China-US relations: zero-sum view misguided, Jake Sullivan says in Trump policy critique
Washington voices who adopt a zero-sum view of
US-China relations without recognising their complexity and long-term trajectory are misguided, the previous US national security adviser said on Tuesday evening.
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Jake Sullivan, who was national security adviser to former president
Joe Biden , made his remarks – one of the first extensive critiques of foreign policy under President
Donald Trump by a top official from the Biden administration – at Harvard, where he has joined the faculty at the university's John F. Kennedy School of Government.
He was not shy about criticising
Trump's policies
01:39
Trump says China's talks with Vietnam are probably intended to 'screw' US
Trump says China's talks with Vietnam are probably intended to 'screw' US
'There are people in Washington who would say, 'Jake, you're wrong. The end state is we win, they lose, we crush them',' Sullivan said. 'I do not think that those voices have an accurate read of either how to balance US interests in the middle term, or what is a plausible outcome that serves us all.'
US leadership would benefit by realising it was not going to see US-China competition disappear and its adversary somehow implode, as happened with the Soviet Union, he added.
'No matter what happens in that competition, we're both going to be there in the world as countries,' Sullivan told Harvard students and faculty. 'There's not an end state that just resolves all of this. There's rather a steady state of managed competition.'
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Sullivan joined the Kennedy School earlier this month, taking up its first professorship named after former secretary of state Henry Kissinger. Sullivan's stint as national security adviser for Biden's four-year term followed extensive experience in government, academia and think tanks.
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Asia Times
an hour ago
- Asia Times
Ukraine's Operation Spider Web redefined the front lines of war
A series of blasts at airbases deep inside Russia on June 1, 2025, came as a rude awakening to Moscow's military strategists. The Ukrainian strike at the heart Russia's strategic bombing capability could also upend the traditional rules of war: It provides smaller military a blueprint for countering a larger nation's ability to launch airstrikes from deep behind the front lines. Ukraine's Operation Spider Web involved 117 remote-controlled drones that were smuggled into Russia over an 18-month period and launched toward parked aircraft by operators miles away. The raid destroyed or degraded more than 40 Tu-95, Tu-160 and Tu-22 M3 strategic bombers, as well as an A-50 airborne-early-warning jet, according to officials in Kyiv. That would represent roughly one-third of Russia's long-range strike fleet and about US$7 billion in hardware. Even if satellite imagery ultimately pares back those numbers, the scale of the damage is hard to miss. The logic behind the strike is even harder to ignore. Traditional modern military campaigns revolve around depth. Warring nations try to build combat power in relatively safe 'rear areas' — logistics hubs that are often hundreds, if not thousands, of miles from the front line. These are the places where new military units form and long-range bombers, like those destroyed in Ukraine's June 1 operation, reside. Since the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the Kremlin has leaned heavily on its deep-rear bomber bases — some over 2,000 miles from the front in Ukraine. It has paired this tactic with launching waves of Iranian-designed Shahed attack drones to keep Ukrainian cities under nightly threat. The Russian theory of victory is brutally simple: coercive airpower. If missiles and one-way drones fall on Kyiv often enough, civilian morale in Ukraine will crack, even as the advance of Russian ground forces gets bogged down on the front line. For Kyiv's military planners, destroying launch platforms undercuts that theory far more cheaply than the only other alternative: intercepting every cruise missile in flight, which to date has achieved an 80% success rate but relies heavily on Western-donated equipment coming increasingly in short supply. Airfields have always been critical targets in modern warfare, the logic being that grounded bombers and fighters are more vulnerable and easier to hit. In the North African desert during World War II, the United Kingdom's Special Air Service used jeep raids and delayed-action explosives to knock out an estimated 367 enemy aircraft spread across North Africa — firepower the Luftwaffe never regenerated. That same year, German paratroopers seized the airstrips on Crete, denying the British Royal Air Force a forward base and tipping an entire island campaign. A generation later in Vietnam, Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army assault teams armed with satchel charges and mortars repeatedly penetrated US perimeters at Phan Rang, Da Nang and Bien Hoa, burning fighters on the ramp and forcing the diversion of thousands of American soldiers to base security. The underlying playbook of hitting aircraft on the ground remains effective because it imposes cascading costs. Every runway cratered and every bomber torched obliges the military hit to pour money into ways to frustrate such attacks, be it hardened shelters or the dispersal of squadrons across multiple bases. Such air attacks also divert fighters from the front lines to serve as guards. US soldiers look at wreckage of an Air Force B-57 Canberra bomber after Viet Cong mortars destroyed 21 planes at Bien Hoa airbase in 1964. AP Photo via The Conversation In Operation Spider Web, Ukraine has sought to repeat that strategy while also leveraging surprise to achieve psychological shock and dislocation. But the Ukraine operation taps into a uniquely 21st-century aspect of warfare. The advent of unmanned drone warfare has increasingly seen military practitioners talk of 'air littorals' — military speak for the slice of atmosphere that sits above ground forces yet below the altitude where high-performance fighters and bombers traditionally roam. Drones thrive in this region, where they bypass most infantry weapons and fly too low for traditional radar-guided defenses to track reliably, despite being able to incapacitate targets like fuel trucks or strategic bombers. By smuggling small launch teams of drones within a few miles of each runway, Kyiv created pop-up launchpads deep into Russia and were able to catch the enemy off guard and unprepared. The economic benefits of Ukraine's approach are stark. Whereas a drone, a lithium-battery and a warhead cost well under $3,000, a Russian Tu-160 bomber costs in the region of $250 million. Ukraine's Operation Spider Web will have immediate and costly consequences for Russia, even if the strikes end up being less destructive than Kyiv currently claims. Surviving bombers will need to be relocated. Protecting bases from repeat attacks will mean erecting earthen revetments, installing radar-guided 30 mm cannons and electronic-warfare jammers to cover possible attack vectors. This all costs money. Even more importantly, the operation will divert trained soldiers and technicians who might otherwise rotate to the front line in support of the coming summer offensive. Russian MiG-31bm fighter jets, a Tu-160 strategic bomber and an Il-78 aerial refueling tanker fly over Moscow during a rehearsal for the WWII Victory Parade on May 4, 2022. Photo: Kirill Kudryavtsev / AFP via Getty Images The raid also punches a hole in Russia's nuclear weapons capabilities. Losing as many as a dozen Tu-95 and Tu-160 aircraft, which double as nuclear-capable bombers, would be strategically embarrassing and may prod the Kremlin to rethink the frequency of long-range air patrols. Beyond the physical and financial damage to Russia's fleet, Ukraine's operation also comes with a potent psychological effect. It signals that Ukraine, more than three years into a war aimed at grinding down morale, is able to launch sophisticated operations deep into Russian territory. Ukraine's security service operation unfolded in patient, granular steps: 18 months of smuggling disassembled drones and batteries across borders inside innocuous cargo, weeks of quietly reassembling kits, and meticulous scouting of camera angles to ensure that launch trucks would be indistinguishable from normal warehouse traffic on commercial satellite imagery. Operators drove those trucks to presurveyed firing points and then deployed the drones at treetop height. Because each of the drones was a one-way weapon, a dozen pilots could work in parallel either close to the launch site or remotely, steering live-video feeds toward parked bombers. Videos of the strike suggest multiple near-simultaneous impacts across wide swaths of runway — enough to swamp any ad hoc small-arms response from perimeter guards. For Ukraine, the episode demonstrates a repeatable method for striking deep, well-defended assets. The same playbook can, in principle, be adapted to missile storage depots and, more importantly, factories across Russia mass-producing Shahed attack drones. Kyiv has needed to find a way to counter the waves of drones and ballistic missile strikes that in recent months have produced more damage than Russian cruise missiles. The Center for Strategic and International Studies' Firepower Strike Tracker has shown that Shaheds are now the most frequent and most cost-effective air weapon in Russia's campaign. But the implications of Operation Spider Web go far beyond the Russia-Ukraine conflict by undermining the old idea that rear areas are safe. Comparatively inexpensive drones, launched from inside Russia's own territory, wiped out aircraft that cost billions and underpin Moscow's long-range strike and nuclear signaling. That's a strategy than can be easily replicated by other attackers against other countries. Anyone who can smuggle, hide and pilot small drones can sabotage an adversary's ability to generate air attacks. Air forces that rely on large, fixed bases must either harden, disperse or accept that their runway is a new front line. Benjamin Jensen is professor of strategic studies at the Marine Corps University School of Advanced Warfighting and scholar-in-residence, American University School of International Service This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Asia Times
an hour ago
- Asia Times
Trump's Golden Dome will make US – and world
President Donald Trump's idea of a 'Golden Dome' missile defense system carries a range of potential strategic dangers for the United States. Golden Dome is meant to protect the US from ballistic, cruise and hypersonic missiles, and missiles launched from space. Trump has called for the missile defense to be fully operational before the end of his term in three years. Trump's goals for Golden Dome are likely beyond reach. A wide range of studies makes clear that even defenses far more limited than what Trump envisions would be far more expensive and less effective than Trump expects, especially against enemy missiles equipped with modern countermeasures. Countermeasures include multiple warheads per missile, decoy warheads and warheads that can maneuver or are difficult to track, among others. Regardless of Golden Dome's feasibility, there is a long history of scholarship about strategic missile defenses, and the weight of evidence points to the defenses making their host country less safe from nuclear attack. I'm a national security and foreign policy professor at Harvard University, where I lead 'Managing the Atom,' the university's main research group on nuclear weapons and nuclear energy policies. For decades, I've been participating in dialogues with Russian and Chinese nuclear experts – and their fears about US missile defenses have been a consistent theme throughout. Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping have already warned that Golden Dome is destabilizing. Along with US offensive capabilities, Golden Dome poses a threat of 'directly undermining global strategic stability, spurring an arms race and increasing conflict potential both among nuclear-weapon states and in the international arena as a whole,' a joint statement from China and Russia said. While that is a propaganda statement, it reflects real concerns broadly held in both countries. Golden Dome explained. Experience going back half a century makes clear that if the administration pursues Golden Dome, it is likely to provoke even larger arms buildups, derail already-dim prospects for any negotiated nuclear arms restraint, and perhaps even increase the chances of nuclear war. My first book, 35 years ago, made the case that it would be in the US national security interest to remain within the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which strictly limited US and Soviet – and later Russian – missile defenses. The United States and the Soviet Union negotiated the ABM Treaty as part of SALT I, the first agreements limiting the nuclear arms race. It was approved in the Senate 98-2. The ABM Treaty experience is instructive for the implications of Golden Dome today. Why did the two countries agree to limit defenses? First and foremost, because they understood that unless each side's defenses were limited, they would not be able to stop an offensive nuclear arms race. If each side wants to maintain the ability to retaliate if the other attacks – 'don't nuke me, or I'll nuke you' – then an obvious answer to one side building up more defenses is for the other to build up more nuclear warheads. For example, in the 1960s and 1970s, the Soviets installed 100 interceptors to defend Moscow – so the United States targeted still more warheads on Moscow to overwhelm the defense. Had it ever come to a nuclear war, Moscow would have been even more thoroughly obliterated than if there had been no defense at all. Both sides came to realize that unlimited missile defenses would just mean more offense on both sides, leaving both less secure than before. In addition, nations viewed an adversary's shield as going hand in hand with a nuclear sword. A nuclear first strike might destroy a major part of a country's nuclear forces. Missile defenses would inevitably be more effective against the reduced, disorganized retaliation that they knew would be coming than they would be against a massive, well-planned surprise attack. That potential advantage to whoever struck first could make nuclear crises even more dangerous. Unfortunately, President George W Bush pulled the United States out of the ABM Treaty in 2002, seeking to free US development of defenses against potential missile attacks from small states such as North Korea. But even now, decades later, the US has fewer missile interceptors deployed (44) than the treaty permitted (100). The US pullout did not lead to an immediate arms buildup or the end of nuclear arms control. But Putin has complained bitterly about US missile defenses and the US refusal to accept any limitation at all on them. He views the US stance as an effort to achieve military superiority by negating Russia's nuclear deterrent. Russia is investing heavily in new types of strategic nuclear weapons intended to avoid US missile defenses, from an intercontinental nuclear torpedo to a missile that can go around the world and attack from the south, while US defenses are mainly pointed north toward Russia. Russia maintains a large force of nuclear weapons like this mobile intercontinental ballistic missile. Photo: Russian Defense Ministry Press Service via APPEAR / The Conversation Similarly, much of China's nuclear buildup appears to be driven by wanting a reliable nuclear deterrent in the face of the United States' capability to strike its nuclear forces and use missile defenses to mop up the remainder. Indeed, China was so angered by South Korea's deployment of US-provided regional defenses – which they saw as aiding the US ability to intercept their missiles – that they imposed stiff sanctions on South Korea. Now, Trump wants to go much further, with a defense 'forever ending the missile threat to the American homeland,' with a success rate 'very close to 100%.' I believe that this effort is highly likely to lead to still larger nuclear buildups in Russia and China. The Putin-Xi joint statement pledges to 'counter' defenses 'aimed at achieving military superiority.' Given the ease of developing countermeasures that are extraordinarily difficult for defenses to overcome, odds are the resulting offense-defense competition will leave the United States worse off than before – and a good bit poorer. Putin and Xi made clear that they are particularly concerned about the thousands of space-based interceptors Trump envisions. These interceptors are designed to hit missiles while their rockets are still burning during launch. Most countries are likely to oppose the idea of deploying huge numbers of weapons in space – and these interceptors would be both expensive and vulnerable. China and Russia could focus on further developing anti-satellite weapons to blow a hole in the defense, increasing the risk of space war. Already, there is a real danger that the whole effort of negotiated limits to temper nuclear arms racing may be coming to an end. The last remaining treaty limiting US and Russian nuclear forces, the New START Treaty, expires in February 2026. China's rapid nuclear buildup is making many defense officials and experts in Washington call for a US buildup in response. Intense hostility all around means that for now, neither Russia nor China is even willing to sit down to discuss nuclear restraints, in treaty form or otherwise. In my view, adding Golden Dome to this combustible mix would likely end any prospect of avoiding a future of unrestrained and unpredictable nuclear arms competition. But paths away from these dangers are available. It would be quite plausible to design defenses that would provide some protection against attacks from a handful of missiles from North Korea or others that would not seriously threaten Russian or Chinese deterrent forces – and design restraints that would allow all parties to plan their offensive forces knowing what missile defenses they would be facing in the years to come. I believe that Trump should temper his Golden Dome ambitions to achieve his other dream – of negotiating a deal to reduce nuclear dangers. Matthew Bunn is professor of the practice of energy, national security and foreign policy, Harvard Kennedy School This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. Thanks
South China Morning Post
3 hours ago
- South China Morning Post
Trump, Hegseth, Rubio: a triple threat to global stability
The Indo-Pacific cannot afford to become collateral damage in America's descent from diplomacy into dysfunction – a decline embodied by Defence Secretary Peter Hegseth's sabre-rattling and Secretary of State and National Security Adviser Marco Rubio's overreach. South Korea , At the recent Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore , Hegseth stunned Asia's defence and diplomatic elite by demanding that Indo-Pacific countries raise defence spending to 5 per cent of gross domestic product to 'counter China'. The proposal was not just tone-deaf; it was combustible. No country in the region, save for outliers, comes close to that threshold. Japan Australia – and certainly Southeast Asia, where military spending averages just 1.5 per cent of GDP – are in no position to meet such a demand. What Hegseth delivered was not a strategy, but an ultimatum. And in doing so, he risked catalysing the very action-reaction cycle Washington once sought to avoid: a region arming in anticipation, while Beijing accelerates its military posture in the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait. Asean , already reeling from intensifying great power rivalries, finds itself caught in the crossfire of an American foreign policy that confuses coercion with clarity, and escalation with influence. Former US president Richard Nixon and then-secretary of state Henry Kissinger wielded ambiguity to signal strategic intent. By contrast, Hegseth, Rubio and US President Donald Trump offer only confusion and contradiction – wielded like a cudgel, fracturing the very alliances they claim to reinforce. In this environment, diplomacy is no longer the art of restraining power. It has become the art of surviving it. A cabinet without guardrails The Hegseth doctrine – if it can be called one – illustrates a deeper unravelling within Trump's second administration: the near-total removal of institutional counterweights. The National Security Council is diminished. The State Department's career corps, once the backbone of US diplomacy, has been hollowed out. What remains is a cabinet of loyalists, not strategists.
