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Responsible Statecraft
Responsible Statecraft is a publication of analysis, opinion, and news that seeks to promote a positive vision of U.S. foreign policy based on humility, diplomatic engagement, and military restraint. RS also critiques the ideas — and the ideologies and interests behind them — that have mired the United States in counterproductive and endless wars and made the world less secure.
Top image credit: President Donald Trump is awarded the Grand Order of Mugunghwa by South Korean President Lee Jae Myung during a ceremony at the Gyeongju National Museum, South Korea on Wednesday, October 29, 2025. (Official White House Photo by Daniel Torok)
South Korea isn't crazy about US-led anti-China bloc
December 08, 2025
In response to what is seen as increased Chinese aggression in Asia, Beijing’s growing military capabilities, and inadequate deterrence, an increasing number of U.S. policymakers and experts now call for Washington to create a grand, U.S.-led coalition of allies to counter and confront China.
Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Australia would supposedly form the allied core of such a coalition. And the coalition’s major security function would be to deter a Chinese attack on Taiwan. In this, Tokyo and Seoul would apparently play a particularly prominent role, given their proximity to Taiwan, their own significant military capabilities and housing of major U.S. military bases.
This notion is apparently endorsed by the Trump administration’s U.S. National Security Strategy that was released Friday. It calls for a collective coalition against Beijing, with its heavy emphasis on tightening U.S. and allied military coordination within the first island chain to counter China and “deny any attempt to seize Taiwan.”
The fundamental problem with this coalition concept, however, is that America’s Asian allies are far from united in support of it. Japan seems to be moving closer to the U.S. view of China in general and of Taiwan in particular, especially since its hawkish new prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, implied recently that Tokyo might intervene militarily to defend Taiwan if China attacked the island.
At the same time, Tokyo’s stance regarding the extent and manner of any Japanese military role beyond the direct defense of the home islands remains unclear. The Japanese public remains ambivalent at best about becoming involved in Taiwan’s defense. In partial contrast, Canberra and especially Manila seem more willing to become involved in a Taiwan conflict, but only indirectly, by defending their own territory against China or by providing non-combat support of various types. And the Australian public is deeply distrustful of the United States, particularly under Trump.
Compared to other regional allies, South Korea has been more reluctant to rally behind the idea of joining a U.S.-led anti-China coalition. Consecutive ROK administrations — conservative and liberal — have sought to position themselves carefully between Washington and Beijing. At the public level, support among South Koreans for the ROK-U.S. alliance remains strong, while sentiment toward China has become quite negative in recent years. Nonetheless, South Korean public opinion polls have also shown consistent support for maintaining a degree of diplomatic balance between Washington and Beijing rather than siding with the U.S. against China.
South Korean reservations and ambivalence about participating in a U.S.-led anti-China coalition could not have been made clearer when I recently traveled to Seoul as part of a Quincy Institute delegation to engage with the strategic community there, including current and former senior officials, major think tanks, university scholars, risk analysts, and journalists. Our South Korean interlocutors were clearly wary of China’s expanding power and influence, viewing it as a long-term regional challenge. But they also preferred to approach China cautiously and expressed strong reluctance to the idea of an allied confrontation with China or choosing between Washington and Beijing, especially in the military realm — including the prospect of fighting a war alongside the U.S. against China over Taiwan.
Our interlocutors offered a range of explanations for why South Korea needs to maintain some distance from the U.S. regional strategy to confront China. These included South Korea’s deep economic dependence on China, a lack of confidence (especially since Trump came to power) in Washington’s reliability as a security partner and its ability to manage relations with Beijing; tepid social feelings toward Taiwan among the Korean populace; and a fear that involvement in a Taiwan conflict could not only drag South Korea into an unwanted conflict with Beijing, but also undermine stability on the Korean Peninsula by drawing forces out of the country or encouraging North Korean provocations.
The South Korean public has virtually no desire to risk a war with China over Taiwan and wants very much for Washington to handle the issue in a restrained manner. And, according to our interlocutors, President Lee Jae-myung holds a pragmatic and balanced view toward relations with both Washington and Beijing, seeking to strengthen the ROK-U.S. alliance on the premise of mutual benefit while maintaining cooperative relations with China.
Seoul’s caution is primarily reflected in its stance toward what has been termed “strategic flexibility” regarding the use of the U.S. armed forces stationed in Korea (USFK) in contingencies outside the Korean Peninsula, especially involving Taiwan.
In 2006, under considerable U.S. pressure, Seoul agreed to allow USFK to be used outside the peninsula for regional or global contingencies. And in more recent years, joint U.S.-ROK defense statements have mentioned “peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait” as a shared concern, possibly indicating (at least from Washington’s perspective) that USFK could be used to address a Taiwan-related contingency. This view was reinforced by the 2023 Camp David joint statement among the U.S., ROK, and Japan, which stated that peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait were “indispensable,” thereby placing Taiwan on the trilateral security agenda and arguably moving Seoul closer toWashington’s view. And at least one senior USFK military officer has said privately that the U.S. could do “whatever it wishes” with U.S. forces on the peninsula.
Despite all this, Seoul has not gone beyond the above vague statements regarding “strategic flexibility” and possible “out-of-peninsula” contingencies. For example, this year, South Korean officials refused to clarify, despite urging by U.S. defense officials, how Seoul would respond to a future Taiwan conflict, and have continued to avoid giving the United States carte blanche use of USFK outside the peninsula, contrary to what some U.S. military officers might say.
In fact, the 2006 agreement stipulated that the USFK could not undertake any activities outside Korea that would harm South Korea’s security or were “against the will of the Korean people.” Seoul also insisted that any USFK deployments would require prior political consultation, if not explicit approval. As many of our interlocutors stated in describing Seoul’s concerns, USFK “beyond-peninsula” operations must not jeopardize Seoul’s deterrence capacity against North Korea or drag South Korea directly into a Taiwan conflict against the will of the Korean people. These stances have remained consistent since 2006 across several South Korean administrations, even though it is probably true that conservative governments have been and will likely be more susceptible to U.S. pressure than liberal governments.
For some of our interlocutors, the vagueness of the 2006 agreement implies that South Korea is not obligated to provide any direct political or military support for USFK missions outside the peninsula. Other interlocutors believe that some type of “rear-area” support for USFK might be possible and, for some, inevitable. And some Korean observers have speculated that long-standing talks about the adjustment of wartime Operational Control of military units on the Korean Peninsula might eventually involve a division of labor in which Seoul takes primary responsibility for peninsula security (e.g., by keeping Pyongyang at bay during a Taiwan conflict) while USFK enjoys a limited form of "strategic flexibility.” But none of this has been clarified between the two countries, and it is no doubt on the agenda of ongoing talks.
So, while the Taiwan issue has become a focus of USFK “strategic flexibility,” South Korean hesitancy and concern remain. Our interlocutors said debates in South Korea continue over: a) how much influence Seoul might exercise over the use of USFK in a Taiwan or other “out-of-peninsula” contingency; b) whether, in a conflict, the U.S. would expect South Korea to provide at least rear-area support in any USFK deployment beyond the Korean Peninsula; c) whether USFK air assets in a possible Taiwan conflict (likely the primary if not sole forces available) would be deployed only to bases in Japan, and whether this would reduce the chance of any Chinese attack on U.S. bases in Korea; and d) whether a Taiwan conflict would lead to Beijing encouraging North Korea to provoke South Korea, thus pinning down both South Korean and USFK to the peninsula. All these uncertainties are greatly complicating any effort to clarify South Korea’s stance toward a Taiwan conflict.
Taken together, these questions demonstrate that, at least from a security perspective, the desire of some American policymakers and strategists to form a grand U.S.-led, anti-China coalition of allies is a long way from being realized, particularly with respect to South Korea. This should, however, be regarded as a good thing. Washington needs to start thinking about how to work with its allies to reduce, if not eliminate, the possibility of a U.S.-China conflict over Taiwan (or any other contingency in Asia) through means other than by simply piling on ever greater levels of military deterrence aimed at Beijing. '
Both carefully defined deterrence efforts along with credible reassurances are needed. Some South Korean interlocutors even believe that a U.S. policy shift that rules out U.S. military intervention in a cross-Strait conflict — while maintaining strong support for Taiwan in all other respects — would benefit regional stability in East Asia. All in all, Washington would be wise to drop its promotion of an unrealistic pursuit of a grand anti-China coalition.
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Top image credit: Project on Government Oversight
Another Navy fleet runs aground
December 05, 2025
The Bunker appears originally at the Project on Government Oversight and is republished here with permission.
Anchors astray!
It was almost eight years ago that The Bunker sounded the klaxon about the Navy’s future $1 billion-a-copy frigate. Last week, two days before Thanksgiving, the Navy finally heard it, too. At long last, it put that turkey on the chopping block and swung its axe.
The service scuttled the program after spending about $2 billion to begin work on the first pair of ships, the USS Constellation and the USS Congress. The Navy scrapped its plans to buy four more, although original projections had called for building up to 20 of the small warships for more than $22 billion.
“We are reshaping how the Navy builds and fields its fleet,” Navy Secretary John Phelan announced November 25. “Today, I can announce the first public action: a strategic shift away from the Constellation-class frigate program.”
Technically, “strategic shift” is Pentagobble for “this isn’t working any more, so we have to try something else.” There’s lots of chatter about how this move will free up more money to buy more ships faster, but we’ve seen this war movie before. The same thing happened with the Navy’s flotillas of Zumwalt-class destroyers and Littoral Combat Ships.
“Both programs were hampered by weak business cases that overpromised the capability that the Navy could deliver,” the Government Accountability Office said (PDF) in March. “Together, these two ship classes consumed tens of billions of dollars more to acquire than initially budgeted, and ultimately delivered far less capability and capacity to fleet users than the Navy had promised.”
But things will be different with the new frigate! the Navy had pledged. We have learned costly lessons from those floating fiascos!
For starters, the new lightly armed warship would be based on a proven Italian design. When the Navy tapped Fincantieri Marinette Marine of Marinette, Wis., to build the vessels in 2022, it declared the ship’s blueprints 88% complete. But, as in so many military procurement programs, the Navy was using a rubbery yardstick and wishful thinking to reach that number (the GAO more gently said [PDF] that the service simply “used metrics for measuring design progress that obscured its visibility into the actual basic and functional design process”). Bottom line: “the basic and functional design was just 70% complete, as of December 2024, over 2 years after the Navy certified the design was 88% complete and construction began.”
The Navy took a proven design and larded it with new requirements that delayed its development, boosted its cost, and made each frigate heavier. The service had been, in fact, “considering a reduction in the frigate’s speed requirement as one potential way, among others, to resolve this weight growth,” the GAO said (PDF). That’s metaphorically rich, given that one reason the Navy cancelled this program is to speed up future ship production.
Incredibly, the day after the Navy killed future work on the frigate at Fincantieri’s Wisconsin shipyard, it took delivery of the final Freedom-class Littoral Combat Ship from the very same contractor at the very same yard. “With the final Freedom-variant LCS now delivered, we celebrate the successful outcome of years of innovation and commitment,” the Navy official overseeing the LCS procurement disaster said. “This highly capable and lethal warship is ready to assert maritime dominance and protect global waters with unparalleled precision and power.”
Wow. The first rule in solving a problem is to admit that you have one. So long as the Navy can’t admit when it has royally screwed up, U.S. sailors will continue to sail, and U.S. taxpayers will continue to buy, over-priced and under-performing ships.
Blueprints aren’t the only thing that’s missing
Two months ago, defense contractors interested in building President Trump’s “Golden Dome” shield were complaining that they hadn’t been told just what the pie-in-the-sky project actually entailed. Last week, taxpayers learned that multiple companies have received contracts to develop the system’s key missile-killing interceptors. Pentagon officials envision such interceptors would orbit the Earth aboard satellites, blasting enemy missiles ferrying U.S.-bound warheads into space during their “boost phase” shortly after launch.
But the Defense Department, with its long-standing fetish for excessive secrecy, refused to name the contractors involved. That became the focus of the story. “Space Force Awards Secret Contracts for Golden Dome Interceptors,” Bloomberg reported. “Space Force won’t say who got money to start developing orbital interceptors,” added Defense One.
Who do those damn former Pentagon reporters — remember, Defense Secretary Pete “Hands-Off” Hegseth booted them from the building after they refused to sign his edict limiting their reporting to his pre-approved agitprop — think they are? Imagine their perfidious intrepidity, seeking information on where our tax dollars are going? Don’t they know that revealing such sensitive intelligence will imperil national security? The Pentagon, for its part, said the contractors’ names didn’t have to be divulged because each initial award was for less than $9 million and the companies’ identities “are currently not releasable as they are protected by enhanced security measures.”
Never mind. Reuters said the contract recipients included the usual suspects, among them Lockheed and Northrop. The Bunker is keeping its fingers crossed. It hopes Golden Dome does a better job at protecting the homeland from incoming threats than its “enhanced security measures” do at shielding those contractors’ names from outgoing reporters.
Wisdom from the late defense secretary
As defense secretary from 1989 to 1993, Dick Cheney could be an acerbic, yet funny, guy. As vice president from 2001 to 2009, especially after 9/11, not so much. The Bunker, who covered Cheney like a blanket at the Pentagon, was reminded of that following Cheney’s death, at 84, November 3. We went looking for some of his insights and humor, and found examples in interviews he did in 2000, in between those two powerful government gigs, with the University of Virginia’s presidential oral history project.
Cheney, who enjoyed his 10 years in Congress, turned on his former colleagues after leaving Capitol Hill to run the Pentagon:
“I’m convinced we still waste an awful lot of money in the Defense Department because we spend it on things we don’t need to spend it on. We do it because Congress directs that it be done, not because we’ve got a bunch of admirals and generals in the Pentagon who sit around trying to figure out ways to waste the taxpayers’ money.”
On giving marching orders to the military services:
“The Army would salute smartly and try like hell to do it. The Navy would say, ‘Hell no, no way.’ And the Air Force would do everything they could to convince you they were doing it, and then they’d do something else.”
Speaking of the Air Force, Cheney recalled its push to use its new F-117 stealth fighter-bomber when the U.S. invaded Panama in 1989:
“I remember going over the plans and raising questions. ‘You’re going to fly 117s to Panama?’ I said, ‘How tough is the Panamanian air defense system? Do they even have one?’ In the end, the argument, of course, was that they wanted to drop these weapons to stun the Panamanian forces. It was a lot of hooey. They finally cut the size of the deployment, but I think they flew two aircraft down there, did fly a mission and claimed great accuracy, which turned out not to be true: they missed when they got there.”
In 1990, Cheney was leery of telling Morocco’s King Hassan about secret U.S. war plans against Iraq with the king’s interpreter present (His Majesty spoke pretty good English):
“He pulled out this little gold box, that I guess had a piece of the Koran in it, and gave it to his aide and made him swear on pain of death that he wouldn’t reveal what he was about to hear. I thought, ‘Boy, I could use one of those in the Pentagon. Great way to enforce some discipline.’’”
Here’s what has caught The Bunker’s eye recently
The world’s top 100 defense contractors saw their revenues jump 5.9% last year to a record $679 billion, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute reported December 1.
Hot defense start-up Anduril is hitting some bumps in its weapons-development efforts, the Wall Street Journal’s Shelby Holliday, Heather Somerville, Alistair MacDonald, and Emily Glazer reported November 27.
The U.S. Coast Guard flies each of its helicopters for roughly twice as many hours per year as other branches of the U.S. military, the Congressional Budget Office reported November 20 — and even used Navy choppers dramatically increase their flying time once they’re inherited by the Coast Guard.
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Top image credit: Gal_Rotem via shutterstock.com
Israel shredding Gaza ceasefire while US distracted by Ukraine
December 05, 2025
There is no ceasefire in the Gaza Strip, even though an agreement reached on October 9 supposedly established one.
The Israeli assault on the Strip continues, albeit at a reduced pace from what it was for most of the past two years. By one count, Israel has violated the ceasefire agreement 591 times between October 10 and December 2 with a combination of air and artillery attacks and direct shootings. The Ministry of Health in Gaza reports that during this period, 347 Palestinians have been killed and 889 injured. The pattern of casualties including women and children as well as journalists continues.
Meanwhile, it is hard to find any documented Israeli casualties in the Gaza Strip during the same period, beyond an early shooting incident at Rafah in which Israel says a soldier was killed and Hamas says it had nothing to do with it.
The rules of engagement that Israel has given itself during this “ceasefire” are illustrated by the killing of two Palestinians last weekend along the “yellow line” ceasefire boundary near Khan Younis. The Israeli military said its forces had “identified two suspects" who “conducted suspicious activities,” after which “the air force, directed by forces on the ground, eliminated the suspects in order to remove the threat.” The “threat” consisted of two boys, ages 9 and 10, who had left their home to gather wood.
The same pattern of Israeli conduct prevails today in Lebanon, where a ceasefire agreement was reached in November 2024. The United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) has recorded more than 7,500 airspace violations and nearly 2,500 ground violations by Israel in what the U.N. special rapporteur describes as a “total disregard for the ceasefire agreement.”
The Israeli attitude toward ceasefires was also displayed after an agreement for a ceasefire in Gaza and partial prisoner exchange was reached in January of this year. Israel welcomed some released hostages and used the breather for its military forces before ending the ceasefire and resuming its full-scale assault in March. The Israeli government evidently had no intention of ever implementing the later phases of that agreement.
Apart from agreeing to a ceasefire, there was no involvement by Hamas or any other Palestinians in the current 20-point “peace plan” for Gaza. The Trump administration constructed it, with the amount of input from Israel left unsaid but with a result that heavily favors Israel. Hamas thus rejects the plan, citing among other things how it leaves Palestinians under foreign rule.
In Gaza, that foreign rule would involve an international body headed by a firm backer of Israel: Donald Trump. The one other named prospective member of this supervisory body is former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who is a controversial figure among Arabs for reasons involving both his abetting of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 and his later performance as an international envoy addressing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Hamas also cites other respects in which the plan strongly tilts against Palestinian interests, including ones involving a prospective international stabilization force. “Assigning the international force with tasks and roles inside the Gaza Strip, including disarming the resistance,” states Hamas, “strips it of its neutrality, and turns it into a party to the conflict in favor of the occupation.”
Given that the plan heavily favors Israel, one might think that the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would be more inclined to complete its implementation than it was with the January agreement. But one of the chief ways in which it favors Israel is to permit Israel to continue to occupy parts of the Gaza Strip indefinitely if certain other conditions are not meant, and to leave it to Israel to decide if those conditions are met. The plan lays the groundwork for Israel to declare that it must continue not only occupation but also its lethal military operations.
The chief stated condition is disarmament of Hamas, which Netanyahu emphasizes in his rhetoric. Given that Hamas has indicated its willingness to forgo a direct governing role in Gaza, complete disarmament would come close to effectively accomplishing Netanyahu’s earlier stated goal of “destroying” Hamas.
It is not surprising that a target of destruction is unwilling to surrender all its arms. It is especially unsurprising in the case of Hamas, given that it had no role in writing the current plan, that this document talks about a “guarantee” that Hamas comply with its obligations while saying nothing about responding to rampant Israeli violations, and that Israel has inflicted death and destruction that are many orders of magnitude greater than anything Hamas has done.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration is having significant difficulty recruiting countries to participate in the proposed international stabilization force. The chief reason for hesitation among would-be participants is that there still are ongoing military operations in Gaza rather than a real ceasefire to monitor or enforce.
Governments especially do not want to get involved in trying to disarm Hamas. If two years of brutal warfare by Israel could not accomplish that objective, then a smaller and weaker international force would not either. Moreover, Arab countries especially, but also other Muslim-majority countries, do not want to be seen doing Israel’s dirty work.
Netanyahu’s motivations for continuing warfare remain mostly unchanged. His request for a pardon to end the corruption case against him potentially could weaken one motivation, but the idea of such a pardon, despite President Trump’s endorsement, is controversial within Israel, and there is no assurance that President Isaac Herzog will grant it.
In any event, Netanyahu staying in power means keeping together a right-wing coalition that includes extremists who will stop at nothing short of complete ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. One reflection of this is Israel’s recent announcement that it is willing to reopen the Rafah crossing between the Gaza Strip and Egypt — but only for Palestinians to leave Gaza, not to re-enter it.
Concentrated attention and follow-up by the United States conceivably could rescue parts of the 20-point plan, but the Trump administration is unlikely to provide such attention. Most of the high-level negotiating bandwidth is taken up at the moment by the Russia-Ukraine war, with both special envoy Steve Witkoff and the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who previously had focused almost entirely on the Middle East, recently conferring with Vladimir Putin in Moscow.
If Trump’s interest in international agreements returns to the Middle East, it might be not to Israel-Palestine but rather to Iran, which, despite the continuing distrust heightened by the Israeli and U.S. aggression against Iran in June, has indicated its commitment to diplomacy and interest in negotiating a new nuclear agreement.
Trump is not big on follow-up. He is interested far more in signing or touting anything he can label as a peace agreement, regardless of its effectiveness. He is likely to value anything new on Ukraine or Iran more than the work required to bring real peace to Gaza.
The prospect is thus for no peace in that miserable territory, with no actual ceasefire taking hold and little likelihood that most of the 20-point plan will be implemented. More broadly, there will be no peace between Israel and the Palestinians as long as the former subjugates the latter.
The one new twist to this familiar sad story is the likelihood of a long-term division of the Gaza Strip along the yellow line, with Israel directly occupying slightly more than half of the Strip, including most of the land where agriculture is possible. Israel has been erecting infrastructure along the yellow line with the look of permanence.
What both the Israeli government and the Trump administration seem to have in mind is to support the argument that Palestinians have a better life under Israeli rule than they would in any territory governed by the likes of Hamas. Further to this argument, the Trump administration has announced its intention to construct residential compounds on the Israeli side of the Strip that would be an improvement over the combination of tents, rubble, and mud that have become the homes of many Gazans.
The other side of this strategy of split-territory contrast is to keep the non-Israeli side miserable. In furtherance of this objective, Israel is still restricting humanitarian aid. According to the United Nations Office of Project Services, only about 20 percent of the aid trucks that were supposed to have been admitted to Gaza under the ceasefire agreement have been let in.
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