The National Interest

Topic: Diplomacy, and Trade Blog Brand: Silk Road Rivalries Region: Eurasia Tags: Afghanistan, Afghanistan War, Belt and Road Initiative, Central Asia, China, Kazakhstan, Russia, Taliban, United States, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, and Vietnam War Why the Taliban Wants to Talk with the US January 14, 2026 By: James D. Durso Share

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Can the Donald Trump administration stomach the short-term political costs of engaging with Afghanistan for the long-term benefit of US influence in Central Asia?

Before Afghanistan in 2021, America was last defeated by a national liberation movement in Vietnam in 1975. After the fall of Saigon, the “domino theory” assured Americans that Asia would quickly fall to Communism. That didn’t happen, and the ensuing violence (Vietnam’s 1979 invasion of Cambodia and China’s attack on Vietnam) didn’t affect American security. But Eurasia in 2026 is another situation entirely. While Washington waited 19 years to establish diplomatic relations with the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, it shouldn’t delay diplomatic recognition of the new regime in Afghanistan. 

There is a lot going on: Nuclear-armed India and Pakistan fought a short war in May 2025; relations between Pakistan and Afghanistan are tense over the activities of the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (Pakistani Taliban) and the Baluchistan Liberation Army; Iran has been accused of developing nuclear weapons and was recently attacked by Israel and America; the region is host to several nascent connectivity networks, and may possess abundant rare earth elements; the Central Asian republics’ economies are rapidly growing; and, everyone depends on Afghanistan for water.

Recent US-Afghanistan history is a history of misunderstandings that caused both sides to commit strategic blunders. 

After the 9/11 attacks, the Taliban erred by not rendering Osama bin Laden to the United States and then proposing that he be tried by a court in an Islamic country. The United States subsequently attacked and occupied the country for 20 years.

After the US attack and rout of the Taliban forces, Taliban leaders attempted to surrender several times, but Washington, intoxicated by a brew of post-Cold War triumphalism and post-9/11 grievance, wanted to make an example of them. America was still the “indispensable nation,” and its neoconservative curators were anxious to operationalize their sacred text, the Fiscal Year 1992 Defense Planning Guidance. 

The Americans failed to understand that the Taliban were Afghan nationalists inspired by Islam instead of transnational Islamists like Al Qaeda or the Islamic State. This misunderstanding was the root of the argument that Afghanistan would become a center of terrorism against the West; however, in 2024, a CIA official reported, “The dire predictions have not come to pass.” 

In the 1990s, the only major infrastructure project in the region was the UNOCAL natural gas pipeline from Turkmenistan to Pakistan via Afghanistan. The project collapsed as Afghanistan’s civil war made construction impossible and the Taliban’s international isolation made financing difficult. After the 1998 US embassy bombings, UNOCAL withdrew entirely as the US government claimed Usama bin Laden, who was believed to be in Afghanistan, was behind the bombings.

But in 2026, Afghanistan will be a key part of most of the regional connectivity projects. 

There is the TransAfghan Multimodal Transport Corridor, which aims to create a “southern corridor” linking Central Asia to the Arabian Sea, ultimately connecting to Jebel Ali Port in the United Arab Emirates (UAE); the Termez-Mazar-i-Sharif-Kabul-Peshawar Railway (Kabul Corridor). Uzbekistan is leading the push to revive this long-planned corridor, which would provide Central Asia with direct access to Pakistan’s seaports; and the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan–Pakistan Railway (Western Corridor), a parallel route to the Kabul Corridor, as Turkmenistan aims for more direct access to Pakistan’s ports, and Kazakhstan wants to diversify its southern transit options. 

The Iran-Afghanistan-China Strategic Railway Link is a strategic railway linking Iran to China through Afghanistan, and avoids maritime chokepoints between China and West Asia. It was added to Iran’s working agenda in 2025. 

Then there is road network expansion in Afghanistan as the government aggressively pursues road upgrades to complement rail corridors and improve internal logistics. And in December 2025, Afghanistan’s Ministry of Finance announced a memorandum of understanding with DP World of the UAE to study potential investment in Afghan port infrastructure. If an agreement is finalized, DP World could help modernize ports such as Hairatan, bordering Uzbekistan, and Torkham, bordering Pakistan. 

According to the China Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) Investment Report 2025 H1, the first half of 2025 saw the highest engagement for any six-month period ever, with $66.2 billion in construction contracts and $57.1 billion in investments (greater than BRI engagement in all of 2024, which was $122 billion) BRI’s total engagement since the program’s start in 2013 now totals $1.3 trillion.

Of that spending, $39 billion went to Africa, and $25 billion went to Central Asia. That’s impressive on a per capita basis, as Africa’s population is about 1.5 billion and Central Asia’s is about 84 million.

At the September 2025 summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Group in Tianjin, China, Chinese president Xi Jinping met one-on-one with all the leaders of the republics. In the official picture of the meeting attendees, the five republics’ presidents are standing in the front row, a clear signal of China’s intent.

China looks to be in the driver’s seat, but in June 2025, the Taliban shocked Beijing by cancelling the 25-year contract to develop oil fields in the Amu Darya River basin; China had pledged to invest $540 million in the first three years. Each side blamed the other, and Afghanistan has no formal process to resolve disputes, so a resolution may not be imminent. 

In December 2025, Amir Khan Muttaqi, Afghanistan’s foreign minister, told former US ambassador to Kabul Zalmay Khalilzad that US-Afghanistan relations are in a “new phase” and that bilateral relations can be developed through sustained dialogue. Any salesman would recognize that as a “buy signal.” 

In July 2025, Russia became the first country to recognize the Taliban government. But will this delay more American engagement with Afghanistan if President Donald Trump resists being a follower of Russia’s move?

Improved roads in faraway places don’t excite Americans much, but Americans held hostage to unfriendly governments do. In March 2025, The Wall Street Journal reported there were seven Americans “wrongfully detained” in Afghanistan. Five Americans were released in 2025, and the Taliban likely hoped for a positive response from Washington, but nothing happened. 

If President Donald Trump just pockets the winnings, that will weaken the Taliban, who want better ties with Washington; they will be less likely to accommodate the next American initiative, as the penalty may be more severe than premature retirement followed by a think tank sinecure. 

Trump would prefer to get the remaining detainees immediately, but an opportunity may come when he visits Central Asia (he has been invited several times to Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan). Tashkent has long dealt with the Taliban and can facilitate the release, but it won’t want to midwife an unfair deal with Kabul, its “forever neighbor.” And Uzbekistan has yet to work out a water-sharing agreement with Kabul over the waters of the Amu Darya, the most critical file for Tashkent.

President Bill Clinton was criticized for restarting ties with Vietnam, and Trump can expect the same for outreach to Afghanistan. In any case, hyperventilating about the Taliban hosting Al Qaeda looks unserious since an Al Qaeda alumnus (Syrian president Ahmed al-Shara) visited the Oval Office and was spritzed with cologne. 

The Taliban beat America fair and square. Now, if Trump really wants to advance US engagement in Central Asia, which includes Afghanistan, he must move beyond low-hanging fruit, like inviting Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan to the next G20 meeting, and take decisive action. Clinton weathered the storm, so will Trump.

About the Author: James Durso

James Durso is a regular commentator on foreign policy and national security matters. Mr. Durso served in the US Navy for 20 years and has worked in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq. Follow him on X: @james_durso.

Image: Aleksey Smyshlyaev / Shutterstock.com.

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Topic: Naval Warfare Blog Brand: The Buzz Region: Americas Tags: Caribbean, Donald Trump, International Law, Iran, US Navy, Venezuela, and War Crimes America’s Caribbean Crackdown Is Testing the Laws of War December 31, 2025 By: Brandon J. Weichert Share

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President Trump’s seizure of The Centuries, a Hong Kong-owned cargo ship, appears to be a flagrant violation of international law. Why did he do it?

President Donald Trump has enthused that he has deployed the largest flotilla of military ships off the coast of Venezuela that the region has ever seen. He is, of course, including the fleets of British, French, and Spanish warships that once dominated the waters of the Western Hemisphere during the Age of Sail and European colonization. 

Trump is also counting all the pirate ships that once terrorized the waters of the region, too. 

The US Navy’s Caribbean Strikes Are Probably Justified

Speaking of imperial missions, the 47th president has used this massive flotilla of US naval power in the Caribbean to sink suspected drug-running boats. He’s ordered the seizure of oil-filled container ships. And in a moment of brutal honesty, the American leader admitted that he is threatening Venezuela simply because he desires to take possession of the country’s vast oil reserves. 

Most Americans are not morally disturbed by the sinking of suspected drug-running boats. After all, illicit narcotics kill more than 100,000 Americans per year. Many people either know someone personally or know someone who knows someone who was killed due to the current opioid crisis plaguing the United States. To the extent that there have been objections in the United States, these have instead mostly been on legal grounds; if the government can kill anyone for any reason and justify it by posthumously labeling them a “terrorist,” is anyone in the world safe? Yet for all the handwringing over the legality of these strikes, there is a high probability that the US military knows what the boats being targeted are carrying—and that the “narco-terrorists” were, in fact, narco-terrorists.

Even the recent seizure of a supposed Iranian oil tanker, the Skipper, that was headed to Cuba can be forgiven, seeing as that ship was likely part of the so-called “Shadow Fleet.” This fleet’s entire purpose is to evade and undermine the US government’s sanctions regime by transporting sanctioned goods—in this case, oil—covertly. Iran is a sanctioned country, as is Venezuela. The US Navy claims that the Iranian container vessels were carrying sanctioned Venezuelan oil to nearby Cuba. Accordingly, the Trump administration ordered the shipment intercepted. 

But then came a real problem.

The Centuries Seizure: Where the Legal Argument Collapses 

Up until December 20, as controversial as the Trump administration’s actions were in the Caribbean, they could still claim the moral high ground. They were killing suspected drug runners and coopting container ships that were blatantly breaking the law. 

But then, The Centuries, a Panama-flagged vessel owned by the Hong Kong-based Centuries Shipping, was then seized by the US Coast Guard in the Caribbean.

The Centuries, unlike the first container ship that was interdicted by the Americans (the SS Skipper), was not on any sanctions list. Nor was there evidence that the Panama-flagged, Hong Kong-owned ship was either part of the Venezuelan shadow fleet or that it was trafficking stolen oil. 

The administration argues that The Centuries was doing just that, but the evidence is simply not there. And failure to produce that evidence—and if that evidence is purely circumstantial—would mean that the Trump administration willfully broke international law. 

In effect, the seizure turns the United States away from being the last remaining global superpower and into something more akin to a piratical power, no better than the “axis of autocracies” (China, Russia, and Iran) that Washington has often complained about. Seizing a Panama-flagged, Hong Kong-owned container ship—a legitimate ship doing legitimate business on the High Seas—is by definition piracy. 

Adding onto the legal woes facing the Trump administration is the fact that, shortly after the seizure of The Centuries, the White House announced a total blockade of Venezuela. In the context of international law, a blockade is an act of war. But war remains undeclared by either the Venezuelans or Americans.

Trump’s Actions Have Congressional Cover—for Now

Currently, the Trump administration can get away with skirting legal norms mostly because the only body that could possibly stop it is Congress—and the Legislative Branch is currently controlled by the Republican Party, which is loath to challenge Trump.

But that might not be the case come next November. The general consensus—even among Republican lawmakers themselves—is that the Republicans will probably lose the House of Representatives. The Senate is slightly more secure, but some Republican political analysts fret that a group of moderate Republican senators, tired of carrying water for Trump, are planning to resign en masse before the midterms, leaving gaping holes in the Senate elections next year, which might hand it over to the Democrats.

Once the Democrats are back in power, they could easily initiate a series of congressional investigations into things like potential war crimes (sinking the boats) or violations of international law, as in the case of The Centuries.

Are Trump’s Actions in the Caribbean Justified?

Of course, there are always two sides to the story. 

Trump has never clearly articulated what exactly he is doing in the Caribbean. He has generally vacillated between claiming he is picking a fight with Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro due to Maduro’s support for international drug cartels, and stressing the need for the United States to acquire Venezuela’s energy and mineral wealth.

Yet there is another reason behind Trump’s fixation on Venezuela. It has to do with concerns that China, Russia, and Iran are all too involved in what should be the United States’ sphere of interest in the Western Hemisphere. Targeting a Chinese-owned oil tanker—as China has seized total control of Hong Kong—is one way to send a message to Beijing: get out and stay out, or we will continue disrupting your energy flows from our hemisphere.

Notably, Washington has already bailed out the government of Javier Milei in Argentina. This was not only because Millei was a political ally of Trump’s. It was also because Argentina had become the epicenter of the contest with China for mastery over South America. Milei’s government is targeting and harassing China’s illegal fishing fleets that are draining the waters of South America of fish that belong to the Argentines.

Why Trump’s Strategy Is Risky—and Probably Too Slow 

Still, the strategy being employed by Trump is risky, and will likely take too long to successfully implement his desire of seeing Maduro removed from power. 

Any blockade of Venezuela that undermines the regime’s ability to make money will take months, if not years, to work—if it works at all. In general, economic warfare either wins quickly or loses slowly; over time, a sanctioned state will find ways to evade it, or to soften the financial blows. And, over time, Trump’s political rivals might return to power and could work to stymie his plans.

The question of whether Trump has broken international law is a more pressing matter. Sadly, the American president likely did violate international precedents. Certainly, it is a legal gray area. And American rivals can now be expected to replicate this behavior in areas they view as being within their strategic interests. 

About the Author: Brandon J. Weichert

Brandon J. Weichert is a senior national security editor at The National Interest. Recently, Weichert became the host of The National Security Hour on America Outloud News and iHeartRadio, where he discusses national security policy every Wednesday at 8pm Eastern. Weichert hosts a companion book talk series on Rumble entitled “National Security Talk.” He is also a contributor at Popular Mechanics and has consulted regularly with various government institutions and private organizations on geopolitical issues. Weichert’s writings have appeared in multiple publications, including The Washington Times, National Review, The American Spectator, MSN, and the Asia Times. His books include Winning Space: How America Remains a Superpower, Biohacked: China’s Race to Control Life, and The Shadow War: Iran’s Quest for Supremacy. His newest book, A Disaster of Our Own Making: How the West Lost Ukraine is available for purchase wherever books are sold. He can be followed via Twitter @WeTheBrandon.

Image: Shutterstock / Dmitri T.

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Topic: Air Warfare Blog Brand: The Buzz Region: Americas Tags: Canada, NGAD, NORAD, North America, and Sixth-Generation Aircraft Canada’s Sixth-Gen Fighter Snub Is Straining Its Alliance with the United States September 3, 2025 By: Andrew Latham Share

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Ottawa’s inaction on the NGAD program is not merely embarrassing. It is dangerous—putting the foundations of Canada’s most important security partnerships at risk.

On one side of the US-Canada border, the United States is racing ahead with the F-47 and the broader sixth-generation NGAD program—constructing the aircraft and networks that will form the core of its future way of war. On the other, Canada has effectively chosen to remain parked at the fifth generation with the F-35. This would be concerning enough if the stakes were limited to lost procurement opportunities or missed industrial contracts. But they are not. By standing on the sidelines of the Next-Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) program, Canada is threatening the very foundations of its defense partnership with the United States, starting with NORAD and rippling outward across the North American security relationship writ large. None of this is in Canada’s national interest.

How Sixth-Generation Fighter Jets Will Work

Sixth-generation airpower is not about another incremental step in fighter capability. It is about building an integrated network of command, control, sensor fusion, and AI-enabled kill chains that will determine how warfare is waged in the 21st century. The platforms at the heart of these programs are not so much new fighters as airborne command nodes, which will need to operate at machine speed in a battlespace where the distinctions between air, space, cyber, and the electromagnetic spectrum are intentionally and increasingly blurred. This is the guiding logic behind sixth-generation fighter development all over the world—America’s NGAD program, Europe’s Future Combat Air System (FCAS), and the Global Combat Air Programme (GCAP) now linking Britain, Japan, and Italy. Each program is less about the specific capabilities of the machines involved than it is about seizing control over the architecture of coalition warfare for decades to come. States that fail to stake out an early place in these ecosystems will not just be behind the curve. They will be locked out.

Canada is on the outside of the NGAD ecosystem looking in. Ottawa has no role in shaping the doctrine or military-technical requirements of NGAD. Canada’s firms have no share in the industrial benefits, and the country’s military leaders have no voice in how the architecture of sixth-generation airpower is being built. The costs of that absence will be heavy. In the NGAD era, “interoperability” will not mean flying compatible aircraft or radios that can talk to one another, but rather sharing integrated cloud-based systems, feeding sensor data into real-time AI engines, and trusting allies with mission-critical code.

Trust in each other’s software—and therefore in each other’s ability to make reliable use of that code on the battlefield—will have to be earned over time through co-development and co-production, not by buying a few dozen platforms off the shelf once the code is already written and frozen. Nor will the US combat cloud stretching from sea to space, from low Earth orbit to the hypersonic layer, slow down to accommodate Canadian platforms left out of code-level integration and unable to feed sensor data back into the wider network. Shared situational awareness will become a veneer. And once trust in that shared situational awareness starts to decay, the partnership itself begins to crumble as well.

Canada Was an Active Partner in America’s Defense. What Changed?

This is not remotely comparable to how Canada partnered with the United States on the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. As a founding partner in that fifth-generation program, Canadian firms won billions of dollars in defense contracts, Canadian pilots gained access to emerging doctrine, and Ottawa received a seat at the design table. With NGAD, the situation is very different. Ottawa has passed on those options, and is choosing instead to play the role of a late-arriving customer—if even that. The contrast is obvious to Washington and other allies and partners: whereas Canada was a full participant in shaping the future of airpower in the past, it is a bystander today.

The implications for NORAD, the cornerstone of continental defence for over six decades, are especially stark. When NORAD was created in 1957, Canada was not merely along for the ride: it was at the center of the vision, which understood North America as a unified and indivisible whole. When the North Warning System was built in the 1980s, radar lines crossed the continent in arcs that bisected Canadian territory. Canadian and American officers worked side-by-side in a genuinely integrated command. And throughout the Cold War, Canadian fighters sat alongside American ones on alert as equal partners, defending North American airspace.

That model of binational cooperation became a global symbol of allied trust and confidence. But when NORAD’s architecture is being remade to address the threats of the 21st century—including hypersonic missiles, stealthy cruise systems, and cross-domain synchronization—Canada is not modernizing to the same standards as the United States. Washington is moving ahead with NGAD integration, and Canada is not.

Ottawa’s neglect is especially glaring when it comes to the Arctic. The northern approaches to North America are once again a zone of great-power competition. Russia continues to operate long-range bombers from Arctic bases, and new hypersonic glide vehicles that are capable of attacking North America over the pole are already entering service. China has announced itself a “near-Arctic power” and is making inroads with both influence operations and mapping of polar routes for commerce and military access. Geography makes Canada an indispensable part of continental defense, but without NGAD-level integration, that advantage risks becoming irrelevant. An air force unable to plug into next-generation command networks will not be able to defend the Arctic effectively, nor reassure Washington that Canada is serious about its own northern responsibilities.

This is not merely a technical problem, but also a strategic one. The United States does not run its alliances based on sentiment, nostalgia, or past contributions—particularly in the era of President Donald Trump, who has made no secret of his transactional worldview. Today, Washington measures and rewards contributions made today, and expects its partners to do the same. States that step up, take hard decisions, and invest in the capabilities of the future are given influence in return. Those that do not are marginalized and quietly pushed to the side.

Ottawa’s current position all but guarantees that Washington will see Canada in the latter camp. The long-term result could be the hollowing out of NORAD as a genuinely binational command. Ottawa would still be briefed, but only after the fact and with no say in decisions that really matter. At that point, the “joint” nature of North American defence will be more fiction than fact.

Canada Cannot Free-Ride Off of America Any Longer

This is where the true failure of Canada’s current path becomes clear. Canada’s political class has spent decades convincing itself that the United States will always foot the bill for continental defence. Governments on both sides have treated defense procurement as optional spending, and strategy as something to defer to its partners on. These governments seem to have fallen under the illusion that Canada could hedge its way through great-power competition—perhaps even relying on Russia and China to balance against each other, all while somehow magically sustaining its sovereignty without needing to pay for it.

That illusion is unraveling further each day. Washington has made clear that it is no longer willing to subsidize allied indifference or complacency. In an era of great-power competition, relevance must be earned. Other allies have heard this message loud and clear; Australia, Japan, South Korea, and even Finland are busy embedding themselves in sixth-generation ecosystems, whether through NGAD partnerings, European FCAS programs, or the Anglo-Japanese-Italian GCAP. They are buying access, building capability, and harmonizing doctrine. They are making sacrifices in order to ensure that they are not just consumers of American security but contributors to it. Canada is doing none of this.

The costs are not just strategic, they are industrial. NGAD, FCAS, and GCAP will dominate the defence marketplace for decades. The intellectual property associated with these programs will be tightly controlled, and access to contracts tightly rationed to those on the inside from the start. Canadian firms will not see another F-35-style bonanza. They will instead be reduced to the role of subcontractors, dependent on the goodwill of others. That might be tolerable in peacetime, but it would be catastrophic in wartime—when Canada would find itself with little leverage, few options to surge production of critical components, and mired in deep dependence on third parties.

The economic effects in this scenario will also have political effects. If Canadian industry is systematically locked out of the cutting edge, Ottawa will lose one of the few tools it has to justify large defense expenditures to the Canadian public—namely the benefits of such expenditures to the Canadian economy. Without contracts going to Canadian companies, creating Canadian jobs, domestic support for higher spending will decline even further. Canada’s political class, already allergic to defence investment, will find new excuses to defer and delay, kicking off a vicious cycle of weakness and strategic irrelevance.

Canada Cannot Put Off Defense Spending Any Longer

Policymakers in Ottawa might attempt to persuade themselves that the NGAD program and its European competitors are still years away from completion. This is no longer the case. NGAD prototypes are already in the air, engines are being tested, and early platforms are scheduled to enter service in the 2030s. FCAS demonstrators are in development, and GCAP partners are building toward their first test flights in the early 2030s. The architecture for sixth-generation airpower and the battle networks it will enable will be locked in long before that. By the end of this decade, those on the inside of the ecosystem will be in. Those on the outside will be out. Today, Canada still has options to reverse its irrelevance—but time is running short.

Those options require a change of mindset. Ottawa could lobby for observer status on NGAD. It could begin making investments in plug-in technologies—AI, advanced sensors, drone teaming, and so on—that would at least give Canada a semi-integrated role in the wider network. It could use NORAD modernization as a bargaining chip to secure meaningful participation. But none of this is possible if Canadian leaders continue to defer hard decisions, then depend on the United States to cover for them.

Ottawa’s inaction up to now is not merely embarrassing. It is dangerous—putting the foundations of Canada’s most important security partnerships at risk. If Canadian leaders do not reverse course and find a place for Canada inside the sixth-generation ecosystem, the country will come to be regarded as a free rider, a bystander, and ultimately a liability for North America’s defense. The blame for that state of affairs will rest squarely on the shoulders of the existing political class—so addicted to deferral, and so blinded by short-term calculation, that it has chosen to gamble away Canada’s security and broader national interest at the very moment when both are more vital than ever.

About the Author: Andrew Latham

Andrew Latham is a senior Washington fellow at the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy, where he focuses on military strategy, great power politics, and the future of warfare. His work has appeared in The National Interest, RealClear Defense, 19FortyFive, The Hill, and The Diplomat. He is also a tenured professor of International Relations at Macalester College in Saint Paul, MN.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

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