even during a crisis is a direct consequence of Canada’s regional factionalism, characterized by each province looking out for their own interests.

The United States-Mexico-Canada (USMCA) trade agreement, which entered into force during the first Trump administration in July 2020, may have also contributed to diminishing the economic power of Canada’s federal government. Article 32.10 of USMCA requires each member of the agreement to notify other countries if it plans to negotiate a free trade agreement (FTA) with a nonmarket economy. Thus, if Canada were to sign an FTA with China, the United States and Mexico could review the agreement and withdraw from USMCA with six months’ notice. After the USMCA was signed, Canadian scholars wrote that this clause would effectively turn Canada into a vassal state of the United States, with the authority to make decisions on internal affairs but having to rely on the larger power for foreign and security policy decisions. Five years later, it looks like the USMCA has put Canada in a difficult position, being targeted by US tariffs and not having advanced trading relations with other countries.

Figure 3: US-Canada overlapping memberships in economic organizations and alliances

Source: Atlantic Council’s Economic Statecraft Initiative Research

Mapping Canada’s economic statecraft systems

To secure Canada’s critical infrastructure and leverage its natural resources to shape favorable foreign policy outcomes, Canada’s federal government has a range of economic tools and the ability to design new ones when appropriate. Canada’s economic statecraft tool kit is similar to those of the United States and the European Union and includes sanctions, export controls, tariffs, and investment screening. Canada has imposed financial sanctions and export controls against Russia along with its Group of Seven (G7) allies. It has levied tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles, in line with US policy, and recently created investment screening authorities to address concerns about adversarial capital.

Financial sanctions

Similar to the United States, Canada maintains sanctions programs covering specific countries such as Russia and Iran, as well as thematic sanctions regimes such as terrorism. Global Affairs Canada (GAC), which is Canada’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, administers sanctions and maintains the Consolidated Canadian Autonomous Sanctions List. Canada’s Finance Ministry, the Department of Finance, is not involved in sanctions designations, implementation, or enforcement, unlike in the United States, where the Department of the Treasury is the primary administrator of sanctions.

The Parliament of Canada has enacted legislation authorizing the imposition of sanctions through three acts: the United Nations Act; the Special Economic Measures Act (SEMA); and the Justice for Victims of Corrupt Foreign Officials Act (JVCFOA).

The United Nations Act enables GAC to implement sanctions against entities or individuals sanctioned by the UN Security Council. When an act of aggression or a grave breach of international peace occurs and the UN Security Council is unable to pass a resolution, Canada implements autonomous sanctions under SEMA; this act is Canada’s primary law for imposing autonomous sanctions and includes country-based sanctions programs. It is also used to align Canada’s sanctions with those of allies. For example, GAC derived its powers from SEMA to designate Russian entities and individuals in alignment with Canada’s Western allies in 2022. Meanwhile, the JVCFOA allows GAC to impose sanctions against individuals responsible for human rights violations and significant acts of corruption, similar to the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act in the United States, with sanctions administered by the Office of Foreign Assets Control.

Once GAC adds entities and individuals to the lists of sanctions, Canadian financial institutions comply by freezing the designated party’s assets and suspending transactions. GAC coordinates with several government agencies to enforce and enable private-sector compliance with sanctions:

FINTRAC: Canada’s financial intelligence unit (FIU)—Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada (FINTRAC)—is responsible for monitoring suspicious financial activities and collecting reporting from financial institutions on transactions that may be linked to sanctions evasion. FINTRAC is an independent agency that reports to the Minister of Finance. FINTRAC works closely with the US financial intelligence unit—Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN)—on illicit finance investigations and when sanctions evasion includes the US financial system. For example, FinCEN and FINTRAC both monitor and share financial information related to Russian sanctions evasion and publish advisories and red flags for the financial sector in coordination with other like-minded partner FIUs.

OSFI: The Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions (OSFI) is a banking regulator that issues directives to financial institutions regarding compliance and instructs banks to freeze assets belonging to sanctioned individuals and entities. FINTRAC also shares financial intelligence with OSFI on sanctions evasion activity under the Proceeds of Crime (Money Laundering) and Terrorist Financing Act (PCMLTFA). OSFI shares intelligence with Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), the national police service of Canada, if there is evidence of sanctions evasion or other financial crimes.

RCMP: Once OSFI notifies RCMP about suspicious activity, RCMP investigates whether the funds are linked to sanctions evasion or other financial crimes. If it finds evidence of a violation of sanctions or criminal activity, RCMP obtains a court order to seize assets under the Criminal Code and the PCMLTFA.

CBSA: Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) is responsible for blocking sanctioned individuals from entering Canada. CBSA also notifies OSFI if sanctioned individuals attempt to move cash or gold through border crossings.

All four agencies work with GAC and with one another on sanctions enforcement. GAC sets sanctions policy, FINTRAC analyzes financial intelligence and shares suspicious activity reports to inform law enforcement investigations, OSFI enforces compliance in banks, RCMP investigates crimes and seizes assets, and CBSA prevents sanctioned individuals from entering Canada and moving assets across borders.

While financial sanctions are part of Canada’s economic statecraft tool kit, Canadian sanctions power does not have the same reach as US sanctions. The preeminence of the US dollar and the omnipresence of major US banks allows the United States to effectively cut off sanctioned individuals and entities from the global financial system. Canadian sanctions are limited to Canadian jurisdiction and affect individuals and entities with financial ties to Canada, but they do not have the same reach as US financial sanctions.

Nevertheless, Canadian authorities have been able to leverage financial sanctions to support the G7 allies in sanctioning Russia. For example, in December 2022, under SEMA, Canadian authorities ordered Citco Bank Canada, a subsidiary of a global hedge fund headquartered in the Cayman Islands, to freeze $26 million owned directly or indirectly by Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich, who has been sanctioned by Canada and other G7 allies. In June 2023, Canadian authorities seized a Russian cargo jet at Toronto’s Pearson Airport pursuant to SEMA.

Figure 4

Export controls

Canada participates in several multilateral export control regimes, including the Wassenaar Arrangement, Nuclear Suppliers Group, Missile Technology Control Regime, and Australia Group. When multilateral regimes fall short in addressing Canada’s foreign policy needs, Canada leverages its autonomous export control list, which is administered by GAC under the Export and Import Permits Act. The Trade Controls Bureau under GAC is responsible for issuing permits and certificates for the items included on the Export Control List (ECL).

Canada Border Services Agency plays a crucial role in the enforcement of export controls. CBSA verifies that shipments match the export permit issued by GAC. It can seize or refuse exports that violate GAC export permits through ports, airports, and land borders. CBSA refers cases to the Royal Canada Mounted Police (CRMP) for prosecution if exporters attempt to bypass regulations.

Separately, FINTRAC monitors financial transactions that might be connected to the exports of controlled goods and technologies. If FINTRAC detects suspicious transactions, it shares intelligence with GAC and other relevant authorities. Canada’s method of leveraging financial intelligence for enforcing export controls is similar to that of the United States, where FinCEN has teamed up with the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security to detect export control evasion through financial transactions.

While in the United States the export controls authority lies within the Commerce Department, Canada’s equivalent, Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada (ISED), does not participate in administering export controls. That responsibility is fully absorbed by GAC.

While Canada has mainly used its export control authority in the context of sensitive technologies, Canadian politiciansand experts have recently been calling on the federal government to impose restrictions on mineral exports to the United States in response to US tariffs. The United States highly depends on Canada’s minerals, including uranium, aluminum, and nickel. Canada was the United States’ top supplier of metals and minerals in 2023 ($46.97 billion in US imports), followed by China ($28.32 billion) and Mexico ($28.18 billion). Notably, President Trump’s recent executive order called Unleashing American Energy instructed the director of the US Geological Survey to add uranium to the critical minerals list. Canada provides 25 percent of uranium to the United States. If Canada were to impose export controls on uranium, the US objective of building a resilient enriched uranium supply chain would be jeopardized.

However, Canada could not impose export controls on the United States without experiencing significant blowback. Export control is a powerful tool. While US tariffs would increase the price of imported Canadian goods by at least 25 percent, Canada’s export controls would completely cut off the flow of certain Canadian goods to the United States. It would be destructive for both economies, so Canada will likely reserve this tool as a last resort and perhaps work on finding alternative export destinations before pulling such a trigger.

Canada employs restrictive economic measures against Russia

In response to Russia’s unjust invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Canada imposed financial sanctions and export controls against Russia in coordination with G7 allies. To date, Global Affairs Canada has added more than 3,000 entities and individuals to its Russia and Belarus sanctions lists under SEMA. Assets of designated individuals have been frozen and Canadian persons are prohibited from dealing with them. Apart from financial sanctions, Canada imposed export controls on technology and import restrictions on Russian oil and gold. Canada also joined the G7 in capping the price of Russian crude oil at $60 per barrel and barred Russian vessels from using Canadian ports.

To enforce financial sanctions against Russia, FINTRAC joined the financial intelligence units (FIUs) of Australia, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States to create an FIU Working Group with the mission of enhancing intelligence sharing on sanctions evasion by Russian entities and individuals. Separately, Canada Border Services Agency’s export controls enforcement efforts included the review of more than 1,500 shipments bound to Russia (as of February 2024), resulting in six seizures and fourteen fines against exporters. CBSA continues to work closely with the Five Eyes intelligence alliance to share information about export control evasion.

To disrupt the operation of Russia’s shadow fleet, Canada proposed the creation of a task force to tackle the shadow fleet in March 2025. Such a task force could be useful in addressing the various environmental problems and enforcement challenges the shadow fleet has created for the sanctioning coalition. However, the United States vetoed Canada’s proposal.

Figure 5

Tariffs

Canada’s approach to tariffs is governed primarily by the Customs Act, which outlines the procedures for assessing and collecting tariffs on imported goods, as well as the Customs Tariff legislation that sets the duty rates for specific imports (generally based on the “Harmonized System,” an internationally standardized system for classifying traded products). The Canada Border Services Agency is responsible for administering these tariffs. Additionally, the Special Import Measures Act enables Canada to protect industries from harm caused by unfair trade practices like dumping or subsidizing of imported goods, with the Canadian International Trade Tribunal determining injury and the CBSA imposing necessary duties. The minister of finance, in consultation with the minister of foreign affairs, plays a key role in proposing tariff changes or retaliatory tariffs, ensuring Canada’s trade policies align with its broader economic and diplomatic objectives.

Canada has frequently aligned with its allies on tariff issues, as demonstrated in 2024 when, following the US and EU tariffs, it imposed a 100 percent tariff on Chinese electric vehicles to protect domestic industries. However, Canada has also been proactive in responding to US tariffs, employing a combination of diplomatic negotiations, retaliatory tariffs, and reliance on dispute resolution mechanisms such as the World Trade Organization and USMCA. In the past Canada was also quick to align itself with allies such as the EU and Mexico, seeking a coordinated international response, as was the case in 2018 when the United States imposed a broad tariff on steel and aluminum.

Similar to the United States, Canada offers remission allowances to help businesses adjust to tariffs by granting relief under specific circumstances, such as the inability to source goods from nontariffed countries or preexisting contractual obligations. The Department of Finance regularly seeks input from stakeholders before introducing new tariffs. In 2024, a thirty-day consultation was launched about possible tariffs on Chinese batteries, battery parts, semiconductors, critical minerals, metals, and solar panels, though it has yet to result in any new tariffs.

Canada’s primary weakness regarding tariffs is its lack of trade diversification. The United States accounts for half of Canada’s imports and 76 percent of its exports. This dependency severely limits Canada’s ability to impose tariffs on the United States without facing significant economic repercussions. Canada’s relatively limited economic leverage on the global stage also complicates efforts to coordinate multilateral tariff responses or to negotiate favorable trade agreements. Furthermore, Canada’s lengthy public consultations and regulatory processes for implementing tariffs hinder its ability to leverage tariffs as a swift response to changing geopolitical or economic circumstances.

Figure 6

Investment screening

Canada’s investment screening is governed by the Investment Canada Act (ICA), which ensures that foreign investments do not harm national security while promoting economic prosperity. The ICA includes net benefit reviews for large investments and national security reviews for any foreign investments which pose potential security risks, such as foreign control over critical sectors like technology or infrastructure.

The review process is administered by ISED, with the minister of innovation, science, and industry overseeing the reviews in consultation with Public Safety Canada. For national security concerns, multiple agencies assess potential risks, and the Governor-in-Council (GIC) has the authority to block investments or demand divestitures.

Criticism of the ICA includes lack of transparency and consistency, particularly in national security reviews, where decisions may be influenced by political or diplomatic considerations. To better mitigate risks to security, critical infrastructure, and the transfer of sensitive technologies, experts have argued that the ICA should more effectively target malicious foreign investments by incorporating into the review process the perspectives of Canadian companies on emerging national security threats. In response to these concerns, Bill C-34 introduced key updates in 2024, including preclosing filing requirements for sensitive sectors, the possibility of interim conditions during national security reviews, broader scope covering state-owned enterprises and asset sales, consideration for intellectual property and personal data protection, and increased penalties for noncompliance. In March 2025, further amendments were made to the ICA, expanding its scope to review “opportunistic or predatory” foreign investments. These changes were introduced in response to the United States’ imposition of blanket tariffs on Canadian goods.

Figure 7

Positive economic statecraft

Apart from coercive/protective tools, Canada maintains positive economic statecraft (PES) tools such as development assistance to build economic alliances beyond North America. For example, Canada is one of the largest providers of international development assistance to African countries. After Ukraine, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Tanzania, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo were the top recipients of Canada’s international assistance. Canada’s PES tools lay the ground for the federal governments to have productive cooperation when needs arise. Canadian authorities should leverage PES tools to enhance the country’s international standing and increase economic connectivity with other regions of the world. This is especially important amid the US pause on nearly all US foreign assistance. Canada could step up to help fill the vacuum in the developing world created by the Trump administration’s radical departure from a long-standing US role in foreign aid.

Canadian authorities have already taken steps in this direction. On March 9, Canadian Minister of International Development Ahmed Hussen announced that Canada would be providing $272.1 million for foreign aid projects in Bangladesh and the Indo-Pacific region. The projects will focus on climate adaptation, empowering women in the nursing sector, advancing decent work and inclusive education and training. Earlier, on March 6, Global Affairs Canada launched its first Global Africa Strategy with the goal of deepening trade and investment relations with Africa, partnering on peace and security challenges, and advancing shared priorities on the international stage including climate change. Through this partnership, Canada plans to strengthen economic and national security by enhancing supply chain resilience and maintaining corridors for critical goods.

Conclusion

Canada’s federal government maintains a range of economic statecraft tools and authorities to address economic and national security threats. While regional factionalism and provincial equities can hinder the federal government’s ability to leverage the full force of Canada’s economic power, threats to Canada’s economic security, including tariffs from the United States, may prove to further unite and align the provinces. The federal government and provincial premiers should work together to meet this challenging moment, consolidating Canada’s sources of economic power and moving forward with a cohesive economic statecraft strategy to protect the country’s national security and economic security interests.

Canada’s leadership and engagement in international fora including the G7, NATO, Wassenaar Agreement, among others, as well as its bilateral relationships, make it well-placed to coordinate and collaborate with Western partners on economic statecraft. Information sharing, joint investigations, multilateral sanctions, and multilateral development and investment can extend the reach of Canada’s economic power while strengthening Western efforts to leverage economic statecraft to advance global security objectives and ensure the integrity of the global financial system. Canada also has a solid foundation for building economic partnerships beyond the West through development assistance and other positive economic statecraft tools.

About the authors

Staff

Kimberly Donovan

Economic Statecraft Initiative GeoEconomics Center

Digital Currencies Economic Sanctions

Staff

Maia Nikoladze

Associate Director, Economic Statecraft Initiative

Economic Statecraft Initiative GeoEconomics Center

Digital Currencies Eastern Europe

Staff

Lize de Kruijf

Program Assistant, Economic Statecraft Initiative

Economic Statecraft Initiative GeoEconomics Center

Dutch Economic Sanctions

The authors would like to thank Nazima Tursun, a young global professional at the Atlantic Council’s Economic Statecraft Initiative, for research support.

The report is part of a year-long series on economic statecraft across the G7 and China supported in part by a grant from MITRE.

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Housed within the GeoEconomics Center, the Economic Statecraft Initiative (ESI) publishes leading-edge research and analysis on sanctions and the use of economic power to achieve foreign policy objectives and protect national security interests.

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Inside Defense reports on the Commission on Software-Defined Warfare final report

Atlantic Council — Wed, 26 Mar 2025 20:30:00 +0000

On March 26, Theresa Maher of Inside Defense published an article highlighting the key recommendations from the final report of Forward Defense’s Commission on Software-Defined Warfare. Entitled “Think tankers urge DOD to keep software procurement simple,” the article underscores the Commission’s call for a commercial-first mindset, improved data collection and sharing, and stronger collaboration between the Department of Defense (DoD) and congressional appropriation staffers.

With China outproducing the United States in military hardware, software has become essential to maintaining a competitive edge. Maher highlights the “Davidson Window,” the prediction that China may take military action against Taiwan by 2027, underscoring the urgency behind the Commission’s near-term recommendations. The report outlines how the Pentagon can leverage software practices to enhance and strengthen US defense strategies.

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Cartwright and Kandasamy in COTS Journal on the Commission on Software-Defined Warfare

Atlantic Council — Wed, 26 Mar 2025 20:00:00 +0000

On March 26, COTS Journal published an article by Gen James “Hoss” Cartwright, USMC (ret.) and Jags Kandasamy, Commissioners on Forward Defense’s Commission on Software-Defined Warfare, highlighting key recommendations from the Commission’s final report. The piece explores enterprise software and operational software, outlining a strategic approach to their procurement and use. The authors urge the Department of Defense to adopt both software systems to enhance warfighter protection, ensure effective equipping, and improve battlefield safety.

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DefenseNews reports on Commission on Software-Defined Warfare final report

Atlantic Council — Wed, 26 Mar 2025 20:00:00 +0000

On March 26, Courtney Albon of DefenseNews published an article analyzing the defense industry’s response to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s recent directive on software acquisition, highlighting Forward Defense‘s Commission on Software-Defined Warfare report as a key framework for understanding the broader reforms required. The piece, “In the wake of Hegseth’s software memo, experts eye further change,” details how military officials and industry executives have expressed “a mix of optimism and angst” about the mandate while calling for more comprehensive reforms.

The article underscores how the commission’s report identified workforce expertise as a critical need for the Pentagon and details its recommendation that Department of Defense (DoD) develop an “extensive, connected, layered and modular software-centric training program” to establish a foundational understanding of commercial best practices. The DefenseNews piece directly quotes from the commission’s findings, noting “While the DoD has taken steps to upskill its existing workforce for the digital age, a widely acknowledged software proficiency shortfall remains.”

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Exclusive on Atlantic Council Commission on Software-Defined Warfare final report published in Axios

Atlantic Council — Wed, 26 Mar 2025 14:00:00 +0000

On March 26, Colin Demarest, future of defense reporter at Axios, published an exclusive article on the Pentagon’s software-hardware balance and featured Forward Defense‘s Commision on Software-Defined Warfare report. The article, “Exclusive: The Pentagon’s software-hardware tug of war,” highlights the commission’s conclusions on the era of “software-defined warfare” and the urgent need for the US military to enhance its software capabilities to compete with China.

The piece examines key findings from the Atlantic Council report, which was the product of eighteen months of work and over seventy interviews. According to the article, the commission concluded that the US military is still anchored to an acquisition system “ill-suited to the rapid tempo of modern technological innovation,” putting the country “at significant risk.” The report emphasizes the Department of Defense’s lack of “sufficient software expertise” and recommends establishing a software cadre by recruiting dozens of specialists to be deployed across various defense departments.

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Ukraine’s growing military strength is an underrated factor in peace talks

Serhii Kuzan — Tue, 25 Mar 2025 21:06:03 +0000

Can Ukraine survive without US military aid? Could Kyiv’s European partners potentially fill the gap in weapons deliveries? Policymakers, analysts, and commentators around the world have been wrestling with these questions in recent weeks as they come to terms with US President Donald Trump’s foreign policy pivot away from Europe and his administration’s overtures toward Russia.

While the urgency and importance of this debate cannot be overstated, there has been a tendency to overlook Ukraine’s own agency and the country’s ability to defend itself. It is true that the Ukrainian war effort since 2022 has relied heavily on Western support, but Ukraine’s military has also evolved dramatically over the past three years to become by far Europe’s biggest and most effective fighting force.

Ukraine currently has approximately one million people in arms defending the country against Russia’s invasion. This makes the Ukrainian Armed Forces more than four times larger than Europe’s next biggest military. Ukraine’s troops are also battle-hardened and have unmatched knowledge of the twenty-first century battlefield. Indeed, in many areas, they are now setting the standards for others to follow.

Crucially, Ukraine’s army is backed by a highly innovative and rapidly expanding domestic military-industrial complex that is harnessing the excellence of Ukraine’s prewar tech sector and reviving long neglected Soviet era capabilities. Any discussion on the likely future course of the war against Russia and the terms of any peace deal must therefore take into account the fact that Ukraine is a now major military power in its own right.

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For the past year, international media coverage of Russia’s invasion has tended to create the impression that Putin’s army is slowly but surely grinding forward toward a costly but inevitable victory. The reality is less straightforward.

Russian troops reclaimed the battlefield initiative in early 2024 and have been advancing fairly steadily ever since, but they have only achieved relatively modest territorial gains while suffering record casualties. Analysts estimate that at the current pace, it would take Russia almost a century to complete the conquest of Ukraine.

Viewed from a broader perspective encompassing the entire full-scale invasion, Ukraine’s military performance becomes even more impressive. Since spring 2022, The Ukrainian Armed Forces have succeeded in liberating around half of all the territory seized by the Russian army, and have won a series of key battles in the Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Kherson regions. Russia has been unable to capture and hold a single Ukrainian regional capital, and is still struggling to force Ukrainian troops out of Russia itself following Kyiv’s bold August 2024 cross-border incursion into the Kursk region.

Far beyond the battlefield, Ukraine has also overachieved. In the Black Sea, Ukrainian marine drones have revolutionized naval warfare and forced Putin to withdraw his fleet from Russian-occupied Crimea to the relative safety of Russian ports. Deep inside Russia, long-range Ukrainian drones strike at military assets, logistical hubs, and energy infrastructure with growing frequency.

Ukraine’s resilience owes much to the international military assistance the country has received. However, this support has often been subject to delays and has frequently fallen victim to political considerations that have cost Ukraine dearly. In order to minimize these vulnerabilities, the Ukrainian authorities have prioritized the development of the country’s domestic defense industry.

The results have been striking. In 2025, the overall capacity of Ukraine’s defense industry is expected to reach a new high of $35 billion, up from just $1 billion at the onset of Russia’s full-scale invasion. While this capacity is not yet being fully utilized due to defense budget limitations, Ukraine now produces around one-third of all weapons, ammunition, and equipment used by the country’s armed forces. In critical areas such as drone production, the figure is now close to one hundred percent.

Meanwhile, Kyiv is encouraging international partners to invest in Ukrainian defense sector companies and finance weapons production in Ukraine. A number of countries have already responded by committing large sums and promoting joint projects within the Ukrainian defense industry. This trend is expected to gain pace during 2025 as the US pivot away from Europe fuels increased defense spending across the continent.

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Drones, defense, and diplomacy: Negotiations and the battlefield in Ukraine

Conflict Defense Technologies Europe & Eurasia Politics & Diplomacy

Ukraine’s biggest defense industry success has been the development of the domestic drone manufacturing sector. On the eve of the full-scale invasion, the country boasted only a handful of drone producers. The sector has now mushroomed to include over 200 businesses producing millions of drones annually, with output expected to treble during the current year. In order to harness this rapidly growing strike potential and maximize battlefield impact, Ukraine last year established a special branch of the armed forces dedicated to drone warfare.

Ukraine’s emergence as a drone warfare superpower owes much to the country’s strong tech traditions and entrepreneurial spirit. Since 2022, Ukrainian drone developers have proved highly innovative and are now recognized internationally as world leaders in military drone technologies. “Foreign models are like Toyotas now, while Ukrainian drones are Mercedes. Ours are just leagues ahead,” one Ukrainian commander told Ukrainska Pravda recently.

Ukraine now has a formidable arsenal of drones for use on the battlefield, at sea, and for long-range attacks against targets across Russia. The country also has a growing collection of hybrid missile-drones and missiles. President Zelenskyy recently confirmed that Ukraine had carried out an attack with the domestically produced Long Neptune cruise missile for the first time, underlining the country’s growing potential to strike back at Russia. Further innovations are in the pipeline, with domestic missile production expected to increase in the coming months if Kyiv is able to secure the necessary additional funding.

The Ukrainian military still faces a range of major challenges. The biggest issue remains manpower shortages. So far, Kyiv has sought to address mobilization problems by updating training and offering recruits the opportunity to choose the unit they will serve in, but shortfalls persist. A new initiative aimed at potential recruits between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five was launched in February 2025, featuring attractive enlistment packages and one-year service contracts.

There is also no escaping the fact that Ukraine remains dependent on Western support in order to maintain the country’s war effort. While officials in Kyiv have spoken of increasing the share of domestically produced war materials to fifty percent, Ukraine cannot realistically expect to match Russia’s overwhelming advantages in manpower, firepower, industrial capacity, and financing without continued assistance from the West.

Despite these limitations, Ukraine’s growing military strength must be taken into consideration during coming negotiations over a potential compromise peace deal with Russia. While nobody in Kyiv would relish the grim prospect of fighting on without Western assistance, the country is far from defenseless and will not accept a bad peace that places Ukrainian statehood in jeopardy.

Russia made the mistake of underestimating Ukraine in 2022, and has since paid a terrible price. Three years on, there can be little doubt that the Ukrainian army is now the most powerful fighting force in Europe. This military reality will help shape the contours of any future peace deal. It should also guarantee Ukraine’s place at the heart of Europe’s changing security system as the continent adjusts to the new geopolitical realities of an isolationist United States and an expansionist Russia.

Serhii Kuzan is Chairman of the Ukrainian Security and Cooperation Center (USCC). He formerly served as an adviser to the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense (2022-2023) and advisor to the Secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council (2014).

Starlink’s India launch is a crash course on New Delhi’s approach to tech sovereignty

Trisha Ray — Tue, 25 Mar 2025 18:41:35 +0000

Earlier this month, SpaceX and India’s largest telecommunications company, Reliance’s Jio Platforms, announced a partnership to deploy Starlink’s services in India. In a now-deleted post on social media, Ashwini Vaishnaw, the Indian minister of railways, information and broadcasting, and electronics and information technology, welcomed Starlink to India, noting its usefulness for railway projects. The announcement comes less than a month after Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Washington, DC, where he met US President Donald Trump and his billionaire adviser Elon Musk, who is also the head of SpaceX.

Longtime observers of India’s telecommunications market may have been surprised by this announcement. Telecoms was a state monopoly until the 1990s. Even today, after waves of liberalization and relaxation of foreign direct investment requirements, it remains one of the most heavily regulated sectors in the country. This market is also notoriously cut-throat, with the past ten year years seeing intensifying competition over India’s booming customer base—one of the largest and fastest growing in the world—between its two largest players, Reliance Jio and Airtel.

But Starlink’s entry into India, albeit on New Delhi’s terms, should not be a surprise. It is an example of India’s hybrid approach to tech sovereignty, which favors co-development and diversification, both in its private and bilateral partnerships.

India’s connectivity challenge

With its drive to bring its billion-plus population online, India has ample reasons to welcome Starlink. India is the world’s second-largest internet-connected population, just behind China, with around 955 million broadband users as of December 2024. Of these users, 95 percent are mobile broadband subscribers. This means that India’s digital economy is “mobile-first,” with substantial gaps in wired broadband, especially in rural areas. In other words, as one moves away from major urban centers, the internet infrastructure for industrial applications remains underdeveloped. The reliability of wireless connections is patchy at best, and fixed broadband speeds are dismally low.

BharatNet (BBNL), an initiative housed under the public sector telecommunications company BSNL, seeks to bridge the rural connectivity gap by laying a National Optical Fiber Network (NOFN) connecting 625,000 villages. As of December 2024, 692,000 kilometers of optical fiber cable has been laid as part of this undertaking. NOFN is, however, several years behind schedule, having missed its 2014, 2015, 2019, 2023, and 2025 deadlines. The project has been held up by launch delays, issues over right-of-way rules, complex terrain, pandemic-related disruptions, and the deterioration of some of the already laid cable.

The tiger enters orbit

Enter satellite internet. BBNL has run pilot tests for satellite services, with the end goal of connecting seven thousand gram panchayats. (Gram panchayats are village-level administrative units, governing one or more villages.) Private-sector players such as Airtel, in partnership with French satellite operator Eutelsat, have also announced commercial satellite services in India. The investment required for satellite internet is front-loaded and entails funding for satellite manufacturing, launch, and ground support. Amazon, for instance, expects to spend $7.4 billion on satellite launch and related services for its subsidiary, Kuiper Systems, LLC. IRIS, the European Union’s proposed 290 satellite constellations, has cost more than eleven billion dollars.

Once the supporting infrastructure is operational, the investment needed to set up ground infrastructure to receive satellite internet, whether as an individual consumer or an enterprise, is less intensive: in Starlink’s case, these are “gateways” that serve as a relay point for several terminals, briefcase-sized units that can be set up anywhere with a clear view of the sky. This architecture also enables remote and rural areas without optical fiber cable to receive internet. Starlink claims that its customers can expect download speeds of up to one hundred megabits per second. For context, the median fixed-broadband speed in the country stands at sixty-four megabits per second as of February of this year, which is well below the global average of ninety-eight megabits per second.

India has 108 satellites in orbit, the seventh-most of any country in the world according to satellite tracking service N2YO. Its satellite and launch infrastructure are partly developed indigenously by the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) and partly supported by partners in countries such as the United States and France. In October 2022, for instance, ISRO launched thirty-six OneWeb satellites. In November 2024, ISRO launched its homegrown satellite GSAT-N2, for the first time via SpaceX, to support satellite internet services with a throughput of forty-eight gigabits per second.

The country’s two largest private telecommunications companies, Reliance Jio and Airtel, have both entered into partnerships with Starlink, despite their initial opposition to what they perceived as unfair competition from the US-based space company.

Playing on an uneven field

As with all its tech engagements, India leans into strategic autonomy in its bid to build out satellite internet connectivity for its population of nearly 1.5 billion. “Autonomy” in the Indian context means the ability to act in its national interest with minimal external pressure, while maximizing the utility of its individual foreign partnerships. Given that approach, the Starlink partnership may at first seem surprising. However, taken in conjunction with the breadth of indigenous initiatives and partnerships in the satellite internet space, what emerges is a picture of pragmatism, where access alone is not the deciding factor. Diversification and competition, with the government laying the groundwork where gaps exist, have driven India’s progress on increasing internet access and speed for its citizens.

In 2016, for instance, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) opted to effectively ban Facebook’s Free Basics, which would have offered limited access to the internet for free, on the grounds that it would create an uneven playing field and harm net neutrality. Given Starlink’s overwhelming dominance in the satellite internet space, TRAI is limiting its license to five years as opposed to the twenty-year permit Musk had reportedly asked for. India’s two largest telecommunications companies have supported TRAI’s proposal. But they have also diversified their partnerships with alternative suppliers, such as France’s Eutelsat and Luxembourg’s SES.

Some decision makers in government and leaders in India’s private sector are likely to view SpaceX’s growing role as a geopolitical force with skepticism. For instance, Starlink was vital in keeping Ukraine online after Russia invaded the country, but it has become a political bargaining chip under the current US administration. Similarly, SpaceX has reportedly pressured its Taiwanese suppliers to reshore their operations. That’s why India’s partnership with Starlink reads as a hedge rather than a whole-hearted endorsement. Delhi is acknowledging the company’s dominance without granting it full control of India’s satellite internet market.

By maintaining a diverse portfolio of partnerships and regulatory safeguards, India is ensuring that its connectivity strategy remains both sovereign and adaptable. As satellite internet becomes an increasingly contested domain, India’s pragmatism may serve as a model for other nations navigating the intersection of technology, geopolitics, and economic self-reliance. India’s approach to satellite internet reflects a careful balancing act—one that prioritizes resilience over reliance and competition over convenience.

Trisha Ray is an associate director and resident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s GeoTech Center.

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Rodriguez, Shanahan, and Sweatt cut into the stakes and opportunities of software-defined warfare on All Quiet on the Second Front podcast

Atlantic Council — Mon, 24 Mar 2025 18:00:00 +0000

On March 24, Stephen Rodriguez, senior advisor at Forward Defense and director of FD’s Commission on Software-Defined Warfare, was a featured guest alongside Lt Gen Jack Shanahan, a commissioner on the Commission on Software-Defined Warfare, on the podcast All Quiet on the Second Front, hosted by Tyler Sweatt, a commissioner on the Commission on Software-Defined Warfare. This episode, entitled “Software Defined Warfare with Lt. Gen. Jack Shanahan and Stephen Rodriguez,” shed light on the urgency of developing innovative strategies that will best prepare the DoD to navigate an increasingly software-driven defense landscape.

Senior Fellow, Global Energy Center

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Four critical questions (and expert answers) about Trump’s new critical minerals executive order

Alexis Harmon, Reed Blakemore — Fri, 21 Mar 2025 23:07:11 +0000

Rock paper signed. Invoking emergency powers on Thursday, US President Donald Trump signed an executive order intended to increase critical mineral production. The White House noted that 70 percent of US imports of rare earths come from China, and the United States must secure more sources. But in the measures it announces to increase supplies, Trump’s order goes beyond these elements and compounds to include copper, uranium, potash, gold, and potentially even coal as critical. So, what does this order mean for mineral supply chains? Two of our top experts from the Atlantic Council Global Energy Center, Alexis Harmon and Reed Blakemore, dig into the details.

1. Why is the Trump administration focused on critical minerals?

Securing US critical mineral supply chains has been a priority for the Trump administration since day one. These roughly fifty minerals serve as the building blocks of many modern technologies—think fighter jets, semiconductors, electric vehicle batteries, and cell phones. With the United States deeply reliant on foreign sources for these crucial inputs, the administration sees boosting US mineral production as a victory on two fronts: It reduces national security risks tied to dependence on China, and it promotes job creation and economic prosperity by revitalizing domestic mining and processing industries.

2. How does the executive order approach securing US critical mineral supply chains?

Trump’s new executive order, “Immediate Measures to Increase American Mineral Production,” uses emergency powers to streamline permitting and ramp up investment through several important mechanisms.

Rapid permitting: Opening up new mines and processing facilities can take decades, and arduous permitting processes are often a major hurdle. Projects sometimes spend a decade languishing in permitting processes. In this order, agencies have been given just ten days to compile a list of pending mineral production projects that could be immediately approved, plus fifteen days to nominate potential candidates for FAST-41 status, which fast-tracks approvals. Although this would be extremely effective in speeding up project timelines, critics warn of serious environmental consequences.

Improved financing: The White House is using a variety of tools here, but most important are the Defense Production Act (DPA) and the International Development Finance Corporation (DFC). The DPA is a powerful industrial-policy tool, traditionally meant to direct production according to defense needs in wartime. By giving the DPA Section 303 authority to the Department of Defense and DFC, the government has the power to directly fund domestic mining and processing projects through subsidies, loans, loan guarantees, and supply contracts. The order also calls for all agencies with loan authorities to speed up approval processes, and it provides interesting new mechanisms for offtake support through the US Export-Import Bank and coordinated bidding processes.

Other things of note: The order also calls for federal lands to prioritize mining operations over all other activity, as well as the Small Business Administration to provide support to small businesses engaged in mineral production. It also calls for increased technical assistance to mining companies (although it’s unclear that the United States has the expertise needed) and improvements to waste management.

3. What’s noteworthy about this approach?

Several additional elements of the order are important to note.

Minerals mentioned: The new order explicitly calls uranium, copper, potash, and gold critical minerals, plus it gives the National Energy Dominance Council the authority to deem any material as a qualifying mineral affected by the order. A subsequent White House fact sheet mentions coal. Although critical mineral designations vary from agency to agency, these materials have not traditionally made the list. How investments will unfold remains to be seen, but the order unleashing financing and smoothing the regulatory path for coal production and gold mining speaks to how a broad definition of what makes a mineral “critical” will be a significant part of mining policy moving forward.

Domestic focus: The order is squarely focused on boosting US production and barely mentions projects abroad. Starting with bolstering US mining is on brand for the Trump administration and a necessary part of a broad-based approach to building a resilient supply chain. US mining has largely floundered due to price volatility and a lack of incentives for long-term investment. While policy is a critical tool to unlock domestic resources, the United States is not abundant in a considerable portion of the critical minerals needed for many important technologies, such as semiconductors, meaning international cooperation will still be integral to securing US critical mineral supply chains. The brief language saying that financing could be used for projects abroad hints that the administration knows this, even if it has not identified it as a major priority in the order.

DFC pivot: Centering the DFC as a main domestic investment tool is a remarkable flexing of executive power. The DFC was created to foster economic development in emerging markets by providing financing and technical support to foreign projects that serve US strategic interests—not finance domestic projects. However, its unique loan and investment authorities inarguably make it a clever candidate for quickly creating a domestic investment body that can boost mining in the United States. With DFC reauthorization on the horizon in October 2025, Congress will be forced to choose whether to codify this huge shift and give the DFC real teeth as a strategic investment tool both at home and abroad. Should the DFC be increasingly positioned as a tool to manage national wealth (note that the order calls to create a mineral production fund for the DFC to use) and supercharged with DPA authority, it may increasingly lay the groundwork for a possible full-fledged sovereign wealth fund.

Offtake support: Providing financing is important, but investment will only flow if companies are confident about the sustainability of their operations. Although the language is vague, the order does float possible offtake agreements at home and abroad. Such offtake agreements could make producers more willing to invest by establishing long-term contracts between a buyer and a seller that give producers confidence that their product will have a steady market at a fair price.

4. Will it be effective in achieving the administration’s goals?

The order is likely the first step of many. However, its success depends on whether investments—and mines and processing facilities—actually materialize. Many fear that in such an uncertain pricing environment, concessional financing won’t be enough to draw out broad private sector interest. Others highlight the United States’ inability to secure supply chains independently, since no authorities are powerful enough to change where mineral deposits are located.

Ultimately, robust supply chain diplomacy and close partnerships with allies and partners will be critical to US mineral security. Future executive orders must address this challenge, likely by also relying heavily on the DFC and other levers for commercial diplomacy to get strategic investments flowing. Notably, this isn’t the first time that a US administration has used DPA authority to try to boost critical mineral production in recent years. Trump tried it in 2020 to reduce dependence on Chinese rare earths, and the Biden administration followed suit in 2022 for electric vehicle minerals. Neither effort was particularly effective, though it’s worth noting that the long timelines for setting up mines and processing facilities make it hard to assess success too quickly. This points to a major limit to executive power here: Given the relatively short-term nature of four-year presidencies, companies remain hesitant to make multi-decade investments with uncertain returns. Just last week, Trump’s revocation of Biden-era DPA designations on green energy technology such as solar panels highlighted the instability of these support systems.

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To win the AI race, the US needs an all-of-the-above energy strategy

Joseph Webster — Fri, 21 Mar 2025 15:11:58 +0000

The United States faces a “Sputnik moment.” Chinese firm DeepSeek claims its artificial intelligence (AI) model has achieved near-parity with US models in terms of functionality—at lower cost and energy use. While many AI analysts are skeptical of some portions of DeepSeek’s claims, particularly surrounding cost nuances, or even its ability to lower energy consumption, virtually all acknowledge that DeepSeek has made a serious technical achievement. DeepSeek’s technical breakthrough will intensify the US-China AI race, with significant economic and military stakes. While acknowledging uncertain AI-related energy demand, the United States must build substantial amounts of new electricity generation and transmission to win the AI competition with China.

To ensure US AI leadership, the United States must harness all forms of energy–while also promoting energy efficiency—allow a level playing field, and remove red tape constraining the buildout of critical enablers, especially transmission lines and grid enhancing technologies. A “some of the above” energy approach could force the United States to compromise on not only AI leadership, but also affordable electricity and other economic priorities.

The competition with China in artificial intelligence may be the defining national security challenge of our time. While AI’s exact electricity needs remain uncertain, substantial power infrastructure expansion and efficiency improvements are needed. By building new generation capacity, including advanced energy technologies, enhancing transmission, and optimizing power consumption, the United States can maintain its competitive edge in AI development. If the United States adopts a “some of the above” approach to energy, however, it will be waging the century’s most important technological fight with China with one hand tied behind its back.

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Putin is ruthlessly erasing Ukrainian identity in Russian-occupied Ukraine

Peter Dickinson — Thu, 20 Mar 2025 21:27:42 +0000

Russian President Vladimir Putin has ordered Ukrainians living under Russian occupation to “legalize” their status by September 10 or face deportation. In other words, those who have not yet done so must apply for Russian passports or risk being expelled from their homes as foreigners. This March 20 presidential decree is the latest step in a campaign to pressure Ukrainians into accepting Russian citizenship as the Kremlin seeks to strengthen its grip over areas of Ukraine currently under Russian control.

Kremlin officials say they have distributed around 3.5 million Russian passports in Russian-occupied regions of Ukraine since the onset of the full-scale invasion just over three years ago. Residents are reportedly being forced to apply for Russian passports in order to access basic services such as healthcare and state pensions, while those without Russian documentation face the possibility of harassment and detention.

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The enforced adoption of Russian citizenship is just one of the many tools being employed by the Kremlin to systematically erase all traces of Ukrainian statehood and national identity throughout Russian-occupied Ukraine. Wherever Russian troops advance, local populations are subjected to mass arrests designed to root out any potential dissenters. Those targeted typically include elected officials, military veterans, religious leaders, civil society activists, teachers, journalists, and patriots. Thousands have been abducted in this manner since 2022 and remain unaccounted for, with many thought to be languishing in a network of prisons in Russian-occupied Ukraine and Russia itself.

Those who remain are subjected to terror tactics in conditions that Britain’s The Economist has described as a “totalitarian hell.” All public symbols of Ukrainian statehood and cultural identity are being systematically dismantled. The Ukrainian language is suppressed, while any Christian denominations other than the Russian Orthodox Church face persecution or worse.

Moscow’s efforts to erase Ukrainian identity begin in the classroom. In schools throughout the occupied regions, Ukrainian children are being taught a new Kremlin-approved curriculum that praises Russian imperialism and glorifies the ongoing invasion of Ukraine while demonizing the entire concept of a separate and independent Ukrainian state. Any parents who dare to resist risk losing custody of their children.

The Kremlin is also accused of kidnapping tens of thousands of Ukrainian children from occupied regions and deporting them to Russia, where they are subjected to ideological indoctrination to rob them of their Ukrainian roots and impose an imperial Russian identity. In March 2023, the International Criminal Court in The Hague issued an arrest warrant for Putin due his personal involvement in these mass abductions of Ukrainian children.

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The actions of the Russian occupation authorities are entirely in line with the vicious anti-Ukrainian rhetoric coming from Putin himself and other officials in Moscow. Putin has long insisted that Ukrainians are actually Russians (“one people”). Six months prior to the full-scale invasion, he took the highly unusual step of publishing a lengthy history essay that read like a declaration of war against Ukrainian statehood.

As Russian troops prepared to invade in February 2022, Putin sought to justify this act of international aggression by describing Ukraine as “an inalienable part of our own history, culture, and spiritual space.” He has since compared his invasion to the eighteenth century imperial conquests of Russian Czar Peter the Great, and has declared occupied Ukrainian territory to be “Russian forever.”

The Russian establishment has enthusiastically followed Putin’s lead. Former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev has stated that “the existence of Ukraine is mortally dangerous for Ukrainians,” while top Putin aide Nikolai Patrushev recently suggested Ukraine may soon “cease to exist.” Meanwhile, poisonous anti-Ukrainian language has become so commonplace in the Kremlin-controlled Russian media that UN investigators believe it may constitute “incitement to genocide.”

This week’s presidential decree threatening to deport Ukrainians from their own homes is the latest reminder that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is no mere border dispute or attempt to address legitimate security concerns. It is a colonial war of the most brutal kind that aims to destroy Ukraine as a state and as a nation. In the heart of Europe and before the watching world, Putin is openly pursuing policies that almost certainly meet the definition of ethnic cleansing and may qualify as genocide.

The grim reality of Russia’s invasion should weigh heavily on the US officials who are currently charged with drawing lines on maps and attempting to create a realistic framework for a possible ceasefire agreement between Russia and Ukraine. While diplomatic compromises and temporary territorial concessions are now clearly inevitable, any future peace deal must also take into account the fate of the millions of Ukrainians who are likely to be left under Russian occupation.

Peter Dickinson is editor of the Atlantic Council’s UkraineAlert service.

Silencing Voice of America will only strengthen autocrats around the world

Mercedes Sapuppo — Thu, 20 Mar 2025 18:53:47 +0000

United States President Donald Trump has moved to shut down a series of prominent US-funded international media outlets including Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty as he continues efforts to cut government spending and reshape US foreign policy. In a March 15 statement, the White House said the decision “will ensure that taxpayers are no longer on the hook for radical propaganda.”

Critics fear the move will strengthen the position of authoritarian regimes around the world while leaving millions of people in closed societies without access to independent information. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty CEO Steve Capus called the step “a massive gift to America’s enemies.” He warned that the shutdown would make the United States weaker and would be celebrated by “the Iranian Ayatollahs, Chinese communist leaders, and autocrats in Moscow and Minsk.”

Russian opposition figure Vladimir Kara-Murza was one of numerous activists from the front lines of the fight against resurgent authoritarianism to voice their alarm over the closures. For many people living in authoritarian societies, outlets like Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty have provided an objective and trustworthy alternative to what is often a heavily censored domestic information space. Kara-Murza suggested the demise of these outlets would be toasted in Moscow and beyond. “One more champagne bottle opened in the Kremlin,” he quipped.

As expected, the shutdown of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Voice of America was enthusiastically welcomed on prime time Russian state TV. Margarita Simonyan, who heads Russia’s flagship international media platform RT and state-owned media group Rossiya Segodnya, called the news an “awesome decision by Trump.” Meanwhile, fellow Kremlin propagandist Vladimir Solovyov took time out from fantasizing about a nuclear attack on Britain to mock the more than one thousand journalists now facing an uncertain future. “You are nasty, lying, deplorable traitors to the motherland. Go and die in a ditch,” he commented.

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For decades, authoritarian regimes ranging from Nazi Germany to Communist China have griped against the influence of US-funded independent media outlets, and have adopted various measures to try and block them. Voice of America was first set up in 1942 at the height of World War II, while Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty was established in 1950 during the early years of the Cold War to provide uncensored information to people living behind the Iron Curtain.

Initially focused on radio broadcasts, these outlets and their numerous affiliates have evolved over time to become multimedia platforms reaching hundreds of millions of people every week. This has never been a purely altruistic endeavor; advocates maintain that providing access to objective information abroad strengthens the US position internationally.

Until their dramatic recent shutdown, Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and many other regional pro-democracy platforms such as Radio Free Asia were all overseen by the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM). While often the subject of debate in the United States due to allegations of political bias and doubts over their continued effectiveness, recent studies have indicated that they remained widely recognized by international audiences as important sources of unfiltered information.

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Despite being funded by the US government, the network adhered to a code of journalistic integrity and objectivity similar to the charters governing the work of other state-funded media such as the BBC. This independence from governmental editorial oversight had on occasion led to issues with United States officials. Some within the Trump White House attempted to justify the decision to cut funding by claiming that these state-funded broadcasters had become overly politicized and were no longer representative of the values the new administration wished to project.

The international impact of the USAGM stable of media outlets is perhaps most immediately apparent in the number of journalists jailed or otherwise targeted by authoritarian regimes for their professional activities. At present, ten journalists and staff members from USAGM-affiliated outlets are being held in countries including Belarus, Azerbaijan, Russia, and Myanmar. Following news of the shutdowns, Ukrainian journalist Stanislav Aseyev posted that while imprisoned by Russian forces in eastern Ukraine, he was subjected to electric shock torture specifically because he had previously worked for Radio Liberty.

The timing of Trump’s decision to shut down the United States international broadcasting network could hardly be worse. In today’s increasingly multipolar world, the information space is an critical front in the escalating global struggle between rival democratic and authoritarian camps. This has long been recognized by China and Russia, with both countries committing vast annual budgets to support sophisticated international media activities in a variety of guises. The US was previously seen as the world leader in this soft power contest, but that is suddenly no longer the case. Generations of autocratic regimes never did manage to silence Voice of America, but the Trump administration has now done so themselves.

Mercedes Sapuppo is assistant director at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center.

Trump’s energy sector ceasefire could be good news for Putin’s war machine

David Kirichenko — Thu, 20 Mar 2025 17:49:46 +0000

US President Donald Trump’s hotly anticipated March 18 call with Russian President Vladimir Putin failed to achieve any major breakthroughs, but it did result in preliminary agreement on a partial ceasefire covering attacks on energy infrastructure. The news was hailed by the White House as a significant step toward a future peace agreement. However, critics have noted that any pause in energy sector attacks may actually benefit Putin while limiting Ukraine’s ability to hinder the Russian war effort.

Putin has so far refused to join Ukraine in accepting a US proposal for a full ceasefire. Instead, during Tuesday’s telephone conversation he agreed to halt attacks on energy infrastructure for a thirty-day period. This appears to be a very calculated concession. It gives Trump something tangible to show for his peacemaker efforts, but at the same time allows Putin to draw out the negotiating process further while continuing efforts to weaken Ukraine militarily and diplomatically.

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Crucially, Russia may have much more to gain than Ukraine from a temporary energy sector ceasefire. While both countries have sought to target energy infrastructure, the timing of the proposed pause in attacks would appear to favor the Kremlin.

Since the first winter of the war, Russia has conducted a series of air offensives targeting Ukraine’s civilian energy infrastructure in a bid to break the country’s will to resist by leaving millions of Ukrainians without access to electricity and heating. These attacks have succeeded in destroying around half of Ukraine’s prewar power-generating capacity, and have resulted in periods of rolling blackouts across the country.

Faced with the unprecedented challenges presented by Russia’s ongoing bombardment, Ukraine has managed to adapt. The country has dramatically enhanced its air defenses since 2022, while the Ukrainian power grid has proved remarkably resilient. Kyiv has also received extensive financial and technical support from international partners, which has proved instrumental in the struggle to keep the lights on.

Seasonal changes are an additional factor shaping Russia’s bombing campaign. Despite multiple large-scale missile and drone attacks in recent months, Ukraine avoided a much feared energy collapse during the winter season. The arrival of spring is now expected to further undermine the effectiveness of Moscow’s energy sector offensive, with higher temperatures in Ukraine reducing demand for electricity, and longer days minimizing the psychological impact of blackouts.

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As the Kremlin struggles to destroy the Ukrainian power grid, Ukraine’s own campaign of airstrikes against Russia’s oil and gas industry has steadily accelerated. Ukrainian officials say these attacks are designed to weaken Russia’s wartime economy while also creating logistical headaches for Putin’s army in Ukraine.

The first attacks on Russian refineries took place during the early months of the war. However, Ukraine initially lacked the long-range firepower to mount a sustained air offensive, and was further hamstrung when the country’s international partners imposed restrictions on the use of Western weapons inside Russia.

The Ukrainian authorities responded to these limitations by prioritizing the development and domestic production of long-range drones and missiles. As Ukraine’s air arsenal has expanded, so have attacks on Russia’s vast energy industry. Ukrainian strikes on Russian refineries first began making headlines in spring 2024. There has been a further escalation in attacks during the first three months of the current year, reflecting Ukraine’s increased long-range capabilities and growing drone production.

Assessing the scale of the damage caused by these Ukrainian strikes is challenging. Amid tightening wartime censorship, Russia no longer publishes refining figures or other key industry data. Meanwhile, Kremlin officials remain tight-lipped and typically claim that any blazes captured on video are the result of falling debris from intercepted drones. However, according to Reuters data published in early February, Ukrainian drone attacks since the start of 2025 had succeeded in knocking out around ten percent of Russia’s total refining capacity.

The recent uptick in attacks may only be the beginning. Ukraine has ambitious plans for dramatically increased drone production, and is also developing a number of long-range weapons including missile-drone hybrids capable of striking targets deep inside Russia.

On March 15, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced the latest breakthrough for the country’s missile program with the successful deployment of a domestically produced cruise missile. Called the Long Neptune, this Ukrainian cruise missile is adapted from the earlier Neptune model, which was designed for use against warships and was famously responsible for the sinking of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet flagship, the Moskva, in April 2022. With a reported range of around one thousand kilometers, the Long Neptune has the potential to wreak havoc throughout Russia’s energy sector.

This is bad news for Putin, who is heavily dependent on the Russian oil and gas sector to fund and supply his war machine. With Russia’s air defenses already stretched thin in order to cover the front lines of the invasion in Ukraine, Putin now finds himself unable to adequately protect his energy industry from aerial assault. It is therefore hardly surprising that he has now agreed to a mutual pause in attacks that will keep his refineries, pipelines, and export hubs safe for at least a month. Any progress toward peace is certainly welcome, but Putin’s support for Trump’s partial ceasefire should be seen as a pragmatic move rather than an indication of his readiness to end the invasion of Ukraine.

David Kirichenko is an associate research fellow at the Henry Jackson Society.

Taking stock of Chinese electric vehicle exports

Chinese EVs continue to take the world by storm. Chinese shipments of battery electric vehicles (BEVs), plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs), and hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs) reached $44 billion in 2024, up 10 percent from the prior year.

The EU is the largest market for Chinese BEV exports, as measured by value. Additionally, China is rapidly increasing shipments to geostrategically significant markets in Southeast Asia and the Middle East.

While the value of Chinese BEV exports rose only slightly in 2024, the number of units shipped globally rose 7 percent. In 2024, shipments to the EU decreased, in large part due to tariffs and disruptions from Red Sea attacks. At the same time, China’s BEV exports to countries in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, its second-largest export market, increased significantly in both value and volume terms. This massive-scale export is made possible by Chinese BEV exporters benefitting from synergy with China’s heavily subsidized shipbuilding and steel complexes. This results in new-build transoceanic car carriers, such as BYD’s new dual-fuel car carrier, to ship the vehicles abroad.

Finally, Chinese BEV prices differ significantly across markets. Per-unit prices suggest that most Chinese BEV exports to emerging markets, such as those in Southeast Asia, are disproportionately of low-cost two- and three-wheelers rather than larger and more expensive frames, though Chinese customs data do not specifically go into this level of detail.

How should Europe respond to its EV dilemmas?

Consider the case of Israel, which was the destination for 4.5 percent of all Chinese BEV exports by value in 2024 (a large share given its smaller population relative to other markets). Acknowledging potential risks that Chinese intelligence could gather sensitive data on military activities, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) disabled media systems in leased Chinese Chery vehicles in October 2024. The IDF taking this step should give pause to Europe, especially given the close coordination between China and Russia.

But there is a way to resolve the dilemma between the decarbonization gains and security risks posed by Chinese EVs: Berlin must step up.

Germany should lead other European countries in investing heavily in EV supply chains while shielding the EU market from subsidized competition. More than many other European countries, Germany has the fiscal space for transformational investments. Germany’s general government debt-to-gross domestic product (GDP) ratio stands at a relatively comfortable 63 percent, versus 111 percent in France, 101 percent in the United Kingdom, and 123 percent in the United States. Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden all enjoy even lower general government debt-to-GDP ratios than Germany, although their collective GDP is only about 60 percent of Germany’s. Berlin is the key player, but other countries should play a supporting role.

Germany’s investment needs are also dire. It was the only Group of Seven (G7) economy to shrink in 2023; last year its GDP declined again. Economists—including the European economy commissioner—agree that Germany’s debt brake is a main culprit for persistent underinvestment. The constitutionally mandated brake limits the federal government’s annual deficit to approximately 0.35 percent of GDP and essentially blocks its sixteen federal states from borrowing. Fortunately, Germany’s likely next chancellor, Friedrich Merz, is moving ahead with reforms of the debt brake to allow for more investment in defense and infrastructure. This was an important step for the famously frugal nation, but it should quickly be followed by another.

German politicians are right now making strides to lift their country’s debt brake. It is important that they are successful. Military aggression from Russia, systemic rivalry with China, and increasing uncertainty about the trajectory of US-Europe relations mean that Germany and Europe face profound and immediate challenges that require action.

If Germany and northern European countries tap credit markets for investment, there are several worthy initiatives. The defense sector, particularly vis-à-vis Ukraine, must be the highest priority.

But EVs are another worthy security-related investment for Germany and other European powers. By reducing reliance on Chinese EVs, Europe can mitigate a security risk while stabilizing employment, as the automotive sector’s direct and indirect jobs comprise 6.1 percent of total EU employment.

Critically, the development of EVs—and their underlying batteries—will complement European defense capabilities. As the war in Ukraine has demonstrated, batteries are a dual-use technology, used in items such as first-person-view drones, lithium-ion powered submarines, and more. Building battery—and drone—supply chains would enhance Europe’s military capabilities. Of course, these supply chains will require the construction of not only manufacturing facilities but also the mining and processing of key materials such as lithium and rare earth elements.

In short, this would amount to a German-led overhaul of European competitiveness, and it would require substantial—though not excessive—investments. Chinese EV subsidies over a fourteen-year period are estimated to exceed $230 billion, or under 5 percent of Germany’s GDP; Berlin would also not need to commit funds at that level. Moreover, Germany could accelerate technological catch-up and limit costs by forcing technology transfer from Chinese firms—a tactic that Beijing has repeatedly embraced, including vis-à-vis German firms. It will not be easy to secure tech transfers, but it’s worth noting that European nations take in roughly half of all Chinese BEV exports by value. Europe is not without leverage.

In addition to investing in domestic EV supply chains and securing technology transfers from China, Germany and other European countries, including the United Kingdom, may need to undertake sensible risk-mitigation measures. It may make sense, for example, to bar Chinese-connected vehicles near NATO facilities in Europe, and to bar NATO personnel from purchasing or operating these vehicles. This will be difficult, but it is an approach that must be considered to ensure security. Europe should comprehensively study the security risks of Chinese connected vehicles and adjust policy as appropriate.

For better and for worse, Europe must increasingly learn to rely on itself. Accordingly, it’s time to remove self-imposed limitations, such as Germany’s debt brake and unnecessary internal European trade barriers. By undertaking critical investments in sectors such as defense, EVs, and other infrastructure, Germany and other European countries can ensure the continent has the means to overcome the threats and challenges it faces from multiple directions.

Joseph Webster is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Global Energy Center and Indo-Pacific Security Initiative and editor of the independent China-Russia Report. This article reflects his own personal opinions.

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Putin backs Trump’s partial ceasefire but insists Ukraine must be disarmed

Peter Dickinson — Tue, 18 Mar 2025 21:10:05 +0000

Russian President Vladimir Putin has accepted a US proposal for a partial ceasefire in the war against Ukraine following a lengthy phone call with US President Donald Trump. If Ukraine now agrees to the terms of the partial ceasefire, both countries will pause attacks on energy infrastructure for a thirty-day period. During the high stakes call, Putin also committed to begin negotiations over a possible maritime ceasefire in the Black Sea.

The White House readout following the Trump-Putin call was fairly upbeat, but in truth the outcomes fell far short of expectations. One week earlier, Ukraine had unconditionally backed a United States initiative for a complete thirty-day ceasefire in a move that was widely hailed as a breakthrough toward a potential peace deal. So far, Russia has refused to reciprocate. Instead, Putin has sought to insert a series of conditions that indicate an unwillingness to compromise on the key issues driving the Russia invasion of Ukraine.

Today’s telephone conversation appears to have been no different. While Putin offered some minor concessions, he also made clear that he has not abandoned his maximalist goal of subjugating Ukraine. Crucially, the Kremlin statement following the call stressed that Russia’s key condition for any progress toward peace is “the complete cessation of foreign military aid and sharing intelligence with Kyiv.” In other words, Putin continues to insist that peace will only be possible once Ukraine has been disarmed and left at his mercy. It does not require much imagination to anticipate the kind of peace Putin has in mind.

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Putin insistence on an end to all Western military support for Ukraine is not new. Since the very first days of the invasion, he has been warning the West not to arm Ukraine. He has also consistently identified the complete demilitarization of Ukraine as one of his primary war aims.

During failed peace talks in spring 2022, Russian negotiators demanded an approximately 95 percent reduction in the size of Ukraine’s army, which was to become a skeleton force of just fifty thousand troops. For the past three years, the Kremlin has repeated these calls for a drastic reduction in the size of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, including severe restrictions on the categories of weapons Ukraine can possess.

Russian officials have also frequently pressed Ukraine’s Western allies to end all military assistance, while boasting to domestic audiences that this would soon force Kyiv to capitulate. Speaking in October 2023 at the annual Valdai Discussion Club in Sochi, Putin predicted that Ukraine would have “a week left to live” if the country’s Western partners ended weapons deliveries. “Imagine if supplies stopped tomorrow. They would have a week left to live until ammunition was exhausted,” he stated.

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The Kremlin has been similarly insistent on the need to isolate Ukraine internationally and deprive the country of potential allies. In addition to a ban on all Western arms supplies, Moscow demands that Ukraine must voluntarily abandon its NATO ambitions and accept enforced neutrality. Putin claims this is necessary as NATO expansion poses a military threat to Russia. However, he himself said Russia had “no problem” when neighboring Finland announced plans to join the alliance in 2022.

Most recently, Russia has firmly rejected the idea of deploying peacekeepers from NATO member countries to Ukraine in order to monitor any future ceasefire agreement. This rejection is particularly revealing, given the fact that the same NATO troops are already present in six countries bordering Russia without sparking World War III. It would certainly seem that Putin’s real problem is with Ukraine rather than NATO.

Putin told Trump today that he wants a lasting peace, but his negotiating position suggests otherwise. The Kremlin dictator’s preferred peace terms envision a disarmed and defenseless Ukraine with virtually no army of its own and no chance of receiving any meaningful military aid from the international community. If he achieves this goal, it is surely only a matter of time before Putin renews his invasion and completes the conquest of Ukraine.

Peter Dickinson is editor of the Atlantic Council’s UkraineAlert service.

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Global China Hub nonresident fellow Wen-Ti Sung quoted in NPR

Wen-Ti Sung — Tue, 18 Mar 2025 19:17:05 +0000

On March 12th, 2025, Global China Hub nonresident fellow Wen-Ti Sung was quoted in an NPR article on how Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company’s $100 billion investment into new semiconductor facilities in Arizona could impact the silicon shield that some believe disincentives a PRC attack.

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Five takeaways from Beijing’s largest annual political meetings

Melanie Hart — Fri, 14 Mar 2025 21:14:57 +0000

This week, Beijing concluded its annual “two sessions”—the big plenary meetings of the National People’s Congress (NPC) and Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC). The NPC is China’s legislature, and the CPPCC is a larger, more representative (and largely powerless) group that provides advice to the NPC. In China’s authoritarian system, this is the annual pageantry the Chinese Communist Party goes through to claim that it governs through so-called “whole process people’s democracy” rather than strongman authoritarianism.

In reality, of course, the party—and increasingly the strongman at the top—makes the real decisions, while the NPC largely serves as a performative rubber stamp. The pageantry is important, however, as it demonstrates what the party believes it needs to signal to its people and the world. Five notable signals stood out at this year’s two sessions.

1. Chinese President Xi Jinping is at the apex of his power

For all the pageantry—which, as always, included heartwarming footage of people from across China marching into plenary sessions, some in colorful indigenous costumes—this was a one-man show. The signaling was as much about paying homage to Xi as it was about presenting the NPC. Throughout the NPC—which included work reports from major government agencies—major successes were attributed primarily to Xi. In contrast, major challenges were attributed to China’s outside environment, which is often code for US actions that constrain Beijing. For example, the National Development and Reform Commission, China’s major economic agency, made sure to give Xi credit for its economic achievements in 2024, stating (in bold): “We owe these achievements to General Secretary Xi Jinping, who is at the helm charting the course . . .” Beijing sees no need to pretend that Xi himself is part of the consultative pageantry. He sits high above it.

2. There are two Chinese economies, and Beijing is betting on the stronger horse to pull the country through

At the macro level, if you look at Chinese consumer sentiment or at the Chinese industries suffering from overcapacity, the situation is dire. But, just as in any economy, there are always winners in the mix somewhere. Several high-tech companies are innovating, have access to capital, and are experiencing rapid growth. DeepSeek is one such company, and Beijing has milked that example to the max. When asked at a press conference on March 7 about DeepSeek and US efforts to hold China back in technological innovation, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi responded: “Where there is blockade, there is breakthrough; where there is suppression, there is innovation; where there is the fiercest storm, there is the platform launching China’s science and technology skyward like the Chinese mythological hero Nezha soaring into the heavens.” Beijing is betting on bright lights in the tech sector to pull its economy through its current slump.

Advancing science and technology were major themes present throughout the NPC. Chinese leaders announced the launch of a new high-tech “state venture capital guidance fund” and committed to maintain high research and development spending. But what did not appear, as my colleague Jeremy Mark noted earlier this week, was any serious, trend-bending movement toward supporting Chinese consumers and ramping up domestic spending.

3. Beijing sees US President Donald Trump’s strongman-style foreign policy as an opportunity to paint China as the kinder, better partner

Beijing is facing foreign policy headwinds. China recently became the world’s largest creditor—and an increasingly unforgiving one—at the same time as its outbound investment flows fell. That combo is painting China as an unpopular debt collector across the Global South. Chinese economic coercion is triggering a wave of de-risking. So-called “wolf warrior” diplomacy has scored multiple own goals.

Now, however, Beijing sees Trump’s style as an opportunity to wipe that slate clean. This was clear throughout the Chinese foreign minister’s press conference on March 7, where he framed China as the responsible leader “providing certainty to this uncertain world” and “safeguarding the multilateral free trade system.” In a clear dig at the United States, he stated “those with stronger arms and bigger fists should not be allowed to call the shots.” He left nothing on the shelf, calling out US rhetoric on Gaza and Latin America, stating on the latter that: “What people in [Latin American and Caribbean] countries want is to build their own home, not to become someone’s backyard; what they aspire to is independence and self-decision, not the Monroe Doctrine.”

From Washington’s perspective, it is easy to view this as empty rhetoric given the reality of Beijing’s global bullying. But this is likely what Chinese diplomats are saying behind closed doors in every capital around the world, too. It will resonate in many. Washington should take heed and avoid scoring own goals itself.

4. Combating climate change is not a priority

The NPC work report continued the trend seen since at least 2019, when Beijing began to shift from shutting down and cleaning up its coal plants to viewing coal as its primary stable source of energy. In the report, China committed to “implement a coal production reserve system, continue to increase coal production and supply capacity, and consolidate the basic supporting role of coal.” The report treats coal production as a resource security issue, separate from China’s clean energy, environment, and climate goals.

5. Chinese leaders see no reason to change course

Throughout the two sessions, Chinese leaders applauded 2024 successes and previewed a 2025 plan that is largely a steady onward course with some modifications at the margins. To the extent they acknowledge challenges—particularly economic challenges—they did not tie those to Beijing’s own policies. Instead, they blamed the United States and other outside forces, including a sluggish global economy. That does not bode well for Chinese consumers or the overseas manufacturers struggling to compete with the outbound flow of goods China’s factories are producing at overcapacity and unable to sell at home.

The Trump administration is rolling out wave after wave of tariffs on US imports from China, ostensibly to build leverage for some type of grand bilateral bargain. Throughout the two sessions, Xi and other Chinese leaders signaled they are sticking to their state-managed economic approach and view the United States as their biggest external political risk. If anyone in Washington is still hoping China will put meaningful economic concessions on the table to buy its way out of US tariffs, those folks are not paying close attention to the signals coming out of Beijing.

Melanie Hart is the senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Global China Hub and a former senior advisor for China at the US Department of State.

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Ukraine’s innovative defense tech sector is the country’s trump card

David Kirichenko — Thu, 13 Mar 2025 21:50:27 +0000

As tempers flared last month during Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s disastrous Oval Office confrontation with US President Donald Trump and Vice-President JD Vance, Trump offered a blunt assessment of Ukraine’s limited leverage in any future negotiations with Russia. “You don’t have the cards,” he told Zelenskyy. It is a message the US leader has repeated on multiple occasions as he seeks to broker a peace deal and end the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Trump’s logic is easy enough to understand. After all, Ukraine is currently locked into a brutal war of attrition against a far larger and wealthier enemy. For over a year, the Russian army has been slowly but steadily advancing as Ukraine struggles to address mounting troop shortages and encounters regular issues with the flow of military assistance from the country’s Western allies. If this continues, most observers believe Moscow’s overwhelming advantages in terms of manpower, firepower, and funding make eventual Russian victory virtually inevitable.

The Ukrainians are acutely aware that the odds are stacked against them. However, they also understand that Russia’s invasion represents an existential threat to their nation. This helps to explain the remarkable resilience displayed by Ukraine’s army and Ukrainian society as a whole. Faced with a fight for survival against a military superpower, Ukrainians recognize that they cannot realistically expect to match Russia in terms of conventional military strength. Instead, their country’s trump card in this uneven struggle is the innovative and rapidly expanding Ukrainian defense tech sector.

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Since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion just over three years ago, an improvised industry of defense tech startups has mushroomed in garages, workshops, and warehouses across Ukraine. This trend has benefited from the country’s vibrant prewar IT industry, with many existing IT businesses and tech entrepreneurs switching their focus in 2022 to support the Ukrainian army.

This has led to dramatic increases in the domestic production of key items such as surveillance and attack drones, with Ukrainian developers engaged in a relentless daily race to stay ahead of their Russian adversaries. Hundreds of Ukrainian companies are now engaged in drone manufacturing, compared to a mere handful in 2021. The Ukrainian government recently unveiled plans to purchase around 4.5 million first person view drones in 2025, more than doubling last year’s number. This is enhancing Ukraine’s reputation as a global defense tech hub and boosting the country’s efforts to reduce its reliance on military aid from the West.

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Ukrainian drones are playing a key role in transforming the modern battlefield and are now responsible for around two-thirds of Russian losses, according to a recent report by the Royal United Services Institute. Ukraine’s progress has been so groundbreaking that leading Western defense companies are increasingly looking to learn from the country. For example, Silicon Valley companies are tapping into the know-how of Ukrainian drone makers, the Wall Street Journal reports.

The impact of Ukraine’s defense tech prowess is perhaps most evident in the Black Sea. At the outset of Russia’s full-scale invasion, Ukraine’s navy was virtually nonexistent, while the dominance of the Russian Black Sea Fleet was taken for granted. Three years on, Ukraine has successfully leveraged low-cost, high-impact naval drones to offset Russia’s initial advantages and break the blockade of the country’s Black Sea ports.

Ukraine’s maritime drones have repeatedly proved their effectiveness, sinking or damaging numerous Russian warships and forcing Putin to withdraw the bulk of his fleet from Crimea to the safety of Russia itself. Despite the distances involved, Ukrainian naval drones are able to pose a threat to Russian shipping far from Crimea. In summer 2023, Ukraine launched a long-range drone attack that reportedly damaged a warship close the Russian Black Sea port of Novorossiysk, around six hundred kilometers from the nearest Ukrainian naval bases in the Odesa region.

Ukraine’s naval drone fleet continues to evolve at a rapid pace. In recent months, a new model equipped with missiles reportedly shot down a Russian helicopter over the Black Sea. Marine drones have also been developed as launch craft for aerial drones. Ukrainian officials claim these “miniature aircraft carriers” have already been used to hit Russian military targets in occupied Crimea and southern Ukraine. Looking ahead, the use of naval drones as platforms for aerial attacks could create opportunities for Ukraine to bypass Russian front line defenses and launch strikes from unexpected angles.

As Ukraine enters a fourth year of full-scale war against one of the world’s leading military powers, the need for continuous innovation on the battlefield and at sea remains critical. Ukraine’s remarkable success in the Battle for the Black Sea is an indication of what can be achieved when the Ukrainian military makes the most of the country’s innovative defense tech industry. Kyiv’s partners should take note of the key role being played by Ukrainian defense tech innovators and maximize their support for this strategically crucial sector.

David Kirichenko is an associate research fellow at the Henry Jackson Society.

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The Trump White House is not the first to misjudge the extent of Putin’s imperial ambitions in Ukraine. On multiple occasions, the preceding Biden administration declared Russia’s invasion of Ukraine a “strategic failure” while pointing to the extremely high cost paid by the Kremlin in terms of military casualties and economic damage. This practical assessment of the invasion assumes that Putin is guided and constrained by the same logic as his Western contemporaries. In reality, however, he is not.

While democratic leaders must worry about approval ratings and economic indicators, Putin has removed virtually all possible sources of domestic opposition and is free to focus on securing his place in Russian history. Since the early years of his reign, he has made no secret of the fact that he views the collapse of the USSR as a tragedy, and regards the post-Cold War world order as an injustice. Crucially, Ukraine has come to embody both of these grievances. Putin firmly believes he cannot hope to achieve his historic mission of reversing the verdict of 1991 and reviving the Russian Empire without first extinguishing Ukrainian independence.

Putin’s obsession with Ukraine has become increasingly apparent over the past two decades as his campaign to subjugate the country has escalated from political interference to military intervention. In 2004, his efforts to rig Ukraine’s presidential election and install a Kremlin-friendly candidate backfired disastrously and helped spark the Orange Revolution. Ten years later, he responded to another Ukrainian pro-democracy revolution by seizing Crimea and invading eastern Ukraine.

In the years following the onset of Russia’s military aggression, it gradually became more and more obvious that the limited invasion of 2014 was not delivering the desired outcome of a pro-Russian Ukraine. On the contrary, Russia’s attack was only strengthening Ukraine’s commitment to turn westward and pursue a Euro-Atlantic future. Rather than acknowledging the counter-productive consequences of his military campaign, Putin chose to raise the stakes even further by launching the largest European invasion since World War II.

Over the past three years, Putin has become increasingly open about his intention to erase Ukraine altogether. He has declared occupied Ukrainian regions to be “Russian forever,” and has compared his invasion to the eighteenth century imperial conquests of Russian ruler Peter the Great. Vicious anti-Ukrainian rhetoric has become so normalized in the Russian state media that UN officials believe it may constitute “incitement to genocide.” Meanwhile, throughout areas of Ukraine under Kremlin control, Russia is systematically suppressing all traces of Ukrainian statehood and national identity.

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Despite the horror and trauma of the Russian invasion, Ukrainians have so far refused to back down. This defiance is a personal humiliation for Putin. It directly undermines his carefully crafted strongman persona, and makes a complete mockery of his insistence that Russians and Ukrainians are “one people.” Rather than securing his place among the most celebrated rulers in Russian history, Putin is now at risk of being remembered as the man who lost Ukraine.

Losing Ukraine is Putin’s worst nightmare. Ever since witnessing the collapse of Soviet power while serving as a young KGB officer in East Germany, he has been haunted by visions of people power movements overthrowing empires. This helps explain his increasingly violent opposition to the robust and often unruly democratic culture that has taken root in post-Soviet Ukraine. Since the 2004 Orange Revolution, he has viewed the consolidation of Ukrainian democracy as an existential threat to his own authoritarian regime and a potential catalyst for the next stage in Russia’s retreat from empire.

Putin knows that the invasion of Ukraine will define his entire reign and decide the future fate of the Russian Federation. While he may be prepared to discuss a strategic pause in hostilities if ceasefire terms can be made to favor Moscow, he will never accept the existence of a separate and genuinely independent Ukrainian state on Russia’s border. This does not mean that current US-led peace efforts are entirely futile, but it is vital to recognize that freezing the conflict along the current front lines will not be enough to end the war.

For decades, Western leaders have made the mistake of viewing Putin through the prism of their own political pragmatism, while underestimating the importance of his revisionist imperial ideology. After three years of total war in the heart of Europe, there is no longer any excuse for such wishful thinking. Putin has bet everything on the destruction of Ukraine and is confident he will be judged favorably by the tribunal of history. Unless he is deterred by the overwhelming might of the collective West, he will continue to wage war against Ukraine until he achieves his chilling goal.

Mykola Bielieskov is a research fellow at the National Institute for Strategic Studies and a senior analyst at Ukrainian NGO “Come Back Alive.” The views expressed in this article are the author’s personal position and do not reflect the opinions or views of NISS or Come Back Alive.

India’s path to AI autonomy

Mohamed Elbashir, Kishore Balaji Desikachari — Thu, 13 Mar 2025 13:00:00 +0000

India’s unique approach to AI autonomy: A three-pillar strategy

India is taking a distinctive approach to the global race for artificial intelligence (AI) supremacy. While the United States and China focus on AI for economic dominance and national security, India’s vision revolves around AI autonomy through the development of homegrown AI solutions that are closely linked to its development goals.¹ This approach seeks to position India as a prominent global AI leader through a three-pillar strategy that distinguishes it from other major nations. India’s vision of AI autonomy is based on:

Democratizing AI through open innovation: Leading the development of open-source models and platforms that make AI more accessible and adaptable to India’s local needs including the Bhashini platform, which incorporates Indian languages in large language model processing, and the iGOT Karmayogi online learning platform for government training.
Public-sector-led development applications: Implementing AI solutions to address critical development challenges through government-led initiatives in healthcare, agriculture, and education, ensuring that technology meets societal needs.
Global leadership in AI for sustainable development: Championing the integration of AI to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals² (SDGs) on a global scale while pushing ethical AI governance and South-South collaboration.

This strategy seeks to establish India as a global AI leader while addressing pressing social issues, closing economic gaps, and improving the quality of life for its diverse population of over 1.3 billion people.

India’s journey toward AI autonomy goes beyond technological independence; it creates a narrative in which innovative AI technologies drive inclusive growth. This philosophy is reflected in the “India AI” mission and its National Strategy for AI, which positions India as both an adopter and developer of AI technologies and a global hub for ethical and development-oriented AI innovation.³

India’s AI landscape: A vision of innovation and strategy

The Indian AI ecosystem is a dynamic landscape shaped by government initiatives, private-sector innovation, and academic research. There has been a notable increase in AI-focused start-ups in recent years, with the National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM) reporting over 1,600 in 2023.⁴ This growing sector highlights India’s technological capabilities and entrepreneurial spirit in tackling local challenges.

Several strategic government initiatives at the core of this ecosystem have paved the way for India’s advancements in AI. The India AI mission, launched in 2023, is a government initiative to build a comprehensive ecosystem to foster AI innovation across various sectors in India. Spearheaded by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), it focuses on developing AI applications to address societal challenges in healthcare, education, agriculture, and smart cities while promoting responsible and ethical AI development.⁵

IndiaAI reflects the country’s ambitions to become a global AI powerhouse and is supported by the National AI Strategy, created by the National Institution for Transforming India (NITI Aayog). The strategy provides a comprehensive road map for AI adoption in those sectors targeted by IndiaAI.⁶

What sets these initiatives apart from AI strategies in other countries is their emphasis on using AI for social good. For instance, the government of India organized the Responsible AI for Social Empowerment (RAISE) initiative in 2020,⁷ preceding the current AI hype. This demonstrates India’s commitment to ethical AI development, and such initiatives align with India’s National Development Agenda 2030, positioning AI as a driver of economic growth and a crucial enabler for achieving SDGs.⁸

Democratizing AI through open innovation

India is making significant progress in promoting open-source AI development, fostering inclusivity and collaboration within the global AI community. Open-source frameworks, driven by collaborative innovation, offer transparency, interoperability, and scalability—essential qualities for a diverse country like India.

The Bhashini initiative, led by the MeitY, exemplifies this commitment by leveraging open-source frameworks to build natural language processing (NLP) models that support twenty-two official Indian languages and numerous dialects. This project goes beyond basic language processing; it signifies India’s dedication to AI democratization by making these models and datasets freely available to developers and start-ups.⁹

The iGOT Karmayogi platform showcases the scalability of open-source AI solutions to improve digital literacy in government. Designed to upskill twenty million employees, it utilizes open-source AI tools to provide personalized learning pathways, reducing costs while ensuring continuous improvement based on user feedback.¹⁰

Leading academic institutions like the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bangalore and the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras actively contribute to open-source AI research through global public platforms such as TensorFlow and Hugging Face.¹¹ Their work encompasses various fields, including computer vision for healthcare, autonomous vehicles, and environmental monitoring.¹²

For Indian start-ups, using open-source AI models or systems provides significant benefits such as lower costs, greater customization flexibility, access to a larger developer community, the ability to tailor models to specific Indian languages and dialects, and enhanced data security by allowing deployment on premises, making it ideal for building localized AI solutions while maintaining control over sensitive data.

In August 2024, Meta’s open-source Llama model reached a significant milestone of 350 million cumulative downloads since the release of Llama 1 in early 2023.¹³. India has emerged as one of the top three markets globally for this model.¹⁴ Several Indian start-ups and well-known consumer apps, including Flipkart, Meesho, Redbus, Dream11, and Infoedge, have announced their integration of Llama into their applications.

Additionally, IBM Elxsi, a partnership between IBM and Tata Elxsi, India’s largest technology company, focuses on designing local digital engineering solutions, like using open-source models to develop AI-powered edge network solutions for rural and remote areas, enhancing AI accessibility while reducing latency and energy consumption.¹⁵

The democratization of AI through open-source initiatives is critical to India’s development trajectory and technological autonomy. This approach enables rapid, cost-effective AI adoption across India’s diverse sectors and regions, with tangible results already visible: The development cycle for AI solutions has been reduced from years to months, as evidenced by the rapid deployment of language models via the Bhashini initiative, which now serves millions in their native languages. Unlike the West, where most AI development is primarily driven by private companies with proprietary technologies, India’s adoption of an open-source-first approach has led to an independent ecosystem in which government initiatives, academic institutions, and private-sector innovations coexist.

The public-sector role in developing applications to address India’s unique challenges

The profound socioeconomic challenges that India’s 1.3 billion people face have fundamentally shaped its approach to AI.

India faces critical healthcare challenges: 70 percent of healthcare infrastructure is concentrated in urban areas serving only 30 percent of the population, and the doctor-patient ratio stands at 1:1,511, far below the World Health Organization’s recommended 1:1,000.¹⁶

The education sector struggles with fundamental gaps, as 250 million Indians lack basic literacy skills, with only 27 percent having access to internet-enabled devices for online learning, further complicated by the country’s diversity of twenty-two official languages and 1,600 dialects.¹⁷

Agricultural challenges are particularly acute, with the sector employing 42 percent of the workforce but contributing only 18 percent to gross domestic product; 86 percent are small and marginal farmers with less than two hectares of land, and 40 percent of food production is lost due to inefficient supply chains.¹⁸

Financial inclusion remains a significant barrier to development, with 190 million unbanked adults, 70 percent of rural transactions being cash-based, and a stark digital gender divide where only 33 percent of women have mobile internet access compared to 67 percent of men.¹⁹

The size and complexity of these challenges necessitate innovative technological solutions that are both scalable and relevant to India’s specific issues.

India’s development-focused AI vision strategically responds to these pressing issues. Rather than viewing AI solely as a tool for economic competition or technological advancement, India has positioned it as a transformative tool for closing fundamental development gaps.

AI is closing critical gaps in access and the quality of care in healthcare. Through the government’s eSanjeevani platform—India’s national telemedicine service offering patients access to medical specialists and doctors remotely via smartphones—has been revolutionary, with over one hundred million teleconsultations in 2023 and the aim of closing the urban-rural healthcare gap.²⁰ The platform developed AI/machine learning models to improve data collection, quality of care, and doctor-patient consultations on eSanjeevani.²¹ The Indian Council of Medical Research’s collaborations with AI start-ups for disease prediction models in tuberculosis and diabetes paved the way for preventive healthcare interventions.

The agricultural sector is experiencing an AI revolution, driven by government initiatives, particularly through two key platforms. The mKisan portal gives more than fifty million farmers personalized SMS access to critical agricultural information, while the Agristack initiative lays the groundwork for precision agriculture by providing AI-powered advisory services for crop planning, pest control, and weather forecasting. The Indian Meteorological Department’s use of AI has improved monsoon forecast accuracy by 20 percent, significantly impacting agricultural planning.²²

In education, state governments have contracted with Embibe, a company that offers AI-powered learning for basic education to bridge the learning gaps and expand access to quality education. It identifies gaps in knowledge and creates content that addresses them by studying data from student interactions. FutureSkills Prime, an initiative of the National Association of Software and Service Companies, provides AI skills training—and has developed a large AI talent pool, with more than 2.5 million technology professionals trained in AI in India. According to the 2025 Global Workplace Skills Study by Emeritus, 96% of Indian professionals are using AI and generative AI tools at work, significantly higher than the 81% in the US and 84% in the UK. This workforce advantage has made India a preferred destination for global companies seeking skilled AI professionals.

India’s public-sector-led approach to AI development uniquely integrates technology with development priorities. The government’s strategic leadership in deploying AI solutions in healthcare, agriculture, education, and finance demonstrates a unique model in which technology acts as a force multiplier for development efforts. Unlike many developed countries, where private-sector innovation drives AI advancement, India’s government-led initiatives ensure that AI solutions address fundamental development challenges on a large scale.

By combining scale, accessibility, and local relevance, India’s public-sector leadership in AI deployment is a unique model for other developing countries facing similar challenges, demonstrating that technology can effectively accelerate inclusive development when guided by clear public-policy goals.

Shaping tomorrow: India’s position in global AI leadership and development

India’s global AI leadership position is uniquely shaped by proactive government policies and collaborative initiatives. As a founding member of the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence (GPAI), India has used its presidency in 2024 to advance key priorities such as democratizing access to AI skills, addressing societal inequities, promoting responsible AI development, and applying AI in critical sectors such as agriculture and education.

AI plays a critical role in India’s vision to achieve all seventeen SDGs by 2030. India also aims to be one of the top three countries in AI research, innovation, and application by 2030, which reflects a larger ambition: to create a more equitable and sustainable global AI landscape. This unique approach balances technological autonomy and inclusive development, by aligning AI initiatives with socioeconomic priorities to address India’s unique challenges.

However, the expansion of India’s AI ecosystem faces several critical challenges, including the demand for an advanced AI compute infrastructure, developing accessible AI tools, ensuring data privacy, and mitigating algorithmic bias at scale. Addressing these issues requires multistakeholder collaboration between the government, local industry leaders, and academic institutions.

As India progresses in its AI journey, its experience provides valuable insights into how to use AI to drive socioeconomic development. The country’s development-focused approach to AI adoption and governance may serve as a model for other developing countries looking to capitalize on AI’s potential for inclusive growth.

About the authors

Mohamed “Mo” Elbashir is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s GeoTech Center, as well as Meta Platforms’ global infrastructure risk and enablement manager. With over two decades of experience, he specializes in global technology governance, regulatory frameworks, public policy, and program management.

Kishore Balaji Desikachari is the executive director for government affairs at IBM India/South Asia. With over thirty years of leadership experience at Microsoft, Intel, and Hughes, he is a recognized regional policy commentator on AI, quantum computing, semiconductors, trade, and workforce strategies.

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The GeoTech Center champions positive paths forward that societies can pursue to ensure new technologies and data empower people, prosperity, and peace.

1 World Economic Forum, “Sovereign AI: What It Is, and 6 Ways States Are Building It,” September 10, 2024, https://www.weforum.org/stories/2024/04/sovereign-ai-what-is-ways-states-building/.

2 United Nations member states adopted these SDGs in 2015. See “The 17 Goals,” United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, accessed February 20, 2025, https://sdgs.un.org/goals

3 The National AI Portal of India,” INDIAai, n.d., https://indiaai.gov.in/.

4 “Indian AI Ecosystem: State of the Industry Report,” National Association of Software and Service Companies, December 2023, https://nasscom.in/knowledge-center/publications/weathering-challenges-indian-tech-start-landscape-report-2023.

5 Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, “India AI Mission: Vision and Implementation Strategy,” Government of India, 2023, https://www.meity.gov.in/indiaai.

6 “National Strategy for Artificial Intelligence: Updated Framework,” National Institution for Transforming India (aka NITI Aayog), Government of India, 2021, https://niti.gov.in/national-strategy-artificial-intelligence.

7 “Raise.” 2020. IndiaAI. 2020. https://indiaai.gov.in/raise.

8 “An Overview of SDGs,” NITI Aayog, n.d., https://www.niti.gov.in/overview-sustainable-development-goals.

9 “Bhashini,” Government of India, 2024, https://bhashini.gov.in/.

10 Department of Personnel and Training, “iGOT Karmayogi: Transforming Capacity Building in Government,” Government of India, 2023, https://igot.gov.in/.

11 “Indian Institute of Science,” n.d., https://iisc.ac.in/; and “Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Tamilnadu,” 2019, https://www.iitm.ac.in/.

12 Bharat, “Top 7 Computer Vision Research Institutes in India,” OpenCV, January 3, 2024, https://opencv.org/blog/computer-vision-research-in-india/.

13 “With 10x Growth Since 2023, Llama Is the Leading Engine of AI Innovation,” Meta, 2024, https://ai.meta.com/blog/llama-usage-doubled-may-through-july-2024/

14 Supreeth Koundinya, “How I Met Your Llama,” Analytics India Magazine, October 26, 2024, https://analyticsindiamag.com/ai-origins-evolution/how-i-met-your-llama/.

15 “Role of Edge AI in Enhancing Real-Time Data Processing,” Hindustan Times (as shown on Tata Elxsi website), December 12, 2024, https://www.tataelxsi.com/news-and-events/role-of-edge-ai-in-enhancing-real-time-data-processing.

16 “Health and Family Welfare Statistics in India 2023,” Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Government of India, 2023, https://mohfw.gov.in/?q=publications-11; and Sakthivel Selvara et al., India Health System Review, World Health Organization Regional Office for South-East, Health Systems in Transition 11, no. 1 (2022), https://iris.who.int/handle/10665/352685.

17 ASER Centre, “Annual Status of Education (Rural) Report 2023,” Pratham Education Foundation, January 2024, https://asercentre.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/ASER-2023-Report-1.pdf

18 “Analytical Reports,” PRS Legislative Research, n.d., https://prsindia.org/policy/analytical-reports/state-agriculture-india.

19 Reserve Bank of India–Annual Report,” 2024, Rbi.org.in, https://www.rbi.org.in/Scripts/AnnualReportPublications.aspx?Id=1404.

20 “Esanjeevani,” n.d., https://esanjeevani.mohfw.gov.in/.

21 “Clinical Decision Support System (CDSS) for Esanjeevani,” MIT SOLVE, 2022, https://solve.mit.edu/challenges/heath-in-fragile-contexts-challenge/solutions/75300.

22 “AI Helps Improve Predictability of Indian Summer Monsoons,” Department of Science & Technology,” 2023, https://dst.gov.in/ai-helps-improve-predictability-indian-summer-monsoons.

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Emerging technology policies and democracy in Africa: South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana, and Zambia in focus

Ayantola Alayande, Samuel Segun, and Leah Junck — Mon, 10 Mar 2025 12:30:00 +0000

Executive summary

Africa is increasingly asserting its participation in the advancement of emerging technologies by engaging in active dialogues and devising roadmaps for the development, deployment, and regulation of these technologies. However, strategies to employ emerging technologies vary widely both in levels of progress as well as regulatory mechanisms. This report explores how five African countries—South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana, and Zambia—are strategically navigating the governance of new technologies to enrich their citizens’ lives while mitigating potential risks. It focuses on three key emerging technology domains, namely: connectivity, digital public infrastructure, and artificial intelligence (AI).

Beginning with an analysis of the foundational digital technology policies around data protection and governance and cybersecurity, the country reviews highlight the current landscape of laws, and strategies governing each of the emerging technologies of interest. By exploring the strengths and weaknesses of each country’s policy landscape across these technology domains, the report offers insights into prospects and challenges in harnessing emerging technologies for societal good.

The report finds that governments are generally optimistic about the potential impact of emerging technologies on economic development in their respective countries. This is reflected in the large public investment in technology infrastructure, promotion of innovative ecosystems, and the integration of information and communication technologies (ICTs) into e-governance and e-services toward a holistic digitalized economy and society. The countries’ multistakeholder approaches highlight the need for responsible governance while promoting active private-sector engagement for the public good.

Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya, and Ghana were found to have comparatively robust policies for each emerging technology examined, or at least—as is the case with Kenya—documentation or drafts in the form of gazettes and public consultation documents. Government efforts are more prominent in the AI domain, given the increased attention it has garnered lately. However, these frameworks are hampered by limited implementation capacities, poor infrastructure, policy fragmentation and overlap, low digital literacy levels, and a growing digital divide. Zambia on the other hand, while having strong aspirations to become an ICT-enabled knowledge economy, lacks dedicated policies pertaining to emerging technologies. Although the country’s data-protection laws, intellectual property, cyber security, and consumer protection provide a foundational framework, more updated regulations are required to keep pace with the speed at which emerging technologies are playing an increasingly pivotal role in citizens’ daily lives.

A SWOT (i.e., strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis of the broader digital-technologies sector across these countries reveals some universal themes. Strengthwise, governments are generally proactive and enthusiastic about engaging new technology issues, and ICT authorities tend to adapt quickly to new developments by publishing subsidiary laws, releasing draft statements, or convening multistakeholder workshops, where national policy frameworks are absent. An overarching rather than specific sectoral or technology-domain approach also drives national technology pursuits, where for example, all the five countries examined have a national ICT/digital economy strategy which predates and already makes foundational provisions for emerging technology policies. Policy-formulation processes were driven by stakeholder engagement and public consultations, as seen in regular calls for contributions and multistakeholder convenings leading up to policy enactment. Yet huge disparities were observed within countries, where rural and marginalized urban communities, as well as women, are left behind by governmental technology ambitions. This calls for updated policy frameworks and strategies that emphasize inclusion and other sociopolitical considerations to avoid deepening inequities.

For Africa to leverage emerging technologies for socioeconomic development while maintaining accountable and transparent systems, legislative frameworks must be streamlined alongside strong institutional integration to ensure effective enforcement. It is imperative that policymakers develop a strong understanding of emerging technologies to enhance their capacities for developing comprehensive policies to address them. Equally important is raising public awareness to protect the African people’s digital rights and foster safe digital environments.

About the authors

Ayantola Alayande is a Researcher at the Global Center on AI Governance. There, Ayantola works on the African Union Continental AI Strategy and the African Observatory on Responsible AI. He is also a researcher at the Bennett Institute for Public Policy at the University of Cambridge, where he focuses on industrial policy and the future of work in the public sector.

Samuel Segun, PhD is a Senior Researcher at the Global Center on AI Governance. He is also an AI Innovation & Technology consultant for the United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute (UNICRI), where he works on the project ‘Toolkit for Responsible AI Innovation in Law Enforcement’.

Leah Junck, PhD is a Senior Researcher at the Global Center on AI Governance. Her work explores human-technology experiences. She is the author of Cultivating Suspicion: An Ethnography and Like a Bridge Over Trouble: An Ethnography on Strategies of Bodily Navigation of Male Refugees in Cape Town.

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Foreword: Protecting global freedom in an age of rising autocracy

Edward L. Glaeser — Wed, 05 Mar 2025 20:02:44 +0000

The man on horseback vanishes while executive aggrandizement persists

The decline of the West and limits on autocracies

Economic freedom and political freedom

Return to Full Essay collection

Download PDF of the entire book

Will 2012 turn out to have been the high-water mark of human liberty? This volume documents that the downward trend in freedom and democracy, which started then, has continued for another year in 2024. Yet this Atlas also reminds us that there is hope amidst this adverse aggregate trend. In much of the world, women’s economic freedom is higher today than it was thirty years ago. Western Europe’s freedom is either unchanged or greater than it was fifteen years ago. The Global South is steadily becoming more prosperous.

The decline in freedom documented in this volume is clear, but it is also not a massive shift. Average global freedom has moved from Montenegro to Malawi, not from Sweden to Laos. Yet we can no longer maintain a Whiggish faith that we are on an inexorable path toward freedom, democracy, and prosperity, or that history has ended. As the fires of war burn in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Sudan, we must ask what has gone wrong, and what we can do about it. Measurement is the first task, and that is why this overview of liberty around the world is important.

The first section of this Foreword discusses the changing nature of the threat to freedom, and presents one hypothesis about rising executive aggrandizement. There has been a significant decline in the prevalence of coups since the 1960s, which means that democratically elected leaders need fear the “man on horseback” much less than in the past. Yet as the threat of military takeovers has fallen, the prevalence of “executive aggrandizements,” in which duly elected leaders push their power beyond constitutional limits, has not. Indeed, elected executives may be more likely to take risks precisely because military coups have become less plausible.

I present a simple framework for thinking about the interplay between technology and executive aggrandizement. Executives are limited by their ability to control the public sector and by popular opposition. Technology can enable the coordination of popular anti-regime action, as was shown vividly in the Twitter Revolutions of the Arab Spring. The increased threat of popular uprising may put limits on some political leaders, but technology can also increase the executive’s ability to control the public sector by monitoring disloyalty or malfeasance. Artificial intelligence (AI) could improve the central government’s ability to detect corruption. If the state is initially weak, the positive impact of technology on popular opposition may lead to less dictatorship. However, if the state is strong, technology will instead reduce the limits on executive activity.

The second section of this Foreword argues that geopolitical changes can also help explain why executive aggrandizement has increased and coups have fallen. Western powers, which used to engineer coups as Cold War policy, now intervene to reverse them. Even more importantly, the influence of the West, which championed democracy in the years after the Cold War, has declined. The 1990s was an era of democratic triumph, in which the strength of liberal democracies was at its apogee. What could have been more appealing to the former Warsaw Pact states of Eastern Europe than to rush toward European integration and prosperity? Mexico’s leaders similarly saw great advantages in tying their country to the United States through the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). In both cases, democracy ended up being the price of free trade.

Yet the last quarter century has seen a relative decline in the Western champions of liberty. The United States lost military face in its failed occupations of both Iraq and Afghanistan, and economic face in the global financial crisis. The economic importance of the European Union (EU) has declined, while China’s economic heft has expanded enormously. China’s growth provides an example of non-democratic success, and its foreign aid reduces the advantage of courting Western donors who have a deeper demand for democratic reform.

In the final section of the Foreword, I discuss the interplay between economic and political freedom. While I do not believe that complete economic freedom is necessary for political freedom, I do believe that a political executive with control over parts of the economy can use that control to augment its own political power. There are risks in supporting activist industrial and trade policies that enable political leaders to reward their supporters and punish their opponents. It would be far better for democratic leaders to articulate the positive case for freedom, which can both enable economic growth and empower human happiness, than to seek to micromanage the economy.

The man on horseback vanishes while executive aggrandizement persists

Bermeo documents that more than one-third of democracies faced coups between 1960 and 1964, and 15 percent of democracies were toppled by coups between 1965 and 1969. In every five-year interval since 1985, fewer than 5 percent of democracies fell to a coup. In every five-year interval since 1995, fewer than 10 percent of democracies have even faced the threat of a coup. Yet, as this volume documents, the global level of freedom has been declining since 2012.

Executive aggrandizement, where the executive expands its authority beyond constitutional limits, can erode freedom without the fireworks of a coup. Yet it has proven difficult to document a global wave in such expansions of incumbent power. Nevertheless, there are important examples, especially those of China, Russia, and Venezuela, in which political executives have significantly increased their power. Vladimir Putin and Hugo Chávez represent the more standard case in which a democratically elected executive expands his power. In the case of China, the more dispersed control of party leaders has been replaced by the more centralized control of Xi Jinping.

In this section, I first discuss the interplay between coups and executive aggrandizement, using Argentina’s 1930 coup as an example. I then turn to a framework that is meant to suggest how technological change might have influenced the prevalence of coups, protests, and executive aggrandizement. I focus on domestic forces that influence freedom in this section, and in the next section, I will focus on the role of foreign influence.

Coup and executive aggrandizement

Few coups seem so consequential as the 1930 coup in Argentina, which ended seventy-five years of political stability and liberal government and ushered in fifty years of coups and dictatorships. Argentina’s remarkable Generation of 1837, which included Domingo Sarmiento and Juan Bautista Alberdi, crafted that country’s 1853 Constitution and presided over a period of increasing freedom, wealth, and education. Like Britain before 1867, nineteenth-century Argentina was better at protecting freedoms than at promoting broad, uninfluenced suffrage, but after 1912, the Sáenz Peña Law made male suffrage universal, secret, and mandatory.

The Radical Civic Union (UCR) rode to power on the basis of broad population support in 1916, and came into conflict with the more conservative National Autonomist Party (PAN), which had held power since the end of Sarmiento’s presidency in 1874. Their conflict ended in 1930, when a military coup replaced the elected President Hipólito Yrigoyen with Lieutenant General Uriburu. Alemán and Saiegh provide evidence against “the claim that demands for drastic redistribution led to democratic breakdown is not a convincing explanation for the 1930 coup.” Instead, they see the coup as a response to the fact that Yrigoyen “used his authority to exclude the political opposition and take away their remaining bases of power.”

Alemán and Saiegh emphasize that the legislative divisions were not determined by ideology or attitudes toward redistribution. Instead, divisions were heightened over power plays, such as the frequent Federal “interventions” in which Yrigoyen replaced provincial governments with politicians that were more to his liking. While these interventions were and are (the last one occurred in 2004) supposed to be responses to unusual and deeply problematic local circumstances, there were twenty interventions during Yrigoyen’s first term and fifteen of these were done without legislative approval. During Yrigoyen’s second term, “between 1928 and 1929, he took over by executive decree the provinces of San Juan, Mendoza, Corrientes and Santa Fe,” and he nationalized the petroleum industry, which was also “seen as a political power-grab.”

On August 9, 1930, the opposition published the Manifesto of the 44 which denounced Yrigoyen for aggrandizement of executive authority. Within the month, a coup had begun and by September 10, Uriburu had replaced Yrigoyen as President of Argentina. Six more coups would follow in 1943, 1955, 1962, 1966, 1976, and 1981. Executive aggrandizement is a perpetual possibility, and, historically, the opponents of that aggrandizement often came from within the government, including from within the military.

Of course, there have been many cases of executive aggrandizement that have not met with opposition from the military. It took eleven years, and the realization that Hitler had led them into a military catastrophe, for any of the Wehrmacht’s leaders to fight against Hitler’s subversion of the Weimar Republic. Similarly, there have been many military coups that had little or nothing to do with executive aggrandizement, including Argentina’s 1943 coup, and the attempted coups in France in 1961, and Spain in 1981.

These two failed coups suggest that improvements in communications have reduced the ability of officers to command their soldiers to fight against political leaders. Improvements in information technology have made it easier for symbolically important legitimate leaders to communicate directly with the army, which can be effective because “military forces—especially perhaps conscript ones—are susceptible to numerous pressures from the civilian population and from civil institutions.”

During the weekend on April 22, 1961, a junta of French officers, hoping to keep Algeria an integral part of France, took control of Algiers. As Thomas writes, “de Gaulle’s military resources were unimpressive,” because “500,000 [soldiers] were in Algeria, whereas in France itself there were very few regular operational units.” Instead of fighting, on the evening of April 23, De Gaulle took to the radio.

The same voice that had travelled the airwaves in 1940 denouncing “the capitulation” to Nazi Germany in the name of “honor, common sense, and the higher interest of the Nation,” and inviting “all the French who want to remain free to listen to me and to follow me,” declared in 1961 that “I forbid every Frenchman, and in the first place every soldier, to carry out any order.” Even though the rebels controlled the Algiers stations, they could not stop ordinary citizens and soldiers from hearing De Gaulle on their transistor radios, and turning against the plot. The defeat of the coup has been called “la Victoire des Transistors.”

On the evening of February 23, 1981, armed agents of Spain’s Civil Guard, led by a Lieutenant Colonel, took control of the Congress of Deputies. In Valencia, General del Bosch rolled out his tanks and declared a state of emergency. Del Bosch had fought under Franco during the Spanish Civil War, and under German Command during World War II, and he wanted to stop Spain’s shift to liberal democracy. But at 1:14 a.m., King Juan Carlos appeared on television in the uniform of the Captain General of the Army and declared that “the Crown cannot tolerate in any form any act which tries to interfere with the constitution which has been approved by the Spanish people.” The coup promptly fizzled, and Spain’s democracy would survive.

In both France and Spain, coups were stopped by leaders who broadcast strong messages which fundamentally undermined their military subordinates. The framework in the next section will argue that improvements in communications technology more generally make it easier for leaders to stop rebellions from within. This is one hypothesis as to why the risks to freedom now come more from executive aggrandizement than from military coups.

Yet there are other reasons why the frequency of coups has declined, most notably the end of the Cold War and the changing behavior of Western powers. During the Cold War, American leaders often preferred a friendly military regime or monarchy to a hostile democratic one, and the US government supported coups from Tehran in 1953 to Chile in 1973. Since 1991, US-led regime change has meant overt invasion far more than covert coups. In 1994, the United States even acted to reinstate President Aristide of Haiti, who had been ousted by a coup in 1991.¹ I will return to the role of the West in promoting democracy in the next section, after first providing a framework for thinking about the interplay between technology and constraints on political leaders.

Technology and constraints on chief executives

The section considers two impacts of improved information technology on the limits facing elected executives or autocrats. Information can be used to organize protests, such as the mass demonstrations in Tahrir Square, Egypt, which brought down the Mubarak regime in 2011, and that places limits on executive action. But information technology can also be used to centralize control over the public sector, such as by granting leaders the ability to communicate directly with soldiers during a coup. I will not focus on other impacts of communications technology, such as enabling leaders like India’s Narendra Modi to bond with their voters by using radio broadcasts and social media.

All actions that an executive might want to take will create some opposition from both the private and public sectors. That opposition places limits on the actions of the executive. I assume that the executive will not risk actions that generate sufficient opposition from either the public sector, which might refuse to implement the action, or the private sector, which might break out into mass protests. If technology expands the range of actions that the executive can take, then the technology is authority-enhancing, but if it contracts the range of executive action, then it is authority-eroding.

The limits on an autocrat’s options are captured by the two solid lines in Figure 1. If the autocrat wants to limit their opposition from either sector to a fixed amount, then his or her options are limited to a rectangle that is below the solid blue line and to the left of the solid orange line. I will argue that recent changes in communications technology have given effective autocrats more power over their own bureaucracies, causing the blue line to rise, but made private opposition more effective by enabling organization, which shifts the orange line to the left.

While China’s surveillance of its own private citizens is frequently discussed in the Western media, the surveillance of public sector workers and the associated anti-corruption campaign has been far more central to Xi Jinping’s centralization of power. The bribery convictions of Bo Xilai and Zhou Yongkang in 2013 and 2015 eliminated two potential rivals early in Xi’s term as president of China. Moreover, because China has “vague and incomplete anti-corruption laws that leave more room for party control,” and “institutional arrangements that centralize control over local anti-corruption agencies,” the fight against corruption essentially gives national leadership the ability to discipline a large swath of the public sector.

Figure 1. The autocrat’s options and technological change

Complaints by ordinary citizens play a significant role in China’s anti-corruption campaign, and those complaints are often transmitted electronically. Pan and Chen report that “China has devoted substantial resources to monitoring the performance of lower-tier officials” including “telephone hotlines,” “government-managed websites where citizens can complain online,” and “web and mobile apps designed for individuals to complain to the government.” In order to reduce bribery, some Chinese “hospitals even put in place monitoring systems with facial recognition technology to identify unregistered medical representatives or unapproved visits.” Fan et al. document that computerizing value-added tax invoices “contributed to 27.1 percent of VAT revenues and 12.9 percent of total government revenues in the five subsequent years.” Beraja et al. examine artificial intelligence procurement across China and find that “autocrats benefit from AI: local unrest leads to greater government procurement of facial-recognition AI as a new technology of political control, and increased AI procurement indeed suppresses subsequent unrest.”

If laws are sufficiently fuzzy, then abundant electronic monitoring, supplemented by the complaints of random citizens, should make it possible to convict almost any public servant. That ability to convict provides a chief executive with enormous control over the public sector. Information technologies, such as the on-board computers carried by commercial truckers, have long been used by corporate chieftains to monitor their workers. There is every reason to believe that government leaders should be able to do the same, and that better technology will strengthen the hold of authoritarian leaders over public sector employees.

For that reason, Figure 1 depicts the blue line rising higher because of better monitoring technology. As the autocrat has an increasing ability to repress opposition within the public sector through better monitoring, they have a greater ability to undertake activities, from suppressing religious minorities to invading their neighbors, that might have been opposed by some public sector workers. This increased range of executive power provides one reason why information technology can lead to less individual freedom. This effect should be much stronger in countries with a more effective public sector.

Better technology can also give the public sector more ability to monitor their private citizens, but there is a countervailing force that I suspect is more important worldwide. Information technology also enables the coordination of citizens, especially through the sharing of information. Historically, cities have been hotbeds of regime change, partially because density enabled the coordination of opposition to the government. Information technology makes it easier to spread information both about why someone should protest and where a protest will occur.

In 2011, protests were coordinated on Twitter in Tunisia and Egypt and two autocrats were forced out of power. In 2022, Maria Litvina called for protests against the Russian invasion of Ukraine on Instagram. While she was arrested, thousands still took to the streets and protests in Russia have continued since then. While the Putin regime does not seem to be in danger, this activity still creates direct and indirect costs for the government, including the challenge of locking up thousands and potential embarrassment on the world stage.

In Figure 1, I chose to capture the ability of improved private coordination as empowering private protest against government, which increases the costs to governments of taking actions that generate private opposition, which shifts the orange line to the left. Consequently, it is unclear whether technology will reduce freedom, by strengthening executives’ controls over their bureaucracies, or increase freedom, by making citizen protest easier. In countries that have large and capable public sectors, such as those in East Asia, I suspect that technology will typically be freedom-reducing. In places where the public sector is weak, then technology seems more likely to encourage regime change, which may lead autocrats to be more cautious.

The core hypothesis put forth in this section is that technology has centralized authority within the government, which can reduce freedom for the rest of us. Direct communication between legitimate leaders and soldiers has reduced the threat of coups. Better monitoring of subordinates has reduced local corruption. The implication of this change is that the centralized authority of autocrats has increased. We now turn to a second hypothesis: that the decline in freedom is associated with the relative weakness of the West.

The decline of the West and the limits on autocracies

The 1990s were a strange time in world history. The Soviet Union was no more. Liberal democracies had triumphed, and they were much wealthier than their alternatives. They were role models for countries emerging from communism. Moreover, the Western democracies were successful enough that they could indulge in the luxury of encouraging others to embrace democracy.

Levitsky and Way emphasize the “international dimension of regime change” and especially the power of “linkage” or “the density of ties (economic, political, diplomatic, social, and organizational) and cross-border flows (of trade and investment, people, and communication) between particular countries and the United States, the European Union (EU), and Western-led multilateral institutions.” These ties led Latin American and Central European countries to democratize in the years after the fall of the Soviet Union.

The two democratizing nations that Levitsky and Way highlight were strongly influenced by the EU and NAFTA. In Slovakia, Vladimír Mečiar “regained control of the government and rapidly sought to eliminate major sources of opposition” and “in the absence of extensive linkage to the West, Mečiar’s autocratic government might well have consolidated power.” But the appeal of access to EU was enormous, and “it employed conditionality in 1997 by rejecting Slovakia’s request to begin accession negotiations due to a failure to meet democratic criteria.” This rejection had political bite, and “Slovakia’s failure to move towards EU membership, for which the EU directly (and very publicly) blamed Mečiar, created a salient electoral issue that benefited the opposition.” In 1998, Slovakia rejected Mečiar and the country has been democratic since then.

The authoritarian PRI (Institutional Revolution Party) controlled Mexico from 1929 to 2000, but the technocratic leadership of the party during the 1990s saw the tremendous economic advantages that could come by enacting NAFTA. While “successive U.S. administrations backed the PRI governments and explicitly excluded democracy from NAFTA negotiations… NAFTA increased Mexico’s salience in the U.S. political arena,” and “as NAFTA negotiations began, the PRI was subjected to intense international scrutiny, including unprecedented media coverage of electoral scandals and US congressional hearings on Mexican human rights”. Mexico’s attempt to placate the United States meant that “by the late 1990s opposition forces had strengthened to the point where they could win national elections” and that “preventing such an outcome would have required large scale fraud or repression, which, given Mexico’s international position, would have been extremely costly.”

Both of these case studies suggest that EU and US influence encouraged democracy in the 1990s either through clear conditionality (as with Slovakia) or through the court of US public opinion (as with Mexico). The democratizing push reflected the Western victory in the Cold War. That victory meant that Western powers looked like role models, and that access to Western markets was enormously profitable. Unlike during the Cold War, when the United States was eager for allies of any political variety, in the 1990s, the West felt sufficiently secure that they could risk alienating countries by pushing democracy.

Indeed, the level of American confidence reached such heights that the United States waged wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq with a stated goal of regime change. When President Bush addressed the nation on October 7, 2001, he said our goal in invading Afghanistan was to “defend not only our precious freedoms, but also the freedom of people everywhere to live and raise their children free from fear.” Two years later, when announcing the invasion of Iraq, President Bush reiterated “we will bring freedom to others and we will prevail” and “we have no ambition in Iraq, except to remove a threat and restore control of that country to its own people.” I am not claiming that promoting democracy was the primary objective of either war, but just that a significant number of policymakers believed that it was reasonable to go to war to promote freedom elsewhere.

Those wars were two reasons for the decline in US influence since 2006. While the US military readily defeated the armed forces of both Iraq and Afghanistan, the US government failed to establish lasting democracies in either country. Moreover, the US management of both occupations appeared incompetent to many global observers. The disastrous collapse of an American housing bubble then brought economic suffering not only to the United States but to the world. The United States started to seem far less like a role model, and a less triumphant United States was less likely to take on the mission of democratizing the world.

Europe’s economic clout has also waned over the last thirty years. While the EU produced one-fourth of the world’s gross domestic product in 1990 (at purchasing power parity prices), it produced less than 15 percent of global output in 2024. After 2005, Turkey seemed poised to join the EU, but it never came to be, partially because many Turks opposed EU membership. One Turkish poll in 2013 reported that “while one third of those surveyed agreed Turkey should persevere with the goal of becoming an EU member, two-thirds of the public lean closer to the view that Turkey should not become a full member.” Given those views, it is unsurprising that President Erdoğan supported a political referendum that would entrench his presidential power despite the risk that such a move would alienate the EU.

Europe’s relative economic heft has diminished, partially because of the growth of China. Between 1990 and 2024, China’s share of the world economy rose from 3.6 percent to 19.05 percent. A strong and wealthy China provides an alternative, non-democratic role model, and access to Chinese aid and markets most certainly does not require democratizing reform. Shinn and Eisenman write that “China’s focus on state sovereignty and reluctance to interfere in the internal affairs of other nations have assisted its ability to develop cordial ties with Africa.” Democratic powers are far less dominant now than they were twenty years ago, and that can help explain why freedom has declined since 2012.

Economic freedom and political freedom

Declining belief in the value of economic freedom in the West may also contribute to declining political freedom both in the Western democracies and elsewhere. Milton Friedman famously saw a particularly tight link between economic and political freedom, writing that “capitalism is a necessary condition for political freedom.” Similarly Hayek saw economic planning as leading down the “road to serfdom.” Critics of this perspective have pointed out that the Scandinavian social democracies seem to have enjoyed almost perfect political freedom, even when their economies looked decidedly non-capitalistic. They have also noted that East Asian economies with very limited political freedom have occasionally been hotbeds of capitalism.

Yet even if Friedman’s statement goes too far, there is an essential truth in his perspective. When the public sector has more discretion to interfere with the economy, then it will also have more ability to reward its supporters and punish its opponents. Hugo Chávez’s direct control over Venezuela’s petroleum enabled his domestic and foreign activities, including subsidizing friendly neighbors with cheap oil. Relief from regulation has been one of the most common sources of illicit public revenues throughout history, and those revenues can also be used to enhance political power.

But as the example of Scandinavia illustrates, not all economic interventions empower political executives. If the rules are decided collectively and enforced strictly, then they are not a source of power for the executive. If the rules are ad hoc and decided by the executive on the spot, then economic intervention can help consolidate political strength. In Chávez’s Venezuela or the Shah’s Iran, public oil revenues became a tool for tyranny. In Norway, they did not, partially because oil revenues go largely into a sovereign wealth fund that is managed by the politically independent Norges Bank.

Yet in recent years, political leaders in the United States and EU have championed economic policies, including industrial policy and tariffs, that are largely discretionary. If a politician seeks support from domestic producers of some product, then that politician can reward those producers either with subsidies, now called industrial policy, or with a selective tariff on that product. The politicization of US pre-World War II tariffs generates little hope that any future discretionary tariff policy will somehow be divorced from politics. Moreover, even if the United States limits its discretionary interventions, public support for these policies, from both parties, reinforces the idea that political leaders should have the right to favor some industries over others.

The case for economic freedom would be strong even if there was not a link between economic and political freedom. Yet, as long as economic policy Edward L. Glaeser interventions provide more scope for political leaders to reward and punish, then these interventions will also pose risks to political freedom. If the leaders of the West want to reverse the downward trend in freedom, then they should continue championing both political and economic liberty and continue to be engaged with the world.

Edward L. Glaeser is the Fred and Eleanor Glimp professor of economics at Harvard University, where he has taught microeconomics and urban economics since 1992. Glaeser previously directed the Taubman Center and the Rappaport Institute. He also leads the Urban Working Group at the National Bureau of Economic Research, co-leads the Cities Programme at the International Growth Centre, and is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Glaeser has written hundreds of papers on cities, political economy, and public economics. He received his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1992.

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1 Former President Aristide has accused the United States of forcing his resignation during a later 2004 coup; the United States has denied these allegations.

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Grundman on Investor’s Business Daily on technological innovation in the defense sector

Atlantic Council — Wed, 05 Mar 2025 20:00:00 +0000

Forward Defense Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security

On March 5, Steven Grundman, senior fellow at Forward Defense, was featured on Investor’s Business Daily in a segment of their Growth Stories, “Palantir Is Shaking Up The Defense Sector. What Comes Next As The AI Revolution Heads To The Front Lines?” Grundman discusses how software is emerging as a key differentiator in military programs.

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Steven Grundman

Senior Fellow

Defense Industry Defense Policy

Nonresident Senior Fellow

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Meyer interviewed in DW on the Trumps administration’s priorities for technology regulation and competition

bgalicia — Mon, 03 Mar 2025 14:34:32 +0000

Original text

On February 27, Joel Meyer, nonresident senior fellow in the Scowcroft Center’s GeoStrategy Initiative, was interviewed by DW after the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Action Summit in Paris. He argues that US Vice President JD Vance’s speech at the summit serves as a “wake-up-call” for European regulators to foster an “AI ecosystem that will allow Europe to catch up” in technological innovation. He notes opportunities for mutual benefit if the United States and its allies partner in AI development.

I think there is still room for a collaborative approach. Because if it is ‘only the US’ or ‘only Europe,’ we will not be able to compete with the scale that China, its economy, and [its] data bring to the AI race.

Joel Meyer

Fellow

Joel Meyer

Adrienne Arsht National Security Resilience Initiative GeoStrategy Initiative

Artificial Intelligence Defense Policy

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Canada’s G7 presidency should prioritize health innovation

Carl Meacham — Fri, 28 Feb 2025 21:03:07 +0000

The COVID-19 pandemic reminded the world just how tightly health and economic stability are linked. Yet beyond the immediate impacts of the pandemic, the growing burden of noncommunicable diseases (NCDs)—such as cancer, diabetes, and cardiovascular conditions—represents an escalating crisis in 2025. This burden, already significant, continues to increase with aging populations and lifestyle changes, threatening to overwhelm healthcare systems and impede economic growth. Investing in health innovation is essential to ensuring sustainable societies and economies.

Despite an eventful start to the year—marked by the resignation of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the looming threat of tariffs that could disrupt key industries—Canada now has a unique opportunity to chart a new course. With a change in leadership coming this year and the 2025 Group of Seven (G7) presidency, Canada can seize this moment to reaffirm its commitment to fostering “economies that benefit everyone,” one of its 2025 G7 goals. Canada should use its G7 presidency, which it has held since January 1, to reaffirm its commitment to fostering such economies by placing advancements in health innovation high on the organization’s agenda. Ottawa should prioritize communicating the importance of health innovation for economic growth and societal well-being, expanding access to early screenings for NCDs, and building sustainable financing and funding models for investing in health technologies.

Why health innovation matters

Healthcare plays a central role in the social contract, fostering trust, cohesion, and resilience by ensuring that individuals can lead healthier, more productive lives. But advances in health innovation and improved health outcomes can also create immense economic value. Improving global health could boost the global economy by up to twelve trillion dollars by 2040, according to a 2020 report by McKinsey. More granular data highlights the socioeconomic costs of failing to address diseases like cancer. A recent study estimated the global economic cost of cancers from 2020 to 2050 to be $25.2 trillion (in 2017 US dollars), essentially an annual 0.55 percent tax on global gross domestic product.

The economic case for health innovation becomes even clearer when considering the economic benefits of optimal research and development spending on treatments and vaccines for known diseases. A 2024 study by the National Institutes of Health showed that the economic benefits of spending for COVID-19 vaccines and treatments ranged from $2 trillion to $60 trillion, with rates of return of 12 percent to 23 percent. Furthermore, innovative treatments for multiple sclerosis, for instance, are expected to make significant improvements over the next decade, which can reduce relapse rates and slow disease progression, leading to enhanced productivity.

Health innovation also provides exceptional returns on investment. According to a McKinsey study, every dollar invested in health innovation yields two to four dollars in economic benefits. Beyond immediate savings, healthier populations are more active in the workforce, have lower rates of absenteeism (for both patients and their caregivers), and demand less from healthcare systems, all of which enhances overall productivity. In addition, addressing NCDs early and efficiently ensures that aging populations remain economically active for longer, offsetting the demographic headwinds many G7 economies currently face.

Prioritizing health innovation in G7 fiscal budgets

G7 countries must make health innovation a fiscal priority. The rising prevalence of chronic diseases and the associated economic costs demand immediate action. For example, integrating early screening and advanced treatment technologies can significantly reduce disease progression, ultimately lowering long-term healthcare costs. Mature economies like Japan and those in the European Union, where aging populations exacerbate healthcare challenges, must proactively allocate budgets toward sustainable health innovation. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development has emphasized that health is not just a cost—it is a driver of wealth. Public-private partnerships are a powerful mechanism to ensure that healthcare spending is efficient and impactful. For instance, public-private partnerships enable collaboration between governments and private companies to share costs, accelerate the deployment of cutting-edge technologies like artificial intelligence (AI)-based diagnostics, and improve infrastructure management, ensuring that resources are directed where they generate the highest value.

Countries like Finland offer a blueprint for success. Finland’s investments in digital health technologies have not only fostered public trust but also built economic resilience. Drawing from such examples, G7 countries should make health innovation a cornerstone of their fiscal strategies, addressing immediate healthcare needs while preparing for future economic and demographic challenges.

Canada’s opportunity to lead on health innovation

With Canada leading the G7 this year, it has a unique opportunity to place health innovation at the forefront of the global agenda. While Canada’s presidency will face competing priorities—geopolitical conflicts, inflation, and economic instability—health should remain a central focus because of its foundational role in addressing these challenges. Robust health systems enhance resilience against crises, support economic stability, and strengthen societal trust.

Canada can lead by encouraging the G7 to embrace four key priorities:

Recognize the economic and societal value of health innovation. Health innovation offers benefits far beyond clinical outcomes. Canada should advocate for greater recognition of how investments in healthcare drive economic growth, improve workforce participation, and enhance societal well-being. This can be done by pushing for G7 targets on reducing the economic burden of specific diseases.
Adopt early screening and diagnosis. Prioritizing early detection of diseases can significantly reduce long-term healthcare costs while improving patient outcomes. Canada can push for collaborative efforts across the G7 to standardize and expand access to early screening technologies.
Promote sustainable funding and financing models. Canada should champion innovative financing solutions that blend public and private funding. These models can ensure that health systems are resilient, adaptable, and capable of addressing rising costs without compromising accessibility or quality of care.
Emphasize the role of digital health technologies in driving efficiency and innovation. Interoperable data systems, for example, enable better coordination of care, earlier diagnosis, and more personalized treatment plans—all critical to managing the growing burden of NCDs.

Building a health-driven economy

By adopting a comprehensive health agenda, G7 nations can unlock immense economic and social rewards. Health improvements alone could increase global employment growth by 0.3 percent by 2040, which would help reduce labor shortages and enhance economic resilience. These benefits extend beyond high-income countries; investments in health innovation can strengthen global partnerships, reduce health inequities, and promote shared growth.

Health innovation is not merely a policy choice; it is an economic imperative. Under Canada’s leadership, the G7 can set a bold agenda that recognizes the broader value of health, prioritizes innovation, and builds resilient economies. By acting now, G7 nations can secure a healthier, more prosperous future for their citizens and the world.

Carl Meacham is a consultant at the Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center. He served as deputy vice president at PhRMA and as senior staffer in the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.

This article was written as part of the Atlantic Council’s partnership with Roche.

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Putin uses NATO as an excuse for his war against Ukrainian statehood

Peter Dickinson — Fri, 28 Feb 2025 12:15:19 +0000

As speculation swirls over the possible terms of a US-brokered peace deal to end the Russo-Ukrainian War, the Kremlin is insisting that above all else, the future Ukraine must be neutral and demilitarized. This is nothing new. Vladimir Putin has been citing Ukraine’s demilitarization as his key war aim since the very first morning of the invasion. Demilitarization also featured prominently in abortive peace talks held during the initial weeks of the war, with Russian representatives demanding an approximately 95 percent reduction in the size of Ukraine’s army, which was to become a skeleton force of just fifty thousand troops.

Calls for a demilitarized Ukraine have remained a central feature of Russian rhetoric throughout the past three years of the invasion, and have been accompanied by demands that Kyiv accept permanent neutrality and rule out the prospect of joining NATO or concluding military alliances with any Western powers. Russian officials have also consistently stated that postwar Ukraine must be banned from receiving weapons or training from the West. Most recently, the Kremlin has rejected the idea of deploying Western troops in Ukraine as peacekeepers to monitor a potential ceasefire agreement. In other words, Putin’s preferred peace terms envision a disarmed and defenseless Ukraine with virtually no army of its own and no chance of receiving any meaningful military aid from the international community.

Putin may currently find it advantageous to entertain talk of peace, but his insistence on Ukraine’s unilateral disarmament reveals what he really has in mind for the country. The Russian dictator is obviously preparing the ground for the eventual resumption of his current invasion, which he fully intends to continue as soon as he has rearmed and circumstances allow. Why else would the demilitarization of Ukraine be seen in Moscow as such a priority?

No serious military analyst would argue that Ukraine poses a credible security threat to Russia itself. Likewise, no Ukrainian politician or public figure has ever harbored any territorial ambitions against their country’s far larger and wealthier neighbor. On the contrary, the sole purpose of the Ukrainian Armed Forces is to defend the country against Russian attack. The Kremlin’s emphasis on disarming Ukraine should therefore be seen as a massive red flag for the Trump White House and the wider international community that signals Putin’s determination to complete his conquest and extinguish Ukrainian statehood altogether.

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There are worrying signs that this is not yet fully understood in Western capitals. Instead, US President Donald Trump and senior members of his administration have recently begun shifting responsibility for the war away from Russia and echoing the Kremlin’s own longstanding efforts to blame the invasion on NATO expansion. Predictably, Russian officials including Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov have welcomed this dramatic change in the US position regarding the causes of the war. However, Russia’s whole NATO narrative suffers from a number of obvious flaws that should spark skepticism among even the most credulous consumers of Kremlin propaganda.

According to Putin, Ukraine’s deepening ties with NATO forced him to launch the full-scale invasion of February 2022. In reality, Ukraine’s prospects of joining the alliance were virtually nonexistent at the time, and had not significantly improved since Kyiv was first fobbed off with platitudes at a landmark NATO summit way back in 2008. Even the Russian seizure of Crimea and invasion of eastern Ukraine in 2014 failed to produce any change of heart among alliance members, with key NATO countries including the United States and Germany openly expressing their opposition to Ukrainian accession. Indeed, on the eve of the full-scale invasion, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz assured Putin that Ukrainian NATO membership was out of the question for at least the next 30 years. This makes it difficult to accept Moscow’s claims that Ukraine’s NATO aspirations represented some kind of immediate danger to Russia.

There are also good reasons to question whether the Kremlin genuinely views NATO as a threat to Russian national security. Thanks to founding member Norway, the alliance has shared a border with Russia ever since its establishment in 1949. More recently, the accession of Poland and the Baltic states at the turn of the millennium dramatically expanded Russia’s shared border with NATO and placed the alliance a few hundred kilometers away from Moscow and Saint Petersburg. This close proximity to Russia’s two biggest cities did not lead to any discernible rise in border tensions.

The most revealing evidence of Russia’s true attitude toward NATO came in 2022 when Finland and Sweden reacted to the invasion of Ukraine by ending decades of neutrality and announcing plans to join the alliance. Putin responded to this landmark decision by declaring that Russia had “no problem” with the accession of the two Nordic nations, despite the fact that Finnish membership would more than double Russia’s border with NATO, while Swedish membership would turn the Baltic Sea into a NATO lake. Putin has since underlined his indifference to this expanded NATO presence on his doorstep by withdrawing most Russian troops from the Finnish frontier and leaving this supposedly vulnerable border zone largely undefended.

So far, nobody has been able to adequately explain the glaring inconsistency in Putin’s logic. He appears to be unfazed by the presence of NATO troops along the Russian border in Norway, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland. And yet at the same time, he expects us to believe that the faint prospect of Ukraine joining the alliance at some point in the distant future is sufficiently alarming to justify the largest European invasion since World War II. Militarily, this makes no sense. The only reasonable conclusion is that Putin’s objections relate specifically to Ukraine and not to NATO in general. He knows perfectly well that the alliance poses no security threat to Russia itself, but does not want to risk a growing NATO presence that might prevent him from achieving his expansionist objective of subjugating Ukraine.

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While Putin moans to foreign leaders about the inequities of NATO expansion, when speaking to domestic audiences he is typically far more candid about the imperial ambitions that shaped his decision to invade Ukraine. For much of his reign, Putin has insisted that Ukrainians are really Russians (“one people”), and has repeatedly accused modern Ukraine of being a invented nation occupying historically Russian lands. On the eve of the full-scale invasion, he published a rambling 5,000-word history essay that many likened to a declaration of war against Ukrainian statehood. During the first summer of the war, he compared his invasion to the eighteenth century imperial conquests of Russian Czar Peter the Great.

Putin’s frequent denials of Ukraine’s right to exist have set the tone throughout Russian society. Poisonous anti-Ukrainian rhetoric has become so commonplace in the Kremlin-controlled Russian media that UN investigators believe it may constitute “incitement to genocide.” Meanwhile, senior Kremlin officials have sought to demonstrate their loyalty to Putin by echoing his vicious attacks on Ukraine. Former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev has declared that “the existence of Ukraine is mortally dangerous for Ukrainians,” while top Putin aide Nikolai Patrushev recently suggested Ukraine may soon “cease to exist.” These are not the words of rational politicians addressing legitimate national security concerns.

This genocidal rhetoric is being more than matched by the actions of the Russian army in Ukraine. Wherever the Kremlin has been able to establish control, Russian troops have systematically detained local officials, military veterans, journalists, religious leaders, civic activists, Ukrainian patriots, and anyone else deemed to be a potential threat. Thousands have disappeared into a vast network of prisons amid a climate of fear that has been described by Britain’s The Economist as a “totalitarian hell.” Many more, including thousands of children, have been subjected to forced deportation and sent to Russia. Those who remain are being pressured to accept Russian citizenship, while all reminders of Ukrainian statehood, culture, and national identity are being methodically removed. Needless to say, anyone who dares speak the Ukrainian language risks severe punishment.

These horrors make a complete mockery of attempts to appease the Russians with limited territorial concessions. US negotiators need to recognize that Putin is not fighting for land. He views the current invasion in far broader terms as an historic mission to erase Ukraine from the map of Europe. In Putin’s chilling worldview, extinguishing Ukrainian statehood is a vital step toward the reversal of the Soviet collapse and the revival of the Russian Empire. He has pursued this messianic vision with increasing violence ever since Ukraine’s 2004 Orange Revolution, and is now closer than ever to realizing his goal.

This is why peace negotiations with Russia must focus primarily on establishing long-term security guarantees that are sufficiently credible to convince the Kremlin. Anything less will be viewed in Moscow as yet more proof of Western weakness and interpreted as a tacit invitation to go further. After all, that has been the pattern ever since the Russian invasion first began in 2014. Putin’s campaign to destroy Ukraine has been gradually unfolding in plain sight for over a decade and already ranks among the worst crimes of the twenty-first century. If Western leaders choose to ignore this and push ahead with a bad peace while leaving Ukraine without the support and security it needs to survive, they will be complicit in all that follows.

Peter Dickinson is editor of the Atlantic Council’s UkraineAlert service.

Ukraine’s IT sector offers opportunities for pragmatic partnership with the US

Anatoly Motkin, Hanna Myshko — Thu, 27 Feb 2025 21:03:50 +0000

As the new Trump administration reassesses its foreign partnerships through a lens of transactional pragmatism, Ukraine’s IT sector presents a potentially compelling case for deepening bilateral cooperation.

While Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has sought to maintain strong ties with the United States, the current shift away from aid-based diplomacy signals that Ukraine must further demonstrate its economic value. In this context, the thriving Ukrainian IT industry is a key asset. This sector not only drives domestic economic resilience, but also offers tangible benefits to American businesses through investment, technological innovation, and cybersecurity expertise.

Since the onset of Russia’s full-scale invasion three years ago, Ukraine’s IT industry has proven to be a resilient and dynamic force. Despite the ongoing war with Russia, the sector has demonstrated remarkable adaptability. In 2024, Ukraine’s IT services exports reached $6.45 billion, contributing 4.4 percent of the country’s GDP and accounting for approximately 38 percent of Ukraine’s total service exports. This strong performance has been possible despite the challenges posed by the largest European invasion since World War II, underscoring the Ukrainian IT sector’s ability to operate under extreme conditions.

Beyond its financial contribution, the Ukrainian IT industry also plays a crucial role in employment. By 2024, Ukraine’s IT workforce had grown to more than 300,000 specialists, solidifying its position as a major employer and a pillar of Ukrainian economic stability in today’s wartime environment.

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The United States is already an important partner for Ukraine’s IT industry. In 2023, the US was the largest importer of Ukrainian IT services, accounting for $2.39 billion or 37.2 percent of the industry’s total exports. This presents opportunities for intensified bilateral collaboration in both the private and public sectors that have the potential to transcend the kind of aid-based relations found elsewhere in the region.

Ukrainian IT companies are not seeking handouts but are actively investing in the US market. Rather than displacing American jobs, they are creating new opportunities and fostering technological advancements. Importantly, these companies are not appropriating US technologies but are in many cases sharing their own advanced developments. This cooperative approach could strengthen both economies, reinforcing a business-driven relationship that aligns with the Trump administration’s strategic vision.

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The knowledge-based economy benefits immensely from such international partnerships. Unlike resource-dependent models, this framework ensures a two-way exchange of expertise. Ukraine’s IT professionals are already playing a significant role in cybersecurity, actively defending against digital threats and ensuring the integrity of critical infrastructure. From the early days of Russia’s full-scale invasion, they have consistently delivered in even the most difficult of circumstances and have enhanced Ukraine’s global reputation as a leading tech nation.

Moreover, the war has propelled Ukrainian engineers to the forefront of innovation in autonomous systems including aerial, maritime, and other drone technologies. Many of Ukraine’s most recent innovations in the drone sphere leverage AI. The depth of experience gained in developing and deploying these systems under real combat conditions is unparalleled worldwide. For the US defense industry, collaboration with Ukraine in this domain could be invaluable, offering access to battle-tested innovations that have the potential to redefine modern warfare.

The obvious synergies between the US and Ukrainian tech industries extends beyond the private sector. Cooperation in areas such as dual-use technologies should be prioritized by both governments to enhance security and drive innovation. Strengthening this partnership could contribute to a safer and more prosperous future for both nations.

By leveraging Ukraine’s IT expertise, the United States can improve its own technological capabilities while supporting a partner nation at a critical time. This partnership can bring further economic and strategic benefits to both parties. As the Trump administration moves toward a business-driven approach to US foreign policy, strengthening ties with Ukraine’s IT sector could boost innovation and security while also offering a range of business opportunities.

Anatoly Motkin is president of StrategEast, a non-profit organization with offices in the United States, Ukraine, Georgia, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan dedicated to developing knowledge-driven economies in the Eurasian region. Hanna Myshko is regional director for Ukraine, Moldova, and the Gulf at StrategEast.

Today, the EU and India see each other as potential sources of stability within an increasingly turbulent geopolitical landscape. India and the EU need each other more than ever, especially on issues like connectivity, trade, technological advancements, and security and defense cooperation. This trip could go a long way in cementing strategic priorities for both sides—that is, if they can move past roadblocks that have thus far hindered deeper cooperation.

—Rachel Rizzo is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Europe Center.

Why is the visit important for India?

This high-profile visit by von der Leyen and most members of the College of Commissioners is a crucial moment for India. The EU is India’s top trading partner, and with India’s economy on pace to become the world’s third largest by 2030, deeper engagement with Europe is a necessary strategy.

While caution about US actions under Trump and the push to de-risk from China may be catalysts for this engagement, there are ample reasons for the EU and India to pursue a stronger bilateral relation for its own sake. Fundamentally, the two have complementary interests, and though consensus has not always been easy, both sides have taken outreach seriously.

In a little more than a year, Modi has visited Greece, Italy, France, Austria, Poland, and Ukraine. The visits to the latter three countries were firsts by an Indian prime minister. Indian ministers have had further bilateral meetings with European counterparts. Engaging with the larger European Commission leadership represents a deepening of these interactions with Europe.

During this week’s meetings, India is looking to strengthen its trade and investment partnership with Europe and develop bilateral technology and defense cooperation with the EU. With an EU-India trade agreement in the pipeline for seventeen years now, the next few years will be crucial for India to take trade relations with Europe to the next level. Additionally, the proposed India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC) serves as a building block for India’s strategy on connectivity with its Western continental partners, while counterbalancing China.

—Srujan Palkar is a global India fellow at the Atlantic Council.

What’s on the agenda?

Modi has made great strides—especially as India prepared for its Group of Twenty (G20) presidency last year—on both physical and digital infrastructure investments, which will help lay the groundwork for more collaboration with the EU. As of now, the partners plan to host a plenary session focused on trade, economic security, and supply-chain resilience. The second meeting of the EU-India Trade and Technology Council (TTC) will take place during this trip, with talks likely to focus on clean technologies, digital infrastructure, and the compatibility of trade systems.

At the same time, beyond these official conversations, the two sides should focus on making real movement on major regional connectivity projects, such as the IMEC. This could help build momentum on broader projects that have thus far been elusive, such as an EU-India free trade agreement. Similarly, European Defense Commissioner Andrius Kubilius could meet with India’s defense minister to talk about defense cooperation, maritime security, counterterrorism, and India’s role in the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue.

With the Trump administration shutting down the US Agency for International Development and significantly curbing US global economic and infrastructure investments, there’s also an opportunity for the two sides to talk about how the EU could fill this gap, especially through its Global Gateway project.

While there are many areas of potential progress, there are unfortunately also issues that continue to make the relationship difficult. These include barriers on trade, intellectual property rights, regulatory environment challenges, the EU’s bureaucracy, and the human-rights situation in India. The hope is that the EU and India can use this visit to better understand each other’s perspectives and priorities and, for their mutual benefit, move past the issues that have plagued the relationship thus far. If the EU and India can do this, then the partnership could be a defining piece of today’s global political, technological, investment, and security environment.

—Rachel Rizzo

With most of the European commissioners visiting with von der Leyen and sitting down for meetings with their counterparts, this is a big step for both European autonomy and enhancing the relationship between the world’s two largest democracies, as the EU refers to India and the bloc. Fundamentally, India and the EU will want to pursue an agenda of bolstering security and trade cooperation, increasing talent-sharing, refreshing the EU-India Strategic Partnership roadmap, and deepening collaboration through the EU-India TTC.

In particular, the EU-India TTC, established in 2022, is meant to foster collaboration in strategic technologies, green energy, and resilient supply chains. It includes issues such as artificial intelligence, 6G, semiconductors, cybersecurity, and digital governance, while also supporting India’s decarbonization efforts through initiatives such as the National Green Steel Mission. The TTC aims to strengthen trade and investment by enhancing supply-chain resilience and economic de-risking. Though many of its initiatives are still in the early stages, both sides recognize the need for tangible progress in trade, investment, and technology cooperation.

Along with the IMEC, do not be surprised to see ideas about skilled workers from India filling the EU’s demand for labor. Germany has led on this, but the EU can be an effective intermediary in the federated structure. While bilateral dialogues with EU countries will be important, a coherent EU messaging strategy will be pivotal for India to effectively partner with Europe on trade and mobility.

Lastly, despite differences between Brussels and New Delhi on India’s approach to the war in Ukraine, these engagements show that Ukraine’s staunch allies in the EU are choosing to work with India rather than isolate it. This should allow the EU and India to communicate through differences more effectively while strengthening common causes.

—Srujan Palkar

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How the Houthis’ strikes on US MQ-9 Reaper drones serve a wider regional agenda

Leonardo Jacopo Maria Mazzucco — Wed, 26 Feb 2025 21:05:54 +0000

On December 28, 2024, Yahya Sare’e, the spokesperson for the Houthis, announced that a Houthi surface-to-air missile shot down a US MQ-9 Reaper unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) overflying the Al Bayda governorate in Yemen. Four days later, the Houthis boasted the downing of a second US-made drone in the Marib governorate, marking the first Houthi strike of an MQ-9 Reaper in 2025.

These attacks represent the latest in a long string of successful Houthi strikes against US UAVs since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war, showcasing the Houthis’ growing offensive capabilities.

For the Yemeni militant group, imposing a heavy toll on the US drone fleet serves tactical, strategic, and symbolic goals at the domestic and regional levels. The strikes against MQ-9 Reaper drones impair US intelligence and targeting systems and help the Houthis shore up domestic and regional support. And, with the Houthis’ ties to China, Russia, and Iran, downed MQ-9 Reaper drones could end up in the hands of US adversaries.

Given the benefits the Houthis continue to enjoy from shooting down these drones, the United States needs to adjust its drone deployment strategy to ensure that MQ-9 Reapers are less vulnerable to the militant group’s attacks.

The offensive

The surge of attacks on US UAVs and the anti-shipping campaign are major pieces of the Houthi’s latest offensive. Since mid-November 2023, the Houthis have held Red Sea freedom of navigation and seaborne commerce hostage, launching hundreds of attacks on merchant vessels. Framing its anti-shipping campaign as an act of solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza, the Houthis have delivered a severe blow to maritime traffic in the commercial artery connecting the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean.

Quickly after the Houthis’ campaign against Red Sea shipping began, the Yemeni armed group significantly broadened its targets to any ship owned or operated by international shipping lines whose vessels service Israel’s ports. Yet, the group’s limited identification and tracking capabilities led to attacks on ships with no official links to Israel, including occasional strikes on Chinese– and Russian-linked vessels (which have since been largely spared from Houthi attacks following Iran-facilitated deals to ensure their safe transit).

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As the Red Sea basin’s maritime security deteriorated in 2023, the United States and the European Union sought to deter the Houthis by setting up multinational naval coalitions: Operation Prosperity Guardian and Operation Aspides. Though successful in countering dozens of Houthi attacks on commercial vessels, Western maritime security missions only partially restored the safety of shipping lanes. In 2024, the United States and the United Kingdom launched Operation Poseidon Archer to conduct precise air strikes on military targets in Yemen’s Houthi-controlled territories. The Houthi naval offensive’s operational tempo appears to have reduced in recent months, with the most recent attack on merchant ships occurring in mid-November 2024.

Since 2002, the United States has regularly fielded UAVs such as the MQ-9 Reaper for surveillance and strike missions in Yemen, especially for gathering intelligence on and eliminating operatives affiliated with al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Despite their protracted deployment, the number of US drones lost to hostile fire was minimal, with only three MQ-9 Reapers shot down by the Houthis between 2017 and 2019.

During the Houthis’ anti-shipping campaign, there has been a marked escalation in the group’s tactical proficiency against US drones. Since November 2023, the Houthis have claimed responsibility for downing fourteen MQ-9 Reaper drones, in a series of attacks that have targeted US assets primarily in Marib and Sa’ada governorates. The intensifying operational tempo and increasing success rate of Houthi attacks on US drones are unprecedented, showcasing the militia’s improved marksmanship and expanding offensive capabilities.

While it isn’t clear what exactly is in the Houthi missile force, and thus is bolstering this offensive capability, a rough sense can be gleaned from Houthi military parades and from seizures of military-grade materials from dhows smuggling Iran’s lethal aid. The Houthi arsenal of surface-to-air missiles includes Russian-made missiles originating from prewar Yemeni army stocks, such as the SA-6/Faster (Innovator) surface-to-air missile and the Thaqib (Piercer) missile family. In addition, the Houthis claim to produce indigenous missile designs. However, those designs are either variants of Iranian weapon systems or based on Iran’s technology, such as the Sayyad-2C (Hunter) missile, the Saqr series (Iran’s 358 missile), and the Barq missile family (Iran’s Taer series).

Inside the Houthis’ strategy

Tactically, the Houthi shootdowns of MQ-9 drones primarily aim to blind the US intelligence and targeting systems. Operation Poseidon Archer significantly relies on data gathered by UAVs to plan US-UK joint air strikes on hostile ground targets in Houthi-controlled territories. Although designed to be a top-notch “hunter-kill” drone, the MQ-9 Reaper also plays an important role in intelligence gathering, surveillance, and recognition thanks to its twenty-four-hour endurance and maximum operational altitude of fifty-thousand feet. The intensification of Poseidon Archer’s precision strikes on Houthi radar, storage, and launch sites compelled the group to rely more on underground facilities and hideouts in Yemen’s rugged interior. The Houthis’ efforts to conceal strategic sites have heightened the Western coalition’s dependence on UAVs to collect actionable intelligence on military installations.

For the Houthis, the shootdowns of US drones also hold symbolic value. Direct armed confrontation with the United States and Israel is part and parcel of its ideological foundation. Wanting to be seen as capable of standing up to the United States, the Houthis have heavily propagandized the downing of MQ-9 Reapers. For instance, as noted by Mohammed Al-Basha (founder of the consultancy Basha Report), the Houthis have turned the US UAV into the main character of a satirical song titled baw-wart (“useless” in local slang) that mocks the drone’s poor combat capabilities.

The Houthis have also sought to strengthen domestic political legitimacy and gain regional recognition by attacking US aerial assets. The shootdowns of US drones boost morale for Houthi supporters at a time of great hardship under Western and Israeli air strikes. From a regional standpoint, claiming the destruction of MQ-9s has allowed the Houthis to portray themselves as the most lethal member of the Iran-led Axis of Resistance and to win the sympathy of anti-US and pro-Palestinian voices in the Arab world.

However, the Houthis’ claims warrant skepticism. The insurgent group is well known for its propaganda operations, including wielding unverifiable declarations to inflate the perception of its military performance. Since the anti-shipping campaign’s onset, the Houthis have often vaunted successful strikes on US naval assets deployed in the Red Sea, although US Central Command has been swift to say such claims are false. Similarly, the downing of MQ-9 Reapers represents a powerful attention-grabber to trumpet the Houthis’ offensive air warfare capabilities. Factual or not, these claims serve to inflate the Houthis’ perceived combat strength and burnish their image as a militia capable of confronting US forces head-on.

The Houthis’ dangerous partners

Although the MQ-9 Reapers have been shot down over Yemen, the negative ramifications of these Houthi attacks on US military assets could spill over beyond the country’s borders. After the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, there has been a marked acceleration in military cooperation, diplomatic coordination, and symbolic support between the Houthis and Iran (the group’s most crucial lifeline), Russia, China, and other regional armed groups in the Tehran-led Axis of Resistance.

Russia has significantly deepened political engagements with the Houthis, showcasing diplomatic solidarity with the group’s military actions and offering a counterweight to Washington’s hardline position against it at the United Nations Security Council (UNSC). In addition, US intelligence revealed that Iran mediated talksbetween Russia and the Houthis that led to Moscow supplying Russian-made advanced anti-ship cruise missiles to the group. It also reported the forward basing of Russian military advisors in Yemen, which allegedly provided the Houthis with ship tracking data and targeting guidance to increase the precision of attacks on commercial shipping.

Similarly to Moscow, Beijing seems to have intensified engagement with the Houthis since mid-November 2023. Beijing reportedly struck a deal with the militia to ensure safe passage for Chinese-flagged commercial ships. The Houthis have allegedly benefitted from China’s neutral stance at the UNSC and the procurement of Chinese-made military and dual-use components to support its domestic military-industrial base.

While motivated by different strategic goals, each of these actors share similar deep-rooted anti-West sentiments, a common denominator that the Houthis have sought to leverage to their advantage. In this regard, the militant group could offer Yemen and the Red Sea as battlegrounds from which Washington’s adversaries can get their hands on US military hardware. Anti-Western forces could have their eye on accessing US-made technology components for multiple purposes: They could attempt to reverse engineer the components, design tailored countermeasures, and obtaining potentially sensitive information stored in the MQ-9 Reapers. For Iran, getting access to US military equipment has long been a coveted prize. For instance, in mid-2019, Iran rushed to retrieve a US Navy MQ-4C Triton that the IRGC shot down over the Strait of Hormuz. But getting access to US-made technology could prove useful for others as well, including China, which faces heightening competition in the Indo-Pacific.

Bolstering the MQ-9 Reaper’s defenses

The MQ-9 Reaper is the backbone of the United States’s UAV fleet, providing US military planners with tactical depth into Yemen’s rugged interior. However, despite its technical edge over the Houthis’ missile force, it has proved vulnerable to basic anti-air weapon systems. Undoubtedly, the deployment of drones remains a preferable alternative to manned aircraft when operating in a high-risk environment such as Yemen. Yet, the rate of MQ-9 drones lost in combat since mid-November 2023 warrants attention from US military strategists. MQ-9 Reapers are worth around thirty million dollars apiece, and losing them at this pace—nearly one a month over the fifteen-month anti-shipping campaign, according to Houthi claims—is not sustainable.

Although the Houthi missile arsenal remains a low-tier threat to US aerial assets, the group has proved capable of partially blunting the United States’ combat edge, denting US air superiority, and exposing significant vulnerabilities in the MQ-9 Reaper’s defense layers. Washington’s adversaries could seek to capitalize on these gaps to further their strategic interests. After the Israel-Hamas cease-fire was brokered in January, the Houthis vowed to scale down their naval offensive, but freedom of safe navigation is far from being restored in the Red Sea. Washington should take advantage of the current lull in Houthi attacks to adjust its drone deployment strategy and accelerate the integration of self-protection kits into the MQ-9 Reaper that bolster its survivability against hostile fire. For example, such kits could include active and passive countermeasure systems against cyber and radio frequency or infrared threats.

Since November 2023, the Houthis have successfully turned the shootdowns of MQ-9 drones into a propaganda boon to tout their military performance domestically and abroad. Should the group conclude that keeping up attacks on US aircraft pays dividends, the Houthis are likely to intensify strikes on US assets. The group’s strong determination to heighten military confrontation with Washington can be seen in attempted strikes on February 19, in which Houthi rebels reportedly fired surface-to-air missiles at a US F-16 fighter jet and MQ-9 Reaper drone (but the missiles did not strike their targets).

The United States needs to keep its guard up. As the security conditions remain volatile in the Red Sea, MQ-9 Reaper drones are poised to keep playing a paramount role in strengthening the United States’ threat awareness over the Houthi menace.

Leonardo Jacopo Maria Mazzucco is a researcher who focuses on the security affairs of the Gulf region. He is also an analyst at Gulf State Analytics, a Washington DC-based geopolitical risk consultancy. Follow him on X: @mazz_Leonardo.

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Warrick quoted in Salon on the lack of answers fueling drone paranoia in the US

Atlantic Council — Tue, 25 Feb 2025 18:14:26 +0000

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WIn Fellowship mentioned in Arab News on its event discussing AI’s role in driving economic growth in Saudi Arabia

Atlantic Council — Tue, 25 Feb 2025 18:13:45 +0000

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China’s Year of the Snake is off to a good start, thanks in part to Trump

Frederick Kempe — Tue, 25 Feb 2025 12:00:00 +0000

China has had a remarkably good month.

While US President Donald Trump’s first weeks in office have his allies reeling and Americans uncertain as they sort out his torrent of executive orders, Beijing is orchestrating a masterclass of reinvention and resolve.

It all began in late January with artificial intelligence (AI) startup DeepSeek’s surprising debut, which jolted US stock markets. That was followed this past week by Chinese President Xi Jinping’s public mending of fences with his country’s sidelined business elites, and an ongoing surge in Chinese capital-market prices, driven by tech stocks. And that has been accompanied by a surprisingly cordial beginning with the new Trump administration despite Beijing’s unsettling military assertiveness.

To be sure, none of China’s underlying problems have vanished. Its economy is growing too slowly, and its debt issues continue to cast a cloud over the property sector. Few serious experts think that the Chinese economy will reach its 5 percent growth target this year. In addition, Beijing’s demographic problems are a generational challenge. And Xi’s insistence on strict Chinese Communist Party control remains a disincentive for investment.

At this moment, two stories are being told about China, RAND researcher Gerard DiPippo pointed out in a recent analysis. China is racing ahead as an economic and technological powerhouse, and China’s economy is slowing under the weight of its mounting problems. “Although these narratives appear contradictory, both are true,” DiPippo argues.

Seek the limelight

No development marked a more powerful shift in the global mood toward China than the release and immediate success of DeepSeek’s reasoning model. Once shrouded in mystery, the breakthrough is now the symbol of China’s potential to rival the United States at less cost and despite export controls on the most advanced US microchips.

In areas where many have assumed that US companies are in the lead—AI, data analytics, quantum computing—Beijing has declared “game on.” Countries that have been betting tens of billions of dollars on the United States’ technological edge are now left wondering just how quickly China will be able to close any technological gap.

If DeepSeek caught investors off guard about Chinese capability to compete on AI, Xi surprised them again on February 17 with a high-profile, deeply choreographed meeting with Chinese business leaders. It was a shift by Xi, who had sidelined some of these leaders in recent years as he consolidated power, sensing that their growing success might be a threat to party and state control.

The most unexpected attendee at Xi’s meeting was Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma, who had fallen afoul of the party after he publicly complained about overregulation in October 2020. It remains a safe bet that Xi doesn’t intend to cede state control to the private sector, but his urgent need for economic growth means that he must provide it more leash. At the same time, he is sending a message to markets.

Take the lead

Global investors have responded with one of the biggest market surprises of 2025: the comeback of the Chinese tech sector, which many global investors had abandoned in recent years due to Xi’s regulatory crackdown.

The Hang Seng Tech Index, which tracks Chinese stocks traded in Hong Kong, surged 6.5 percent alone this past Friday. Shares of Alibaba, now with more official blessing, rose 15 percent that same day after robust sales growth. Since the beginning of the year, Chinese stocks have outperformed many of their US counterparts.

Many global investors are now willing to place bets on Beijing’s new direction, even as they begin to hedge on uncertainties related to the Trump administration’s actions and potential US inflation.

Washington’s recalibration

Trump himself is fueling this change of mood regarding China. Having threatened tariffs as high as 60 percent against China during his presidential campaign, his softening of tone as president has soothed Chinese nerves. Trump’s gestures have included an invitation to Xi to attend his inauguration, an executive order that has brought a reprieve to the banning of TikTok, and an imposition of a relatively modest 10 percent tariff on China that Chinese leaders seem to have received with more relief than disdain.

If relations between China and the United States in recent months seemed to be a powder keg ready to ignite, then Trump appears to have pulled the fuse. He has done this through his willingness to engage with Beijing and his apparent lack of concern for Xi’s gathering autocratic challenge to US global leadership, including China increasingly acting in concert with Russia, Iran, and North Korea.

Trump’s dramatic recalibration this past week regarding Russian President Vladimir Putin further boosted Xi—someone whom Trump, only days earlier in Davos, had blamed for complicity in Russia’s war against Ukraine. While the Biden administration often warned that losing Ukraine would only encourage China in its aspirations to gain control of Taiwan, the Trump administration appears less convinced of the connection.

China also rightly senses a potential opening among Washington’s European allies and even with Ukraine. Despite China’s support for Putin’s war, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has been careful not to close the door to engaging with Beijing. China has even signaled its willingness to provide troops for a peacekeeping role in Ukraine, while Trump has ruled out the use of US soldiers for such purposes.

Beijing’s maneuvers

China may sense another opening, as well. Beijing’s military moves in the past month underscore that Xi sees little downside to greater military assertiveness in the first days of the new Trump administration.

Last week, New Zealand’s government said that the Chinese navy held live-fire drills in international waters off its coast. This came just a day after Chinese vessels staged a similar drill off Australia’s southwestern coast that forced some commercial airlines to divert their flights.

During the recent Lunar New Year celebrations, China’s People’s Liberation Army increased military maneuvers around Taiwan. And on February 18, a Chinese navy helicopter flew within ten feet of a Philippine patrol plane in an effort to force it out of disputed skies.

“You are flying too close, you are very dangerous,” the Philippine pilot warned by radio.

It adds up to a remarkable start of the year for China. The emergence of DeepSeek, Xi’s olive branch to Ma and others, an ongoing market rally led by tech stocks, Trump’s conciliatory approach amid Beijing’s muscular military posturing—all contribute to increased Chinese confidence in 2025, which is the Year of the Snake, symbolizing transformation and the shedding of negativity.

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on X: @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points newsletter, a column of dispatches from a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

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Issue brief: A NATO strategy for countering Russia

Ian Brzezinski, Ryan Arick — Thu, 20 Feb 2025 19:56:35 +0000

Europe Center Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security

Key takeaways

Russia is the most direct and significant threat to the security of NATO member states—and since Moscow’s invasion of Georgia in 2008 this threat continues to grow. It now encompasses the war in Ukraine, the militarization of the Arctic, hybrid warfare, and violations of arms control treaties.
While NATO holds a significant advantage over Russia in military and economic power, an effective and unified strategy is needed to counter Russia’s aggression and fully harness the Alliance’s collective capabilities.
To effectively counter Russia, NATO must defeat Russia in Ukraine, deter Russian aggression against NATO allies and partners, contain Russian influence beyond its borders, and degrade Russia’s ability and will to accomplish its revisionist agenda. That will require, among other actions, a significant increase of support and commitment to Ukraine’s defense against Russia, and a more robust Alliance force posture including the modernization of its nuclear deterrent, the permanent stationing of brigade elements along NATO’s eastern frontier and increased defense industrial capacities.

Russia is “the most significant and direct threat to Allies’ security.” So states the NATO Strategic Concept promulgated at the Alliance’s Madrid Summit in June 2022, just four months after Russia’s massive escalation of its invasion of Ukraine.¹ The concept and NATO declarations not only underscore the illegality and brutality of that ongoing attack but also highlight Moscow’s use of nuclear and conventional military aggression, annexation, subversion, sabotage, and other forms of coercion and violence against NATO allies and partners.

Ever since its invasion of Georgia in 2008, Russia’s aggression against the Alliance has steadily intensified. This led NATO leaders at their 2024 Washington Summit to task the development of “recommendations on NATO’s strategic approach to Russia, taking into account the changing security environment.”² The Alliance’s “Russia strategy” is due for consideration at NATO’s next summit at The Hague in June 2025.³ This issue brief reviews Moscow’s actions affecting the security of the Euro-Atlantic area and presents the enduring realities, objectives, and actions that should constitute the core of an effective NATO strategy to counter the threat posed by Russia.

Intensified and globalized Russian aggression

Russia’s objectives go far beyond the subordination of Ukraine. Moscow seeks to reassert hegemony and control over the space of the former Soviet Union, diminish the power of the democratic community of nations, and delegitimize the international rules-based order. Moscow aims to subjugate its neighbors and to weaken—if not shatter—NATO, the key impediment to its European ambitions.

Toward these ends and under the leadership of President Vladimir Putin, Russia:

Has illegally occupied Moldova’s Transnistria region since the early 1990s.
Invaded Georgia in 2008, has continued to occupy portions of that country, and recently increased its influence, if not control, over the nation’s governance.
Invaded Ukraine in 2014 and significantly escalated this ongoing war in February 2022.
Militarized the Arctic by increasing its military presence in the region, including through reopening Soviet-era bases and building new facilities to buttress Russian territorial claims over Arctic waters.
Leveraged trade and energy embargoes and other forms of economic pressure to intimidate and coerce its European neighbors.
Conducts an escalating campaign of active measures short of war against NATO allies and partners, including information warfare, election interference, sabotage, assassination, weaponized migration, cyberattacks, GPS jamming, and other actions.
Expanded its conventional and nuclear military capabilities, an effort that was part of President Putin’s preparations to invade Ukraine.
Violated, suspended, and abrogated international arms control agreements, including New START Treaty, the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), the Open Skies Agreement, and others.⁴

Enduring realities

A NATO strategy to counter Russia’s aggression is long overdue. Its absence cedes to Russia the initiative, leaving the Alliance too often in a reactive, if not indecisive and passive, posture in this relationship. An effective strategy requires recognition of nine enduring realities:

First, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was a failure of deterrence. The weakness of the Alliance’s response to Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine, NATO’s failure to respond forcefully to Russia’s months long mobilization of forces along Ukraine’s frontiers in 2021, and NATO’s acquiescence to Putin’s exercise of nuclear coercion emboldened and facilitated Putin’s actions against Ukraine. As a result, the credibility of the Alliance’s commitment to defend resolutely its interests and values has been damaged.

A destroyed Russian tank remains on the side of the road near the frontline town of Kreminna, amid Russia’s attack on Ukraine, in Luhansk region, Ukraine March 24, 2023. REUTERS/Violeta Santos Moura

Second, Russia is at war, not just against Ukraine. It is also at war against NATO. The Alliance can no longer approach the relationship as one of competition or confrontation considering the military invasions, active measures, and other forms of violence and coercion Russia has undertaken against NATO allies and partners.⁵ As former US Deputy Secretary of State Stephen Biegun has written, “Quite simply, Putin has declared war on the West, but the West does not yet understand we are at war with Russia.”⁶ By failing to recognize this reality, NATO has ceded escalation dominance to Russia as evidenced by its limiting of support to Ukraine and its inaction against repeated Russian aggression and provocations. The Alliance must recognize and act upon the reality that Moscow has pushed the NATO-Russia relationship into the state of war.

Third, NATO faces long-term conflict with Russia. Putin cannot be expected to abandon his ambitions, even if defeated in Ukraine. Ever since Putin’s speech before the February 2007 Munich Security Conference in which he railed against the international order and NATO’s expanding membership, Russia’s campaign to subjugate its neighbors and to intimidate, divide, and weaken the Alliance has been unceasing and relentless. Nor can the Alliance assume that Putin’s successor will significantly diverge from the objectives and policies that drive Russia’s actions today. Peaceful coexistence with Russia is not attainable in the short to medium term and will be difficult to attain in the long term.

Quite simply, Putin has declared war on the West, but the West does not yet understand we are at war with Russia.

—Stephen Biegun, former US Deputy Secretary of State

Fourth, Russia will continue efforts to increase the size and capability of its armed forces. While Russian land forces have suffered significant losses in its invasion of Ukraine, Moscow has reconstituted that force faster than expected. Russia’s land forces were estimated to be 15 percent larger in April 2024 than when Russia attacked Kyiv in February 2022.⁷ Earlier this year, Russia announced new ambitious plans to restructure and expand its ground forces to 1.5 million active personnel.⁸ Moreover, the Russian air force and navy have not been significantly degraded by the war against Ukraine. Russia’s air force has only lost some 10 percent of its aircraft. While Russian naval ships have been destroyed in the Black Sea, Russian naval activity worldwide has increased.⁹ Similarly, Russian nuclear forces have been unaffected by the conflict in Ukraine. Russia retains the world’s largest arsenal of deployed and nondeployed nuclear weapons and continues to develop new models of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM) and intermediate range ballistic missiles (IRBM), hypersonic boost-glide vehicles, nuclear-powered cruise missiles, nuclear-powered subsurface drones, antisatellite weapons, and orbital space weapons.¹⁰ With some 6 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) being directed to its military, Moscow is investing to increase its defense-industrial and research and development capacities.¹¹ Russia’s industrial base produces more ammunition than that produced by all NATO members and is fielding new high-tech weapons systems, such as the nuclear-capable multiple warhead IRBM Oreshnik Russia, which was demonstrated in combat against Ukraine last November.¹² In April 2024, NATO SACEUR General Christopher Cavoli testified to the US Congress that:

“Russia is on track to command the largest military on the continent and a defense industrial complex capable of generating substantial amounts of ammunition and material in support of large-scale combat operations. Regardless of the outcome of the war in Ukraine, Russia will be larger, more lethal and angrier with the West than when it invaded.”¹³

Fifth, Moscow’s aggressive actions short of war will continue and escalate. Putin has yet to face a response from the Alliance that will dissuade him from further exercising information warfare, cyber warfare, energy and trade embargoes, assassination, GPS jamming, sabotage, fomenting separatist movements, and other forms of hybrid warfare. These actions are intended to intimidate governments; weaken the credibility of the Alliance’s security guarantee; create and exacerbate internal divisions; and divide allies, among other objectives. Left unchecked, they threaten to undermine the Alliance’s ability to attain consensus necessary to take decisive action against Russia.

Sixth, Moscow’s exercise of nuclear coercion will continue as a key element of Russia’s strategy and should be expected to intensify. Threats of nuclear warfare are a key element of Putin’s strategy to preclude NATO and its members from providing Ukraine support that would enable it to decisively defeat Russia’s invasion. This repeated exercise of nuclear coercion includes verbal threats from President Putin and other senior Russian officials; the launching of nuclear capable ICBMs; the use of a nuclear capable IRBM against Ukraine, the first use of such a system in a conflict; nuclear weapons exercises; and the deployment of nuclear weapons to Belarus, according to both Russia and Belarus.¹⁴ NATO allies have repeatedly rewarded this coercion by expressing fear of nuclear war; declaring that NATO forces will not enter Ukraine; restricting NATO’s role in assisting Ukraine; limiting the flow of weapons to Ukraine; and restricting their use against legitimate military targets in Russia. Rewarding nuclear coercion encourages its repeated exercise and escalation. It risks leading Russia to conclude it has attained escalation dominance. A key challenge for NATO going forward will be to demonstrate that Russia’s threats of nuclear strikes are counterproductive, and the Alliance cannot be deterred by nuclear coercion.

NATO leaders stand together for a photo at NATO’s 75th anniversary summit in Washington in July 2024. REUTERS/Yves Herman

Seventh, Moscow is conducting a global campaign of aggression to weaken the democratic community of nations and the rules-based international order. Over the last two decades, Russia has exercised its military, informational, and economic assets to generate anti-Western sentiment across the globe, including in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and the Indo-Pacific region. This has included military support to authoritarian, anti-Western regimes well beyond Europe, including Venezuela, Syria, and Mali. The most concerning element of Russia’s global campaign is the partnerships it has operationalized with China, Iran, and North Korea. Russia’s “no limits partnership” with China enables Putin to mitigate the impacts of Western sanctions on his war economy. Both Iran and North Korea have provided Russia with weapons and ammunition, and North Korean soldiers have joined Russia’s fight against Ukraine. In return, Russia has supplied missile and nuclear technologies, oil and gas, and economic support to these nations that enables them to stoke violence across the Middle East, threaten the Korean Peninsula, and drive forward Beijing’s hegemonic ambitions in the Indo-Pacific region.

Eighth, an effective Russia strategy will require a coordinated leveraging of all the instruments of power available through the Alliance, its member states, and its key partners, including the European Union. This includes the application of diplomatic, economic, ideological, informational, and other elements of power—none of which are the Alliance’s primary capacity, military power—that can be marshaled through its members states and multinational institutions, such as the European Union, where the Alliance and its member states have influence and authority.

Ninth, NATO significantly overmatches Russia in military and economic power.
NATO Headquarters estimates the combined GDP of Alliance member states to be $54 trillion, more than twenty-five times Russia’s estimated GDP of more than $2 trillion.¹⁵ The combined defense budget of NATO members amounts to approximately $1.5 trillion,¹⁶ more than ten times that of Russia’s publicly projected defense budget of $128 billion for 2025.¹⁷ This imbalance of power favoring the Alliance will be enduring and makes the execution of an effective Russia strategy not a matter of capacity, but one of strategic vision and political will.

Core objectives

To counter the direct and significant threat posed by Moscow, a NATO strategy for Russia should be structured around four core objectives:¹⁸

Defeat Russia in Ukraine: NATO must defeat Russia’s war against Ukraine. This is its most urgent priority. Failure to do so—and failure includes the conflict’s perpetuation—increases the risk of a wider war in Europe and will encourage other adversaries around the world to pursue their revisionist and hegemonic ambitions. Russia’s decisive defeat in Ukraine is essential to return stability to Europe and to reinforce the credibility of the Alliance’s deterrent posture.

Deter aggression by Russia: A key Alliance priority must be the effective deterrence of Russia aggression against the Alliance. A robust conventional and nuclear posture that deters Russian military aggression is far less costly than an active war. Deterrence must also be more effectively exercised against Russia’s actions short of war. Failure to deter aggression in this domain can undermine confidence in the Alliance and increase the risk of war.
Contain Russia’s influence and control: The Alliance must actively contain Russia’s efforts to assert influence and control beyond its borders. The Alliance must assist Europe’s non-NATO neighbors in Central and Eastern Europe, the Balkans, the Caucasus, and in Central Asia to strengthen their defenses and resilience to Russian pressure. NATO and NATO allies should also work to counter and roll back Russia’s influence and engagement around the globe.
Degrade Russia’s capabilities and determination: A core objective for the Alliance should include weakening Russia’s capacity and will to pursue its hegemonic ambitions. Denying Russia access to international markets would further degrade its economy, including its defense-industrial capacity. Active engagement of the Russian public and other key stakeholders should aim to generate opposition to Putin and the Kremlin’s international aggression.

Achievement of these objectives would compel the Kremlin to conclude that its revanchist ambitions, including the diminishment or destruction of NATO, are unachievable and self-damaging. It would diminish Russia’s will and ability to continue aggression in Europe and weaken the impact of Russia’s partnerships, including with China, Iran, and North Korea. In addition, achieving these objectives would return a modicum of stability to Europe that in the long-term would enhance the prospects for NATO’s peaceful coexistence with Russia.

Regardless of the outcome of the war in Ukraine, Russia will be larger, more lethal, and angrier with the West than when it invaded.

—Gen. Christopher Cavoli, NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe

Recommended actions

A NATO strategy to defeat, deter, contain, and degrade Russian aggression and influence should effectuate the following actions by the Alliance, its member states, and partners:

Defeat Russia in Ukraine and accelerate Ukraine’s accession into the NATO alliance Defeating Russian aggression against Ukraine requires its own strategy, which should feature five key elements: adopting Ukraine’s war objectives, including total territorial reconstitution (i.e., the Alliance must never recognize Russian sovereignty over the territories it illegally seized from Ukraine); maximizing the flow of military equipment and supplies to Ukraine, free of restrictions on their use against legitimate military targets in Russia; imposing severe economic sanctions on Russia; deploying aggressive information operations to generate opposition in Russia against Putin’s aggression; and presenting a clear, accelerated path for Ukraine to NATO membership. NATO membership, and the security guarantee it provides, would add real risk and complexity to Russian military planning. NATO membership for Ukraine is the only way to convince the Kremlin that Ukraine cannot be subject to Russian hegemony and would provide security conditions needed for Ukraine’s rapid reconstruction and economic integration into Europe.
Fulfill and operationalize NATO’s regional defense plans. To establish a credible and effective deterrent against Russian military aggression, NATO allies must:
- Build and deploy the requisite national forces. Military plans are no more than visions in the absence of required capabilities. NATO’s European and Canadian allies need to generate more forces, with requisite firepower, mobility, and enabling capacities. In short, given European allies’ obligations under NATO’s new regional defense plans, they must act with urgency.
- Strengthen transatlantic defense industrial capacity. High intensity warfare, as seen in Ukraine, consumes massive amounts of weapons stocks, much of which have to be in a near constant state of modernization to match the technological adaptations of the adversary. Today, the Alliance has struggled (and often failed) to match the defense-industrial capacity of Russia and its partners. NATO’s defense industrial base must expand its production capacities and its ability to rapidly develop, update, and field weapons systems.
- Increase allied defense spending to the equivalent of 5 percent of GDP. To facilitate the aforementioned requirements and to address emerging challenges beyond Europe that could simultaneously challenge the transatlantic community, NATO allies need to increase the agreed floor of defense spending from 2 percent to 5 percent and fulfill that new commitment with immediacy. NATO members cannot allow themselves to be forced to choose between defending against Russia and another geopolitical challenge beyond Europe.

Terminate the NATO Russia Founding Act (NRFA). Russia has repeatedly and blatantly violated the principles and commitments laid out in the Founding Act. Russia’s actions include having invaded Ukraine both in 2014 and in 2022, using nuclear coercion and escalatory rhetoric to pressue the Alliance, and deploying nonstrategic nuclear weapons to Belarus, as both Russia and Belarus have affirmed. Consequently, NATO should formally render the NRFA defunct, including the Alliance’s commitments to:
- Adhere to the “three nuclear no’s” that NATO member states “have no intention, no plan and no reason to deploy nuclear weapons on the territory of new members, nor any need to change any aspect of NATO’s nuclear posture or nuclear policy – and do not foresee any future need to do so.”¹⁹
- Abstain from permanently stationing “substantial combat forces” in Central and Eastern Europe.²⁰

Update NATO’s nuclear force posture. In response to Russia’s modernization of its nuclear arsenal, exercise of nuclear coercion, and adjustments to its nuclear strategy that lowers the threshold for first use of nuclear weapons, the Alliance must update its own nuclear posture. The objectives should be to provide NATO with a broader and more credible spectrum of nuclear weapons options. An updated force posture would improve NATO’s ability to manage, if not dominate, the ladder of conflict escalation, complicate Russian military planning, and thereby weaken Moscow’s confidence in its own military posture and its strategy of nuclear “escalation to de escalate.” Toward these ends, the Alliance should:
- Increase the spectrum of NATO’s nuclear capabilities. This should include a nuclear-armed sea-launched cruise missile (SLCM-N) and a ground-launched variant. The breadth and number of NATO nuclear weapons exercises, such as the yearly Steadfast Noon, should be expanded and further integrated with exercises of conventional forces.
- Expand the number of members participating in the Alliance’s nuclear sharing agreements. Doing so will expand the tactical options available to NATO and underscore more forcefully Alliance unity behind its nuclear posture.
- Broaden the number and locations of infrastructure capable of hosting the Alliance’s nuclear posture. The Alliance’s nuclear posture still relies solely on Cold War legacy infrastructure in Western Europe. Given the threat posed by Russia, NATO should establish facilities capable of handling nuclear weapons and dual capable systems, including nuclear weapons storage sites, in NATO member states along its eastern frontier.

Reinforce NATO’s eastern flank. Russia’s assault on Ukraine and its growing provocations against NATO member states and partners underscore the need to further reinforce the Alliance’s eastern frontier. To date, NATO’s deployments along its eastern flank amount to more of a trip-wire force rather than one designed for a strategy of defense by denial. To give greater credibility to the Alliance’s pledge not to “cede one inch” when considering a potential attack by Russia, NATO should:
- Establish a more robust permanent military presence along the Alliance’s eastern frontier. NATO is expanding its eight multinational battlegroups deployed to Central and Eastern Europe. But each of these deployments should be further upgraded to full brigades that are permanently stationed there. These elements should feature robust enabling capacities, particularly air and missile defenses and long-range fires. If the United States is expected to sustain a presence of 100,000 troops in Europe, the least Western Europe and Canada can do is to forward station some 32,000 troops combined in Central and Eastern Europe.
- Conduct large-scale, concentrated exercises on NATO’s eastern flank. The Alliance has commendably reanimated its emphasis on large-scale joint military exercises. However, those exercises have yet to be concentrated on NATO’s eastern flank. Doing so would enhance readiness, reassure the Alliance’s Central and Eastern European member states, and demonstrate resolve and preparedness in the face of Russian aggression.
- Upgrade the Alliance’s air defense and ballistic missile defense systems to more robustly address Russian threats. In its attacks on Ukraine, Russia has demonstrated with brutality its emphasis on missile and long-range drone strikes against military and civilian targets. As part of its efforts to upgrade its air and missile defense capacities, NATO should direct the European Phased Adaptive Approach to address threats from Russia.²¹

A Grad-P Partizan single rocket launcher is fired towards Russian troops by servicemen of the 110th Territorial Defence Brigade of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, amid Russia’s attack on Ukraine, on a frontline in Zaporizhzhia region, Ukraine January 21, 2025. REUTERS/Stringer

Expand the NATO SACEUR’s authority to order deployments and conduct operations along NATO’s eastern frontier. The Alliance’s regional defense plans are said to provide SACEUR with greater authority to activate and deploy NATO forces before crisis and conflict situations. Due to the aggressiveness of Russia’s ambitions, NATO should consider further expanding those authorities as they relate to the deployment and missions of forces along the Alliance’s eastern frontier. The actions of a deterrent force can be even more important than the magnitude of their presence.
Augment the Alliance’s posture in the Arctic. Russia has heavily militarized the Arctic, upgraded the status and capability of its Northern Fleet, and deepened its military cooperation with China in the region while the Kremlin continues to assert Arctic territorial claims that conflict with those of NATO allies. While NATO has been increasing the tempo of its Arctic operations and improving its Arctic capabilities, Russia continues to pose a significant threat in the region and possibly outmatches the Alliance in the High North. To further reinforce deterrence against Russian aggression in the Arctic, the Alliance should:
- Develop a comprehensive NATO strategy to defend its interests in the High North. Such a document would underscore the Alliance’s commitment to the region and help foster allied investments in infrastructure, capabilities, and training needed to defend and deter Russian threats in the High North.
- Establish a NATO Arctic Command and Joint Force. The Arctic poses a unique set of geographic and climatic challenges requiring tailored operational capabilities. A command and air-ground-naval force focused specifically on the High North would provide the Alliance a dedicated and tailored deterrent to counter Russian aggression in the Arctic.²²

Bolster deterrence against Russian actions short of war by strengthening resilience and through more assertive and punitive counteractions. NATO and NATO member states’ failure to respond robustly to Russia’s hybrid warfare—whether it is information warfare, cyberattacks, sabotage, assassinations, or other forms of aggression — has resulted in Russia’s intensification and escalation of these actions. The transatlantic community must strengthen its resilience against such attacks but also take stronger punitive measures against Russia if it is to persuade Russia to cease these attacks. While much of what needs to be done falls beyond the remit of NATO’s military capabilities, greater consideration should be given to how military assets can be leveraged to gather intelligence about Russian activity and provide a military dimension to the transatlantic community’s response to such provocations. For example, when a Russian ship fired a warning shot directed at a commercial Norwegian fishing boat within Norway’s exclusive economic zone or when Russia pulled out Estonian navigation buoys from the Narva River,²³ an immediate show of force from NATO could have been an appropriate response.
Strengthen the deterrence and resilience capacities of non-NATO nations in Europe and Russia’s periphery. Recent elections in Georgia, Moldova, and Romania reflect the intensity of Russia’s determination to claw back control and influence over the space of the former Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact. A key priority of a Russia strategy should be to strengthen efforts by the Alliance, its member states, and key institutional partners, such as the European Union, to reinforce the resilience and defense capabilities of non-NATO nations in Central and Eastern Europe, the Balkans, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. NATO’s programs, such as the Defence and Related Security Capacity Building Initiative, warrant even greater emphasis and resources, particularly in those regions.
Intensify Russia’s economic and diplomatic isolation. The current set of measures taken against Moscow in these realms have failed to sufficiently degrade Russia’s war economy and its ability to sustain its invasion of Ukraine and provocations elsewhere in the world. A key priority for NATO and its member states should be to significantly escalate economic sanctions, including the exercise of secondary sanctions to eliminate Moscow’s ability to generate international revenue from energy exports and attain critical technologies needed by its defense industrial sector.
Increase efforts to generate internal Russian opposition to the Kremlin’s revanchist objectives and greater support for democratic principles and governance. Russia has undertaken aggressive campaigns to influence the politics of NATO allies and partners. In the recent elections of Moldova and Romania, Russian intervention nearly effectuated regime change. For too long, the transatlantic community has remained on the defensive in this realm. NATO and its member states need to shift to the offensive and weaponize the power of truth to illuminate the brutal realities of Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, the corruption of Russian officials, and other realties of Russian governance. NATO allies must more actively support Russian stakeholders—particularly civil society—that are more aligned with transatlantic values. This is critical to degrading the political will of the Russian state to continue its aggressions.
Modulate dialogue with Russia, limiting it to what is operationally necessary. The Alliance should formally disband the NATO-Russia Council—which last met in 2022—until Moscow has demonstrated genuine commitment to a constructive relationship. Nonetheless, the Alliance should establish and/or maintain lines of communication between the NATO secretary general and the Kremlin, as well as between Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) and the Russian General Staff, to enable crisis management and provide transparency needed for military stability. This would not preclude NATO allies from dialogues with Russia deemed necessary, for example, to assist Ukraine or pursue arms control measures.

The bottom line

As noted, NATO possesses an overmatching capacity to defeat Russia in Ukraine, deter Russian aggression, contain Russian influence beyond its borders, and degrade Russia’s ability and will to accomplish its revisionist agenda. Today, there is no better time to achieve these objectives by fully marshaling the Alliance’s assets and potential. Moscow cannot undertake an all-out military attack on NATO without risking the viability of Russia’s armed forces and thus its regime. The accomplishment of these objectives would provide stability to Europe’s eastern frontier and establish the best foundation for an eventual relationship with Moscow that is minimally confrontational, if not cooperative and constructive. However, this will take political will and resources. Russia today is determined to prevail in Ukraine, expand its military capabilities, and further leverage its partners, particularly China, Iran, and North Korea, to defeat the community of democracies and, particularly, the Alliance. Russia already envisions itself as being at war with NATO.

About the authors

Fellow

Ian Brzezinski

Senior Fellow

Central Europe Defense Policy

Staff

Ryan Arick

Associate Director

Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security Transatlantic Security Initiative

NATO Security & Defense

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The Transatlantic Security Initiative, in the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, shapes and influences the debate on the greatest security challenges facing the North Atlantic Alliance and its key partners.

Busting the top myths about AI and energy efficiency

Josh Parker — Thu, 20 Feb 2025 14:00:00 +0000

GLOBAL ENERGY AGENDA

Josh Parker is the senior director of corporate sustainability at Nvidia. This essay is part of the Global Energy Agenda.

The rapid growth of AI in recent years has sparked an unprecedented rush of investment in data centers worldwide to develop the next generation of algorithms, fueling concerns that running these systems will push the world toward an energy crisis.

However, to determine the true impact of AI on global energy consumption, consider the full picture: 

AI computing still makes up a tiny slice of the world’s energy consumption. Data centers accounted for about 2 percent of energy-related carbon emissions in 2022, according to the International Energy Agency—and today, not all data centers run AI.

AI, powered by rapidly advancing accelerated computing technology, is becoming much more energy efficient every year.

AI delivers insights and results that can increase energy efficiency in the domains that use energy the most—including energy generation, manufacturing, transportation, and residential heating and cooling.

Recent advancements in AI and accelerated computing have enabled developers to harness more computational capabilities while using less energy. Some—in climate science, financial services, and healthcare—already are. But to achieve widespread adoption, it’s critical to separate misconceptions from reality. 

To that end, here are the top myths around AI and energy efficiency, and the long-term perspectives and facts that dispel them. 

MYTH: The carbon footprint and energy consumption of data centers will grow at the same rate as computation. 

Growing demand for computing power does not result in an equivalent rise in energy consumption. 

Global data centers saw a 550 percent increase in compute instances—which are virtual machines—and a 2,500 percent jump in storage capacity between 2010 and 2018, while electricity use rose only 6 percent, noted a report from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a Washington-based think tank. 

These initial energy savings were largely due to the effects of Moore’s Law, which predicted that the number of transistors on a chip would double approximately every two years, leading to a biannual doubling in computing power while maintaining similar energy consumption. 

However, by the mid-2010s, Moore’s Law began to slow as the physical limits of shrinking transistors became more challenging to overcome. This slowdown highlighted the need for new approaches to maintain and accelerate efficiency gains. Accelerated computing emerged as the solution, leveraging specialized hardware like graphics processing units (GPUs) to perform tasks more efficiently than central processing units (CPUs).

Today, accelerated computing is transforming the world’s data centers, with GPUs and advanced networking technology replacing traditional CPU servers that struggle to keep pace with the rise in computing demand. The parallel computing capabilities of GPUs make them twenty times more energy-efficient than CPUs. If every data center shifted from CPU-based to GPU-based infrastructure, the world would save an estimated 40 terawatt-hours of energy, equivalent to the annual energy usage of five million US homes. 

MYTH: The computing processes required to run AI systems are much more resource intensive than previous methods. 

The demand for new AI models, and therefore compute demand, is growing exponentially. The result is that AI is currently demanding more energy faster than computing is getting more efficient.

But both the performance and energy efficiency of accelerated computing increase with each GPU generation: meaning that with every advancement, developers and scientists can accomplish more compute work with less energy. Today’s most advanced AI chip matches the performance of supercomputers that were among the fastest in the world a decade ago. 

The newest GPUs deliver thirty times more compute performance with a twenty-five-fold increase in energy efficiency compared to those built just two years ago. This adds up to greater efficiency over several years by a factor of 45,000. 

MYTH: AI is consuming more energy than it will save. 

The rate of AI adoption today is resulting in short-term increases in energy usage, but one long-term view is optimistic. 

Claims of an “AI doomsday” often rely on extrapolations from published AI training statistics. But training predictive and generative AI models isn’t a goal in itself—the real goal is to use those models. The insights that an AI model provides during inference can save time and energy and reduce carbon emissions in resource-intensive domains such as agriculture, weather forecasting, transportation, manufacturing, and drug discovery.

Accelerated computing and AI can also power climate models that help global organizations more effectively predict weather patterns, manage natural disasters, build climate-resilient infrastructure, and save lives.

It takes a holistic, longitudinal view to fully calculate the efficiencies that stem from AI adoption. While many AI initiatives are currently in the infrastructure building or training phases, with widespread implementation still to come, early adopters are already seeing benefits. 

Efforts to increase energy efficiency and decarbonize buildings across industries are one critical use case for AI. In the United States, buildings are responsible for 40 percent of total energy usage—and, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, 30 percent of energy used in commercial buildings is wasted. 

Peter Herweck, former CEO of Schneider Electric, has predicted that in the next few years AI could reduce energy consumption in buildings by up to 25 percent. Data collected by smart home devices and smart meters are producing data that could train AI models to find optimizations across residential and commercial buildings.

For example, a pharmaceutical company worked with BrainBox AI, which helps customers optimize their buildings with AI, to boost equipment efficiency at its California campus, making improvements that resulted in annualized electricity savings of 156,000 kilowatt-hours.

Healthcare is energy intensive: The industry’s facilities account for close to 10 percent of commercial building energy consumption in the United States and about 4.6 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. The life-saving research processed within them is also computationally demanding.

Genome sequencing is one example. Sequencing the DNA of tumors and healthy tissues is crucial to understanding genetic drivers of cancer and identifying treatments. Using AI, the Wellcome Sanger Institute has significantly reduced the “runtime” (i.e., how long a program runs to execute its function) and energy consumption of genomic analysis—saving approximately 1,000 megawatt-hours annually and potentially reducing costs by $1 million compared to traditional CPU-based methods.

MYTH: Electric grids can’t handle the energy load of growing AI use.

AI models can be trained anywhere—and there’s a significant opportunity to build future data centers in parts of the world where there’s excess energy, such as near geothermal reservoirs, which act as 24/7 renewable energy sources, unaffected by weather conditions. 

Rather than placing every data center in urban areas that already have significant power demands, they could be built near these sources of renewable energy. Doing so minimizes transmission issues while simultaneously decreasing or eliminating operational carbon footprints.

Once they’re trained, models can be deployed to GPUs, which are twenty times more efficient for AI inference tasks than CPUs. Beyond large data centers, lightweight models optimized for inference can run anywhere—on small embedded systems on a robot or other edge device, on desktop workstations, or on cloud servers located in any part of the world.  

AI is becoming an essential technology for businesses in nearly every industry to improve productivity and enable rapid new advancements and discoveries. And although AI’s direct energy footprint is certainly growing, AI is also proving to be a powerful tool for finding ways to save energy and may very well become the best tool we have for advancing sustainability worldwide. 

All essays

Ushering the auto industry into a new energy era

By Jim Farley

Ukraine can unleash energy investment even amid war

By Volodymyr Kudrytskyi

The US must assure its energy-secure future

By Meredith Berger

The importance of US LNG for economic growth and the global energy transition

By Daniel Yergin and Madeline Jowdy

Southeast Asia aims for sustainability through connectivity

By Kok Keong Puah

Energy realities require pragmatic solutions

By Rick Muncrief

Tech and power sector partnerships can accelerate the energy transition

By Arshad Mansoor

Forging stronger transatlantic energy cooperation

By Dan Jørgensen

Latin America and the Caribbean are leading the green energy transition

By Andrés Rebolledo Smitmans

Busting the top myths about AI and energy efficiency 

By Josh Parker

The small reactor revolution can transform African energy systems

By Lassina Zerbo

Explore the program

The post Busting the top myths about AI and energy efficiency  appeared first on Atlantic Council.

The 2025 Global Energy Agenda

Landon Derentz, Christine Suh, Paul Kielstra, Bailee Mathews (Editors) — Thu, 20 Feb 2025 14:00:00 +0000

Public Event Thu, February 20, 2025 • 3:30 pm ET

The scale of political transformation that took place throughout the democratic world in 2024 will be evident when the Group of Seven (G7) convenes under new Canadian leadership later this year. Ultimately, elections last year led to a notable political shift to the right, laying the foundation for a new international energy and climate architecture.

Global affairs are only part of the story, however. The release of generative artificial intelligence (AI) models like ChatGPT and OpenAI illustrate the emergence of novel challenges with global consequences on par with those stemming from foreign affairs. For a world still largely pursuing a net-zero future, its leaders must now also contend with yet another competitive race between the United States and China, this time for dominance over key aspects of the development, deployment, and governance of a technology central to global military and economic primacy.

It’s with this backdrop that the Atlantic Council is pleased to present its fifth Global Energy Agenda. To illuminate this period of profound democratic transition, where the urgent need to secure reliable and sustainable energy systems remains a defining issue, this year’s publication shares the insights from leading industry, civil society, and government voices. As in prior years, this collection of essays is complemented by our in-depth analysis of the results of the Atlantic Council Global Energy Center’s annual global energy survey.

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Global Energy Agenda

Feb 20, 2025

Global Energy Agenda full survey results

In the fall of 2024, the Atlantic Council’s Global Energy Center surveyed global energy and climate experts to take the community’s pulse on the outlook for geopolitical energy risks, a global energy market in transition, and prospects for the net-zero imperative.

Africa Americas

Essays

Ushering the auto industry into a new energy era

By Jim Farley

Ukraine can unleash energy investment even amid war

By Volodymyr Kudrytskyi

The US must assure its energy-secure future

By Meredith Berger

The importance of US LNG for economic growth and the global energy transition

By Daniel Yergin and Madeline Jowdy

Southeast Asia aims for sustainability through connectivity

By Kok Keong Puah

Energy realities require pragmatic solutions

By Rick Muncrief

Tech and power sector partnerships can accelerate the energy transition

By Arshad Mansoor

Forging stronger transatlantic energy cooperation

By Dan Jørgensen

Latin America and the Caribbean are leading the green energy transition

By Andrés Rebolledo Smitmans

Busting the top myths about AI and energy efficiency 

By Josh Parker

The small reactor revolution can transform African energy systems

By Lassina Zerbo

Watch the event

Setting the Global Energy Agenda for 2025

The Global Energy Center hosts a discussion to launch this year’s edition of the Center’s annual flagship report, the Global Energy Agenda.

Climate Change & Climate Action Energy & Environment Energy Transitions Geopolitics & Energy Security

Previous Global Energy Agenda

Global Energy Agenda

Nov 30, 2023

The 2024 Global Energy Agenda

By Landon Derentz, Christine Suh, Paul Kielstra (Editors)

The fourth edition of the Global Energy Agenda kicks off with a collection of essays by energy leaders that are rolling out during COP28. Rounding out the Agenda in early 2024, the Atlantic Council Global Energy Center will release the results of its annual survey of experts that takes the pulse on the geopolitical risks affecting energy markets, the future of fossil fuels, and the transition to clean energy.

Energy & Environment Geopolitics & Energy Security

Editors

Landon Derentz is senior director at the Atlantic Council Global Energy Center; Christine Suh is the managing editor for the Atlantic Council Global Energy Center; Paul Kielstra is a freelance editor, analyst, and writer based outside of London; and Bailee Mathews is a program assistant for the Atlantic Council Global Energy Center.

Staff

Landon Derentz

Senior Director

Global Energy Center

Energy & Environment Middle East

Staff

Christine Suh

Managing Editor, Global Energy Center

Global Energy Center

Energy & Environment French

Staff

Bailee Mathews

Program Assistant

Global Energy Center

Energy & Environment Energy Transitions

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The ninth Atlantic Council Global Energy Forum will be held June 17 and 18 in Washington, DC. Please check back regularly for updates on our programming.