Think Tanks
Here's a look at documents from think tanks
Think Tanks
Capital Research Center Issues Commentary: Pipeline - Immigration NGOs and Medicaid Fraud (10/21/26)
Hudson Institute Issues Commentary: America and Europe - A Blueprint for the Next Chapter (10/21/26)
Featured Stories
Manhattan Institute Issues Commentary to The Tennessean: Tenn. Amendment 1 Would Give Judges More Power To Deny Bail | Opinion
NEW YORK, Oct. 21 -- The Manhattan Institute issued the following excerpts of a commentary:
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Tenn. Amendment 1 Would Give Judges More Power To Deny Bail | Opinion
By Rafael A. Mangual
The Tennessean
October 19th, 2026
Tennessee's constitution limits when judges can deny bail before trial. Amendment 1 would give judges greater authority to detain defendants they determine pose serious risks.
When a criminal defendant walks into a courtroom in the United States, a judge makes two decisions: First, she determines whether there is probable cause to believe the defendant committed the offense, ... Show Full Article NEW YORK, Oct. 21 -- The Manhattan Institute issued the following excerpts of a commentary: * * * Tenn. Amendment 1 Would Give Judges More Power To Deny Bail | Opinion By Rafael A. Mangual The Tennessean October 19th, 2026 Tennessee's constitution limits when judges can deny bail before trial. Amendment 1 would give judges greater authority to detain defendants they determine pose serious risks. When a criminal defendant walks into a courtroom in the United States, a judge makes two decisions: First, she determines whether there is probable cause to believe the defendant committed the offense,and she will also decide whether the defendant is likely to flee justice or revictimize his community.
Continue reading the entire piece here at The Tennessean (https://www.tennessean.com/story/opinion/contributors/2026/10/19/tennessee-amendment-1-bail-judges-pretrial-detention/92302912007/?gca-cat=p&gnt-cfr=1)
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Rafael Mangual is the Nick Ohnell Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and a member of the Council on Criminal Justice
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Original text here: https://manhattan.institute/article/tenn-amendment-1-would-give-judges-more-power-to-deny-bail-opinion
[Category: ThinkTank]
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Tenn. Amendment 1 Would Give Judges More Power To Deny Bail | Opinion
By Rafael A. Mangual
The Tennessean
October 19th, 2026
Tennessee's constitution limits when judges can deny bail before trial. Amendment 1 would give judges greater authority to detain defendants they determine pose serious risks.
When a criminal defendant walks into a courtroom in the United States, a judge makes two decisions: First, she determines whether there is probable cause to believe the defendant committed the offense, ... Show Full Article NEW YORK, Oct. 21 -- The Manhattan Institute issued the following excerpts of a commentary: * * * Tenn. Amendment 1 Would Give Judges More Power To Deny Bail | Opinion By Rafael A. Mangual The Tennessean October 19th, 2026 Tennessee's constitution limits when judges can deny bail before trial. Amendment 1 would give judges greater authority to detain defendants they determine pose serious risks. When a criminal defendant walks into a courtroom in the United States, a judge makes two decisions: First, she determines whether there is probable cause to believe the defendant committed the offense,and she will also decide whether the defendant is likely to flee justice or revictimize his community.
Continue reading the entire piece here at The Tennessean (https://www.tennessean.com/story/opinion/contributors/2026/10/19/tennessee-amendment-1-bail-judges-pretrial-detention/92302912007/?gca-cat=p&gnt-cfr=1)
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Rafael Mangual is the Nick Ohnell Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and a member of the Council on Criminal Justice
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Original text here: https://manhattan.institute/article/tenn-amendment-1-would-give-judges-more-power-to-deny-bail-opinion
[Category: ThinkTank]
Manhattan Institute Issues Commentary to Daily Wire: How DOGE Beat The Bureaucracy
NEW YORK, Oct. 21 -- The Manhattan Institute issued the following excerpts of a commentary:
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How DOGE Beat The Bureaucracy
By Judge Glock
Daily Wire
October 19th, 2026
What really happened when Elon's layoff experiment went to Washington.
Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) went from an inside joke about a Musk-favored cryptocurrency, Dogecoin, to the biggest story in Washington to a near-nonentity -- all in under a year.
During DOGE's whirlwind tour in power, the press highlighted its improbable promises of trillions of dollars in savings, its exaggerations of the ... Show Full Article NEW YORK, Oct. 21 -- The Manhattan Institute issued the following excerpts of a commentary: * * * How DOGE Beat The Bureaucracy By Judge Glock Daily Wire October 19th, 2026 What really happened when Elon's layoff experiment went to Washington. Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) went from an inside joke about a Musk-favored cryptocurrency, Dogecoin, to the biggest story in Washington to a near-nonentity -- all in under a year. During DOGE's whirlwind tour in power, the press highlighted its improbable promises of trillions of dollars in savings, its exaggerations of thesavings it did achieve, and its occasional naivete about the politics and policy of Washington.
Yet the media spent so much time disputing DOGE's claims that they largely ignored how it did change spending. In the end, while DOGE made only modest reductions in government contracting and a handful of cuts to government grants, it had a massive impact on the federal civil service.
Before Trump took office, the civil service hit a modern peak of more than 2.3 million employees. Since then, it has shrunk by more than 270,000 people, a 12% drop -- the fastest decline in federal employment since the end of World War II.
Continue reading the entire piece here at The Daily Wire (https://www.dailywire.com/news/how-doge-beat-the-bureaucracy?author=Judge+Glock&category=undefined&elementPosition=0&row=3&rowHeadline=Latest+News&rowType=Vertical+Carousel&title=How+DOGE+Beat+The+Bureaucracy)
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Judge Glock is the director of research and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor at City Journal. This piece was originally published in City journal (https://www.city-journal.org/article/doge-spending-cuts-civil-service-elon-musk).
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Original text here: https://manhattan.institute/article/how-doge-beat-the-bureaucracy
[Category: ThinkTank]
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How DOGE Beat The Bureaucracy
By Judge Glock
Daily Wire
October 19th, 2026
What really happened when Elon's layoff experiment went to Washington.
Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) went from an inside joke about a Musk-favored cryptocurrency, Dogecoin, to the biggest story in Washington to a near-nonentity -- all in under a year.
During DOGE's whirlwind tour in power, the press highlighted its improbable promises of trillions of dollars in savings, its exaggerations of the ... Show Full Article NEW YORK, Oct. 21 -- The Manhattan Institute issued the following excerpts of a commentary: * * * How DOGE Beat The Bureaucracy By Judge Glock Daily Wire October 19th, 2026 What really happened when Elon's layoff experiment went to Washington. Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) went from an inside joke about a Musk-favored cryptocurrency, Dogecoin, to the biggest story in Washington to a near-nonentity -- all in under a year. During DOGE's whirlwind tour in power, the press highlighted its improbable promises of trillions of dollars in savings, its exaggerations of thesavings it did achieve, and its occasional naivete about the politics and policy of Washington.
Yet the media spent so much time disputing DOGE's claims that they largely ignored how it did change spending. In the end, while DOGE made only modest reductions in government contracting and a handful of cuts to government grants, it had a massive impact on the federal civil service.
Before Trump took office, the civil service hit a modern peak of more than 2.3 million employees. Since then, it has shrunk by more than 270,000 people, a 12% drop -- the fastest decline in federal employment since the end of World War II.
Continue reading the entire piece here at The Daily Wire (https://www.dailywire.com/news/how-doge-beat-the-bureaucracy?author=Judge+Glock&category=undefined&elementPosition=0&row=3&rowHeadline=Latest+News&rowType=Vertical+Carousel&title=How+DOGE+Beat+The+Bureaucracy)
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Judge Glock is the director of research and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor at City Journal. This piece was originally published in City journal (https://www.city-journal.org/article/doge-spending-cuts-civil-service-elon-musk).
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Original text here: https://manhattan.institute/article/how-doge-beat-the-bureaucracy
[Category: ThinkTank]
Jamestown Foundation Issues Commentary: EU-Backed Infrastructure Strengthens Azerbaijan-Central Asia Connectivity
WASHINGTON, Oct. 21 -- The Jamestown Foundation issued the following commentary on Oct. 20, 2026, in the foundation's Eurasia Daily Monitor:
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EU-Backed Infrastructure Strengthens Azerbaijan-Central Asia Connectivity
Roza Bayramli
Executive Summary:
* At an EU-Uzbekistan conference in Tashkent on September 30, officials signaled that the Trans-Caspian Transport Corridor is shifting from political commitments to implementation, backed by growing European bank financing in Uzbekistan.
* In Kazakhstan, German logistics firm Rhenus Group and local partners agreed to advance a planned container ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Oct. 21 -- The Jamestown Foundation issued the following commentary on Oct. 20, 2026, in the foundation's Eurasia Daily Monitor: * * * EU-Backed Infrastructure Strengthens Azerbaijan-Central Asia Connectivity Roza Bayramli Executive Summary: * At an EU-Uzbekistan conference in Tashkent on September 30, officials signaled that the Trans-Caspian Transport Corridor is shifting from political commitments to implementation, backed by growing European bank financing in Uzbekistan. * In Kazakhstan, German logistics firm Rhenus Group and local partners agreed to advance a planned containerterminal at Aktau, and Rhenus plans 14 terminals along the Trans-Caspian International Transport Route, where cargo volumes rose 58 percent year on year.
* The European Union proposed a connectivity partnership with Azerbaijan and announced up to 200 million euros ($225 million) in South Caucasus grants, with possible projects including the Nakhchivan railway and Port of Baku.
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On September 30, the European Union and Uzbekistan convened the Second National Conference on the Trans-Caspian Transport Corridor in Tashkent, bringing together government officials, international financial institutions, development partners, and the private sector. The European Union uses this name for its connectivity agenda along the Trans-Caspian International Transport Route (TITR), also known as the Middle Corridor. The meeting underscored the corridor's shift from political commitments toward implementation, with a focus on converting shared priorities into investable projects. European Commission Director for Asia and the Pacific Peteris Ustubs noted the corridor is "moving from ambition to implementation," with growing emphasis on "concrete projects" and "real investment on the ground" (European External Action Service, September 30).
Discussions covered railway and road infrastructure, logistics centers, border-crossing procedures, digital transport documents, and greater private-sector participation. The conference was held within the EU-funded Trans-Caspian Transport Corridor Coordination Platform, which operates under Global Gateway, the European Union's global infrastructure investment strategy. The platform brings together the five Central Asian states, the European Union, international financial institutions, and other partners (European External Action Service, September 30).
The conference took place amid growing European financial support for Uzbekistan's transport sector. In June, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBDR) approved a loan of up to 38.4 million euros ($43.1 million) for the digital transformation of Uzbekistan Railways. The project will introduce modern traffic-management systems, including dispatching, scheduling, and operational control, while strengthening cybersecurity. Uzbekistan Railways operates a 6,950-kilometer (4,318-mile) network and handles up to 40 percent of the country's freight, making its modernization relevant to cargo flows toward the Caspian (EBDR, June 17).
European financial engagement with Uzbekistan could expand further. In June, the European Investment Bank opened its Central Asian regional representation in Tashkent and announced that its regional project pipeline was approaching 3 billion euros ($3.37 billion). Potential operations under consideration in Uzbekistan total around 1 billion euros ($1.12 billion) and include transport, energy, climate, digital connectivity, and critical raw materials, with the Trans-Caspian Transport Corridor among the priorities (European External Action Service; European Investment Bank, June 18)
Uzbekistan is also exploring additional links to Azerbaijan across the Caspian. During the September 30 conference, Uztemiryolkonteyner, the state-controlled container freight subsidiary of Uzbekistan Railways, proposed regular feeder services between Turkmenbashi, Turkmenistan, and Baku, Azerbaijan, to expand multimodal transport between Uzbekistan and Europe. "The organization of regular feeder services between Turkmenbashi and Baku will create additional opportunities to accelerate cargo delivery, expand multimodal transportation and strengthen Uzbekistan's connectivity with European markets," the company said at the conference (Trend News Agency, September 30).
Kazakhstan is advancing larger-scale infrastructure projects along the Caspian section of TITR. On September 30, German logistics company Rhenus Group, Kazakhstan's national railway company Kazakhstan Temir Zholy, and the Port of Aktau agreed to move forward with a new trimodal container terminal in Aktau. The planned facility would cover at least 30 hectares (74 acres), integrate rail, road, and maritime transport, and provide at least 150,000 twenty-foot equivalent units (TEU) of additional annual handling capacity. Rhenus links the project to TITR and the European Union's Global Gateway initiative. Rhenus Group Chief Executive Officer Tobias Bartz said the challenge is "to bring individual infrastructure projects together step by step into an efficient network," with Kazakhstan playing a key role in connecting the People's Republic of China, Central Asia, the Caspian region, and Europe (Rhenus Logistics, September 30).
Rhenus' plans extend beyond Aktau. Bartz said the company intends to develop 14 terminals along sections of TITR across Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, and Turkiye. "After that, they will be connected to our company's networks in Europe. Rhenus has 23 container terminals and 70 port facilities there. This project will connect the logistics networks of Central Asia and Europe into a single network," he said (Azernews, October 1).
Traffic volumes are also rising. About 44,000 TEU were transported via TITR in the first eight months of 2026, up 58 percent year on year, Kazakhstan Temir Zholy Deputy Chairman Yerlan Koyshibayev said at the Azerbaijan International Investment Forum in Baku on September 25. He highlighted the corridor's role in strengthening transport and logistics links between "Central Asia, the Caucasus, and European markets" (Trend News Agency, September 26).
The European Union is deepening its connectivity engagement with Azerbaijan. During her May visit to Baku, EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Kaja Kallas said there was "clear scope to deepen our cooperation, particularly on trade, transport and digital," adding that stronger connectivity between "the EU, the South Caucasus, and Central Asia" was a shared strategic interest (European External Action Service, May 5).
That approach became more concrete in July. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen proposed an EU-Azerbaijan Connectivity Partnership and a High-Level Connectivity Dialogue covering transport, energy, and digital connectivity. Under Global Gateway, she announced up to 200 million euros ($225 million) in grants for South Caucasus connectivity projects, with the potential to mobilize up to 2 billion euros ($2.25 billion) in public and private investment. Possible projects include the railway connection through Nakhchivan and the "development of the Port of Baku" (European Commission, July 1).
The Nakhchivan railway had already entered the preparatory stage in January, when the European Union, Azerbaijan, and the EBRD agreed to launch a feasibility study. The European Union describes the railway as part of the broader Trans-Caspian Transport Corridor linking Europe and Central Asia (European Commission, January 29). Von der Leyen also announced plans for a Regional Connectivity Investment Conference in Baku, bringing together Europe, the South Caucasus, and Central Asia.
The TITR is moving from political ambition toward a more integrated transport system. European-backed modernization in Uzbekistan, German-led logistics investment in Kazakhstan, and the European Union's expanding connectivity agenda with Azerbaijan are strengthening the Central Asia-Caspian-South Caucasus link. The next stage will be to deepen coordination and connect these projects into an increasingly seamless corridor between Central Asia and Europe.
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Roza Bayramli is a leading research fellow at the Center for Analysis of International Relations (AIR Center) in Baku, Azerbaijan.
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Original text here: https://jamestown.org/eu-backed-infrastructure-strengthens-azerbaijan-central-asia-connectivity/
[Category: ThinkTank]
* * *
EU-Backed Infrastructure Strengthens Azerbaijan-Central Asia Connectivity
Roza Bayramli
Executive Summary:
* At an EU-Uzbekistan conference in Tashkent on September 30, officials signaled that the Trans-Caspian Transport Corridor is shifting from political commitments to implementation, backed by growing European bank financing in Uzbekistan.
* In Kazakhstan, German logistics firm Rhenus Group and local partners agreed to advance a planned container ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Oct. 21 -- The Jamestown Foundation issued the following commentary on Oct. 20, 2026, in the foundation's Eurasia Daily Monitor: * * * EU-Backed Infrastructure Strengthens Azerbaijan-Central Asia Connectivity Roza Bayramli Executive Summary: * At an EU-Uzbekistan conference in Tashkent on September 30, officials signaled that the Trans-Caspian Transport Corridor is shifting from political commitments to implementation, backed by growing European bank financing in Uzbekistan. * In Kazakhstan, German logistics firm Rhenus Group and local partners agreed to advance a planned containerterminal at Aktau, and Rhenus plans 14 terminals along the Trans-Caspian International Transport Route, where cargo volumes rose 58 percent year on year.
* The European Union proposed a connectivity partnership with Azerbaijan and announced up to 200 million euros ($225 million) in South Caucasus grants, with possible projects including the Nakhchivan railway and Port of Baku.
-
On September 30, the European Union and Uzbekistan convened the Second National Conference on the Trans-Caspian Transport Corridor in Tashkent, bringing together government officials, international financial institutions, development partners, and the private sector. The European Union uses this name for its connectivity agenda along the Trans-Caspian International Transport Route (TITR), also known as the Middle Corridor. The meeting underscored the corridor's shift from political commitments toward implementation, with a focus on converting shared priorities into investable projects. European Commission Director for Asia and the Pacific Peteris Ustubs noted the corridor is "moving from ambition to implementation," with growing emphasis on "concrete projects" and "real investment on the ground" (European External Action Service, September 30).
Discussions covered railway and road infrastructure, logistics centers, border-crossing procedures, digital transport documents, and greater private-sector participation. The conference was held within the EU-funded Trans-Caspian Transport Corridor Coordination Platform, which operates under Global Gateway, the European Union's global infrastructure investment strategy. The platform brings together the five Central Asian states, the European Union, international financial institutions, and other partners (European External Action Service, September 30).
The conference took place amid growing European financial support for Uzbekistan's transport sector. In June, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBDR) approved a loan of up to 38.4 million euros ($43.1 million) for the digital transformation of Uzbekistan Railways. The project will introduce modern traffic-management systems, including dispatching, scheduling, and operational control, while strengthening cybersecurity. Uzbekistan Railways operates a 6,950-kilometer (4,318-mile) network and handles up to 40 percent of the country's freight, making its modernization relevant to cargo flows toward the Caspian (EBDR, June 17).
European financial engagement with Uzbekistan could expand further. In June, the European Investment Bank opened its Central Asian regional representation in Tashkent and announced that its regional project pipeline was approaching 3 billion euros ($3.37 billion). Potential operations under consideration in Uzbekistan total around 1 billion euros ($1.12 billion) and include transport, energy, climate, digital connectivity, and critical raw materials, with the Trans-Caspian Transport Corridor among the priorities (European External Action Service; European Investment Bank, June 18)
Uzbekistan is also exploring additional links to Azerbaijan across the Caspian. During the September 30 conference, Uztemiryolkonteyner, the state-controlled container freight subsidiary of Uzbekistan Railways, proposed regular feeder services between Turkmenbashi, Turkmenistan, and Baku, Azerbaijan, to expand multimodal transport between Uzbekistan and Europe. "The organization of regular feeder services between Turkmenbashi and Baku will create additional opportunities to accelerate cargo delivery, expand multimodal transportation and strengthen Uzbekistan's connectivity with European markets," the company said at the conference (Trend News Agency, September 30).
Kazakhstan is advancing larger-scale infrastructure projects along the Caspian section of TITR. On September 30, German logistics company Rhenus Group, Kazakhstan's national railway company Kazakhstan Temir Zholy, and the Port of Aktau agreed to move forward with a new trimodal container terminal in Aktau. The planned facility would cover at least 30 hectares (74 acres), integrate rail, road, and maritime transport, and provide at least 150,000 twenty-foot equivalent units (TEU) of additional annual handling capacity. Rhenus links the project to TITR and the European Union's Global Gateway initiative. Rhenus Group Chief Executive Officer Tobias Bartz said the challenge is "to bring individual infrastructure projects together step by step into an efficient network," with Kazakhstan playing a key role in connecting the People's Republic of China, Central Asia, the Caspian region, and Europe (Rhenus Logistics, September 30).
Rhenus' plans extend beyond Aktau. Bartz said the company intends to develop 14 terminals along sections of TITR across Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, and Turkiye. "After that, they will be connected to our company's networks in Europe. Rhenus has 23 container terminals and 70 port facilities there. This project will connect the logistics networks of Central Asia and Europe into a single network," he said (Azernews, October 1).
Traffic volumes are also rising. About 44,000 TEU were transported via TITR in the first eight months of 2026, up 58 percent year on year, Kazakhstan Temir Zholy Deputy Chairman Yerlan Koyshibayev said at the Azerbaijan International Investment Forum in Baku on September 25. He highlighted the corridor's role in strengthening transport and logistics links between "Central Asia, the Caucasus, and European markets" (Trend News Agency, September 26).
The European Union is deepening its connectivity engagement with Azerbaijan. During her May visit to Baku, EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Kaja Kallas said there was "clear scope to deepen our cooperation, particularly on trade, transport and digital," adding that stronger connectivity between "the EU, the South Caucasus, and Central Asia" was a shared strategic interest (European External Action Service, May 5).
That approach became more concrete in July. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen proposed an EU-Azerbaijan Connectivity Partnership and a High-Level Connectivity Dialogue covering transport, energy, and digital connectivity. Under Global Gateway, she announced up to 200 million euros ($225 million) in grants for South Caucasus connectivity projects, with the potential to mobilize up to 2 billion euros ($2.25 billion) in public and private investment. Possible projects include the railway connection through Nakhchivan and the "development of the Port of Baku" (European Commission, July 1).
The Nakhchivan railway had already entered the preparatory stage in January, when the European Union, Azerbaijan, and the EBRD agreed to launch a feasibility study. The European Union describes the railway as part of the broader Trans-Caspian Transport Corridor linking Europe and Central Asia (European Commission, January 29). Von der Leyen also announced plans for a Regional Connectivity Investment Conference in Baku, bringing together Europe, the South Caucasus, and Central Asia.
The TITR is moving from political ambition toward a more integrated transport system. European-backed modernization in Uzbekistan, German-led logistics investment in Kazakhstan, and the European Union's expanding connectivity agenda with Azerbaijan are strengthening the Central Asia-Caspian-South Caucasus link. The next stage will be to deepen coordination and connect these projects into an increasingly seamless corridor between Central Asia and Europe.
* * *
Roza Bayramli is a leading research fellow at the Center for Analysis of International Relations (AIR Center) in Baku, Azerbaijan.
* * *
Original text here: https://jamestown.org/eu-backed-infrastructure-strengthens-azerbaijan-central-asia-connectivity/
[Category: ThinkTank]
CSIS Issues Commentary: Why the United States Needs Europe in Order to Win the Technology Race
WASHINGTON, Oct. 21 -- The Center for Strategic and International Studies issued the following commentary:
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Why the United States Needs Europe in Order to Win the Technology Race
Commentary by Federico Steinberg and Riccardo Bosticco
October 20, 2026
Context
As Washington strives for technological dominance and Beijing builds technological self-sufficiency, the global technology system is splitting. The race for technological superiority between the United States and China requires third countries to sustain the advantages of each great power. Europe has a key role to play in this geopolitical ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Oct. 21 -- The Center for Strategic and International Studies issued the following commentary: * * * Why the United States Needs Europe in Order to Win the Technology Race Commentary by Federico Steinberg and Riccardo Bosticco October 20, 2026 Context As Washington strives for technological dominance and Beijing builds technological self-sufficiency, the global technology system is splitting. The race for technological superiority between the United States and China requires third countries to sustain the advantages of each great power. Europe has a key role to play in this geopoliticalrivalry, but its perceptions and cost-benefit analyses are being reevaluated as the Trump administration's stance toward the European Union becomes more aggressive.
Initiatives to build Europe's technological sovereignty have proliferated in recent years, and opposition to reliance on U.S. platforms has grown as the United States' retaliatory and punitive measures have intensified. The costs for Europe of building its own technology stack are considerable, with estimates starting at Euros3.6 trillion. But the security costs of continued reliance on U.S. technology are equally severe.
The United States, for its part, is committed to achieving technological dominance. The Trump Administration's "AI Action Plan" states that the United States "must meet global demand for AI by exporting its full AI technology stack . . . to all countries willing to join America's AI alliance." Yet adversarial measures toward longstanding allies, including Europe and Canada, are pushing those same partners to diversify away from U.S. technology, ultimately undermining Washington's technological ambitions.
U.S. technological dominance must be global, and for it to succeed, it must be coproduced. The United States needs allies to not only absorb its technology but also to help produce the technology--all the more so as technological competition concentrates at the cutting edge. Adversarial behaviors and policies, by contrast, will produce the opposite effect, reducing the incentives to rely on U.S. technology and spurring technological indigenization as well as diversification, including toward China.
The Costs of Losing Europe
The United States holds a technologically dominant position relative to Europe. Sensitive European government, health, and corporate data is stored on servers subject to U.S. surveillance laws, such as the Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data (CLOUD) Act and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Regulatory control over platforms gives the United States the capacity to retaliate against European policy initiatives it perceives as discriminatory. Cloud access can be deliberately interrupted for political purposes. Europe's perceptions of U.S. hostility are turning these concerns into a conviction that reliance on U.S. technology poses an existential threat.
European governments are actively working to move away from U.S. technology. The Tech Sovereignty Package introduced earlier this year, the Cloud and AI Development Act, and the Chips Act 2.0 are emblematic of this shift. France, meanwhile, has restricted the use of Zoom and Microsoft Teams. France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Italy have joined forces to build European digital commons.
Most commentary on these initiatives has questioned their credibility and feasibility. Indeed, in October 2026, Europe-based search engine Ecosia announced it would drop French AI company Mistral from its backend, instead opting to use cheaper and more capable Chinese alternatives. But Europe's motivation, and the resources it commits to reducing its dependence on U.S. technology, will grow in proportion to perceived U.S. antagonism. While budget strains might complicate these efforts, if national security is on the line, traditional fiscal orthodoxy is still likely to bend, with efforts to decouple increasing at either the supranational or national level. And while Europeans will undergo a costly process of adjustment, Americans risk losing significant market access that will not automatically be absorbed elsewhere. The result will be a net loss on both sides of the Atlantic.
The scale of the transatlantic market is far from negligible. In 2025, U.S.-EU trade was valued at approximately $2 trillion. No other bilateral trade and investment relationship in the world is comparable. The transatlantic economy accounts for almost a third of global trade in goods and services and 43 percent of global GDP. Moreover, the relationship is complementary: In 2025, U.S. goods exports to the European Union totaled $412.5 billion and imports $632.9 billion; in services, U.S. exports amounted to $324.8 billion and imports from the bloc to $217.6 billion.
In digital services, Europe is a vital market for U.S. cloud providers. In 2025, the market share of U.S. cloud providers in Europe exceeded 80 percent, compared with around 15 percent for European providers. In artificial intelligence, European model providers struggle to compete with Anthropic and OpenAI. Dependencies cut both ways: Europe's reliance on the United States for technology supplies is mirrored by U.S. tech providers' reliance on European demand.
Moreover, U.S. technology is coproduced with European industry leaders. The case is clearest when it comes to U.S. reliance on Dutch company ASML's extreme ultraviolet machines. But ASML is not the only U.S. dependency. ZEISS's optics and TRUMPF's lasers are indispensable components of the extreme ultraviolet lithography ecosystem; Imec is a critical hub for advanced semiconductor research and development; Ericsson and Nokia are major suppliers of US 5G and telecommunications infrastructure; and companies such as Infineon, STMicroelectronics, Siemens, and Bosch Rexroth are deeply embedded in U.S. automotive, power-electronics, industrial-automation, AI, and manufacturing supply chains.
Concerns about U.S. technology affect European businesses as well as governments. EU-listed companies rely on the United States for almost a fifth of their revenues. Yet partnerships with U.S. counterparts and the use of components and technologies with U.S. content expose private companies to the risk of suddenly being targeted by extraterritorial rules. This creates an unfavorable business environment and dims prospects for profitability, motivating supply chain and market diversification. In a 2025 survey, more German companies said they planned to reduce their investments in the United States than said they planned to increase them. Smaller member states have noted that some prospective first-time investors in the United States have abandoned their plans, while businesses with long-standing U.S. relationships planned to continue to invest.
Notably, U.S. policies that make alignment with Washington strategically more costly increase the relative attractiveness of diversification. Since Europe began exploring its options in earnest at the start of the second Trump administration, French President Emmanuel Macron made a state visit to China (widely hailed as a success), with Chinese President Xi Jinping embracing Europe's aspirations for strategic autonomy. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz's also made a trip to China, accompanied by a delegation of business leaders from Volkswagen, BMW, Mercedes, and Siemens, all of whom were seeking contracts. The visit's objective was to "improve and make fair" Sino-German relations. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney--now in the process of formalizing its association partnership with the European Union--also traveled to China earlier this year to forge a "new strategic partnership with People's Republic of China." Given Western concerns over Beijing's trade practices, such visits send a particularly strong signal to Washington: Traditional allies are willing to hedge their technological dependencies for greater economic security.
Restoring Partnership
There is still an opportunity to make the transatlantic relationship the foundation of a larger and more resilient technology ecosystem. Restoring the partnership, however, does not mean restoring the status quo. The future transatlantic technology relationship should rather enable both sides to gain control over sensitive technological bottlenecks, thereby restoring a domestic sense of security, while deepening interdependence in areas where capabilities are difficult to develop domestically or are not critical enough to justify the effort.
The United States should encourage greater European participation in the U.S. technology ecosystem, including through government procurement, defense cooperation, and commercial partnerships. Precedents for this model already exist: European defense-tech and telecom companies have secured direct U.S. government contracts and entered into transatlantic teaming arrangements.
At the same time, Washington should help foster a positive environment for U.S. firms to participate in EU markets and supply chains. There is an appetite for this. Commenting on Intel's continued partnership with ASML, Intel's executive vice president said the company "will continue to work closely with ASML and the entire industry to enable [the AI] transition." In summer 2026, Paris-based Mistral AI established a strategic cloud distribution and infrastructure partnership with Microsoft, allowing European-developed models to run on U.S. hyperscale computing infrastructure. This is notable, considering the company has long been regarded as Europe's only AI champion.
Such deals, however, will multiply only to the extent that governments and companies on both sides of the Atlantic perceive the business climate as positive. Efforts to renew the partnership should not assume that current tensions will simply disappear. A significant segment of European political opinion hopes that the current period of confrontation will pass, much as the relationship recovered after the first Trump administration. Still, U.S. rapprochement will possibly be met with European resentment: European governments might use recent episodes of U.S. aversion as leverage to extract political advantages from future engagement with the United States.
While policies adopted today to reduce dependence on the United States could be softened in a period of rapprochement, however, they may still become embedded in Europe's emerging industrial policy. History points this direction: France's departure from NATO's integrated command in 1966 did not end the alliance, but the defense-industrial and nuclear autonomy France built in those years outlasted the rupture by decades.
The more plausible outcome, then, is that cooperation will resume on terms that preserve space for European autonomy.
Conclusion
If the United States wants Europe to remain part of a U.S.-led technological ecosystem, it needs to make participation the more attractive option for European governments.
The United States cannot compete with China while losing its allies. Meeting the China challenge requires building an ecosystem capable of achieving the same scale and offering countries around the world a credible alternative. Europe is indispensable to that effort. Its markets and industrial capabilities sustain the attractiveness and resilience of U.S. technology and enable the United States to shape the next generation of technology.
For the United States to win the technology race and establish technological dominance vis-a-vis China, it must first make sure its allies remain in the race with it. This would require Washington to move away from leveraging Europe's technological dependencies and toward offering Europe a stake in coproducing the technologies of the future, through more open procurement, joint investment, and commitments capable of enduring across administrations.
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Federico Steinberg is a visiting fellow with the Europe, Russia, and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. Riccardo Bosticco is a PhD researcher at the Centre for Security, Diplomacy and Strategy at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and Fulbright visiting researcher at Georgetown University School of Foreign Service.
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Original text here: https://www.csis.org/analysis/why-united-states-needs-europe-order-win-technology-race
[Category: ThinkTank]
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Why the United States Needs Europe in Order to Win the Technology Race
Commentary by Federico Steinberg and Riccardo Bosticco
October 20, 2026
Context
As Washington strives for technological dominance and Beijing builds technological self-sufficiency, the global technology system is splitting. The race for technological superiority between the United States and China requires third countries to sustain the advantages of each great power. Europe has a key role to play in this geopolitical ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Oct. 21 -- The Center for Strategic and International Studies issued the following commentary: * * * Why the United States Needs Europe in Order to Win the Technology Race Commentary by Federico Steinberg and Riccardo Bosticco October 20, 2026 Context As Washington strives for technological dominance and Beijing builds technological self-sufficiency, the global technology system is splitting. The race for technological superiority between the United States and China requires third countries to sustain the advantages of each great power. Europe has a key role to play in this geopoliticalrivalry, but its perceptions and cost-benefit analyses are being reevaluated as the Trump administration's stance toward the European Union becomes more aggressive.
Initiatives to build Europe's technological sovereignty have proliferated in recent years, and opposition to reliance on U.S. platforms has grown as the United States' retaliatory and punitive measures have intensified. The costs for Europe of building its own technology stack are considerable, with estimates starting at Euros3.6 trillion. But the security costs of continued reliance on U.S. technology are equally severe.
The United States, for its part, is committed to achieving technological dominance. The Trump Administration's "AI Action Plan" states that the United States "must meet global demand for AI by exporting its full AI technology stack . . . to all countries willing to join America's AI alliance." Yet adversarial measures toward longstanding allies, including Europe and Canada, are pushing those same partners to diversify away from U.S. technology, ultimately undermining Washington's technological ambitions.
U.S. technological dominance must be global, and for it to succeed, it must be coproduced. The United States needs allies to not only absorb its technology but also to help produce the technology--all the more so as technological competition concentrates at the cutting edge. Adversarial behaviors and policies, by contrast, will produce the opposite effect, reducing the incentives to rely on U.S. technology and spurring technological indigenization as well as diversification, including toward China.
The Costs of Losing Europe
The United States holds a technologically dominant position relative to Europe. Sensitive European government, health, and corporate data is stored on servers subject to U.S. surveillance laws, such as the Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data (CLOUD) Act and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Regulatory control over platforms gives the United States the capacity to retaliate against European policy initiatives it perceives as discriminatory. Cloud access can be deliberately interrupted for political purposes. Europe's perceptions of U.S. hostility are turning these concerns into a conviction that reliance on U.S. technology poses an existential threat.
European governments are actively working to move away from U.S. technology. The Tech Sovereignty Package introduced earlier this year, the Cloud and AI Development Act, and the Chips Act 2.0 are emblematic of this shift. France, meanwhile, has restricted the use of Zoom and Microsoft Teams. France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Italy have joined forces to build European digital commons.
Most commentary on these initiatives has questioned their credibility and feasibility. Indeed, in October 2026, Europe-based search engine Ecosia announced it would drop French AI company Mistral from its backend, instead opting to use cheaper and more capable Chinese alternatives. But Europe's motivation, and the resources it commits to reducing its dependence on U.S. technology, will grow in proportion to perceived U.S. antagonism. While budget strains might complicate these efforts, if national security is on the line, traditional fiscal orthodoxy is still likely to bend, with efforts to decouple increasing at either the supranational or national level. And while Europeans will undergo a costly process of adjustment, Americans risk losing significant market access that will not automatically be absorbed elsewhere. The result will be a net loss on both sides of the Atlantic.
The scale of the transatlantic market is far from negligible. In 2025, U.S.-EU trade was valued at approximately $2 trillion. No other bilateral trade and investment relationship in the world is comparable. The transatlantic economy accounts for almost a third of global trade in goods and services and 43 percent of global GDP. Moreover, the relationship is complementary: In 2025, U.S. goods exports to the European Union totaled $412.5 billion and imports $632.9 billion; in services, U.S. exports amounted to $324.8 billion and imports from the bloc to $217.6 billion.
In digital services, Europe is a vital market for U.S. cloud providers. In 2025, the market share of U.S. cloud providers in Europe exceeded 80 percent, compared with around 15 percent for European providers. In artificial intelligence, European model providers struggle to compete with Anthropic and OpenAI. Dependencies cut both ways: Europe's reliance on the United States for technology supplies is mirrored by U.S. tech providers' reliance on European demand.
Moreover, U.S. technology is coproduced with European industry leaders. The case is clearest when it comes to U.S. reliance on Dutch company ASML's extreme ultraviolet machines. But ASML is not the only U.S. dependency. ZEISS's optics and TRUMPF's lasers are indispensable components of the extreme ultraviolet lithography ecosystem; Imec is a critical hub for advanced semiconductor research and development; Ericsson and Nokia are major suppliers of US 5G and telecommunications infrastructure; and companies such as Infineon, STMicroelectronics, Siemens, and Bosch Rexroth are deeply embedded in U.S. automotive, power-electronics, industrial-automation, AI, and manufacturing supply chains.
Concerns about U.S. technology affect European businesses as well as governments. EU-listed companies rely on the United States for almost a fifth of their revenues. Yet partnerships with U.S. counterparts and the use of components and technologies with U.S. content expose private companies to the risk of suddenly being targeted by extraterritorial rules. This creates an unfavorable business environment and dims prospects for profitability, motivating supply chain and market diversification. In a 2025 survey, more German companies said they planned to reduce their investments in the United States than said they planned to increase them. Smaller member states have noted that some prospective first-time investors in the United States have abandoned their plans, while businesses with long-standing U.S. relationships planned to continue to invest.
Notably, U.S. policies that make alignment with Washington strategically more costly increase the relative attractiveness of diversification. Since Europe began exploring its options in earnest at the start of the second Trump administration, French President Emmanuel Macron made a state visit to China (widely hailed as a success), with Chinese President Xi Jinping embracing Europe's aspirations for strategic autonomy. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz's also made a trip to China, accompanied by a delegation of business leaders from Volkswagen, BMW, Mercedes, and Siemens, all of whom were seeking contracts. The visit's objective was to "improve and make fair" Sino-German relations. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney--now in the process of formalizing its association partnership with the European Union--also traveled to China earlier this year to forge a "new strategic partnership with People's Republic of China." Given Western concerns over Beijing's trade practices, such visits send a particularly strong signal to Washington: Traditional allies are willing to hedge their technological dependencies for greater economic security.
Restoring Partnership
There is still an opportunity to make the transatlantic relationship the foundation of a larger and more resilient technology ecosystem. Restoring the partnership, however, does not mean restoring the status quo. The future transatlantic technology relationship should rather enable both sides to gain control over sensitive technological bottlenecks, thereby restoring a domestic sense of security, while deepening interdependence in areas where capabilities are difficult to develop domestically or are not critical enough to justify the effort.
The United States should encourage greater European participation in the U.S. technology ecosystem, including through government procurement, defense cooperation, and commercial partnerships. Precedents for this model already exist: European defense-tech and telecom companies have secured direct U.S. government contracts and entered into transatlantic teaming arrangements.
At the same time, Washington should help foster a positive environment for U.S. firms to participate in EU markets and supply chains. There is an appetite for this. Commenting on Intel's continued partnership with ASML, Intel's executive vice president said the company "will continue to work closely with ASML and the entire industry to enable [the AI] transition." In summer 2026, Paris-based Mistral AI established a strategic cloud distribution and infrastructure partnership with Microsoft, allowing European-developed models to run on U.S. hyperscale computing infrastructure. This is notable, considering the company has long been regarded as Europe's only AI champion.
Such deals, however, will multiply only to the extent that governments and companies on both sides of the Atlantic perceive the business climate as positive. Efforts to renew the partnership should not assume that current tensions will simply disappear. A significant segment of European political opinion hopes that the current period of confrontation will pass, much as the relationship recovered after the first Trump administration. Still, U.S. rapprochement will possibly be met with European resentment: European governments might use recent episodes of U.S. aversion as leverage to extract political advantages from future engagement with the United States.
While policies adopted today to reduce dependence on the United States could be softened in a period of rapprochement, however, they may still become embedded in Europe's emerging industrial policy. History points this direction: France's departure from NATO's integrated command in 1966 did not end the alliance, but the defense-industrial and nuclear autonomy France built in those years outlasted the rupture by decades.
The more plausible outcome, then, is that cooperation will resume on terms that preserve space for European autonomy.
Conclusion
If the United States wants Europe to remain part of a U.S.-led technological ecosystem, it needs to make participation the more attractive option for European governments.
The United States cannot compete with China while losing its allies. Meeting the China challenge requires building an ecosystem capable of achieving the same scale and offering countries around the world a credible alternative. Europe is indispensable to that effort. Its markets and industrial capabilities sustain the attractiveness and resilience of U.S. technology and enable the United States to shape the next generation of technology.
For the United States to win the technology race and establish technological dominance vis-a-vis China, it must first make sure its allies remain in the race with it. This would require Washington to move away from leveraging Europe's technological dependencies and toward offering Europe a stake in coproducing the technologies of the future, through more open procurement, joint investment, and commitments capable of enduring across administrations.
* * *
Federico Steinberg is a visiting fellow with the Europe, Russia, and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. Riccardo Bosticco is a PhD researcher at the Centre for Security, Diplomacy and Strategy at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and Fulbright visiting researcher at Georgetown University School of Foreign Service.
* * *
Original text here: https://www.csis.org/analysis/why-united-states-needs-europe-order-win-technology-race
[Category: ThinkTank]
CSIS Issues Commentary: Cartels, Cameras, and Commercial Data - Nonstate Actors and Ubiquitous Technical Surveillance
WASHINGTON, Oct. 21 -- The Center for Strategic and International Studies issued the following commentary:
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Cartels, Cameras, and Commercial Data: Nonstate Actors and Ubiquitous Technical Surveillance
Commentary by Justin Sherman
October 20, 2026
The Justice Department published an inspector general audit in September on how the department was mitigating threats from modern data collection and surveillance. The answer was: not well. Because the department's inspector general had released a report on Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) efforts at data surveillance risk mitigation in ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Oct. 21 -- The Center for Strategic and International Studies issued the following commentary: * * * Cartels, Cameras, and Commercial Data: Nonstate Actors and Ubiquitous Technical Surveillance Commentary by Justin Sherman October 20, 2026 The Justice Department published an inspector general audit in September on how the department was mitigating threats from modern data collection and surveillance. The answer was: not well. Because the department's inspector general had released a report on Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) efforts at data surveillance risk mitigation inJune 2025, this new report went department-wide. Its findings are a survey of fast-moving data, technology, and intelligence threats to the U.S. government, its personnel, and its operations, underscoring that many gaps remain in making public servants and those who seek to help them safer from bad actors.
But another striking point is the revelation of some nonstate actors' capabilities for pointed data collection and exploitation. In its 2025 report, the department already detailed how a Mexican cartel had, according to a source, previously hired a hacker who exploited mobile phones and other electronic devices, used the phone number of an FBI assistant legal attache in Mexico City to "obtain calls made and received, as well as geolocation data," and then mapped that against city camera networks to identify, intimidate, and in some cases kill FBI sources or cooperators. Now, the new report adds that the head of an organized crime family, in another instance, obtained access to call logs on a phone belonging to an employee of one of the family's businesses to identify calls with a cell phone it knew the FBI had issued. Ominously, the report continues, "the FBI lost the source."
In the era of advertising technologies, commercial data, globalized and interconnected digital networks and devices, and constant communication, sophisticated nation-states will continue, in many ways, to reign supreme in exploiting information to their benefit. For the United States, these threats loom large from governments such as China, Russia, and Iran, among others. But U.S. national security policymakers are also behind in appreciating the rising technological intelligence threats from well-resourced nonstate actors, such as transnational organized crime groups. The new report makes clear that whatever barrier to entry had previously existed for cartels and the like to exploit ubiquitous technology and data--even if that barrier was merely a lack of awareness--has been surpassed in some major cases. Looking forward, training, technology, and policies to systematically address the commercial data and technology threats require appreciating the breadth of actors who can now weaponize them.
The Problem Space
One of the terms used to describe this problem space is "ubiquitous technical surveillance," or UTS. The FBI defines UTS as "the widespread collection of data and application of analytic methodologies for the purpose of connecting people to things, events, or locations." Put in less bureaucratic speak, UTS refers to the degree and speed of modern connectivity: billions of people carrying smartphones in their pockets and regularly using mobile apps, many wearing smart devices on their wrists, automated license plate readers at toll booths and intersections, CCTV cameras in cities (some additionally loaded with facial recognition), tap-to-pay points at retailers, smart vehicles, data brokers, advertising technology systems, and much, much more. Data is moving everywhere, and connectivity is, as the term suggests, ubiquitous. In this environment, governments and other organizations can use the data and connectivity for their own intelligence purposes.
These risks hit everyone from spies to law enforcement officers. Speaking in 2022, the then-CIA director said that UTS "means that intelligence officers are being watched, tracked, and observed all the time" and that it has "prompted us to fundamentally rethink how we do our operations." The Justice Department's 2025 report noted that the FBI "is aware of prior and ongoing UTS compromises that have impacted FBI operations, threatened the safety of its sources, and are currently being used by adversaries to challenge the United States government on a global scale." Data- and connectivity-related threats are fast-paced, and they are nearly everywhere.
As a framing, the Justice Department breaks down UTS into five vectors:
1. Visual and Physical: Identifying people or objects tied to an operation through cameras or physical surveillance.
2. Electronic Signals: Using electronic devices such as mobile phones to gather information.
3. Financial: Exploiting transactional financial records with unique identifiers linked to a specific account holder.
4. Travel: Harnessing records that include unique identifiers for hotel stays, border crossings, plane reservations, and more.
5. Online: Leveraging individual advertising data, such as from web browsing and social media.
It is no mystery that nation-states could play in this space. China, Russia, and Iran have sophisticated, well-resourced, and persistent intelligence and security apparatuses that could take advantage of the many vulnerabilities in U.S. digital connectivity. Data brokers collect and sell reams of data on Americans, including current government personnel and active-duty military service members, sometimes for pennies per person, in ways Beijing or Moscow could easily exploit. Advertising technology systems constantly broadcast granular and highly sensitive data on devices. Smartphones can show up on Wi-Fi networks in their vicinity, connected vehicles log trips and even sell the telemetry to data brokers, and social media profiles reveal far more than people often realize. Adversarial governments can use infrastructure located in their own countries to help track people and activities within their borders, too, such as China's extensive facial recognition and camera networks or Russia's growing biometric surveillance infrastructure. Combined, these nation-states could penetrate systems, monitor people and movements in physical space, retroactively or predictively acquire and combine datasets (and even analyze them with AI), and use the insights against a wide range of U.S. government personnel, missions, and interests, turning U.S. data exposure into their data advantage.
Yet this report is a wake-up call about the UTS threat from advanced nonstate actors, both overseas and potentially at home. The fact that criminal groups might use technology is not novel: Cartels already use drones, and other international criminal groups can deploy malware to break into devices, for example. Drug Enforcement Administration agents who seized a Cali Cartel location in 1994 in Colombia, somewhat famously discovered the cartel was using an IBM supercomputer to mine data and hunt potential threats. What is new today is that the Justice Department has publicly identified the nonstate-UTS threat vector and underscored how it is already harming personnel, sources, and operations.
A Mexican cartel or an unspecified criminal organization could get access to camera networks, automated license plate readers, and other digital surveillance systems in places where it already has access, or could bribe its way through the metaphorical door, then combine that data with insights from human sources. It could illicitly access AI models, even those offered by U.S. companies, use them to scrape the social media accounts of U.S. government personnel, help sift through public records to identify the home addresses of judges or law enforcement officers, and combine data points acquired via a hacker-for-hire. The tech threat lies not just in individual pieces of technology or data out there in the world but in how nonstate actors can fuse them together.
For the coming years, this indicates multiple growing problems to add to the list for U.S. operational security, counterintelligence, and personnel protection. The fact that some advanced nonstate actors are now leveraging the UTS environment underscores that barriers to entry are seemingly dropping, which means more criminal groups may begin figuring out how data brokers, combinations of human surveillance and facial recognition-laden CCTV networks, or automated license plate readers meshed with hackers and drones could aid their operations. A lowering barrier to entry likewise suggests that nation-states below the top tier of intelligence and security service capability--occupied by actors such as Beijing and Moscow--may also have the opportunity to break more into this space.
And, critically, these activities by criminal organizations such as cartels or large crime families highlight a possibly different kind of intent facing U.S. government personnel and their cooperators. Yes, there are spy organizations that undertake covert action or kill people--consider Russian assassinations or attempts in Europe and elsewhere, as well as Iran's assassinations or facilitations of state-sponsored terrorism--and nation-states can exploit UTS to achieve similar ends, such as a modern version of how the Chinese government reportedly may have identified, rounded up, and executed U.S. government sources in China. But criminal organizations may have a different, or a different kind of, appetite for violence--a sort of violence with a vengeance that has no qualms about targeting friends and family members. For a large, well-funded, and technologically advanced transnational criminal organization seeking to protect its bottom line, it is easy to imagine how using UTS could look less like a spy service's want to quietly watch a target and more, in some cases, like going after judges, physically targeting law enforcement officers, and using data to incite violence.
Urgent Next Steps
U.S. national security policymakers need to urgently pursue at least three types of solutions:
1. Invest in anti-UTS training: Training is required for personnel in the Justice Department and other agencies, both to understand the problem space--it's hard to say whether the typical military service member or case analyst has even heard about real-time bidding networks or the frontier of gait recognition--and to be handed practical, empowering, and immediate or near-term mitigations.
2. Focus on mitigating technologies: Technology is required to scale up protections both in U.S. operations and in U.S. public servants' personal lives, including the use of privacy-enhancing technologies, dark web and online threat monitoring capabilities, proactive data obfuscation and data removal services, and much more. Providing an awareness of the problem and the technology to help mitigate it can each be helped by knowing and conveying that not just nation-states but cartels, the largest weapons-trafficking criminal groups, and others outside the realm of security services could potentially exploit UTS. The Justice Department should designate its own lead for this effort, but the problem affects many U.S. government components, meaning that, at minimum, the Department of Defense and the U.S. intelligence community should each similarly designate a lead of their own. As always, these leads will need appropriate resources, authorities, and institutional backing to get work done.
3. Pass comprehensive legislation: Critically, the third urgent step is that Congress and the executive branch need to scale up systemic responses to this threat space. This includes passing common-sense and comprehensive privacy legislation to curtail the widespread sale and transmission of Americans' sensitive data, enforcing existing regulations on U.S. data security, designating leads within the U.S. government on UTS (something the recent report notes the Justice Department lacks), imposing stricter data privacy and security requirements in U.S. government contracts, coordinating across agencies on the problem space, and defining a government-wide strategy that is workable and proactive, rather than waiting for incidents to happen. Many of these steps require congressional action, but some relate to regulatory enforcement and other mitigations and would be carried out by respective executive branch agencies.
Whack-a-mole attempts to rein in globalized, enormously profitable commercial data and tracking systems, data marketplaces, smart devices, and so forth will fail to move the needle compared to systemic measures that can at least shift the risk baseline for the United States. Personnel on the front lines of an operation or acute threat will always have to take extra steps to protect themselves, but they shouldn't be doing it alone. Systemic responses under new legislation should aim to dramatically reduce the initial defensive costs for personnel and their immediate teams as much as possible.
Much like their counterparts who work on issues of weaponry, cybersecurity and digital security experts have long worried about what happens when the barrier to entry for advanced tech capabilities lowers, or when organizations perform well enough to clear it. Clearly, at least two criminal organizations have reached that place--and likely many more--in exploiting components of the ubiquitous data and technology environment to undermine U.S. interests and activities. Without swift action, the risks will keep flying under the strategic radar, and the harms will only accelerate.
* * *
Justin Sherman is a senior associate (non-resident) with the Intelligence, National Security, and Technology Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.
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Original text here: https://www.csis.org/analysis/cartels-cameras-and-commercial-data-nonstate-actors-and-ubiquitous-technical-surveillance
[Category: ThinkTank]
* * *
Cartels, Cameras, and Commercial Data: Nonstate Actors and Ubiquitous Technical Surveillance
Commentary by Justin Sherman
October 20, 2026
The Justice Department published an inspector general audit in September on how the department was mitigating threats from modern data collection and surveillance. The answer was: not well. Because the department's inspector general had released a report on Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) efforts at data surveillance risk mitigation in ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Oct. 21 -- The Center for Strategic and International Studies issued the following commentary: * * * Cartels, Cameras, and Commercial Data: Nonstate Actors and Ubiquitous Technical Surveillance Commentary by Justin Sherman October 20, 2026 The Justice Department published an inspector general audit in September on how the department was mitigating threats from modern data collection and surveillance. The answer was: not well. Because the department's inspector general had released a report on Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) efforts at data surveillance risk mitigation inJune 2025, this new report went department-wide. Its findings are a survey of fast-moving data, technology, and intelligence threats to the U.S. government, its personnel, and its operations, underscoring that many gaps remain in making public servants and those who seek to help them safer from bad actors.
But another striking point is the revelation of some nonstate actors' capabilities for pointed data collection and exploitation. In its 2025 report, the department already detailed how a Mexican cartel had, according to a source, previously hired a hacker who exploited mobile phones and other electronic devices, used the phone number of an FBI assistant legal attache in Mexico City to "obtain calls made and received, as well as geolocation data," and then mapped that against city camera networks to identify, intimidate, and in some cases kill FBI sources or cooperators. Now, the new report adds that the head of an organized crime family, in another instance, obtained access to call logs on a phone belonging to an employee of one of the family's businesses to identify calls with a cell phone it knew the FBI had issued. Ominously, the report continues, "the FBI lost the source."
In the era of advertising technologies, commercial data, globalized and interconnected digital networks and devices, and constant communication, sophisticated nation-states will continue, in many ways, to reign supreme in exploiting information to their benefit. For the United States, these threats loom large from governments such as China, Russia, and Iran, among others. But U.S. national security policymakers are also behind in appreciating the rising technological intelligence threats from well-resourced nonstate actors, such as transnational organized crime groups. The new report makes clear that whatever barrier to entry had previously existed for cartels and the like to exploit ubiquitous technology and data--even if that barrier was merely a lack of awareness--has been surpassed in some major cases. Looking forward, training, technology, and policies to systematically address the commercial data and technology threats require appreciating the breadth of actors who can now weaponize them.
The Problem Space
One of the terms used to describe this problem space is "ubiquitous technical surveillance," or UTS. The FBI defines UTS as "the widespread collection of data and application of analytic methodologies for the purpose of connecting people to things, events, or locations." Put in less bureaucratic speak, UTS refers to the degree and speed of modern connectivity: billions of people carrying smartphones in their pockets and regularly using mobile apps, many wearing smart devices on their wrists, automated license plate readers at toll booths and intersections, CCTV cameras in cities (some additionally loaded with facial recognition), tap-to-pay points at retailers, smart vehicles, data brokers, advertising technology systems, and much, much more. Data is moving everywhere, and connectivity is, as the term suggests, ubiquitous. In this environment, governments and other organizations can use the data and connectivity for their own intelligence purposes.
These risks hit everyone from spies to law enforcement officers. Speaking in 2022, the then-CIA director said that UTS "means that intelligence officers are being watched, tracked, and observed all the time" and that it has "prompted us to fundamentally rethink how we do our operations." The Justice Department's 2025 report noted that the FBI "is aware of prior and ongoing UTS compromises that have impacted FBI operations, threatened the safety of its sources, and are currently being used by adversaries to challenge the United States government on a global scale." Data- and connectivity-related threats are fast-paced, and they are nearly everywhere.
As a framing, the Justice Department breaks down UTS into five vectors:
1. Visual and Physical: Identifying people or objects tied to an operation through cameras or physical surveillance.
2. Electronic Signals: Using electronic devices such as mobile phones to gather information.
3. Financial: Exploiting transactional financial records with unique identifiers linked to a specific account holder.
4. Travel: Harnessing records that include unique identifiers for hotel stays, border crossings, plane reservations, and more.
5. Online: Leveraging individual advertising data, such as from web browsing and social media.
It is no mystery that nation-states could play in this space. China, Russia, and Iran have sophisticated, well-resourced, and persistent intelligence and security apparatuses that could take advantage of the many vulnerabilities in U.S. digital connectivity. Data brokers collect and sell reams of data on Americans, including current government personnel and active-duty military service members, sometimes for pennies per person, in ways Beijing or Moscow could easily exploit. Advertising technology systems constantly broadcast granular and highly sensitive data on devices. Smartphones can show up on Wi-Fi networks in their vicinity, connected vehicles log trips and even sell the telemetry to data brokers, and social media profiles reveal far more than people often realize. Adversarial governments can use infrastructure located in their own countries to help track people and activities within their borders, too, such as China's extensive facial recognition and camera networks or Russia's growing biometric surveillance infrastructure. Combined, these nation-states could penetrate systems, monitor people and movements in physical space, retroactively or predictively acquire and combine datasets (and even analyze them with AI), and use the insights against a wide range of U.S. government personnel, missions, and interests, turning U.S. data exposure into their data advantage.
Yet this report is a wake-up call about the UTS threat from advanced nonstate actors, both overseas and potentially at home. The fact that criminal groups might use technology is not novel: Cartels already use drones, and other international criminal groups can deploy malware to break into devices, for example. Drug Enforcement Administration agents who seized a Cali Cartel location in 1994 in Colombia, somewhat famously discovered the cartel was using an IBM supercomputer to mine data and hunt potential threats. What is new today is that the Justice Department has publicly identified the nonstate-UTS threat vector and underscored how it is already harming personnel, sources, and operations.
A Mexican cartel or an unspecified criminal organization could get access to camera networks, automated license plate readers, and other digital surveillance systems in places where it already has access, or could bribe its way through the metaphorical door, then combine that data with insights from human sources. It could illicitly access AI models, even those offered by U.S. companies, use them to scrape the social media accounts of U.S. government personnel, help sift through public records to identify the home addresses of judges or law enforcement officers, and combine data points acquired via a hacker-for-hire. The tech threat lies not just in individual pieces of technology or data out there in the world but in how nonstate actors can fuse them together.
For the coming years, this indicates multiple growing problems to add to the list for U.S. operational security, counterintelligence, and personnel protection. The fact that some advanced nonstate actors are now leveraging the UTS environment underscores that barriers to entry are seemingly dropping, which means more criminal groups may begin figuring out how data brokers, combinations of human surveillance and facial recognition-laden CCTV networks, or automated license plate readers meshed with hackers and drones could aid their operations. A lowering barrier to entry likewise suggests that nation-states below the top tier of intelligence and security service capability--occupied by actors such as Beijing and Moscow--may also have the opportunity to break more into this space.
And, critically, these activities by criminal organizations such as cartels or large crime families highlight a possibly different kind of intent facing U.S. government personnel and their cooperators. Yes, there are spy organizations that undertake covert action or kill people--consider Russian assassinations or attempts in Europe and elsewhere, as well as Iran's assassinations or facilitations of state-sponsored terrorism--and nation-states can exploit UTS to achieve similar ends, such as a modern version of how the Chinese government reportedly may have identified, rounded up, and executed U.S. government sources in China. But criminal organizations may have a different, or a different kind of, appetite for violence--a sort of violence with a vengeance that has no qualms about targeting friends and family members. For a large, well-funded, and technologically advanced transnational criminal organization seeking to protect its bottom line, it is easy to imagine how using UTS could look less like a spy service's want to quietly watch a target and more, in some cases, like going after judges, physically targeting law enforcement officers, and using data to incite violence.
Urgent Next Steps
U.S. national security policymakers need to urgently pursue at least three types of solutions:
1. Invest in anti-UTS training: Training is required for personnel in the Justice Department and other agencies, both to understand the problem space--it's hard to say whether the typical military service member or case analyst has even heard about real-time bidding networks or the frontier of gait recognition--and to be handed practical, empowering, and immediate or near-term mitigations.
2. Focus on mitigating technologies: Technology is required to scale up protections both in U.S. operations and in U.S. public servants' personal lives, including the use of privacy-enhancing technologies, dark web and online threat monitoring capabilities, proactive data obfuscation and data removal services, and much more. Providing an awareness of the problem and the technology to help mitigate it can each be helped by knowing and conveying that not just nation-states but cartels, the largest weapons-trafficking criminal groups, and others outside the realm of security services could potentially exploit UTS. The Justice Department should designate its own lead for this effort, but the problem affects many U.S. government components, meaning that, at minimum, the Department of Defense and the U.S. intelligence community should each similarly designate a lead of their own. As always, these leads will need appropriate resources, authorities, and institutional backing to get work done.
3. Pass comprehensive legislation: Critically, the third urgent step is that Congress and the executive branch need to scale up systemic responses to this threat space. This includes passing common-sense and comprehensive privacy legislation to curtail the widespread sale and transmission of Americans' sensitive data, enforcing existing regulations on U.S. data security, designating leads within the U.S. government on UTS (something the recent report notes the Justice Department lacks), imposing stricter data privacy and security requirements in U.S. government contracts, coordinating across agencies on the problem space, and defining a government-wide strategy that is workable and proactive, rather than waiting for incidents to happen. Many of these steps require congressional action, but some relate to regulatory enforcement and other mitigations and would be carried out by respective executive branch agencies.
Whack-a-mole attempts to rein in globalized, enormously profitable commercial data and tracking systems, data marketplaces, smart devices, and so forth will fail to move the needle compared to systemic measures that can at least shift the risk baseline for the United States. Personnel on the front lines of an operation or acute threat will always have to take extra steps to protect themselves, but they shouldn't be doing it alone. Systemic responses under new legislation should aim to dramatically reduce the initial defensive costs for personnel and their immediate teams as much as possible.
Much like their counterparts who work on issues of weaponry, cybersecurity and digital security experts have long worried about what happens when the barrier to entry for advanced tech capabilities lowers, or when organizations perform well enough to clear it. Clearly, at least two criminal organizations have reached that place--and likely many more--in exploiting components of the ubiquitous data and technology environment to undermine U.S. interests and activities. Without swift action, the risks will keep flying under the strategic radar, and the harms will only accelerate.
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Justin Sherman is a senior associate (non-resident) with the Intelligence, National Security, and Technology Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.
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Original text here: https://www.csis.org/analysis/cartels-cameras-and-commercial-data-nonstate-actors-and-ubiquitous-technical-surveillance
[Category: ThinkTank]
CSIS Issues Commentary Entitled 'The Pacific Security Puzzle'
WASHINGTON, Oct. 21 -- The Center for Strategic and International Studies issued the following commentary:
* * *
The Pacific Security Puzzle
Commentary by Angelina Bruno and John Auge
October 20, 2026
Introduction
The Pacific region has emerged as an arena of strategic competition as China expands its diplomatic, economic, and security presence. Meanwhile, Australia, the United States, and New Zealand act to maintain their positions as preferred partners and limit China's pursuit of influence. Across the Pacific, these competing efforts are reshaping the security environment, and Pacific ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Oct. 21 -- The Center for Strategic and International Studies issued the following commentary: * * * The Pacific Security Puzzle Commentary by Angelina Bruno and John Auge October 20, 2026 Introduction The Pacific region has emerged as an arena of strategic competition as China expands its diplomatic, economic, and security presence. Meanwhile, Australia, the United States, and New Zealand act to maintain their positions as preferred partners and limit China's pursuit of influence. Across the Pacific, these competing efforts are reshaping the security environment, and PacificIslands are navigating growing pressure from external powers while seeking to preserve their strategic autonomy. Yet the proliferation of security-related arrangements has made the landscape harder to assess. The growing number of defense commitments, security partnerships, and other arrangements differ significantly in their scope and legal weight, making it difficult to evaluate how external partners are shaping the region's security environment.
Mapping the Competition for Influence
The breadth and evolving nature of these relationships present a practical problem for analysts and policymakers: The region's security commitments have multiplied quickly and have been unevenly documented, making it difficult to consider the security landscape in aggregate. To address this problem, the CSIS Australia Chair has created a tool titled "Security Influence in the Pacific: Who's Competing--and Where?" This interactive map plots the security agreements between Pacific Island countries and Australia, the United States, New Zealand, China, and Taiwan. The arrangements vary widely--from treaty-level defense obligations to status of forces agreements, maritime surveillance arrangements, policing cooperation, and general memorandums of understanding. For clarity, these are arranged into three categories:
1. Defense Treaty Ally: Includes a ratified treaty, agreement, or political declaration that includes an obligation to respond to an armed attack.
2. Formal Security Agreement/Status: A named, standing instrument or official designation, but has no defense guarantee.
3. Non-Binding Cooperation Only: Includes defense MOUs, strategic partnership statements, pending agreements, statements of intent, dialogues, joint exercises, and arms sales.
The tool covers 56 arrangements across 14 countries and includes a link to agreement texts where publicly available.
Explore The Interactive Map Here (https://www.csis.org/programs/australia-chair/projects/mapping-security-influence-pacific)
Competing Strategic Approaches
By compiling the majority of external partner security arrangements into one place, this tool reveals several trend lines and shifts of influence. For example, the map illuminates Australia's significant push over the past few years to shore up security relationships across the Pacific, largely in response to China's growing ambitions to gain influence and presence in the region.
Australia signed a mutual defense treaty (MDT) with Papua New Guinea in October 2025 and a second with Fiji in July 2026. These are the first new alliances concluded in the Asia-Pacific since the early Cold War and only the third and fourth MDTs Australia has ever signed (the first two were with the United States and New Zealand in 1951). The MDT with Fiji, known as the Veitacini Treaty or Ocean of Peace Alliance, leaves open the opportunity for other members to join. New Zealand has signaled interest in acceding to the Veitacini Treaty, though a decision is unlikely before its November elections, and officials in Canberra, Suva, and Wellington have described New Zealand's accession as a possible foundation for a wider alliance. Australia's negotiations on a security pact with Tonga, the only Pacific Island country with defense forces that has not yet signed a defense agreement with Australia, are reportedly underway.
Australia has also pursued a distinct class of security arrangement with states that do not maintain militaries. The 2023 Falepili Union Treaty with Tuvalu and the Nakamal Agreement with Vanuatu, concluded in June 2026, are designed to foreclose Chinese military basing and to constrain security arrangements presented as police cooperation. In December 2024, Australia finalized a treaty with Naoero, giving it an effective veto over Naoero's third-party security arrangements, and it has been negotiating a comparable agreement with the Solomon Islands following the latter's change of government in May 2026.
The other four external partners on the map have also stepped up their engagement in the region. U.S. treaty commitments remain concentrated in the northern Pacific, where the Compacts of Free Association assign U.S. responsibility for the defense of Palau, the Marshall Islands, and the Federated States of Micronesia. The United States also signed a 2023 defense cooperation agreement with Papua New Guinea and holds shiprider arrangements with 13 Pacific Island countries, the most recent of which was signed with the Solomon Islands in July 2026. New Zealand's defense and security declaration with the Cook Islands in April 2026 reaffirmed Wellington as Avarua's primary security partner, a move largely prompted by the Cook Islands concluding a comprehensive strategic partnership with China in February 2025.
China's own efforts to strengthen security ties with the Pacific have ramped up significantly over the past decade, with some success. In April 2022, Beijing signed a still-undisclosed security agreement with the Solomon Islands, much to the alarm of the United States and its like-minded partners. That same spring, however, then-Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi was thwarted in his attempt at a wide-ranging Pacific-China security agreement during a tour of the region. Overall, partners other than China account for most of the recent security arrangements, with a notable surge just after China's 2022 Solomon Islands agreement (see Figure 1). China's regional security footprint relies primarily on policing agreements, law enforcement training, and other engagement with a security nexus, such as port and airfield infrastructure and support for disaster relief.
* * *
Figure 1: New Security Agreements with Pacific Island Countries
* * *
Taiwan has only three diplomatic allies in the region--the Marshall Islands, Palau, and Tuvalu--limiting the number of governments with which it can engage in formal bilateral arrangements. On the map, Taiwan therefore appears only once, through the Kaitasi Treaty with Tuvalu, signed in November 2025 to formalize and strengthen their bilateral partnership. This narrower treaty footprint should not be mistaken for an absence of regional engagement, however, as Taiwan remains active across its Pacific partnerships in areas including infrastructure, renewable energy, trade, and investment.
A Recent Test of the Architecture
Beijing's July 2026 missile test was a significant stress test of the region's security architecture. The submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) test, which landed north of Fiji, was the first of its kind from China into international waters. This launch coincided with the signing of the Australia-Fiji Veitacini Treaty and hardened attitudes in several countries, including Fiji, whose defense minister had asked that the launch be canceled--a request that Beijing ignored.
Despite statements against the SLBM launch, attitudes toward Beijing's actions are not uniform across the region. At the Pacific foreign ministers' meeting in August, Kiribati and Naoero blocked a collective statement condemning China's missile test, with New Zealand's foreign minister accusing Kiribati and Naoero of appeasement. A month later in Palau at the annual Pacific Islands Forum leaders' meeting, a softened clause registering concern and calling for advance notification passed. However, Naoero disassociated from the statement (despite its 2024 treaty with Australia), and Kiribati was absent from the leaders' retreat.
Conclusion
The "Security Influence in the Pacific: Who's Competing--and Where?" tool points to a regional security architecture in transition, shaped by intensifying competition between China and the region's established security partners. Australia's expanding network of agreements suggests a move toward solidifying its security interests across the Pacific, but whether these bilateral arrangements develop into a broader multilateral framework remains uncertain. More importantly, the growing number of arrangements does not necessarily clarify how Pacific Islands themselves want to define their security interests--or how they would act in a major regional crisis, especially if they were asked to choose sides. The central strategic question is therefore not how many security relationships exist, but what purposes they serve and how they shape the broader pattern of external security engagement across the Pacific.
* * *
Angelina Bruno is the 2026 Michael and Deborah Thawley Scholar for the Australia Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C., and the Lowy Institute in Sydney. John Auge is program manager for the Australia Chair at CSIS.
* * *
Original text here: https://www.csis.org/analysis/pacific-security-puzzle
[Category: ThinkTank]
* * *
The Pacific Security Puzzle
Commentary by Angelina Bruno and John Auge
October 20, 2026
Introduction
The Pacific region has emerged as an arena of strategic competition as China expands its diplomatic, economic, and security presence. Meanwhile, Australia, the United States, and New Zealand act to maintain their positions as preferred partners and limit China's pursuit of influence. Across the Pacific, these competing efforts are reshaping the security environment, and Pacific ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Oct. 21 -- The Center for Strategic and International Studies issued the following commentary: * * * The Pacific Security Puzzle Commentary by Angelina Bruno and John Auge October 20, 2026 Introduction The Pacific region has emerged as an arena of strategic competition as China expands its diplomatic, economic, and security presence. Meanwhile, Australia, the United States, and New Zealand act to maintain their positions as preferred partners and limit China's pursuit of influence. Across the Pacific, these competing efforts are reshaping the security environment, and PacificIslands are navigating growing pressure from external powers while seeking to preserve their strategic autonomy. Yet the proliferation of security-related arrangements has made the landscape harder to assess. The growing number of defense commitments, security partnerships, and other arrangements differ significantly in their scope and legal weight, making it difficult to evaluate how external partners are shaping the region's security environment.
Mapping the Competition for Influence
The breadth and evolving nature of these relationships present a practical problem for analysts and policymakers: The region's security commitments have multiplied quickly and have been unevenly documented, making it difficult to consider the security landscape in aggregate. To address this problem, the CSIS Australia Chair has created a tool titled "Security Influence in the Pacific: Who's Competing--and Where?" This interactive map plots the security agreements between Pacific Island countries and Australia, the United States, New Zealand, China, and Taiwan. The arrangements vary widely--from treaty-level defense obligations to status of forces agreements, maritime surveillance arrangements, policing cooperation, and general memorandums of understanding. For clarity, these are arranged into three categories:
1. Defense Treaty Ally: Includes a ratified treaty, agreement, or political declaration that includes an obligation to respond to an armed attack.
2. Formal Security Agreement/Status: A named, standing instrument or official designation, but has no defense guarantee.
3. Non-Binding Cooperation Only: Includes defense MOUs, strategic partnership statements, pending agreements, statements of intent, dialogues, joint exercises, and arms sales.
The tool covers 56 arrangements across 14 countries and includes a link to agreement texts where publicly available.
Explore The Interactive Map Here (https://www.csis.org/programs/australia-chair/projects/mapping-security-influence-pacific)
Competing Strategic Approaches
By compiling the majority of external partner security arrangements into one place, this tool reveals several trend lines and shifts of influence. For example, the map illuminates Australia's significant push over the past few years to shore up security relationships across the Pacific, largely in response to China's growing ambitions to gain influence and presence in the region.
Australia signed a mutual defense treaty (MDT) with Papua New Guinea in October 2025 and a second with Fiji in July 2026. These are the first new alliances concluded in the Asia-Pacific since the early Cold War and only the third and fourth MDTs Australia has ever signed (the first two were with the United States and New Zealand in 1951). The MDT with Fiji, known as the Veitacini Treaty or Ocean of Peace Alliance, leaves open the opportunity for other members to join. New Zealand has signaled interest in acceding to the Veitacini Treaty, though a decision is unlikely before its November elections, and officials in Canberra, Suva, and Wellington have described New Zealand's accession as a possible foundation for a wider alliance. Australia's negotiations on a security pact with Tonga, the only Pacific Island country with defense forces that has not yet signed a defense agreement with Australia, are reportedly underway.
Australia has also pursued a distinct class of security arrangement with states that do not maintain militaries. The 2023 Falepili Union Treaty with Tuvalu and the Nakamal Agreement with Vanuatu, concluded in June 2026, are designed to foreclose Chinese military basing and to constrain security arrangements presented as police cooperation. In December 2024, Australia finalized a treaty with Naoero, giving it an effective veto over Naoero's third-party security arrangements, and it has been negotiating a comparable agreement with the Solomon Islands following the latter's change of government in May 2026.
The other four external partners on the map have also stepped up their engagement in the region. U.S. treaty commitments remain concentrated in the northern Pacific, where the Compacts of Free Association assign U.S. responsibility for the defense of Palau, the Marshall Islands, and the Federated States of Micronesia. The United States also signed a 2023 defense cooperation agreement with Papua New Guinea and holds shiprider arrangements with 13 Pacific Island countries, the most recent of which was signed with the Solomon Islands in July 2026. New Zealand's defense and security declaration with the Cook Islands in April 2026 reaffirmed Wellington as Avarua's primary security partner, a move largely prompted by the Cook Islands concluding a comprehensive strategic partnership with China in February 2025.
China's own efforts to strengthen security ties with the Pacific have ramped up significantly over the past decade, with some success. In April 2022, Beijing signed a still-undisclosed security agreement with the Solomon Islands, much to the alarm of the United States and its like-minded partners. That same spring, however, then-Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi was thwarted in his attempt at a wide-ranging Pacific-China security agreement during a tour of the region. Overall, partners other than China account for most of the recent security arrangements, with a notable surge just after China's 2022 Solomon Islands agreement (see Figure 1). China's regional security footprint relies primarily on policing agreements, law enforcement training, and other engagement with a security nexus, such as port and airfield infrastructure and support for disaster relief.
* * *
Figure 1: New Security Agreements with Pacific Island Countries
* * *
Taiwan has only three diplomatic allies in the region--the Marshall Islands, Palau, and Tuvalu--limiting the number of governments with which it can engage in formal bilateral arrangements. On the map, Taiwan therefore appears only once, through the Kaitasi Treaty with Tuvalu, signed in November 2025 to formalize and strengthen their bilateral partnership. This narrower treaty footprint should not be mistaken for an absence of regional engagement, however, as Taiwan remains active across its Pacific partnerships in areas including infrastructure, renewable energy, trade, and investment.
A Recent Test of the Architecture
Beijing's July 2026 missile test was a significant stress test of the region's security architecture. The submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) test, which landed north of Fiji, was the first of its kind from China into international waters. This launch coincided with the signing of the Australia-Fiji Veitacini Treaty and hardened attitudes in several countries, including Fiji, whose defense minister had asked that the launch be canceled--a request that Beijing ignored.
Despite statements against the SLBM launch, attitudes toward Beijing's actions are not uniform across the region. At the Pacific foreign ministers' meeting in August, Kiribati and Naoero blocked a collective statement condemning China's missile test, with New Zealand's foreign minister accusing Kiribati and Naoero of appeasement. A month later in Palau at the annual Pacific Islands Forum leaders' meeting, a softened clause registering concern and calling for advance notification passed. However, Naoero disassociated from the statement (despite its 2024 treaty with Australia), and Kiribati was absent from the leaders' retreat.
Conclusion
The "Security Influence in the Pacific: Who's Competing--and Where?" tool points to a regional security architecture in transition, shaped by intensifying competition between China and the region's established security partners. Australia's expanding network of agreements suggests a move toward solidifying its security interests across the Pacific, but whether these bilateral arrangements develop into a broader multilateral framework remains uncertain. More importantly, the growing number of arrangements does not necessarily clarify how Pacific Islands themselves want to define their security interests--or how they would act in a major regional crisis, especially if they were asked to choose sides. The central strategic question is therefore not how many security relationships exist, but what purposes they serve and how they shape the broader pattern of external security engagement across the Pacific.
* * *
Angelina Bruno is the 2026 Michael and Deborah Thawley Scholar for the Australia Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C., and the Lowy Institute in Sydney. John Auge is program manager for the Australia Chair at CSIS.
* * *
Original text here: https://www.csis.org/analysis/pacific-security-puzzle
[Category: ThinkTank]
America First Policy Institute Issues Commentary to Texas Dispatch: Why America First Matters For Texas
WASHINGTON, Oct. 21 -- The America First Policy Institute issued the following excerpts of a commentary on Oct. 20, 2026, to the Texas Dispatch:
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Why America First Matters For Texas
On October 7, President Donald J. Trump came to San Antonio to make the case that America First policies are strengthening Texas - and the nation. Unlike his recent predecessors, the president understands that for Texans, security, prosperity, and liberty are not abstract political ideas.
In the Lone Star State, the words "Remember the Alamo" still speak to what it takes for a free people to flourish. And "America ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Oct. 21 -- The America First Policy Institute issued the following excerpts of a commentary on Oct. 20, 2026, to the Texas Dispatch: * * * Why America First Matters For Texas On October 7, President Donald J. Trump came to San Antonio to make the case that America First policies are strengthening Texas - and the nation. Unlike his recent predecessors, the president understands that for Texans, security, prosperity, and liberty are not abstract political ideas. In the Lone Star State, the words "Remember the Alamo" still speak to what it takes for a free people to flourish. And "AmericaFirst" is a similar rallying cry - and commitment - for an entire nation.
America First policies are also on the ballot in next month's midterms. And as President Trump makes his case to the country, Texas serves as a leading example of why and how those policies make Americans safer, freer, and more prosperous.
To read the full article, click here (https://thetexasdispatch.com/greg-sindelar-texas-america-first-policy-blueprint/).
Originally published by The Texas Dispatch (https://thetexasdispatch.com/greg-sindelar-texas-america-first-policy-blueprint/)
* * *
Greg Sindelar
Interim President and Chief Executive Officer
* * *
Original text here: https://americafirstpolicy.com/issues/why-america-first-matters-for-texas/
[Category: ThinkTank]
* * *
Why America First Matters For Texas
On October 7, President Donald J. Trump came to San Antonio to make the case that America First policies are strengthening Texas - and the nation. Unlike his recent predecessors, the president understands that for Texans, security, prosperity, and liberty are not abstract political ideas.
In the Lone Star State, the words "Remember the Alamo" still speak to what it takes for a free people to flourish. And "America ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Oct. 21 -- The America First Policy Institute issued the following excerpts of a commentary on Oct. 20, 2026, to the Texas Dispatch: * * * Why America First Matters For Texas On October 7, President Donald J. Trump came to San Antonio to make the case that America First policies are strengthening Texas - and the nation. Unlike his recent predecessors, the president understands that for Texans, security, prosperity, and liberty are not abstract political ideas. In the Lone Star State, the words "Remember the Alamo" still speak to what it takes for a free people to flourish. And "AmericaFirst" is a similar rallying cry - and commitment - for an entire nation.
America First policies are also on the ballot in next month's midterms. And as President Trump makes his case to the country, Texas serves as a leading example of why and how those policies make Americans safer, freer, and more prosperous.
To read the full article, click here (https://thetexasdispatch.com/greg-sindelar-texas-america-first-policy-blueprint/).
Originally published by The Texas Dispatch (https://thetexasdispatch.com/greg-sindelar-texas-america-first-policy-blueprint/)
* * *
Greg Sindelar
Interim President and Chief Executive Officer
* * *
Original text here: https://americafirstpolicy.com/issues/why-america-first-matters-for-texas/
[Category: ThinkTank]