Diplomacy & Crisis News

Dans les pays occidentaux comme dans les nations émergentes, la quête du bonheur est omniprésente en entreprise, sur les réseaux sociaux ou dans les librairies. Elle prend la forme d'une offre souvent marchande, qui va du yoga globalisé aux diverses formes de psychologie positive promues par les (...) / Développement, Économie, Société, Inégalités - 2023/05

“Chaos,” wrote Albert Camus, constitutes “a form of servitude.” That is why true freedom must be a search for order. Yet, because order itself can be unjust and extreme, there is always the impetus to topple it. Camus writes in his greatest book, The Rebel, published in 1951, that ever since the mythical Prometheus rose up against Zeus in the deserts of Scythia, revolt has been a distinguishing characteristic of man. And since it is not enough to topple a regime unless one has planned a new and better order to replace it, Camus devotes an entire book to the morality of revolt.

“When the throne of God is overturned, the rebel realizes that it is now his own responsibility to create the justice, order, and unity … and in this way to justify the fall of God.” Camus’ reference to God is secular since when an authoritarian regime maintains a choke hold over its own people, it is usurping the role of God. A people, therefore, can be enslaved twice: first by the regime and second by the anarchy that succeeds its toppling. That is why the celebration of revolt in and of itself, without an idea of what follows, can be narcissistic.

Syria’s rebel leaders, according to their early statements and instincts, appear to comprehend this conundrum. When Syria’s new ruler, Ahmed al-Sharaa, talks about building institutions, getting bus service and electricity restored, and keeping the existing civil authorities of the old regime intact, it is as if he has read Camus. But this seemingly mundane realization about restoring the basic functions of the state has been a long time coming in Syria’s modern history. And it is important to understand why.

Servitude in Syria, whether because of tyranny or anarchy, did not begin with the Assad family regime in 1970. In that respect, the recent spate of news commentary has shown strikingly little curiosity about what preceded Hafez al-Assad and precipitated his rise to supreme power in Syria.

Ottoman imperial rule was followed after World War I by French imperial rule. When Syria finally became independent in 1946, it harbored all the illogical borders, the ethnic and sectarian complexities, and the contradictions of the greater Middle East. It cannot be emphasized enough that in the first quarter-century after independence, Syria experienced twenty-one changes of government, almost all of them extralegal, and ten military coups. There were also experiments with democracy during this period, which always broke down on account of ethnic, sectarian, and regional splits. Post-independence Syria’s first serious ruler was Adib Al-Shishakli in the early 1950s. Dubbed the Syrian Ataturk, he, nevertheless, referred to Syria as “the current official name for that country that lies within the artificial frontiers drawn up by imperialism.” He took power in a coup and was overthrown in a coup.

The elder Assad’s coup in 1970 took the most unstable country in the Middle East and turned it into a stable police state, which he ruled until his death in 2000. But with all of his organization and ruthlessness, he couldn’t easily quell a rebellion of radical Sunni Muslim Arabs from the Aleppo-Homs-Damascus corridor against his own Shia-trending, Alawite power structure originating in Syria’s rugged northwest. At the artillery school in Aleppo in 1979, Sunni Muslim terrorists killed and wounded close to a hundred Alawite cadets. As time went on, Syria seemed close to a bloody Sunni Islamic revolution, a counterpart to the Shia revolution in Iran at the time. This was the background to the elder Assad’s atrocity in Sunni Muslim Hama in 1982 when as many as 20,000 were slaughtered: an event that is almost always portrayed in the Western media out of context, as if Syria were totally at peace at the time. That doesn’t excuse the elder Assad, but it does rob the Western reader of the logic and reasoning behind his actions.

Hafez was haunted by chaos. He always knew how close Syria was to falling apart. Even so, as a journalist who traveled back and forth between Iraq and Syria in the 1980s, I can attest that Assad’s Syria was less oppressive than Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. In Iraq, you needed a minder to travel around the country and could not punch out your telex copy yourself but had to hand it to a government operator for review. In Syria, I traveled all over the country alone and could go into a post office to punch out my news copy with no one overseeing me. You could talk to people in Syria; there was not the feeling of a concrete block on people’s chests as there was in Iraq.

But there was a catch. Because of Syria’s inherent artificiality, Assad needed an ideology to hold it together. And the ideology was anti-Zionism. Baathism wasn’t enough. The elder Assad’s Syria, local officials constantly told me, was the “throbbing heart” of Arabism, unlike Egypt, which was never really trusted regarding its anti-Israel credentials. Whatever is proposed regarding peace, “we remain steadfast” in opposition to Israel, a public affairs officer told me in Damascus in 1983. Indeed, Syria was the most radical of the frontline states. Thus, in 1974, when Assad grudgingly signed a troop disengagement accord with Israel over the Golan Heights, thanks to the tireless diplomacy of Henry Kissinger, it ended the cycle of Arab-Israeli wars that had begun in 1948. The Egyptian-Israeli accords that followed, however lionized as they were by the media, were less geopolitically significant than the de facto removal of radical, Baathist Syria from the fight.

And the elder Assad paid for it. The Sunni jihadist revolt that began in 1979, though a partial reaction to the Shia revolt in Iran, was also driven by the Alawite Assad’s compromise with the Americans and Israelis, as well as his support for the Maronite Christians in the ongoing Lebanese civil war. The 20,000 dead in Hama was the price of Syria’s utter fragility.

Hafez was a self-made man, full of innate reserve, born in a house of undressed stone in the Alawite mountains to a father who had eleven children by two marriages. He rose through the ranks of the Air Force and took power when he was forty. His coup was virtually bloodless and called a “corrective movement.” Because of his Machiavellian genius, he maintained power until his death in 2000. It was the very longevity of his rule that proved a tragedy since it allowed for his increasingly spoiled and corrupt family to gradually amass a fortune stashed abroad, even as the internal stability he ultimately wrought by defeating the Sunni extremists did not convert his people from subjects to citizens. That is to say, over thirty years in power, he could have built a civil society. But he was so obsessed with anarchy that he demanded a suffocating order. Just as the Soviet Union quietly rotted away during the rule of Leonid Brezhnev from the 1960s to the 1980s, Syria followed the same path under the elder Assad.

Over time it was assumed that Assad’s eldest son, Basil, a career military officer and tough daredevil, would succeed him. When Basil died in a road accident in 1994—he was driving at high speed in a fog without a seatbelt—the mantle was placed on Bashar, a timid ophthalmologist in London. “Think of Basil as Sonny Corleone and Bashar as Fredo,” an American intelligence official once told me. Bashar’s over-compensating cruelty and inability to control the goons and warlords around him helped lead to Syria’s descent into a living hell in the years following the initial promise of the Arab Spring in 2011. It would turn out that the most “steadfast” state opposed to the existence of Israel was never really a state to begin with.

The current, ongoing destruction of Syria’s entire military apparatus, everything from its navy to its chemical weapons plants, by the Israelis is born of decades of mutual hatred between the two states. The elder Assad may have signed a disengagement accord with Israel, but Syria remained a potential strategic threat against Israel until the collapse of the country in the Arab Spring. As for any new Syria that might now arise, Israel will want it weak and permanently defanged. Israel welcomed the Arab Spring in Syria in 2011 precisely because it led to chaos: so that Syria was no longer a menace to the Jewish state.

In the early years following the Arab Spring, there were literally hundreds of militias in Syria with little identifiable sense of national purpose. Camus would not have been impressed. But now we have the possibility of a national leader who appears sensible about governance instead of ideology. And he is home-grown, not the product of an invasion by a foreign power. The fact that he is Islamist might not matter much since, in this part of the world, religiosity is entrenched in a way that it hasn’t been in the West since the days when Europe was known as Christendom.

The question presents itself: can Syria forge a path out of chaos without the need for an extreme ideology to hold it together? To call for democracy is premature. There is no precedent for a successful democracy in the Arab world. What the country’s new rulers must create now is a new and less oppressive order. That would morally justify their revolt and be the lesson of Camus’ The Rebel.

Robert D. Kaplan’s most recent book is Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis. He holds the Robert Strausz-Hupé Chair in Geopolitics at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.

Image: Shutterstock.

Grâce à la plume savante et alerte d'Abir Mukherjee, le Bengale de l'entre-deux-guerres reprend vie, à travers des intrigues qui mêlent habilement crimes sordides et petits complots, sur fond de grande politique. Depuis 2016 et L'Attaque du Calcutta-Darjeeling, sa série, débutant en 1919, reprend (...) / Littérature, Royaume-Uni, Inde, Ecosse - 2023/05

It is with a heavy heart that we announce the passing of a great American patriot and true champion of freedom-loving peoples (especially anticommunists) everywhere, Dr. Lee Willard Edwards (December 1, 1932-December 12, 2024). The cause of his untimely death was pancreatic cancer.

As I type these words on the evening of December 19, I have just returned home from having attended Edwards’s Funeral Mass—which took place at St. Rita Catholic Church in Alexandria, Virginia—and the reception thereafter (which took place at the Hyatt Regency Crystal City at Reagan Airport in Arlington, Virginia). It is now both my solemn duty and my tremendous honor to pay tribute to Edwards via this article, though no words will be adequate to convey what an amazing human being and friend of freedom Lee truly was.

Dr. Lee Edwards’s Bio

Edwards, ninety-two, of Arlington, Virginia, beloved husband, father, and grandfather, passed away peacefully at home on December 12, 2024.

Born in Chicago to Leila and Willard (a Chicago Tribune reporter) and raised in Silver Spring, Maryland. Lee graduated from Bullis School and Duke University.

After U.S. Army service in West Germany, Lee was moved by the 1956 Hungarian Revolution while living in Paris and vowed to spend his life fighting for freedom and against communism. He helped found Young Americans for Freedom in 1960, served as director of public information for Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign, and started or helped sustain key anti-communist organizations. In 1986, Lee earned a doctorate from the Catholic University of America, where he was also a longtime adjunct professor. A preeminent historian of the American conservative movement and the former distinguished fellow in conservative thought at the Heritage Foundation, he was the author, editor, or co-author of over twenty-five books.

Edwards is predeceased by his wife Anna and survived by his daughters Elizabeth Edwards Spalding (Matthew) of Arlington and Catherine Marie O’Connor (Mike) of Spotsylvania, VA, and grandchildren Joseph, Catherine, Daniel (Chrstine), Thomas, Genevieve, Stephen (Marjorie), Zachary, Magdalene, Chrstopher, Michael, and Timothy. An eternal optimist devoted to freedom, family, and faith, his spirit lives on in his children, grandchildren, many friends, and all those he mentored.

Lee and Anne conceived of an organization to memorialize all the victims of communism around the world and to educate Americans about the atrocities of communism. In 1994, Lee co-founded the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. Friends and family wishing to honor his life and legacy are invited to donate to the Lee and Anne Edwards Freedom Fund at VOC.

My Personal Interactions with Dr. Edwards

I didn’t quite get to know Edwards well enough to be able to accurately call him a true close personal friend per se, but I met him enough times at official events to affirm that he and I definitely had a strong, mutually respectful professional acquaintanceship.

My first time meeting Lee was at the Victims of Communism (VOC) Museum on October 25, 2022, at an event titled “Remembering the Hungarian Freedom Fighters of 1956.” It was definitely an honor and pleasure to make Lee’s acquaintance then and there, but it didn’t fully dawn on me at that moment in time just what a true giant of the anticommunist cause I was meeting.

Full disclosure here: I am a proud monthly donor to VOC. So accordingly, I became a regular attendee of VOC events such as the China Forum, and thus I not only got to interact further with Edwards but also got to know his wonderful daughter Elizabeth and grandson Joe (and reconnected with his son-in-law, Matthew Spalding, who is vice president of Washington Operations for Hillsdale College, after a 27-year hiatus. (The last time I’d seen Matt was way back in 1996, when I was a precocious, wild-eyed twenty-year-old intern at the Heritage Foundation’s Asian Studies Center and he was the founding director of Heritage’s B. Kenneth Simon Center for Principles and Politics.)

It was yet another Heritage Foundation employee, Dr. Jim Carafano (LTC, U.S. Army, ret.), the think tank’s current vice president for foreign and defense policy studies, who recruited me for my current career path as a journalist, starting with 19FortyFive back in May 2022 and leading to my current position with The National Interest!

I like to think of my all-too-brief acquaintanceship with Lee as an embodiment of the phrase “standing on the shoulders of giants.”

Requiescat in pace, Dr. Lee Edwards, and thanks and kudos to you for all of your amazing accomplishments and contributions to the cause of peace & freedom in your lifetime. It was truly an honor to have known you, and you will be sorely missed.

About the Author: Christian D. Orr

Christian D. Orr is a former U.S. Air Force Security Forces officer, Federal law enforcement officer, and private military contractor (with assignments worked in Iraq, the United Arab Emirates, Kosovo, Japan, Germany, and the Pentagon). Chris holds a B.A. in International Relations from the University of Southern California (USC) and an M.A. in Intelligence Studies (concentration in Terrorism Studies) from American Military University (AMU). He has also been published in The Daily Torch, The Journal of Intelligence and Cyber Security, and Simple Flying. Last but not least, he is a Companion of the Order of the Naval Order of the United States (NOUS). If you’d like to pick his brain further, you can ofttimes find him at the Old Virginia Tobacco Lounge (OVTC) lounge in Manassas, Virginia, partaking of fine stogies and good quality human camaraderie.

Image courtesy of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his defense minister went up to the highest peak on Mount Hermon on December 17. This area of the mountain overlooks Lebanon, southern Syria, and Israel. It is just over 2,800 meters high. The peak of the mountain used to be occupied by a Syrian army post, which looked down over Israeli posts several miles away. It’s an important strategic site, and Israel knows this. For this reason, the Israel Defense Forces sent forces up to the peak as the Syrian regime evaporated on December 8. Laid out below them in Syria is a country at a crossroads. What comes next will profoundly affect the region, U.S. policy, Israel, and many other countries.

The fall of Bashar Al-Assad’s regime was a symbolic moment. Syria was once one of Israel’s most fearsome foes. Under Bashar al-Assad’s father, Hafez, the Syrian army was well-equipped with modern Soviet-supplied tanks and warplanes. It attacked Israel in 1973, crossing part of the Golan Heights that can be seen from Mount Hermon. It almost succeeded in handing Israel a major setback. Forty years later, in 2013, Assad found his regime besieged by rebels. However, he survived and was able to return to control part of Syria with the aid of Russia and Iran. It didn’t end up as planned, though. He was pushed out of power in a blitzkrieg-like offensive by a Syrian opposition group called Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) on December 8.

I was in the Golan Heights that day, looking into Syria from the Israeli side of the line. There is a lot at stake in the country today. Syria is at a crossroads, and so is the region. The lesson of the Syrian Civil War is that what happens in Syria does not only matter to Syria or just its neighbors. For instance, the civil war helped provide fuel for ISIS and its invasion of Iraq in June 2014. That led to the genocide of Yazidis in Iraq in August 2014 and the United States and allied intervention against ISIS. Eventually, the anti-ISIS coalition grew to over seventy countries. To defeat ISIS, the United States helped the Iraqi army and Kurdish Peshmerga in Iraq. In Syria, the United States partnered with the Syrian Democratic Forces, a group in eastern Syria that is primarily rooted in the Kurdish region of Syria.

Today, the Kurdish minority in Syria faces new threats from Turkey, whose proxies have attacked their cities in the north. This is an odd situation because the SDF is partnered with the United States, and Turkey is a NATO ally. One would think that the United States could patch things up and forge a deal between the SDF and Turkey. However, Ankara is resolute to use the Syrian proxies it has recruited, called the Syrian National Army, to fight the SDF. Ankara claims the SDF is linked to the separatist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which it views as terrorists.

This situation presents a dilemma in Syria policy for the United States and Turkey. The U.S. role in eastern Syria was highly successful. With only a handful of troops, ISIS was largely defeated by 2019. However, this military success never translated into political engagement with the SDF and Syria. This is because U.S. diplomats generally viewed the partnership with the SDF as temporary, tactical, and transactional. They did not see a way forward for this group in terms of playing a role in the future government of Syria. That has meant a missed opportunity to leverage the U.S. role.

This doesn’t mean things cannot be salvaged. In southern Syria, the United States has a garrison at Al-Tanf. This is a base seemingly in the middle of nowhere, located in Syria near the Jordanian and Iraqi borders. The United States helped train a Syrian rebel group for more than half a decade. The group, now called the Syrian Free Army (not to be confused with the Free Syrian Army), helped topple Assad by marching toward Palmyra on December 7. It’s possible that this group might help provide security in parts of the Syrian desert between Homs, Damascus, and Albukamal on the Iraqi border. However, the new Syrian government of Ahmed Sharaa, whose HTS group is a U.S.-designated terrorist group, has demanded that armed groups in Syria disband and form a new army.

Where does all this leave us? The United States has a key role in eastern Syria, but it is at risk if Turkey chooses to invade and fight the SDF. There are thousands of ISIS detainees being held in eastern Syria. Any fighting in the east could jeopardize the anti-ISIS mission. ISIS still has many cells in the Syrian desert and has by no means disappeared.

Then there is southern Syria. The U.S.-backed group in Tanf is an important and possible avenue to discuss security arrangements with the new rulers in Damascus. Moreover, the Israelis, who now have an outpost on the Hermon peak, have advanced some forces into a buffer zone next to the Golan Heights into villages that the Syrian regime once controlled.

On December 11, the head of U.S. Central Command, General Michael “Erik” Kurilla, arrived in Israel. His visit reaffirmed close relations between Central Command and the Israel Defense Forces. Israel became part of the Central Command area of operations at the end of the first Trump administration, a significant move that came about in the wake of the Abraham Accords and Israel’s closer ties with some Arab nations. What that means is that the U.S. command that plays a key role in places like Iraq and Syria now consults closely with Israel.

For its part, Israel used the days after Assad’s fall to carry out hundreds of airstrikes in Syria against former Syrian military assets, such as warplanes and munitions depots. This eviscerated many potential threats. It is a lesson learned from the fall of the Gadafi regime. If a regime with a lot of guns and tanks falls, those weapons will end up flooding the region and destabilizing countries. With the Middle East already suffering a year of war in Gaza and Lebanon, and with Iranian-backed groups destabilizing Yemen and Iraq, it’s good Assad’s old military assets have been vaporized. The big question is if the new Syrian government can bring some stability to Syria.

This is now the crossroads. Can Damascus sort things out in eastern Syria, and can Washington make sure it doesn’t miss an opportunity to leverage a decade of work in Syria with the SDF and other groups? Other countries are making the pilgrimage to Damascus to meet the new rulers. Turkey, Qatar, the UK, France, Italy, Germany, and the EU seem ready to work with the new regime. The United States should be ready to utilize its partners in Syria and work with its friends in the region to make the most of this new reality. 

Seth Frantzman is the author of The October 7 War: Israel’s Battle for Security in Gaza (2024) and an adjunct fellow at The Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

Image: Mohammad Bash / Shutterstock.com. 

Les livres de Mariana Enríquez paraissent en France dans le désordre. Ses premières nouvelles publiées en 2009 en espagnol viennent d'être traduites alors que deux de ses œuvres nettement plus récentes l'avaient déjà été. Cela ne serait pas pour déplaire à cette auteure argentine qui aime dilater le temps (...) / Littérature, Argentine - 2023/05

Jusqu'alors totalement inconnu des têtes pensantes de la diplomatie, le concept d'Indo-Pacifique a fait une entrée en fanfare dans le monde des relations internationales au milieu des années 2000. Il outille désormais toutes les chancelleries. Certaines sont alignées sur la doctrine des États-Unis ; (...) / Chine, Pacifique, Asie, France, États-Unis (affaires extérieures), Stratégie, Géopolitique - 2023/05

U.S.-Chinese tensions may rise, but Washington’s isolationism will help Beijing.

A secure peace will depend on economic revitalization.

Team Trump is scrambling to control the fallout from Elon Musk almost singlehandedly terminating a stopgap spending bill that would have ensured the federal government is funded through March 14. The problem is twofold. One is that the government may soon shutter, leaving House Speaker Mike Johnson with essentially no exit from the debacle. The other is that Musk is starting to eclipse President-elect Donald Trump.

Instead of Trump heading into his second term as Mr. Big, it increasingly looks like Musk is calling the shots. “This bill should not pass,” Musk declared. It didn’t. The result is political mayhem. Sen. Rand Paul is suggesting that Musk should replace Johnson as House speaker. So is Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Writing in Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall observed, “Musk is erratic, volatile, impulsive, mercurial. He introduces a huge source of unpredictability and chaos into the presidency that for once Trump doesn’t control. See it clearly: Musk did this. Trump thrives on chaos, but his chaos. Not someone else’s chaos.”

Vice President-elect J.D. Vance has essentially been AWOL over the past several weeks. It appears that Musk has cemented the bromance between himself and Trump. He’s everywhere. He goes to the Notre Dame with Trump. He goes to the Army-Navy game with Trump. He goes to dinner with Trump at Mar-a-Lago. The only question is where he does not go.

Now Trump is moving to quash the notion that he’s in some kind of co-presidency with Musk, a notion that Gerald Ford once proposed to Ronald Reagan in 1980, who promptly rejected the notion. Instead, the Trump campaign released a statement to Business Insider claiming that Trump remains in command: “As soon as President Trump released his official stance on the CR, Republicans on Capitol Hill echoed his point of view,” Leavitt told it. “President Trump is the leader of the Republican Party. Full stop.”

However, the more the Trump campaign feels compelled to deny the claim, the more plausible it will become. For their part, Democrats are playing up the idea that Musk is the true president-elect. Rep. Rosa DeLauro issued a fact sheet showing what Elon’s move to kill disaster supplemental aid will cost each state. Others are referring to “President-elect Musk.” “He’s president and Trump is now vice president,” stated Rep. Jim McGovern.

Musk himself says that he is simply an upstanding patriot who seeks to bring important matters to the incoming administration’s attention.

For Trump, who has vowed to upend the federal government, torpedoing the bill offered an opportunity to flex his political muscles even before he officially becomes president. President Joe Biden is nowhere in sight. Trump dominates.

But in dominating the debate, he risks taking responsibility for a government shutdown, one largely engineered by his buddy Musk. At some point, there may be a collision between Trump and Musk. After all, if the shutdown isn’t resolved by January 6, Congress won’t be able to certify his election as president.

Jacob Heilbrunn is editor of The National Interest and is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center. He has written on both foreign and domestic issues for numerous publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, Reuters, Washington Monthly, and The Weekly Standard. He has also written for German publications such as Cicero, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and Der Tagesspiegel. In 2008, his book They Knew They Were Right: the Rise of the Neocons was published by Doubleday. It was named one of the one hundred notable books of the year by The New York Times. He is the author of America Last: The Right’s Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators.

Image: Hadrian / Shutterstock.com

There is a short window for President Trump and Congress to reassert U.S. competitiveness on artificial intelligence (AI) and undercut China’s strategy before it cements its economic and geopolitical influence for a generation to come. Beijing and Washington are already in an AI race with the highest stakes for our economic and national security. Thankfully, innovation is in America’s strong suit. Open-source AI is how the United States can compete with China in both cost and capability. President Trump and his national security team, led by Rep. Mike Waltz (R-FL) and Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL), can embrace the competitive advantages of open innovation so that America will unquestionably win the AI contest with Beijing.

China is on pace to spend more than $1.4 trillion by 2030 in its strategy to become the world leader in AI and other emergent technologies. Additionally, it is releasing AI models that are already competitive with the best American models. In November, the Chinese company Alibaba released its latest AI model, “Qwen,” which beat the best U.S. models in several performance benchmarks. According to CNBC, Alibaba’s models have been downloaded 40 million times since their initial release last year. 

Open sourcing is an explicit part of China’s Global AI Governance Initiative. If China is allowed to set global AI standards, the CCP’s long history of censorship will be exported around the world. In one concerning example, Chinese generative AI chatbots censor topics by refusing to respond to questions about Tiananmen Square or falsely claiming that Taiwan is part of China.

Recent administrations have tried and failed to keep advanced chips needed to develop powerful AI out of the hands of Chinese companies. Still, a committed adversary like China will always seek advantage where possible. Chinese companies have reportedly used U.S. cloud providers to get around bans on accessing chips and are hiring AI teams in the United States, in part to access these chips within our borders and evade controls.

There are four core elements to a successful open-source AI strategy that President Trump and Congress can implement.

First, the Trump administration should encourage federal agencies and the public sector to adopt freely available open-source models in their AI tools and products, or at least not prefer proprietary or closed models over open-source ones.

Second, America must be prepared to push back on other countries that are seeking to punish American innovation through restrictions that would target U.S. models while protecting their domestic ones.

Third, Congress must step up by pre-empting any state laws with federal policies or legislation so that the United States doesn’t end up with a patchwork of incompatible state laws that limit American innovation. This would stop future harmful, anti-innovation bills, like California’s SB1047, which was fortunately vetoed this Fall before it could be enacted.

Fourth and finally, leaders in Washington should avoid placing export controls on generative AI, which would prevent U.S. companies from releasing open-source models.

U.S. restrictions on open-source models will only disadvantage the United States and its allies while doing nothing to slow China’s momentum. Access to the latest AI developments and models is critical for our national security. The U.S. military and Intelligence Community are already using U.S. open-source AI to gain tactical and strategic decision advantages. Large language models can identify patterns within source intelligence reporting, accelerate the speed and accuracy of battlefield decisions, and expose terrorist financing or identify cyber vulnerabilities before attacks happen. Slowing down our advances in this technology is not an option.

Instead, the United States should focus on holding off China’s AI advancements by restricting its access to the chips and computing power needed to train AI models. An AI researcher noted that China’s latest models show that it has the raw data and talent to train large models, but it will need more specialized technology and chips to solidify its lead at the top.

To win the tech race, America must lead in both open and closed-source AI models. Each approach has its unique advantages, but to beat China, we need to foster both. Some argue that closed models are more secure, but that’s not the case. Every year, China steals more than $500 billion in trade and tech secrets from the United States, and well-resourced states like China can easily gain access to closed-source models. 

“Closed” doesn’t mean secure, and proprietary AI models could easily end up in Chinese hands through IP theft, insider attacks, or other means. Open-source AI has several benefits for the United States and our allies because it makes us more competitive in the global economy through open-source models, making AI technology more accessible—especially for smaller developers and researchers who are challenging the status quo.

Open source also fosters economic growth because it drives competition, spurs homegrown innovation, and increases consumer choice. Open source can also make products safer because more eyes can mean fewer faults: a wide community is providing ongoing feedback and scrutiny, which isn’t possible when a company makes their AI proprietary through selling access.

As history has demonstrated, open-source technology typically becomes the global standard over the closed alternative. AI will be no different. The AI standard that emerges will become embedded in the financial, e-commerce, infrastructure, manufacturing, and communications systems of the future. The domains and industries AI affects are too consequential for the United States to ever fall behind an adversary, including China. The incoming Trump administration is positioned to ensure the United States leads on this front for decades to come.

Alexander B. Gray served as deputy assistant to the president and chief of staff of the White House National Security Council (2019-21) and special assistant to the president for the defense industrial base (2017-18).

Image: Billion Photos / Shutterstock.com. 

Over the last 20 years, America has failed in both war and peace. The world is on fire and is waiting for President Donald Trump to fulfill his promise to bring about a ceasefire in the war and, ultimately, broker a peace agreement. The war in Ukraine presents itself as both a challenge to Trump and, for the first time since the end of the Korean War, an opportunity for America to win the war by winning the peace.

To envision a successful future, we must look to learn from the past. The reconstruction of Japan after World War II, the reconstruction of South Korea after the conflict on the Korean Peninsula, and the reconstruction of Germany provide lessons and perspectives to draw upon. All three nations experienced economic and security renewals, which not only had national benefits but also enhanced the United States in terms of both economics and security.

This same opportunity exists today for the people of Ukraine and for the United States. The coming Ukraine economic miracle and recovery will reshape the Eurasian continent. Ukraine will become a lighthouse for innovation, resilience, and future-oriented development. Nothing brings two nations together more than strong commercial ties. Economic entanglement between the United States and Ukraine will bring prosperity to both.

Critical mineral security and development will be a cornerstone of this success. Fast-tracking the extraction and processing of Ukraine’s vast mineral resources is key. Securing the multi-trillion dollars of critical minerals in Ukraine is a vital national interest of the United States.

Civil nuclear power will provide stable, clean energy for the reindustrialization of Ukraine. Robust capacity is needed to drive the coming economic renaissance. Energy security is foundational to sovereignty and success.

Likewise, land restoration is essential. Unexploded ordnance and other ground contamination must be mitigated. Ukraine has always been the breadbasket of the world. Along with Europe, much of the African continent relies on Ukraine’s agricultural resilience and success. Clean-up will put people to work quickly and kick-start agricultural development.

Redesigning the defense industrial base with an eye to implementing new battlefield technologies and proven legacy systems is crucial to Ukraine’s security. A holistic integration of command, control, communications, computer systems, manufacturing, and innovation will create a “live” and responsive system to face all adversaries and new technologies.

World-class data systems will be needed to shoulder the incoming needs. This includes robust fiber rings, server capacity, and AI infrastructure. This should be built at overcapacity and leverage new technologies to provide all stakeholders with scalable information systems.

There is an incredible opportunity for the United States and Ukraine to develop, test, and deploy revolutionary AI infrastructure. Small modular reactors, providing nuclear-powered data centers, offer a new physics-based approach versus legacy server design. That, combined with the aforementioned data network capacity, will yield game-changing results.

A Silicon Valley-type citadel of innovation will be another key driver. This means harnessing the deep intellectual capacity of the Ukrainian people as world leaders in technological innovation.

Restructuring government for economic success, security success, and a secure and resilient democracy will be key to achieving all of these long-term goals.

Lastly, the story of Ukraine must be told, including why Ukraine matters and why a strong partnership with the United States matters. The values of the Ukrainian people mirror our own, and their resilience can provide hope and vision, not just for their people but for our nation as well.

David Ayer is a writer, director, and producer whose films include Fury, End of Watch, and Beekeeper. A former Navy Submariner, David has an abiding interest in global messaging and fresh ways to tell stories.

RDML (Ret.) Michael Hewitt, U.S. Navy, is co-founder and CEO of IP3 Corporation and CEO of Allied Nuclear Partners. IP3 creates thriving, peaceful environments in critical world markets through the development of sustainable energy and security infrastructure via public/private initiatives and industry-led partnerships.

Image: Seneline / Shutterstock.com

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