Top image credit: Photo agency and Lev Radin via shutterstock.com
Why Texas should invite Xi Jinping to a rodeo
November 07, 2025
Last year, Texas banned professional contact by state employees (including university professors) with mainland China, to “harden” itself against the influence of the Communist Party of China – an entity that has governed the country since 1949, and whose then-leader, Deng Xiaoping, attended a Texas rodeo in 1979.
Defending the policy, the new provost of the University of Texas, my colleague Will Inboden, writes in National Affairs that “the US government estimates that the CPC has purloined up to $600 billion worth of American technology each year – some of it from American companies but much of it from American universities.” US GDP is currently around $30 trillion, so $600 billion would represent 2% of that sum, or roughly 70% of the US defense budget ($880 billion). It also amounts to about one-third of all spending ($1.8 trillion) by all US colleges and universities, on all subjects and activities, every year. Make that 30 cents of every tuition dollar and a third of every federal research grant.
Moreover, it seems the Chinese made better use of the purloined knowledge than we would have. Compare their growth rate to America’s, or look at Chinese cities, their high-speed railroads, and advanced industries. Then there’s the elimination of mass poverty and the 3.5 million engineers and scientists the country mints every year. Such theft must be akin to stealing emeralds from the Louvre – a zero-sum game. Not only did the Chinese get the good stuff, but they somehow prevented America from using it. How very diabolical.
Of course, the figure that Inboden cites is absurd, though I don’t doubt that the US government said it somewhere. Such claims about China (and not only China) have become routine in recent years. The tactic is straightforward. By saturating the information space with far-fetched assertions too numerous and too pervasive to rebut, disagreement, let alone dissent, becomes tantamount to disloyalty, even treason.
Yet universities obviously cannot be the secret laboratories of a national-security state. We are, by our nature, open. To the extent that we produce useful knowledge or new technologies, these naturally become the common property of the whole world. That is what “publication” is about. As for American companies, they went to China to make money. Many succeeded. That China got something out of it – at the expense of American workers, we can admit – was part of the deal. It’s called capitalism.
We’ve been here before. In the 1950s, “Who lost China?” became a national war cry as ambitious witch-hunters in Congress and elsewhere destroyed the careers and lives of US officials who knew the country firsthand. When my father was serving as ambassador to India in 1961, he cabled the State Department to argue for recognition of the People’s Republic, only to receive this epic reply: “Your views, to the extent that they have any merit, have already been considered and rejected.”
And yet, at a conference in 2003, Chester Cooper, a national-security veteran of that era, told me that even then Secretary of State Dean Rusk had privately agreed, saying, “I’m not the village idiot.” The US would have recognized the People’s Republic of China after the 1964 election had John F. Kennedy lived and been re-elected; instead, it was Richard Nixon who opened the door in 1971, and Jimmy Carter who stepped through it in 1977. I was present in the small crowd that greeted the great-but-tiny Deng as he entered the Rayburn House Office Building in 1979.
Meanwhile, the sands are shifting once again. RAND, an eminent redoubt of American national-security thought, has published a landmark paper calling for coexistence with China, and for accepting the CPC’s legitimacy. Imagine that. The authors cite similar views held by other top China hands, notably Rush Doshi, formerly of the National Security Council and now with the Council on Foreign Relations, and they carefully correct US mistranslations that made Chinese official documents and statements appear more aggressive than they were. Suddenly, highly placed voices are hinting at what many of us who watch China without the benefit of inside sources have long suspected: that the government of China is mainly concerned with governing China.
But what lies behind this apparent thaw? Recent developments in the trade war provide a clue. Recall that China recently announced export restrictions on rare earths and especially on gallium, a by-product of aluminum (and zinc) production that is essential for advanced electronics. China controls over 98% of the global supply of gallium, thanks to its aluminum capacity, which is 59% of the world total and 60 times that of the US. After a half-century of deindustrialization, the US cannot close this gap – and there are no good substitutes for gallium (nor for several other materials that China controls). China has therefore effectively lowered the boom on the prospect of US military confrontation with China.
Meeting with his Chinese counterpart in Malaysia this week, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent secured a one-year delay on China’s rare-earth export restrictions. With Chinese President Xi Jinping in Busan on October 29, Trump confirmed that deal. The postponement is, in effect, probation: China will assess, for a year, whether a new spirit of non-aggression, cooperation, de-escalatory rhetoric, and open trade can take hold. If not, the situation will not be better for the US a year from now, and both sides know it.
The long-term history of China’s rise and America’s decline dates back at least to the 1970s: the end of the Mao era in China, and the rise of free-market economics in the US, the high-dollar policy of Paul Volcker, and the arrival of Ronald Reagan. It is not a simple story of America being ripped off, as our president, my governor, and the alarmists in our security agencies, think tanks, and media like to claim. But we are where we are. Even our most obtuse leaders have begun to realize that the US is no longer fully in control.
Here in Texas, it would be nice if a few of us who have tracked the situation accurately for decades could reclaim our right to travel and engage professionally with China. We might then begin to reacquaint our local leaders with the real world. And – who knows? – maybe when Xi visits the US next year, we could host him at a rodeo. It wouldn’t be the first time.
This article was originally published at Project Syndicate.
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Top photo credit: Solomon Maina, father of Debora, one of the 276 schoolgirls kidnapped from their dormitory by Boko Haram Islamist militants in 2014, reacts as he speaks during an interview with Reuters, at his home in Chibok, Nigeria April 7, 2024. REUTERS/Temilade Adelaja TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY
What Trump should know before going 'guns-a-blazing' into Nigeria
November 07, 2025
In one weekend, U.S. President Donald Trump not only damaged previously cordial relations with an important African ally, he also pledged U.S. military action in one of the world’s most complex conflict landscapes.
On October 31, Trump designated Nigeria, Africa’s largest country by population and one of its economic powerhouses, a “Country of Particular Concern” for the ”existential threat” purportedly faced by Christians in the West African country who he alleged are undergoing “mass slaughter” at the hands of “Radical Islamists.”
The following day, he warned that should the Nigerian government continue to allow the killings of Christians, the U.S would immediately stop all aid and assistance to Nigeria and “may very well go into that now disgraced country, ‘guns-a-blazing.’”
Although this is not the first time Trump has picked on the oil-rich country of some 230 million people, nevertheless the threat of military action is new and stands as an unprecedented escalation.
Washington considers Nigeria one of its most important partners in Africa. Until February, when Trump froze foreign aid, Nigeria was ranked third among recipients of U.S humanitarian aid in Sub-Saharan Africa. Despite this, significant cooperation has continued between both countries especially in the arena of counter-terrorism.
Since 2017, Nigeria has received U.S security assistance estimated, as of January, at approximately $650 million, including $500 million in Foreign Military Sales. In August, the U.S. Defense Security Cooperation Agency approved a $346 million arms sale to aid Nigeria’s fight against Islamist terrorists and trafficking in the Gulf of Guinea.
Rattled by Trump’s threats, Nigeria’s president Bola Ahmed Tinubu disputed Trump’s characterization of the situation in his country while assuring Washington of his commitment to protecting the lives of all Nigerians regardless of faith. Yet for many Nigerians who have watched for years the Nigerian state’s helplessness as insecurity escalates, many are welcoming Trump’s threat to intervene militarily if it can succeed where the government has failed in ending the violence.
In reality, Trump’s criticism of Nigeria did not arise in a vacuum. It is the direct result of years of the failure of successive Nigerian governments to protect citizens in the face of endless mass killings of both Christians and Muslims. Of course, when killings persist for years — with little or no consequence for perpetrators, the difference between doing nothing and quiet approval soon blurs.
Yet Trump’s suggestion of a religious-driven conflict is a one-dimensional view of the catastrophic situation on the ground.
While religion is always in the background of Nigeria’s multiple conflict theaters, it is not always the driving force. On several occasions, religion is only a cover for other primarily economic, environmental, and political factors. According to Armed Conflict Location & Event Data, a U.S.-based think tank, the nearly 53,000 civilians killed in Nigeria since 2009 as a result of political violence are people of all faiths. While Nigeria recorded about 389 cases of violence targeting Christians between 2020 and 2025 resulting in at least 318 deaths, there were 197 attacks targeting Muslims within the same period leading to at least 418 deaths.
The conflict landscape is complex, cutting across vast geopolitical expanses and overlapping causes. The country itself is almost evenly divided between a Christian-dominated south and a Muslim-dominated north while at its center lies the Middle Belt, home to over 200 ethnic groups where adherents of both religions, and mostly Muslim pastoralists and mostly sedentary Christian farmers, have long lived side by side.
In the northeastern part of the country where Boko Haram and the regional Islamic State affiliate (ISWAP) have been waging a bloody insurgency to establish an Islamic caliphate, Muslims are the primary victims of violence. Since 2009, the violence has led to more than 40,000 civilian deaths while forcing more than two million to flee their homes.
Boko Haram considers anyone, whether Christians or Muslims, who does not accept their version of Islam as infidels. Meanwhile, the most iconic violent incidents that made Nigeria’s jihadists shoot into global headlines more than a decade ago have predominantly been Christian victims. This includes Boko Haram’s kidnapping of 276 schoolgirls from Chibok village in 2014 and, four years later, 110 schoolgirls taken by ISWAP in Dapchi Yobe state. While 104 of the girls were soon released after negotiation (5 were killed during the kidnapping), Leah Sharibu, a young Christian girl, is still being held years after for refusing to convert to Islam.
Focus on these stories can create a misleading impression that Christians are the main victims of violence in Nigeria. Indeed, Trump’s own Senior Advisor for Arab and African affairs, Massad Boulos, observed just last month that Boko Haram and ISWAP "are killing more Muslims than Christians."
This is not just an argument over numbers. When the raison d'etre for a military action is based on inaccurate assumptions, not only are the chances of success limited, it also raises the risk of the U.S. getting bogged down in another “forever war.” When Trump was asked this week if he was considering a ground invasion of Nigeria or air strikes, he said: “Could be, I mean, a lot of things – I envisage a lot of things.”
The U.S. could target Islamist jihadists in the northeast. But any military action outside of Nigeria’s Middle Belt would not protect Nigerian Christians — at least not in the way Trump is promoting it. The Middle Belt is where the Nigerian Christian population has suffered disproportionately in a manner that suggests a systematic targeting. Here for over two decades, sedentary farmers and Fulani pastoralists have been locked in an internecine conflict. Other perpetrators of violence include armed bandit gangs who raid villages, rustle cattle and kidnap victims for ransom.
According to new findings by the Observatory for Religious Freedom in Africa, out of the approximately 36,056 civilians killed across Nigeria between 2019 and 2024, the Fulani militias, considered the world’s deadliest terrorist group, and who operate within the Middle Belt and southern parts of the country “were responsible for a staggering 47% of all civilian killings —more than five times the combined death toll of Boko Haram and ISWAP.”
The breakdown of the data shows an alarming disproportionality. Nearly 3 “Christians were killed for every Muslim during this period, with proportional losses to Christian communities reaching exceptional levels. In states where attacks occur, Christians were murdered at a rate 5.2 times higher than Muslims relative to their population size,” the report said.
Yet religion is not the main driving force for this horrific violence. Rather, it is the acute competition for diminishing land and water resources alongside other factors, although the fact that pastoralists are often Muslim Fulanis and sedentary farmers are often Christians sometimes causes observers to consider religion the primary motive.
Whether by air strikes or ground forces, American military intervention in Nigeria’s complex terrain carries many risks, particularly extensive civilian harm, the consequence of which is that the situation gets worse than it already is.
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Top image credit: President Donald Trump hosts a bilateral dinner for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Monday, July 7, 2025, in the Blue Room. (Official White House Photo by Daniel Torok)
The signs for US Middle East retrenchment are increasingly glaring
A sneak peek at how Americans view Trump foreign policy so far
November 06, 2025
Like domestic politics, American public opinion on foreign policy is extremely polarized and that is not likely to change soon as new polling from my team at the Institute for Global Affairs at Eurasia Group shows striking partisan splits on the top Trump issues of the day.
Among the most partisan findings: 44% of Americans support attacks on drug cartels in Latin America, even if they are unauthorized by Congress, while 42% opposed. Breaking down on party lines, 79% of GOP respondents support such strikes, while 73% of Democrats are against them.
Americans hold a mixed assessment of how President Donald Trump has implemented his “America First” policies in the first nine months of his second term. Overall, half of Americans think he is performing poorly and more than a third rate his performance as good or excellent. Broken down by party, the contrast is striking: 89% of Democrats say poor, while 53% of Republicans say excellent and 29% say good.
We asked about specific policies in the Middle East and Asia, but some of our most interesting findings pertained to how Americans think the president should conduct foreign affairs writ large. A plurality of Republicans (46%) think the most important obligation of the United States government is to protect America from foreign threats (only 13% of Democrats agree). Meanwhile, 40% of Democrats said promoting democracy, human rights, and the rule of law around the world is the most important (only 8% of Republicans agreed).
Most Democrats view a rise in authoritarianism that imperils democracy as the greatest threat to the United States. For a plurality of Republicans, the greatest threat is the country losing its national identity due to immigration and free trade. Most Democrats think the best way to achieve peace is through democracy promotion, diplomacy, and international cooperation. Republicans are split between primarily focusing on domestic issues and maintaining overwhelming military strength to defend the United States when necessary.
Trump has emphasized his acumen for dealmaking, and he made the case last month that he was deserving of the Nobel Peace Prize. As our survey was fielded in October, his administration brokered a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. However, 63% of Americans still do not think he deserves the coveted prize. Nearly all Democrats we surveyed (95%) say he shouldn’t get it, while a slight majority of Republicans (56%) say he should (about one in five Republicans were unsure).
There is evidence that when choosing a commander-in-chief, policy specifics may matter less than perceptions of strength. We tried to get a sense of how Americans view Trump’s leadership by presenting a series of descriptors and asking them to select up to two. About half of Democrats think he is reckless and destructive. About half of Republicans think he is tough and intelligent, and about a third consider him a peacemaker. This split reflects the paradox that Trump embodies, somehow reconciling a commitment to peace with aggressive international posturing.
Aside from partisan differences on Trump’s military action against alleged narco boats, which so far have killed 67 people, Americans are split along party lines on other specific conflict areas and how Trump is handling them.
More than a third of Democrats think the United States should stop supporting Israel’s military campaign in Gaza (the survey was conducted before and after the current ceasefire was agreed to on Oct. 10), while about a third of Republicans think the United States should support Israel unconditionally. When asked about their impression of Israel’s operations, half of Democrats say it can be described as genocide but only 8% of Republicans agree. Republicans are most likely to describe it as the destruction of a terrorist organization (51%), followed by a hostage rescue (40%).
Meanwhile, after the United States imposed massive trade tariffs on China in April, the Trump administration also announced plans to restrict visas for Chinese students. We found Democrats are overwhelmingly supportive of allowing Chinese students to study at U.S. universities (81%), while a plurality of Republicans are opposed (47%).
On Ukraine War policy, 19% overall said Trump was making things worse. On that question, only 40% of Republicans said Trump was making things better, while 72% of Democrats said the opposite.
A rare point of agreement emerged on Iran. Should Iran resume work on its civilian nuclear program, which appears highly likely, a plurality of Americans think the United States should impose harsher sanctions, including 50% of Republicans and 43% of Democrats. However, 39% of Republicans also support a return to military action compared with only 10% of Democrats. Democrats are much more likely than Republicans to support U.S. negotiations with Iran (43% vs. 24%).
Trump bombed Iranian nuclear sites and targeted alleged drug boats without congressional authorization, yet most Americans think the president should be required to seek approval from Congress before ordering military action overseas. There is some consensus among Americans overall, but the partisan split has grown drastically since we asked the same question a year ago. In 2024, 70% of Democrats and 77% of Republicans agreed that the president should not act without congressional approval. In 2025, 94% of Democrats and 50% of Republicans think the same.
A similar split exists on military spending. More than half of Democrats (58%) think the United States should decrease military spending compared with 18% of Republicans, most of whom favor maintaining current spending levels (66%).
Another era of common ground is military aid. Amid lively debates over the last several years about U.S. aid to Ukraine and Israel, a plurality of Americans, including 58% of Democrats and 41% of Republicans, think the United States has provided too much aid to other countries.
When asked about U.S. military presence in four regions (Asia, Europe, Middle East, and Western Hemisphere), more Americans are in favor of decreasing or withdrawing troops than increasing. After lengthy and costly wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, many Americans may be ready to reconsider their country’s military commitments abroad. That said, pluralities are still in favor of maintaining the status quo.
Trump's “America First” pitch clearly appealed to the American people – he had an edge over the Biden-Harris campaigns on foreign policy. His pledge to end wars and focus on the needs of average Americans clearly resonated, although views of his implementation are deeply polarizing. As the United States wages war on drug cartels and possibly gears up to topple Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, perhaps the greatest test of “America First” and public opinion of Trump is yet to come.
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