In his opening remarks at last Wednesday’s “Worldwide Threats Assessment” hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Chairman Mark Warner, D-Va., announced what the focus of that day’s hearing, and by extension, what the greatest threat facing American national security was: The growing technological, economic and military power of China. The rest of the hearing demonstrated that a new bipartisan consensus has solidified in Washington: That we need to counter Beijing’s rise, and must do so quickly and aggressively.
In her opening statement, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines called China an “unparalleled priority for the intelligence community” that had become a “near-peer competitor challenging the United States in multiple areas, while pushing to revise global norms in ways that benefit the Chinese authoritarian system.”
The rest of the members of the spy community agreed. FBI Director Christopher Wray reassured Vice Chairman Marco Rubio, R-Fla., that the bureau was committed to fighting back against Chinese disinformation campaigns looking to influence U.S. domestic politics. He noted that there is no country that “presents a more severe threat to our innovation, our economic security, and our democratic ideals. And the tools in their toolbox to influence our businesses, our academic institutions, our governments at all levels, are deep and wide and persistent.”
According to Wray, there are currently over 2,000 FBI investigations that tie back to the CCP, and they are opening new investigations into China every 10 hours. In the last few years, said the FBI director, economic espionage investigations have surged 1300 percent.
This testimony accompanied the insights from the 2021 Intelligence Community annual threat assessment, released on April 9, in which the first chapter was titled “China’s Push for Global Power.” Despite the fact that that it is practically impossible for Beijing’s nuclear arsenal to approach anything near the United States’ in the near future, the report contains a section on WMDs that notes “Beijing will continue the most rapid expansion and platform diversification of its nuclear arsenal in its history, intending to at least double the size of its nuclear stockpile during the next decade.” Even if China were able to accomplish this goal, their nuclear weapons stockpile would represent roughly 17 percent of the American stockpile, according to recent estimates.
“We are basically asking the intel community to justify its own utility in facing future threats. No wonder their assessment is invariably hyped,” tweeted John Glaser, director of foreign policy at the Cato Institute. “Can we rely instead on a panel of experts whose jobs don’t incentivize threat inflation?”
China’s emergence was evidently the primary focus for the members of the Senate committee, as well. In fact, each of the first four Senators to speak, Warner, Rubio, Diane Feinstein, D-Calif., and Richard Burr, R-N.C., asked their first questions about China. Most of these senators were concerned with Beijing’s technological competition with the United States and the race to 5G, while Rubio raised questions about whether the coronavirus may have originated due to an accident in a lab in Wuhan.
As one of the last Senators to speak, Sen. Ben Sasse, R-Neb., offered a comprehensive overview of the coalescence that has taken place: “One of the things that’s new in the last 4-6 is that there is consensus, in your community and on this committee — in a bipartisan way — that there is an unparalleled, number one threat,” Sasse said. “The tech race with China is the biggest, existential national security threat we face.”
Sasse also argued that it should be a goal of both the Senate and the intelligence community to communicate to the American people that Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party are the “one, overarching national security threat we face.” As Sen. Warner remarked during opening statements, the United States must be “clear-eyed in assessing the threats posed by Xi Jinping.”
What this should mean is that we must acknowledge that China will continue to challenge the United States, while not overreacting to the nature of that threat. Yes, there is serious competition right now with China — primarily technological and economic. But the threat posed to the United States by Beijing today is not necessarily military in nature, and is certainly not existential.
The best way to compete with Beijing is by strengthening the American economy and promoting American manufacturing, through comprehensive industrial and trade policies, and by remaining diplomatically and economically engaged in East Asia. Attempting to launch a new Cold War by matching or exceeding Beijing’s every move will both not serve American interests and limit Washington’s ability to cooperate with the Chinese government on critical issues such as global health and climate change.
The hearing didn’t openly advocate for confrontation with China, and many of the issues raised by both the Senators and intelligence leaders were important ones that American leaders must grapple with. But Washington has a tendency to hype the threat presented by a coterie of foreign entities — whether Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Iran, or Al-Qaeda — and the unique focus on China suggests that the national security establishment is ripe to repeat that mistake. If China is portrayed as an existential threat, many of its own actions, even in its own neighborhood, will be used as justification to perpetuate America’s entanglement in unnecessary military conflicts, arms racing, and more.
On a day when many who have been pushing for a more humble American foreign policy celebrated the announcement of a September withdrawal from Afghanistan, the agreement about the next threat to be dealt with was loud and clear.
Joe Biden’s speech on Wednesday signaled a potential new way of thinking about the United States’ role in the world. The reaction to the attacks on 9/11 led to a two-decade long fixation on the threat of terrorism which prompted a warped and ultimately catatstrophic “Global War on Terror” which is only now winding down. If this inflated threat is only replaced by over the top concern over China — as last week’s hearing indicates — Beijing will now play the role of bogeyman to justify an overly militarized foreign policy.
Blaise Malley is a freelance writer and a former Responsible Statecraft reporter. He is currently a MA candidate at New York University. His writing has appeared in The New Republic, The American Prospect, The American Conservative, and elsewhere.
CIA Director William Burns testifies alongside Director Avril Haines of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), during a Senate Select Committee on Intelligence hearing about worldwide threats, April 14, 2021. Saul Loeb/Pool via REUTERS
Top photo credit: U.S. Army Soldiers assigned to weapons squad, 1st Platoon, C Company, 1st Battalion, 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment, pose for a photo before patrolling Rusafa, Baghdad, Iraq, Defense Imagery Management Operations Center/Photo by Staff Sgt. Jason Baile
On St. Patrick’s Day, March 17, 2003, President Bush issued his final ultimatum to Saddam Hussein. Two nights later, my Iraq War started inauspiciously. I was a college student tending bar in New York City. Someone pointed to the television behind me and said: “It’s begun. They’re bombing Baghdad!” In Iraq it was already early morning of March 20.
I arrived home a few hours later to find the half-expected voice message on my answering machine: “You are ordered to report to the armory tomorrow morning no later than 0800, with all your gear.”
At the time, I served in an infantry unit of the New York Army National Guard. By mid-day, our gear loaded, most of my company headed up the Hudson River to New York’s military training site, Camp Smith. The state had activated us for a homeland security mission. As the war began, one of the biggest unknowns was whether Saddam had the resources and connections to conduct terrorist strikes in the U.S. Less than two years after September 11, 2001, many feared New York City could be struck again.
Our unit spent about a week training for various scenarios that could take place on New York City’s transit system. By night we watched news reports and evaluated our military’s progress in Iraq. Before April, we were executing a mission guarding the subways alongside the New York City Police Department. I led a four-man team securing the platform under City Hall.
By the time President Bush staged his “Mission Accomplishment” moment on May 1, I was back in class, studying international relations. I expected to graduate the following January. But the mission wasn’t quite accomplished.
In August, as I prepared to begin my final semester, my unit received a verbal warning order that we would be mobilizing to deploy to Iraq. Graduation was delayed. In October I found myself at Fort Drum, New York, training for Iraq.
It wasn’t until early March that our battalion task force, including my company, was deployed into Iraq itself. On the evening of March 17, 2004, just a few days short of the war’s first anniversary, I came under and returned fire, alongside a few dozen of my battle buddies.
At the end of October, while driving the lead HMMMV of a patrol returning to base, I received a frantic call from our Battalion Commander, advising of enemy contact and calling for reinforcement and casualty evacuation. In the patrol’s lead vehicle, I didn’t wait for orders, I simply turned around and headed toward the fight.
A complex attack by insurgents with small arms and an IED killed Segun Akintade. We got there too late. It was October 28. Segun had immigrated to New York from Nigeria a few years earlier. Nicknamed Obi Wan, he was a giant man with a larger laugh. He worked at Bear Stearns to afford school and, like me, he studied at the City University of New York. He served in my fire team during that mission securing the subway at the beginning of the war.
His death was not the first for our battalion. Officially, it was the last, but tragedy struck again a month later and a few dozen kilometers away. Several soldiers we left behind in 2003 had been reassigned to another New York unit and then mobilized for the next cycle of deployments. In late November, another IED killed two more of my friends, both New York firefighters. Men we had trained with and knew well had their lives taken too soon. Several others suffered devastating wounds but survived.
All of this happened more than two decades ago. In the intervening years, more soldiers from that deployment died in Iraq and Afghanistan. Several took their own lives back at home.
In 2010, President Obama “brought all military combat personnel” home from Iraq. There are multiple problems with that statement, but the most obvious is: The enemy gets a vote as we say. If you come under fire while serving in the military, you’re a combatant (rare exceptions like chaplains prove the rule).
On March 20, 2025, we still have American soldiers in Iraq. There are roughly 2,500 U.S. troops serving overtly in a “train and advise” mission. These American service members, like their current counterparts in Syria and the greater Middle East, are at risk. The attack on Tower 22 in Jordan last year, which killed three young American reservists, demonstrates the vulnerability of thinly stretched U.S. forces, deployed with no clearly elaborated national interest to the United States. This vulnerability will sooner or later be exploited again to the detriment of our troops.
In the 22 years since I received the news that I would be mobilized to support the war in Iraq, over 4,000 American troops have fought and died there. Some of these deaths were deeply personal. The costs to families have been tragic. With the Islamic State’s caliphate long-since defeated, the so-called logic for U.S. forces to be in Iraq is gone.
After 22 years, it’s time to put an end to our “boots on the ground” mission in Iraq, draw down our presence in the Middle East, and only risk the lives of American military men and women when there is an undeniable national interest.
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Top photo credit: A supporter of Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro wears a shirt with U.S. President Donald Trump's face that reads "Yankee Go Home" during a rally to mark the anniversary of late Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez's initial coup attempt in 1992, in Caracas, Venezuela February 4, 2025. REUTERS/Leonardo Fernandez Viloria
For successive U.S. administrations, the big region below the American southern U.S. border was considered a bit of a backwater.
Sure, there were a few internal conflicts left outstanding, a couple of old-school leftist insurgencies still in operation, and the perpetual problem of drug trafficking. But after the Soviet Union collapsed, Latin America was never thought of as an epicenter of great power competition. The United States, frankly, didn’t have to worry about a geopolitical contender nosing into its own neighborhood.
The Trump administration, however, isn’t like any other administration before it. Trump campaigned on stopping narcotics from entering the U.S., defanging the drug cartels that have proven to be almost as powerful as the Mexican state, and dealing with irregular migration. So Latin America is now a center of gravity for U.S. foreign policy. Secretary of State Marco Rubio chose the region for his first trip as America’s top diplomat.
As we speak, the USS Gravely, a guided-missile destroyer, is steaming toward the Gulf of Mexico on a mission that Gen. Gregory Guillot, the commander of U.S. Northern Command, says is intended to protect the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the U.S.
If the Trump administration’s first eight weeks tell us anything, it’s that the 1823 Monroe Doctrine, which carved out the Western Hemisphere as Washington’s exclusive sphere of influence, is again at the forefront. Whether it’s threatening unilateral U.S. military action against the Sinaloa and New Jalisco Generation Cartels in Mexico, yelling about taking back the Panama Canal, or leveraging tariffs to coerce smaller states to cater to his policy priorities, Trump is treating the entire area as his own personal piñata.
To be fair, Washington has won some short-term wins. Either out of deference to a superpower or because they don’t have other alternatives in the short-term, the region’s governments have largely acceded to Trump’s wishes. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, for instance, has been far more aggressive against the cartels than her predecessor and mentor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) ever was during his six-year presidency. Law enforcement operations, often conducted by the Mexican military, have resulted in a steep increase in arrests, the seizure of 7 tons of narcotics and the dismantling of more than 100 fentanyl labs over a 10-day period.
Trump’s erratic tariff threats, like slapping a 25% tax on Mexican goods destined for the U.S. market, compelled the Mexican government to deploy an additional 10,000 troops to the U.S.-Mexico border for counter-narcotics operations (although how successful this operation will be in the long-run is up for debate). And while the evidence is circumstantial, it’s likely Mexico’s decision to hand over 29 of the country’s senior cartel leaders to the U.S. Justice Department had something to do with the tariff cudgel Trump is so fond of yielding.
There is movement further south as well. Despite Panamanian President José Raúl Mulino’s vocal declarations that the Panama Canal will forever remain under Panama’s control, his government has nevertheless tried to mollify the Trump administration by cooperating with Washington’s deportation schemes, getting out of China’s Belt and Road Initiative earlier than anticipated, and announcing an audit of a Hong Kong-based company that owns two ports on either end of the strategic waterway.
The heavy-handed U.S. approach is also working to an extent with some of Washington’s few adversaries. Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro, the same man Trump tried to dethrone during his first term by recognizing his main competitor, Juan Guaidó, as Venezuela’s rightful president and instituting a maximum pressure sanctions policy on the Venezuelan economy, is now exploring whether a detente with Trump’s second administration is possible. Despite labeling Maduro’s regime an enemy of the state and alleging that it cooperates with Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua to destabilize the U.S, Maduro agreed last week to resume accepting flights of Venezuelans who were deported from the U.S., likely in an attempt to ensure Chevron can continue to operate in Venezuela.
The record at this early stage is clear: Trump can legitimately claim that his tactics have produced results.
U.S. policymakers, however, would be wrong to assume that these tactics will work over the long-term or don’t have costs attached to them. Today, Latin American countries might be wary of confronting the U.S. But that wariness is unlikely to last if the Trump administration continues to throw around the stick at the exclusion of the carrot. Even small states have pride, dignity and an aversion to getting mercilessly kicked in the teeth at every opportunity. Look no further than Iran and North Korea, two relatively weak states that continue to thumb their nose at Washington’s demands notwithstanding the economic vise the U.S. has put them in.
Colombia, Peru, Mexico and Panama aren’t Iran and North Korea, of course. Outside of tariffs, it’s hard to envision that even Trump would go so far as to lock these countries out of the U.S. financial system, station warships off their coasts without their consent or shut down their respective embassies on U.S. soil. Yet Trump doesn’t have to do any of this to cause resistance and antagonism in these countries. The U.S. already has a bad reputation throughout Latin America thanks to its Cold War-era history of interventions, coup plotting and support for right-wing authoritarian regimes, particularly in Central America, which were more adept at killing civilians than servicing the basic needs of their populations.
Even more significant, Latin America has other options. In the past, these states couldn’t do much of anything to register their disapproval to U.S. actions. Most of them relied on the U.S. market and didn’t want to jeopardize the hand that fed them. Others relied on U.S. aid to ensure their militaries were still functioning. Outside of Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua, the region was America’s domain, a place where it could afford to be dismissive precisely because near-peer competitors didn’t have the capability or intent to challenge U.S. power.
But this is no longer the case. China isn’t about to displace the U.S. in Latin America but it’s by far a more palpable alternative for the region’s states today than it was at the turn of the century, when the Chinese economy was still scraping the bottom of the barrel. The statistics bear this out; between 2002 and 2022, trade between Beijing and Latin America increased from around $18 billion to over $450 billion. China provides investment and capital for major infrastructure projects in the region, from mines in Peru and ports in Ecuador to rails in Mexico and flashy soccer stadiums in El Salvador.
The Chinese aren’t doing all of this out of the goodness of their hearts—they’re doing it to undermine U.S. power in its own neighborhood.
The U.S. would be wise not to overreact. But it shouldn’t be making China’s work easier either. There’s a substantial risk that the Trump administration’s policy could be counterproductive. Hopefully Trump will recognize this sooner rather than later.
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Top image credit: Kenyan police officers disembark from a plane while arriving as part of a peace-keeping mission to tackle violence in Haiti, at the Toussaint Louverture International Airport, in Port-au-Prince, Haiti January 18, 2025. REUTERS/Ralph Tedy Erol
Haiti is sinking deeper into crisis as gangs tighten their stranglehold on the country, now controlling more than 85% of the capital Port-au-Prince.
More than one million people are internally displaced, sexual violence against children has increased by 1,000% and thousands struggle to receive food, water, and health and sanitation services. U.N. Independent Expert on the Human Rights Situation in Haiti William O’Neill said in a press statement last week that he saw in Haiti “the pain and despair of an entire population,” and called on the international community to intervene “without delay,” as the crisis reaches a tipping point.
Haiti has a long and fraught history of prolonged foreign interventions that have failed to secure lasting political stability, and the current crisis is no exception. Experts argue that international actors must rethink how they allocate their efforts and resources in Haiti to more effectively support the country’s path to stabilization.
Gangs in Haiti have steadily expanded their control of the country since the 2023 assassination of President Jovenel Moïse, seizing the power vacuum left in his wake. The crisis deepened in April 2024 when acting Prime Minister Ariel Henry resigned, paving the way for a transitional government. But the U.S.-backed Transitional Council has since struggled to stabilize the country or move it closer to presidential elections.
In a bid to restore order to the increasingly insecure state, the U.S. and Kenya entered into a defense agreement in 2023 to deploy Kenyan troops to Port-au-Prince. But since their delayed arrival to the capital in June, the Kenyan troops’ haven’t made meaningful progress in curbing gang violence. Jake Johnston of the Center for Economic and Policy Research says the mission’s shortcomings underscore a broader issue: foreign intervention in Haiti has lacked the strategic planning necessary to address the root causes of the crisis, both in the short and long term.
One major obstacle is that the mission is operating well below its already limited capacity. The mission currently consists of approximately 800 of the pledged 1,000 Kenyan officers so far, 168 of whom arrived in February. This number has proven inadequate in the face of the estimated 200 active gangs in the country.
O’Neill said in a statement to the press that stabilizing the country would be “doable" if the force was expanded to 2,500 or 3,000 officers.
However, Johnston says that while additional personnel could help in regaining territory from gangs, a larger force won’t resolve the mission’s deeper structural flaws.
The Kenyan mission was originally intended to support the Haitian National Police (HNP) in stabilizing violence while the transitional government worked towards establishing political stability. Johnston says this plan failed to contend with the HNP’s deeper issues — the organization is deeply politicized and many underpaid officers deal directly with gang members to privately make money.
“Strengthening that through this imported security force was an incredibly fraught proposal from the very beginning,” Johnston says, adding that a more sustainable approach would have prioritized reforming the Haitian police force to address these entrenched problems.
Another critical yet overlooked driver of the conflict is the steady influx of arms into Haiti, most of which come from Florida. Cutting off the gangs’ ammunition would significantly weaken them, Johnston says, yet this is not a focus of the Kenyan mission.
These shortcomings raise the question of whether limited resources and energy from foreign actors are being directed to the right priorities. Millions of dollars have been funneled into supporting the police force, while support of other critical areas — such as anti-corruption mechanisms and governance reforms that have long plagued Haiti's government — have been neglected.
“You can’t address this phenomenon strictly through force. It’s putting all of the eggs in this one basket to the detriment of other things,” Johnston says.
International actors have a role to play in supporting Haiti’s electoral and constitutional process, which will be essential for restoring legitimacy between Haitian civil society and its leaders and establishing long term stability, says Eduardo Gamarra, an international relations professor at Florida International University who has advised security reform and democratization in Haiti. This includes rebuilding Haiti's electoral system “from scratch” by updating outdated voter registries, establishing electoral oversight mechanisms, and implementing protections against fraud.
However, such efforts demand sustained investment from the international community. The question of which country or international body would support these more meaningful reforms remains unclear, as few countries want to absorb the challenges Haiti is facing, Gamarra adds.
Haiti’s current vulnerability is further exacerbated by its reliance on foreign aid, the majority of which comes from the U.S. and has now been abruptly pulled back after the Trump administration issued a 90-day pause on foreign aid last month. More than $300 million in aid to Haiti has now been halted, much of which was allocated for humanitarian assistance. The consequences are already being felt on the ground, as shortages of food and critical health supplies worsen.
“The money wasn’t much, but its impact was huge given Haiti’s current reality,” Gamarra says.
For now, U.S. support of the Kenyan mission will continue. In a February press conference, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that the Trump administration was committed to continuing to work with the Kenyan forces, and that its numbers need to increase to restore stability to the country. Rubio also approved exemptions in the funding pause for $40.7 million in foreign aid for the mission. However, Johnston says it is unlikely that the Trump administration will follow through with the Biden administration’s plans to transform the mission into a U.N. peacekeeping operation, which would allow for funding for the mission to come from member nations.
While reducing Haiti’s reliance on foreign aid should remain a long-term goal, Johnston emphasizes that an abrupt loss of international support presents immediate and significant challenges to the country’s stability.
This reality becomes even more critical when considering that current international efforts on the ground, meant to quell the severity of the situation, are failing to address Haiti’s most urgent security needs.
“Foreign intervention is a daily reality in everything that's happening in Haiti. Even if it's not direct, the situation has been defined by that in the past and as a result of those past interventions,” Johnston says. “You can't disentangle these things. So, the key is to change the modality of intervention.”
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