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How Russia’s winter warfare strategy targets Ukrainian civilians

Conflict Europe & Eurasia Geopolitics & Energy Security Human Rights

Ukraine’s most immediate contribution to European security is likely to be in terms of helping countries defend against the mounting threat posed by Russian drones. The Kremlin’s current harassing activities around airports and other strategic sites across Europe are essentially an annoyance, but even such small-scale drone operations have exposed an alarming lack of readiness. At present, it seems safe to say that the continent as a whole is utterly unprepared for the kind of large-scale Russian drone attacks that have become a routine feature of the war in Ukraine.

Europe has responded to escalating Russian drone activity by developing plans to establish a “drone wall” along the continent’s exposed eastern flank. So far, however, this initiative remains somewhat fragmented with no unified concept or central coordination. While a collective response could eventually prove effective, pursuing this goal without learning from Ukraine’s unique experience makes little sense. Only Kyiv has the data and insights necessary to build layered defensive networks capable of combating waves of Russian drones.

In recent months, a growing number of European countries have taken the practical step of seeking to tap into Ukraine’s drone warfare prowess by working with Ukrainian trainers or establishing joint production initiatives. “Ukraine’s experience is the most relevant in Europe right now. Our specialists and technologies can become a key element of the future European drone wall, a large-scale project that will ensure safety in the skies,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy commented in September 2025.

In addition to drone tactics and technologies, Ukraine can also offer its European partners an unrivaled environment for drone operator training and weapons development. The whole of Ukraine is now a vast drone warfare laboratory where novel threats are identified and addressed on a daily basis. As a result, new drone models and upgraded designs can move from the drawing board to the battlefield at a pace that is unheard of in peacetime Europe.

Drone warfare is just one of the many areas where Europe can learn from Ukraine. As European leaders explore new security strategies in a rapidly shifting geopolitical environment, it should be abundantly clear that Kyiv has a crucial role to play. No other European country has such a battle-hardened army or intimate knowledge of modern warfare. In an increasingly unpredictable world, that makes Ukraine a vital partner.

Lesia Orobets is the founder of the Price of Freedom air defense initiative and a former member of the Ukrainian parliament.

To make AI accessible to the widest possible swath of the population, AI developers should offer not just cheaper monthly subscription models but also sell the equivalent of a sachet of AI. This means offering small-scale uses of AI tools and applications for low fees. For example, one notable approach that has already been adopted is the IndiaAI Compute Pillar, which allows scholars, researchers, and startups to utilize computational power for less than a dollar per hour. To make this a scalable consumer product, however, the private sector would need data from the government on how the Compute Pillar is being used. Such data could make Compute Pillar a proof of concept for the AI sachet model. Under India’s AI Governance Guidelines, metrics for both the scale of adoption and how consistently the service is used could set the bar for whether this proof of concept should spur a larger-scale investment in such services.

India also has ample experience with scaling up such society- and accessibility-driven models. The Aadhaar biometric ID system, the Unified Payments Interface instant payment system, and the country’s digital public infrastructure (DPI) buildout were bottom-up models. For example, from 2011 to 2021, the number of Indian adults (ages fifteen and up) with a bank account rose from 35 percent to 80 percent thanks to this approach.

As an illustration for how this sachet model could be of use, think of the places where shampoo and other kinds of sachets are sold in India—usually small mom-and-pop stores run by one person or family. For such small stores, bookkeeping can be a laborious, time-consuming task. But with a ₹15 AI sachet, a shopkeeper could take photos of that day’s transactions, prompt an AI to parse the handwriting, and calculate revenue and inventory figures. If small business owners were to widely adopt AI sachets for such tasks, it would be a significant step toward demonstrating the scalability of the AI sachet model. This is how shampoos and other consumer goods expanded their footprints using the sachet model.

During my trip to Pune, many of the people I spoke with were curious about how AI can help improve efficiency in areas including business, scholarship, research, management, and farming practices. When it comes to harnessing this demand for wider AI adoption, the government can play a major role in bringing stakeholders such as unions, cooperatives, and trade associations together with private sector AI developers to demonstrate the utility of AI for their respective fields.

At the AI Impact Summit, centering on the three sutras of “people, planet, and progress,” policymakers and tech company leaders should meet with small business owners, farmers (most of whom are small-scale), students, and others to discuss the benefits of AI adoption. Moreover, an AI impact case study in Pune or the wider state of Maharashtra could serve this purpose further, allowing the private sector and India’s AI governance model to bring more proofs of concept to empower society-driven, value-based AI adoption in India.

The post Dispatch from India: How a low-cost, high-quality consumer model can expand India’s AI adoption appeared first on Atlantic Council.

How India’s AI talent playbook can provide a blueprint for aspiring AI powers

Trisha Ray — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 17:49:25 +0000

In February, New Delhi will host the AI Impact Summit, a gathering of policymakers, industry leaders, and researchers, with the tagline “People, Planet, Progress.” This summit arrives at a turning point, as the center of gravity on artificial intelligence (AI) adoption shifts toward emerging economies, home to three-quarters of the world’s population. With the summit, India, already a leader in AI skill penetration, is positioning itself as a “shaper” rather than a mere “adopter” of these technologies.

But the success of the New Delhi summit will depend on how effectively it moves beyond rhetoric to address the realities of AI adoption, including the need for workforce development. To this end, on January 23, the Atlantic Council hosted an official pre-summit event in partnership with the Indian embassy in Washington, DC. The event opened with remarks by Ajay Kumar, minister (commerce) at the Indian embassy in Washington, DC, as well as Tess DeBlanc-Knowles, senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Technology Programs. This was followed by a panel discussion with Martijn Rasser, vice president for technology leadership at the Special Competitive Studies Project; Nicole Isaac, vice president for global public policy at Cisco; and Peter Lovelock, chief consultancy and innovation officer at Access Partnership. Below are some of the key takeaways from that discussion, as well as several of the panelists’ recommendations for how to approach these issues heading into the AI Impact Summit. The discussion underscored that while the potential for AI-driven growth is immense, the hurdles, ranging from a global talent shortage to fragmented labor data, require more than just market forces to overcome.

The global AI talent gap

The current global AI talent landscape can be viewed as a pyramid, according to Rasser. At the apex, he said, sits a cohort of around ten thousand elite PhD-level researchers and machine learning engineers. While the United States and China currently dominate this top layer of researchers, the real opportunity for emerging powers lies at the applied level. India possesses significant depth in its service sector, but the true challenge is building institutional readiness, ensuring that organizations can effectively channel available talent into high-value applications.

The most underappreciated deficit is not in raw coding but in AI-adjacent skills. There is a pressing need for product managers and domain experts who can bridge the gap between technical tools and organizational needs. For emerging economies, said Lovelock, the goal should not be to replicate Silicon Valley’s research labs, but to build an ecosystem where AI is “burned into” industrial applications such as supply chain management and export-import calculations.

AI infrastructure as workforce policy

“At its core, AI is designed, built, and deployed by humans,” noted Knowles. Indeed, a persistent theme for the global majority is that connectivity cannot be separated from workforce policy. Without reliable digital access, Isaac noted, billions remain excluded from the transformative benefits of AI. Security is another foundational layer; as AI environments become more complex, training in cybersecurity and digital resilience becomes essential to protect vulnerable populations from bad actors.

Trisha Ray, Martijn Rasser, Nicole Isaac, and Peter Lovelock at the Atlantic Council’s public panel, “Road to Impact Summit 2026: India’s AI talent playbook,” hosted on January 23, 2026.

Kumar, the Indian embassy official, laid out India’s strategy for a comprehensive five-layer “AI stack,” including sovereign models, semiconductors, and data centers. By providing compute power to educational institutions at a fraction of the global market rate, he argued, the government aims to democratize access across smaller cities. However, the widening digital divide remains a threat. If certain segments of the population are left behind, the resulting “have and have-not” divide could persist for generations, he said.

The other data problem

We cannot manage what we cannot measure. Policymakers, said Lovelock, are currently operating with “static” data that looks in the rearview mirror. Traditional labor statistics, often based on outdated surveys, are ill-suited for a fast-moving technology. Furthermore, labor data is often fragmented across various ministries, making it difficult to understand where the actual skill gaps lie.

Standard adoption metrics are increasingly irrelevant because individual AI use is highly varied. Instead of tracking who is using the technology, said Lovelock, governments need a “diffusion framework” that measures the actual impact of AI use on the economy. Only then can they make the strategic bets required for a long-term return on investment.

Four pillars for the summit’s AI talent agenda

Following from the panelists’ insights, the AI Impact Summit can deliver a scalable and inclusive AI talent framework by coalescing the global community around four primary actions:

Modernize education through personalized AI tools. Rather than sticking to the “one-to-many” broadcast model of traditional schooling, curricula should be reformed to put AI tools directly in the hands of students. This shift allows for personalized learning and ensures that students learn by doing, preparing them for a rapidly changing job market.
Create an AI Diffusion Index to measure actual adoption. Policymakers should move away from static adoption statistics and toward real-time data signals that measure how AI is being embedded into industrial and public services. This requires supplementing government surveys with nontraditional data sources to better align educational output with actual labor market demand.
Treat connectivity and security as foundational workforce issues. Investment in fiber and satellite infrastructure must be paired with training in digital resilience and cybersecurity. This ensures that the benefits of AI are shared broadly and that new users are protected from the heightened risks of an AI-ready environment.
Position government as the “first user” of new technologies. The public sector should take the lead in adopting AI for the delivery of public services in agriculture, healthcare, and education. By demonstrating the usefulness and accessibility of these tools within government, the state can send a powerful signal to the broader population and help accelerate national adoption.

The success of the AI Impact Summit will be measured not just by the declarations its participants make, but by the structural cooperation that survives past February. The summit offers a rare opportunity to pool global resources to solve the AI workforce crisis, replacing anecdotal evidence of AI adoption with rigorous data and flexible approaches to meet shifting workforce needs. At the summit, New Delhi has the opportunity to transform a week of dialogue into a sustained, collaborative framework that can help enable emerging economies to tap the benefits of AI adoption.

Trisha Ray is an associate director and resident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s GeoTech Center.

#AtlanticDebrief – What was the geopolitical significance of the EU-India summit? | A Debrief from Rachel Rizzo

nlawler — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 17:06:26 +0000

IN THIS EPISODE

The EU-India summit came at a pivotal moment with both powers concluding the largest trade agreement either has ever signed, paired with a new security and defence partnership, elevating the relationship to a new strategic level. This marks a major shift in how both sides think about economic resilience and security cooperation, especially in a time of rising global and transatlantic uncertainty.

On this episode of the #AtlanticDebrief, Jörn Fleck sits down with Senior Fellow with ORF’s Strategic Studies Programme Rachel Rizzo to debrief on the EU-India summit and the strategic rationale of increased bilateral cooperation.

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Abdillahi in Le Monde on artificial intelligence (AI) in Africa

Atlantic Council — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 14:00:00 +0000

Original source

On January 30, Yasmine Abdillahi, a nonresident senior fellow with the Africa Center published an article in Le Monde arguing that although Africa accounts for nearly 20% of the world’s population, it contributes less than 1% of the data used to train AI systems. This imbalance, she warns, risks excluding African languages, cultures, and lived realities from artificial intelligence.

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Yasmine Abdillahi

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Africa Cybersecurity

The post Abdillahi in Le Monde on artificial intelligence (AI) in Africa appeared first on Atlantic Council.

The US needs a cybersecurity roadmap

Franklin D. Kramer, Robert J. Butler, and Melanie J. Teplinsky — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 20:24:20 +0000

A fundamental approach of the Trump administration is ensuring and enhancing the defense of the United States homeland. Border security has accordingly been prioritized, and a “Golden Dome” missile defense has been proposed. But equivalent to the challenges of the border and of missile defense is the defense of the information and operational technology systems upon which the national security, economy, and public safety of the United States depend. This report focuses on operations and its companion report focuses on technology and architectures; together they identify the challenges facing the United States and describe a proposed national cybersecurity strategy that encompasses key roles for government and for the private sector.

A national cybersecurity strategy will require an operational road map for offensive and defensive campaigning and significantly enhanced resilience for key critical infrastructures built upon the development and adoption of safe coding and the implementation of zero trust architectures. Establishment of such capabilities will provide the president and the national leadership with the necessary capabilities to deter and defeat nation-state and criminal activities in cyberspace.

read part one

read part two

About the authors

Franklin D. Kramer is a distinguished fellow and board director at the Atlantic Council. Kramer has served as a senior political appointee in two administrations, including as assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs.

Robert J. Butler serves as the Managing Director for Cyber Strategies LLC.

Melanie J. Teplinsky is a cyber law and policy expert with over thirty years of experience spanning the private sector, government, and academia. She is an adjunct professor at American University, Washington College of Law (WCL); a senior fellow in the Technology, Law and Security Program at WCL; and a faculty fellow at American University’s Internet Governance Laboratory.

Explore the programs

The Atlantic Council Technology Programs comprises five existing efforts—the Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab), the GeoTech Center, the Cyber Statecraft Initiative, the Democracy + Tech Initiative, and the Capacity Building Initiative. These operations work together to address the geopolitical implications of technology and provide policymakers and global stakeholders necessary research, insights, and convenings to address challenges around global technology and ensure its responsible advancement.

The post The US needs a cybersecurity roadmap appeared first on Atlantic Council.

Ukraine’s defense tech sector can play a key role in economic security

Eric K. Hontz — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 20:22:33 +0000

Ukraine’s defense tech and dual-use sector is a rare wartime success story, with over six hundred innovative and combat‑tested firms becoming increasingly attractive to international investors. However, the future growth of this sector is constrained by obstacles including export licensing bottlenecks, currency controls, weak intellectual property protection, inconsistent consultation between government and business, and fears that old problems including corruption and rent-seeking could re‑emerge.

The Ukrainian government has an obvious interest in supporting the growth of the defense tech sector, but many officials believe the top priority remains preventing strategic vulnerabilities. The list of potential threats includes infiltration by corrosive capital, a loss of sensitive technologies, and systemic risks arising from insufficiently regulated markets. Experts emphasize the need for new policy instruments, clearer definitions, monitoring systems, and alignment with G7‑style economic security practices. So far, discussion of these issues remains mostly conceptual, leaving businesses uncertain about rules, timelines, and risks.

Ukraine’s economic security debate is currently being shaped by three overlapping realities. First, the global economy has shifted away from maximum trade liberalization toward a more security-based paradigm, particularly in strategic sectors such as defense, energy, critical minerals, and advanced technology. Second, Ukraine is fighting a full‑scale war, making economic resilience and industrial capacity existential concerns rather than abstract policy goals. Lastly, Ukraine’s defense and dual‑use sectors have undergone an unprecedented transformation since 2022, emerging from a prewar model dominated by state enterprises to become one of the most dynamic segments of the Ukrainian economy.

The core question now is not whether the state should intervene, but how to design intervention that protects national interests without suffocating private initiative or driving away international investors. This means finding the middle ground between security and economic freedom. Democratic Ukraine must seek to strike a better balance than its authoritarian adversary in order to enable the kind of continued defense tech innovation necessary to prevail on the battlefield and increase deterrence.

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There are currently concerns that Ukraine’s fast‑growing defense tech sector risks inheriting longstanding governance problems including opaque procedures, slow decision‑making, and uneven enforcement. Recent corruption scandals in Kyiv have already damaged trust, creating what some businesses have described as “negative expectations.”

From the Ukrainian government’s side, there is recognition that institutions are still adapting, with many of the available economic security tools still fragmented or not yet fully operational. This represents an opportunity for Ukraine if the country is able to build governance structures tailored to strategic sectors rather than retrofitting existing and outdated bureaucratic models. Creating a new generation of transparent institutions to address defense sector exports, investment screening, and procurement could become a competitive advantage for Ukraine if designed with private sector input from the outset.

Export licensing is one of the most acute potential bottlenecks. Ukraine’s defense tech businesses currently face a process requiring excessive approvals from multiple institutions, with little accountability or predictability. There is also a perception of unequal treatment, undermining confidence in the system. Ukrainian officials, meanwhile, tend to stress the necessity of strict controls to prevent leakage of sensitive technologies.

A risk‑based and tiered export control regime could address these concerns. By clearly defining a narrow list of highly sensitive technologies requiring strict oversight, the Ukrainian authorities could create faster and more predictable export pathways for less sensitive defense and dual‑use products. This would support economic growth while preserving core security interests.

Wartime currency controls and capital movement restrictions severely limit the ability of Ukrainian defense sector companies to expand internationally. Multiple investors have noted the paradox of profitable Ukrainian firms being unable to deploy their own capital abroad, forcing them to raise funds outside the country simply to operate globally.

From the perspective of Ukrainian policymakers, currency restrictions are viewed as necessary to preserve macro‑financial stability and to prevent capital flight. Targeted exemptions for vetted defense and dual‑use companies, particularly those pursuing foreign acquisitions or joint ventures aligned with national priorities, could unlock growth without undermining financial stability. Such a mechanism would signal trust in compliant firms and reward transparency.

Another key issue is intellectual property (IP). Standard IP processes are too slow for wartime innovation cycles. In the dynamic current environment, Ukrainian companies rely on trade secrets and know‑how rather than formal patents, but this increases risks when partnering internationally.

Ukrainian officials acknowledge the importance of innovation but have so far only been able to offer limited concrete solutions. Accelerated IP pathways for defense and dual‑use technologies, combined with support for joint research and development frameworks with trusted foreign partners, could help Ukrainian firms secure protection in allied jurisdictions while strengthening international integration.

Eurasia Center events

How Russia’s winter warfare strategy targets Ukrainian civilians

Conflict Europe & Eurasia Geopolitics & Energy Security Human Rights

There is a degree of uncertainty in Ukraine’s expanding defense tech sector that can be seen in inconsistent terminology, unclear boundaries, and undefined red lines. A shared vocabulary and published strategic framework, co‑developed by the public and private sectors, could help reduce this uncertainty.

Different priorities lead to diverging visions. Defense tech industry executives and investors tend to view the issue of economic security primarily through the lens of scalability, competitiveness, and speed. Their key assumptions include the notion that innovation thrives in predictable, transparent environments.

Many also argue that Ukraine’s combat‑tested technologies represent a unique global opportunity, while cautioning that excessive controls risk pushing talent, capital, and IP abroad. With this in mind, industry representatives and investors generally support targeted security measures but fear blanket restrictions that treat all technologies and companies as equally sensitive.

Ukrainian officials tend to frame economic security primarily as a defensive necessity. They warn that adversaries actively use markets, investment, and technology transfer as weapons. Many are also concerned that under‑regulation could result in irreversible strategic losses. Naturally, their perspective prioritizes caution, monitoring, and alignment with allied security frameworks, even at the cost of slower growth.

The central tension here is time-based and risk‑based. Businesses operate on market timelines and accept calculated risk, while governments operate on security timelines and seek to minimize worst‑case scenarios. Without structured dialogue, these differences manifest as mistrust rather than complementary roles.

If managed effectively, wartime Ukraine’s approach to economic security in the defense tech and dual-use sectors could become a model for the country’s broader postwar reconstruction. Ukraine has the opportunity to redesign institutions in a strategic sector that already commands global attention. Success may depend on whether government policy is seen by businesses as a partnership or as an obstacle.

Constructive cooperation grounded in transparency, risk‑based policy, and continuous dialogue can transform economic security from a constraint into a catalyst for Ukraine’s long‑term strength and sovereignty, providing significant security benefits for allies and partners along the way. This is a realistic objective. After all, industry, investors, and government all ultimately seek the common goal of a resilient, innovative Ukrainian economy integrated with democratic allies and protected from adversarial exploitation.

Bridging the gap between perspectives is less a matter of ideology than of process, trust, and execution. Ukraine is currently in a period of transition that is marked by many significant challenges but no irreconcilable obstacles. Industry and investors are ready to scale globally while the government is racing to build safeguards against unprecedented threats. The task now is to synchronize these efforts.

Eric K. Hontz is director of the Accountable Investment Practice Area at the Center for International Private Enterprise.

On disinformation and influence operations, the deal is unlikely to be transformative. As we argued in a 2024 report examining TikTok’s national security implications, Beijing’s ability to conduct influence operations does not depend on ownership of a single platform. While the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) could theoretically attempt to shape content via TikTok’s recommendation algorithm, it already engages in influence campaigns across US-based social media platforms and will continue to do so even with TikTok’s structural reorganization. Restricting TikTok does not dismantle the broader information ecosystem in which foreign influence campaigns operate.

The data security case is even more revealing. The type of data generated by TikTok is not fundamentally different from that collected across the digital advertising ecosystem, which over the past decade has evolved into a system capable of extremely granular micro-targeting. Data brokers routinely aggregate information from mobile advertising identifiers, cookies, location data, and online activity to build detailed dossiers on individuals. Although these identifiers are often described as “anonymized,” it is widely understood that combining multiple datasets makes re-identification fairly straightforward.

This ecosystem enables the creation of highly specific audience segments—such as military personnel with financial vulnerabilities, politically active voters, or individuals likely to participate in protests—drawing on data that includes location histories, credit card transactions, employment records, social media activity, and government filings. Investigations by civil society organizations and journalists have repeatedly demonstrated how easy it is to access such data, often with minimal vetting, and how readily it could be exploited by foreign intelligence services or malign actors.

Importantly, this data is not confined to fringe actors. Major US technology platforms continue to earn significant revenue from foreign advertisers, including Chinese firms, even as they attempt to place guardrails on data flows. While companies such as Google have introduced measures to limit the sharing of certain identifiers with Chinese entities, advertising experts note that these restrictions are often porous. Once an ad is served, advertisers can still infer sensitive information—such as IP addresses and device characteristics—and real-time bidding systems offer no technical guarantee that data will not be misused after it is received.

Compared to this sprawling and still inadequately regulated market, TikTok’s data practices are not uniquely dangerous. Focusing narrowly on this one app risks obscuring the far more consequential vulnerabilities embedded in the broader data economy.

Finally, it is worth underscoring how little ByteDance has conceded in the deal. If ByteDance has in fact licensed the algorithm, as subsequent reporting has indicated, the company has preserved control over its most valuable intellectual property. The principal concession—that is, the loss of majority ownership in the entity overseeing data security—imposes limited strategic costs.

In addition, depending on how the actual licensing deal is laid out, this structure could still hypothetically leave room for PRC influence over the algorithm—though it will likely be more difficult than it would be if ByteDance retained full ownership. The licensed algorithm is a continuously trained system shaped by design choices, training data, model updates, and operational parameters. If ByteDance is retaining control over that core intellectual property, in theory, the PRC government could exert some influence over how the system evolves, even if day-to-day content moderation or data security oversight is localized. Once further details of the licensing agreement are released, this risk will be better understood.

At the same time, it is important not to overstate what that influence could look like in practice. Rather than eliminate the risk of manipulation, this structure redistributes it among a different set of actors. Algorithmic manipulation is unlikely to take the form of overt, platform-wide promotion of pro-CCP content. Should manipulation occur, it would likely take the form of more subtle interventions that would be difficult to attribute to PRC influence or parse out from how the recommender system is working on US user data. This is especially the case now as the handover gets under way and the algorithm is being trained on US user data from scratch; in the short term, the app could exhibit high variability in terms of the content it surfaces while the system learns what users want and curates their “For You” page accordingly.

In essence, this structure largely shifts visible forms of control from Beijing to other actors without eliminating the underlying vulnerabilities inherent in the US social media ecosystem. While the deal may reduce political pressure in Washington and be framed as a decisive step to protect the US information environment from PRC interference, it does little to resolve the systemic challenges of information manipulation, foreign influence, and data exploitation. Those risks are embedded in the architecture of the digital ecosystem itself, and mitigating them will require far more than rearranging the ownership of a single platform.

The post TikTok’s new ownership structure doesn’t solve security concerns for Americans appeared first on Atlantic Council.

Unable to win on the battlefield, Putin escalates war on Ukrainian civilians

Peter Dickinson — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 22:05:41 +0000

Russian strikes against Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure are nothing new, of course. On the contrary, such attacks have been a routine feature since the onset of the full-scale invasion nearly four years ago. However, the current bombing campaign is by far the most comprehensive of the war. In recent months, Russia’s attacks on civilian targets have expanded dramatically in scope as the Kremlin seeks to inflict maximum harm on Ukraine’s population by denying them access to heating, electricity, gas, and water during the coldest period of the winter season.

The impact has been devastating, particularly as most residential districts in Ukrainian cities continue to rely on Soviet-era central heating systems powered by huge plants that are almost impossible to defend. The Kremlin has ruthlessly exploited this weakness with repeated bombardments of the same facilities to disrupt repair efforts. While teams of Ukrainian engineers continue to work miracles, each successive attack makes their task more difficult.

Ukrainians have responded to plummeting temperatures and freezing apartments with a range of improvised solutions such as erecting tents indoors and heating bricks on gas stoves to generate some precious warmth. There has also been plenty of trademark Ukrainian wartime defiance on display, with local communities rallying in support of one another, posting lighthearted videos on social media, and holding street parties in the snow.

At the same time, many have expressed frustration over the continued media emphasis on Ukrainian resilience amid a mounting humanitarian crisis that has left much of the country in desperate need of help. “Resilience doesn’t mean immunity. Ukraine cannot withstand everything indefinitely,” wrote Ukrainian commentator Iryna Voichuk on January 16. “Framing this as only a story of strength risks dulling the urgency of what’s happening.”

Others have echoed this sentiment, including some of Ukraine’s most prominent international supporters. “Mythologizing endurance is a quiet form of abandonment. Resilience does not mean invulnerability,” cautioned R.T. Weatherman Foundation president Meaghan Mobbs in a recent post. “When we speak as if Ukrainians can simply ‘take it,’ we absolve ourselves of responsibility.”

With the present arctic weather conditions expected to continue well into February, the situation in Ukraine is critical. In the high-rise apartment blocks that dominate Ukraine’s cities, many less mobile residents have already been housebound for weeks and will likely remain trapped in frigid darkness throughout the coming month. The outlook is particularly grave for the elderly, those with young families, and people in need of medical care. In other words, Russia’s present bombing strategy appears to have been specifically tailored to target the most vulnerable members of Ukrainian society.

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As the potential for large-scale loss of life becomes increasingly apparent, international audiences are waking up to the true extent of Russia’s criminal intentions. Wall Street Journal chief foreign affairs correspondent Yaroslav Trofimov recently referred to Russia’s winter bombing campaign as “Putin’s genocidal effort to make Kyiv unlivable.” It is easy to see why such terms are now being employed. The 1948 UN Genocide Convention identifies “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part,” as one of five recognized acts of genocide. At the very least, Russia’s current actions closely resemble this definition.

The current winter bombing campaign reflects a broader trend of mounting Russian attacks against Ukraine’s civilian population. According to UN data, 2025 was the deadliest year of the war for Ukrainian civilians since 2022, with more than 2,500 people killed and over twelve thousand injured. This was 31 percent higher than the figure for the previous year and 70 percent more than in 2023. Many of these deaths were due to a spike in Russian missile and drone strikes on civilian targets including residential buildings, hospitals, and a children’s playground.

Russia also stands accused of conducting a systematic campaign of drone strikes targeting members of the public in the front line regions of southern Ukraine. These attacks have been dubbed a “human safari” by terrified locals. They involve the use of drones with video camera guidance systems to hunt individual victims, underlining the deliberate nature of the killings. An October 2025 United Nations investigation into this drone terror found that Russia was guilty of “systematically coordinated actions designed to drive Ukrainians out of their homes,” and concluded that the Kremlin’s actions in southern Ukraine qualified as the crimes against humanity of murder and of forcible transfer of civilians.

Eurasia Center events

How Russia’s winter warfare strategy targets Ukrainian civilians

Conflict Europe & Eurasia Geopolitics & Energy Security Human Rights

Putin is dramatically escalating attacks on Ukraine’s civilian population because he cannot win the war on the battlefield. When he first launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Putin was expecting a quick and complete victory. Instead, his army has become bogged down in a brutal war of attrition that will soon enter a fifth year.

Despite pouring vast resources into the invasion and placing his entire country on a war footing, the Kremlin dictator has been unable to secure a decisive breakthrough. Many in Moscow had hoped the return of Donald Trump to the White House would transform the military situation, but even a dramatic decline in US aid for Ukraine over the past year has failed to turn the tide in Russia’s favor. Putin’s army captured less than one percent of Ukrainian territory during 2025, while suffering hundreds of thousands of casualties. At the present glacial pace, it would take Russia decades and millions of men to fully subjugate Ukraine.

In his official statements, Putin continues to project confidence and boast of his invading army’s success. However, with so few genuine victories to toast, this has often meant inventing imaginary advances. Putin’s habit of exaggerating Russian gains came back to haunt him in late 2025 when he repeatedly claimed to have captured the Ukrainian city of Kupyansk, only for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to personally visit the city and record a selfie video exposing the Russian ruler’s lies. This embarrassing episode underlined the growing credibility gap between Putin’s bold talk of inevitable Russian victory and the far more sobering battlefield reality of minimal Russian gains and disastrous losses.

With no obvious route to military victory, Putin is now openly embracing a strategy of terror tactics against Ukraine’s civilian population. He hopes that by weaponizing winter and putting millions of lives at risk, he can finally break Ukrainian resistance and force Kyiv to capitulate. Europe has not witnessed criminality on such a grand and terrible scale since the days of Hitler and Stalin.

So far, the international response to Russia’s winter bombing campaign has been utterly inadequate. While many of Kyiv’s partners have rushed to provide humanitarian aid, no additional costs whatsoever have been imposed on the Kremlin. Instead, it is Ukraine and not Russia that is reportedly being asked to make concessions. Unless this changes, the normalization of Russian war crimes will continue and Putin’s sense of impunity will become even more deeply entrenched. It will then only be a matter of time before other civilian populations experience the horrors currently taking place in Ukraine.

Peter Dickinson is editor of the Atlantic Council’s UkraineAlert service.

The two Davoses

Davos is always two different things at once. “Business Davos” is the place where executives huddle in Swiss office buildings negotiating deals far away from the TV cameras. This is, actually, what brings most people to the mountain year after year. That Davos traditionally operated independently from “geopolitical Davos.” That’s the Davos most people are familiar with—leaders from around the world speaking in the Congress Center, and academics, journalists, and think tankers debating on panels.

Most years, those two Davoses can operate in their own spheres. But not this year. Last Monday, as markets swung sharply negative on the Greenland news, business Davos had its eyes glued to the Congress Center. Leaders of some of the largest companies in the world lined up and waited just like everyone else to get a seat. Suddenly, everyone was an expert on Nuuk, the Arctic, and whether military leases were a viable compromise. It was a reminder of a big lesson of the past few years—from the COVID-19 pandemic to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—that finance and national security are deeply interconnected. In fact, there’s a good word for that—geoeconomics.

The new reality of tariffs

One year ago Davos attendees watched Trump’s inaugural address and then listened to him virtually address the forum. He hardly said the word “tariffs” once between the two speeches, and the delegates decided that his threats during the campaign were just threats. What a difference a year makes. After twelve months of the biggest shock to the global trading system in decades, which left the world facing the long-term prospect of the US economy having a 10 percent or higher tariff rate, reality settled in on the mountain. Gone was the optimistic talk about how deregulation was going to lead to an investment boom. In its place was chatter about finding new trade arrangements with emerging markets, and forecasting what would happen if the Supreme Court rules against Trump in the tariff case.

The risk and rewards of artificial intelligence

Few topics were more in the air in Davos than artificial intelligence (AI). Almost every billboard and storefront had a reference to AI—whether for supply-chain efficiency or content creation. On the surface, businesses wanted to project confidence, with AI positioned as the engine of future growth. But step inside these company events and a different picture emerged. Many featured chief risk officers or chief ethics officers, titles that barely existed a few years ago, grappling with questions around the different types of “risks,” whether those were geopolitical risks, economic risks, or climate risks. There was a stark contrast between the glossy AI optimism outside and the sober risk assessment on the inside of these conversations, and a reminder that for all the promise of growth, the industry knows the hard questions are just beginning.

More than a transatlantic affair

On the main stage and in the global news cycle, this Davos felt like a US–Europe affair. Tariffs announced and abandoned on European allies. French President Emmanuel Macron responding directly. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent outlining the health of the US economy. California Governor Gavin Newsom sparring rhetorically with Washington. For audiences watching from afar, it was easy to conclude this was a narrow, transatlantic Davos.

On the ground, however, the picture was far more global. Brazil House, India House, Indonesia House, and a dozen country pavilions were packed with programming all day. A large Pakistani delegation arrived on its own official shuttle bus. Philippines House ran cultural programs, including concerts featuring traditional music, alongside policy panels.

India, in particular, projected quiet confidence. Officials framed the country as a durable pillar of global growth, especially on AI. China maintained a low profile, with Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng offering brief remarks about Beijing’s willingness to buy more foreign goods and services—a notably muted presence compared to previous years.

Yet the US footprint on the promenade was impossible to miss. The US delegation was one of the largest in Davos, anchored by a sprawling USA House with a dense schedule of events and receptions. From the number of officials and security on the ground to the symbolic bald eagle overlooking the promenade, the message was clear: US influence loomed over nearly every discussion. For all the activity in country pavilions, this remained a global forum shaped by great-power rivalry.

From Canada, a clarion call

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney delivered one of the most consequential addresses during Davos, declaring that the post–Cold War rules-based international order is “in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.” Carney argued that great-power rivalry, economic coercion, and unilateral actions by dominant states (not mentioning Trump by name) have weakened longstanding global norms and institutions. He called on middle powers to work together to protect their interests and build new cooperative frameworks rooted in shared values. Simply going along to get along is no longer the answer, he argued. Whether other middle powers respond to that message may be the single most important question from this year’s forum.

Descending the mountain

As delegates packed their bags and headed down the mountain, few were under any illusions. The convergence between business Davos and geopolitical Davos is the new reality. The tightrope that companies are walking is not getting any less precarious. And the question of whether economic cooperation can survive an era of rising geopolitics remains very much unanswered.

Next year’s forum may face these same tensions. The key question is whether the world will have found ways to navigate them successfully or whether the rupture Carney described will have deepened further.

The post Inside the biggest Davos debates (other than Greenland) appeared first on Atlantic Council.

Surrender or freeze: Putin’s winter blitz targets Ukrainian civilians

Yuliya Kazdobina — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 21:16:26 +0000

Millions of Ukrainians have spent much of January without electricity and heating amid subzero winter temperatures, sparking fears that the country is on the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe. This desperate situation has been deliberately provoked by a sustained Russian bombing campaign against Ukraine’s critical infrastructure, as Kremlin dictator Vladimir Putin targets the civilian population in order to pressure Kyiv into capitulation.

Russia’s attacks have led to dramatically deteriorating living conditions across Ukraine. Thousands of high-rise apartment buildings in large cities as well as smaller rural homes have been cut off from power, heating, and water for days at a time. As a result, indoor temperatures have dropped to dangerous levels. For the elderly, those with young children, and people suffering from health issues, the risks are particularly grave.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has declared a state of emergency in the country’s energy sector, while other Ukrainian officials have appealed to partners for urgent support. While international aid has begun arriving, the sheer scale of the crisis means that much may depend on weather conditions in the coming weeks.

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Attacks on Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure have been a routine feature of the war ever since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022. According to Ukrainian Energy Minister Denys Shmyhal, every single energy-generating facility in the country has been bombed. “There is not a single power plant in Ukraine that has not been hit by the enemy since the beginning of the war,” he commented last week. “Thousands of megawatts of generation capacity have been knocked out. Nobody else in the world has ever faced a challenge like this.”

Russia’s current aerial offensive began to escalate noticeably during the final months of 2025 ahead of the cold season. As temperatures plummeted in early January, there was a further intensification of attacks on Ukraine’s power and heating infrastructure, with large numbers of drones and missiles concentrated on specific cities to overwhelm air defenses. The timing of Russia’s bombing campaign leaves no room for reasonable doubt; this was a premeditated attempt to target the Ukrainian population by weaponizing the winter weather.

The Kremlin’s goal is easy enough to decipher. By making Ukrainian cities unlivable and threatening to freeze millions of civilians, Moscow aims to break Ukraine’s resistance and force the Kyiv authorities to accept peace on Russian terms. In other words, the present bombing offensive is Putin’s response to US President Donald Trump’s peace efforts. Rather than agree to a ceasefire or offer concessions, Putin uses terror as a negotiating tool to secure Ukraine’s surrender.

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The targeting of Ukrainian civilians is not limited to attacks on critical infrastructure. According to the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine, 2025 was the deadliest year of the invasion for Ukrainian civilians since 2022. In a report released in early January, United Nations officials confirmed that more than 2500 Ukrainian civilians were killed in 2025. This was 31 percent higher than the figure for the previous year and 70 percent more than in 2023. A separate assessment by European governments reached similar conclusions and found that the scale of Russian attacks on Ukrainian civilians increased whenever the Trump administration attempted to advance peace negotiations.

The rising civilian death toll in Ukraine is largely due to increased Russian bombing of Ukrainian cities. Moscow’s mounting air offensive owed much to a spike in domestic drone production, which has made it possible to launch hundreds of drones at Ukraine in a single night. Russia has also been accused of conducting a large-scale campaign of individual drone strikes against civilians in southern Ukraine that terrified locals have branded a “human safari.” UN investigators reported in October 2025 that Russia’s targeted drone strikes on civilians were a crime against humanity.

Russian attacks on Ukrainian civilians have increased amid mounting frustration in Moscow over the slow pace of the invasion. Despite holding the battlefield initiative throughout 2025, Putin’s army failed to achieve any significant breakthroughs and gained less than one percent of Ukrainian territory while suffering heavy losses. With little immediate prospect of military success, Putin seems to have decided that his best chance of victory lies in terrorizing the civilian population.

So far, Russia’s terror tactics do not appear to be working. A nationwide poll conducted in mid-January by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology found that a majority of Ukrainians continue to reject the Kremlin’s territorial demands in eastern Ukraine. Meanwhile, more than two-thirds of Ukrainians do not believe the present round of US-led negotiations will result in a lasting peace. Instead, most Ukrainians remain convinced that Russia aims to continue the war.

Today’s arctic conditions will eventually give way to milder weather, but the damage done to Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure in recent weeks will take months to repair. Nor is there any reason to believe that Russian attacks on Ukrainian civilians will abate. On the contrary, the Kremlin is likely to escalate further in a bid to demoralize, destabilize, and depopulate the country. By seeking to freeze millions of Ukrainians, Putin has underlined his readiness to target civilians as he seeks to impose an imperialistic vision of peace through submission.

Yuliya Kazdobina is a senior fellow at the “Ukrainian Prism” nongovernmental analytical center.

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Ukraine’s arsenal of long-range weapons has evolved significantly since 2022. Over the past four years, the country has managed to develop a variety of strike drones with the capacity to reach targets located well over a thousand kilometers from the Ukrainian border. Ukraine also now boasts an expanding selection of domestically produced cruise missiles. This enhanced long-range firepower has made it possible for Ukraine to conduct an escalating bombing campaign inside Russia that has already changed the geography of the war.

Since summer 2025, long-range Ukrainian attacks on Russian territory have reached record highs. Ukraine has struck dozens of military facilities and defense industry enterprises, while also paying special attention to the oil and gas infrastructure that fuels the Russian war economy. Ukraine has hit refineries, pipelines, oil rigs, ports, and a number of tankers belonging to the Kremlin’s so-called shadow fleet. These strikes have complicated the logistics of the invasion while contributing to a significant decline in Russia’s energy export revenues.

In addition to hampering the Kremlin war machine and causing economic damage, Ukraine’s mounting campaign of long-range strikes has also had a major psychological impact that is helping to bring home the reality of the war to the Russian public. Since the start of the full-scale invasion, the Kremlin has worked hard to shield ordinary Russians and contain the conflict within the borders of Ukraine. However, with air raid sirens becoming an increasingly routine feature of daily life in Russian towns and cities, the Putin regime is no longer able to control the narrative.

A recent survey conducted by Russia’s only remaining independent pollster, the Levada Center, has highlighted the impact Ukrainian strikes are having on Russian public sentiment. Asked to name the most notable event of the past year, 28 percent of respondents cited Ukrainian drone attacks on Russian cities and industrial facilities, making this the third most popular answer. Clearly, Ukraine’s long-range bombing campaign has succeeded in breaking through the Kremlin propaganda bubble and has made a strong impression on the Russian population.

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For Ukraine’s partners, the objective now should be to boost Ukraine’s long-range capabilities to the maximum in order to equip the country with the kind of strike power that can deter Russia. Numerous Western leaders have shied away from providing Kyiv with long-range missiles from their own arsenals due to escalation fears. The solution is simple: Western partners should focus their efforts on helping Ukraine produce sufficient quantities of drones and missiles domestically.

Ukrainian officials are well aware that the ability to hit targets across the Russian Federation may be their country’s most effective security guarantee against further Kremlin aggression. They are now appealing to Kyiv’s international partners for increased support as they seek to exploit the country’s considerable spare defense industry production capacity and crank up output.

“The modern arms race is not about nukes. It is about millions of cheap drones. Those who can scale up production quicker will secure peace,” commented Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha in late 2025. “This requires quick and sufficient funding for Ukraine’s defense industry, which is now the greatest source of defense innovation in the world. We can produce up to twenty million drones next year if we get sufficient funding.”

Throughout the past year of faltering US-led peace efforts, Vladimir Putin has repeatedly demonstrated that he has no intention of ending the invasion. As long as the war is being fought predominantly inside Ukraine, he is unlikely to change his position, regardless of Russian combat losses. However, if Ukrainian drone and missile strikes inside Russia continue to expand during 2026, the economic and social impact may become too serious to ignore. This could force Putin to abandon his stalling tactics and finally enter into genuine negotiations. It would also oblige him to think carefully before restarting his invasion in the years ahead.

Serhii Kuzan is chairman of the Ukrainian Security and Cooperation Center (USCC). He formerly served as an adviser to the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense (2022-2023) and as an advisor to the Secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council (2014).

Eight ways AI will shape geopolitics in 2026

Atlantic Council experts — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 23:35:20 +0000

The events of 2025 made clear that the question is no longer whether artificial intelligence (AI) will reshape the global order, but how quickly—and at what cost.

Throughout the year, technological breakthroughs from both the United States and China ratcheted up the competition for AI dominance between the superpowers. Countries and companies raced to build vast data centers and energy infrastructure to support AI development and use. The scramble for cutting-edge chips pushed Nvidia’s valuation past five trillion dollars—the first company to reach that milestone—even as concerns mounted over circular financing and the question of how much the AI boom is founded on hype versus reality. Meanwhile, policymakers grappled with the balance between safety, security, and innovation and how to manage possible labor disruptions on the horizon.

As 2026 begins, rapid AI integration threatens to inject even more unpredictability into an already fragmented global order. Below, experts from the Atlantic Council Technology Programs share their perspectives on what to expect from AI around the globe in the year ahead.

Click to jump to an expert prediction:

Tess deBlanc-Knowles: The US pushes AI tech exports to counter China

Konstantinos Komaitis: AI governance turns global

Ryan Pan: The US-China AI race intensifies in a multipolar world

Esteban Ponce de León: AI challenges human judgment

Trisha Ray: Countries go all in on ‘sovereign AI’

Mark Scott: The battle of the AI stacks escalates

Kenton Thibaut: China doubles down on AI-powered influence operations

AI poisoning goes mainstream

Russia’s Pravda network of websites has published millions of articles targeting more than eighty countries. These sites launder and amplify content from Russian state media, seeking to legitimize Russian military aggression while casting doubt on Western support for Ukraine. Most of these articles will never be viewed by a human. Instead, they seem intended to target the web crawlers that scour the internet for training data to feed to insatiable AI models.

And the strategy is working. Last year, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab) and CheckFirst demonstrated how mass-produced Pravda articles were cited in Wikipedia, X Community Notes, and responses from major chatbots. Parallel research by Anthropic and the United Kingdom’s AI Safety Institute has shown how trace amounts of faulty data can effectively “poison” even very large models. People increasingly turn to AI systems to understand current events. If an AI model’s knowledge has been altered by sources intended to deceive, then the users’ will be, too.

In 2026, the issue of AI poisoning will break into the mainstream. Because of a roughly two-year lag in AI training data (many AI models are still waiting for the results of the 2024 US presidential election, for instance), these AI-targeted propaganda campaigns are about to start manifesting more often. And because one cannot reliably audit what’s inside a deployed AI model, the result will be a staggering research and policy challenge.

Digital policy experts, including the DFRLab, have spent a decade learning to identify, explain, and expose online disinformation where people can see it. This is online disinformation where they can’t.

—Emerson Brooking is the director of strategy and a resident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab.

The US pushes AI tech exports to counter China

In 2026, the United States will double down on exporting the US tech stack as the cornerstone of its international AI strategy. In December 2025, US President Donald Trump set the tone with his decision to allow Nvidia to export its advanced H200 chips to China, a clear endorsement of the view that the United States wins when the world builds and deploys AI using US technology.

Published days before the Nvidia decision, the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy makes this explicit: “We want to ensure that US technology and US standards—particularly in AI, biotech, and quantum computing—drive the world forward.” This framing echoes the AI Action Plan the administration released in July 2025, which stated that the “United States must meet global demand for AI by exporting its full AI technology stack,” warning that a failure to do so would be an “unforced error.”

In 2026, expect to see the United States sign more AI-focused partnerships like those forged with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates in 2025, alongside efforts to counter China’s growing influence in emerging markets. But as the United States makes this push, China holds some key advantages. Its lead in open-source AI models and focus on applied AI could prove to be the winning formula for capturing global market share with free models and deployment-ready technologies.

—Tess deBlanc-Knowles is the senior director of Atlantic Council Technology Programs.

AI governance turns global

In 2026, AI governance enters its first truly global phase with the United Nations–backed Global Dialogue on AI Governance and Independent International Scientific Panel on AI. For the first time, nearly all states have a forum to debate AI’s risks, norms, and coordination mechanisms, signaling that AI has crossed into the realm of shared global concern.

Yet this ambition unfolds amid acute geopolitical tension: The European Union pushes a rights- and risk-based regulatory model, while the United States favors voluntary standards to preserve innovation and security flexibility. For its part, China promotes inclusive cooperation while defending state control over data and AI deployment. Smaller and developing states gain a voice but remain structurally dependent on the major powers that control the bulk of AI talent, capital, and computing power.

The result is a fragile, uneven global framework. States converge on scientific assessments, transparency norms, and voluntary principles, but they avoid binding limits on high-risk AI uses such as autonomous weapons, mass surveillance, or information manipulation. Coordination emerges, but the core strategic competition remains unresolved, producing a governance architecture that manages risks at the margins while leaving rival models largely intact.

By the end of 2026, the Global Dialogue will likely have made AI governance global in form but geopolitical in substance—a first test of whether international cooperation can meaningfully shape the future of AI or merely coexist alongside competing national strategies. This juncture offers states an opportunity to demonstrate leadership by strengthening institutional capabilities and collaborative mechanisms, fostering a global AI governance framework that is more coherent, equitable, and universally engaged.

—Konstantinos Komaitis is a resident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Democracy + Tech Initiative.

The US-China AI race intensifies in a multipolar world

The year ahead will see an even fiercer competition over AI dominance between the world’s two largest powers—the United States and China—while middle powers gradually close the gap in the race. China’s DeepSeek started off this year with a research paper on a new AI training method to efficiently scale foundational models and reduce costs. This publication comes almost exactly a year after the headline-making paper it released in January 2025, which was followed by the launch of DeekSeek-R1. The timing of this year’s new publication signals that the company will launch new models and continue shaping the world’s AI industry this year.

In 2026, expect China to double down on its open-source AI strategy to influence the world’s AI infrastructure. (Several major US tech companies are already using Chinese large language models in their applications.) The United States and China may also engage in further trade retaliation in the AI supply chains in light of recent developments in Venezuela, from which Chinese companies had gained access to rare earth minerals crucial to developing the AI stack. The Trump administration’s recent claims regarding Colombia, from which China also sources rare earth elements, could make Latin America the next technology battleground between the two powers.

But what about powers beyond the United States and China? In 2026, look for Europe to increase its AI defense investments even more than it did in 2025. Middle powers, notably India, will see their AI capability greatly improved this year, as US tech giants have recently pledged billions in investments in India’s AI capabilities.

The AI race in 2026 will still be defined by a multipolar order. Nevertheless, the United States and China will continue to yield the greatest influence.

—Ryan Pan is a program assistant with the Atlantic Council’s GeoTech Center.

AI challenges human judgment

In 2026, human–AI interaction will likely challenge human judgment and identity more deeply than in any year to date. This is not only because AI models are demonstrating increasingly complex capabilities, but also because AI-generated content can be so emotionally charged in today’s polarized information environment.

Online sources and social media have shown how polarization can be deliberately targeted, and the use of AI to generate fabricated or distorted content adds a new layer to how social and political events are interpreted. AI content is reshaping the dynamics of both manipulation and what could be described as a “misinformation game,” in which techniques such as the deployment of AI slop and the memeification of events are used to mock adversaries and amplify key propaganda narratives. For example, in June 2025, amid the Israel-Iran escalation, AI became the new face of propaganda. This included graphic and sensational AI-generated fake content, such as fabricated missile strikes, military hardware, religious and national symbols, and memes. But it also included more sophisticated fabrications of CCTV footage that became increasingly difficult to debunk.

In the first days of 2026, as the Trump administration captured Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro, the use of AI to generate media content increased drastically. While much of this content was humorous or satirical in nature, it nonetheless illustrates emerging usage patterns, as playful AI-generated media can still shape perceptions of power and blur the line between satire, manipulation, and propaganda. Whether fabricated content aims to provoke humor or confusion, human judgment will face new challenges in the year ahead.

This challenge to human judgment and identity extends beyond misinformation. In 2026, the AI landscape may begin to show early signs of benchmark saturation, in which models converge at near-maximum scores on established capability tests, collapsing the measurable differences between them. This matters for the information environment because the same logic applies: If distinguishing real from fabricated content becomes difficult, then so too does distinguishing what humans uniquely contribute from what AI can replicate. The implications extend to professional identity and how to understand individual value and competence.

—Esteban Ponce de León is a resident fellow with the Digital Forensic Research Lab.

Countries go all in on ‘sovereign AI’

There are unprecedented amounts of capital flowing in to meet the anticipated demand for AI. Last year, for instance, kicked off with Trump’s announcement of Stargate, with the aim of investing $500 billion in AI infrastructure over five years. The principle driving this trend is straightforward: Countries think they must control AI before it controls them. Consequently, there was a wave of sovereign AI announcements in 2024 and 2025.

That momentum will only grow in 2026, starting with the launch of India’s sovereign large language model at the AI Impact Summit in February. Nations are seeking sovereign AI to strengthen their domestic economies, protect national security, mitigate geopolitical shocks, and reflect national values. However, there’s a catch: Not every country can, or should, try to build every part of the AI stack on its own. Trying to recreate from scratch everything from data centers to models is expensive, redundant, and impractical. Nations will need to choose what to build, what to buy, and where partnerships make more sense than going solo.

—Trisha Ray is an associate director and resident fellow with the GeoTech Center.

The battle of the AI stacks escalates

As AI becomes more central to countries’ economic prospects, national policymakers will likely seek to impose greater control over critical digital infrastructure. This infrastructure includes compute power, cloud storage, microchips, and regulation, and it is central to how emerging AI technology will develop in 2026. For the world’s largest digital powers—the United States, the European Union, and China—the push to control this infrastructure will likely evolve into a battle of the “AI stacks”—increasingly opposing approaches to how such core digital AI-enabling infrastructure functions at home and abroad.

The White House’s AI Action Plan, published in July 2025, made it the stated policy of the federal government to export the US stack to third-party countries, including via potential funding support from the US Department of Commerce for other governments to purchase offerings from the likes of Microsoft, OpenAI, and Nvidia. The European Commission has earmarked billions of euros for so-called AI gigafactories, or high-performance computing infrastructure, from Estonia to Spain, while national leaders also vocally called for a “Euro stack.” The Chinese Communist Party is urging local firms to forgo Western AI know-how and rely instead on domestic alternatives from companies such as Alibaba or Huawei.

The rest of the world will have to navigate these increasingly rivalrous approaches to AI infrastructure at a time when all countries seek greater control of so-called digital public infrastructure—that is, the underlying hardware and, increasingly, software needed to power complex AI systems. How these different AI stacks interact with each other will be critical to how the technology develops over the next twelve months.

—Mark Scott is a senior resident fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Democracy + Tech Initiative.

China doubles down on AI-powered influence operations

In 2026, the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC’s) AI-enabled disinformation efforts are likely to intensify in scale, persistence, and technical sophistication, particularly those targeting Taiwan. PRC actors are already using AI-generated audio, video, and text, distributed through networks of fake accounts and contracted private firms, to conduct “cognitive warfare” campaigns aimed at shaping political perceptions and voter behavior. These campaigns prioritize volume, localization, and algorithmic exploitation, and they are increasingly designed to be continuous rather than episodic. As AI-generated content is blended with human-curated messaging and commercial infrastructure, PRC-linked operations will become harder to detect and attribute, reflecting a shift toward more deniable, adaptive, and professionalized influence operations.

At the same time, Beijing is expected to pair these activities with defensive diplomatic messaging that rejects allegations of PRC-linked disinformation or cyber operations and reframes such claims as politically motivated attacks. This pattern reinforces a broader hybrid strategy in which AI-enabled influence operations, cyber activity, and diplomatic signaling are tightly integrated. In 2026, PRC disinformation campaigns are likely to focus less on overt propaganda and more on shaping narratives around crises and cyber incidents, contesting blame, eroding trust in attribution, and influencing strategic decision-making outcomes.

—Kenton Thibaut is a senior resident fellow with the Democracy + Tech Initiative.

The post Eight ways AI will shape geopolitics in 2026 appeared first on Atlantic Council.

Ukraine’s enhanced fortifications are increasing the cost of Putin’s invasion

David Kirichenko — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 22:01:39 +0000

Russian forces continued to gradually advance in Ukraine during 2025, but suffered huge losses in exchange for minimal gains. This unfavorable ratio reflects the increasing effectiveness of Ukraine’s defensive lines, which now feature a combination of layered fortifications backed by deadly drone coverage. Together, these elements have turned much of the front line into a controlled kill zone that makes large-scale offensive operations extremely challenging while dramatically raising the cost of each new assault.

As Ukraine focuses on preventing further Russian advances and solidifying the front lines of the war, Kyiv has invested consideration resources in a major upgrade of the country’s defenses. This has resulted in what Britain’s The Economist recently described as a “massive fortification system” up to two hundred meters in depth covering much of the Ukrainian battlefield. “Ukraine now has the fortress belt it wishes it had in 2022,” the publication reported in early January.

Physical obstacles play an important role in this approach. Anti-tank ditches, razor wire, and concrete obstacles are layered to slow Russian advances. Defensive lines are often spaced within mortar range of one another, allowing Ukrainian units to trade space for time and counterattack against exposed enemy assault groups before they have had an opportunity to consolidate. The emphasis is on attrition and disruption rather than rigid territorial defense.

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Ukraine’s defensive strategy goes far beyond a reliance on traditional static barriers. Over the past year, there has also been a growing emphasis on dispersed, concealed, and flexible defensive networks. These small-scale fortified positions are often located underground or embedded in tree lines at strategic locations, and are supported by remote fires and decoys. Each individual node in these networks is designed to shape enemy movement rather than stop it outright, channeling attackers into deliberately prepared kill pockets without exposing defenders. By creating choke points for Russian troops, Ukraine aims to maximize Kremlin casualties and capitalize on its in-built advantages as the defending party in a war of attrition.

There are growing signs that this approach is working. Ukraine’s top military commander Oleksandr Syrskyi commented recently that the current strategy has proved particularly effective on the Pokrovsk front, which has witnessed some of the heaviest fighting of the entire war over the past year. According to Syrskyi, “timely and high-quality fortifications and engineering obstacles” enabled Ukrainian forces to inflict maximum losses on Russian units close to Pokrovsk and disrupt their plans, even when facing numerical superiority.

Where Ukrainian defenses have failed, the reasons are instructive. In areas such as Toretsk and parts of the Kharkiv front, troop rotations occurred without sufficient time or equipment to construct proper fortifications, leading to Russian gains. Constant Russian drone surveillance made the use of heavy engineering machinery dangerous, leaving units unprepared when assaults followed. These cases serve as confirmation that fortifications are not optional enhancements but foundational to battlefield survival under drone saturated conditions.

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Drones are at the heart of Ukraine’s defensive strategy, serving as a ubiquitous presence over kill zones and preventing localized Russian advances from consolidating into more substantial breakthroughs. Meanwhile, in some sectors of the front such as Pokrovsk, ground robotic systems are now being used to deliver the vast majority of supplies to troops. With this in mind, Ukrainian commanders argue that all future defensive lines should be optimized for both aerial and ground drones.

These technological advances do not eliminate the need for manpower. Even the most sophisticated fortifications require soldiers to react to emerging threats. When Russian units manage to infiltrate defensive lines or push into urban areas, infantry forces remain essential in order to clear and secure ground. While Ukraine’s improved fortifications are an encouraging development for the war-weary nation, no physical barrier can realistically stop Russia unless it is supported by sufficient quantities of well-trained troops.

Strengthening Ukraine’s fortifications and addressing manpower shortages will be among the top priorities for incoming Ukrainian Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov, who took up his post this week. Fedorov made his name in government as Minister of Digital Transformation. Since 2022, he has been one of the driving forces behind Ukraine’s rapidly expanding drone warfare capabilities.

Fedorov’s extensive defense tech background, along with his reputation as a modernizer who has countered institutional corruption through the digitalization of state services, has led to considerable optimism over his appointment. He is now faced with the twin challenges of improving Ukraine’s front line defenses while addressing the mobilization and desertion problems hindering the Ukrainian war effort. If he is able to make progress on these two fronts, Ukraine’s prospects for 2026 and beyond will begin to look a lot better.

David Kirichenko is an associate research fellow at the Henry Jackson Society.

Teams of engineers are working around the clock to repair damaged facilities, fix power lines, and reconnect Ukrainian homes and businesses to the electricity grid. However, repeated Russian attacks are making it increasingly difficult to patch up battered equipment and find the necessary replacement component parts.

The bombing campaign appears to have been timed to coincide with the coldest period in over a year, with temperatures plummeting to minus fifteen Celsius (five degrees Fahrenheit) for extended periods of time. “ They deliberately waited for freezing weather to make things worse for our people. This is cynical Russian terror specifically against civilians,” stated Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

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This is not the first time Russian President Vladimir Putin has attempted to weaponize winter in his war against Ukraine. Russia launched a major air offensive against Ukraine’s civilian energy infrastructure in October 2022, establishing a pattern that would be repeated each year as the cold season approached. While this tactic is not new, the present destruction of the Ukrainian power grid is widely recognized as the most severe of the entire war.

In Kyiv and other cities, the Ukrainian authorities have established so-called Points of Invincibility in heavily populated areas featuring heating and internet access along with electricity sources that can be used to charge up personal devices and power banks. Visitors can also expect hot drinks and a warm welcome.

Throughout Ukraine the buzz of generators has become the background noise of the winter season. Many Ukrainians have installed backup power sources in their homes, which are typically able to provide electricity for a limited period of time. Portable gas stoves are also a common feature as people adapt and improvise in the extreme conditions caused by Russia’s bombardment.

With millions of Ukrainian civilians at risk of being trapped in freezing darkness for days at a time, the potential for a humanitarian catastrophe is obvious. Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko has already urged residents of the Ukrainian capital to temporarily leave the city if they are able to and move to less affected areas where power and heating are more readily available. With the present cold snap set to last for at least another week and further Russian attacks widely expected, fears are now mounting over a possible winter exodus to neighboring EU countries.

That may be exactly what Putin has in mind. Since the start of the full-scale invasion, Russia has repeatedly targeted Ukrainian civilians in a bid to break Ukraine’s resistance and depopulate large parts of the country. In addition to attacks on energy, heating, and other critical infrastructure, Russia has also launched large-scale drone strike campaigns designed to make entire towns and cities unlivable. A recent United Nations probe into Russia’s campaign of drone attacks throughout southern Ukraine’s front line regions concluded that Moscow’s actions amounted to the crimes against humanity of “murder and forcible transfer of population.”

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As Russia attempts to freeze Ukrainians into submission, Kyiv desperately needs a wide range of international support. This includes alternative energy supplies to replace domestic gas production damaged in Russia’s attacks, along with spare parts to mend the country’s power stations and associated infrastructure.

Ukraine also urgently requires additional air defense systems and interceptor missiles. At present, Ukraine’s existing air defenses are struggling to cope with the dramatically increased intensity of Russia’s aerial attacks, which now routinely feature hundreds of drones along with dozens of cruise and ballistic missiles.

Most of all, Ukraine needs to be able to strike back. However much Ukraine’s network of air defenses improves, the sheer scale of the Russian bombardment means that a percentage of missiles and drones will inevitably reach their targets. The only truly effective defense is deterrence. In other words, Russia’s attacks will continue until Putin is restrained by the knowledge that Ukraine has the capacity to reply in kind.

The next few weeks will be among the most challenging of the war for Ukraine’s civilian population that will test the country’s famed resilience to the limit. “I think the Russians want to break us. They want to make Ukrainians angry and unhappy. They think this will make us go out on the streets and protest but that won’t happen,” Kyiv resident Valentina Verteletska told Britain’s Guardian newspaper. “This makes us tougher and more determined. War doesn’t make people bad or good but it amplifies who you are. It allows people to show who they are inside and we have seen a lot of people volunteering to help their neighbors.”

Many believe Russia’s wintertime bombardment of Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure now represents Putin’s best chance to achieve some kind of breakthrough at a time when his army is struggling to advance on the battlefield. Russia gained less than one percent of Ukrainian territory in 2025 despite suffering hundreds of thousands of casualties, and is still fighting over villages located within walking distance of the front lines at the start of the invasion in February 2022.

Despite this lack of progress, Putin remains committed to his original invasion objective of extinguishing Ukrainian independence and forcing the country permanently back into the Kremlin orbit. He clearly has no qualms about targeting millions of Ukrainian civilians in pursuit of this criminal goal. “You can see with your own eyes what is going on,” commented Kyiv building manager Oleksandr Matienko. “They are trying to kill us. They can’t win any other way. So they are willing to do anything to destroy Ukraine.”

Peter Dickinson is editor of the Atlantic Council’s UkraineAlert service.

Over the past year, Russian attacks on Ukraine’s agricultural sector have escalated alarmingly. According to research conducted by the University of Strasbourg, the University of Maryland, and NASA’s Harvest program, the number of farmland fires identified in Ukrainian-controlled areas of the Kherson region during 2025 rose by 87.5 percent.

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The Kherson farming community’s wartime experience is mirrored throughout Ukraine, particularly in areas close to the front lines of the invasion. By attacking agricultural infrastructure, Russia seeks to undermine Ukraine’s food security, just as it targets the country’s energy infrastructure to deprive Ukraine’s civilian population of access to electricity and heating.

The implications of Russia’s war on Ukrainian farmers are international in scope. Known historically as the breadbasket of Europe, Ukraine is home to around one quarter of the world’s black soil, the most fertile farmland on the planet. This makes Ukraine a potential agricultural superpower and a key contributor to global food security. Ukrainian farmers are among the leading exporters of foodstuffs to the European Union, with Ukrainian produce also playing a prominent role in aid programs to counter hunger throughout the developing world.

Russia’s invasion has had a devastating impact on Ukrainian agricultural output. In addition to mined fields, burned crops, and bombed facilities, large numbers of Ukrainian farms are currently in Kremlin-controlled regions, leading to seized harvests.

Kherson region farmers received a further blow in summer 2023 when a suspected Russian sabotage operation destroyed the Kakhovka Dam in Russian-occupied southern Ukraine. This act of ecocide undermined one of Europe’s largest irrigation systems, leaving hundreds of thousands of hectares without access to water. The impact on the environment was catastrophic, leading to drought conditions, failed crops, and the loss of farmland.

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Despite the unprecedented challenges posed by Russia’s ongoing invasion, Kherson’s farmers continue to work. In 2025, they managed to harvest a remarkable quantity of the watermelons that serve as the region’s unofficial calling card. Other key Kherson crops include wheat and potatoes.

Since 2022, domestic and international support programs have proved instrumental in bolstering the resilience of the Kherson agricultural industry. Initiatives in recent years have included subsidies for farmers and technical assistance focused on areas such as irrigation, with the goal of helping farmers adapt to the new wartime realities.

Kherson agricultural businesses are also responding to the changing conditions. Due to water scarcity and rising temperatures, some farms have reduced planting areas and turned to cultivating crops that utilize soil moisture more efficiently. Research is also underway to develop additional drought-resistant crops better suited to the current environment.

Further international support for Ukrainian farmers will be critically important during 2026. Ukraine’s agricultural industry is one of the cornerstones of the national economy and a major exporter to global markets. By targeting farmers and their land, Russia aims to make Ukraine unlivable and break the country’s resistance. This strategy poses a significant threat to international food security and must be addressed.

Oleksandr Tolokonnikov is Deputy Head of the Kherson Regional Military Administration.

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The current emphasis on UGVs is part of a broader technological transformation taking place on the battlefields of Ukraine. This generational shift in military tech is redefining how modern wars are fought.

Since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, homegrown innovation has played a critical role in Ukraine’s defense. Early in the war, Ukrainian troops deployed cheap commercial drones to conduct reconnaissance. These platforms were soon being adapted to carry explosives, dramatically expanding their combat role. By the second year of the war, Ukraine had developed a powerful domestic drone industry capable of producing millions of units per year while rapidly adapting to the ever-changing requirements of the battlefield.

A similar process has also been underway at sea, with Ukraine deploying domestically produced naval drones to sink or damage more than a dozen Russian warships. This has forced Putin to withdraw the remainder of the Black Sea Fleet from occupied Crimea to Russia itself. Recent successes have included the downing of Russian helicopters over the Black Sea using naval drones armed with missiles, and an audacious strike on a Russian submarine by an underwater Ukrainian drone.

By late 2023, drones were dominating the skies over the Ukrainian battlefield, making it extremely dangerous to use vehicles or armor close to the front lines. In response to this changing dynamic, Ukrainian forces began experimenting with wheeled and tracked land drones to handle logistical tasks such as the delivery of food and ammunition to front line positions and the evacuation of wounded troops.

Over the past year, Russia’s expanding use of fiber-optic drones and tactical focus on disrupting Ukrainian supply lines has further underlined the importance of UGVs. Fiber-optic drones have expanded the kill zone deep into the Ukrainian rear, complicating the task of resupplying combat units and leading to shortages that weaken Ukraine’s defenses. Robotic systems help counter this threat.

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Remote controlled land drones offer a range of practical advantages. They are more difficult to jam electronically than aerial drones, and are far harder to spot than trucks or cars. These benefits are making them increasingly indispensable for the Ukrainian military. In November 2025, the BBC reported that up to 90 percent of all supplies to Ukrainian front line positions around Pokrovsk were being delivered by UGVs.

In addition to logistical functions, the Ukrainian military is also pioneering the use of land drones in combat roles. It is easy to see why this is appealing. After all, Ukrainian commanders are being asked to defend a front line stretching more than one thousand kilometers with limited numbers of troops against a far larger and better equipped enemy.

Experts caution that while UGVs can serve as a key element of Ukraine’s defenses, they are not a realistic alternative to boots on the ground. Former Ukrainian commander in chief Valerii Zaluzhnyi has acknowledged that robotic systems are already making it possible to remove personnel from the front lines and reduce casualties, but stressed that current technology remains insufficient to replace humans at scale.

Despite the advances of the past four years, Ukraine’s expanding robot army remains incapable of carrying out many military functions that require infantry. When small groups of Russian troops infiltrate Ukrainian positions and push into urban areas, for example, soldiers are needed to clear and hold terrain. Advocates of drone warfare need to recognize these limitations when making the case for greater reliance on unmanned systems.

UGVs will likely prove vital for Ukraine in 2026, but they are not wonder weapons and cannot serve as a miracle cure for Kyiv’s manpower challenges. Instead, Ukraine’s robot army should be viewed as an important part of the country’s constantly evolving defenses that can help save lives while raising the cost of Russia’s invasion.

David Kirichenko is an associate research fellow at the Henry Jackson Society.

The art of war is undergoing a technological revolution in Ukraine

Oleg Dunda — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 23:52:17 +0000

Ukraine is currently at the epicenter of radical changes taking place in the way modern wars are fought. However, much of the world is still busy preparing for the wars of yesterday. European armies are only combat-ready on paper, while the invincibility of the United States military is based largely on past victories.

The current state of affairs is far from unprecedented. In early 1940, Polish officers tried to warn their French counterparts about Nazi Germany’s new blitzkrieg tactics but were ignored. France surrendered soon after. There is still time to adapt to the transformations that are now underway, but the clock is ticking.

One of the key lessons from the war in Ukraine is the evolving role of soldiers. People are now the most expensive, vulnerable, and difficult resource to replace on the battlefield. Meanwhile, many of the core weapons systems that dominated military doctrines in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries are becoming less relevant. Tanks, artillery, and other traditional systems are simply too expensive and are unsuited to the challenges created by newer technologies.

Unmanned systems of all kinds have emerged since 2022 as a fundamental element of modern military doctrine. This is radically changing everything from the structure of armies to the role of the individual soldier. Remotely controlled equipment no longer needs a large crew to support it, while individual models are becoming more compact and maneuverable. As a result, the power of unmanned weapons systems is increasing exponentially, while production is expanding to industrial scale and becoming significantly cheaper.

More and more soldiers now serve as unmanned systems operators. Those who remain in more traditional roles perform tasks such as special operations, guard duties, or logistical functions. The war being waged by Ukraine has demonstrated that the modern battlefield features a kill zone up to 25 miles deep and spanning the entire front line. This zone is controlled by drones that destroy any infantry or equipment. Combat operations are increasingly conducted by drone operators located deep in the rear or in underground bunkers.

In these conditions of drone dominance over the battlefield, any attempts to stage major breakthroughs are doomed to failure. Instead of tank columns and artillery duels, offensive operations require maximum dispersal of forces and the greatest possible camouflage. The main task of troops is to gradually shift the kill zone deeper into the enemy’s rear.

Success depends upon the ability to rapidly produce large quantities of inexpensive combat drones and continually update their control systems. Initial tactics involving single drones and individual targets are already becoming a thing of a past. Instead, operators can now use artificial intelligence to control entire fleets featuring large numbers of drones deployed simultaneously. This approach allows a single soldier to manage kilometers of front line space rather than just a few hundred meters. The result is a reduction in the need for mass mobilization and an emphasis on the professionalism and technical skills of each operator manning the front.

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Combat operations now boil down to two main scenarios: Either the collapse of an enemy who is not prepared for the new intensity of combat, or a positional struggle in the style of World War I. In a protracted positional war, it is crucial to ensure control over the kill zone and maintain sufficient supplies while depriving the enemy of similar capabilities. The protection of logistics networks and the infliction of maximum damage on the enemy’s rear areas is of decisive importance.

First and foremost, this means cutting off ground supply routes. To protect logistics, armies must develop fleets of maneuverable transport drones that are not dependent on road quality and can navigate minefields. Meanwhile, to ensure the steady supply of ammunition and spare parts to underground storage points along the front lines, a mobile air defense system featuring interceptor drones is necessary.

At the strategic level, key targets are now weapons factories, logistics centers, and command posts, which are often hidden deep in the rear or located inside underground bunkers close to the front lines. Destroying these high-value targets requires guided missiles or other air strike capabilities. Military planners are therefore faced with the challenge of moving away from expensive manned aircraft toward reusable strategic drones.

Testing of fully-fledged unmanned aircraft is already underway. The transition toward unmanned aviation will open up the mass deployment of guided aerial bombs, which are significantly cheaper than missiles. In addition, strategic drones will themselves be able to act as “aircraft carriers” for kamikaze drones.

The same principles apply equally to the maritime theater of operations. Ukrainian Sea Baby naval drones have already proven themselves by destroying numerous warships from Russia’s Black Sea Fleet and carrying out attacks on Russia’s shadow fleet of oil tankers.

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To ensure their future national security, states must focus on the mass production of unmanned systems and their components. China currently accounts for the lion’s share of component parts. This is a challenge for any country that seeks to play a role in global affairs. China must be deprived of the strategic advantages it enjoys due to its status as the leading producer of components for unmanned systems.

Many NATO generals appear to think that recent technological advances are making war cheaper and creating a more level military playing field. This is a mistake. In reality, any reduction in the cost of weapons is more than offset by the need for increased quantities.

It is also important to stress that unmanned technologies alone are not enough. Another key factor is an army’s access to reliable digital communications similar to Starlink. Without this capability, it is impossible to coordinate combat operations, collect data, and maintain connections between individual units and command structures. It is no coincidence that China is already investing billions to address this issue.

The transformation currently underway in the military sphere also increases the role of cyber warfare. Disruption to logistics, power outages, and communications breakdowns can all provide the enemy with the opportunity to advance. A hacked cyber system can expose vital defenses or dramatically reduce the possibility of recovery.

Looking ahead, technological innovation in the military must be recognized as a national priority when allocating defense budgets. This applies to everything from unmanned systems to the development of artificial intelligence.

The most important revolution must take place within the minds of today’s military generals. A comprehensive rethink of existing military doctrines is currently needed. Armies must be completely re-equipped. It is time for the top brass to acknowledge that they should either change or give way to a new generation of military strategists.

Ukraine’s experience since 2022 has confirmed that in order to be successful in modern warfare, armies should model themselves on technological giants like Amazon and SpaceX. They must embrace flexible thinking and be capable of competing in terms of implementing new innovations.

In an era of accelerated military change, all countries face a simple choice of adapting or accepting the inevitability of defeat. The winners will be those who embrace the lessons from the technological revolution currently underway on the battlefields of Ukraine.

Oleg Dunda is a member of the Ukrainian Parliament from the Servant of the People party.

José Antonio Kast will head to La Moneda in March 2026. Chile’s president-elect won the second round of the election with 58.2 percent of the vote—winning by a margin of more than 16 percentage points. The day after the election, Kast met with outgoing President Gabriel Boric and emphasized afterward that he will advance a “government of national unity on priority issues: security, health, education, and housing.”

Kast will enter office with a slew of economic pressures in his inbox: slow growth, weak investment, stagnant productivity, high inequality, limited social mobility, and regional gaps. The labor market remains segmented, with low female participation and high informality. Along with these economic pressures, security and rising crime rates dominated the electoral campaign and addressing them will be central to Kast’s government plan.

In 2024, Chile’s economy showed signs of stable but uneven recovery, with moderate 2.6-percent gross domestic product (GDP) growth driven largely by mining, easing inflation, and falling poverty, while unemployment and informality remained elevated and investment growth lagged. Looking ahead to 2026, growth is expected to remain steady at 2.6 percent. Alongside a narrowing fiscal deficit and inflation stabilizing, this suggests a macroeconomic environment that is steady but still dependent on restoring investment momentum.

Chileans want to see changes and expect Kast to deliver some economic wins quickly. But the ability to do so goes hand in hand with addressing the increased rates of crime and violence. Kast’s campaign focused on the security of the country with proposals such as his Plan Implacable, which aims to “restore state authority and curb organized crime” through tougher penalties, more federal control over prisons, and stronger security operations, while also reasserting state authority in areas where criminal networks have expanded. This plan might be among the things on which Chileans want Kast to take action first. However, Kast and his administration need to balance what they want and what they can actually get done, especially regarding migration and deportation.

A challenging congress

The first one hundred days of the Kast administration will test the executive’s ability to move legislation that supports faster growth, rebuilds investor confidence that has been weakened by security concerns and political fragmentation, and signals a clearer economic direction.

That said, Kast takes office with a congress that leans right but does not give him full control. Right and far-right parties aligned with Kast hold seventy-six of the 155 seats in the Chamber of Deputies, with his second-round opponent Jeannette Jara’s left and far-left coalition of Unidad por Chile controlling sixty-one. The swing party of Franco Parisi, Partido de la Gente, holds fourteen seats.

Kast will need a simple majority to pass most legislation. But constitutional amendments and reforms of the electoral system would require two-thirds of votes in the congress. Kast’s coalition cannot reach either threshold on its own, and must work with partners to move any major bill forward. This makes the Partido de la Gente especially important. Because no bloc controls a majority, its fourteen deputies are in position to decide whether a proposal advances or fails. Its votes can tilt negotiations, shape the final text of legislation, and determine how governable the next term becomes.

Passing legislation through the lower house will be easier, but major legislation such as Kast’s proposed mass deportations will need broader support. The evenly split senate will require him to work with the traditional right as well as swing actors to move legislation. As such, Kast will be faced with increased pressure to deliver short-term results on crime and economic growth, signaling early whether his administration can translate public demand for order and stability into a more predictable environment for investment, something US investors typically look for before committing capital in Chile.

How Chile’s investment environment has shifted

Since the mid-1980s, Chile has implemented significant reforms that opened its economy and encouraged foreign investment. These included changes in the financial and social markets, such as Law No. 20.848 of 2015 establishing the framework for foreign direct investment (FDI), as well as other tax and labor reforms. However, social unrest in 2019, the COVID-19 pandemic, two failed constitutional reform attempts, and rising crime have affected investor confidence.

The trade relationship between Chile and the United States is one of the deepest and most strategic for our country. Since the Free Trade Agreement came into effect in 2004—which allowed 100 percent of bilateral trade to be duty-free by 2015—trade between the two countries has more than doubled, and Chilean exports to the US have grown steadily. Today, the United States is our second-largest export destination and also the second-largest foreign investor in Chile, reflecting a mutual trust built over time.

The opportunities to deepen this partnership are enormous: sustainable energy, critical minerals, green hydrogen, water and digital infrastructure, and advanced technologies. Chile contributes stability, legal certainty, and strategic resources; the United States brings innovation and capital. Strengthening this cooperation is key to driving investment, productivity, and new opportunities for both countries.

—Susana Jiménez Schuster, president, Confederation of Production and Trade (CPC)

The foundation for investment in Chile lies in democracy, rule of law, and a predictable regulatory environment. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has indicated that Chile’s growth might be reaching a ceiling, making continued reforms—such as streamlining permits, encouraging innovation, digitalizing paperwork, simplifying regulations, and removing bottlenecks—essential for reigniting momentum.

Chile has economic sectors with great potential that meet global demand for a wide range of goods and services, as well as developed markets and a stable institutional framework. Just as our country can offer attractive conditions to foreign investors, we can also provide knowledge and talent in those industries where we have developed a high level of know-how and expertise. Chile’s growth has been founded on strong collaboration, and free trade agreements with various economies around the world.

—Francisco Pérez Mackenna, board member, AmCham Chile

What makes Chile an attractive destination for US investors

Several conditions strengthen opportunities for US investment in Chile. Together they shape a more attractive environment for long-term investment is likely to be a priority for the incoming Kast government.

Chile is a key tech hub in Latin America. This is because of its stable economy, strong startup ecosystem, skilled workforce, advanced digital infrastructure, and government-backed innovation programs. Successful tech projects require a strong and solid workforce. According to CBRE’s Scoring Tech Talent 2025 report, Santiago has the third-highest tech talent pool in Latin America, with more than 143,000 professionals. This positions Chile as an attractive hub for companies to expand. That said, most initiatives are heavily concentrated in Santiago, emphasizing the need for additional training in both the northern and southern regions to ensure successful new project implementation.
US companies benefit from working with reliable local partners, in part because Chile has clear rules for contracts and strong institutions and because local firms usually have long experience navigating permitting, local procurement, cultural nuances, and sector-specific regulations. These conditions create an environment where these partnerships give foreign investors a dependable base of support on the ground.
Investors trust Chile because its infrastructure is strong, and its politics stay steady. In 2024, Chile received $15.3 billion in FDI, one of the highest inflows in recent years. A big share of that comes from reinvesting earnings, which shows that companies already in Chile are confident enough to expand. The government agency InvestChile closed 2024 with a portfolio of $56.2 billion in foreign-backed projects, with US companies investing the largest share at $20.5 billion. Major investments target clean energy: green hydrogen, mining, and infrastructure. These numbers show that foreign investors, especially those from the United States, believe in Chile’s long-term stability and the clarity of its rules. They see a country where projects can start quickly and scale up, thanks to predictable regulations and reliable systems. That confidence in both infrastructure and political stability strengthens the case for more investment.

The U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (DFC)’s mandate prioritizes investments in markets that offer predictability, stability, and clear rules, conditions that have historically made countries like Chile attractive for engagement. The DFC, a US federal agency, was created under the 2018 Better Utilization of Investments Leading to Development (BUILD) Act, which merged the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) with USAID’s Development Credit Authority. Its core purpose is to mobilize private capital to advance US development and foreign policy objectives by leveraging financial tools such as loans, equity investments, guarantees, and political risk insurance to support private-sector-led solutions in markets where commercial finance is limited or unavailable.

In December 2025, Congress reauthorized and modernized the DFC through the FY 2026 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), extending its authorization through 2031, and significantly expanding its scope and authorities. Under this reauthorization, the DFC’s investment cap (Maximum Contingent Liability) was raised to $205 billion, and the agency gained new tools, including a $5 billion equity revolving fund and increased equity investment authority. The legislation also broadened DFC’s ability to invest in more countries and sectors while placing limits on financing in the wealthiest countries, ensuring that no more than 10 percent of its portfolio may support high-income markets, with specified sector exceptions such as energy, critical minerals, and information and communications technology.

While Chile’s high-income status means that large-scale DFC engagement is still limited compared with developing markets, the agency can support selected projects in strategic areas, including clean energy, critical minerals, infrastructure, and technology, particularly where there is a clear economic or strategic rationale and consistent with the statutory constraints on participation in wealthy countries.

Addressing bottlenecks to further FDI in Chile

Following the presidential election, Chile enters a new political phase with renewed attention on how the next administration will translate campaign promises into policy. Chile continues to take steps to strengthen its investment environment, while facing persistent bottlenecks that shape foreign investor confidence and will influence the country’s economic direction in the months ahead.

Regulatory delays are a major concern and become impediments. Permitting and environmental review processes can take several years. However, the Framework Law on Sectoral Authorizations (Law 21.770)—better known as the Ley de Permisología, which creates the Framework Law on Sectoral Authorizations (LMAS)—was enacted and posted in September 2025. The goal is to update and speed up the permit process to encourage investment. The law creates a single digital portal called SUPER to manage permits simultaneously, introduces simplified procedures for low-risk projects, and establishes administrative silence. Streamlining and updating procedures are expected to drop processing times between 30 percent and 70 percent without lowering regulatory standards. This will also be a step forward for attracting foreign investment.
Policy uncertainty remains a concern for long-term investors. Over the past decade, shifts between governments of the right and left have created questions about the direction of future regulations. Relations between Santiago and Washington are expected to further deepen under a new administration. Kast will need to show that he can meet public expectations for stronger growth and higher investment. Here, it’s critical to balance the demands of [JF1] parties across the political spectrum as this congressional balancing act is what’s needed to advance legislation reassuring to investors. Although Chile has struggled lately to attract FDI, the United States remains its second-largest source, with a strong presence in energy, data centers, and mining.
The economy also plays a major role in the current political moment. Chile has experienced slow growth for several years and unemployment sits at about 9 percent. Investment remains stagnant, with inflation and high living costs shaping daily choices for many Chileans. Voters widely see the current government as falling short in addressing these issues. The national budget was also a central topic of conversation during the election. The legislative commission in charge of reviewing the annual budget recently rejected the proposal for 2026; Kast will now likely express his approach to next year’s spending plan in the short term. That said, his proposal of gradual elimination of property taxes on primary residences, starting with those on homeowners over sixty-five, would reduce government revenue, meaning the 2026 budget will need to account for this shortfall. The administration will need to balance funding public services and implementing the policy in a fiscally responsible way.
Security is another major risk. While Chile remains relatively safe in comparison to select other countries, crime has risen in recent years—including organized crime, drug trafficking, and violence in northern regions and Santiago. Researchers estimate crime costs the country nearly $8 billion annually, discouraging some foreign investment. Kast made public safety a core part of his platform through the previous mentioned Plan Implacable, which includes tougher penalties for organized crime, high-security prisons, expanded self-defense laws, protections for law enforcement and judicial actors, and targeted border security measures with his Plan Escudo Fronterizo.

American investment has been central to the growth of Chile’s strategic industries, while Chile’s stability, talent, and infrastructure have enabled US companies to scale across Latin America. Significant opportunities remain. Chile is the world’s largest copper producer and holds 25 percent of global lithium output, with growing mineral-processing capacity and emerging resources such as rare earths and cobalt. The country is also becoming a regional digital hub, supported by projects like Google’s Humboldt Cable and expanding data-center infrastructure. Upcoming port concessions and the need for energy storage solutions in a rapidly growing clean-energy system offer additional avenues for deeper US investment.

—Beatriz Herrera, investment commissioner for North America, Embassy of Chile

Sectors in Chile with investment potential

Information technology (IT): Chile’s IT sector is expanding rapidly, driven by high internet penetration, widespread mobile connectivity, and growing demand for digital services. Key emerging sectors include fifth-generation (5G) deployment, big-data analytics, and artificial intelligence (AI) integration, supported by initiatives such as Chile Digital 2035 and the National AI Policy. To accelerate growth, Chile can build on existing programs by expanding Chile Digital 2035 and Digital Talent for Chile, increasing investment in digital infrastructure, scaling training and education initiatives, and deepening public-private partnerships to ensure broader access to advanced IT solutions, close the skills gap, and achieve full digitalization of public services.
Critical minerals (copper and lithium): As the world’s largest copper producer, supplying 24 percent of global output, and home to 41 percent of lithium reserves, Chile is a strategic source of materials essential for clean technologies. These include electric vehicles, energy storage, and digital infrastructure. With public policies promoting sustainability and high environmental standards, Chile is positioning itself to attract investment that advances technological innovation, supports the global energy transition, and fosters inclusive economic growth. China currently dominates global demand for Chilean copper and lithium, but Kast could attract more Western-aligned investment by promoting legal certainty, officering incentives, and fostering partnerships with companies that meet high environmental and governmental standards.
Water management and drought mitigation: Chile is increasingly leveraging public-private partnerships to improve water management and climate resilience. Investments focus on both traditional infrastructure, such as dams, and natural solutions including reforestation and wetland restoration. There is demand for technologies that enhance water efficiency, like advanced treatment and recycling systems, data-driven water management tools, and construction waste reduction. Sustainable agricultural practices that conserve water and lower input costs also present promising opportunities. Water management could become a strategic priority for Kast, with the advancement of such projects allowing the administration to deliver visible results, balance regional needs, and contribute to Chile’s robust agriculture sector.
Seismic-resilient infrastructure: Situated on one of the most active fault lines in the world, Chile experiences frequent earthquakes, including several above magnitudes of eight. Critical infrastructure—such as ports, airports, and energy facilities—requires modern seismic design. There is strong demand for engineering and technology services in risk modeling, resilience planning, and early warning systems. Opportunities include digital twins, smart sensors, and integrated solutions to strengthen utilities, transportation networks, and urban development.

How can the new Kast administration help unlock Chile’s economic potential and attract investment?

Visit Washington before the March 11 inauguration. This would reinforce Chile’s shared interests in economic security and investment cooperation, present project pipelines aligned with DFC priorities and clarify Chile’s commitments in areas such as energy transition and trade. Early engagement would allow Chile to secure a proactive position in shaping US investment decisions, demonstrate commitment to close cooperation with the United States, and build political support in the US Congress and executive branch for stronger bilateral financing ties. When in Washington, use the visit to generate broader public interest in the importance of Chile as a strong US partner.
Identify emerging skills and priority growth sectors in Chile and encourage private-sector programs that link education directly to industry needs. Kast can do this by providing tax incentives and speeding up the processing of paperwork for companies involved in workforce training. Scholarships, vocational training, apprenticeships, and partnerships with universities that teach technical skills can help equip students and current workers with the skills required for mining, technology, energy, and other strategic industries.
Maintain continuity in key policies on permitting reforms. This applies to policies such as the Ley de Permisología, which aims to streamline and coordinate environmental and sectoral permitting across government agencies, and they should be expanded to ensure that the ministries and offices involved are actively collaborating with each other. If government entities are not coordinating—for example, in the processing of environment permits—the procedures for key sectors such as mining and technology will continue to be delayed. Demonstrating consistency will reinforce Chile’s reputation as a stable investment destination and encourage both new and reinvested capital.
Avoid over-centralizing these initiatives in Santiago. This can be done by collaborating with regional partners or established private-sector actors to develop and train local workforces. This could include local recruitment, training programs at regional universities, and ongoing partnerships between the government and private sector.

These measures strengthen security in ways that matter for investors by creating clearer rules, steadier institutions, and stronger local trust. When the government improves workforce training and expands formal job opportunities, it reduces pressures that fuel crime in regions tied to mining and energy. Better coordination on permits lowers chances of corruption or operational disruptions because companies face fewer conflicting decisions from different agencies. Together, these steps create a safer and more predictable environment for investors.

Conclusion

Chile remains a trusted and stable partner for the United States. Its democratic values, institutional strength, and openness to trade make it a strategic destination for US investment. But sustaining and expanding this partnership will require continued economic reforms and political engagement between both countries to ease processes for doing business, improve regulatory efficiency, enhance human capital, and foster political stability toward a robust, long-term strategic partnership. As Kast prepares to take office, he has an opportunity to set a foundation to ignite Chile’s economic growth and attract investment. And with the Western Hemisphere as a top priority for Washington, Chile has the potential to be an even more strategic partner to the United States.

The views expressed in this publication are those of the authors alone. Some of the investment opportunities discussed in this issue brief were informed by an October roundtable discussion on US-Chile investment relations, which included the participation of US and Chilean private-sector leaders, public-sector representatives, and multilateral organizations. The roundtable was organized in partnership with AmCham Chile and with the support of MetLife. Neither were involved in the production of this issue brief.

About the authors

Maite Gonzalez Latorre is program assistant at the Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center of the Atlantic Council.

Jason Marczak is vice president and senior director of the Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center of the Atlantic Council

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The Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center broadens understanding of regional transformations and delivers constructive, results-oriented solutions to inform how the public and private sectors can advance hemispheric prosperity.

The post First hundred days: How Kast can accelerate US investment in Chile appeared first on Atlantic Council.

Narrating the war: Analyzing Russia’s narratives for its invasion of Ukraine

Casey Michel — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 14:00:00 +0000

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 challenged much of the common Western understanding of Russia. How can the world better understand Russia? What are the steps forward for Western policy? The Eurasia Center’s new “Russia Tomorrow” series seeks to reevaluate conceptions of Russia today and better prepare for its future tomorrow.

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Introduction
Russia’s relationship with Ukraine
Russia’s global standing
About the author

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been, by any metric, a strategic nightmare for Moscow. Not only has Russia lost more soldiers in Ukraine than in any war since World War II—and might well end up losing more troops than the United States lost during the entirety of WWII—but the Russian economy has lurched between overheating and stagflation. All the while, the Kremlin’s decision to expand its invasion of Ukraine has resulted in a NATO both enlarged and enhanced; in Russia’s transition from regional hegemon to a “junior partner” (and even potential vassal) of China; in waning influence in places such as the South Caucasus, the Middle East, Africa, and Europe; and the creation of a heavily armed, deeply resentful neighbor in Ukraine, which will see Kyiv nurse both an animus toward Russia and a desire to reclaim much of the occupied territories for years to come.

The entire war has been an exercise in Russian myopia, accelerating Russian decline and leading to a broad range of self-inflicted wounds. Mirroring other neo-colonial wars—France in Algeria, the Netherlands in Indonesia, Portugal in southern Africa—the war has exposed Russia as a pretender to great-power status and a shell of a once-swaggering empire. While Moscow might yet gain more towns scattered throughout Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region, any remaining victories will remain pyrrhic, with Russia continuing to sacrifice its future prospects for any present gains.

Much of Russia’s failure rests on Ukrainians’ ongoing sacrifices, as well as on the broader West’s willingness to back Ukraine’s troops. But a great deal of this disaster also stems from a series of muddled narratives that Russia has peddled about precisely why it launched the expanded invasion in the first place. Pushing a sprawling, occasionally contradictory series of goals and rationales, and without a clear narrative push to consolidate either support or success, Moscow has flailed for years, lurching from one rationale to another—all while its troops continue dying en masse and its domestic population continues to feel escalating pain and stress as the war drags on.

Given all of the competing claims Moscow has put forth to defend its invasion of Ukraine, it is worth analyzing how the Kremlin has justified its expanded war and how Moscow has tried to sell the deadliest war Europe has seen since the days of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. Such analysis can not only help Western allies of Ukraine figure out how best to back Kyiv’s efforts but can provide a roadmap for sounder Russia policy in the West overall. In sifting and sorting these narratives, we can identify precisely what is motivating the Kremlin—and, better yet, how to stop it.

Selling the war

The Kremlin’s public rationales for its war in Ukraine fall into two broad buckets.

The first rests directly on Russia’s relationship with Ukraine, focusing specifically on the links, both historic and contemporary, between Moscow and Kyiv. The narratives focused specifically on Ukraine, and on Russians’ relationships with Ukrainians, can be broken down further into three primary prongs.

The Ukraine war is primarily about “rescuing” Russians and Russian speakers, especially (but not exclusively) in eastern and southern Ukraine. This is primarily predicated on the idea that Ukraine is overseen by “fascists” and “Nazis,” who have been in power since the 2014 Euromaidan “coup.”
Russia and Ukraine are actually “brotherly” nations, and Ukrainians are simply “confused” about their relationship as subalterns to Russia. This is primarily predicated on the idea that Ukraine is simply “Little Russia,” part of the “triune state” of Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine—and, naturally, not part of the West. The war is simply about restoring that Ukrainian status. It is also about restoring Russia’s colonial control of Ukraine and keeping Ukraine as an entity subservient to Russia.
“Ukraine” does not actually exist but is a Leninist fabrication. This is predicated on the idea that Vladimir Lenin and other Soviet leadership were mistaken to draw any internal, republican borders within the Soviet Union—and that the entire “near abroad” is rightfully Russian. The war is about rectifying this Leninist mistake.

However, the Kremlin’s rhetoric explaining its war in Ukraine has often expanded far beyond Ukraine itself. Indeed, while the fighting might take place largely on Ukrainian (and occasionally Russian) territory, the Kremlin has often claimed that the war is both global and epochal, linked directly to the second broad bucket of narratives and focused on the status of Russia’s global standing. Those narratives centering on Russia’s role in the broader international context, as well as the creation of a new geopolitical order, can also be broken down into three primary threads.

This war is primarily about beating back NATO and Western expansion. NATO “pledged” in 1990 that it would not expand its borders, and this war is simply about forcing NATO to uphold that pledge. This war is a “defensive” war, aimed at preventing Russian “encirclement.”
This war is about the non-Western world standing up to Western bullying, hypocrisy, and decadence. Russia is at the vanguard of the non-Western world’s fight against Western “colonialism,” trying to restore “traditional values” that the West is attempting to destroy around the world.
This war is about restoring Russia’s status as a “great power,” both in Europe and globally. It is primarily about ushering in a “multipolar” world, with other “civilization-states” such as China and India rising to parity with the United States.

None of the narratives above are mutually exclusive. Indeed, one of the difficulties in assessing these narrative components is the multiple instances of reinforcing themes and topics. For example, the idea that Russia and Ukraine are brotherly nations—or even the notion that Ukraine does not exist—can be directly tethered to the idea that NATO must never extend to Ukraine and that the war is necessarily defensive. The false claim that Ukraine’s 2014 revolution was in reality a coup is also often paired with the idea that the war is about rolling back Western influence and meddling in non-Western nations. These narratives can often work in conjunction—and are often included in the same speeches and writings from Russian President Vladimir Putin and his allies.

Adding to the difficulty, many of these narratives are also in tension with one another. For example, Putin wrote at length about the supposed brotherly relationship between Ukraine and Russia, yet he has simultaneously claimed that Ukraine is a mere fabrication set to be annulled. Likewise, the idea that this is somehow an anti-colonial war grates against the claim that some countries are civilization-states destined to rule over smaller nations.

Still, each of these narratives is worth analyzing on its own. The remainder of this paper will be dedicated to just that: detailing the primary contours of each of these narratives, as well as offering analysis (and often corrections) therein. The paper will also offer a brief conclusion about what these competing and contradictory narratives reveal about Russia’s aims—and how best to combat Russian expansionism in Ukraine and elsewhere.

Russia’s relationship with Ukraine

The Ukraine war is primarily about “rescuing” Russians and Russian speakers, especially (but not exclusively) in eastern and southern Ukraine. This is primarily predicated on the idea that Ukraine is overseen by “fascists” and “Nazis,” who have been in power since the 2014 Euromaidan “coup.”

Details

One of the primary narratives that Russia has relied on since its expanded invasion did not originate in February 2022, or even in the months beforehand. It instead traces back to at least early 2014, when Ukrainian protesters successfully ousted former President Viktor Yanukovych in the democratic Euromaidan Revolution—and when Putin launched Russia’s initial invasion of Ukraine in Crimea and parts of the Donbas.

At its simplest, Russia’s post-Euromaidan narrative boiled down to the idea that the Ukrainian protesters were illegitimate usurpers, ousting a democratically elected leader and instituting a new regime dedicated not only to wresting Ukraine out of Moscow’s orbit but focused especially on the immiseration of Russians and Russian speakers. The “junta” responsible for this “coup” was secretly in hock to its “real masters in the West,” who were simply using Ukraine and its post-2014 government as a means of targeting Russia and Russian interests. In this view, these new Ukrainian leaders—including Volodymyr Zelenskyy—should be considered fascists and Nazis, simply because they were opposed to Russia writ large, whether that meant not recognizing Russia’s claims to Crimea or encouraging the use of the Ukrainian language throughout the country.

According to Russia, this supposed junta continued its persecution for years until things reached a breaking point in early 2022. That February, Moscow was supposedly forced to invade Ukraine for the express protection of Russians in regions like eastern Ukraine. As Putin claimed, Russia did not need to annex any further parts of Ukraine, but authorities in Kyiv needed to recognize the nominal independence of both the Donetsk People’s Republic and Luhansk People’s Republic—building upon previous demands that these entities must also have a veto over Kyiv’s foreign policy decisions. According to Moscow, Ukraine also needed to renounce any fascist or Nazi leaders and sympathies forevermore.

As Putin said during his address announcing the expanded invasion, “The purpose of this operation is to protect people who, for eight years now, have been facing humiliation and genocide perpetrated by the Kiev regime.” As he added in 2025, the crisis did not begin with Russia’s invasion but was the “result of the coup d’etat in Ukraine, which was supported and provoked by the West.” More specifically, Putin said in 2022 that Russia’s expanded invasion was a direct response to the “tragedy” in the Donbas. As Tass reported, Putin told a twelve-year-old girl that Ukraine’s “bombardments, artillery strikes and combat operations” in Donetsk and Luhansk “compelled Russia to start this military operation.”

Putin’s rhetoric also built on this narrative to call for the notion of “denazifying” Ukraine. As he memorably claimed during his February 2022 address, Russia would “seek to demilitarize and denazify Ukraine, as well as bring to trial those who perpetrated numerous bloody crimes against civilians, including against citizens of the Russian Federation.” The Russian Foreign Ministry and the Russian ambassador to the United Nations echoed this language.

Analysis

The idea that Russia needed to invade Ukraine in order to rescue compatriots and remove Nazi elements from Ukraine’s leadership is, to outside observers, perhaps the most farcical of the narratives detailed here. The notion that Ukraine—whose president is Jewish—requires denazification was immediately met with ridicule and mockery. However, this argument also provided a sense of flexibility for Putin. After all, it remains unclear what denazification would actually entail—whether regime change, full lustration, the ending of any pro-Western trajectory policies, a mix of these options, or something else entirely. Likewise, the call has a clear domestic component, with Putin able to sell the war as a battle against a new generation of supposed fascists and a reprise of Moscow’s victory in World War II.

The calls that Moscow must rescue ethnic Russians suffering in Ukraine, especially in the Donbas, also have significant salience for domestic audiences in Russia. For many Russians, the Donbas remains a traditionally Russian land and Moscow maintains a unique role in protecting Russians in neighboring nations—including beyond Ukraine. Given its salience, this line of argument would likely be employed again should Russia launch another invasion of a neighboring nation in the future, with potential usage from Estonia to Kazakhstan.

Russia and Ukraine are actually “brotherly” nations, and Ukrainians are simply “confused” about their relationship as subalterns to Russia. This is primarily predicated on the idea that Ukraine is simply “Little Russia,” part of the “triune state” of Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine—and, naturally, not part of the West. The war is simply about restoring that Ukrainian status. It is also about restoring Russia’s colonial control of Ukraine and keeping Ukraine as an entity subservient to Russia.

Details

As with the narrative on Ukraine suffering a coup via fascists in 2014, the idea that Russia and Ukraine are brotherly nations—and that they are destined for embrace, with Russia lording as the “elder brother” over Little Russia—long predated Russia’s 2022 expanded invasion. Indeed, such a narrative stretches back to at least the middle of the nineteenth century, when young Russian aristocrats “discovered” Ukraine and began “to work intensely to uncover the region’s supposed original Russianness,” wrote Johns Hopkins University’s Eugene Finkel, whose 2024 book traced the origins of such efforts. No longer was Ukraine a separate polity with a distinct history; by the 1830s and 1840s, as Russian Slavophile writer Aleksei Khomiakov noted, Ukraine was “an organic and inseparable part of a single Russian nation.” Russia and Ukraine, alongside Belarus, formed a supposed triune state, in which all three nations were part of one greater Slavic nation headed by Russia.

It is an idea that, nearly two centuries later, remains largely unchanged—and which helped provide the outline for one of Moscow’s prime narratives about why it needed to launch its expanded invasion in 2022. This narrative formed much of the basis for Putin’s lengthy 2021 treatise on the topic, in which he detailed the supposed “historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians.” As Putin wrote:

I am confident that true sovereignty of Ukraine is possible only in partnership with Russia. Our spiritual, human and civilizational ties formed for centuries and have their origins in the same sources, they have been hardened by common trials, achievements and victories. Our kinship has been transmitted from generation to generation. It is in the hearts and the memory of people living in modern Russia and Ukraine, in the blood ties that unite millions of our families. Together we have always been and will be many times stronger and more successful. For we are one people.

If anything, Putin’s beliefs in the historical unity binding Russia and Ukraine have only grown despite the military setbacks and massive casualty rates continuing to climb. In late 2022, Putin announced the supposed “annexation” of further Ukrainian territory, including territory Moscow had not yet even conquered. As a means of getting around this awkward fact, Putin pointed to the supposed unity already extant between Ukraine and Russia—found, naturally, in the land he was now claiming as Russia’s. As Putin said, those in Ukraine were “our compatriots, our brothers and sisters . . . the native part of our united people.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin attends a pro-war concert at Luzhniki Stadium in Moscow, Russia. February 22, 2023. (Sputnik/Maksim Blinov/Kremlin via REUTERS)

Nor is it just Putin who has peddled such tropes. In a malicious, revelatory article originally posted on (and later removed from) RIA Novosti, one Russian writer laid out what Russian victory in Ukraine would look like. “Ukraine has returned to Russia,” the article begins. “It will be reorganized, re-established and returned to its natural state as part of the Russian world . . . [Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine] will now act in geopolitical terms as a single whole.” Thanks to the invasion, “Russia is restoring its unity” via a “de facto civil war” waged by “brothers.” And thanks to Moscow’s victory, “Russia is restoring its historical completeness, gathering the Russian world, the Russian people together—in all its totality of Great Russians, Belarusians and Little Russians [i.e., Ukrainians].”

Analysis

In this narrative, Ukraine and Ukrainians still exist in concept, but only as a nation and people subordinated to Russia and Russian sovereignty. It is, if anything, a vision that posits Ukraine as simply another Belarus: a state that retains nominal independence but is nonetheless tightly embraced by Moscow and subservient to the Kremlin’s demands. This, as Moscow sees it, is the natural state of things—and anything else would simply be a historical anomaly.

This narrative, of course, is chock-full of historic revisionism, outright fabrications, and warmed-over excuses for empire. As Finkel noted, Kyiv’s origins predate Moscow’s founding by centuries, and few if any Russian intellectuals ever considered Ukraine part of their history and identity until the middle of the nineteenth century. Moreover, this narrative grossly ignores what Ukrainians actually think—and blinded Moscow to just how fiercely Ukrainians would fight to preserve both their state and their nation moving forward.

“Ukraine” does not actually exist but is a Leninist fabrication. This is predicated on the idea that Vladimir Lenin and other Soviet leadership were mistaken to draw any internal, republican borders within the Soviet Union—and that the entire “near abroad” is rightfully Russian. The war is about rectifying this Leninist mistake.

Details

This narrative flips the notion of a supposed triune state on its head. Instead of Ukraine being a constituent part of a greater Russia, there is no Ukraine whatsoever—and any claims of a separate Ukrainian nation, language, or identity are simply slander against the one, true, and indivisible Russia. It is a narrative that tips into the genocidal, giving Russia cover to try eliminating Ukrainian identity entirely.

As with other narratives mentioned above, the idea that Ukraine is not a separate polity but is simply a “project” meant to target and undercut Russia has a lengthy lineage. In the 1860s, Russian officials shunted the idea of Ukraine entirely to the side, claiming that the Ukrainian language “never existed, does not exist and cannot exist,” culminating in a tsarist edict banning the teaching of Ukrainian and marking the first instance of Russian authorities trying to stamp out the idea of Ukraine entirely.

The key inflection point in this narrative—that Ukraine is a mere fabrication, rather than a fraternal nation that has lost its way—came in the early 1920s, when Lenin and other Soviet higher-ups began outlining the borders of the new Soviet republics. Given the levels of support in Ukraine for Ukrainian nationhood, Soviet leadership granted Ukraine (and a number of other polities) republican status, effectively placing it on par with the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic. For Putin and others, this decision was a “time bomb” that ultimately detonated in the Soviet Union’s dissolution and is a historic wrong that must be corrected.

We see elements of this narrative throughout Putin’s speeches and writings. In the same essay mentioned above about the supposed historical unity of Russia and Ukraine, Putin claims that “modern Ukraine is entirely the product of the Soviet era,” created “on the lands of historical Russia.” As he added when announcing the expanded invasion, “modern Ukraine was entirely created by Russia or, to be more precise, by Bolshevik, Communist Russia. This process started practically right after the 1917 revolution, and Lenin and his associates did it in a way that was extremely harsh on Russia—by separating, severing what is historically Russian land . . . When it comes to the historical destiny of Russia and its peoples, Lenin’s principles of state development were not just a mistake; they were worse than a mistake.”

As such, the time had come to rectify that “mistake”—even to the point of destroying and subsuming Ukraine entirely.

Analysis

Putin might play-act as a historian, but his reading of history is saturated in grievance and mythmaking, cherry-picking facts and concocting details of his own. The idea that Ukraine is a fabrication or some facile project is, of course, belied by the fact that Ukraine and Ukrainians continue to exist and continue to fight back against Russian forces.

Moreover, Putin’s shoddy history is easily dismissed by those who have actually studied the region. As acclaimed historian Serhii Plokhy noted, the idea that Ukraine exists on historical Russian lands is nonsensical. “Even a cursory acquaintance with the history of the Russian Revolution and fall of the Russian Empire that accompanied it indicates that the modern Ukrainian state came into existence not thanks to Lenin but against his wishes and in direct reaction to the Bolshevik putsch in Petrograd in October . . . of 1917,” Plokhy wrote. “The Bolsheviks tried to take control of Kyiv as well but were defeated, jumpstarting the process of the modern Ukrainian state-building.”

Putin is hardly the only Russian nationalist who has learned the hard way the peril of dismissing Ukrainian identity. During the Russian Civil War, the pro-tsarist White forces refused to grant Ukraine (among other nations) any political freedoms or sovereignty. They instead claimed they were fighting for “Russia, one and indivisible”—a cry that rallied few non-Russians and eventually doomed the White forces to defeat.

Russia’s global standing

This war is primarily about beating back NATO and Western expansion. NATO “pledged” in 1990 that it would not expand its borders, and this war is simply about forcing NATO to uphold that pledge. This war is a “defensive” war, aimed at preventing Russian “encirclement.”

Details

Not all of the Russian narratives backing the expanded invasion center on Ukraine. In fact, a number claim that Ukraine is simply the latest flashpoint in a far broader struggle Russia is waging against a perfidious West, and the United States in particular. A case in point is the claim that the war in Ukraine is not just about toppling Kyiv’s “regime,” or even preventing Ukraine from joining NATO, but that it is about unwinding NATO’s post-1991 gains and preventing the wholesale encirclement of Russia by Western forces.

Such a narrative came to the fore in the weeks leading up to the expanded invasion in early 2022. In December 2021, the Kremlin moved from demanding that Ukraine simply acquiesce to Russian demands (especially foregoing NATO membership) to demanding that NATO deployments leave much of Eastern and Central Europe entirely. Moscow specifically called for the removal of NATO forces and weapons from countries such as Romania and Bulgaria, and formally called for NATO to pull back to its 1997 borders, effectively abandoning Poland, Czechia, the Baltics, and others—and effectively restoring military parity between the United States and Russia in Europe.

The Kremlin has justified these demands by claiming that the United States pledged in the early 1990s not to expand NATO eastward. Putin has regurgitated these claims multiple times, including after Russia first launched its invasion in 2014, when the Russian leader stated that Western leaders “have lied to us many times . . . This happened with NATO’s expansion to the east, as well as the deployment of military infrastructure at our borders.” According to Putin, all NATO enlargement following the Soviet dissolution is invalid and must be rolled back. Preventing Ukraine from NATO membership is simply the first domino in a far broader effort to push NATO out of all of its newest member states.

Analysis

Putin’s claims that the United States pledged not to expand NATO are ahistorical and fabricated. The United States never pledged any such veto. Even Mikhail Gorbachev, then ruling as Soviet premier, attested to this, saying that the “topic of ‘NATO expansion’ was not . . . brought up in those years.” Moreover, the key comment in question, in which Secretary of State James Baker floated the idea of NATO moving “not one inch east,” referred solely to NATO troops from West Germany moving into East Germany. The George H. W. Bush administration, however, never adopted this or any prohibition on NATO expansion as formal policy.

However, such a lie is a handy means of cultivating support among gullible audiences, both domestically and internationally, and helps present Russian aggression as being defensive in nature. Of course, this kind of framing—that invading a neighbor is not imperialism but is actually a defensive move—long predates Putin. It can be found in everything from the US decision to invade Mexico in the 1840s to Japan’s decision to invade much of Asia in the 1940s. This “defensiveness” was also the basis for much of the Soviet Union’s rationale for invading numerous neighbors, from Hungary in 1956 to Czechoslovakia in 1968 and beyond. Putin will almost certainly not be the last imperial leader to claim his country’s expansion is defensive in nature.

Thankfully, the Kremlin’s demands have been roundly dismissed by NATO and Western governments alike, and Ukraine remains dedicated to joining NATO. Yet the demands highlight how Russia has spun the war in Ukraine as a means not simply of thwarting NATO’s enlargement but of restoring a military parity between the United States and Russia on the European continent. It implies, in other words, an effective return to the Cold War military status quo within Europe and an unwinding of all the post-Cold War gains that have helped beat back malign Russian influence and military dominance in Europe, far beyond just Ukraine.

This war is about the non-Western world standing up to Western bullying, hypocrisy, and decadence. Russia is at the vanguard of the non-Western world’s fight against Western “colonialism,” trying to restore “traditional values” that the West is attempting to destroy around the world.

Details

While the war is taking place in Ukraine, this narrative posits that the war is about far more than simple NATO expansion or Ukrainian nationhood. Instead, it is about finally standing up to Western predation and perfidy, and to the West’s attempts to spread supposedly liberal values around the world—including all those elements opposing so-called traditional values.

Russia’s efforts to transform itself into a bastion of these supposed traditional values dates back at least a decade, when the Kremlin first began positioning itself as the primary bulwark for those opposed to liberal democracy. These include those opposed to LGBTQ rights, those opposed to so-called “gender ideology,” and even those opposed to democracy writ large. This effort has been largely successful, with Russia and Putin widely viewed as the lodestar for these anti-democratic forces.

The war in Ukraine, then, is simply a continuation on this theme. Announcing the expanded invasion in 2022, Putin claimed that the West “sought to destroy our traditional values and force on us their false values that would erode us, our people from within.” Patriarch Kirill, one of the key spokesmen for Putin’s regime and the titular head of the Russian Orthodox Church’s Moscow Patriarchate, echoed Putin’s claims that the war was predicated on those in eastern Ukraine “refus[ing] to accept the so-called values that are being offered by” the West, including “the gay parade.” RT editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan, one of the war’s biggest boosters, warned that Ukraine risked becoming “an LGBTQ capital or a venue for the Transgender Olympics.”

More broadly, the Kremlin has attempted to position the war as an effort to stand up to Western “neo-colonialism.” Ignoring centuries of Russian colonialism in Ukraine (and elsewhere), Putin has attempted to sell the war as a means of beating back Western colonial efforts. As he said when announcing the supposed annexations of multiple Ukrainian provinces in late 2022, “The West is ready to step over everything in order to preserve the neo-colonial system that allows it to parasitize, in fact, to plunder . . . Hence their aggression towards independent states, towards traditional values and original cultures[.]”

Analysis

It’s difficult to take seriously Russia’s claims that it is waging a war in Ukraine for traditional values, or that it has some kind of spiritual mission to beat back the encroachment of LGBTQ rights. After all, Russia is a country in which the rate of regular church attendance is in the single digits, while the country’s abortion rate remains higher than that of many other European nations. Moreover, the country routinely persecutes Christian denominations, even in Russia itself. The country is hardly a bastion of traditional values, despite Putin’s claims otherwise.

However, the claim that Russia is supposedly leading an anti-colonial war is perhaps the most farcical. Russia was a constituent part of the broader, ghastly story of European colonization, stealing lands and brutalizing populations from Eastern Europe and the Caucasus to North Asia and Central Asia—and even joining Great Britain, France, and Spain in colonizing North America. Claiming it was spreading “civilization” and “Christianity” to “heathen” groups of “savages,” Russia’s colonialist claims were indistinguishable from those in European empires elsewhere. In other words, Moscow was as much a European colonizer as London, Lisbon, Brussels, or Paris.

This was true not just in Chechnya, Kazakhstan, Sakha, or Finland, but also in Ukraine, where Moscow—during tsarist, Soviet, and now Putin eras—routinely engaged in colonial behavior, from ethnic cleansing to cultural genocide to mass murder, all while claiming non-Russian lands as its own. The war in Ukraine is indeed colonial, but with Russia once more in the role of colonizer.

This war is about restoring Russia’s status as a “great power,” both in Europe and globally. It is primarily about ushering in a “multipolar” world, with other “civilization-states” such as China and India rising to parity with the United States.

Details

Arguably the broadest narrative propounded by Russian authorities is that the war in Ukraine is not about the status of certain Ukrainian provinces, or Ukrainian security arrangements, or even the size and status of NATO in Europe. It is instead about restoring Russia’s role as a supposed great power on par with a small number of other states that make up an exclusive club of nations dominating geopolitics. These nations include the United States, China, and potentially India, with Russia also seen as a natural member.

The Kremlin claims Russia’s rightful status as a great power has been dismissed by the West—and especially by the United States, which has preferred to oversee a unipolar world—but no more. In invading Ukraine, Russia has announced its permanent status as one of the supposed civilization-states in a new multipolar world. This is not to say that Russia is aspiring to global dominance, per se. Rather, Russia is aspiring to—and has already achieved—a role as one of the key geopolitical players internationally, regionally dominant and globally relevant. Ukraine remains firmly within Russia’s supposed sphere of influence and, as such, Russia should have the right to do whatever it wants within Ukraine with no outside interference.

This obsession with great-power status has long pervaded Putin’s rhetoric, infusing and inflaming Russia’s revanchism. In October 2022, when he announced Russia’s supposed annexation of four Ukrainian provinces, Putin claimed that Russia is “a great millennial power” and a “country-civilization” that will follow its own path. In March 2023, Putin signed a strategic blueprint outlining Russia’s “historically unique mission” as a “unique state-civilization.” As Uppsala University’s Igor Torbakov wrote, it was the first time that Russian leadership had “officially stated that Russia is a sui generis civilization.”

Much of this narrative has manifested in specific calls for a “new Yalta,” in which leaders in Moscow, Beijing, and Washington effectively carve up the world, Ukraine included. In such a scenario, Russia would be the modern equivalent of the United Kingdom: an empire that might not be quite as powerful or wealthy as the other two nations, but that nonetheless deserves a place at such a summit. “Putin has never hidden that his dream is a new Yalta . . . [to] establish a new world order,” writes journalist Mikhail Zygar. Russia’s Ukraine war—and its supposedly imminent victory—is merely the opening salvo in a far broader global reordering. As the much-maligned RIA Novosti article mentioned above claimed, the invasion of Ukraine meant that a “new world is being born before our eyes”—a world that Russia will help steer.

Analysis

This pretension to greatness hardly began with Putin. Years before Russia’s expanded invasion, the Kremlin and Russian intellectuals were long obsessed with “the pursuit of derzhavnost,” which scholar Seva Gunitsky translates as “both being a great power and being recognized as such by others.” Not only does this mean acting as a regional hegemon, but it also means being entitled to “an unquestioned sphere of influence.” This rhetoric—of Moscow’s “special mission” and its “historic destiny” as a “great power”—stretches back centuries and was evident in the Kremlin’s tsarist, Soviet, and post-Soviet history.

It is perhaps ironic, then, that little has done more to expose the hollowness of Putin’s claims than his invasion of Ukraine. Rather than restore Russia’s great-power status, the war has led not just to the degradation of the Russian economy and outright military disaster in Ukraine but to Russia’s weakening influence in the South Caucasus, the Middle East, Africa, and, of course, Europe more broadly. It has likewise forced Russia to rely on North Korea to shore up national security, and to lean on China to shore up Russia’s teetering economy.

The war has only accelerated Russian decline and undone, perhaps for good, the potential restoration of Russian greatness. Moscow might still maintain its status on things like the United Nations’ Security Council and might still be the only post-Soviet state with nuclear weapons. But the idea that Russia is, or will soon become, a great power is increasingly laughable—and a testament to what a disaster Putin’s rule has been for Russia.

Conclusion

Wars can often contain multiple narratives. The US invasion of Iraq, for example, was originally pegged to removing Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction program before it shifted to fostering “democracy” for Iraqis. The US Civil War was originally launched to restore the sovereignty of the federal government before it shifted to eliminating slavery within the United States entirely. A war with multiple narratives does not necessarily portend either success or failure.

Rare are those wars, however, that push as many competing narratives as Russia has peddled in Ukraine. Indeed, it’s difficult to think of another war that has seen so many different justifications from the invading party. And it’s difficult to identify another war that has seen such a massive difference in scale of what those narratives are proposing, from simple territorial shifts to the entire reordering of the state of global affairs.

But as we’ve seen above, this is precisely what Russia has attempted with its invasion of Ukraine. From protecting pockets of Russians in the Donbas to ushering in an entirely new geopolitical era, from restoring a supposed Slavic unity to eliminating liberal values, the Kremlin’s justifications for its war have been breathtaking in their breadth.

They have also been a confused, muddled mess and a testament to just what a fiasco Russia’s entire war has been for Moscow. Instead of a clear-cut series of goals and aims, Russia’s leadership has flailed for excuses for its invasion, tossing idea after idea into the ether to see what might succeed. Such narrative confusion has stemmed, in large part, from Russia’s overall failures in Ukraine, forcing the Kremlin to reach for more and more justifications as the war drags on. At the same time, the confusion has played a significant role in Russia’s overall strategic failures in Ukraine and elsewhere; without a clear set of strategic goals, there’s little reason to think that tactical or battlefield successes would follow. Of course, much of this is also predicated on the Kremlin’s historical myopia as it pertains to Ukrainian history and Ukrainian nationhood; rather than a constituent part of some kind of Greater Russia, Ukraine is a distinct polity with a unique, separate history—a reality that hundreds of thousands of Russians have now died to learn. While Russia might continue to occupy sections of Ukrainian territory, the Kremlin has all but assured that a heavily armed Kyiv remains Russia’s greatest geopolitical foe for decades to come, if not longer.

For those looking forward, all this narrative confusion highlights one thing: there’s little reason to think Putin will be satisfied with simple recognition of Russian sovereignty over places such as Donetsk or Kherson. As Russian authorities have claimed, this war is about far more than the status of certain sections of eastern Ukraine, or even about Ukrainian membership in NATO. The Kremlin has far broader, and far more destabilizing, goals than simply dominating Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia, or even necessarily toppling Kyiv. Ukraine is but a stepping stone to Putin’s far more sweeping goals of rolling back US and allied interests, reaffirming Russian dominance over all of its neighbors (China and North Korea excepted), and creating a world in which the rights of smaller nations are subject to the whims of a handful of great powers. Given Putin’s ongoing obstinacy about winding down the war and finding a so-called “off-ramp,” it is clear that, for him, this war is about far more than simply the territorial status of parts of eastern or southern Ukraine.

It is, indeed, a reflection of the Kremlin’s obsession with derzhavnost—an obsession of which Ukrainians have done everything they can to disabuse Russia. And it reflects the fact that what can end this war is not the status of places like Crimea or Donetsk oblasts, but a full and outright defeat of Russia. Anything less would simply tempt the Kremlin to try again—with another effort to upend the global order and another war to try making Russia great again.

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About the authors

Casey Michel is an author and journalist who writes extensively on international corruption, kleptocracy, national security, and Russia policy. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Foreign Affairs, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, and many other outlets. His 2021 book, American Kleptocracy, was named by the Economist as one of the “best books to read to understand financial crime,” and his 2024 book Foreign Agents was named by Foreign Policy Magazine as one of the “biggest foreign-policy book releases of 2024.” His next book, United States of Oligarchy, will be released in summer 2026.

He is based in New York, and is currently sanctioned by the Russian regime for his work.

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The Eurasia Center’s mission is to promote policies that strengthen stability, democratic values, and prosperity in Eurasia, from Eastern Europe in the West to the Caucasus, Russia, and Central Asia in the East.

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Engaging generative artificial intelligence in African development

William Yancey Brown — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 20:03:45 +0000

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Executive summary

From classrooms to farming communities, generative artificial intelligence (gen AI) holds great potential for Africa. The key question is whether its promise of abundance will reach everyone—or only those already well-connected.

The technology should be regulated with both its strengths and weaknesses in mind, and approached with a healthy dose of skepticism toward corporate advocates; but ignoring the obvious value and use of gen AI makes little sense. Those concerned with development in Africa must engage with the technology and consider its potential for reducing poverty and strengthening education, alongside other priorities such as digitizing and preserving languages.

Gen AI poses real risks and requires guardrails, especially for young people. Yet disengagement carries risks of its own: if gen AI is not actively shaped and governed, the very youths and communities it could benefit—or harm without proper controls—risk being left behind. Not engaging with gen AI would be not only harmful but also patronizing. More conversation is needed between those inventing and implementing gen AI models and those who work in development assistance, including actors involved in shaping and advancing the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Two of these SDGs—ending poverty and providing quality education—closely mirror gen AI’s promise, or boast, of future “abundance” and human or even superhuman intelligence. The SDG and gen AI camps must explore what each can realistically offer the other.

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The Africa Center works to promote dynamic geopolitical partnerships with African states and to redirect US and European policy priorities toward strengthening security and bolstering economic growth and prosperity on the continent.

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‘Putin is lying’: Zelenskyy visits front to expose false claims of Russian gains

Peter Dickinson — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 23:00:14 +0000

According to Russian President Vladimir Putin, the invasion of Ukraine is going entirely according to plan, with Russian troops advancing everywhere and conquering all before them. This swaggering stance is intended to bolster Russian support for the war while demoralizing Ukrainians and deterring Kyiv’s partners. Most of all, it is designed to secure US President Donald Trump’s support for a Kremlin-friendly peace by convincing him that Russian victory is inevitable.

In order to maintain this air of inevitability, Putin stands accused of routinely inflating Russian battlefield achievements. At a time when Kyiv is already coming under mounting pressure to make painful concessions, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is clearly conscious of the dangers posed by these exaggerated claims. In a bid to expose the Kremlin’s disinformation efforts, Zelenskyy traveled personally to the front lines in eastern Ukraine last week to visit a city that Putin and his colleagues have repeatedly bragged of seizing.

Zelenskyy’s trip to Kupyansk came amid a successful Ukrainian counteroffensive in the vicinity that resulted in significant gains. The selfie video he recorded during his visit was masterclass in wartime messaging that debunked Putin’s boasts while also underlining Ukraine’s continued ability to defeat Russia on the battlefield. “Putin publicly lied, claiming that Russian forces had already taken the city. So I went to Kupyansk myself to show the world that Putin is lying,” the Ukrainian leader commented. “We must keep exposing every single Russian falsehood because truth restores justice.”

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Kupyansk is a strategically important city located close to the Russian border in northeastern Ukraine’s Kharkiv region. It was occupied by Russian troops in the initial stages of the full-scale invasion before being liberated during Ukraine’s September 2022 counteroffensive. In recent months, the city has once again become a key target for the advancing Russian army, with Putin and his generals announcing the capture of Kupyansk on multiple occasions.

Putin’s proclamations of victory in Kupyansk began in late October, when he issued an invitation to international journalists and promised to provide them with safe passage to witness the encirclement of Ukrainian units trapped in the city. Days later, he told a meeting of Russia’s National Security Council that Kupyansk was “practically in the hands of Russian forces,” with victorious troops engaged in mopping up operations. “The city’s future has already been determined,” Putin stated.

On November 20, Russia’s top general Valery Gerasimov informed Putin that Russian forces had established full control over Kupyansk. The following day, Putin invoked the alleged fall of the city in an attempt to project Russian strength and intimidate Ukraine. “If Kyiv does not want to discuss President Trump’s proposals and refuses it, then both they and the European warmongers should understand the events that took place in Kupyansk will inevitably be repeated in other key areas of the front,” he warned.

Similarly bold Russian statements continued into the current month. On December 2, Putin remarked that Kupyansk had been under Russian occupation “for several weeks now,” and accused the Ukrainian authorities of being completely detached from reality. In fact, it is now apparent that Ukrainian assessments of the battle were broadly accurate, while Putin was guilty of spinning fantasies about the imaginary conquest of Kupyansk. Speaking on the outskirts of the evidently unconquered city, Zelenskyy openly mocked the Kremlin dictator’s dishonesty. “The Russians have had a lot to say about Kupyansk,” he commented. “The reality speaks for itself.”

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Zelenskyy’s latest front line appearance was much more than a high stakes photo opportunity or a chance to troll the Kremlin. In his selfie video, the Ukrainian leader acknowledged the importance of challenging false Russian narratives and stressed the need to shape international perceptions of the war in order to strengthen Ukraine’s negotiating position. “Today, achieving results on the front line is crucial so that Ukraine can achieve results in diplomacy,” he noted. “This is exactly how it works: All our strong positions within the country translate into strong positions in the negotiations to end the war.”

Ukraine’s recent gains in the Battle of Kupyansk do not alter the country’s precarious position at various other points along the vast front lines of Europe’s largest armed conflict since World War II. Nevertheless, Zelenskyy was right to shine a spotlight on the city. His headline-grabbing selfie video served as a timely reminder that Putin is a proven liar whose word cannot be trusted. It also confirmed that contrary to Kremlin propaganda, the Ukrainian army is far from collapse and remains a formidable fighting force.

These are exactly the messages Ukraine needs to convey to the current US administration. Donald Trump seems remarkably susceptible to Putin’s portrayal of Russia as an irresistible military force, and has repeatedly suggested that Ukraine should accept a Kremlin-friendly peace or risk destruction. The facts on the ground simply do not support this defeatist assessment.

While the Russian military holds the overall initiative and is currently advancing, it is grinding forward at glacial pace while suffering catastrophic losses. Nobody understands this better than Putin himself, who must be acutely aware that he would not need to exaggerate Russian gains and invent new triumphs if his invasion had not yielded such underwhelming results at so high a cost.

Last week’s front line visit by the Ukrainian leader underscored the fact that Russian victory is anything but inevitable. The military outlook for 2026 is actually far more nuanced. With enough international support, there is good reason to conclude that the Ukrainian army could replicate its recent Kupyansk success elsewhere and eventually stem the tide of Russia’s invasion. This is a realistic recipe for peace. Indeed, it may be the only way to pressure Moscow into serious negotiations. Putin wants the world to believe he cannot be beaten on the battlefield, but the Russian troops retreating from Kupyansk would likely tell a different story.

Peter Dickinson is editor of the Atlantic Council’s UkraineAlert service.

To gain a clearer understanding of how the New York City Cyber 9/12 Strategy Challenge is building cyber talent and crowdsourcing solutions to pressing cyber challenges, we asked teams from this year’s competition, as well as judges and organizers, about their experiences and the lessons learned.

Participating in the Cyber 9/12 competition was an invaluable experience in applying cybersecurity and policy knowledge to a complex, fast-evolving scenario. Our team learned about the importance of being thoroughly familiar with every detail of the situation and considering potential impacts from all angles, whether it be technical, political, economic, or diplomatic, to anticipate the judges’ questions and defend our recommendations.

Future competitors should be prepared to simulate the role of 24/7 cyber crisis advisors, which involves late nights of distilling urgent details into briefs within a short time frame.

Also, future competitors should focus on developing a clear, unified strategy and should practice communicating their analysis under time pressure to present a confident, well-rounded briefing. For example, teams should practice their oral briefing to get their timing down, adapt to any kinks in their presentation, get comfortable with the subject matter, and even consider alternative policy options. Teams should recognize the value of participating in this competition, as the scenario and work product we produced felt very real and reflected current challenges in cyberspace.

—The Cache of Amontillado of the University of Maryland

When the scenario first unfolded, what was your team’s immediate reaction, and how did you prioritize developing your policy responses?

When we were first presented with the scenario, we were shocked. We all had limited knowledge of the tensions in the South China Sea, and as we did our research and became more informed, our surprise did not wane. Our team was adamant about doing thorough research about the situation, and with our diverse backgrounds, we were able to compile a comprehensive situation report.

We prioritized our policies by focusing on a holistic perspective. We wanted to address the immediate issues and halt those that would have cascading effects, no matter how menial. My team also used a temporal approach to list our priorities. We highlighted what our immediate, short-term, and long-term goals were.

—UAlbany Cyber Danes of the University of Albany

Did the scenario force your team to rethink assumptions about the impact of cyberattacks on energy infrastructure?

While competing, our team viewed the cyberattacks on energy systems primarily through technical and operational lenses, with the attacks’ disruptions to power, fuel supply, and critical services. However, the scenario pushed us beyond that. We quickly realized how attacks on energy infrastructure can serve as strategic pressure points in geopolitical crises, shaping diplomacy, public perception, and coordination with allies and partners long before physical impacts fully unfold.

The simulation highlighted how adversaries may target energy assets not just to disable them but to create uncertainty, economic anxiety, and political friction. We found ourselves thinking about the cascading effects: emergency response strain, regional security implications, misinformation risks, and the need for clear public communication to maintain confidence and avoid panic.

Real-world examples like the Colonial Pipeline ransomware incident proved useful in grounding our assessment, reminding us that even short disruptions can trigger outsized reactions on a national scale.

Competing also reinforced lessons in decision-making during a crisis: managing incomplete information, prioritizing actions, and balancing rapid response with strategic restraint. When one teammate had unexpected technical issues during our presentation, we had to adapt on the spot, a small but fitting reminder that resilience is not only about technology; it’s about teamwork, preparation, and the ability to continue operating under pressure.

Overall, the competition broadened our understanding of cyber-energy crises as multidimensional problems that blend national security, diplomacy, technology, and public trust. It challenged us to think like policymakers, not technicians, and taught us how critical a coordinated, cross-sector strategy is in defending modern energy infrastructure.

—Rutgers Cybersecurity Club of Rutgers University

Were there any real-world events or policy frameworks that helped inform your team’s approach to the fictional scenario?

Our team’s approach was influenced by real-world events and existing policy frameworks around international cyber incidents and crisis management. When developing recommendations for the scenario, we drew on actual US government playbooks such as response protocols from the Department of Energy and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which emphasize containment, segmentation, and rapid restoration of infrastructure during cyber emergencies.

We modeled our strategies on past major incidents like the SolarWinds and NotPetya attacks, implementing lessons learned such as network isolation and zero-trust upgrades. International cooperation frameworks—such as those used by countries in Five Eyes, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, and the Group of Seven—inspired our emphasis on cross-border intelligence sharing, joint cyber exercises, and coordinated responses with allies. We also incorporated legal structures for escalation and attribution, referencing US law and multilateral tools in our recommendations. Ultimately, our approach balanced technical resilience, diplomatic caution, and alliance building to reflect best practices from global experience with cyber crises.

—Phish Finders of Columbia University and Fordham University

What was the most complex or unexpected challenge your team faced during the simulation, and how did you navigate it?

This was our first year competing in Cyber 9/12, so we were very nervous when submitting our decision document and written brief. As a team, the most unexpected challenge was quickly adapting our strategy to the new intelligence report that dropped ahead of the semi-final round. After the first round, we received useful feedback about how we should consider international collaboration to mitigate the Volt Typhoon. Therefore, we were ecstatic to move on to the semi-finals and have a chance to apply the feedback we were provided. Our team had both technical and policy-focused members, so we were interested in weaving together our experiences in incident response and governance.

Although challenging to balance the fast-moving and multifaceted nature of policy with the intricacies of cybersecurity, we confronted this challenge head-on by discussing and rethinking existing paradigms. Through collaboration and innovative thinking, we were able to put our best foot forward at the competition.

—Cyber Cats of Northwestern University

As a Cyber 9/12 judge and alumna, what advice would you offer to future teams preparing to compete in a Cyber 9/12 competition?

Cyber 9/12 can feel a lot bigger than it actually is. Before I participated in 2021, I didn’t think I had the know-how to compete. My first inclination was to participate as a volunteer, not a competitor. I believed that I needed to have all the technical and policy expertise first before I could sign up to join a team. Now, as both a former first-place winner and three-time judge, I realize that Cyber 9/12 is, at its core, a team sport. Like on any team, success in this competition is found when a team demonstrates a diversity of skill sets and roles.

The cybersecurity industry works like this, too—it is an amalgamation of technicians, engineers, communicators, policymakers, and program managers. Starting with the right team will make it possible to break up the competition based on each team member’s unique skill sets.

Looking at the strategy as an accumulation of its smaller parts will help a competitor weave together the narrative and then coherently deliver the story to the judges. For example, teams should consider delegating the technical risk factors to the computer science student to analyze and present and having the communicator or marketer present opening and closing remarks for the judges. At the end of the day, the most prepared teams are the ones who perform together the best.

—Danielle Neftin Errant, Cyber 9/12 Strategy Challenge judge and alumna; senior associate at JP Morgan and Chase

In your view, what specific skills are becoming most essential for future cyber leaders, and how can universities, faculty, and mentors better prepare and support students to develop those skills through experiential learning opportunities like Cyber 9/12?

One of the most essential, and often overlooked, skills for future cyber leaders is the ability to discern what they don’t know. Exercises like Cyber 9/12 sharpen that discipline by forcing students to make policy recommendations under pressure, with the perceived weight of national-level consequences attached.

In real decision environments, senior leaders want three things: first, “the situation” and what is known to be fact; second, “the analysis,” which is an interpretation of what those facts mean; and third, “the known unknown,” covering what is not known, which often defines the uncertainty that must be weighed in the decision making process.

Academic settings rarely expose students to that dynamic, yet it mirrors how decisions are actually made by senior leaders in geopolitics and national security.

Universities, faculty, and mentors can better prepare students by creating experiential learning environments like those created in Cyber 9/12 that reward discernment as much as technical precision. When students learn to separate fact from assumption, truth from influence, and confidence from overconfidence, they develop the judgment needed to recognize misinformation, foreign manipulation, and cognitive traps that risk leading to strategic miscalculation. I was fortunate to serve as a judge for two of the top three teams in the New York City competition, and one commonality between them stood out: both teams excelled at diagnosing the situation and clearly articulating what they knew to be true, what was unconfirmed (or, in some cases, possibly conjecture from biased sources), and what they did not know. That level of clarity under pressure reflects exactly the kind of discernment and communication that defines effective decision-making in cyber leadership.

—Fred Bailey, Cyber 9/12 Strategy Challenge judge; managing director at Gideon Arktos

Having transitioned from a competitor to an organizer, what insights have you gained about how scenario design and event structure can best prepare students to think critically under real-world policy and technical pressure?

Transitioning from a competitor to an organizer for Cyber 9/12 completely reshaped my understanding of what the challenge is meant to teach. When I was competing in March 2025, my team was hyper focused on crafting the best decision documents, reviewing and analyzing various frameworks that could guide our response, and anticipating judges’ questions. But once I became an organizer, I realized that the ethos of the competition does not lie in defending one’s recommendations, but instead, it is a test to see how critically one’s team can think on their feet, adapt in a fast-paced environment, and collaborate. The competition is ultimately about making consequential choices in times of uncertainty, and as a student, there’s no better skill to practice than that.

Moreover, the challenge is a logistical feat that few participants have ever seen. I have a deep appreciation for just how much effort it takes to run the show. What looks seamless from the outside (the timed intelligence reports, the brilliant judges, the smooth transitions over Zoom) is, in reality, the product of relentless coordination.

When I speak to Cyber 9/12 alumni, what strikes me most is how many describe the competition as life-changing. They talk about how it opened doors by helping them land jobs, navigate complex policy roles, and even simply think more critically in their professional lives. I can affirm the same now—Cyber 9/12 really is life-changing.

—Amiya Kumar, president, Digital and Cyber Group, Columbia University

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The Cyber Statecraft Initiative’s Cyber 9/12 Strategy Challenge is an annual cyber policy and strategy competition where students from across the globe compete in developing policy recommendations tackling a fictional cyber catastrophe.

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The Atlantic Council’s Cyber Statecraft Initiative, part of the Atlantic Council Technology Programs, works at the nexus of geopolitics and cybersecurity to craft strategies to help shape the conduct of statecraft and to better inform and secure users of technology.

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Russia’s insistence on a defenseless Ukraine betrays Putin’s true intentions

Peter Dickinson — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 08:21:08 +0000

As American, Ukrainian, and European officials continue to debate potential peace plans among themselves, there remains very little to indicate that Russia is genuinely interested in ending the war. On the contrary, many of the Kremlin’s key demands during negotiations appear tailored to facilitate a continuation of the invasion on more favorable terms.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s territorial claims alone should be enough to set off alarm bells. He insists that in order to secure a ceasefire, Ukraine must first hand over the remaining 10 percent of the Donbas region that his troops have failed to seize since the invasion first began eleven years ago.

As the ruler of what is by far the largest country in the world, Putin has no pressing need for the approximately 6600 square kilometers of Donbas territory still under Ukrainian control. Nor does the region contain any particularly important natural resources or historic sites that could justify its present position at the very heart of the peace process.

Putin’s true motivation is not difficult to discern. The unoccupied portion of the Donbas that he now so openly covets may seem relatively inconspicuous on the map, but it plays host to some of Ukraine’s strongest fortifications. Developed over the past decade, this fortress belt represents a formidable obstacle to Moscow’s invasion.

Analysts estimate that it could take years for Russia to occupy the area by force, and would likely cost the Kremlin hundreds of thousands of additional casualties. Beyond the fortress belt, the way would be open for further sweeping Russian advances into central Ukraine and toward Kyiv itself. This vital role in Ukraine’s overall defense explains why Putin is prepared to reduce his demands elsewhere but remains so eager for Kyiv to hand over this particular territory without a fight.

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Among Moscow’s many demands, the biggest red flag of all is the Kremlin’s determination to demilitarize Ukraine and deprive the country of international allies. Ever since the first round of peace talks during the initial months of the war, Putin has consistently sought to impose restrictions on the size of the Ukrainian military and the categories of weapons the country can possess. While recent drafts envision a Ukrainian army of 600,000 troops, the fact that Russia remains so keen on limiting Ukraine’s ability to defend itself is an unambiguous signal of Putin’s bad intentions.

Likewise, the Kremlin’s bitter opposition to continued international support for Ukraine betrays the reality behind Moscow’s current peace posturing. This extends far beyond Russia’s well-documented objections to Ukrainian membership of NATO. Putin’s negotiators also seek to block future arms supplies to Kyiv and have completely ruled out the possibility of even a symbolic Western troop presence in postwar Ukraine, while demonstrating a deep reluctance to accept anything resembling credible security guarantees.

Attempts to defend Russian objections on security grounds are unconvincing. Putin has debunked his own claims of a NATO security threat to Russia by reacting with obvious indifference to neighboring Finland’s NATO accession in 2022, just months after using the issue as a convenient pretext for the invasion of Ukraine. According to this bizarre Kremlin logic, Ukraine’s slim hopes of joining NATO in the distant future were sufficient grounds to unleash the largest European war since World War II, but Finland’s almost immediate membership of the alliance was “no problem” for Moscow, despite the fact that both countries share long land borders with Russia.

Putin’s refusal to countenance purely defensive commitments from Kyiv’s allies that are clearly designed to safeguard Ukrainian sovereignty is even harder to justify. If the Russian ruler intended to coexist with an independent Ukraine, he would surely recognize the need for international involvement in efforts to reestablish stability in the region. Instead, he has adopted the opposite approach. While Ukraine appeals for security guarantees, Putin seeks to guarantee Ukraine’s insecurity.

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The insincerity of Russia’s current approach to the US-led peace process should come as no surprise. After all, while Putin may be willing to consider a pause in hostilities if it comes on Kremlin-friendly terms, he simply cannot risk a peace deal that secures the continued existence of an independent Ukrainian state. Any settlement based on the present front lines of the war would leave around 80 percent of Ukraine beyond Kremlin control and free to continue along the path toward greater European integration. That is exactly what Putin is fighting to prevent.

The Kremlin dictator has always viewed his war against Ukraine in the broadest of historical contexts as a crusade to reverse the verdict of 1991 and return Russia to its rightful place as a global superpower. Like many of his contemporaries, Putin remains embittered by the Soviet collapse and determined to avenge what he perceives as modern Russia’s humiliating fall from grace. This has fuelled his obsession with independent Ukraine, which he has come to regard as the ultimate symbol of the historical injustice resulting from the breakup of the USSR.

Putin’s increasingly rabid opposition to Ukrainian independence reflects his Cold War experience as a KGB officer in East Germany, where he witnessed the disintegration of the Soviet Empire firsthand. This traumatic experience has helped to convince him that the Ukrainian state-building project now poses an existential threat to Russia itself. If Ukraine is able to consolidate its statehood and emerge as a recognizably European democracy, Putin fears this could serve as a catalyst for the next phase in a Russian imperial retreat that began with the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Over the past two decades, Putin’s determination to undermine Ukrainian statehood has come to dominate his entire reign and has led directly to a new Cold War. From the 2004 Orange Revolution to the 2014 seizure of Crimea and the full-scale invasion of 2022, Ukraine has been at the epicenter of each new milestone in the deteriorating relationship between Russia and the West.

Time after time, Putin has demonstrated his readiness to sacrifice all other Russian national interests in his quest to subjugate Ukraine and force the country permanently back into the Kremlin orbit. He has reversed decades of integration into Western economies, placed Russian society on a wartime footing, and sent hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers to their deaths. It is deeply delusional to think that he is now suddenly ready to abandon all of this and accept the reality of Ukrainian independence in exchange for the marginal gains of a compromise peace.

Putin’s own position during peace talks betrays his complete lack of interest in ending the war. His territorial demands would rob Ukraine of crucial fortifications and set the stage for further Russian advances, while his calls for restrictions on the Ukrainian armed forces and Kyiv’s ability to maintain military ties with the West would leave postwar Ukraine disarmed and defenseless. In isolation, any of these demands would look deeply suspect. Taken together, they represent overwhelming evidence of Putin’s intention to continue the invasion.

Peter Dickinson is editor of the Atlantic Council’s UkraineAlert service.

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As the bombardment of Kharkiv intensifies, events taking place one hundred kilometers to the east are reshaping the city’s broader security outlook. In recent months, advancing Russian troops have attempted to reoccupy Kupiansk. This strategically important city came under Russian occupation during the initial phase of the full-scale invasion before being liberated during Ukraine’s successful September 2022 counteroffensive. Renewed Russian gains in this direction would further strain Ukraine’s defenses and expand the aerial threat looming over Kharkiv.

As the front line creeps closer to Kharkiv, the main threat remains air strikes. Russian attacks focus on civilian targets including energy infrastructure, apartment blocks, schools, hospitals, and shopping malls. The overall intention is clear: Russia aims to degrade municipal infrastructure, disrupt essential services, and make the city unlivable for its inhabitants.

One of the most shocking attacks in recent months took place on October 22, when Russia carried out a targeted drone strike on a Kharkiv kindergarten. On that occasion, images of firefighters carrying young children from the burning building made global headlines. However, the vast majority of attacks targeting the Kharkiv population do not attract the attention of international audiences.

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Alongside drones, Kharkiv residents must also now contend with extended periods of darkness. In early November, a major Russian bombardment caused the city’s energy supply system to collapse, leaving entire districts without electricity, heating, and light. Local residents have had to adapt to the realities of life without power while navigating the city in the winter gloom. For the Kharkiv population, this has meant returning to familiar blackout routines developed during earlier Russian winter bombing campaigns.

Despite these pressures, Kharkiv continues to function and maintain an air of normality. Everyday life in the city is in many ways defined by a culture of resilience that is both practical and disciplined, reflecting years of adaptation under fire.

Utilities crews repair power lines within hours of each new Russian attack. Municipal workers immediately clear away debris from air strikes and make sure the city remains tidy, even in the most extreme of circumstances. Teachers hold classes in specially constructed underground schools or metro stations. Doctors treat patients behind boarded up windows. Each individual demonstration of resilience is a direct rejection of Russia’s efforts to depopulate Kharkiv.

In order to maintain this remarkable resilience, Kharkiv requires continued international support. Most of all, this means additional air defenses. Supporting Kharkiv is not just a matter of humanitarian assistance. It is a strategic investment in European security.

Today, Kharkiv serves as a vital bastion in eastern Ukraine. The city’s endurance makes it possible to reinforce Ukrainian front line units, bolster the country’s defenses, offer a safe haven to the region’s civilian population, and prevent the war from spreading further west. A secure Kharkiv means a stronger Ukraine and a safer Europe, but this will only be possible with help from the international community.

Maria Avdeeva is a Ukrainian security analyst. The views in this article are her own and are expressed in a personal capacity.

Why exporting advanced chips to China endangers US AI leadership

Tess deBlanc-Knowles — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 18:21:15 +0000

WASHINGTON—In a Truth Social post on Monday that shook up the global tech race, US President Donald Trump announced his approval for Nvidia to sell its H200 (“Hopper”) series chips to “approved customers” in China, with the United States receiving a 25 percent cut of the revenues.

This marks the latest pendulum swing in the administration’s approach to export controls on advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chips. In July, Trump allowed the sale of Nvidia’s less powerful H20 chips to China with a 15 percent revenue share requirement, pulling back from an April announcement that his administration would ban the sale of those same chips. Even the same morning of Trump’s announcement, the US attorney’s office in Houston trumpeted the disruption of a smuggling operation focused on exporting H200 and the older H100 chips to China.

In his post on Monday, Trump said that Chinese President Xi Jinping “responded positively” to the decision; on Tuesday a spokesperson for China’s foreign ministry dodged a question about the deal. If Xi is on board, this is significant, since when the H20 controls were lifted, China’s Cyberspace Administration banned Chinese firms from purchasing H20s, citing security concerns. Whether Xi took this step to protect domestic chip manufacturers or as a bet to unlock higher-performing exports (such as the H200s) remains unclear.

While the H200 far surpasses the capabilities of the H20, it’s still a generation behind Nvidia’s cutting-edge Blackwell chips and will soon be overshadowed by the forthcoming Rubin architecture. Prior to meeting with Xi in October, Trump floated the idea of allowing Blackwell exports. But following the meeting, Trump said that the topic did not come up. Notably, Monday’s announcement stops short of allowing the export of Blackwell chips.

The Trump administration’s rationale

The Trump administration’s calculus comes down primarily to economics and the belief that projecting US technology abroad strengthens national power. Allowing the export of H200s to China will provide Nvidia access to the world’s largest single market and likely ensures that the next generation of Chinese AI runs on US hardware.

Proponents of this approach claim this move could slow the development of China’s indigenous AI capabilities by cutting off revenue to companies such as Huawei as sales divert to Nvidia. Under Xi’s leadership, China has undertaken a concerted national strategy to build a domestic chip manufacturing capability and break free from dependence on Western technology.

The 25 percent cut from sales to the US government gives the administration another means to tout benefits to the taxpayer. Still, recent reports of a special security review that the chips will undergo before export raise questions about how processes will be structured to legally charge this fee. Expect more from the administration in the coming days on how it will navigate this novel approach.

By approving exports of H200 chips but not Blackwell chips, the administration is attempting to strike a compromise position between those who see the advantages of strengthening Nvidia’s global market share and those worried about eroding the United States’ AI advantage.

US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping talk as they leave after a bilateral meeting in Busan, South Korea, on October 30, 2025. (REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein)

The real implications

The United States and China are locked in an existential race for AI supremacy. Until now, the United States’ one true advantage has been access to cutting-edge compute.

In recent years, China has proven that it can build frontier models that rival the performance of the leading models in the United States. It produces top AI talent and has cultivated a vibrant AI start-up ecosystem. Chinese companies have access to the same data as their US counterparts while also benefiting from internal data, such as that stemming from China’s surveillance state and widespread AI deployment. China also has a leg up in terms of energy generation, producing more than twice the electricity that the United States did in 2024.

Where the United States maintains a definitive edge is on aggregate computing power. As of mid-2025, the US share of global AI computing power reached 74 percent, with China at only 14 percent. Aggregate computing power is critical for training new frontier models, supporting the widespread use of AI and new applications of the technology, and exploring new architectures and pathways toward more powerful systems. Recent reporting finds that much of the compute used by companies such as OpenAI is in service of research.

Allowing Chinese companies to purchase H200 chips will significantly degrade this advantage. Chinese companies will likely pursue a strategy of scale, networking H200 chips into clusters that could rival the performance of Blackwell chips, albeit with a higher price tag. This is a strategy already widely employed in China to maximize the performance of their domestically produced, lower-end chips. With access to H200 chips, Chinese firms will be positioned to train the next generation of models and provide cloud-computing services beyond their borders. This would put them into competition with US providers for international market share and fundamentally undermine the Trump administration’s goal of establishing the US AI tech stack as the global standard.

Estimates for how far China’s domestic chip manufacturing capability lags that of the United States range from five to fifteen years. Currently, China cannot produce at scale to meet domestic demand. The Trump administration has estimated, for example, that major Chinese tech giant Huawei can only produce 200,000 of its Ascent AI chips this year, which is only 1-2 percent of estimated US production. Access to H200s could bridge this gap, allowing Chinese AI companies to compete globally until domestic manufacturing capability has reached parity. At which point, they would almost certainly move away from Nvidia.

From a national security perspective, many fear that H200 chips will not only bolster Chinese industry but also the People’s Liberation Army’s defense capabilities. Given China’s civil-military fusion doctrine, restricting sales to approved corporate entities likely won’t prevent military use.

Finally, the question remains whether Nvidia has the capacity to serve the Chinese market without eroding its ability to meet demand from US companies. Already, surging demand from data center build-outs is putting stress on the supply chain, and research universities are struggling to procure chips to support crucial research and education efforts.

As China moves forward to aggressively integrate AI into every aspect of its economy and society, as outlined in its recent “AI plus” initiative, providing the computational fuel to realize this vision will supercharge the United States’ strongest AI competitor, significantly endangering the Trump administration’s own global AI ambitions.

The post Why exporting advanced chips to China endangers US AI leadership appeared first on Atlantic Council.

Ukraine’s wartime experience provides blueprint for infrastructure protection

Oleksandr Bakalinskyi, Maggie McDonough — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 15:36:56 +0000

When cyberattacks and missile strikes converge on the same targets, infrastructure resilience becomes more than a technical mandate; it becomes a matter of national survival. For Ukraine, this is not a hypothetical future scenario. On the contrary, it has been daily reality for more than a decade.

Since 2014, Ukraine’s power grid, banking system, telecommunications networks, and digital infrastructure have faced sustained and increasingly sophisticated attacks. Yet these systems continue to function, adapt, and evolve, offering the world one of the most comprehensive case studies for how national infrastructure can endure under unrelenting cyber-kinetic pressure.

Ukraine’s experience reveals clearly that defending critical infrastructure is no longer simply a matter of cybersecurity. It requires a fundamentally different approach grounded in cyber-physical resilience, decentralization, system redundancy, institutional autonomy, and the capacity to sustain essential services, even when networks fail.

Industrial control systems were not designed for modern cyber warfare. The systems that operate electrical substations, power distribution logistics, and grid balancing typically prioritize availability and uptime rather than cyber defense. Russia exploited this structural vulnerability in 2015 and 2016, when Ukraine became the first country in history to suffer a nationwide power outage triggered by a cyberattack.

The same attacks that exposed digital fragility also revealed Ukraine’s greatest source of strength: Analog resilience. Even as digital control systems were compromised, engineers were able to manually isolate impacted grid segments, reroute power, and restore transmission through mechanical overrides and localized network segmentation.

The lessons are clear. While digital modernization delivers efficiency, full digital dependency creates systemic brittleness. Meanwhile, resilience can be enhanced through layered systems that incorporate manual fallbacks, localized control, and the ability to physically outmaneuver a digital attack. And while the ability to manually connect electricity to an electrical substation was not by design, the lack of digitalization at the time of the attacks proved to be an advantage in terms of service restoration speed.

The global takeaway from Ukraine’s grid defense is not a rejection of modernization; it is a rejection of exclusively digital modernization. True resilience requires hybrid architectures in which digital innovation is paired with analog redundancy, segmented control, and last resort options when networks are taken down.

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If the Ukrainian power grid demonstrated the value of technical redundancy, Ukraine’s banking sector has shown the value of institutional autonomy. The National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) has emerged since the onset of Russian aggression as one of the most effective national actors in defending and sustaining critical infrastructure under attack. This has not only been due to advanced cybersecurity measures, but also thanks to operational freedom to act in line with the pace of the threat environment. The NBU has rapidly introduced mandatory security protocols, created a dedicated incident response unit, synchronized directly with law enforcement, and deployed real-time regulatory updates to address emerging vulnerabilities.

This capacity for decisiveness has helped ensure continuity in one of the country’s most essential sectors. Even under sustained digital attack, Ukrainians could still access their bank accounts, make electronic payments, and rely on national financial infrastructure without systemic interruption.

The most innovative aspect of this resilience came in the form of the Power Banking Initiative, a nationwide network of bank branches retrofitted for operational continuity during extended outages. Equipped with alternative energy sources, satellite communications, secure cash storage, and offline transaction capacities, these branches ensured uninterrupted access to currency, transfers, and basic banking services during power blackouts and infrastructure disruptions.

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Ukraine’s experience confirms that the boundary between cyberattacks and conventional warfare is often blurred. In many cases, the two elements are sequenced, synchronized, and structurally interdependent. Cyber operations can blind infrastructure sensors, disrupt communications, compromise operational decision-making, and erode trust in essential systems, often in direct coordination with physical strikes.

Resilience does not depend on preventing breaches, but on the ability to sustain essential services when breaches succeed. This requires a hybrid framework that integrates digital security, infrastructure continuity planning, and decentralized operational responses.

Alignment with EU and NATO standards will accelerate interoperability with allied infrastructure defense systems and enable long-term investment security. Compliance must move beyond voluntary adoption to formal certification, standardized auditing, and enforceable resilience benchmarks for infrastructure operators.

Ukraine’s national bank has shown the importance of sector-specific response units. This model should expand to the energy, telecommunications, transportation, healthcare, and regional government systems. In order to be effective, response units require independent monitoring authority, 24/7 threat detection, digital forensics, and integration into NATO and EU cyber fusion hubs.

Infrastructure resilience also demands institutionalized public-private intelligence sharing. A legally protected, mandatory, real-time intelligence exchange will shorten detection timelines and prevent cascading failures. Critical infrastructure owners must integrate into national security information-sharing with liability protections, rapid alert systems, and reciprocal intelligence flows.

Looking ahead, a national resilience investment fund should pool Ukrainian government resources, EU support, World Bank guarantees, EBRD/EIB financing, and private capital to enable infrastructure segmentation, micro-grid deployment, backup power systems, secure cloud environments, and hardened data centers. However, none of these technical investments will succeed without sufficient human capital. Ukraine should aim to develop a minimum of 10,000 new security specialists through university partnerships, military-civilian pipelines, veteran reskilling programs, and national cyber reserves.

Today, Ukraine possesses infrastructure resilience tested continuously under real cyber-kinetic attack. This unique experience should form the basis of international efforts to enhance critical infrastructure resilience. Ukraine can lead an international training center, host multinational resilience exercises, publish attack anatomy case files, and shape new NATO and EU doctrine. This would allow Kyiv to position itself not only as a defender, but as an architect of resilient infrastructure strategy.

Dr. Oleksandr Bakalinskyi is a Senior Researcher at the G. E. Pukhov Institute for Modeling in Energy Engineering at the National Academy of Sciences in Ukraine. Maggie McDonough is the Senior Vice President and Chief Innovation Officer at the Baltimore Development Corporation. She was previously affiliated with the Purdue Applied Research Institute (PARI) and Purdue’s Center for Education & Research in Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS), where she served as a technical advisor on global cyber security resilience programming.

At the start of the full-scale invasion, Ukraine’s vibrant tech sector represented an important asset that the authorities in Kyiv were quick to mobilize. This tech prowess helped cement the country’s strategic focus on drones, which could be designed and produced domestically to compensate for a lack of more conventional weapons.

Since 2022, the number of Ukrainian companies developing drones has skyrocketed, while annual output has risen to millions of units. This has allowed Ukraine to establish a “drone wall” along the front lines of the conflict, making any buildup of enemy forces extremely challenging. Over the past year, around three-quarters of all Russian casualties have been as a result of Ukrainian drones.

At sea, Ukraine has used drones to sink multiple warships and break the Russian navy’s Black Sea blockade, forcing Putin to withdraw the bulk of his remaining fleet from Russian-occupied Crimea. Ukraine’s growing drone capabilities have also made it possible to bring Putin’s invasion home to Russia with an escalating campaign of deep strikes on military and industrial targets across the Russian Federation.

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Russia has responded to Kyiv’s groundbreaking use of drone warfare by studying Ukrainian tactics and technologies, while also dramatically expanding its own domestic drone manufacturing base. The Kremlin has been aided in this by allies including China and Iran, who have provided vital components along with the blueprints for key drone designs.

The Kremlin strategy has focused on mass producing a limited range of models for use on the battlefield and in the bombardment of Ukrainian cities. This methodical approach has paid dividends. By the end of 2024, it was already becoming clear that the drone war was turning in Russia’s favor. This trend has only intensified over the past year.

One of Russia’s most important innovations has been the widespread use of fiber-optic drones. These drones are controlled by a wire connected directly to the operator, making them immune to jamming technologies and extremely difficult to intercept.

Russian commanders first began using large quantities of fiber-optic drones during fighting in late 2024 to push Ukrainian troops out of Russia’s Kursk region. The drones proved highly effective at disrupting Ukrainian logistics by targeting supply vehicles. This was widely seen as a crucial factor behind the success of the operation.

Russia has now replicated and scaled up these tactics throughout southern and eastern Ukraine, creating a drone wall of its own while reaching deeper and deeper into Ukrainian-controlled territory. Fiber-optic drones are being used to ambush supply vehicles far behind the front lines, forcing Ukraine to become increasingly reliant on ground robotics to supply combat units and evacuate the wounded.

In addition to striking Ukrainian logistics, Russian drone forces are also prioritising attacks on their Ukrainian counterparts, forcing Ukrainian drone crews to pull further back from the line of contact to ensure safety. This distance gives Russian operators room to move their own teams forward, increasing their ability to dominate the battlefield.

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Russia’s Rubicon drone unit has emerged during 2025 as a prominent symbol of the Kremlin’s rapidly evolving and increasingly effective drone warfare strategy. Highly trained and well funded Rubicon teams are leading the campaign to cut Ukraine’s supply lines and widen the kill zone.

Crucially, Rubicon pilots pass their experience on to newcomers and provide extensive training that is helping to improve the effectiveness of other Russian army drone units. According to Ukrainian drone commander Yurii Fedorenko, Rubicon can rapidly scale up drone units using manpower and financial advantages that Ukraine cannot replicate.

In the drone war between Russia and Ukraine, the Kremlin is betting on mass and hoping that a combination of smart choices, specialised production, extensive training, and sheer numbers will eventually overwhelm Ukraine’s technological edge. In contrast, Kyiv continues to rely on a highly decentralised ecosystem of volunteer groups, startups, and military workshops producing a wide variety of different drone models. This diversity helps to drive innovation but also creates coordination challenges.

The current effectiveness of Russia’s drone units does not mean the drone war has shifted decisively in Moscow’s favor, but recent trends do expose a gap that Ukraine must urgently close. In order to counter Russia’s increasingly centralised and well-resourced drone formations, Kyiv needs to adopt key elements of the Rubicon model. This means scaling up training pipelines, sharing front line experience more systematically, and ensuring Ukrainian drone units have all the resources they need to hunt down Russian operators and regain the initiative.

Since 2022, the Russian military has been widely mocked for its primitive “human wave” tactics and generally poor performance in Ukraine. However, the progress made by Russia in drone warfare indicates an army that is fully capable of learning, adapting, and innovating. Moscow has not been able to achieve any major technological breakthroughs, but Russian military strategists have significantly strengthened their country’s position by concentrating on scale, training, and relentless battlefield experimentation.

This progress should be a major wake-up call for European leaders. Small numbers of suspected Russian drones are already causing chaos and disruption across Europe. The longer the war in Ukraine lasts, the more advanced Russia’s drone capabilities will become.

David Kirichenko is an associate research fellow at the Henry Jackson Society.

Executive summary

President Donald Trump’s policies are substantially reshaping prospects for transatlantic cooperation across a range of policy areas. In digital competition, the picture is complex. The Trump administration opposes Europe’s competition regulation, but both the European Commission and US federal and state competition enforcers have similar priorities when it comes to competition in digital markets.

US-European Union (EU) dialogue could help make interventions to promote digital competition more effective. It could boost consistency (helping firms adopt the same remedies across both sides of the Atlantic) and help regulators share knowledge and best practices. Beyond technical alignment, EU and US authorities can coordinate on narratives and messaging, ensuring that regulatory measures are perceived as fair and mitigating the risk of digital competition policy fueling foreign policy disputes.

At a recent roundtable hosted by the Centre on Regulation in Europe (CERRE) and the Atlantic Council, we identified the following recommendations for competition enforcers on digital antitrust.

The European Commission and national competition authorities should continue to cooperate with US federal agencies and strengthen their cooperation with US state attorneys general, given their important role in US digital antitrust cases.
To effectively learn from each other’s experience with remedies, and to enhance mutual learning and correct remedies when needed, competition agencies in both the EU and the United States should have a robust, evidence-based assessment about how their remedies have performed.
The European Commission needs to improve its communication strategy when pursuing antitrust cases. Antitrust enforcement must be closely linked to consumer welfare, competitiveness, and economic growth. Enhancing its legitimacy can help ensure European competition enforcers withstand any political pressure.
Europe needs to better highlight how open and competitive markets foster innovation. Tools to open competition are therefore important ways to support US and European global technological leadership.

In relation to merger policy, competition authorities on both sides of the Atlantic are evolving to better tackle the role of innovation in digital markets. Recommendations include the following.

EU and US authorities should develop consistent guidelines setting out how they will assess a merger’s impacts on innovation capabilities (such as chips and computing power, skills, data, and risky and patient capital) and incentives to innovate. Pro-innovation merger control should promote the new innovators and not protect the old ones.
The Directorate-General for Competition (DG-Comp) should aim to learn from the US merger guidelines and US authorities’ recent practices to inform the EU’s current exercise of revising its own guidelines.
As with antitrust remedies, competition authorities in both the EU and the United States must be honest and clear about how their merger remedies have performed, so that different authorities can become better by learning from each other’s successes and mistakes.

Introduction

Trump’s policies have challenged the transatlantic relationship and are reshaping prospects for transatlantic cooperation. On digital competition, the picture is particularly complex. The president and some of his appointees to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) Antitrust Division oppose Europe’s competition regulation, the Digital Markets Act (DMA)—and the president recently threatened to investigate the EU’s nearly €3 billion fine imposed on Google as an unfair trade barrier under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974. Despite this, when it comes to ex post digital antitrust cases, US federal and state competition enforcers and the European Commission have similar priorities. More broadly, competition authorities on both sides of the Atlantic are grappling with how to adopt consistent, principled, and predictable approaches in digital markets. This can better take innovation, investment, and firms’ capabilities into consideration during competitive analysis, and a consistent approach is key for global corporations.

US-EU dialogue could help improve the efficiency and effectiveness of interventions to promote digital competition. It could do the following.

Facilitate mutually consistent approaches to common regulatory challenges, reducing burdens on regulators and making it easier for global firms to adopt the same business models across both sides of the Atlantic.
Even where consistency is not possible, help regulators by sharing knowledge and best practices, or even help authorities to divide and conquer in areas such as ex post antitrust cases in which authorities on both sides of the Atlantic are pursuing similar goals.
Mitigate the risks of foreign policy disputes as digital competition interventions increasingly have cross-border impacts, and as the Trump administration bristles at foreign governments enforcing competition law and pro-competitive regulation against US champions.

But how can this mutually beneficial cooperation be maintained? In 2021, the EU and United States established a Joint Technology Competition Policy Dialogue, supplementing established agreements between the European and US competition agencies, and there is still dialogue between antitrust enforcers. However, given the growing perception of a difference in values between the EU and the United States, and tensions on a range of topics from trade to defense, prospects for cooperation risk becoming narrower in the future.

Cooperation on digital antitrust

European and US authorities have a significant degree of alignment on ex post antitrust enforcement in the digital sector. In digital markets, large firms have often argued that highly innovative digital markets had natural “winner take all” characteristics, but there is nevertheless competition for the market. These firms argue they are subjected to significant competitive pressure from those who might displace them with disruptive innovation and, therefore, have strong incentives to keep innovating. This implies a marginal role for competition agencies. In practice, however, many digital markets have seen little displacement of incumbents in recent years. Effective antitrust remedies not only enforce competition law but also create space for innovation, enabling new entrants and disruptive technologies to challenge incumbents and thrive. While, until recently, innovation in some markets appeared to have slowed, there is an open question about how much artificial intelligence (AI) could disrupt the architecture of digital ecosystems—and whether that implies antitrust authorities should step back or play a role in keeping this possibility open.

In the meantime, competition authorities in the EU and United States have become more assertive. On the US side, the FTC and DOJ are pursuing cases against tech firms brought under previous administrations, despite the Republican Party’s traditional light-touch approach to antitrust. The FTC and DOJ’s approach is fueled by a view that conservative antitrust must not allow “private tyranny,” just as it is opposed to government tyranny.¹ In particular, FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson has applauded that “this administration . . . is rediscovering the wisdom of taking competition enforcement seriously.”²

In Europe, although there have been few new antitrust cases under the new European Commission, a number of ongoing cases are being pursued against the same firms, on similar timeframes and in relation to similar conduct. These cases have been supplemented by enforcement action under the DMA. Some of these cases might have different underlying motivations—with US authorities more concerned with the potential role of large technology firms in stifling plurality of voices online, and the EU more concerned with ensuring market contestability. But they nevertheless illustrate authorities’ common challenges, particularly how to design remedies for highly complex and fast-moving digital markets.

EU and US competition policies increasingly interact. For example, in a case brought by the US DOJ and some states against Google regarding its conduct in the search market, the DOJ sought an extensive list of potential remedies, including data-sharing rules that looked similar to obligations in the EU’s DMA. In September 2025, the district court decided to apply a narrower data-sharing remedy. A similar question about alignment of remedies will arise in the EU and US cases concerning Google’s digital advertising technologies.

However, challenges remain in coordinating antitrust actions on both sides of the Atlantic.

A first challenge is ensuring that the tenets of antitrust analysis remain synchronized. Protecting disruptive innovation in digital markets, for example, might require identifying robust theories of harm closer to market realities and moving away from reliance on static market definitions. However, the US legal system—in which the FTC and DOJ must convince a judge of their case—makes EU-US alignment difficult. Even if EU and US competition authorities agree on a common approach to a particular case, judges might take a different approach. In particular, competition cases in the United States go before generalist US judges, some of whom might be relatively conservative about government intervention. For example, European competition agencies are exploring how large firms can stymie disruptors by preventing their access to inputs to innovate or impacting their access to customers. They have used these concerns to rework the essential facilities doctrine and the tests for when discrimination is anticompetitive (with EU courts often sympathetic to their approaches, as in the Google Shopping and Android Auto cases).³ However, there is limited evidence that US courts are as willing to see principles evolve.

A second challenge is remedy design. Ex post antitrust remedies can have global impacts—for example, by raising costs of operating different business models in different countries, or by requiring structural changes to large firms or technical changes that cannot be implemented at a regional level. Conversely, for firms that can benefit from remedies, a consistent approach to remedy design in the EU and United States could lower costs and allow innovative firms to scale faster. Securing consistent approaches to remedies between the EU, the United States, and third countries such as the United Kingdom could therefore have widespread benefits. There is acceptance that past remedies in tech antitrust cases have sometimes not been very effective, and that innovation seems to have played more of a role than antitrust remedies in promoting competition in digital markets. Both sides seem to be learning from these past experiences, but they have adopted different lessons. The EU has sought to front-end tougher remedies in the DMA while, in the US Google Search case, the judge adopted a narrower set of remedies and instead put more faith in possibilities for AI to disrupt online search markets. Both European and US authorities can benefit from robust and transparent evaluations of past remedies, learning from successes and failures to design more effective interventions in the future.

Thirdly, the EU and United States also take different approaches to the merits of ex ante digital competition regulation. Europe’s DMA has few influential friends among the current US administration. Trump has implied he sees the law as an attack on “the growth or intended operation of United States companies,” and FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson has described the DMA as a “tax on American companies” and one which is “overly rigid,” despite most of the beneficiaries of the DMA being US firms.⁴ The EU’s objectives with the DMA were to foster a competitive and fair digital market, creating opportunities for challenger firms from both Europe and the United States, and supporting the West’s global technological leadership. From a European perspective, there is no appetite to rescind or water down the DMA; Commissioner Teresa Ribera has signaled the European Commission would take a “brave” approach to enforcement and has fined Apple and Meta for noncompliance.⁵ However, there is a widespread perception that the commission is tailoring its enforcement approach to reflect the current environment. For example, the Apple and Meta fines came only after the commission missed its own self-imposed deadlines, seemingly to avoid torpedoing EU-US trade talks.⁶

There is also a question of how European and US regulatory authorities can best cooperate and coordinate in practice, given the different timeframes and processes of their respective cases and concerns in the United States about Europe taking the lead on antitrust matters. Ferguson, for example, has argued, “If we think that Americans are suffering from anticompetitive conduct at home, we should address it here at home . . . I don’t want the Europeans doing it for us.”⁷ The EU and United States have a positive comity agreement, which allows one party affected by anticompetitive behavior originating in the other party to request that said party address the conduct. But this agreement has never been used in practice. Under the Trump presidency, the European Commission has shown a desire to allow the United States to take the lead. For example, in the Google AdTech case, the European Commission has found that Google breached competition law. However, the US federal court also considered remedies in its case regarding the same conduct. The commission has therefore delayed a final decision on remedies, stating that it wanted to “ensure that Google puts in place an effective remedy on both sides of the Atlantic . . . It is in everyone’s interest to achieve a joint outcome, including for Google itself, and for citizens worldwide.”⁸ While in principle such an approach might lead to harmonization, and would provide the EU with political cover, it poses the risk of delaying the imposition of remedies or encouraging the EU to accept remedies that might prove ineffective in the European context.

The broader political backdrop remains challenging. Trump has challenged the independence of numerous public authorities, including the FTC—and there is a risk of the president seeking to change the direction of US digital antitrust policy in the future. On the European side, while the EU secured a trade deal with the United States without needing to change its digital antitrust or digital regulation, the European Commission’s enforcement of the DMA and competition law—both procedurally and substantively—already appears to have been influenced by fears of triggering retaliation by the United States. It is difficult to see how the EU can adopt a rigorous and independent approach while remaining dependent on the United States for its security.

These challenges suggest several lessons for competition enforcers.

The European Commission and national competition authorities should continue cooperating with the US federal agencies and strengthen their cooperation with US state attorneys general, given their important role in US digital antitrust cases.
To effectively learn from each other’s experience with remedies, and to enhance mutual learning and correct remedies when needed, competition agencies in both the EU and the United States should have a robust evidence-based assessment of how their remedies have performed.
The European Commission needs to improve its communication strategy when pursuing antitrust cases. Antitrust enforcement must be closely linked to consumer welfare, competitiveness, and economic growth. Enhancing its legitimacy can help ensure European competition enforcers withstand any political pressure.
Europe needs to better highlight how open and competitive markets foster innovation instead of protection of national champions. Tools to open competition are therefore important ways to support US and European global technological leadership.

Merger policy and innovation

The discussion on antitrust enforcement naturally leads to questions about how merger policy can also protect innovation and competition in digital markets. Both EU and US approaches to competition policy are evolving to better tackle the role of innovation in digital markets. In particular, there is growing unease that competition authorities need to improve how they approach the impacts of a merger on innovation.

Reflecting these concerns, the United States updated its merger guidelines in 2023 after a two-year process. Merger guidelines are traditionally intended to describe the FTC and DOJ practices to the public, businesses, and courts—such as setting out important questions to which the agencies seek answers during the review process, including what type of evidence they are looking for and how that evidence is typically analyzed. However, the updated guidelines have been perceived by some as a more political document and a statement of the agencies’ intent to toughen merger policy, with more mergers likely to be presumed anticompetitive and the introduction of novel theories of harm. These guidelines remain in place for now, despite changes of leadership at the DOJ and FTC.⁹

The European Commission is still in the process of updating its merger guidelines, a process that it aims to finalize in 2027. Recently, both Mario Draghi and Commission President Ursula von den Leyen have pushed for the process to speed up. Much of the debate has centered on the importance of scale. Draghi’s report on European competitiveness—often interpreted as reigniting discussion about the merits of allowing EU firms to merge to create more innovative “European champions”—also proposed an innovation defense to allow mergers that would otherwise be prohibited. While some consider the report to be misunderstood, Draghi’s subsequent speeches have contributed to the perception that he is arguing for a loosening of merger policy. However, the extent to which new guidelines will (or can) represent a significant evolution in approach is unclear.

First, in Europe, different stakeholders have vastly different objectives when they argue that innovation (and other factors such as resilience) should play a bigger role in merger review. For enforcers, taking innovation into account might imply being able to intervene in more mergers; it is difficult to argue that EU merger policy has been too lax given that only a tiny proportion of mergers have ever been prohibited. For other stakeholders, the objective of giving innovation a stronger role in merger policy is to allow more deals. It is unclear how the guidelines can promote European champions while preventing foreign competitors from engaging in similar large-scale mergers.
Second, the recommendations in Draghi’s report are modest. His report has been understood to propose relaxing EU competition law constraints on mergers of major industrial companies. In fact, he acknowledges that a dominant firm would still be precluded from making use of the innovation defense, which would make it inapplicable in almost all cases in which a merger is blocked today. It would also be accompanied by strict safeguards and investment commitments by the merging parties. If Draghi’s proposal is adopted, there might not be much difference from today’s efficiency defense, which has never changed the outcome of a merger review process in Europe (though that might be, in part, because so few mergers are challenged in the first place or because the efficiency defenses have not been clearly articulated or sufficiently convincing). Therefore, there is a significant gap between some of the political rhetoric surrounding the review and the technical reality.
Third, the EU’s existing merger guidelines have already been superseded by changes in the commission’s practices, so the urgency of a new set of guidelines can be overstated. In reality, the guidelines should not be a statement of intent but, rather, a description of current practices and approaches. This means they might not fundamentally change case-specific analysis.
Fourth, it is difficult to see how changes in merger review alone will significantly alter the EU’s innovation trajectory. In the absence of further development of the single market, and greater availability of venture capital, highly innovative European firms will remain more likely to move to the United States or be acquired by foreign companies rather than remain European.

This might mean that—despite the call for a fundamental change in approach in Europe—the EU and the United States will stay relatively aligned.

One area in which divergence remains a risk is adopting predictable approaches to assessing the impact of a merger on capabilities and incentives to innovate, particularly in relation to disruptive innovation. Competition authorities have pursued theories of harm based on how a merger might impact innovation, even in the absence of immediate impacts on price or quality in particular markets. For example, innovation and innovative capabilities (or access to assets considered essential for innovations) featured heavily in cases such as Dow-DuPont, Amazon-iRobot, Facebook-Giphy (in the UK), and Google-FitBit. However, these cases have often (but not exclusively) focused on sustaining innovation rather than disruptive innovation. Where competition authorities have taken disruptive innovation into account (such as the UK authority in Facebook-Giphy) or examined markets for research and development (as the US and EU authorities did in the Illumina/Grail merger) they were highly criticized for making the results of merger reviews unpredictable.

Authorities will need to make decisions when the evolution of markets is not fully certain. An insistence on only acting when the anticompetitive outcome is undeniable will, on the whole, lead to less competition. On one hand, this suggests authorities should be humble. Sources of disruptive innovation are hard to identify beforehand, which suggests some firms might have more vulnerable positions than static markers of market power might imply. On the other hand, if authorities take the need to protect possibilities for disruptive innovation seriously, this might help illuminate previously under-identified types of anticompetitive effects, such as mergers that stymie potentially disruptive firms even if they appear to be in an unconnected market. This might require defining markets for innovation or focusing more on firms’ capabilities, their management practices, and their strategies in merger review.¹⁰ While the outcomes might not always be predictable, EU and US authorities could work together to try to ensure more transatlantic consistency when identifying the impact of a merger on innovation and incentives to innovate. This could increase certainty about the process and framework that competition authorities will adopt.

A second area of potential conflict is whether competition authorities should seek to promote certain types of innovation over others. In line with the Trump administration’s broader deregulatory approach, US competition authorities appear to be taking an agnostic and free-market approach to this question. In contrast, European authorities have emphasized how merger control can contribute to innovation in the area of sustainability and protect incentives for green innovation.¹¹ This includes reflecting customer and government preferences for sustainable products when defining markets. For example, when the European Commission prohibited the Hyundai-Daewoo merger in 2022, it took into account the parties’ incentives to invest in lower-emission liquefied natural gas (LNG) vessels.

A third area of divergence risk relates to politicization of the merger process in both the EU and United States. More than ever, there is a perceived risk of US merger policy and practice being influenced by industry lobbying and top-down political influence. The lack of an institutionally independent competition regulator at the EU means this also remains a risk in Europe. Industry capture could happen at the level of guidelines—where there is a risk of helping today’s largest European companies rather than promoting the growth of disruptive and innovative firms—or on a case-by-case basis. There have been previous merger cases in which the formal technical analysis did not align well with the final decision reached. In this respect, updating the EU’s merger guidelines—by reducing the European Commission’s room for maneuver in response to political pressure—could provide significant cover for taking difficult decisions.

Lessons for merger review authorities include the following.

EU and US authorities should develop consistent guidelines setting out how they will assess the impacts of a merger on innovation capabilities (such as chips and computing power, skills, data, and risky and patient capital) and incentives to innovate. A pro-innovation merger control should promote the new innovators and not protect the old ones.
DG-Comp should aim to identify and adopt positive aspects of the revised US merger guidelines and US authorities’ recent practices to inform the EU’s current exercise of revising its own guidelines. For example, adopting the US approach by combining horizontal guidelines (which signal how a competition authority examines mergers between direct competitors) and vertical guidelines (which signal the approach to mergers between players at different points in the supply chain) would prove useful to ensure the European Commission thinks holistically about the impact of mergers on innovation, including in digital ecosystems in which horizontal and vertical concerns can be closely related. On the other hand, the EU guidelines still need to follow and reflect DG-COMP’s practices and should avoid becoming politically charged or signaling major changes to the EU approach.

As with antitrust remedies, competition authorities in both the EU and the United States must be honest and clear about how their merger remedies have performed, so different authorities can become better by learning from each other’s successes and mistakes. This will be especially important if there is increasing use of long-term investment commitments as a merger remedy (as in the UK with the Vodafone-O2 merger, and as recommended by Draghi). Such an approach can help ensure authorities across the Atlantic can work with each other. DG-COMP’s previous retrospective studies on remedies are an excellent starting point.

About the author

Zach Meyers is the director of research at the Centre on Regulation in Europe (CERRE). Previously the assistant director of the Centre on European Reform, Meyers has a recognized expertise in economic regulation and network industries such as telecoms, energy, payments, financial services and airports. In addition to advising in the private sector, with more than ten years’ experience as a competition and regulatory lawyer, he has consulted to governments, regulators, and multilateral institutions on competition reforms in regulated sectors.

This issue brief benefits from the insights of discussants at an online roundtable on EU-US regulatory co-operation hosted jointly by CERRE and the Atlantic Council. However, the contents of this brief are attributable only to the author.

About CERRE

Providing high-quality studies and dissemination activities, the Centre on Regulation in Europe (CERRE) is a not-for-profit think tank. It promotes robust and consistent regulation in Europe’s network, digital industry, and service sectors. CERRE’s members are regulatory authorities and companies operating in these sectors, as well as universities.

CERRE’s added value is based on

its original, multidisciplinary, and cross-sector approach covering a variety of markets (e.g., energy, mobility, sustainability, technology, media, and telecommunications);
the widely acknowledged academic credentials and policy experience of its research team and associated staff members;
its scientific independence and impartiality; and
the direct relevance and timeliness of its contributions to the policy and regulatory development process impacting network industry players and the markets for their goods and services.

CERRE’s activities include contributions to the development of norms, standards, and policy recommendations related to the regulation of service providers, to the specification of market rules, and to improvements in the management of infrastructure in a changing political, economic, technological, and social environment. CERRE’s work also aims to clarify the respective roles of market operators, governments, and regulatory authorities, as well as contribute to the enhancement of those organizations’ expertise in addressing regulatory issues of relevance to their activities.

About the Atlantic Council

The Atlantic Council promotes constructive leadership and engagement in international affairs based on the Atlantic community’s central role in meeting global challenges. The council provides an essential forum for navigating the dramatic economic and political changes defining the twenty-first century by informing and galvanizing its uniquely influential network of global leaders. The Atlantic Council—through the papers it publishes, the ideas it generates, the future leaders it develops, and the communities it builds—shapes policy choices and strategies to create a more free, secure, and prosperous world.

The Atlantic Council’s Europe Center conducts research and uses real-time analysis to inform the actions and strategies of key transatlantic decision-makers in the face of great-power competition and a geopolitical rewiring of Europe. The center convenes US and European leaders to promote dialogue and make the case for the US-EU partnership as a key asset for the United States and Europe alike. The center’s Transatlantic Digital Marketplace Initiative seeks to foster greater US-EU understanding and collaboration on digital policy matters and makes recommendations for building cooperation and ameliorating differences in this fast-growing area of the transatlantic economy.

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1 “Assistant Attorney General Gail Slater Delivers First Antitrust Address at University of Notre Dame Law School,” US Department of Justice, April 28, 2025, https://www.justice.gov/opa/speech/assistant-attorney-general-gail-slater-delivers-first-antitrust-address-university-notre.

2 Andrew N Ferguson, “Competition in the 21st Century: Heeding the Rallying Cry for Deregulation,” US Federal Trade Commission, May 7, 2025, https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/chairman-ferguson-2025-icn-remarks.pdf.

3 “Judgment of the Court (Grand Chamber ) of 25 February 2025: Alphabet Inc. and Others v Autorità Garante della Concorrenza e del Mercato,” European Union, February 25, 2025, https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=celex:62023CJ0233.

4 “Defending American Companies and Innovators From Overseas Extortion and Unfair Fines and Penalties,” White House, February 21, 2025, https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/02/defending-american-companies-and-innovators-from-overseas-extortion-and-unfair-fines-and-penalties/.

5 Francesca Micheletti, “Trump’s Antitrust Agency Chief Blasts EU Digital Rules as ‘Taxes on American Firms,’” Politico, April 2, 2025, https://www.politico.eu/article/trumps-antitrust-agency-chief-blasts-eu-digital-rules-as-taxes-on-american-firms/.

6 Francesca Micheletti and Jacob Parry, “Big Tech Fines Just Got Political, Whether the Commission Likes It or Not,” Politico, April 14, 2025, https://www.politico.eu/article/big-tech-fines-digital-markets-act-political-european-commission-meta-apple-donald-trump-tariffs/.

7 Micheletti, “Trump’s Antitrust Agency Chief Blasts EU Digital Rules as ‘Taxes on American Firms.’”

8 “Statement by Executive Vice-President Ribera on the Adoption of the Google Adtech Decision,” European Commission, September 4, 2025, https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/statement_25_2034.

9 “Chairman Ferguson Memo re Merger Guidelines,” US Federal Trade Commission, February 18, 2025, https://www.ftc.gov/legal-library/browse/cases-proceedings/public-statements/chairman-ferguson-memo-re-merger-guidelines.

10 Giulio Federico, Fiona Scott Morton, and Carl Shapiro, “Antitrust and Innovation: Welcoming and Protecting Disruption,” Innovation Policy and the Economy (2019), https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/705642?af=R; David J. Teece, Dynamic Capabilities and Strategic Management: Organizing for Innovation and Growth (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2009).

11 Catherine Ellwanger, et al., “EU Green Mergers & Acquisitions Deals—How Merger Control Contributes to a Sustainable Future,” Competition Merger Brief, September 2023, https://competition-policy.ec.europa.eu/system/files/2023-09/kdal23002enn_mergers_brief_2023_2.pdf.

The post Improving transatlantic cooperation on digital competition appeared first on Atlantic Council.

Hicks and Thornberry published in Defense News

Atlantic Council — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 15:01:04 +0000

ORIGINAL SOURCE

On December 2, Defense News published an op-ed by ReForge Commission Co-Chairs Kathleen Hicks and Mac Thornberry outlining why the United States must urgently rebuild an industrial base capable of outproducing and outlasting its adversaries. The piece highlights the strategic risks posed by today’s manufacturing shortfalls and the reforms needed to ensure the nation can deter, surge, and win in a prolonged conflict

Forward Defense leads the Atlantic Council’s US and global defense programming, developing actionable recommendations for the United States and its allies and partners to compete, innovate, and navigate the rapidly evolving character of warfare. Through its work on US defense policy and force design, the military applications of advanced technology, space security, strategic deterrence, and defense industrial revitalization, it informs the strategies, policies, and capabilities that the United States will need to deter, and, if necessary, prevail in major-power conflict.

The post Hicks and Thornberry published in Defense News appeared first on Atlantic Council.

Cloudbusting: Policy for evaluating trust in compute infrastructure

Sara Ann Brackett — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 14:00:00 +0000

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Executive summary
Introduction
A shared cloud computing vocabulary
Cloud computing and artificial intelligence
Building trust
Digital sovereignty and data localization
Implications for cybersecurity and AI
Conclusion
Author and acknowledgements

Executive summary

Placing trust in cloud computing is no longer optional. Cloud computing is essential to critical infrastructure, commercial, and government operations.¹ Outages over the past few months emphasize the vitality of cloud services to modern economies and essential government services.² As cloud adoption and transformation continue, policy attention should shift from the question of whether to simply trust cloud computing to the methods for establishing and verifying that trust.

The stakes will only continue to increase as artificial intelligence systems, which have been identified by the US, China, and the European Union as essential national priorities, continue to utilize cloud infrastructure for development and deployment.³ Sophisticated and unsophisticated threat actors continue to target cloud computing systems, striking rapidly, globally, and opportunistically. ⁴ These cloud incidents can result in data theft, financial losses, and operational disruptions. Even accidents require rapid coordination and information sharing to ensure systems can get back up and running as quickly as possible.⁵

Ensuring trust in cloud computing systems between nations and cloud providers is an essential task for modern economies, national security, and ways of life. This report argues that cloud trust will require collaboration between providers, nation states, and customers, but should not start with location requirements and geographic restrictions on access to cloud computing. Instead, national cloud policies should prioritize criteria of trust that verifiably and meaningfully improve the security of customer cloud operations.

Introduction

As a component of artificial intelligence deployment, development, and use, as well as an enabling technology for business, government, and critical infrastructure functions, cloud computing is a fixture of cyber policy discussions. Within the emerging AI supply chain, cloud services are the means of deploying ‘compute’, a critical resource powering models in both training and inference throughout the global economy.⁶ This paper aims to offer a nuanced discussion of cloud computing through the consolidation of a shared policy vocabulary and common technical principles to describe and understand trust in cloud computing. By adding detail to how cloud computing is portrayed, policymakers can more effectively understand the systems they’re expected to trust. By adding granularity to existing discussions of cloud computing, policymakers can more effectively understand the systems they are expected to trust and better appreciate how policy shapes both those systems and that trust.

Attackers continuously scan public-facing devices and infrastructure for misconfigurations and weaknesses.⁷ Countries with advanced cyber capabilities, including Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran, show no signs of ceasing cyber threat activity.⁸ The pace of vulnerability exploitation continues to accelerate, and within days of their public disclosure, attackers weaponize vulnerabilities to gain access to and exploit cloud environments.⁹ Meanwhile, policy debates often focus on limiting access from cloud providers to customer information, instead of ensuring the security of such resources and information from adversary access.

Developing a more compelling model and framework for trust in cloud computing requires bridging debates around localization, digital sovereignty, and technical security, as well as emerging trends in artificial intelligence development and deployment. The risks posed to the cloud ecosystem by the unintended consequences of policy intervention are significant, but so too are the consequences of untrusted and insecure cloud deployments.

A shared cloud computing vocabulary

This section will establish essential vocabulary and terms for cloud computing. The terms and characteristics defined here are non-exhaustive but are a useful starting point for cloud policy discussions. Cloud computing describes a model where service providers offer metered, on-demand access to computing resources.¹⁰ Instead of operating their own servers and facilities, customers specify workloads—sets of defined computing tasks, utilizing computing resources—for which cloud providers handle implementation and execution.¹¹ Sometimes the resources used by these workloads are virtual versions of physical resources (“virtual machines” or VMs), but often they are abstract resources or functions, such as data storage or analysis services, and are not rooted in or wedded to specific hardware or software implementations. Cloud providers must manage and architect both individual hardware and software components and the protocols, pathways, and constraints of their communications and interactions. To ensure visibility and reliability, cloud providers must build systems that carefully manage changes, catch and alert on outages, and gracefully handle errors or failures. This model of access to computing resources includes general access to applications and data storage, but also specialized services for specific customers or sectors.

Cloud providers aggregate and distribute workloads across computing resources. Centralized control over the design, development, testing, and maintenance of both hardware and software enables cloud providers to reduce costs while optimizing their services for the performance and reliability needs of customers.¹² End-to-end control over cloud systems also allows costly experimentation with specially-tailored or developed software and hardware, including custom advanced semiconductors (chips, silicon).¹³ Prominent cloud providers, including Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, derive advantages from both the scale of their cloud infrastructure and their expertise in adjacent fields and product offerings (earning them the name hyperscalers”).¹⁴ For example, Google’s development of its distributed data storage and processing platform BigTable was driven by the computing demands of its search product.¹⁵ Embedded within the configurations and offerings available to customers are a cascading sequence of impactful decisions made by cloud service providers. Balancing incentives, imperatives, and resource constraints creates an ever-evolving system of systems that is more than the sum of its parts.

Customers of cloud providers can adjust their use of computing resources elastically. Instead of purchasing physical hardware, launching software, and monitoring it directly for power outages or reliability issues, customers can outsource those responsibilities to cloud providers. This allows companies to focus on their unique products and services instead of monitoring and maintaining networking, energy, and processing equipment. Decomposing workloads into discrete tasks, scheduling tasks for individual hardware components, and monitoring the execution of those tasks for errors, delays, or hardware failures requires carefully optimized software, specific hardware, and dedicated research capabilities.¹⁶ Within nano- or milliseconds, cloud computing systems communicate and synchronize across oceans and continents, ensuring availability and reliability despite frequent outages, hardware failures, and natural disasters. Using metered, elastic cloud services also allows companies to “scale” their computing resource footprint in response to demand.¹⁷ Seasonal surges, such as a boom in visits to e-commerce sites around the holiday season, or daily and weekly patterns, such as workplace software peaking in use during business hours Monday-Friday, no longer require projections months ahead of time, and the build-up of infrastructure to handle maximum demand, which then sits idle outside of specific moments. Instead, enterprises can dynamically and automatically adjust their use of computing resources and services through their cloud providers.¹⁸ At the global scale of modern cloud systems, cloud providers triage and respond to issues that would be completely unfamiliar to self-hosted cloud operators accustomed to handling only hundreds or thousands of servers.

Cloud customers and providers optimize the architecture of services to support different computational demands, using distinct technology configurations to execute workloads. Cloud computing architectures dictate “how various cloud technology components, such as hardware, virtual resources, software capabilities, and virtual network systems interact and connect to create cloud computing environments.”¹⁹ Workloads such as high-definition video streaming, training AI models, and analyzing and extracting information from data have different requirements for synchronicity, availability, reliability, and error tolerance, which demand different choices of software and hardware to balance tradeoffs. By optimizing cloud infrastructure and systems for different tasks, cloud providers can utilize heterogeneous components to their full relative advantages.

As an example, to ensure rapid access to cloud resources, providers maintain and offer content delivery networks (CDNs)—networks of servers and computing resources distributed worldwide to minimize the distance and latency (time delay) between cloud infrastructure and end-users.²⁰ Cloud providers also maintain points of presence, or edge locations, where their infrastructure connects with internet service providers, on-premise customers, or other cloud providers.²¹ These points of connection include Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) and other co-location services, a subset of which are sometimes referred to as peering locations.²² Network infrastructure, including edge servers, is a critical vantage point for information useful for security monitoring and incident response. Security practices involving network infrastructure range from mitigating attacks that attempt to overwhelm servers with large amounts of requests to limiting unauthorized access to data and cloud resources.²³

Cloud computing and artificial intelligence

Cloud computing is involved in AI development and deployment at every stage, from providing data storage and structures to enabling interactions between models and users, all while serving as a central hub of monitoring and evaluation for AI systems. Artificial intelligence companies have close financial and technical relationships with hyperscale cloud providers, and cloud providers themselves develop their own AI models and integrate them with other products. This section will give a brief overview of the importance of cloud computing to artificial intelligence development and deployment as a component of the broader compute infrastructure used in the development and deployment of AI systems.

Emerging players, sometimes referred to as neo-clouds, also offer cloud computing services specific to artificial intelligence workloads. CoreWeave, Lambda, Crusoe, and Nebius all operate under this model.²⁴ These companies are financially intertwined with both existing hyperscale cloud providers and key chipmaker NVIDIA. NVIDIA has invested in both Lambda and CoreWeave, in addition to its own quasi-cloud offering, which is built on the infrastructure of other cloud service providers.²⁵ Oracle has contracted Crusoe to build out compute offerings for OpenAI as part of the Stargate project.²⁶ Microsoft was responsible for 62 percent of CoreWeave’s 2024 revenue, while Google recently inked a deal to use CoreWeave to deliver computing resources to OpenAI.²⁷ These interactions and overlaps all complicate the cloud ecosystem, creating new, interdependent players and novel connections among long-established entities. These new relationships could complicate existing patterns of information sharing and incident response practices, while emerging players have yet to establish long-term track records of security and reliability.

Hyperscale cloud providers have also invested extensive resources in creating and expanding cloud offerings to support AI workloads and to provide access to AI models for their customers within cloud offerings. Examples include AWS’s managed container offerings, which Anthropic uses to execute training and inference workloads at “ultra” scale, as well as tailoring of existing services, plugins, monitoring agents, credentials, and caching features.²⁸ AWS’s Bedrock offering provides access to several models, including Anthropic’s.²⁹ Microsoft’s Azure managed cloud offerings monitor, orchestrate, and execute AI workloads, including inference for OpenAI’s models.³⁰ Google Cloud’s Cloud TPU platform includes a compiler, managed software frameworks, and custom chips designed to accelerate AI workloads and is used both internally at Google and by companies like Cohere, Stability AI, and Character AI.³¹

Scarcity or lack of access to key computing resources specific to artificial intelligence could also drive customers to overlook security requirements, focusing instead on rapid access to essential computing power. The increasing compute demands of AI firms and the growth of niche cloud computing service companies, both intertwined with hyperscale cloud providers, will continue to strain existing compute resources such that cloud computing policy interventions run a growing risk of compromising a fragile ecosystem.

Policymaking in this sector has largely focused on advanced semiconductors, particularly NVIDIA GPUs, as the principal component of AI compute, from the Biden administration’s AI diffusion rule to the Trump administration’s AI Action Plan.³² Proposals have also examined the challenges of securing model weights, managing the flow of advanced semiconductors used in AI training development, and acquiring energy and land needed to construct datacenters.³³

However, limited attention has focused on the risks and opportunities of cloud computing’s role in AI development and deployment, and as an essential component of the AI supply chain itself. Efforts to secure the cloud computing ecosystem can protect sensitive intellectual property involved in AI development in deployment, including model weights and proprietary details of both AI use and research methods and practices used to develop frontier AI models. Conversely, policies and security practices that hamper efforts to secure cloud computing infrastructure could jeopardize the security of AI development and deployment.

Building trust

Trust, in this paper, refers to both the ability of cloud customers to ensure that their cloud configurations are secure from external threats and from excessive interference or access from cloud providers themselves. Quickly verifying trustworthiness after a violation is paramount for customers wanting to keep up with attackers. This section will discuss the challenge of establishing trust in cloud computing systems. Miscommunication and misalignment regarding trust have immediate consequences for cloud customers, who often bear the costs of security incidents.

Threat intelligence from cloud security firms suggests that the pace of incidents is increasing, with a 2024 Google Cloud report finding only five days of average observed time between the disclosure and exploitation of vulnerabilities, down from 32 days in 2023.³⁴ Another 2023 report from Orca Security found that it took only two minutes for AWS encryption keys that were publicly exposed on GitHub to be used by threat actors.³⁵ Sophisticated attackers have targeted companies, such as Cloudflare, that specialize in cloud network infrastructure, stealing credentials to access documentation and source code.³⁶ Advisories from cybersecurity companies and intelligence agencies indicate that organizations persistently experience breaches from sophisticated, nation-state-sponsored threat actors who utilize publicly known vulnerabilities as part of a global espionage strategy.³⁷ Meanwhile, trust deficits that result from customers’ lack of trust in cloud providers, or an inability by cloud providers to verifiably demonstrate trustworthiness, hamper both the adoption of cloud capabilities and the ability of organizations to prevent and respond to security incidents. When trust criteria are insufficient or incomplete, preventable incidents can occur at breathtaking speed.

In policy contexts, trust frequently centers on an entity-based definition. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) notes that trust is “a belief that an entity meets certain expectations and therefore, can be relied upon.”³⁸ A focus on entities can lead to technology policies focused on static, easily verifiable attributes, such as the national origin or corporate headquarters of cloud providers, from which policymakers derive restrictions on specific firms or sweeping prohibitions against foreign entities. This dynamic is not exclusive to cloud computing policy and has occurred throughout national security debates over trusted technology, from Kaspersky to Huawei.³⁹ While organizational attributes can provide useful information, requirements exclusively based on entity-based definitions of trust can overlook technical security measures and implementation details that directly affect system trustworthiness, while incentivizing the use of proxy companies and circuitous legal setups.

Technical communities have developed alternative approaches to trust that emphasize continuous verification instead of static, binary decisions to trust or not trust a technology provider. The zero-trust security model operates on “the premise that trust is never granted implicitly but must be continually evaluated,” according to NIST.⁴⁰ This model is a shift from a perimeter-based security strategy toward contextually securing and restricting access to dynamic computing resources and assets.⁴¹ As an illustrative example, a zero-trust approach would reflect a company’s decision to shift from a sign-in system to enter a building, after which each person would have complete access to move around a building, to an approach where each room or floor requires a special key that only certain people can access, regardless of whether or not the person requesting access is already within the building. However, zero-trust is more of a broad set of principles than a set of specific operational requirements and might not align with existing organizational structures and regulatory frameworks that mandate perimeter-based security approaches.

Cryptographic and hardware-based verification mechanisms offer another path through technical, not organizational, assurances. Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) and confidential computing could enable remote attestation of the integrity and confidentiality of data and code.⁴² Remote attestation and technical assurances can establish trust outside of organizational attributes but require specialized hardware and software implementations that are not currently widely available or cost-effective.⁴³

These divergent approaches to trust create challenges for cloud providers and customers. A coherent, cohesive approach to cloud trust must bridge different methods while accounting for the scale and complexity of cloud computing. This requires moving beyond simple analogies and one-size-fits-all policies towards frameworks that thoughtfully weigh technical and organizational attributes. The alternative is a fragmented system in which policies undermine the economic and technical benefits of cloud computing without improving security. The costs of insecurity will only grow as the cloud becomes more entwined with AI applications, making the question of ensuring trust in cloud computing increasingly critical.

Digital sovereignty and data localization

This paper’s focus is on digital sovereignty policies that target cloud infrastructure, such as the promotion of national or local alternatives to cloud providers, the exclusion of foreign cloud providers from specific certifications or sectors, or restrictions on the structure and configuration of cloud deployments within national borders.⁴⁴ This section will ground this paper’s discussion of trust and security in cloud computing and infrastructure within a contemporary policy debate: the application of digital sovereignty and data localization restrictions to cloud computing.⁴⁵

In many cases, companies that qualify as hyperscalers also offer search engines, operating systems, social media sites, and ad platforms, which could also be relevant to digital sovereignty debates. Those offerings remain outside of the scope of this paper but could very well have implications for cloud computing if remedies or policies aimed at achieving digital sovereignty goals impacted hyperscale providers and their cloud offerings.

There are at least three essential characteristics of digital sovereignty and data localization policies with direct implications for cloud computing: the affected country or region, the scope of customers affected, and the criteria for cloud trust. In addition to descriptions, each characteristic will include illustrative examples.

Table 1: Key characteristics for digital sovereignty policies affecting cloud computing systems

Geography

The first essential characteristic is the geographic region affected by a policy. Typical examples of cloud sovereignty or digital sovereignty policies apply at a national level and are set by a federal policymaking body.

For example, the French SecNumCloud certification scheme, which includes localization requirements and restrictions on foreign ownership of cloud providers, is in effect within France.⁴⁶ Attempts to extend sovereignty policies in certification requirements across the EU within the European Union Cybersecurity Certification Scheme for Cloud Services have been unsuccessful so far, facing opposition from Denmark, Estonia, Greece, Ireland, Lithuania, Poland, Sweden, and the Netherlands.⁴⁷ Outside the EU, digital sovereignty policies appear to remain national in scope, which aligns with the focus of supporters of some digital sovereignty policies in ensuring government control over and visibility into cloud services.

Scope

Another essential characteristic is the scope of customers or procurers of cloud services affected by digital sovereignty policies. Direct government use of cloud services or use by critical infrastructure sectors like finance and defense have been a focus of digital sovereignty policies. These policies can take the form of explicit bans or prohibitions on critical sector or government use of foreign cloud providers, procurement incentives for local companies, or technical requirements that in effect mandate country or sector-specific cloud configurations.

Several countries and geographies have experimented with sovereignty and localization requirements specific to critical infrastructure sectors or government use. The Cross Border Data Forum’s 2021 data localization report highlighted requirements for exclusive localization of financial sector information and operations, such as transactions and banking information, in several countries, including South Africa, Turkey, and India.⁴⁸ The aforementioned French SecNumCloud scheme applies to government agencies and “operators of national importance.”⁴⁹ South Korea’s Cloud Security Assurance Program (CSAP) applies to public sector cloud use, but debates over its provisions have suggested it could be extended to additional sectors such as healthcare and education.⁵⁰

The sensitivity of government and critical infrastructure sector data and operations raises heightened concerns regarding the risks of unauthorized access to information or disruption of services. The sheer size of the government and critical infrastructure sectors’ cloud budgets also creates an appealing policy target, as including requirements or incentives within procurement regimes serves as an intermediary between economy-wide regulations and no regulation at all. Government and critical infrastructure criteria for cloud computing are often thought to induce effects outside of their direct targets, as other companies and organizations incorporate or reference criteria used by those entities in their own cloud procurement decisions.⁵¹

Criteria for trust

The final essential characteristic of digital sovereignty policies applying to cloud infrastructure is the criteria for trust that policies reference or create. Criteria of trust can include restrictions on nationality or operational jurisdictions of cloud providers, geographic locations of cloud infrastructure, or specific technical and operational measures, such as the use of encryption or external key management. These criteria can be directly put into force through legislation or through references to external certifications or standards bodies.

Digital sovereignty policies often seek to ensure that cloud service providers have local physical footprints. Ensuring the physical footprint of a technology provider can create a toehold for further enforcement and oversight, clarifying the obligations of cloud providers to the citizens and laws of different countries. Without a clear presence in the form of personnel or physical infrastructure in a country, it is difficult for governments to enforce regulations or to substantively hold companies accountable for abuses or violations of policy. Russia and Vietnam both adopted policies requiring local offices and representatives for technology companies, which have been described as creating opportunities for government control and coercion.⁵² Incentives for local data center construction, such as Brazil’s proposed package of incentives and tax breaks for developers, can alternatively focus on the potential economic benefits of localized infrastructure, from collected taxes to construction and maintenance jobs.⁵³

Other localization requirements seek to restrict the physical location of cloud infrastructure. Proponents of data localization argue that restricting the physical location of data, including prohibiting cross-border data transfers, provides security and privacy advantages. Countries around the world have adopted localization measures applicable to various sectors, types of data, or processing requirements. Localization measures mandate restricting operations to cloud infrastructure located within certain geographic boundaries. Often, this manifests as restricting the set of cloud “regions” that companies have access to, while cloud providers recommend structuring applications to span multiple regions and availability zones.“⁵⁴ Availability zones are logically isolated segments of cloud infrastructure that attempt to ensure that if one zone suffers an outage, it does not take down other zones within the same region.⁵⁵ However, region-wide disruptions such as October’s AWS DynamoDB incident in the us-east-1 region, while rare, have significant impacts on both customers relying on resources within a region and cloud service providers that operate within a specific region.⁵⁶

Figure 1: Region and launch year

Restricting the flow of data and information can limit access to computing and processing resources, limiting the ability of cloud providers to surge capacity and geographically distribute workloads. The ability to migrate workloads and computing assets, such as data, to other countries is essential for effective disaster recovery, which could motivate carving out backups as exempt from data localization. In preparing for Russia’s invasion, for instance, Ukraine paused localization requirements and shifted essential government data to cloud infrastructure outside of its borders to ensure availability and access in the event of the physical destruction of domestic data centers.⁵⁷ Estonia has also established a data embassy, which consists of an external private cloud region in Luxembourg to ensure continuity of government operations in the event of a crisis.⁵⁸

Beyond infrastructure locations, countries and customers might seek to restrict the geographic location of technical support staff and engineers, especially individuals who might access or view sensitive data. Requirements can restrict physical location, citizenship, or clearance of support personnel, which can impact the staffing strategies, create challenges for around-the-clock availability, and require duplication of expertise across nations. According to ProPublica, Microsoft worked around such restrictions from the United States Defense Department by using support structures such as “digital escorts,” where individuals in possession of security clearances but lacking technical expertise supervised engineers, including engineers physically located in China, as they interacted with cloud systems used for national security purposes.⁵⁹ The impulse towards workarounds for location-based restrictions, such as the digital escort system, which Microsoft has reportedly stopped using for the Department of Defense, demonstrates the operational difficulties restrictions on the location of support staff can create and the security risks that can result from the uneven implementation of location restrictions.⁶⁰

Infrastructure localization approaches can also be designed to ensure that companies or governments have local oversight and control over security measures, including the use of encryption. Keeping encryption keys off cloud provider infrastructure, and instead on local or on-premise infrastructure, can be referred to as “key escrow” or “external key management.”⁶¹ Apple has historically complied with key localization requirements in China, while Google has implemented an offering designed for compliance with a requirement in Saudi Arabia.⁶² These offerings may be developed in partnership with local providers, who can oversee cloud provider access to encryption keys.⁶³ However, this approach introduces distinct risks to cloud computing systems, as customers must trust the additional provider to secure encryption keys, which, if compromised, would provide access to sensitive data. Countries can also impose other requirements relating to encryption, such as country-specific standards. South Korea’s government cloud certification requires national standard encryption algorithms that are not widely used outside of Korea.⁶⁴

In the US, debates on state-sponsored, proprietary encryption standards have resulted in concerns about the intelligence community creating “backdoors,” or exploitable flaws within encryption algorithms, which could be used by intelligence agencies and malicious actors to monitor communications and access content.⁶⁵ Governments could also directly restrict the ability of cloud service providers to offer products with certain encryption standards or features. The UK’s secret law enforcement request to Apple to access certain encrypted communications led Apple to withdraw its Advanced Data Protection feature from the UK market rather than create a backdoor for authorities.⁶⁶ Restrictions or constraints on encryption standards and encryption system architectures can give local authorities control over access to encrypted data, but can also create vulnerabilities if they result in compromising key local management systems or mandates for insecure encryption standards.

The jurisdictions cloud providers originate from or operate within can be a source of concern for governments, especially when other governments mandate, incentivize, or promote practices that undermine the security of underlying technology systems. Digital sovereignty policies can aim to exclude specific cloud providers or providers from certain countries, either with outright bans or structural requirements mandating local partnerships. The approach of excluding specific countries, or restricting the access of companies from certain countries, is referred to as a blacklist, while a policy that only allows transfers to specified countries is referred to as a whitelist.⁶⁷

The United States has typically taken a blacklist approach to national security reviews of foreign companies, imposing a smaller, ad-hoc set of limitations on companies’ jurisdictions and origins. For example, the US government has expressed skepticism over Chinese cloud providers’ access to American information, resulting in investigations of Alibaba’s cloud business.⁶⁸ These concerns include Chinese policies requiring technology companies to notify the government when they discover technical vulnerabilities and extensive cooperate with defense and intelligence services.⁶⁹ In reviews of other technical systems, such as telecommunications infrastructure, the US has weighed the national security risks of the involvement of both Chinese and Russian companies.⁷⁰

Meanwhile, European data protection regimes, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), utilize a whitelist approach, requiring “adequacy decisions” to approve data transfers to certain countries.⁷¹ European leaders have raised concerns about US surveillance practices and the lack of federal privacy legislation, which has prompted regulators to revoke previous data transfer agreements.⁷² The dominance of US hyperscale cloud providers, domestically and abroad, has led to a close focus in policy discussions on US legislation applicable to cloud providers, including those that affect the operations of cloud providers in other jurisdictions. Concerns regarding US government access to information have led to repeated references in policy debates to one piece of legislation: the 2018 Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data (CLOUD) Act.

The CLOUD Act restated requirements of the US Stored Communications Act (SCA) as they apply to information under the control of cloud providers, including if that information is shared, sharded (splitting data into multiple, more manageable pieces), or distributed across geographic locations, but did not change the requirements for warrants under US law to access the content of electronic communications.⁷³ The CLOUD Act’s clarification of the SCA’s scope brought the United States into compliance with the Budapest Convention on Cybercrime, while also authorizing bilateral agreements for countries to request information from cloud providers for law enforcement investigations outside of the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty (MLAT) process.⁷⁴ The EU-US Data Privacy Framework currently holds an adequacy decision, allowing individual US companies to transfer data under GDPR. However, the Trump administration’s disruption of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) and US intelligence community data collection have raised questions in Europe about the merits of the adequacy decision and could result in further legal challenges, which could remove the United States and American companies from the GDPR whitelist.⁷⁵

Concerns about the market dominance of US hyperscalers, as well as US government access to content stored on cloud computing systems, have also led to various European initiatives to foster domestic alternatives, such as the GAIA-X initiative.⁷⁶ Foreign ownership restrictions contained within cloud certifications, such as the SecNumCloud regime, have led cloud providers to set up operations and joint ventures with domestic companies that manage local configurations of cloud computing. In France, for instance, Google has partnered with Thales, while Microsoft has partnered with Orange and Capgemini.⁷⁷ Hyperscale cloud providers have also announced commitments to expand “sovereign” cloud regions, such as Microsoft’s partnership with a German SAP subsidiary, which will consist of “a sovereign cloud platform for the German public sector, hosted in German datacenters and operated by German personnel.”⁷⁸ AWS’s sovereign cloud commitment language also highlights the physical and logical isolation of a forthcoming sovereign European cloud region, which will have “no operational control outside of EU borders.”⁷⁹ These commitments and infrastructure developments require significant investments as well as a shift in operational and management strategies from the existing global distributed models.

Table 2: Illustrative policies mapped to characteristics for digital sovereignty policies affecting cloud computing systems

Implications for cybersecurity and AI

This multifarious tug of war over sovereignty and trust has significant implications for cloud computing infrastructure, security, and the services, including for AI. Focusing on location as a proxy for control and trust can lead to policies that ultimately undermine security goals by decreasing the reliability and integrity of essential systems. The critical nature of cloud computing means it deserves intensive evaluation to ensure the trustworthiness of foundational systems, but evaluation and assurances of trust in cloud computing should be rooted in effective guarantees. The efficiency and performance benefits of cloud computing are fractured and disrupted by location-based requirements. The replication of infrastructure, support systems, and other operational overhead creates meaningful costs for cloud providers, limiting their ability to invest in other measures that could improve performance or security. Filings by industry organizations, including the US Chamber of Commerce, prove this point by repeatedly highlighting the costs of staff and infrastructure location requirements impose on the operations of cloud providers.⁸⁰

This location requirements race fragments security monitoring and threat response, limiting the ability of organizations with global footprints and technical systems to mitigate and respond to cross-border risks. National or regional silos of cloud deployments with the same underlying software and hardware deployments—all relying on core features, patterns, and architectures developed by the same handful of companies—insulate cloud deployments from legal concerns while creating technical and financial burdens.

Constraints on provider locations and jurisdictions can also limit organizations from taking full advantage of advanced global capabilities, including networking infrastructure. In 2021, for example, Portugal’s Supervisory Authority fined its public census body €4.3 million for using Cloudflare’s services, citing concerns regarding Cloudflare’s global, distributed network of servers and position as a US company.⁸¹ Despite Cloudflare’s reputation as a cost-effective and highly reliable network security provider, the ruling occurred in the wake of broader discussions on the ability of European organizations to transfer data to the United States as part of GDPR compliance.⁸²

Moreover, the impacts of limiting access to network infrastructure are not mitigated by local datacenters and computing capacity, as organizations will still be unable to use state-of-the-art platforms that enable global communications and stronger security protections. Policies that only consider datacenter capacity and access ignore these impacts and can inadvertently create security issues while degrading service quality.

Governments should avoid imposing restrictions on access to cloud computing based exclusively on the location of cloud infrastructure. Location is at best a proxy for the security practices and guarantees of cloud providers and imposes cost and security consequences on providers. Localization requirements should, at a minimum, involve an advanced notification and blacklist approach, minimizing disruptions and operational concerns for cloud providers who build infrastructure configurations years in advance. Ad-hoc revocation should be reserved for well-documented offenders, observed compromises, and emergencies, as cloud providers, their customers, and the security ecosystem broadly benefit from stability and predictability.

Cloud security fundamentally depends upon the ability of organizations to respond to incidents rapidly at scale. Container escape vulnerabilities, which are errors in the implementation of encryption standards, or misconfigurations in the software connecting different services that expose can data and enable lateral movement, are just a few examples of cybersecurity flaws that are agnostic to the physical location of servers and support staff. If location-based requirements restrict companies’ ability to monitor, observe, and remediate incidents, or even prohibit or discourage them from retaining non-domestic cybersecurity incident response companies, organizations and governments will be cut off from the global flow of cutting-edge threat intelligence, vulnerability reports, and mitigation guidance.⁸³

Conflicting trust frameworks can also undermine the ability of organizations to collaborate across the cloud ecosystem. Instead of working with cutting-edge providers and cybersecurity companies focused on addressing security challenges, organizations are encouraged to turn inward, reinventing the wheel by managing their own technology configurations and security postures. While these organizations have useful context for their own security risks, rapid coordination and information-sharing bolsters collective defenses in ways that are difficult to replicate. Ad-hoc grants and revocations of trust in cloud computing systems or cloud providers exacerbate these challenges, and governments should adopt frameworks for trust that allow for continuous verification and evaluation instead.

The management of cloud encryption keys and credentials is also essential to cloud security. Externalizing key management systems poses enhanced risks for the same reasons that advocates seek to localize control of encryption keys: they unlock access to otherwise secure data.⁸⁴ However, removing key management from cloud provider infrastructure and placing it under the control of another provider creates additional risks, as cloud users must now trust each provider and the infrastructure or platform through which keys or identities are managed.⁸⁵ Threat actors have targeted key and identity management platforms, recognizing their importance to the overall security posture of cloud customers. Okta, an identity and management company, has been the subject of repeated attacks, including a breach of its customer support portal, which initially became public because of a threat actor’s boasts on Telegram.⁸⁶ Removing keys from cloud provider infrastructure does not reduce the importance of securing cryptographic information and credentials, and externalizing key management only places additional responsibility on individual customers to manage and ensure key security.

Cloud security errors and flaws cross organizational boundaries and are not prevented by distinctions between cloud providers and other companies in operating or managing infrastructure. Attackers have leveraged connections between on-premise and public cloud systems (known as hybrid cloud deployments), such as shared credentials or identity systems, to compromise and wreak havoc in cloud environments.⁸⁷. In a 2023 example, a suspected Iranian threat actor used stolen credentials to move from an on-premise environment into a customer’s Azure configuration.⁸⁸

Security flaws can also be similar across cloud providers, even when cloud providers separately develop features and products. The cloud security firm Wiz conducted research on the incorporation of a popular open-source database service, PostgreSQL, into cloud platforms and found similar vulnerabilities in Azure and Google Cloud, despite their independent development.⁸⁹

Policymakers should not operate under the assumption that segmenting cloud infrastructure —or the oversight of cloud infrastructure —across organizations will automatically improve the cybersecurity posture of cloud configurations. By limiting the ability of companies to share information about vulnerabilities or observe threat activity across active cloud configurations, policymakers can inadvertently exacerbate the challenge of common security failures across cloud providers. The trajectory of AI development and its intense reliance on cloud resources will only exacerbate the challenges of navigating these tradeoffs. Policies that require jurisdictional independence, exclusive local legal or operational control, and partnerships with local companies incentivize configurations that are not based upon a solid foundation of technical boundaries and isolation. Artificially constraining cloud providers, mandating technology transfer, and rewarding regulatory arbitrage do nothing to advance national sovereignty objectives and incentivize lax security practices instead of proactive, systemic monitoring.

If specific government or critical infrastructure sector criteria for cloud procurement are too onerous or burdensome, they also risk artificially segmenting the cloud market, leaving public sector customers out of step with industry norms and delayed in accessing new offerings. For example, AWS’s US GovCloud region contains detailed documentation on services available in other regions that are unavailable or require distinct configurations within GovCloud.⁹⁰ A US Government Accountability Office report on federal agency use of generative AI also references delays of cloud certification processes as an obstacle to access and use of new services, particularly when the companies offering them are not interested in gaining authorization through procurement processes or are unaware of federal procurement requirements.⁹¹

Critical infrastructure sectors and government agencies already shoulder cybersecurity burdens as the targets of persistent cyberattacks, with consistent ransomware attacks on hospitals as one example.⁹² In budget-constrained organizations, interpreting and implementing cybersecurity regulatory requirements can create cost burdens that lead to difficult tradeoffs with essential functionality.⁹³ Policies designed to shape the cloud market broadly should carefully evaluate which sectors are impacted and to what degree. If the goal of a procurement or incentive structure is cross-sector security requirements, public entities with limited cybersecurity expertise or leverage to negotiate with hyperscale cloud providers, such as critical infrastructure operators, may not be a logical starting point.

Governments around the world have a crucial role to play in allowing cloud providers to demonstrate trustworthiness, as they can remove barriers to information sharing, harmonize international trust regimes, and demand information from providers that customers would otherwise be unable to access. Accepting and embracing this role requires a strategic focus outside of the role of governments as merely cloud procurers. While governments are essential users of the cloud, consumer protection mandates and broader security goals merit a focus on ecosystem-wide security, which should be disentangled from direct procurement capabilities. Cloud providers should be required to share cloud security indicators with governments not just as a step to securing public sector contracts, but also to verify the trustworthiness of cloud infrastructure critical to modern society.

The US can play an important role in shepherding confidential computing technology—which runs computations on isolated systems—but must also manage coordination to ensure that by the time this technology is available and trustworthy, that allies and partners have not fully pivoted to regulatory regimes that mandate fragmented cloud infrastructure. One way to assure allies and partners is to demonstrate commitments to the security of the cloud ecosystem. Where legislation like the CLOUD Act has been mis- or over-interpreted by outside entities to provide expansive authorities, law enforcement agencies should continue to clarify the scope and details of warranted access to the content or information stored by cloud providers. Through its oversight functions, the US Congress can also publicize further aggregated, anonymized, and declassified information about the nature of interactions between the intelligence community, law enforcement agencies, and cloud providers, including allowing further information sharing about national security requests.

Conclusion

As artificial intelligence demands force the evolution of cloud computing systems, policies aiming to ensure the security of cloud computing must balance the goals of visibility and control with essential capabilities. Specialized providers and the relative opacity of the AI ecosystem both make cloud computing’s role in AI more critical and fragile. As artificial intelligence workloads continue to require careful coordination across specialized providers and infrastructure, establishing clear criteria of trust in cloud computing gains urgency. The consequences of failing to establish and maintain this trust will not just be felt by organizations using the cloud to develop and deploy artificial intelligence, but by governments and companies broadly, as the cloud infrastructure they depend upon and utilize becomes fragmented and limited.

Countries around the world have implemented and proposed policies that impose geographic or location restrictions on cloud systems, instituting organizational and operational changes for cloud providers without fully evaluating the security tradeoffs. Requirements that change the criteria for trust in cloud computing to prioritize location can silo and fragment cloud infrastructure, reducing geographic distribution that provides resilience and elasticity. Focusing the evaluation of trust instead on technical assurances, rather than geographic and organizational proxies, should be the priority of governments. The location and nationality of cloud providers, while important, are insufficient proxies for security guarantees and outcomes and ultimately serve to incentivize regulatory arbitrage and compliance over state-of-the-art security practices.

The complexity of cloud computing—driven by scale, specialization, and demand—enables the reliable systems and technical innovations that define modern economies and ways of life—and that is why that policies and regulations in this sector need to be finely-tuned and informed by technical realities. Interventions that aim to manage this complexity by tearing apart infrastructure and segmenting it within geographic borders will only end up undermining these systems and their security without fulfilling national security goals.

There is no doubt this is a tall task. But only strategies as nuanced as the technology itself can safeguard its advantages while establishing the foundational trust that will underpin the future of artificial intelligence and technological innovation.

About the author

Sara Ann Brackett is an assistant director with the Cyber Statecraft Initiative, part of the Atlantic Council Tech Programs. She focuses her work on open-source software security, software bills of materials, software liability, and software supply-chain risk management within the Cyber Statecraft Initiative’s cybersecurity and policy portfolio.

Brackett graduated from Duke University, where she majored in computer science and public policy and wrote a thesis on the effects of market concentration on cybersecurity. She participated in the Duke Tech Policy Lab’s Platform Accountability Project and worked with the Duke Cybersecurity Leadership Program as part of Professor David Hoffman’s research team.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Trey Herr, Stewart Scott, Nitansha Bansal, Kemba Walden, Devin Lynch, Justin Sherman, Dominika Kunertova, and Joe Jarnecki for their comments on earlier drafts of this report, as well as all the individuals who participated in background and Chatham House Rule discussions about issues related to data, AI applications, and the concept of an AI supply chain.

Explore the program

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60 Renee Dudley, “Microsoft Says It Has Stopped Using China-Based Engineers to Support Defense Department Computer Systems,” Pro Publica, July 18, 2025, https://www.propublica.org/article/defense-department-pentagon-microsoft-digital-escort-china.

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62 Tom McKay, “Apple Moves Chinese iCloud Encryption Keys to China, Worrying Privacy Advocates,” Gizmodo, February 25, 2018, https://gizmodo.com/apple-moves-chinese-icloud-encryption-keys-to-china-wo-1823312628; Archana Ramamoorthy and Bader Almadi, “Google Cloud expands services in Saudi Arabia, delivering enhanced data sovereignty and AI capabilities,” Google Cloud, August 19, 2024, https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/identity-security/google-cloud-expands-services-in-saudi-arabia-delivering-enhanced-data-sovereignty-and-ai-capabilities.

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68 Alexandra Alper, “Exclusive: U.S. examining Alibaba’s cloud unit for national security risks – sources,” Reuters, January 19, 2022, https://www.reuters.com/technology/exclusive-us-examining-alibabas-cloud-unit-national-security-risks-sources-2022-01-18/.

69 Peter Harrell, “Managing the Risks of China’s Access to U.S. Data and Control of Software and Connected Technology,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, January 30, 2025, https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2025/01/managing-the-risks-of-chinas-access-to-us-data-and-control-of-software-and-connected-technology?lang=en.

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71 Propp, Who’s a national security risk?

72 Caitlin Fennessy, “The ‘Schrems II’ decision: EU-US data transfers in question,” IAPP, July 16, 2020, https://iapp.org/news/a/the-schrems-ii-decision-eu-us-data-transfers-in-question.

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76 Mark Scott and Francesco Bonfiglio, “Why Europe’s Cloud Ambitions Have Failed,” AI Now Institute, October 15, 2024, https://ainowinstitute.org/publications/xi-why-europes-cloud-ambitions-have-failed.

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78 Brad Smith, “Microsoft announces new European digital commitments,” Microsoft, April 30, 2025, https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2025/04/30/european-digital-commitments/.

79 Colm MacCarthaign, “Establishing a European trust service provider for the AWS European Sovereign Cloud,” Amazon Web Services, July 10, 2025, https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/establishing-a-european-trust-service-provider-for-the-aws-european-sovereign-cloud/.

80 Jelalian, “Subject: Public Consultation on Amendments to Korea’s Cloud Security Assurance Program (CSAP).”

81 “The Portuguese Supervisory Authority fines the Portuguese National Statistics Institute (INE) 4.3 million EUR,” European Data Protection Board, December 19, 2022, https://www.edpb.europa.eu/news/national-news/2022/portuguese-supervisory-authority-fines-portuguese-national-statistics_en.

82 Hendrik Mildebrath, “The CJEU judgment in the Schrems II case,” European Parliament, September 2020, https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/ATAG/2020/652073/EPRS_ATA(2020)652073_EN.pdf.

83 Peter Swire and DeBrae Kennedy-Mayo, “The Risks to Cybersecurity from Data Localization – Organizational Effects,” 8 Arizona Law Journal of Emerging Technologies 3 (June 2025), https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4030905.

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85 “Cloud External Key Manager,” Google Cloud, accessed September 4, 2025, https://cloud.google.com/kms/docs/ekm#considerations; Chuvakin and Segel, “Unlocking the mystery of stronger security key management;” “Use Secure Cloud Key Management Practices,” US National Security Agency, CISA, March 7, 2024, https://media.defense.gov/2024/Mar/07/2003407858/-1/-1/0/CSI-CloudTop10-Key-Management.PDF.

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89 Ronen Shustin, Shir Tamari, Nir Ohfeld, and Sagi Tzadik, “The cloud has an isolation problem: PostgreSQL vulnerabilities affect multiple cloud vendors,” Wiz, August 11, 2022, https://www.wiz.io/blog/the-cloud-has-an-isolation-problem-postgresql-vulnerabilities.

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93 Ashley Thompson, “Re: Cyber Incident Reporting for Critical Infrastructure Act (CIRCIA) Reporting Requirements,” American Hospital Association, July 3, 2024, https://www.aha.org/lettercomment/2024-07-02-aha-responds-cisa-proposed-rule-cyber-incident-reporting-requirements.

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The G20 is moving forward on global AI governance—and the US risks being left out

Konstantinos Komaitis — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 13:07:25 +0000

Something notable happened in Johannesburg late last month, although it drew limited attention in Washington: Many of the world’s major economies signaled a growing alignment around how artificial intelligence (AI) and data should be approached—not primarily as instruments of geopolitical competition, but as vehicles for inclusive and sustainable development. The Group of Twenty (G20) leaders’ declaration, adopted despite uneven participation among several countries, reflects an important shift in how states are positioning themselves on AI governance. It offers a snapshot of an emerging global conversation that increasingly links AI to development goals and digital equity.

And the United States was not part of that moment.

The US delegation did not attend the Johannesburg summit and declined to join the declaration—a decision that stemmed in part from concerns about the host nation and broader disagreements with aspects of the process. And the United States is making AI a focus of the G20 summit it is hosting next year, an indication that it has not ruled out collaboration. Still, this year’s absence carried symbolic weight. It suggested a narrowing US appetite to engage multilaterally at a time when many governments are moving quickly to shape the rules and norms surrounding transformative technologies. Other capitals may reasonably interpret this as an opening: If Washington steps back from these discussions, others will step forward.

And many did.

The G20’s digital agenda this year went further than any previous summit in knitting together AI governance with sustainable development. What emerged from Johannesburg was a clear premise: AI is not just a commercial or security asset; it is a public good, one that must be governed collectively. Countries from South Africa to Brazil to India insisted that data governance, ethical guidelines, and inclusive digital infrastructure are not luxuries—they are developmental necessities.

What came out of Johannesburg wasn’t the usual tech-salon optimism or Western policy jargon. It was the voice of a world determined to stop the next wave of innovation from hard-wiring the injustices of the last. For example, the declaration insisted that AI must be “human-centered” and “development-oriented,” backed by trustworthy data governance—not just for privacy, but as the backbone of equitable AI. It called for digital public infrastructure and real capacity-building for countries long pushed to the margins of the digital economy. And it linked information integrity directly to democratic resilience. It aligned itself with the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO’s) ethical AI framework and the United Nations’ resolutions on equitable technology.

Call it whatever you want: multilateralism, solidarity, or simple common sense. But the message was unambiguous. A broad group of the world’s largest economies came together to say that AI must serve humanity, not just the handful of companies and countries capable of building it.

The United States still has avenues to re-engage—not by dictating outcomes, but by participating as a genuine partner.

What makes the US absence so striking is that for decades it was the United States that championed precisely these kinds of conversations. US diplomats helped build the global internet governance system through international multilateral and multistakeholder fora, such as the Internet Governance Forum. American civil society was instrumental in pushing human rights into digital debates. American universities trained the researchers shaping AI ethics. Yet today, as major economies explore AI’s developmental dimensions, the United States is largely outside the room.

The US administration’s current approach to AI—marked by a preference for domestic industrial strategy and selective bilateral partnerships—reflects a hardening belief that multilateral governance is either futile or dangerous. In too many parts of Washington, there is a sense that global cooperation simply helps China; that multilateral institutions dilute US influence; and that if the United States leads on innovation, it doesn’t need to lead on rules.

This is a profound misreading of how power works in the digital age.

It is true, of course, that the United States remains the world’s AI frontrunner. Its companies build the most advanced models and its research institutions are unmatched—at least for the time being. But technological dominance without normative influence is brittle. Governance frameworks—data standards, safety norms, ethics principles—shape markets and behavior as much as silicon and compute. If the rest of the world agrees on a vision for AI grounded in development, inclusion, and human rights, and the United States is not part of that process, then Washington risks becoming a rule-taker rather than a rule-maker.

Some observers are already calling Johannesburg a win for China. There is some truth to that. Beijing has long argued that developing countries deserve a larger voice in global tech governance, with Chinese President Xi Jinping criticizing the idea of AI as a “game of rich nations,” a theme emphasized in Chinese state media coverage. And China’s investments in digital infrastructure across the Global South give it clear geopolitical advantages. With Washington absent, Beijing’s narrative—centered on equity, development, and multilateral dialogue—faces fewer obstacles.

But focusing solely on China misses the bigger story. Johannesburg was not a Chinese diplomatic triumph. It was a Global South diplomatic triumph. India, Brazil, South Africa, Indonesia, and others played central roles in shaping the digital agenda. They were not passive recipients of a Chinese vision; they were co-authors of something genuinely new: a multilateral AI framework that reflects their own developmental priorities. This agency was highlighted not only in the declaration but also in the reporting across the Global South, including South Africa’s official summit briefings.

None of this means the United States has been written off as an ally. But it does reflect a growing impatience among other states. Adopting the declaration without US support was not a rebuke; it was a recognition that global cooperation cannot wait for universal participation. A generation ago, such a move would have been unlikely. Today, it feels increasingly normal.

What should worry Washington most is that this shift comes at the precise moment when AI is beginning to reshape the global economy in ways as profound as industrialization. The International Monetary Fund estimates that AI could boost global growth by nearly a full percentage point, transforming labor markets, education, healthcare, and agriculture. It could concentrate power or democratize it. And the rules that govern these transformations are being written now.

To be clear, G20 declarations are nonbinding and often aspirational. Implementation will depend on infrastructure, innovation ecosystems, and the particular needs of member states. Still, the fact that the Johannesburg declaration so explicitly anchors AI within the sustainable development agenda—at a moment when US alignment with that agenda is often questioned—signals a meaningful shift in global positioning.

By staying home, the United States is making a bet that it can shape these norms later, through market dominance alone. But history suggests otherwise. Governance norms, once set, are sticky. They embed themselves in institutions, standards, and expectations. They shape how technologies are built and how they spread. And they rarely bend to accommodate a latecomer—even a powerful one.

It is telling that, while the world was forging a collective path in Johannesburg, Washington was charting a very different course at home with the launch of the Genesis Mission—an ambitious drive to harness AI for domestic innovation and national competitiveness. It’s a bold investment, but one that risks reinforcing a US approach to AI that is inward-looking and self-referential at the very moment the rest of the world is moving toward shared governance and collective benefit.

But retreat is not destiny. The United States still has avenues to re-engage—not by dictating outcomes, but by participating as a genuine partner. The G20 declaration did not emerge in a vacuum; it builds on existing foundations the United States helped create, including the Group of Seven’s Hiroshima AI principles and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD’s) AI framework. Those earlier initiatives emphasized trustworthy, rights-based AI—but they lacked a deep developmental dimension. Johannesburg extends the trajectory, integrating ethical safeguards with the practical realities of inclusion and infrastructure.

If Washington wants to regain its normative footing, it can start by showing up. The upcoming India AI Impact Summit in February 2026—already gaining momentum as a convening of Global South digital priorities—offers a stage where the United States can listen rather than lecture, and even align itself with the developmental intent now shaping global AI norms. And with the United States set to host the G20 next year, it has a rare chance to reset: to bring the existing principles into conversation with the Johannesburg framework rather than treating them as competing visions.

The choice ahead is not between US power and multilateral governance. It is whether the United States can recognize that power now depends on multilateral governance—on shaping shared norms, not merely exporting products. Much of the world has signaled that AI must be human-centered, equitable, and globally accessible. The question is whether Washington is willing to take its seat—not at the head of the table, but at the table at all.

Konstantinos Komaitis, PhD, is a resident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Democracy + Tech Initiative at the Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab).

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Russian imperial impunity is the key obstacle to a lasting peace in Ukraine

Kristina Hook — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 22:04:18 +0000

US President Donald Trump’s latest bid to broker a deal between Russia and Ukraine has sparked a flurry of diplomatic activity in recent days, with officials from Washington, Kyiv, Moscow, and across Europe all seeking to shape the contours of a possible agreement. For now, discussion has centered on immediate matters, such as the wording of security guarantees. However, the far deeper historical roots that have long driven Russian violence against Ukraine also hold important policy implications for any peace process.

Given Moscow’s enduring ideological extremism toward Ukraine, renewed attempts at hidden and open warfare are likely. For this reason, the lasting success of Trump’s plan will depend not only on its terms, but on the strength and logistics of the enforcement measures that accompany it.

Moscow’s current aggression against Ukraine is neither new nor unprecedented. It is, in fact, the latest iteration of a centuries-long Russian campaign to Russify and erase the Ukrainian people. From Peter the Great to Stalin and Putin, generations of Russian tyrants have directed violence at Ukrainians in ways that are deliberate, systematic, and filled with an ideological fervor that must be confronted.

Every city the Russian military bombs, every child it kidnaps, every Ukrainian life it destroys today can only be understood within the long genealogy of Russia’s imperialistic state ideology. For centuries, this violent brand of expansionism has been directed at Ukraine.

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The present full-scale invasion of Ukraine will soon pass the four-year mark, but the war did not begin in 2022. It was preceded by eight years of warfare in eastern Ukraine following Russia’s 2014 seizure of Crimea. This has been recognized by the European Court of Human Rights, which has ruled that Russia has been conducting sustained military operations in Ukraine since at least 2014. But even this is only the most recent chapter in a far older story.

During the eras of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, the authorities consistently pursued policies aimed at dismantling Ukrainian identity. Tactics included banning the Ukrainian language, repressing cultural and religious leaders, and imprisoning advocates of Ukrainian independence.

Most devastatingly, Stalin and his regime engineered an artificial famine in the 1930s that killed at least four million Ukrainians in less than two years. Today, this deliberate mass starvation of Ukrainians is known as the Holodomor (“killing by hunger”). No outlier, the Holodomor was central to a broader Soviet campaign aimed at breaking Ukrainian resistance and other assertions of political autonomy. The lawyer who coined the term “genocide,” Raphael Lemkin, identified this attempt to destroy the Ukrainian nation as the “classic example” of Soviet genocide.

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What unites these episodes is not only the violence itself but the ideology behind it. Moscow’s long history of crimes in Ukraine reflects an imperial worldview that treats human beings as resources to be harnessed for the state and as obstacles to be eliminated in the pursuit of total domination.

This ideology has evolved over time, but its core logic has remained remarkably consistent. Crucially, it has never faced sustained, meaningful repudiation by the international community. Because it was never confronted, Russia’s imperial ideology has been allowed to regenerate. A clear line of impunity links Stalin’s starvation of Ukrainian society in the 1930s to today’s Kremlin rhetoric insisting Ukraine is not a real nation at all.

This continuity is not abstract; it directly shapes present-day atrocities. When a state views humans as raw material for empire, the kidnapping and forced Russification of thousands of Ukrainian children becomes an acceptable instrument of policy rather than an aberration. This logic also applies to other aspects of the current invasion including filtration camps, torture chambers, rape and sexual violence, and mass deportations, along with the systematic destruction of Ukrainian cultural and religious life throughout every area under Russian control.

Ukraine’s top prosecutor notes that the number of open war crimes investigations has reached 178,391 documented cases. Indicating deliberate Kremlin policy, the former US ambassador-at-large for global criminal justice recently stated that Russian atrocities in Ukraine are “systematic” and have been identified “literally everywhere that Russia’s troops have been deployed.”

The current actions of Putin’s occupation forces in Ukraine are the same state practices that have long defined Russian imperial rule: Absorb what can be absorbed, erase what cannot, and turn the conquered into fuel for the next stage of expansion.

Russia’s genocidal intent is not limited to eliminating Ukrainian identity. Putin’s extreme ideology drives him to pursue the incorporation of Ukrainians into Russia’s war machine against the West. The danger is not only the destruction of Ukraine as a nation, but the possibility that Russia will assimilate as much of Ukraine’s territory, cutting-edge technology, and population as it can before continuing further.

Contemporary Russian rhetoric makes this explicit. Strikingly, the Putin era has witnessed the resurgence of the slogan “We can do it again.” Originally graffiti scrawled on the Reichstag by Red Army soldiers in 1945, the popularity of this phrase surged after Russia’s 2014 occupation of Crimea to become a menacing mantra of modern Russian nationalism that signals a society intent on conquest and domination.

The atrocities we are witnessing today in Ukraine reflect centuries of Russian impunity. Impunity not only allows perpetrators to continue; it invites them to escalate. Russia’s imperial ideology has never been confronted with the kind of accountability needed to dismantle it. As long as this ideology persists unchallenged, the threat will not stop at Ukraine’s borders.

The international community now finds itself confronted with the consequences of a genocidal worldview that has been left intact for generations. The urgent question is not only how to halt Russia’s genocidal actions against Ukrainians today, but how to ensure that the world finally repudiates the extremist ideology that made this war possible. Without that repudiation, millions of Russians will remain convinced that they can, in fact, “do it again.”

Kristina Hook is assistant professor of conflict management at Kennesaw State University and a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center.

Here is what I heard on the ground in Johannesburg:

US economic leadership remains unpredictable but indispensable

Throughout the week, I heard consistent concern about the stability and rules of the global economic order. Participants described US policy tools—from tariffs and export controls to financial sanctions—as being deployed more frequently, with shorter notice and fewer clear guardrails, creating spillovers that materially affect emerging-market stability. The T20 communiqué’s emphasis on reducing reliance on a single dominant currency, for example, reflects some of these concerns.

And yet, no one argued that the system can function without the United States. The Johannesburg declaration’s focus on adaptation finance, debt sustainability, and critical minerals still leans heavily on institutions where US support is essential. The goal is not to abandon the existing system, but to diversify risk within it and push for more transparent, rules-based, and reliable engagement from Washington.

AI as the new fault line

Sessions on artificial intelligence (AI) and the digital economy revealed a different but related imbalance. There was a shared recognition that the global AI ecosystem is highly concentrated: compute capacity, high-quality datasets, and advanced model development sit in a handful of countries and firms.

For emerging markets, this raises two concerns. First, dependence on foreign technology and infrastructure. Second, governance frameworks that were largely designed elsewhere and may not reflect their development priorities. Speakers argued that current global AI frameworks reflect advanced-economy risk profiles and regulatory debates, not the realities of countries still building basic digital infrastructure. Several participants called for open-source models, stronger regional collaboration, and domestic data-governance frameworks that better protect their interests.

AI is no longer a niche technical issue in these conversations. It is now firmly part of debates on industrialization, labor markets, and sovereignty.

A more coordinated Global South posture

The current presidency cycle has widened the G20 agenda to include development-finance reform, climate adaptation, and inclusive growth—areas emerging markets have long prioritized. Speakers emphasized that they are not simply responding to external pressures but setting agendas and building coalitions.

Africa is no longer framed as peripheral to global affairs. European participants described the continent as essential to the energy transition and supply-chain diversification. For both the United States and China, Africa has become a central arena of strategic competition. Participants argued that this attention can be turned into leverage, particularly as Africa is the center of critical-minerals supply chains.

Infrastructure and connectivity offered one of the clearest tests of this shift. Participants consistently argued that Africa needs better transport, energy, and digital links, but there was far less agreement on who should build them and on what terms. Frustration persists that many Western-backed corridors still primarily facilitate extraction and export of raw materials rather than supporting domestic industrial capacity. As one participant noted, Africa is “more connected to the global economy than to itself.” The core question was not how to supply more minerals to global markets, but how to capture more value within their own borders.

That leverage was visible in Johannesburg. The G20 Leaders’ Declaration and the new critical-minerals framework both emphasize “resilient” and “stable” critical-minerals value chains—reflecting the priorities of import-dependent economies. African officials, by contrast, used their position in those value chains to push for value addition at source and for corridors that knit together African markets under the African Continental Free Trade Area. Whether that leverage translates into concrete outcomes depends on a G20 system that is already overextended.

The leaders’ declaration also exposed a structural problem. While the G20 agenda keeps expanding, the willingness to deliver on commitments appears to be shrinking. The forum’s scope has evolved—infrastructure and critical minerals are now core macroeconomic issues, but they sit alongside debt, trade, and financial regulation on an increasingly crowded agenda, all competing for limited political capital and delivery capacity. That the declaration was adopted at all, and at the outset of the summit, sets an important precedent as the presidency rotates again in 2026. But it also raises a harder question: Can the G20 meaningfully tackle an ever-expanding list of priorities, or will it be forced to pivot to a more focused agenda?

Next up is the United States

The upcoming rotation presents an unusual opening. In its G20 presidency in 2026, the United States could lead on issues such as debt transparency, financial innovation, and energy security—areas where US interests align with broader G20 concerns about productivity and structural reform.

What stood out in Johannesburg is that, despite deepening geopolitical divisions, G20 members still face common economic challenges. Rising debt burdens, energy-security pressures, technological disruption, and climate adaptation affect all members, even as they diverge on solutions. That reality gives every major power a stake in keeping the G20 as a venue where these debates continue. Whether the G20 can maintain its relevance will depend on how those powers respond to emerging-market expectations and on whether they can still identify practical areas of coordination even as broader consensus frays.

Alisha Chhangani is an assistant director at the Atlantic Council’s GeoEconomics Center.

Note: The author’s visit to Johannesburg was sponsored by the South African T20 secretariat.

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Safety should be front and center in India’s vision for its AI Impact Summit

Trisha Ray — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 16:01:19 +0000

Almost two years ago, more than 150 government officials, industry leaders, and academics met at Bletchley Park, the English estate where Allied forces broke the Nazis’ Enigma Code in World War II. This meeting, the 2023 AI Safety Summit, concluded with a warning from the more than two dozen countries represented: artificial intelligence (AI) held the “potential for serious, even catastrophic, harm, either deliberate or unintentional.” The participants also agreed to meet again, and summits in Seoul and Paris followed.

In February 2026, the next such summit will take place in New Delhi, India. But while the earlier gathering in the United Kingdom billed itself as concerning AI safety, India has opted for AI “impact.” As I noted in an analysis of this past February’s AI Action Summit in Paris, “the commitment, resources, and priorities of the host determine the summit’s successes and failures, as well as the level of buy-in from its guests.” So, as the contours of India’s goals for its AI Impact Summit come into focus, what should the participants and the wider world expect in New Delhi?

Why “impact”?

New Delhi’s challenge for the summit resembles the three-body problem—in this case, the three competing forces are political momentum, stakeholder consensus, and on-the-ground implementation. The task here is to keep all three in motion without losing coherence. Many initiatives have spun out of orbit at this stage, when lofty consensus gives way to the hard gravity of real commitments.

Superimposed upon this drive for “impact” are the specific challenges for countries that cannot afford to blitzkrieg their way into AI dominance. Their challenge is not a lack of ambition but the limits of scale, resources, and infrastructure, all while the global narrative around AI as a general-purpose technology grows louder.

India’s leadership team for the summit seems to feel a sense of urgency. In September, Shri S. Krishnan, secretary of the Indian Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, said in a speech, “This particular wave of technology, driven by AI . . . is probably the last opportunity that countries of the Global South, including India, have to truly grow rich and prosperous before they grow old. This is a wave the Global South has to ride.”

Ahead of the summit, India released seven “chakras,” or “axes,” that will be discussed at the gathering. While these chakras cast a wide net, most are largely global coordination problems: human capital, social empowerment, inclusive growth, innovation and research, and safe and trusted AI. India’s vision for impact therefore is twofold: both to maintain momentum by driving action on agenda items for global coordination, and to highlight equitable access to AI infrastructure as essential to developing countries’ ability to meaningfully participate.

India’s approach

The AI Impact Summit framework also carries the hallmarks of New Delhi’s techno-legal approach to digital technologies, where regulation is part of the design of technical systems rather than an extraneous compliance requirement. Rather than relying only on regulatory instruments that may stifle innovation, the focus is on empowering a wide range of nations and stakeholders with the technical capabilities needed to govern AI effectively. India has implemented techno-legal approaches in data governance, animated by its digital public infrastructure (“India Stack”) as well as the Data Empowerment and Protection Architecture, which proposed the concept of “consent manager” institutions that put individuals at the center of data access and control decision flows.

With its framing, New Delhi is positioning itself as an arbiter of a very specific model of AI-driven growth, where governments are co-creators and not just buyers and regulators of AI. This is distinct from, for example, the United States’ techno-nationalist approach, which is driven by a handful of massive AI companies. New Delhi’s hybrid system prioritizes narrow, tailored government interventions in sectors that have the deepest scope for impact and inclusion, such as healthcare, agriculture, and education. The marquee initiative of the summit is the Global Impact Challenge, which encourages AI applications for climate, financial inclusion, health, urban infrastructure, agritech, and more.

In this vein, expect the launch of India’s sovereign foundation models, reportedly trained entirely on homegrown datasets and hosted on Indian cloud infrastructure. One such model is being built by BharatGen, a Department of Science and Technology initiative, supported by strategic collaborations with Indian research institutions and partners such as IBM.

The safety imperative

While large amounts of capital and political will are focused on one kind of AI race—capabilities and infrastructure—there is another race that must receive the same attention.

The International AI Safety Report, led by Canadian computer scientist Yoshua Bengio, launched just before the Paris AI Action Summit. The first update to the report was published in October, and among its findings is this alarming tidbit: “Some research shows that AI systems may be able to detect when they are in an evaluation setting and alter their behavior accordingly.” In other words, AI systems may know when they are being evaluated and may produce outputs tailored to the evaluation. This is a function of core AI behaviors such as goal preservation (maintaining core objectives) and self-preservation (not wanting to be shut down or replaced). If current AI models can deceive human evaluators, the danger is that more sophisticated, potentially harmful models may be able to slip past national AI safety testing regimes.

“Safe and Trusted AI” is one of the chakras for the summit, but while the summit treats it as one distinct theme, AI safety should not be thought of as optional. Rather, it is essential to the achievement of the other chakras.

Notably absent so far from the agenda is the IndiaAI Safety Institute (IAISI). Launched in March 2024, the IAISI follows a virtual hub-and-spokes model, with different IAISI cells carrying out specific mandates. That said, there are likely to be some demonstrations of the thirteen AI safety projects that IndiaAI supports under its Safe & Trusted AI pillar. Among these is a unique contribution to a subfield of AI safety called “machine unlearning” by Indian Institute of Technology, Jodhpur. This approach involves making a machine learning system forget a piece of incorrect, corrupted, or harmful training data without fine-tuning or retraining the entire model.

Despite the headline attention on impact, safety needs to be fundamental to India’s vision for AI that engenders trust, inclusion, and empowerment. Take a hypothetical AI use case for agricultural advisory. The intended goal of a system would be to empower smallholder farmers with predictive tools to help with crop management in areas such as pest control and crop choice based on expected weather patterns. AI systems trained for average accuracy would fail in outlier or extreme cases. The objective function (or goal) of such a system may be to minimize error, not to minimize harm under uncertain conditions. In other words, in the world of the smallholder farmer, a confidently wrong forecast could cause more serious, even catastrophic, harm than a tentatively right one.

The messaging from India about the AI Impact Summit is compelling: AI must be safe, empowering, and trustworthy. New Delhi appears to be taking a people-centered approach, emphasizing use cases that have the greatest scope for positive impact for the widest swath of the population. This approach will resonate with established, emerging, and aspiring AI powers alike. However, without embedding AI safety as a design principle, New Delhi risks repeating a familiar pattern: developing technologies that orbit policy ambitions but never fully land in people’s lived experience.

Trisha Ray is an associate director and resident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s GeoTech Center.

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Any serious Ukraine peace plan must address Putin’s imperial ambitions

Mykola Bielieskov — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 22:21:33 +0000

This week has seen a flurry of diplomatic activity around a new US peace plan to end Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. White House officials stated on Thursday that the plan had been developed by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Special Envoy Steve Witkoff over the past month based on input from both Ukrainians and Russians. However, other reports have claimed that the document was drafted by Witkoff and his Russian counterpart without Ukraine’s involvement.

Details of the 28-point proposal have not yet been made public, but the terms are believed to include extensive Ukrainian concessions along with a series of economic and political incentives for Russia. This has led to widespread alarm, with many critics dismissing the proposal as a call for Ukraine’s “capitulation.”

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has so far offered a more diplomatic response. The Ukrainian leader received the plan in Kyiv on Thursday and commented that he intends to speak with US President Donald Trump in the coming days about “diplomatic opportunities and the key points required to achieve peace.”

While Zelenskyy is understandably eager not to alienate Trump, there is little optimism in Kyiv or across Europe that this latest US initiative can end the continent’s largest invasion since World War II. Multiple similar attempts to secure a settlement by offering the Kremlin generous terms have already been made without success.

This approach reflects a fundamental failure to recognize that Russian President Vladimir Putin is not driven by the same straightforward cost-benefit rationality as his Western counterparts. On the contrary, Putin believes he is engaged in an existential struggle to revive Russia’s great power status and secure his own place in history. It is therefore delusional to think that he can be satisfied by promises of minor territorial concessions or future economic opportunities.

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The disconnect between Moscow and Western capitals over Russia’s war aims has been most immediately apparent during Trump’s attempts to broker a peace agreement. Since February 2025, US-led discussions over a possible negotiated settlement have featured plenty of vague talk about lucrative joint ventures and potential US investments in Russia. Some Trump administration members may have interpreted the prominent role of Putin’s economic envoy Kirill Dmitriev as a positive signal that Moscow is open to such overtures. However, promises of business opportunities have not translated into any meaningful progress toward peace.

Trump has also often given the impression that he views the issue of a territorial settlement between Russia and Ukraine from the perspective of a real estate developer solving a property dispute. The US leader has spoken of the need for “land swaps” and described Russian-occupied regions of Ukraine as “prime territory,” while indicating that the two sides should sit down and agree on new boundaries. This overlooks the awkward but important fact that Putin is not actually fighting for Ukrainian land. He is fighting for Ukraine itself, and will regard the war as lost unless he is able to reassert complete Russian dominance over the whole country.

Another issue that highlights the tendency of Western leaders to project their own logic onto Putin is the topic of Russian military losses. Western officials and media outlets often identify the extremely high Russian casualty figures in Ukraine as a key argument for ending the war, while pointing to Russia’s slow advance as evidence that the invasion has reached a strategic stalemate.

From a Western perspective, this makes perfect sense. But high casualty rates are a traditional feature in the Russian army, which has always relied on mass to win wars. Furthermore, Putin has been careful to make sure his army’s heavy losses in Ukraine do not destabilize the domestic front. Since 2022, the Kremlin has focused recruitment efforts on the poorest provinces of Russia and has enlisted large numbers of inmates from the country’s vast prison network, while also offering extremely attractive financial packages to volunteers. This has helped reduce any social pressures to a minimum, despite the high death toll of the invasion.

Some Western leaders have sought to strike a chord by underlining the damage Putin is doing to Russia’s long-term prospects and his own legacy. Outgoing British MI6 chief Richard Moore offered a good example of this in his September 2025 farewell speech, which highlighted the threats posed by the ongoing invasion of Ukraine to Russia’s economic and demographic outlook. Moore’s logic would certainly have resonated with Western policymakers and electorates, but it meant little to an ageing autocrat guided by imperial delusions and his own distorted reading of history.

Eurasia Center events

How Russia’s winter warfare strategy targets Ukrainian civilians

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If Western leaders wish to end the war, they must stop trying to implement peace plans that they themselves would find persuasive and accept that Putin’s motivations are altogether different. He sees the invasion of Ukraine as part of a sacred historic mission that will define his reign and determine Russia’s place in the world for decades to come. Extinguishing Ukrainian independence is only one part of this process. Putin ultimately aims to reshape the global order and end what he sees as the period of geopolitical humiliation suffered by Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Most of all, Western policymakers must finally come to grips with the sheer scale of Putin’s imperial ambitions and acknowledge the central role these ambitions play in fueling Russian aggression in Ukraine and beyond. This would be long overdue. Since 2022, Putin has publicly compared himself to Russian Emperor Peter the Great. He frequently claims to be returning historically Russian lands, and has declared that “all Ukraine is ours.”

Attempting to bargain with such a man by appealing to common sense or offering limited concessions is worse than futile; it actually helps convince Putin that his Western opponents are too weak and overindulged to grasp the historical significance of the moment. This makes him more confident than ever that his enemies will ultimately back down and hand him victory in Ukraine.

Instead of trying to appease Russia, Ukraine’s allies must first admit that Putin is playing for the highest possible stakes and has no interest whatsoever in a compromise peace. They must then demonstrate that they have the political will to prevent his twisted imperial fantasies from becoming reality.

Mykola Bielieskov is a research fellow at the National Institute for Strategic Studies and a senior analyst at Ukrainian NGO “Come Back Alive.” The views expressed in this article are the author’s personal position and do not reflect the opinions or views of NISS or Come Back Alive.

Axis of authoritarians poses mounting threat on the global information front

William Dixon, Maksym Beznosiuk — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 20:19:56 +0000

Ever since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022, there has been growing alarm over the support that Moscow is receiving from fellow authoritarian regimes including Iran, North Korea, Belarus, and China. However, while Western officials have publicly raised concerns over material support for the Russian war effort, the issue of cooperation in the information sphere has received less attention.

This is short-sighted. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has demonstrated the critical importance of the information front in modern conflicts. The lessons of the war in Ukraine have not been lost on the Kremlin, which invests vast sums to finance information operations and has repeatedly used disinformation to destabilize its opponents. China is also well aware of the increasing role played by information capabilities and has established a range of powerful tools. This is creating potentially significant challenges for Western policymakers.

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Many Western countries continue to view the issue of information warfare as primarily a matter of fact-checking and debunking fakes. In contrast, there are growing indications that Moscow and Beijing share a vision of the information space as a key element of their power projection and national security strategies.

A recent meeting between Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin and his Chinese counterpart Li Qiang signaled deepening cooperation between Moscow and Beijing on the information front. The annual summit held in Hangzhou in early November featured commitments from both sides to partner on media initiatives, countering disinformation, and promoting traditional values.

Moscow already has extensive experience in information operations designed to disrupt and reshape Europe’s political landscape, and is widely regarded as a global pioneer in the use of multimedia information operations to advance foreign policy objectives. Beijing has also faced accusations of playing a role in these activities, which are aimed at exploiting social divisions and boosting polarizing narratives with a view to generating support for anti-establishment political forces throughout the Western world.

While measuring the success of information operations is not an exact science, there is certainly no shortage of evidence to suggest that these tactics are having an impact. Support for far-right political parties is now surging across Europe. While each party has its own individual agenda, these populist political forces tend to share a sympathetic stance toward Russia while enjoying extensive coverage on Kremlin-linked media platforms.

Eurasia Center events

How Russia’s winter warfare strategy targets Ukrainian civilians

Conflict Europe & Eurasia Geopolitics & Energy Security Human Rights

Perhaps the clearest indication of cooperation between Russia and China in the information arena is the growing Russian state media presence on TikTok. This is alleged to include coordinated campaigns and the use of AI technologies.

Disinformation watchdogs from Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council have accused the Kremlin of using the TikTok platform to conduct information campaigns designed to demoralize Ukrainian society and undermine resistance to Russia’s invasion. Ukrainian officials claim Moscow has employed AI to create videos featuring “ordinary Ukrainians” conveying pessimistic messages.

Russia is also reportedly using Chinese social media platforms to recruit Chinese citizens for the war in Ukraine. The large volume of recruitment adverts across China’s strictly controlled and monitored social media sphere has been interpreted by some as a sign of tacit approval from the authorities in Beijing.

Chinese and Russian information ecosystems appear to be engaging in significant cross-promotion. Kremlin outlets actively promote war-related content on platforms such as China’s Weibo. Meanwhile, Chinese state media and officials amplify key Kremlin narratives blaming the West for the Russian invasion of Ukraine and framing sanctions policies as self-defeating. Both Beijing and Moscow employ similar language to describe the war in Ukraine, which they typically depict as a defensive reaction to the West’s provocative policies.

As information cooperation between Moscow, Beijing, and other authoritarian regimes expands, Western policymakers must recognize that information warfare is now a tier-one national security threat requiring a comprehensive response. This should include signaling that information offensives will be treated as comparable to other violations of sovereignty, with the European Union and NATO working to establish clear diplomatic, legal, and economic red lines in the information domain.

Efforts must be undertaken to defend the information space more effectively by combining the initiatives of individual governments along with civil society. This could draw on a wide range of specific examples, such as Ukraine’s wartime experience and recent elections in Romania and Moldova. Greater accountability for hostile information operations is also crucial. Western governments must be prepared to publicly expose attacks and impose tangible costs.

The authoritarian axis that has taken shape since the onset of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine is currently setting new standards in terms of coordinated information operations across media platforms. The West’s response must be equally systematic. The tools and frameworks exist; Western governments must now demonstrate the necessary political will.

William Dixon is an associate fellow of the Royal United Service Institute specializing in cyber and international security issues. Maksym Beznosiuk is a strategic policy and security analyst with a focus on Ukraine, Russia, European security, and EU-Ukraine cooperation.

China’s new five-year plan should be a wake-up call for the United States

Robert Hormats — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 12:50:00 +0000

Much of the recent attention devoted to the US-China relationship has focused on the October 30 meeting between presidents Donald Trump and Xi Jinping in Busan, South Korea. There, the two leaders struck a deal that reduced trade tensions and, at least temporarily, seems to have ameliorated several highly contentious issues. It was clearly a positive diplomatic step—although many more are needed.

But another event last month may ultimately do far more to determine both the deeper, longer-term economic relationship and the outcome of the intense technological competition underway between China and the United States.

From October 20 through 23, the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party held its Fourth Plenum in Beijing. The plenum discussed and foreshadowed the country’s fifteenth five-year plan. It will be the authoritative government policy blueprint for the Chinese economy over the next half decade.

While the final plan will not be formally released until March 2026, the communiqué that emerged from the October meeting provides an early indication of where Chinese economic policy is headed. Americans should pay close attention. These plans will have a major effect on the US economy; US international leadership in many aspects of business, science, economics, technology, and foreign policy; and US national security for years to come.

I’ve visited China frequently since the early 1970s, beginning when I served as a senior economic advisor to then-National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger. I have continued to meet with senior Chinese leaders and officials, many of whom have worked on the development of earlier five-year plans, and I have observed how these plans have changed over time. Earlier versions were built on an old Soviet model with specific production targets for items such as steel, cement, ships, and grain. They have since become authoritative “guidance-oriented” documents, with major changes especially evident during the period when Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping and Premier Zhu Rongji exerted their influence over the process.

Beginning in the early 1980s, Deng made famous the term “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” Under this policy theme, the Chinese Communist Party would remain at the center of economic power, but the Chinese economy would become somewhat more market-oriented. The policy established the early basis for the breathtaking economic and technological progress that China has made in the past several decades.

US officials and business leaders should study both the October 23 communiqué and, when it is released, the actual five-year plan in order to assess what China’s economic policies and ambitions mean for the United States. They will also need to consider how to respond to the economic, technology, and security challenges—and perhaps a few opportunities—that it poses.

Reading between the lines

As with most such communiqués, the one released in October often speaks in very general terms. The party’s goal here is not to provide specifics, but rather to signal a policy direction through carefully chosen language, and to convey major points of policy emphasis.

In this case, a few notable phrases stand out. One is that “high-quality development” should be a major focus, suggesting that China intends to enhance its status as a major producer of advanced industrial products. This is already evidenced by its dominant role in products such as electric vehicles, integrated wireless communications technologies, and solar panels, based on increasingly advanced technologies and production practices.

A second notable phrase is that “reform and innovation” will be “the fundamental driving force” for the country. More specifically, the communiqué speaks of the need for “substantial improvements in scientific and technological self-reliance and strength.” It continues:

We should enhance the overall performance of China’s innovation system, raise our innovation capacity across the board, strive to take a leading position in scientific and technological development, and keep fostering new quality productive forces.

Importantly, the communiqué reinforces the link between technology and the military, noting the need for “further advances in strengthening the national security shield” and for bolstering “the military through reform, scientific and technological advances.” Additional emphasis is placed on increasing the already close interaction between military-oriented and civilian-oriented industries, especially when the latter produce items that the military can quickly and strategically use. A recent live-fire drone exercise in Inner Mongolia suggests how much integration there is already.

While the United States is not mentioned in the document, there are oblique references to growing US-China tensions: “We must,” the communiqué states, “proactively identify, respond to, and steer changes, demonstrate the courage and competence to carry forward our struggle and dare to brave high winds, choppy waters, and even dangerous storms.” Here “storms” of American origin are doubtless what Chinese leaders had in mind; Xi has used similar language in speeches in the past. To make the point even more vividly, he emphasized during the recent plenum the priority he attached to winning “the strategic initiative amid fierce international competition.”

Elsewhere, the communiqué states that “strategic opportunities exist alongside risks and challenges, while uncertainties and unforeseen factors are rising.” The only other phrase that rises to that level and seems to be written with the United States in mind is the call for “self-reliance and self-strengthening in science and technology.” This signals an intent to reduce the country’s dependence on foreign suppliers who might attempt to use China’s reliance on their products for negotiating leverage or to apply political or strategic pressure.

To put these measures into historical context, it’s hard to overestimate how deep and politically sensitive memories are in China about the history of foreigners using strategic leverage to put political or military pressure on the country. When I first visited China, while Mao Zedong was still its dominant leader, I was often reminded of his statement:“We are bullied by others.” To this day, China is determined to ensure that this never happens again.

American business leaders, as well as top US economic and defense officials, will need to pay particular attention to how the plans relate to China’s desire to enhance its role as an already enormously competitive industrial power, often in products formerly dominated by the United States or the West. They should also anticipate a multitude of new regulations, data-privacy and protection policies, and techniques for global advancement of Chinese-centric advanced technology hardware and software. Elaboration of policies on technologically critical rare-earth minerals is also likely. US military strategists especially should take note of rapidly growing connections between technology and national security. These elements will affect virtually all aspects of China’s relations with the United States.

Competition for the best and brightest

US policymakers should heed China’s efforts to accelerate the scientific talent behind its technological development. Beijing wants to recruit a new wave of world-class scientists, researchers, and innovators—many of whom are now in the United States—to work with its own world-class teams. It is also trying to entice Chinese researchers back from US companies and research centers. Both efforts could be bolstered by what Chinese leaders see as Washington’s sudden introduction of a host of new policies hostile to basic scientific and medical research. These US policies are causing many researchers and scientists to look for new opportunities abroad.

Both Deng, the former Chinese leader, and Zhu, the former Chinese premier, were strong advocates of Chinese students and researchers going abroad, especially to the United States—a practice that had been largely forbidden during the Cultural Revolution. In one memorable meeting that I and a small group of international colleagues had with Deng, he asserted that this was one of the decisions of which he was most proud. When these students returned, he said, they would “change China.”

One manifestation of this change was the development of a more market-friendly five-year planning process. Another was more competitive practices by both state-owned enterprises and the few but rapidly growing number of private companies.

For many years, much of China’s technological progress was attributed to Chinese companies finding various ways—some through illicit methods and some through normal business transactions—of obtaining advanced foreign technology. Now, however, many advanced Chinese products come from Chinese-originated, highly successful technology—a process known as “indigenous innovation.”

China’s indigenous innovation has grown rapidly of late to include sophisticated drones, impressively engineered robots, advanced electric vehicles (EVs), new generations of chips, widely used 5G technology, surprise advances in artificial intelligence (AI), advanced solar energy and battery technology, and fast, comfortable trains.

Some of the funding for advanced technologies in China comes from private capital, much of it from abroad, but huge sums also come from the government. Xi has determined that China should become the preeminent technology power in the world. Moreover, he wants Chinese businesses to provide the infrastructure that other countries, particularly in the Global South, use to build their data and telecommunications networks. He also wants these companies to sell them EVs and other technology. And he wants to supplant the United States as the most important force shaping global rules and network systems to make them more friendly to Chinese economic and political interests.

In the view of many Chinese officials, the next steps in the technology race will depend primarily on the skills of a rapidly growing number of formidable Chinese scientists, researchers, and innovators. But China also sees the potential for attracting scientists and researchers from abroad, as the United States has done for decades.

At the end of the same meeting mentioned above, Deng pulled me aside. Observing that I was probably the youngest member of our delegation, he told me that it would be good for US-China relations if significant numbers of bright young American scholars and scientists could visit, study, and work in China. He asked if I thought that were possible. I replied that I thought many young people would be interested, under the right conditions. He smiled and said, “Please tell your friends that I hope they do come. They will be very welcome.”

Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping escorts former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger at the Great Hall of People, Beijing, on November 10, 1989. (REUTERS/Richard Ellis)

Over the years, Deng’s hope has materialized, probably beyond his wildest dreams. China is tapping into top talent, in numerous cases from the United States, to advance its remarkable technological rise. But until now it has had to compete with great American universities and research centers that were able to attract, support, and retain leading US and foreign scientific and research talent—often thanks in part to generous US government grants from the US National Laboratories, the National Science Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health.

Recent US policy changes present an opening for China’s leaders. According to a survey by Nature of more than 1,600 scientists in the United States, about 75 percent are considering leaving the country. Many of those who said they have thought about leaving are young, up-and-coming researchers and post-docs. And while most listed Canada and Europe as potential destinations, some doubtless have their eyes on China. A major reason given for their desire to leave the United States was major cuts in government grants for scientific and medical research—and the resulting cuts in jobs for researchers and post-docs in those areas.

Beijing clearly sees this as a golden opportunity. This summer, China announced a new “K visa” category that is designed specifically for young science and technology talent from abroad. The new five-year plan will surely reflect a desire to capitalize further on this opportunity.

Building economic and technology alliances

While China has very few military alliances, it does have a great many economic- and technology-oriented ones—especially with Singapore and other countries in Southeast Asia. And Chinese technology, through such formidable telecommunications companies as Huawei, is a key link to other nations. Solar-energy infrastructure and harbor development are other areas for collaboration. Sales of low-cost, gas-saving autos, especially electric vehicles, are yet another. Also, China is playing a key role in establishing the digital ecosystems of many of these nations, mostly in the Global South, likely giving Beijing enormous access to their data.

One major follow-up to the new five-year plan, hinted at in the communiqué, is likely to be a focus on strengthening these kinds of linkages. By attempting to achieve technological preeminence and by working with such countries, China seeks to assume a leadership role in shaping the twenty-first-century economic order to its benefit. It is a prospect that US policymakers should bear in mind when engaging in massive and disruptive funding cuts. China is positioning itself to lead the effort to write the future international rules affecting many areas of science and technology to its advantage. At the same time, the United States is pulling back and, consequently, its influence in this area is waning.

Domestic confrontations vs. domestic cohesion

China has not failed to observe the political and ideological chasm—and the dismaying acrimony—in the United States over support for scientific and medical research and innovation, along with collapsing US support for global economic institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and World Trade Organization. Chinese officials with whom I have recently spoken see these developments as examples of weakening US potential to sustain international leadership in many economic areas.

Meanwhile, the Chinese government has been using its five-year plans as a vehicle for strengthening internal collaboration and cohesion among key players in science and technology. While the plan traditionally is developed under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party, it is the result of years of consultation with nongovernmental experts, private-sector companies, environmentalists, technology leaders, and university researchers from around the country. This process narrows differences among these experts and creates a sense of national unity around the final plan. While the Chinese Communist Party’s decisions still prevail, collective participation enhances the prospects of acceptance and implementation. This is certainly true in research, technology, and innovation.

The planning process is also one way of enhancing policy consistency, continuity, and predictability. This predictability creates a more stable environment for investment and business decisions—assuming, importantly, that party intervention can be kept to a minimum. Chinese leaders are quick to contrast their approach with political and policy uncertainties and unreliability in the United States.

To be sure, China’s is far from a perfect system. Many significant problems still exist. Youth unemployment remains high. Investment continues in the production of goods where there is already massive overcapacity. Private investment has lagged expectations. Household consumption is exceptionally low as consumers remain relatively cautious. Indeed, as the communiqué indicates, encouraging considerably more consumption is a high priority for party leaders. The government also is still grappling with how to govern and regulate AI. And fully integrating foreign scientists, with different languages and backgrounds, is often challenging.

How the United States should respond to China’s plans

Nevertheless, US policymakers need to come to terms with a central fact: The United States now faces, in China, the most formidable economic and technology competitor it has encountered in nearly a hundred years. And the United States is doing so at precisely the same time that it is engaging domestically in more intense, partisan, and harmful confrontations and divisions on many subjects critical to its future financial stability and technological and scientific competitiveness.

Such deep divisions at home are inflicting harm on the very institutions and principles that made the United States the world leader in the areas noted above for many decades. And while Americans struggle with rancorous domestic divisions, project dysfunction over such basic issues as keeping the government open and planes flying, and indulge in partisan hostility to science and research, China’s role in important areas of technology and its public pronouncements around the world, especially in the Global South, about the dysfunctionality of the US government and governance model have increased.

It might be easiest to start with what the United States should not to do in response to this challenge. Decoupling from China is not an effective answer; US dependence on China for rare-earth minerals and ingredients in many pharmaceuticals illustrate as much. Nor are a full-scale effort to contain China or hoping the relationship returns to what it was a few decades ago. Nor is a prolonged and unstable confrontation with Beijing, which is not in the interest of either great power. Nor is waiting for some Sputnik-like moment to awaken the United States to the challenge.

The awakening needs to come from within. The United States has enormous competitive strengths and a plethora of leading companies. It has abundant labor skills, world-class scientific expertise, highly successful research labs, and globally respected universities. It has an impressive history of entrepreneurial capitalism and competitive markets dating back decades. But if the United States continues to succumb to hostile partisan divisions on major economic and technology issues—and if its policies continue to damage the scientific, educational, technological, and basic research traditions and institutions that have driven its achievements in the past—then the United States’ economic future and scientific preeminence will become more and more uncertain.

Some US politicians see China’s successes as an economic threat and advocate engaging in a slew of punishing measures in areas such as trade and investment. But much as some in Washington may hope, the United States will not win its competition with China this way. Some tough trade and investment measures may be justified from time to time to defend US economic or security interests. Many others, however, will likely be of dubious benefit or counterproductive, or invite painful retaliation from China.

Rather, the United States should rise to the challenge of China’s economic and technological ascendance by supporting sound fiscal policies, increases in basic research, more funding for advanced science, higher quality education for more Americans, an attractive environment for foreign students and researchers, and other elements essential to growth and competition.

US leaders should see competition with China as a wake-up call—an opportunity to pull together US society at home, recognize the roots of the long history of US economic and strategic success, and mobilize its historic economic advantages and its resources to meet the competitive challenges that will define the twenty-first century.

The United States’ economic future will be determined not by a document, however dynamic, of another great power across the Pacific. But the policies in that document should serve as a wake-up call—a test of US ability and will to successfully meet the challenges the country now faces at home and abroad to advance its principles and interests in the face of twenty-first-century realities.

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China’s new five-year plan should be a wake-up call for the United States

Robert Hormats — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 11:00:00 +0000

Reading between the lines

We should enhance the overall performance of China’s innovation system, raise our innovation capacity across the board, strive to take a leading position in scientific and technological development, and keep fostering new quality productive forces.

Competition for the best and brightest

Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping escorts former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger at the Great Hall of People, Beijing, on November 10, 1989. (REUTERS/Richard Ellis)

Building economic and technology alliances

Domestic confrontations vs. domestic cohesion

How the United States should respond to China’s plans

Robert Hormats is a member of the Atlantic Council’s board of directors and a former US undersecretary of state for economic, energy, and environmental affairs.

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Digging into the details of the US-Saudi deals

Atlantic Council — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 18:14:53 +0000

GET UP TO SPEED

“We’ve always been on the same side of every issue.” That’s how US President Donald Trump described Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) during a chummy Oval Office meeting on Tuesday, part of a day of pageantry and dealmaking at the White House. The United States and Saudi Arabia struck a series of agreements on defense, semiconductors, nuclear power, and more. While the world awaits the fine print of these deals, our experts took stock of what the leaders have announced so far and what to expect next.

TODAY’S EXPERT REACTION BROUGHT TO YOU BY

Daniel B. Shapiro (@DanielBShapiro): Distinguished fellow at the Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative and former deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East and US ambassador to Israel
Tressa Guenov: Director for programs and operations and senior fellow at the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, and former US principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs
Jennifer Gordon: Director of the Nuclear Energy Policy Initiative and the Daniel B. Poneman chair for nuclear energy policy at the Global Energy Center
Tess deBlanc-Knowles: Senior director with the Atlantic Council Technology Programs and former senior policy advisor on artificial intelligence at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy

Jet setters

On defense, Trump approved the sale of fifth-generation F-35 fighter jets to Saudi Arabia, which Dan interprets as an indication that the US president “is going all-in on the US-Saudi relationship.”
But “China remains an issue in the backdrop of US-Saudi defense relations,” Tressa tells us. She notes that US intelligence agencies have reportedly raised concerns about Chinese access to the F-35 if a US-Saudi sale were to proceed, and “similar efforts to sell F-35s to the UAE were not realized across the previous Trump and Biden administrations, in part due to concerns of technology transfer to China.”
There’s also the US legal requirement to ensure Israel’s qualitative military edge (QME) in the region. Dan points out that although the 2020 F-35 deal with the United Arab Emirates was later scuttled, it did pass a QME review, and the Saudi deal is likely to do so as well, in part because “Israel will have been flying the F-35 for a decade and a half before the first Saudi plane is delivered, and Israel will have nearly seventy-five F-35s by then.”
But the UAE deal was linked to its normalization of diplomatic relations with Israel, and “it appears there is no link to Saudi normalization” with Israel in this deal, Dan points out. In the Oval Office, MBS conditioned his joining the Abraham Accords on “a clear path” to a Palestinian state, which does signal a potential disparity from Saudi Arabia’s previous stance requiring the “establishment” of a Palestinian state.
The Biden administration held talks with Saudi Arabia about a treaty that “would have included restrictions on Saudi military cooperation with China and ensured access for US forces to Saudi territory when needed to defend the United States,” Dan tells us. But “Trump has not announced whether he is giving the Saudis a one-way security guarantee, or whether there are mutual-security commitments.”
So what about Trump’s announcement during MBS’s visit that Saudi Arabia has become the United States’ twentieth Major Non-NATO Ally? Tressa tells us the designation “is a favorite tool of US presidents to cap off major visits with a symbolic flourish to indicate elevated relations.” But Saudi Arabia already enjoys many of the benefits of the designation, Tressa notes, such as privileged access to US arms sales, and the designation “does not provide any special or enforceable security guarantees, nor is it a binding treaty.”

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Nuclear option

The White House also announced a Joint Declaration on the Completion of Negotiations on Civil Nuclear Energy Cooperation. Jennifer tells us it’s “likely a precursor to an official Section 123 agreement” on peaceful nuclear cooperation, which must also be reviewed by Congress.
“Saudi Arabia has indicated keen interest for years in pursuing civil nuclear technologies,” Jennifer notes, both to add to its power grid and for water desalinization. If the United States provides that nuclear technology, she adds, then “it can exert influence on security matters and help prevent the development of nuclear weapons in Saudi Arabia and beyond.”
“Although there had long been speculation that a civil nuclear agreement between the US and Saudi Arabia might cover broader geopolitical issues,” Jennifer adds, “this week’s announcement reflects a more pragmatic approach with a focus on technologies that have strong national security implications.”

Chipping in

The two leaders also announced an AI Memorandum of Understanding but did not release many details. “Likely this means the approval of the sale of a package of advanced AI chips to Saudi Arabia,” Tess says. In the Oval Office, she points out, “MBS shared his vision (and strategic bet) on computing to compensate for the country’s workforce shortfalls and ensure continued economic growth.”
While the Trump administration has lifted the Biden administration’s “AI Diffusion Rule” that limited the sale of chips to many countries, it still has the final say on exports of the most advanced chips to Saudi Arabia, Tess notes, “likely due to fears related to ties with China.”
Now, Tess adds, US national security officials will keep their eyes on “the provisions of the new AI agreement focused on technology protection and what measures will be put in place to keep America’s most advanced AI chips out of reach of Chinese adversaries.”

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Biometrics and digital identity in Africa

Sani Suleiman Sani — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 14:00:00 +0000

Bottom lines up front

Forty-nine African countries now operate biometric systems, with foreign vendors dominating a market that controls the continent’s most sensitive identity infrastructure.
An estimated half a billion Africans lack identity documents, driving governments to deploy biometric systems rapidly. Still, weak governance frameworks often mean these technologies exclude the very populations they’re intended to serve.
From Uganda’s Ndaga Muntu to Kenya’s Huduma Namba, biometric deployments across Africa face common challenges: data breaches, corruption in enrollment processes, exclusion of elderly citizens, and the use of facial recognition to monitor political dissent.

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Executive summary

The rapid adoption of biometric and digital identification systems is transforming governance and public administration across Africa. Promoted as tools to modernize service delivery, enhance electoral integrity, and strengthen state capacity, these systems are becoming central to how identity and citizenship are managed. From national identification schemes and voter registration to border management and SIM card registration, biometrics have become deeply embedded in Africa’s political, social, and economic landscape.

However, this technological expansion comes with profound risks. Weak legal frameworks, limited oversight, and a growing reliance on foreign vendors have created an ecosystem vulnerable to privacy breaches, state surveillance, and systemic exclusion. Biometric systems increasingly integrate electoral and civil identity data, giving governments vast surveillance capabilities while disenfranchising marginalized groups such as rural communities, migrants, and individuals without foundational IDs.

The report explores the main use cases driving biometrics and digital identification systems in Africa, focusing on their governance, vendor dynamics, and human rights impacts. Key areas include national identification and civil registration, which provide the foundation for legal identity and access to services; immigration management; elections, where they strengthen voter registration and authentication; and smart city initiatives, which leverage digital IDs for efficient service delivery and urban governance.

The research reveals that foreign technology firms dominate Africa’s biometric ecosystem; that forty-nine African countries have at least one form of biometric system; and thirty-five out of the fifty-four countries on the continent use biometrics in their election processes. Companies such as Idemia (France), Semlex (Belgium), Veridos (Germany), Thales (France), and Huawei (China) provide the core technology, hardware, and algorithms that underpin these systems. African governments often finance these projects through loans from international institutions like the World Bank, creating dependencies that shape procurement and governance practices.

While biometric systems are often introduced to improve electoral processes and service delivery, their fragmented rollout forces citizens to repeatedly submit sensitive data across multiple platforms, increasing costs and risk of fraud. Many projects lack transparency, with procurement processes shielded under the guise of national security. Public knowledge of these systems remains low: a sample study in three countries by ICT Works found that only 38 percent of surveyed citizens were aware of their governments’ purchases of biometric, facial recognition, or AI systems, highlighting a significant transparency gap.

To mitigate these risks, the report offers seven key policy recommendations:

Strengthening independent oversight bodies free from political interference;
Enacting comprehensive data protection laws covering the full life cycle of biometric data;
Ensuring transparent, participatory deployment processes; Integrating human rights due diligence into all projects;
Establishing continuous oversight and remedies for rights violations;
Protecting electoral integrity and preventing the over-integration of ID systems;
Embedding a rights-based governance model rooted in privacy, equality, and non-discrimination.

The findings underscore that biometric and digital identity systems must not be viewed merely as technical tools for modernization. They are inherently political, with the potential to either strengthen democratic governance or entrench authoritarian control. Without robust reforms, these systems risk becoming instruments of exclusion and surveillance rather than empowerment.

read the full report

About the authors

Sani Suleiman Sani is a policy and research strategist shaping continental dialogue on digital rights, technology governance, and inclusive innovation in Africa. He leads the research portfolio at Paradigm Initiative, where he oversees multi-country studies that inform legislative processes, corporate accountability, and global debates on digital policy.

Thobekile Matimbe is a human rights lawyer and Senior Manager Partnerships and Engagements at Paradigm Initiative (PIN) where she dedicates her skills to the advancement of digital rights and inclusion in Africa and beyond.

Kenton Thibaut is a senior resident China fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab), where she leads China programming for the Democracy + Tech Initiative, and a resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Indo-Pacific Security Initiative (IPSI) at the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security.

Iria Puyosa is a senior research fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Democracy+Tech Initiative. She specializes in the complex interplay between technology and political dynamics.

Acknowledgements

This report was made possible with support from the Embassy of Denmark in the United States. The Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab) would also like to thank the Paradigm Initiative for contributing writing and research.

Explore the programs

The Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab) has operationalized the study of disinformation by exposing falsehoods and fake news, documenting human rights abuses, and building digital resilience worldwide.

The Democracy + Tech Initiative creates policy practices that align global stakeholders toward tech and governance that reinforces, rather than undermines, open societies. It builds on the DFRLab’s established track record and leadership in the open-source field, empowering global communities to promote transparency and accountability online and around the world.

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Vladimir Putin fears entering Russian history as the man who lost Ukraine

Peter Dickinson — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 21:47:02 +0000

The invasion unleashed by Vladimir Putin almost four years ago has often been called unprovoked, but nobody can say it was entirely unexpected. On the contrary, the full-scale invasion of 2022 was merely the latest and most extreme stage in a prolonged campaign of escalating Russian aggression aimed at preventing Ukraine from leaving the Kremlin orbit and resuming its place among the European community of nations.

During the early years of Putin’s reign, this campaign had focused primarily on massive interference in Ukrainian domestic affairs. Following Ukraine’s 2014 Revolution of Dignity, the Russian dictator opted for a far more forceful combination of military and political intervention. When even this descent into open aggression failed to derail Kyiv’s westward trajectory, Putin sought to solve Russia’s Ukraine problem once and for all by launching the largest European invasion since World War II.

As the fifth year of the war looms on the horizon, there is very little to indicate that Putin’s hard line tactics are working. While Russia has managed to occupy around 20 percent of Ukraine, opinion in the remaining 80 percent of the country is now overwhelmingly hostile to Moscow and supportive of closer European ties. For the vast majority of people in Ukraine, the invasions of 2014 and 2022 represent watershed moments that have profoundly impacted their understanding of Ukrainian identity while radically reshaping attitudes toward Russia.

The transformation in Ukraine’s geopolitical orientation is being mirrored by changes taking place domestically as the country’s center of gravity shifts decisively from east to west. For the first decade or so of independence, Ukraine was politically and economically dominated by the industrial east, with major cities including Donetsk, Kharkiv, Dnipro, and Zaporizhzhia serving as power bases for billionaire oligarch clans who shaped the Ukrainian national narrative and helped maintain high levels of Russian influence across the country. At the time, the comparatively quaint cities of central and western Ukraine lacked the wealth and general wherewithal to compete.

The first indication of a significant change in this dynamic was the 2004 Orange Revolution, which saw an unprecedented nationwide protest movement erupt over an attempt to falsify the country’s presidential election orchestrated by Kremlin-backed political forces rooted firmly in eastern Ukraine. This popular uprising represented a clear and unambiguous rejection of the idea that Ukraine was inextricably bound to Russia. A decade later, the onset of Russian military aggression would turbo-charge modern Ukraine’s historic turn toward the west.

Stay updated

As the world watches the Russian invasion of Ukraine unfold, UkraineAlert delivers the best Atlantic Council expert insight and analysis on Ukraine twice a week directly to your inbox.

Since 2014, traditional east Ukrainian bastions of Russian influence such as Donetsk and Luhansk have been occupied by Kremlin forces and effectively cut off from the rest of Ukraine. More recently, the full-scale invasion has left the broader Donbas region devastated and depopulated, while the formerly preeminent metropolises of the east face an uncertain future as fortified front line cities under relentless Russian bombardment.

The situation in western Ukraine is strikingly different. Cities throughout the region are experiencing rapid growth thanks to an influx of families and businesses seeking to relocate away from the war zone. The experience of Lviv since 2022 illustrates this trend. The largest city in western Ukraine, Lviv’s population has expanded by around a quarter since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion to reach approximately one million. The Lviv real estate market has comfortably surpassed the regional capitals of eastern Ukraine and now rivals Kyiv itself. Likewise, Lviv is also second only to the Ukrainian capital in terms of new companies and investments.

Politically and diplomatically, Lviv is clearly in the ascendancy. Many Kyiv embassies partially relocated to the city in 2022 and continue to maintain a presence. Over the past three years, Lviv has hosted a number of high-level international events including presidential summits and gatherings of EU ministers. The rise of Lviv has been so striking that it has sparked rumors of jealousy among the establishment in Kyiv, with some suggesting that the potential reopening of Lviv International Airport has been deliberately sidelined in order to prevent the further eclipse of the Ukrainian capital.

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Whatever happens in the war, the shift in Ukraine’s national center of gravity toward the west of the country is unlikely to be reversed. In addition to the urgent impetus provided by Russia’s ongoing invasion, the emergence of western Ukraine is also being driven by the pull factor of EU integration. Over the past decade, Ukraine has secured visa-free EU travel and been granted official EU candidate status. This is transforming the investment climate in western Ukraine, which shares borders with four EU member states.

Large-scale infrastructure projects are already helping to cement western Ukraine’s status as the country’s most attractive region and gateway to the EU. Work on a 22km European-gauge railway line from the EU border to Uzhhorod was completed earlier this year, while construction of a far more ambitious Euro-gauge line connecting Lviv to the Polish border is scheduled to begin in 2026. As the EU accession process continues to gain momentum, these logistical links will only strengthen.

It remains unclear exactly when Ukraine will become a fully fledged EU member state, but there is a growing sense of confidence throughout the country that the once distant dream of EU membership is now finally within reach. For western Ukraine in particular, joining the European Union will complete the region’s historic journey from imperial outpost on the fringes of the Soviet Empire to economic engine nestled in the heart of the world’s largest single market.

All this is very bad news for Vladimir Putin. The Kremlin dictator’s Ukraine obsession reflects his fear that the consolidation of a democratic, European, and genuinely independent Ukraine could serve as a catalyst for the next phase in the long Russian retreat from empire that began almost four decades ago with the fall of the Berlin Wall. As Putin’s reign has progressed, his determination to prevent Ukraine’s geopolitical defection has only intensified, as has his readiness to sacrifice Russia’s more immediate national interests in pursuit of his anti-Ukrainian crusade. It is now increasingly obvious that his decision to invade Ukraine has backfired spectacularly, eroding centuries of Russian influence while accelerating the European integration he so bitterly opposes.

Unless Putin succeeds in dismantling Ukrainian statehood entirely and erasing the very idea of the Ukrainian nation, he must surely realize that the Ukraine of the postwar period is now destined to establish itself within the wider Western world while remaining implacably hostile to Russia. Rather than acknowledging this disastrous outcome, he will seek to continue the war indefinitely. If he stops now and accepts a compromise peace, Putin knows he will be doomed to enter Russian history as the man who lost Ukraine.

Peter Dickinson is editor of the Atlantic Council’s UkraineAlert service.

Nov 18, 2025

The MBS visit to the White House could revive IMEC

By Afaq Hussain

After October 7, the corridor that once symbolized economic integration in the Middle East became a victim of regional instability.

India Middle East

MENASource

Nov 18, 2025

Peace, pacts, and recognition: Saudi Arabia at the forefront of a new Middle East

By R. Clarke Cooper

Trump and other US officials remain eager to add Saudi Arabia to the Abraham Accords rota and to strike a defense pact.

Middle East Peacekeeping and Peacebuilding

The timing matters because Vision 2030 has reached a more demanding stage. The kingdom has made clear gains in entertainment, tourism, public administration, and industry. At the same time, its most visible projects face delays, rising costs, and heavier reliance on public financing. Experts have documented higher construction expenses, shortfalls in foreign investment, and repeated capital injections into regional development projects such as Neom—all of which place pressure on state finances and investor confidence.

These challenges explain why Saudi policymakers are increasingly sensitive to regional shocks—including conflicts between Israel and Iran, increased maritime threats in the Red Sea, and political instability in the Levant—that can slow progress or weaken investor trust. Vision 2030 is now shaped not only by domestic choices but by the stability of the neighborhood around Saudi Arabia.

Regional instability

Increased attacks on commercial vessels in the Red Sea from Yemen’s Houthi rebels in recent years show how regional instability directly affects Vision 2030. The Houthis continue to disrupt global supply chains and raise insurance premiums for vessels heading toward the Suez Canal. The campaign of attacks has prompted companies, such as Maersk, to divert ships around the Cape of Good Hope. These changes increased transit times and created uncertainty in the logistics networks that Saudi Arabia hopes to anchor along its western coast. Tourism in the Red Sea has also slowed as travelers reassessed security conditions. These trends matter because the western coastline sits at the center of the kingdom’s tourism and infrastructure plans.

Sudan’s conflict reinforces these pressures. The war has destabilized a region that matters for Saudi food supplies, investments across Africa, and security around Port Sudan’s shipping lanes. Gulf states have considerable leverage in Sudan because of their financial and political ties, yet competing agendas have complicated efforts to reach a durable peace. Analysts warn that the conflict is reshaping Red Sea security and that instability on land is spilling over into the maritime environment. For Saudi Arabia, prolonged fighting threatens the long-term viability of coastal tourism and logistics projects that rely on predictable security conditions.

With Israeli strikes in Gaza continuing and Hamas yet to disarm, the Gaza peace plan continues to face strong headwinds. This unsettles global markets—including in the energy sector—and harms tourism in this region. Riyadh has signaled readiness to support postwar stabilization, but any substantial Saudi commitment hinges on governance reforms in Gaza and a recognized Palestinian political authority.

The Twelve Day War between Iran and Israel this June was a reminder of how quickly this region can drift into a bigger conflict, as well as Saudi Arabia’s vulnerability to spillovers. Saudi officials see the renewed Iran-Israel tensions as a direct threat to the energy security and investment climate Vision 2030 relies on. Cognizant of Israel’s strike in Qatar last September as well as Iran-supported strikes on commercial facilities in Saudi Arabia in 2019, Riyadh likely views its decent relationships with both Israel and Iran as helpful for reducing miscalculation and maintaining communication. However, they do not replace Riyadh’s need for sustained US engagement to deter a wider confrontation.

Saudi Arabia’s stabilizing role and its alignment with US interests

Saudi Arabia’s regional diplomacy has expanded as Vision 2030 has taken shape, positioning Riyadh as a stabilizing force in the region. It continues to play a role in mediating the decade-long conflict in Yemen while supporting Yemen’s government in Aden. Along with the United States, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates, Riyadh pursues an end to the war in Sudan via the Quad mechanism and remains an active partner in supporting post-Assad Syria through its transition. These diplomatic and development efforts not only support stabilization efforts but ultimately create the conditions Vision 2030 requires for Saudi Arabia’s own economic transformation.

This approach is also visible in emerging Saudi defense policy, which centers on deterrence, diversification of partnerships, and the development of domestic defense-industrial capacity. Riyadh believes that security cannot be outsourced and is seeking a more structured security relationship with the United States. This aligns with a wider trend in the Gulf, where Washington and its partners are exploring a more formal regional security architecture built around burden sharing, defined guarantees, and joint operational planning.

Washington wants secure sea lanes, an energized market, and partners in the Middle East capable of preventing or resolving conflicts without the expectation of significant US resources or military support. A Saudi Arabia that achieves an economic transformation is a better, more reliable partner in international diplomacy for US national security needs. This week’s visit by MBS reflects this recognition of shared priorities for Riyadh and Washington: The United States sees an economic transformation unfolding in Saudi Arabia, and Saudi Arabia sees the United States as a partner critical for creating a stable regional context in which its Vision 2030 is possible.

For the Trump administration, stability in the Middle East is essential to the regional strategy it is building. The White House is placing political and economic bets that a partnership with Saudi Arabia results in increased energy security, investment partnerships, and conflict-ending diplomacy in places like Gaza, Yemen, and Sudan.

Frank Talbot is a nonresident senior fellow with the North Africa Initiative at the Atlantic Council’s Rafid Hariri Center & Middle East programs. Previously, he served in the Department of State supporting stabilization initiatives in the Middle East and North Africa.

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Building the digital front line: Understanding big tech decision-making in Ukraine

Emma Schroeder — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 15:35:11 +0000

Executive summary
Introduction
Pull factors
- Clarity of conflict
- Business alignment
Push factors
- Difficulty of coordination
- Risk of retaliation
Key takeaways and conclusion
Author and acknowledgements

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Executive summary

The war in Ukraine has seen Russia launch and sustain a full-scale invasion across the information and physical domains against a country that has embraced technological development and increased technological and geopolitical connections to the United States, Canada, and Europe. Private technology companies have provided essential and often irreplaceable support to Ukraine following Russia’s invasion in 2022 and—especially in the early months of the conflict—did so largely without a request from an allied state or payment from Ukraine.

However, more than three years on, although the private sector’s assistance in Ukraine has been well-documented, the policymaking community at large is still largely unaware of how companies decided whether and how to provide technological support to and in Ukraine. Through open research as well as interviews and roundtable discussions with various private sector and government representatives, this report posits that companies were primarily motivated by a complex combination of factors in tandem, which pulled them toward or pushed them away from support. The factors pulling companies toward cooperation were the moral clarity of the conflict, and alignment with existing business opportunities. At the same time however, among factors pushing companies away from involvement in Ukraine was the difficulty of coordinating assistance in-country, as well as the risk of Russian retaliation. Meanwhile, both sets of factors were either enhanced—or mitigated—due to various actions taken by Ukraine, allied states, and international bodies. This includes Ukrainian tech diplomacy; the development of Ukraine’s technical capabilities; aid facilitations and coordination efforts by both various groups and entities; and risk mitigation efforts undertaken by both states and private companies.

Dependency on the private sector in the cyber domain has become a somewhat frequent refrain in domestic cybersecurity conversations. However, prior to the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, no one—not supranational bodies, states, or even companies themselves—was prepared for the role they would assume once the tanks rolled and the missiles fired. The Russia-Ukraine conflict’s cyber dimension has revealed an underlying dependency on products, services, and infrastructure owned and operated by private companies. This has proved to be both a source of opportunity to enhance Ukraine’s defenses, while at the same time revealing fundamental risks and vulnerabilities. Given the heft and impact of technology companies in today’s digital infrastructure, let alone in conflict, it is essential that policymakers grasp this complex interplay of factors that influenced companies‘ decision-making as they headed in Ukraine, to inform planning or preparedness for future conflicts where the private sector will inevitably play a key role.

Introduction

Amid the Russia-Ukraine conflict, the private sector was and is a crucial line of defense and source of cyber resilience to a greater extent than any conflict previously observed. As the first case study of this phenomenon in an overt, conventional war, the past three years in Ukraine have clearly demonstrated how crucial the cyber and informational domain, and the private companies at its forefront, will be in competition, conflict, and war to come.

More than three years following the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in the early morning of February 24, 2022, the war—and the crucial role of the international community in it—continues, but not unchanged. The war that Putin expected to end in Russian victory within a handful of days is now well into the third year of the largest and deadliest war in Europe since World War II.

This study examines the characteristics of this conflict that influenced companies’ decision-making regarding the type and degree of their involvement in Ukraine. Which factors and actions taken by states shaped tech companies’ decisions throughout the conflict as to whether and how to lend their support to Ukraine? These include both pull factors, those that increased the likeliness and degree of technology company involvement in Ukraine, and push factors, those that decreased the likeliness or degree of the same. Additionally, a key element influencing this space was the response by the Ukrainian government, allied governments, and international bodies to either build on the effects of the pull factors or mitigate the effects of the push factors throughout the conflict.

These factors and reactions are explored through open research, individual interviews with executives from tech companies active in Ukraine,¹ and workshop discussions including private sector, civil society, and representatives from various governments. It puts forward the private sector’s perspective on its own involvement in Ukraine since the 2022 invasion, reflecting on opinions and actions as they stood at the time of initial decision but also on the lessons learned since. The intention is to contribute to a baseline of understanding of public-private cooperation in Ukraine so that future policy decisions, whether in the Ukraine context or beyond, are built upon a full evaluation of experience.

Pull factors

Clarity of conflict

Clarity of conflict refers to the perception of the “right” and “wrong” or “victim” and “perpetrator” in a conflict, among one or more set audiences, whose support has the potential to provide materiel aid. In examining the role of this factor in the provision of tech aid to Ukraine, these audiences are primarily state policymakers, general populations, and technology leaders in Europe and North America. Overwhelmingly, in both public reporting and private interviews, the central reason given by companies themselves for why private companies provide aid and services supporting Ukraine is the moral clarity that these companies, their employees, and a large portion of their customers saw in the conflict and its conduct. Many interviewed commented on how the Russo-Ukrainian War, distinct from most other conflicts, has a clear and binary “right” and “wrong” side in the perspective of at least most of the Western world, from governments to individuals.

Russia engaged in continuous overt and covert aggressive action through a wide variety of coercive, though largely nonescalatory, tools in an attempt to exert control on Ukraine and its population. On February 24, 2022, however, Russia unleashed coordinated missile strikes on Ukrainian cities, airborne deployments of soldiers to key locations beyond the border region, conventional advancement across the border, and coordinated cyber aggression.

In March 2022, Amnesty International released a statement saying, in part, that “In less than a week, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has triggered a massive human rights, humanitarian, and displacement crisis that has the makings of the worst such catastrophe in recent European history.”² Photos and videos poured out of Ukraine, documenting Russian violence and war crimes against the people of that country. Reports on Russian atrocities and Ukrainian resistance dominated the headlines and news discussions in the West for months. A Monmouth University survey conducted in March 2022 found that 89 percent of Americans believed that Russia’s actions in Ukraine were not justified.³ Similarly, a poll of public perceptions of responsibility for war, taken across ten European countries showed that a clear majority in all countries attribute the primary responsibility to Russia.⁴

During these early months of 2022 the private sector quickly became an essential pillar of support for the Ukrainian war effort. As one expert put it, “If you had ordered a generic villain, you would have gotten Putin. From a moral standpoint, it was really easy for companies to take a stand, you have a moral highpoint.”⁵ Russia’s long decade of slowly escalating violence toward Ukraine, culminating in a brutal conventional assault and now, yearslong war, created an unusually stark geopolitical environment in which both Western states and the majority of their populations not only supported the defense of Ukraine but did so enthusiastically.

Across interviews and roundtable discussions, industry experts demonstrated an appreciation of the clarity of the “right” and “wrong” in the case of Ukraine. Nearly every private sector individual interviewed highlighted the importance of this factor in determining whether and how their company decided to begin or deepen its involvement in Ukraine following the invasion. One expert from a leading tech company said that “This was the easiest of all scenarios I could imagine for the private sector to seek to help an entity like Ukraine. The clarity on the conflict made the decision to assist Ukraine clear.”⁶ As several experts attested, much of the cyber aid provided to Ukraine required technical expertise that was not only limited to a few companies but also limited to a relatively small population of skilled individuals. At this level of analysis, the degree of available assistance had to take into account the bandwidth and possible burnout risk for these individuals as well as a strong, prevalent reluctance to work with a government or, especially, a military. The perceived clarity of the war in Ukraine, however, was critical to overcoming these concerns—at least for a while.⁷

Reaction – Ukrainian tech diplomacy

Tech diplomacy is the engagement between state authorities and tech companies, civil society organizations, other states, and multilateral fora to influence the development of both technology itself and the policy that surrounds it.⁸ Within the early days of the conflict, members of the Ukrainian government and especially the Minister for Digital Transformation Mykhailo Fedorov, rallied for aid across the technology sector. These calls, and the generally positive reception to them, built on arguments regarding the clarity of the conflict. Although this tech diplomacy has been the project of various Ukrainian officials and offices, both before the 2022 invasion and in the years since, a focus in on Fedorov is illustrative of the Ukrainian approach to cultivating and extracting mutual benefit from relationships with international technology companies.

In 2019, Fedorov was tapped as deputy prime minister and minister of digital transformation and was subsequently named deputy prime minister for innovation, education, science and technology and minister for digital transformation and most recently first deputy prime minister of Ukraine—minister of digital transformation of Ukraine.⁹ Fedorov and his team have been adept, according to government affairs executive from a US-based multinational technology corporation, at creating and using “carrots and sticks” to influence company leadership and employees to more favorably view Ukraine and to augment their willingness to contribute to its defense.¹⁰

Fedorov cultivated a strong social media presence with an audience both within Ukraine and across Europe and North America. He emphasized the importance of social media platforms—using primarily English to connect with an international audience—to bring awareness to the dire situation in Ukraine. He pointed to the social media platform X (formerly Twitter), saying it “has become an efficient tool that we are using to counter Russian military aggression.”¹¹ In efforts like United24, the Ukrainian government’s official fundraising platform, which began with Fedorov tweeting the government’s crypto wallet addresses with an ask for donations,¹² he saw it not just as a fundraising tool, but as a tool that is “keeping people around the world aware of what is going on in Ukraine.”¹³ Crowdfunding efforts, even if donations are small, make people feel that their contributions are making a difference and fosters a closer relationship between that person and the Ukraine regardless of the distance.

Fedorov leveraged this engaged global audience to incentivize company action, effectively mobilizing his audience’s attention. A look at Fedorov’s social media presence shows a clear pattern of this strategy in action. Between March 2022 and July 2024, Fedorov posted fifty-two requests for aid from specific companies, celebrated companies and individuals taking positive action, and called out companies engaging in business practices that he deemed detrimental to Ukrainian defense efforts. These posts served as additional public acknowledgement of the contributions of specific companies to Ukraine in a global public forum that other states were watching, as were individuals, aid organizations, and companies. One tech executive explained that not only did these callouts serve as thanks, they also leveraged the competitive nature of these companies that “one up” each other with aid as an additional driver.¹⁴

The Starlink case provides an interesting example of this strategy in action. Fedorov tagged Elon Musk in an X post and asked him directly to instruct SpaceX to provide Ukraine with Starlink stations, calling him out for trying to “colonize Mars” instead of helping civilians on Earth.¹⁵ Musk responded publicly on X less than twelve hours later that, “Starlink Service is now active in Ukraine. More terminals en route.” Two days later these stations, which would come to serve critical functions for civilians, government entities, and even military personnel, arrived. Fedorov again publicly responded on X with a photo of a truck full of terminals saying, “Starlink – here. Thanks, @elonmusk.”¹⁶

According to Fedorov’s deputy minister, Alex Bornyakov, in the months leading up to the Russian invasion, Fedorov’s office was unable to secure a meeting with Elon Musk. However, SpaceX President and COO Gwynne Shotwell indicated in March of 2022 that the company had been coordinating with Ukraine as part of its European expansion effort for several weeks before the invasion and were awaiting final approval from the Ukrainian government. According to Shotwell, “they tweeted at Elon and so we turned it on … that was our permission. That was the letter from the minister. It was a tweet.¹⁷ These early interactions show that at the very least, Fedorov’s social media engagement functioned as a nontraditional method to accelerate the provision and delivery of essential technical equipment that would enable connectivity for civilians, government entities, and even military units.¹⁸

Six months before the February 2022 invasion, Fedorov went on a tech diplomacy tour to Silicon Valley, intent on building stronger relationships with key technology companies with Ukraine’s digital transformation on the agenda. Fedorov‘s tech diplomacy work laid a solid foundation for coordination between the Ukrainian government and these technology companies by the time the war began. These relationships and Fedorov and his ministry’s direct approach with private companies meant that his office could seek solutions in the private sector directly and more swiftly than in traditional government acquisition. For example, in less than a month, a new and improved air raid alert system was implemented across the country as a result of a direct and informal conversation between Ajax Systems Chief Marketing Officer Valentine Hrytsenko, Deputy Minister of Digital Transformation Valeriya Ionan, and a team of digital transformation officers.¹⁹

Therefore, Ukraine’s approach to tech diplomacy represents a significant shift in how states, especially small or mid-power states, should conceptualize and shape their relationships with technology companies. Given that global technology companies’ (“big tech”) yearly revenue continually overshadows the gross domestic product (GDP) of many states,²⁰ this evolution in states’ relationships with big corporations suggests that corporate ties are sometimes more important than a state’s relationship with another state. This was echoed in a statement from the Danish government, recognizing the extent to which technological disruption affects societal and geopolitical change, nothing that the companies driving that innovation “have become extremely influential; to the extent that their economic and political power match—or even surpass—that of our traditional partners, the nation states.”²¹ Fedorov’s actions therefore proved the importance of tech diplomacy as a key government priority to secure the cooperation of the tech sector in a crisis, aided by the moral clarity that many companies saw in assisting Ukraine in a time of war.

Business alignment

For companies examining whether and how to provide tech-based support to Ukraine in its defense, business alignment can take a variety of forms, but typically refers to some combination of benefits that the company receives from these activities. Although the primary driver cited publicly for tech companies’ involvement has been the desire to aid Ukraine, their customers, and employees in Ukraine against blatant Russian aggression, another factor in companies’ decision-making was in fact how the provision of assistance to Ukraine fit into and supported the overall health and security of their organizations. This included the character of preexisting relationships with both Ukraine and Russia, direct financial profit, and indirect benefits such as instructive experience, field-testing products, and reputational benefits.

Preexisting relationships

The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 was not the start of the conflict between the two nations, nor was it the beginning of technology companies’ relationships with Ukraine and Russia. The nature and tone of these relationships provided a key foundation for these companies’ decisions throughout the post-2022 conflict. Ukraine and Russia, both as partners and as markets, had different starting points and were also on different active trajectories that informed the types and depth of engagement that tech companies wished to have with each country, both individually and comparatively.

One of the primary motivations cited for company involvement in Ukraine after the Russian invasion was the simple fact that many of these companies were already active in Ukraine to some extent and their leadership felt a responsibility to protect its employees and continue to serve its customers within Ukraine. For example, threat intelligence companies like Mandiant and CrowdStrike had been engaged in Ukraine since at least 2014, actively tracking cyber espionage, influence, and attack operations, while companies like Microsoft and Google were actively building capacity in the country despite Ukraine’s prohibitions on cloud services. In 2020, Google opened its second research and development center in Ukraine and Microsoft signed a memorandum of understanding with Ukraine’s Ministry of Digital Transformation to include a $500 million investment to build two data centers.²²

Several private sector and government representatives conveyed in private interviews that one of companies’ greatest concerns in the first few weeks of the conflict was the safety of their employees in Ukraine.²³ Many companies set up or contributed to programs intended to help employees leave the country, if they wished, or to provide protection measures for those who remained.²⁴ Additionally, companies with existing customers in Ukraine saw their mission as largely unchanged, seeking to serve their customers regardless of their location.²⁵ Companies with these preexisting relationships had more reason to continue or expand their work in the country due to these long-term connections.

By contrast, many of these companies also had preexisting, albeit weaker, ties with and in Russia. According to a 2024 report from the Center for Security and Emerging Technology, however, of the eighteen US tech companies that provided “direct assistance on the battlefield and/or services to maintain critical infrastructure or government functions,” none had “significant economic or financial linkages to Russia.”²⁶ While Ukraine had undertaken concerted steps to foster mutually beneficial relationships, Russia had been largely coercive. The Kremlin in the years before the 2022 reinvasion sought to tighten control over the Russian information space and exert influence over international tech companies’ activities in Russia. For example, in 2021 Russia passed a law requiring large technology companies with a presence in the Russian market to establish Russian offices registered with the Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology, and Mass Media, commonly known as Roskomnadzor, or risk severe punitive measures.²⁷ Some in the industry viewed the move as an attempt to blackmail tech companies into complying with Russian censorship.²⁸ Google was one such target of these coercive measures—in a push to force Google to censor the content available on its platforms within Russia, Russian authorities seized the company’s bank accounts. In response, Google’s Russian subsidiary declared bankruptcy and ceased all but its free services within Russia.²⁹

Amplified by the clarity of conflict discussed above, and Ukrainian tech diplomacy efforts for companies to sever financial ties with Russia and the Russian market, the decision calculus for these companies was less complex than it may have been otherwise.

Not all companies chose to leave the Russian market completely. Despite the coercion that Google faced, the company chose to keep YouTube available in Russia; however, without ads for users in Russia and without the ability to monetize content that would “exploit, dismiss, or condone Russia’s war in Ukraine.”^“³⁰ As discussed previously, many companies decided to continue services in Ukraine out of an obligation to existing customers. Depending on the company and the type of product sold or service provided, this same motivation was seen with respect to Russia as well. One tech executive explained that some of these products and services remained active because they provided a benefit to the Russian public, as opposed to the Russian government. For example, YouTube remained partially active, with restrictions, so that the platform could continue to serve as an alternate source of information for Russians.³¹

Direct profit

For companies, both those with an existing presence in Ukraine and those without, providing technical services in and to Ukraine could also serve more clear-cut business interests. Some were at least partially motivated by direct financial gain like new paid contracts and revenue potential such as additional value generated through the delivery of services and the possibility of positive publicity for the company or their products.

Although much of private companies’ work in Ukraine was (or started as) free of charge, many others were acquired in a more traditional contractual manner, with either Ukraine or an allied government footing the bill. Company representatives said in several interviews and roundtables that while they wish to continue their work in the country, as the war continues, they will require financial support to do so.³²

Indirect benefit

Some of the tech companies active in Ukraine derived value from the very act of providing a service itself, with indirect gains that included instructive experience with Russian cyber operations, the ability to field-test products, and reputational benefits.

For more than a decade, many multinational threat intelligence companies have been tracking Russian cyber aggression in Ukraine as part of their core function. These services helped to drive the development of Ukrainian cyber infrastructure, but it was not solely a charitable effort. It was in these companies own interests to gain the closest possible insights into areas like Ukraine that experience a high degree and sophistication of cyberattacks. As a result, these companies sowed valuable intelligence from their experience, and improved their business offerings across the board. As one executive in threat intelligence at a US cybersecurity nonprofit put it: “for threat intelligence companies, having this depth of access is a gold mine, the details delivered out of Ukraine on Russian tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) are quite amazing.”³³

These benefits are not only limited to threat intelligence companies. Companies that run active platforms used by and in Ukraine, such as cloud platforms, also gained greater direct experience against Russian cyber operations. As one executive put it, “while acting as a shield, [these] companies are collecting vast intelligence that can be used to improve their products and protect all their customers.”³⁴ The experience of defending against Russian activity at that scale and volume served as training of sorts for companies’ cybersecurity teams.

Both representatives from private companies and the Ukrainian government cited an additional benefit to working in Ukraine during the current war: it served as a testing ground for technology. As Fedorov stated, Ukraine “is the best test ground for all the newest tech … because here you can test them in real-life conditions.”³⁵ Several company executives privately seconded this notion, saying that alongside their company’s desire to do the right thing, their work in Ukraine provided proof of concept for their capabilities.³⁶ Ukraine also offered a means to demonstrate to potential customers the effectiveness of their offerings. Founding partner of Green Flag Ventures Deborah Fairlamb said at a European defense conference that “no one would even look at a product unless it had ‘Tested in Ukraine’ stamped on it.”³⁷ During a roundtable conversation, a company executive said that governments were more likely, having seen a company’s work in Ukraine, to purchase their products and trust that they are secure.³⁸

Finally, companies working actively in Ukraine were also motivated by the benefits to public perception and reputation. Popular support of Ukraine meant that companies’ support may have improved their reputation by association. In a TIME article from early 2024, author Vera Bergengruen argued that this reputational concern was part of Palantir’s decision calculus for its work in Ukraine, by helping to dispel characterization of the company’s work as a tool to support intrusive government surveillance. This would situate Palantir’s work in Ukraine among its similar efforts to “shed its reputation as a shadowy data-mining spy contractor.”³⁹ Clearview AI’s reputational concerns also likely motivated its assistance to Ukraine. The company was sanctioned multiple times throughout Europe for privacy violations and was lambasted in a 2020 New York Times article for its controversial use by law enforcement and private companies to track people through AI-enabled facial recognition.⁴⁰ Nevertheless, the company received an outpouring of positive press following public announcements that Ukraine was using this same AI-enabled facial recognition software to identify Russian soldiers, including deceased soldiers and those suspected of committing war crimes in Ukraine.⁴¹ Whether trying to capitalize on a positive reputation or counter negative perceptions, companies benefit from their association with a cause popular across their customer base.

Reaction – Ukrainian technical capability and posture

In both the buildup to war and the conduct of it, some companies with interest in setting up operations in or with Ukraine were reluctant to do so out of concern regarding Ukraine’s ability to act as a capable and trustworthy recipient of goods and services. Executives working in threat intelligence and information security at US-based multinational technology companies have pointed to corruption in Ukraine as a barrier to engagement prior to the invasion and a factor that was carefully considered when deciding how to provide aid in Ukraine.⁴² This challenge is openly acknowledged in Ukraine’s Anti-Corruption Strategy for 2021-25, which states that “corruption prevalence and distrust in the judiciary are the key obstacles to attracting foreign investment to Ukraine.”⁴³

To mitigate these factors, Ukraine and its partners have invested heavily over the past decade to take on corruption and build out legal, economic, and technical frameworks to transform Ukraine so as to make it a more appealing target for assistance and cooperation from the public and private sectors. According to Alex Bornyakov, Ukraine’s deputy minister of digital transformation, Ukraine’s sought to develop “the largest IT hub in Eastern Europe with the fastest growing GDP, industrial parks, and its own security-focused ‘Silicon Valley.’”⁴⁴

Anti-corruption efforts

The Ukrainian government’s commitment to anti-corruption efforts has been an important factor for the success of the process, which began well before the buildup of Russian tanks on its border. According to the 2025 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Integrity and Anti-Corruption Review of Ukraine, since 2013 Ukraine “significantly reformed its anti-corruption framework to fight what were then historically high corruption levels in the country.”⁴⁵

Ukraine’s public and private IT sectors have long been a breeding ground for software acquisition-related fraud, a scheme in which an individual reports the purchase of a legitimate software license but actually buys a pirated or outdated version of that software and pockets the difference. Before 2014, approximately 80 percent of Ukrainian government and private entities were using network software that had either never been or was no longer supported by the associated software vendor,⁴⁶ making Ukraine a difficult and unappealing market for software vendors.

In 2014, anti-corruption activists started the ProZorro project, which over the past decade moved public sector procurement, including that of IT infrastructure, to a central platform built around the tenets of transparency, efficiency, and cross-sector collaboration and competition.⁴⁷ According to a report by Dr. Robert Peacock, through the use of ProZorro and other anti-corruption efforts, senior officials at Ukraine’s State Special Communications Service estimated that “the share of pirated and unsupported software on the country’s networks had dropped from more than 80 percent in 2014 to only 20 percent in 2020.”⁴⁸

As the conflict in Ukraine escalated into a full-scale war, Ukraine’s anti-corruption efforts became even more urgent and essential. For example, UNITED24, the country’s official fundraising platform to fund the Ukrainian war effort that has raised approximately $350 million since the beginning of the war, sends money directly into transparent national accounting systems depending on the choice of the donor, with the leading global accounting firm Deloitte auditing platform.⁴⁹ In addition, in the first year of the war Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his government dismissed several high-ranking government officials based on allegations of corruption. This included two of the top Ukrainian cyber officials after they were accused of participated in corrupt procurement practices. According to the country’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau, the accused allegedly embezzled $1.7 million between 2020 and 2022 through fraudulent software acquisition.⁵⁰ The Ukrainian government’s efforts largely mitigated companies’ concerns regarding corruption, and those companies that cited corruption as a barrier to working with Ukraine have since commenced programming previously denied to Ukraine on those grounds.⁵¹

For a private company to make the decision to invest more heavily in Ukraine, the benefits—financial or otherwise—must outweigh the risks. By addressing corruption within the government, and especially tech-related corruption, the Ukrainian government effectively diminished the weight of this factor in companies’ overall decision calculus. Crucially, such efforts take time to implement and yet more time to create meaningful change. Had these anti-corruption programs not been well underway before 2022, the question of corruption may have significantly deterred companies from deeper involvement in Ukraine.

Ukraine turns toward tech

Instead of sowing distrust in the idea of cyberspace as a safe space for economic and even government services, the past decade of Russian aggression against Ukraine in cyberspace motivated Ukraine to invest heavily in that space and turn its former weakness into a newfound strength. It could even be said that the continuous Russian aggression against Ukraine, through cyberspace and otherwise, helped Ukraine to better defend itself against Russia. Before the 2022 Russian invasion and even more so since, the Ukrainian government sees a flourishing technology sector within Ukraine as a key component to the economic strength of the country.⁵² However, to foster such a flourishing tech environment, Ukraine needed to first invest in its legal and economic foundations.

As a response to escalating Russian aggression in 2014, Ukraine began what would be an intensive decade of government reform and policy advancement on cyber issues. The figure below highlights various investment and development programs aimed at enhancing Ukrainian technological capacity, including efforts of the Ukrainian government itself and in partnership with various international entities such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the US Agency for International Development (USAID).

These, among other efforts, were essential steps to creating and expanding a technologically capable and developed Ukraine. Especially important was the increased relative cybersecurity of the Ukrainian digital environment, the development of Ukraine’s cyber workforce and general cyber literacy, and an influx of capital enabling increased investment in private sector tools and services.

On the economic front, the Ukrainian government made strides to create an attractive environment for investment. The government’s mission has been to shift the conversation from purely one of donations and aid to a direct appeal to the companies’ more pecuniary concerns. According to Bornyakov, “The best way to help Ukraine is to invest in Ukraine.”⁵³ This call is both international and domestic. The Ukrainian government has implemented a number of projects and programs dedicated to fostering the local tech ecosystem. As of December 2024, the IT sector accounted for 4.4 percent of Ukraine’s GDP and 38 percent of the country’s total service exports. Much of this technological energy is being dedicated back to the war effort—according to a report compiled in cooperation with the Ministry of Digital Transformation of Ukraine, 97 percent of Ukrainian IT companies are “actively supporting projects that contribute” to Ukrainian defense.⁵⁴

Diia City in particular, launched just two weeks before the invasion, is a tool intentionally designed to make it easier and more appealing for foreign companies to set up and run operations within Ukraine. Diia City is a “virtual free economic zone for tech companies in Ukraine” that offers a variety of legal and tax benefits.⁵⁵ The connected Brave1 initiative launched in early 2023 to “create a fast track for innovation in the defense and security sectors,” especially those projects of high importance to Ukrainian military leadership, such as “drones, robotic systems, electronic warfare, artificial intelligence tools, cybersecurity, communications, and information security management systems.”⁵⁶

These efforts, both domestic and international, bolstered the defense of Ukraine by building and demonstrating trustworthiness, capability, and economic value for the private sector. In other words, the political and economic engine driving technological development in Ukraine was composed of more than a decade of concentrated action from Ukraine and its international partners, and was in place well before tanks began rolling across the borders. This vital work ultimately helped to bring about conducive conditions for private sector investment or provision of services, as long-term structural factors indirectly shaping company decision-making to aid Ukraine.

Push factors

Difficulty of coordination

Difficulty of coordination refers to the friction that private companies experienced along the lifecycle of technical assistance to Ukraine—from understanding which products or services would be impactful, knowing who to coordinate with and how, or the logistics of providing that assistance. Friction, as in all domains of warfare, is the imposition of the constraints of reality upon one’s plans and impulses, and therefore each additional complexity that stands between a certain technology and its use in Ukraine increases the likelihood that that desired provision will not occur, will take longer, or will be provided in a less helpful form.

One of the most persistent hindrances to the provision of tech-related assistance from private companies in Ukraine was the difficulties that all parties involved faced, which was to effectively coordinate the assistance available with the assistance that Ukraine needed most in a fast-moving and high-pressure environment, particular as more Ukrainian organizations expressed a need for more threat intelligence, licenses, or training for tools. In almost every conversation with industry representatives about their experience in this space raised this coordination problem. The factors that most significantly impacted coordination effectiveness included whether a company had a preexisting presence in or relationship with Ukraine, the clarity with which Ukraine communicated its technical needs, and the ability to assess the effectiveness and impact of products or services provided.⁵⁷

Especially in the early months of the full-scale Russian war, much of the assistance that private tech companies provided was coordinated by companies themselves and in a largely ad hoc manner. In addition, Ukraine experienced communications challenges such as a lack of secure channels or limited visibility into networks and infrastructure on the ground.⁵⁸ Companies that did not have a strong relationship with the Ukrainian public sector prior to the conflict found that direct coordination was difficult to establish once the conflict had begun.⁵⁹ For some, not having a direct relationship with or in Ukraine had been an intentional choice, due to regulation complexity or corruption concerns.⁶⁰ Initially, companies without a preexisting presence often struggled to pinpoint the correct office or person with which to speak. They bridged this gap most often with some combination of brand recognition driving direct outreach from the Ukrainian government and facilitation by Ukrainian private companies that had established relationships with international tech companies and could act as middlemen.⁶¹

Even in cases of existing relationships within Ukraine, complexities abound for companies. A threat intel executive indicated that, for many, there is a tension between what companies thought they could provide and what the Ukrainian government knew about its own needs. While Ukraine was effective in communicating its technical needs at the tactical level, according to various company representatives, effective coordination was somewhat hampered by their ability to effectively communicate and coordinate technical assistance needs across government at a strategic level lagged behind.⁶²

An additional point of friction was the high degree of difficulty in deconflicting the assistance provided to Ukraine from different companies. Understandably, the Ukrainian government—and various individuals and agencies working within it—were responding to imminent threats and thus would send out the same or similar requests to various companies in the hope that one would respond.⁶³ This meant that at times various companies were devoting time and resources to developing an assistance measure that was not actually needed and would not be implemented, or if it was in part, had a lesser relative impact on Ukrainian defense because of duplicative measures. This inability to understand and plan around the impact of assistance was broader than just the duplication issue; dozens of company representatives reported difficulties in getting a clear view as to whether their assistance was actually effective once provided.⁶⁴

Without this data, future requests for and fulfillments of technical aid will continue to be based on theory rather than evidence from their growing experiences together. A 2024 paper from the Cyber Defense Assistance Collaborative (CDAC) and Columbia School of International and Public Affairs, made strides in its effort to collate and assess the effectiveness of those companies and organizations that provided cyber defense assistance to Ukraine through their program. The report identified both direct indicators, where effectiveness can be assessed via concrete measures, and proxy indicators, where possible contributing factors are assessed on a scale of perceived impact.⁶⁵

Reaction – Ukrainian coordination and adaptation

On top of domestic development efforts, Ukrainian government officials spent concerted time and effort to build relationships that would serve as the foundation for future cooperation. Fedorov‘s tech diplomacy work forged new connections with these companies, as well as their leadership and employee bases, that in many ways enabled the speed of company response following Russia’s February 2022 invasion. “When the invasion began, we had personal connections to these companies,” Fedorov said. “They knew who we are, what we look like, what our values are and our mission is.”⁶⁶

According to Fedorov, in the first month of the war he sent “more than4,000 requests to companies, governments, and other organizations, each one personally signed.”⁶⁷ Some of these connections built on existing relationships, but companies without preestablished links either initiated conversations directly with or received direct requests from the Ukrainian Government. Beyond the Ministry of Digital Transformation, various Ukrainian offices like the State Special Communications Service of Ukraine, Security Service of Ukraine, National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, and Ukrainian National Cybersecurity Coordination Center were engaging in relationship building and outreach efforts in order to coordinate the provision of tech assistance.⁶⁸ According to Bornyakov, the early days of coordination with the international private sector were chaos.⁶⁹ Various offices and employees sent out messages and requests without internal coordination, and products or services were provided without sufficient due diligence to ensure that they were truly useful to the Ukrainian war effort.

The Ukrainian government quickly updated its practices to facilitate more efficient cooperation. Among the first of these moves was a Ukrainian policy change to directly enable increased private sector participation. In February 2022, prior to the invasion, the Ukrainian parliament Verkhovna Rada amended the laws that had barred government use of Cloud services. This change meant that just days before the Russian invasion, companies including Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Cloudflare were able the aid the Ukrainian government and several critical sector entities in migrating their critical data to their cloud servers—a critical move, as Russia’s attacks during the first few weeks of the war specifically targeted physical data centers.⁷⁰ In addition, due to the imposition of martial law, Ukraine adopted two resolutions to streamline public procurement. Resolution 169, adopted on February 28, 2022, enabled government contracting authorities to ignore, when necessary, the procurement procedures required by the laws on public and defense procurement.⁷¹ Resolution 723, passed four months later, added new, more efficient requirements to the procurement process, amending both resolution 169 and resolution 822, most important of which was the introduction of the ProZorro platform as the mandatory electronic procurement system.⁷² As previously discussed, this platform was both a tool to facilitate procurement and to counter corruption in the procurement process at large.

Despite improvements to coordinate more effectively with private tech companies, and even as international coordination mechanisms emerged, a significant contingent of companies has maintained a preference for direct coordination. One government affairs executive noted that their company, like many others, preferred direct coordination with the Ukrainian government since it enabled more immediate and relevant support, and they were skeptical that third-party mechanisms would be as effective.⁷³

Reaction – International aid facilitation

Since the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, and even before that, international entities—states, supranational bodies, and non-state groups— played an important role in coordinating technical-focused aid in support of Ukraine.

However, states’ coordination efforts were notably inconsistent. In the first year and a half after the Russian reinvasion, the United States allocated $113 billion in response to the war in Ukraine—largely allocated to the Department of Defense at 54.7 percent, USAID at 32.3 percent, and the Department of State at 8.8 percent.⁷⁴ This money should not be viewed like a check signed over to the Ukrainian government, but rather as money allocated to respond to the Russian invasion through a combination of forms and recipients, primarily the defense industrial base in the United States.⁷⁵ By contrast, private companies publicly announced and celebrated their digital and tech aid to Ukraine. In an interview, one leading tech executive observed a clear dearth of focus from the US government toward digital and tech aid, instead opting for significant humanitarian and more traditional military assistance.⁷⁶ This prioritization was likely an intentional choice—the US government’s perspective seems to have been that it was leading conventional aid by a significant margin and wanted others, like European governments and the private sector, to take the lead on digital and tech matters.⁷⁷Though not speaking specifically on cyber and tech elements, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth in February 2025 called publicly for European states to provide the “overwhelming” majority of defense funding for Ukraine, bemoaning what he saw as an “imbalanced relationship.”⁷⁸ Hegseth specifically pushed for the expansion of existing Europe-led coalitions—discussed below—dedicated to coordinating technological aid.⁷⁹

By contrast, industry experts agreed that the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) was a very effective facilitator of private sector aid.⁸⁰ The UK’s efficiency on this issue was due in part to fewer restrictions on aid money between distinct civilian- and military-designated buckets.⁸¹ According to an assessment from the Independent Commission for Aid Impact, which scrutinizes UK aid spending, this flexibility enabled the FCDO to respond and adapt to the constant evolutions of the war and geopolitical environment—thereby acting as an effective channel for private sector assistance into Ukraine.⁸²

The ad hoc nature of many of the early digital assistance programs provided by private companies was in some ways a double-edged sword. In many cases they were present and able to move more quickly than government programs, and in some places they stepped into de facto political roles—shaping the conflict and public understanding of it. However, this efficiency and effectiveness became difficult to sustain in the long run as governments and government-sponsored mechanisms were slow or insufficient to step in to support these efforts.⁸³ US government entities were instrumental in facilitating support from private companies to Ukraine through purchase agreements, such as that of hundreds of Starlink devices and subscriptions in coordination with other governments⁸⁴ and partnerships. US government entities also participated in intelligence sharing and collaboration efforts regarding Russian cyber capabilities and activities⁸⁵ and even conducted hunt forward operations to assist in Ukrainian defense against Russian cyber aggression both before and after the February 2022 Russian invasion.⁸⁶

In various conversations, both industry and government representatives confirmed the lack of effective governmental and supranational coordination and its impact on the private sector, and on Ukrainian defense.⁸⁷ Company representatives across the United States and Europe shared the same refrain: “we can’t keep supporting Ukraine ourselves forever without government assistance.⁸⁸

In addition to bilateral assistance efforts, various entities emerged across the conflict focused on cooperation organization and facilitation of digital and tech aid. The first of these was the CDAC, not a government entity, but a nonprofit organization that brought together a number of cybersecurity and technology organizations to better coordinate assistance efforts. The organization was founded by Gregory Rattray and a coalition of cyber executives to address the impediments and complications that accompanied the early days of digital and tech assistance provision from the private sector. A CDAC representative said in May 2024 that the group had facilitated $20-30 million in tech-related assistance for Ukraine since its inception.⁸⁹ As Ukrainian and CDAC representatives noted, CDAC’s facilitation efforts have since slowed for a variety of reasons: decreased ability to act as an intermediary as requests have become more specific, a stabilization among companies that no longer require a coordinator after their relationships in Ukraine were established, and a lack of sufficient financial support for both CDAC and the companies willing to provide assistance.⁹⁰

The vacuum noted by industry representatives and CDAC founders in the shape of a true digital and tech aid coordination body with the resources and remit to execute that mission is the planned role of the IT Coalition and the Tallinn mechanism. The IT Coalition, part of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group (UDCG; also known as the Ramstein Group), was established in September 2023 as “a dedicated group of donor nations led by Estonia and Luxembourg within the UDCG framework, focused on delivering support to Ukraine’s Defense Forces in the area of IT, communications, and cyber security.”⁹¹ The group consists of eighteen member countries, with the European Union, NATO, the United States, and France acting as observers.⁹² In 2024 and 2025, the coalition had raised “€1,1 billion in both financial and material assistance.”⁹³ The coalition aims to support Ukraine cyber defense capability and command and control integration while also delivering on more long-term goals such as fostering innovation and cloud adoption. The United States is currently an observing member of the IT Coalition and have thus far has declined taking a more active role. Those familiar with the inner workings of the mechanism have emphasized the clear benefit of a more active US role in the mechanism, as most of the tech companies with whom the organization would like to coordinate are headquartered out of the United States.⁹⁴

The Tallinn Mechanism was established in December 2023 with 11 states to “coordinate and facilitate civilian cyber capacity building” within Ukraine, and is intended to be complementary to military-focused cyber aid facilitation bodies like the IT Coalition.⁹⁵ The Tallinn Mechanism is focused on “amplifying the cyber support of donors to Ukraine in the civilian domain.”⁹⁶ The mechanism raised approximately $210 million by the end of 2024 and has focused on bolstering cyber defense capabilities, especially that of critical national infrastructure, through the public and private provision of hardware and software, incident response, satellite communication provision, and cybersecurity training for government officials.⁹⁷

The international community has certainly made strides to better facilitate technology aid to Ukraine, to counteract the pushing effect that complicates such coordination for technology companies. However, it is yet unclear whether these programs and practices will meet the demands of this conflict, or those of conflicts to come. The most effective element of the tech sector at large’s efforts in Ukraine has been its speed, both in its response to the invasion itself and to individual challenges that have arisen over the course of this war. Meanwhile, government and supranational coordination—aside from those programs already in place—were much slower to implement.

Risk of retaliation

A significant factor shaping the behavior of companies’ work in and with Ukraine is the heightened threat state created by active warfare. Various technology company officials cited their concern about potential backlash—whether financial, cyber, or physical violence—from Russia against their infrastructure, products, and people.⁹⁸ The real risk that these companies took on was informed by a number of factors, such as the application of their products or services by and for military ends, the required physical presence of personnel, products, or infrastructure, and also the degree to which increased Russian aggression against these companies might be a meaningful increase from prewar conditions.

Defense application

An undeniable yet complex risk that companies face as a result of providing support to Ukraine is the threat of Russian retaliatory action. Private sector behavior in Ukraine is shaped by the degree to which the goods and services provided are connected to the conduct of the conflict itself. Products and services provided to civilian groups for purely humanitarian purposes come with a different risk profile than goods that underpin government functions. Though not discrete or exhaustive, cyber and technical aid to Ukraine can be understood in four categories: humanitarian aid, critical infrastructure protection, government support, and military application. In practice, this division exists on a continuum, from purely humanitarian support to products or services that the state itself has come to rely on for the continued provision of government services, with particular importance placed on whether the good is for military use and whether that use is in direct support of combat operations.

By and large, companies have made their own determinations as to how to amend their work in Ukraine, looking not only at the direct military application of their product or service but also examining existing and potential products or services to determine potential applicability for offensive operations—and where to avoid their abuse. A clear example of this is Google’s cessation of the live traffic display functionality within Google Maps. A team of open source researchers at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, under the leadership of Professor Jeffrey Lewis, were allegedly able to infer the early movements of the February 2022 Russian invasion before official reporting by analyzing Google Maps traffic data in combination with radar imagery.⁹⁹ Following these reports, Google announced that it would temporarily disable live traffic data so that it would not be used to plan military operations.¹⁰⁰ An internal task force at Google largely coordinated these and similar decisions to coordinate aid to Ukraine and, most importantly, to examine their actions and decisions in order to identify and address programs that had a potential to cause harm.¹⁰¹ However, even after these amendments were made, Google Maps was again the subject of controversy. In November 2024, Ukrainian defense chiefs accused Google of revealing the location of key military positions following an earlier Google Maps update. According to Russian military bloggers, among these revelations was the position of new air defense systems, including US-made Patriot anti-aircraft missiles, surrounding an airport near Kyiv. According to the head of Ukraine’s counter-disinformation unit Andriy Kovalenko, Google representatives reached out to Ukrainian government officials to address the issue shortly thereafter.¹⁰²

Similar in many ways was the SpaceX effort to restrict use of the Starlink satellite network close to the active front of the war. Though controversial in the public eye, and significant for military operators and planners, the SpaceX decision to restrict the use of Starlink devices near the front was an intentional one—to limit escalation directly supported by their devices. SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell explained “our intent was never to have them use it for offensive purposes.”¹⁰³ The Starlink network, despite these imposed limitations, has undeniably been an extremely useful tool for the Ukrainian military,¹⁰⁴ but its network also supports a much wider geography of users, from individuals to government entities. The inherent dual-use nature of the Starlink network poses a much greater risk should its network be considered a military object. This risk framework is likely a significant part of the drive behind Space X’s creation of Starshield, announced in early December 2022. A partner project to Starlink, Starshield operates on a separate network and is specifically and exclusively for government—rather than consumer and commercial—use.¹⁰⁵ With this application in mind, reports still vary as to whether such a contract, like the $1.8 billion deal with the National Reconnaissance Office, would be operated by the contractee, in this case the NRO, or whether, like Starlink, the service would remain operated by SpaceX.¹⁰⁶ It is possible that this case will follow, in practice, the principle that the closer that the operation of a technology sits to strategic and sensitive national priorities, the higher the risk for both state and company of that technology being operated by said company, and the more likely that technology will come to be operated from within a government body.

Physicality

Products and services that require the physical presence of personnel, products, or infrastructure within Ukraine are the riskiest to undertake. Providing support in this way carries a level of risk that most companies did not have either the willingness or the infrastructure to take on.¹⁰⁷ While some companies, for certain products, chose to partner with government entities to deliver products or services where physical presence was necessary, as in the preceding example, others chose instead to eschew options with such a requirement. In an interview, one expert said, “there were some products that you wanted to go forward with, but you couldn’t. Your informational security can only be as good as your physical security, so projects requiring new physical infrastructure development, or new infrastructure dependencies, was a major stumbling block.”¹⁰⁸

Russia’s cyber-offensive impact

To some degree, most of the technology companies in question—especially those with a preexisting presence in Ukraine—were already a target of a significant volume of Russian cyber intrusion attempts as well as other coercive actions. As one industry executive put it when asked about the role of risk assessment in decisions to deepen their work in Ukraine following the invasion, “we knew the risk, we were already targeted on a daily basis.”¹⁰⁹ The risk of Russian aggression and retaliation remains, but for many large tech companies, their work already took them into spaces where they were in direct or indirect conflict with Russian or Russian-affiliated groups. However, the risk of Russian cyber intrusions against their networks was already a built-in calculation for their existing cybersecurity plans.

In addition to the experience and expectations of many of these private companies, Russian cyber operations accompanying and following its February 2022 invasion were less disruptive than previously anticipated. The most prominent case of coordinated disruption in the information space remains the ViaSat satellite communications system hack during the invasion. As cyber scholar Jon Bateman writes, this intrusion demonstrated clear “timing (one hour before Russian troops crossed the border), clear military purpose (to degrade Ukrainian communications), and international spillover (disrupting connectivity in several European countries).”¹¹⁰ However, the incident appeared to be limited in duration and unclear in impact—senior Ukrainian official Victor Zhora acknowledged the loss to communications during the early hours of the invasion, but later stated that the incident was less disruptive than it could have been because of redundancies in Ukrainian communication methods.¹¹¹

As nonresident senior fellow Justin Sherman explored in May 2025 Atlantic Council report, Unpacking Russia’s cyber nesting doll,¹¹² the comparably muted effectiveness of Russian cyber operations during the war is the result of a multitude of factors including:

Cross-domain coordination difficulties
Resource constraints
Interagency competition
Intentional strategic prioritization
Ukrainian defensive strength

Sherman goes on to explain that while cyber operations against Ukraine did not have that catastrophic impact expected by some—the promised cyber Pearl Harbor—Russian cyber capabilities should not be underestimated.¹¹³

In just the first year of the war, Russia and—importantly—non-state actors in Russia’s orbit, launched a multitude of cyberattacks and intrusions against the public and private sector in Ukraine—including those entities relying on products, platforms, or infrastructure owned and operated by Western tech companies.¹¹⁴ In May 2025, the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency released a joint cybersecurity advisory highlighting this threat, and explicitly calling out Russian targeting of “those involved in the coordination, transport, and delivery of foreign assistance to Ukraine.”¹¹⁵ The question at hand, then, is not what level of risk is associated with these actions but how prepared the company is to encounter such risks.

Reaction – Risk definition and mitigation

In response to the risk of Russian retaliatory action, either through cyber or kinetic means, states and intranational bodies had a role to play in helping companies to navigate and mitigate these risks. The first method by which this was attempted was in an increased clarity on the types of actions that may be considered military or escalatory in nature. Additionally, in many cases states were necessary partners in securing any element of product delivery or operation required new physical presence in or movement into and across Ukraine.

Definition

Throughout the conflict, industry executives and civil society displayed a great deal of concern about where the line falls between civilian actors and military objectives, and how to ensure that their activities fall squarely on the civilian side of this line. Individuals and companies reiterated a desire for increased clarity on this question from Western governments and international legal bodies.¹¹⁶ Current humanitarian law requires the country at war to target only military objects, defined as objects “whose total or partial destruction, capture or neutralization, in the circumstances ruling at the time, offers a definite military advantage” in a manner proportional to the military gain foreseen by the operation.¹¹⁷

In a 2023 report, the International Red Cross posited that, “tech companies that operate in situations of armed conflict should understand and monitor whether the services they provide may amount to a direct participation in hostilities by their employees and whether the company might qualify as a military objective.”¹¹⁸ Essentially, the line between civilian and military object is determined by Russia in its assessment of the battlespace, as well as the broader question of whether the Kremlin is concerned about staying within the bounds of international humanitarian law. The subjectivity of this divide allows for some range in interpretation.¹¹⁹ Indeed some, like Lindsay Freeman at UC Berkeley School of Law, argue that “civilian objects have been intentional, direct targets and not simply collateral damage.”¹²⁰ Ukraine and its allies cannot simply dictate where such a line exists. However, greater clarity from national and supranational entities would provide some measure of cover to these companies and help solidify their ability to make more accurate risk calculations.¹²¹

Mitigation

For products and services that require physical presence, either of people or products, many companies view some kind of partnership with government, local or otherwise, as a virtual necessity to bridge the risk imposed.¹²²

Cisco’s Project PowerUp, led by Senior Security Strategist Joe Marshall of Cisco Talos Intelligence Group,¹²³ is a clear demonstration of this. The project innovated and delivered a new industrial ethernet switch that could ensure continued effective power grid management even when Russian GPS jamming blocked Ukrenergo substation synchronization, and avoid the resulting forced outages across the Ukrainian power grid.¹²⁴ The delivery of these devices into Ukraine was coordinated via a phone call to a US government official who coordinated the first shipment on an upcoming cargo shipment to Poland and then onto a train into Ukraine to be installed by Ukrenergo engineers.¹²⁵ While this project was conceived of and executed by Cisco employees, those involved in the project emphasized the importance of Cisco’s partnership with the US government on this, as well as other private assistance programs.¹²⁶

Several governments and international organizations have established insurance programs, particularly political risk insurance to help shield companies from the financial risk of investment into Ukraine. In 2023, the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency of the World Bank issued guarantees of $9.1 million to support the construction and operation in the M10 Industrial Park in Lviv.¹²⁷ Additionally, the US International Development Finance Corporation has established several financial packages guaranteeing millions in political risk insurance for a variety of projects.¹²⁸ Within Ukraine, war and political risk insurance is offered by the Export Credit Agency, which insure loans for qualifying Ukrainian businesses against such risks, as well as for direct investment from or into Ukraine.¹²⁹ The Ukrainian Ministry of Economy also drafted a law, in cooperation with the National Bank of Ukraine, which would create a unified framework for political or war risk insurance, with a focus on mitigating risks that may deter foreign investments.¹³⁰

The physical element of presence in Ukraine and especially near the battlefield remains a clear demarcation between activities that are the realm of the public sector and those that are the realm of the private sector. In this area, cooperation and coordination between companies and governments could largely follow established practices and procedures. But, for technology whose infrastructure does not touch the territory of Ukraine, the question of where the line is between civilian product and military object, and where bodies like NATO, the European Union, and the United Nations would define that line to be, resembles a gradual gradient rather than a stark line.

Key takeaways and conclusion

Behind much of the discussions and debates among various groups on the role of the private sector in in the war in Ukraine is a deeper anxiety about the evolving character of warfare as we reach the quarter marker of the twenty-first century. The integration and implementation of new technologies and its effect on the practice of war is familiar territory for theoreticians and practitioners alike, from Douhet’s theories on the supremacy of air power to the revolution of military affairs (RMA) school of thought, to those today that focus on the effect of evolving drone tactics on the operation and strategy of war. Less comfortable, however, is the analysis of what changes in technology may mean in practice not just for the conduct of war itself, but more fundamentally for the very nature of actors whose abilities and choices shape the conduct of war.

Over the past few years, private companies, especially technology companies based in North America and Western Europe have made decisions as to whether and how to contribute to the Ukrainian war effort in ways that have greatly impacted the ability of the Ukrainian government to direct and effectuate its own defense. In other words, they have moved beyond the status of resource providers in this conflict toward something more resembling actors in and of themselves, at times approaching the importance of states in their contributions.

Clarity of conflict

The war in Ukraine—especially in the first months and years of the war— was notably less divisive in the court of public opinion in the West than many other contemporary conflicts. The historical context of the Russia-Ukraine relationship, along with the sustained aggression launched against Ukraine for more than a decade prior to this invasion and the nature of the invasion itself, combined with myriad factors including those discussed throughout this report, created conditions conducive to widespread sympathy and support across much of Western Europe and North America. The efforts of the Ukrainian government proactively built on these conditions both before and after the invasion. Ukrainian leaders, Zelenskyy in particular, both publicly and in private conversations with government and private sector representatives, clearly communicated the effects of Russian aggression against Ukraine and the actions undertaken by the Ukrainian government and its people.

Clarity of conflict, as a motivating factor for tech companies’ decision-making over the course of this conflict, was important in creating favorable conditions for such choices, but is not determinative. Most important as a lesson applicable in potential future conflicts, is that the seeds that grew these conditions into place were planted well before Russian forces rolled across the Ukrainian borders in February 2022.

Business alignment

Many firms had preexisting operations, employees, or customers in Ukraine—generating both a sense of duty and a pragmatic incentive to safeguard assets and personnel. Firms that were already active in Ukraine, or whose services directly contributed to protecting their employees and customers, were the most proactive and consistent contributors. Additionally, companies could derive direct or indirect benefits from their engagement. Several firms leveraged their involvement as an opportunity for product testing, cybersecurity innovation, and real-world validation of technologies under extreme conditions. In doing so, companies not only supported Ukraine’s defense but also advanced their own technical capabilities and reputational standing.

Ukraine’s long-term digital transformation further enhanced this alignment. Over the past decade, the government has implemented legal and technical reforms aimed at combating corruption and promoting digital industry growth, positioning the country as a prospective regional tech hub and a credible, innovation-friendly partner. This proactive transformation reassured corporate partners that their investments and assistance could be practicable and impactful.

For future conflicts, states will need to account for business alignment factors as an important driving factor in private sector’s decision-making. This includes the uncomfortable, yet important finding that this includes companies’ ability to profit, or at a minimum, sustain their operations in a conflict in a way that maintains their organizational health, noting that companies’ motivations will not always align with that of the states in which they are headquartered. While moral conviction catalyzed early engagement, sustained corporate involvement in Ukraine depended on alignment between ethical action and business strategy.

Difficulty of coordination

Even amid broad goodwill, the initial months of the war revealed the challenge of coordination. Companies often struggled to identify appropriate Ukrainian counterparts, assess needs accurately, or ensure that their offerings were deployed effectively. Early efforts were marked by confusion—with multiple government offices issuing overlapping requests and little centralized control. As Bornyakov later acknowledged, the early days of outreach “were chaos.”

Many of the most significant factors that shaped company involvement were already in place and being acted upon before the February 2022 Russian invasion. Preexisting relationships were key, both as a motivating factor and a facilitating factor, effectively minimizing coordination friction. Additionally, the technological and policy developments well underway before the February 2022 invasion created the appealing Ukrainian tech landscape and improved coordination necessary once the conflict was underway.

While private companies excelled in speed and agility, governments brought scale, reliability, and regulatory legitimacy. The war illustrated how preparedness for potential future conflicts will depend on preestablished coordination frameworks that merge these strengths—enabling rapid mobilization of technological capabilities, matching private capabilities with public needs in real time.

Risk of retaliation

Providing assistance to Ukraine exposed technology companies to new security risks from cyberattacks, sanctions, or kinetic threats against personnel or infrastructure. The degree of perceived risk—and retaliation—varied depending on each company’s exposure, particularly for firms whose technologies had direct military applications or some kind of physical presence.

Ambiguity around international law, cyber norms, and export controls can delay or discourage private assistance. Companies must understand whether providing certain technologies or services could be construed as escalatory, illegal, or sanctionable. Private firms are increasingly targeted in state-level cyber operations. The possibility of retaliation, in any of a myriad of forms, was a serious risk for companies aiding Ukraine; managing and sharing that risk is essential to sustaining long-term cooperation.

To mitigate these risks, Ukraine and allied governments played an essential supportive role, clarifying the boundaries between civilian and military assistance, helping companies avoid escalatory missteps and, in some cases, underwrote contracts or insurance to shield firms from loss. Such measures demonstrate the emerging need for risk-sharing frameworks between states and corporations. In cases where physical operations within Ukraine were necessary, governments provided logistical and security coordination to protect personnel and assets. Such collaboration underscores an emerging model of public-private security cooperation, wherein states and corporations jointly navigate the blurred boundaries between national defense and digital resilience.

If private technology companies’ decisions and actions are so impactful to the conduct of war, as they have shown themselves to be, then the character of warfare has evolved in such a way as to require states to likewise evolve in the ways that they provide military assistance and plan for potential future conflicts. The foundation for this evolution needs to be a greater understanding of the factors in the case of Ukraine that most greatly impacted company decision-making regarding their participation, or not, in the conflict space, starting with the four factors identified in this report: those that pulled companies toward cooperation, and those that pushed companies away. By assessing the factors that drove companies’ decision-making in Ukraine, states can better plan and prepare for future crises and conflicts—and not leave such critical capabilities, once again, to chance.

About the author

Emma Schroeder is an associate director with the Cyber Statecraft Initiative, part of the Atlantic Council Tech Programs. Her focus in this role is on developing statecraft and strategy for cyberspace useful for both policymakers and practitioners. Her work focuses on the role of cyber and cyber-enabled technology in conflict and crime.

Originally from Massachusetts, Schroeder holds an MA in History of War from King’s College London’s War Studies Department. She also attained her BA in International Relations & History, with a concentration in Security Studies, from the George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs.

Acknowledgements

This report was made possible by the participation of dozens of scholars and practitioners who shared their expertise and experiences with the author.

Thank you to the Cyber Statecraft Initiative team for their support, particularly Nikita Shah and Trey Herr for their guidance. Particular thanks to Emerson Johnston, Grace Menna, and Zhenwei Gao for their research assistance, as well as to Nancy Messieh, Samia Yakub, and Donald Partyka for the creation and review of language and digital assets. All errors are the author’s own.

Explore the program

1 All unattributed interviews were conducted in confidentiality with the author, and the names of interviewees are withheld by mutual agreement.

2 “Russia/Ukraine: Invasion of Ukraine Is an Act of Aggression and Human Rights Catastrophe,” Amnesty International, March 1, 2022, https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/03/russia-ukraine-invasion-of-ukraine-is-an-act-of-aggression-and-human-rights-catastrophe/.

3 “Majority back U.S. troop presence in Europe, but not in Ukraine itself,” Monmouth University Polling Institute, March 16, 2022, https://www.monmouth.edu/polling-institute/reports/monmouthpoll_us_031622/.

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7 Industry executive, IT coalition roundtable, Atlantic Council, February 21, 2024.

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16 Elon Musk (@elonmusk), “Starlink service is now active in Ukraine. More terminals en route,” X, February 26, 2022, 5:33 p.m., https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1497701484003213317; Mykhailo Fedorov (@FedorovMykhailo), “Starlink — here. Thanks, @elonmusk,” X, February 28, 2022, 3:19 p.m., https://twitter.com/FedorovMykhailo/status/1498392515262746630?s=20&t=vtCM9UqgWRkfxfrEHzYTGg.

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29 “Google’s Russian Subsidiary Files Bankruptcy Document,” Reuters, May 18, 2022, https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/googles-russian-subsidiary-files-bankruptcy-document-2022-05-18/; “Google’s Russian Subsidiary Recognised Bankrupt by Court—RIA,” Reuters, October 18, 2023, https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/googles-russian-subsidiary-recognised-bankrupt-by-court-ria-2023-10-18/.

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31 Interview with executive at US multinational technology corporation, date withheld.

32 Industry executive, “Public-Private Cyber Support” Workshop, Royal United Services Institute, May 29, 2025.

33 Interview with threat intelligence executive at US cybersecurity nonprofit, May 2, 2024.

34 Interview with business development executive at US information and communications technology corporation, July 18, 2024.

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36 Interview with information security executive at US intelligence and data analysis software technology corporation, May 8, 2024.

37 Bergengruen, “How Tech Giants Turned.”

38 Industry Executive, “Supporting Ukraine’s Warfighting Efforts with Digital Capabilities” Roundtable, Embassy of Estonia and the Estonian Ministry of Defense, September 13, 2024.

39 Bergengruen, “How Tech Giants Turned.”

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49 “About UNITED24,” UNITED24 – The Initiative of the President of Ukraine, accessed October 20, 2025, https://u24.gov.ua/about; Guest, “Mykhailo Fedorov is Running.”

50 Daryna Antoniuk, “Two Ukraine Cyber Officials Dismissed amid Embezzlement Probe,” The Record, November 20, 2023, https://therecord.media/two-ukraine-cyber-officials-dismissed-amid-embezzlement-probe; “Misappropriation of UAH 62 million during the purchase of software: the leadership of the State Special Communications Service is suspected,” National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine, news release (in Ukrainian), November 20, 2023, https://nabu.gov.ua/news/zavolod-nnia-62-mln-grn-pri-zakup-vl-programnogo-zabezpechennia-p-dozriu-t-sia-ker-vnitctvo-derzhspetczviazku/.

51 Interview with government affairs executive at US multinational digital communications technology corporation, May 2, 2024; Interview with information security executives at US intelligence and data analysis software technology corporation, May 8, 2024; Industry executive, “Public-Private Cyber Support” Workshop, Royal United Services Institute, May 29, 2024.

52 Bergengruen, “How Tech Giants Turned.”

53 Bergengruen, “How Tech Giants Turned.”

54 “Ukrainian Tech Industry Shows Resilience in the Face of War — IT Research Ukraine 2024,” techukraine.org, December 5, 2024, https://techukraine.org/2024/12/05/ukrainian-tech-industry-shows-resilience-in-the-face-of-war-it-research-ukraine-2024/.

55 “Diia City,” Diia, accessed October 20, 2025, https://city.diia.gov.ua/en.

56 Mykhailo Fedorov, “Ukraine’s Vibrant Tech Ecosystem Is a Secret Weapon in the War with Russia,” UkraineAlert (Atlantic Council), August 17, 2023, https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/ukraines-vibrant-tech-ecosystem-is-a-secret-weapon-in-the-war-with-russia/.

57 Greg Rattray, Geoff Brown, and Robert Taj Moore, The Cyber Defense Assistance Imperative: Lessons from Ukraine, Aspen Digital, May 2025, https://www.aspeninstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Aspen-Digital_The-Cyber-Defense-Assistance-Imperative-Lessons-from-Ukraine.pdf.

58 “CDAC: “The Scale of What We Can Do is Severely Hampered by not Having Funding for Dedicated Staff or to Fulfill Requirements Directly,” Common Good Cyber, May 29, 2025, https://commongoodcyber.org/news/interview-cdac-funding/.

59 Industry executive, “Public-Private Cyber Support” Workshop, Royal United Services Institute, May 29, 2024.

60 Interview with business development executive at US information and communications technology corporation, July 18, 2024; Interview with government affairs executive at US multinational digital communications technology corporation, May 2, 2024; Interview with information security executives at US intelligence and data analysis software technology corporation, May 8, 2024.

61 Interview with business development executive at US information and communications technology corporation, July 18, 2024.

62 Interview with threat intelligence executive at US cybersecurity nonprofit, April 2, 2024; Industry executive, “Supporting Ukraine’s Warfighting Efforts with Digital Capabilities” Roundtable, Embassy of Estonia and the Estonian Ministry of Defense, September 13, 2024.

63 Industry executive, “IT Coalition” Roundtable, Atlantic Council, February 21, 2024.

64 Industry executive, “Public-Private Cyber Support” Workshop, Royal United Services Institute, May 29, 2024; Industry executive, “Supporting Ukraine’s Warfighting Efforts with Digital Capabilities” Roundtable, Embassy of Estonia and the Estonian Ministry of Defense, September 13, 2024.

65 “Cyber Defense Assistance Evaluation Framework,” Cyber Defense Assistance Collaborative, June 18, 2024, https://crdfglobal-cdac.org/cda-evaluation-framework/.

66 Peter Guest, “Mykhailo Fedorov is Running,” WIRED, July 25, 2023, https://www.wired.com/story/ukraine-runs-war-startup/.

67 Cat Zakrzewski, “4,000 letters and four hours of sleep: Ukrainian leader wages digital war,” Washington Post, March 30, 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/03/30/mykhailo-fedorov-ukraine-digital-front/.

68 Interview with tech assistance coordination executive, US nonprofit organization, July 17, 2025.

69 Bergengruen, “How Tech Giants Turned.”

70 Colin Demarest, “Data Centers Are Physical and Digital Targets, Says Pentagon’s Eoyang,” C4ISRNET, November 17, 2022, https://www.c4isrnet.com/cyber/2022/11/17/data-centers-are-physical-and-digital-targets-says-pentagons-eoyang/.

71 Oleh Ivanov, “Procurement During the Full-Scale War,” Vox Ukraine, October 14, 2022, https://voxukraine.org/en/procurement-during-the-full-scale-war.

72 “On Amendments to the Resolutions of the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine No. 822 of September 14, 2020 and No.169 of February 28, 2022,” Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine, June 24, 2022, https://zakon.rada.gov.ua/laws/show/723-2022-%D0%BF#n2.

73 Interview with government affairs executive at US multinational technology corporation, August 28, 2024.

74 Elizabeth Hoffman, Jaehyun Han, and Shivani Vakharia, Past, Present, and Future of US Assistance to Ukraine: A Deep Dive into the Data, Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), September 26, 2023, https://www.csis.org/analysis/past-present-and-future-us-assistance-ukraine-deep-dive-data.

75 The difficulty, for the purposes of this paper, is understanding the breakdown of this assistance as it applies to digital and tech-focused aid to Ukraine. The author found examples breaking down US government assistance by general category (i.e., humanitarian, military, financial) and breakdowns of weapons systems aid (e.g., tanks and air defense systems) but little enumeration of the kind and amount of digital and tech aid provided by the US government. See “Ukraine Support Tracker,” Kiel Institute for the World Economy, updated October 14, 2025, https://www.ifw-kiel.de/topics/war-against-ukraine/ukraine-support-tracker.

76 Interview with government affairs executive at US multinational technology corporation, August 28, 2024.

77 Industry executive, “Supporting Ukraine’s Warfighting Efforts with Digital Capabilities” Roundtable, Embassy of Estonia and the Estonian Ministry of Defense, September 13, 2024; Interview with information security executive at US multinational technology corporation, August 28, 2024; Interview with threat intelligence executive and government affairs executive at US multinational digital communications technology corporation, October 2, 2024.

78 Alex Therrien and Frank Gardner, “Hegseth Sets Out Hard Line on European Defense and NATO,” BBC News, February 12, 2025, https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy0pz3er37jo.

79 Jon Harper,“Hegseth Puts Onus on Allies to Provide ‘Overwhelming Share’ of Weapons to Ukraine,” DefenseScoop, February 12, 2025, https://defensescoop.com/2025/02/12/hegseth-ukraine-defense-contact-group-allies-military-aid-trump/.

80 Industry executive, “Supporting Ukraine’s Warfighting Efforts with Digital Capabilities” Roundtable, Embassy of Estonia and the Estonian Ministry of Defense, September 13, 2024; Interview with threat intelligence executive and government affairs executive at US multinational digital communications technology corporation, October 2, 2024.

81 Industry executive, “Supporting Ukraine’s Warfighting Efforts with Digital Capabilities” Roundtable, Embassy of Estonia and the Estonian Ministry of Defense, September 13, 2024.

82 “UK aid to Ukraine,” Independent Commission for Aid Impact (ICAI), April 30, 2024, https://icai.independent.gov.uk/html-version/uk-aid-to-ukraine-2/.

83 Industry executive, “Public-Private Cyber Support” Workshop, Royal United Services Institute, May 29, 2024.

84 “SpaceX, USAID Deliver 5,000 Satellite Internet Terminals to Ukraine,” Reuters, April 6, 2022, https://www.reuters.com/technology/spacex-usaid-deliver-5000-satellite-internet-terminals-ukraine-2022-04-06/; Alex Marquardt, “Exclusive: Musk’s SpaceX Says it Can No Longer Pay for Critical Satellite Services in Ukraine, Asks Pentagon to Pick Up the Tab,” CNN, October 13, 2022, https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/13/politics/elon-musk-spacex-starlink-ukraine; Michael Sheetz, “Pentagon Awards SpaceX with Ukraine Contract for Starlink Satellite Internet,” CNBC, June 1, 2023, https://www.cnbc.com/2023/06/01/pentagon-awards-spacex-with-ukraine-contract-for-starlink-satellite-internet.html.

85 “United States and Ukraine Expand Cooperation on Cybersecurity,” Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, July 27, 2022, https://www.cisa.gov/news-events/news/united-states-and-ukraine-expand-cooperation-cybersecurity; David Jones, “White House Warns of US of Possible Russian Cyberattack Linked to Ukraine Invasion,” Cybersecurity Dive, March 22, 2022, https://www.cybersecuritydive.com/news/white-house-warns-russian-cyberattack-ukraine/620755/; Egle Murauskaite, “U.S. Assistance to Ukraine in the Information Space: Intelligence, Cyber, and Signaling,” Asymmetric Threats Analysis Center (University of Maryland), February 2023, https://www.start.umd.edu/publication/us-assistance-ukraine-information-space-intelligence-cyber-and-signaling.

86 Maj. Sharon Rollins, “Defensive Cyber Warfare: Lessons from Inside Ukraine,” US Naval Institute Proceedings, June 2023, https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2023/june/defensive-cyber-warfare-lessons-inside-ukraine; “Before the Invasion: Hunt Forward Operations in Ukraine,” US Cyber Command (declassified briefing), November 28, 2022, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/sites/default/files/documents/rmsj3h-751×3/2022-11-28-CNMF-Before-the-Invasion-Hunt-Forward-Operations-in-Ukraine.pdf; Dina Temple-Raston, Sean Powers, and Daryna Antoniuk, “Ukraine Hunt Forward Teams,” The Record, October 18, 2023, https://therecord.media/ukraine-hunt-forward-teams-us-cyber-command.

87 Interview with tech assistance coordination executive at US nonprofit organization, July 17, 2025; Interview with government affairs executive at US multinational technology corporation, August 28, 2024.

88 “Interview with threat intelligence executive at US multinational technology corporation, April 22, 2024; Industry executive, “IT Coalition” Roundtable, Atlantic Council, February 21, 2024; Industry executive, “Public-Private Cyber Support” Workshop, Royal United Services Institute, May 29, 2024; Interview with threat intelligence executive and government affairs executive at US multinational digital communications technology corporation, October 2, 2024.

89 Industry executive, “Public-Private Cyber Support” Workshop, Royal United Services Institute, May 29, 2024.

90 Industry executive, “Public-Private Cyber Support” Workshop, Royal United Services Institute, May 29, 2024.

91 “Luxembourg, Estonia, and Ukraine Have Launched the IT Coalition,” Government of Luxembourg, September 19, 2023, https://gouvernement.lu/en/actualites/toutes_actualites/communiques/2023/09-septembre/19-bausch-itcoalition.html.

92 “Ukraine Defence Contact Group: Estonia and Luxembourg Announce New Contributions to IT Coalition,” European Pravda, April 8, 2024, https://www.eurointegration.com.ua/eng/news/2024/04/8/7183316/; “IT Coalition Established by Estonia and Luxembourg … Has Raised about 500 Million Euros in Its First Year,” Republic of Estonia Ministry of Defense, December 12, 2024, https://www.kaitseministeerium.ee/en/news/it-coalition-established-estonia-and-luxembourg-help-ukraine-has-raised-about-500-million-euros.

93 “IT Coalition Led by Estonia and Luxembourg Has Raised over One Billion Euros to Support Ukraine,” Republic of Estonia Ministry of Defense, May 28, 2025, https://kaitseministeerium.ee/en/news/it-coalition-led-estonia-and-luxembourg-has-raised-over-one-billion-euros-support-ukraine.

94 Industry executive, “Supporting Ukraine’s Warfighting Efforts with Digital Capabilities” Roundtable, Embassy of Estonia and the Estonian Ministry of Defense, September 13, 2024.

95 “Formalization of the Tallinn Mechanism to Coordinate Civilian Cyber Assistance to Ukraine,” US Department of State (Office of the Spokesperson), December 20, 2023, https://2021-2025.state.gov/formalization-of-the-tallinn-mechanism-to-coordinate-civilian-cyber-assistance-to-ukraine/.

96 “Tallinn Mechanism Raises €200 Million to Support Ukraine’s Resilience in Cyberspace,” Republic of Estonia Ministry of Foreign Affairs, December 20, 2024, https://www.vm.ee/en/news/tallinn-mechanism-raises-eu200-million-support-ukraines-resilience-cyberspace.

97 “Joint Statement Marking the First Anniversary of the Tallinn Mechanism,” US Department of State (Office of the Spokesperson), December 20, 2024, https://2021-2025.state.gov/joint-statement-marking-the-first-anniversary-of-the-tallinn-mechanism/.

98 Interview with government affairs executive at US multinational technology corporation, August 28, 2024; Industry executive, “Supporting Ukraine’s Warfighting Efforts with Digital Capabilities” Roundtable, Embassy of Estonia and the Estonian Ministry of Defense, September 13, 2024.

99 Rachel Lerman, “On Google Maps, Tracking the Invasion of Ukraine,” The Washington Post, February 25, 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/02/25/google-maps-ukraine-invasion/.

100 Marc Cieslak and Tom Gerken, “Ukraine Crisis: Google Maps Live Traffic Data Turned Off in Country,” BBC News, February 28, 2022, https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-60561089.

101 Interview with government affairs executive at US multinational technology corporation, date withheld.

102 Seb Starcevic, “Ukraine Slams Google for Revealing Location of Military Sites,” Politico, November 4, 2024, https://www.politico.eu/article/ukraine-google-reveal-location-military-site/; James Kilner, “Google Maps ‘reveals location’ of Ukrainian military positions,” The Telegraph, November 4, 2024, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2024/11/04/ukraine-angry-google-maps-reveal-location-military-position/.

103 Alex Marquardt and Kristin Fisher, “SpaceX Admits Blocking Ukrainian Troops from Using Satellite Technology,” CNN, February 9, https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/09/politics/spacex-ukrainian-troops-satellite-technology/index.html.

104 “Russia Using Thousands of SpaceX Starlink Terminals in Ukraine, WSJ says,” Reuters, February 15, 2024, https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russia-using-thousands-spacex-starlink-terminals-ukraine-wsj-says-2024-02-15/.

105 “Starshield,” SpaceX, accessed October 20, 2025, https://www.spacex.com/starshield/; Joey Roulette and Marisa Taylor, “Exclusive: Musk’s SpaceX Is Building Spy Satellite Network for US Intelligence Agency, Sources Say,” Reuters, March 16, 2024, https://www.reuters.com/technology/space/musks-spacex-is-building-spy-satellite-network-us-intelligence-agency-sources-2024-03-16/.

106 Tim Fernholz, “The Big Questions About Starshield: SpaceX’s Classified EO Project,” Payload, March 22, 2024, https://payloadspace.com/the-big-questions-about-starshield-spacexs-classified-eo-project/; Brian Everstine, “SpaceX: DoD Has Requested Taking Over Starship Individual Missions,” Aviation Week Network, January 30, 2024, https://aviationweek.com/space/spacex-dod-has-requested-taking-over-starship-individual-missions; Sandra Erwin, “Pentagon Embracing SpaceX’s Starshield for Future Military SATCOM,” SpaceNews, June 11, 2024, https://spacenews.com/pentagon-embracing-spacexs-starshield-for-future-military-satcom/.

107 Interview with information security executive at US intelligence and data analysis software technology corporation, May 8, 2024; Interview with government affairs executive at US multinational technology corporation, March 1, 2024; Industry executive, “Supporting Ukraine’s Warfighting Efforts with Digital Capabilities” Roundtable, Embassy of Estonia and the Estonian Ministry of Defense, September 13, 2024.

108 Interview with information security executive at US intelligence and data analysis software technology corporation, May 8, 2024.

109 Industry executive, “Supporting Ukraine’s Warfighting Efforts with Digital Capabilities” Roundtable, Embassy of Estonia and the Estonian Ministry of Defense, September 13, 2024.

110 Jon Bateman, Russia’s Wartime Cyber Operations in Ukraine: Military Impacts, Influences, and Implications, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, December 16, 2022, https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2022/12/russias-wartime-cyber-operations-in-ukraine-military-impacts-influences-and-implications?lang=en.

111 Rafael Satter, “Satellite Outage Caused ‘Huge Loss in Communications’ at War’s Outset—Ukrainian Official,” Reuters, March 15, 2022, https://www.reuters.com/world/satellite-outage-caused-huge-loss-communications-wars-outset-ukrainian-official-2022-03-15/; Kim Zetter, “ViaSat Hack ‘Did Not’ Have Huge Impact on Ukrainian Military Communications, Official Says,” Zero Day (Substack), September 26, 2022, https://www.zetter-zeroday.com/viasat-hack-did-not-have-huge-impact/; Emma Schroeder with Sean Dack, A Parallel Terrain: Public‑Private Defense of the Ukrainian Information Environment, Atlantic Council, February 27, 2023, https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/in-depth-research-reports/report/a-parallel-terrain-public-private-defense-of-the-ukrainian-information-environment/.

112 Justin Sherman, Unpacking Russia’s Cyber Nesting Doll, Atlantic Council, May 20, 2025, https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/content-series/russia-tomorrow/unpacking-russias-cyber-nesting-doll/.

113 Justin Sherman, Unpacking Russia’s Cyber.”

114 Shane Huntley, “Fog of War: How the Ukraine Conflict Transformed the Cyber Threat Landscape,” Threat Analysis Group blog (Google), February 16, 2023, https://blog.google/threat-analysis-group/fog-of-war-how-the-ukraine-conflict-transformed-the-cyber-threat-landscape/.

115 “Russian GRU Targeting Western Logistics Entities and Technology Companies,” Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, May 21, 2025, https://www.cisa.gov/news-events/cybersecurity-advisories/aa25-141a.

116 Industry executive, “IT Coalition” Roundtable, Atlantic Council, February 21, 2024; Interview with government affairs executive at US multinational technology corporation, March 1, 2024; Industry executive, “Supporting Ukraine’s Warfighting Efforts with Digital Capabilities” Roundtable, Embassy of Estonia and the Estonian Ministry of Defense, September 13, 2024; Interview with information security executive at US intelligence and data analysis software technology corporation; Interview with threat intelligence executive at US multinational digital communications technology corporation, July 26, 2024.

117 International Committee of the Red Cross, Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, and Relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts (Protocol I), (June 8, 1977), United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, https://www.refworld.org/docid/3ae6b36b4.html.

118 Protecting Civilians Against Digital Threats During Armed Conflict: Recommendations to States, Belligerents, Tech Companies, and Humanitarian Organizations, ICRC Global Advisory Board on Digital Threats during Armed Conflict, October 19, 2023, https://www.icrc.org/en/document/protecting-civilians-against-digital-threats-during-armed-conflict, 15.

119 Zhanna L. Malekos Smith, “No ‘Bright‑Line Rule’ Shines on Targeting Commercial Satellites,” The Hill, November 28, 2022, https://thehill.com/opinion/cybersecurity/3747182-no-bright-line-rule-shines-on-targeting-commercial-satellites/; Emma Schroeder and Sean Dack, A Parallel Terrain: Public‑Private Defense of the Ukrainian Information Environment, Atlantic Council, February 27, 2023, https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/in-depth-research-reports/report/a-parallel-terrain-public-private-defense-of-the-ukrainian-information-environment/.

120 Lindsay Freeman, “Evidence of Russian Cyber Operations Could Bolster New ICC Arrest Warrants,” Lawfare, March 13, 2024, https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/evidence-of-russian-cyber-operations-could-bolster-new-icc-arrest-warrants.

121 Industry executive, “Supporting Ukraine’s Warfighting Efforts with Digital Capabilities” Roundtable, Embassy of Estonia and the Estonian Ministry of Defense, September 13, 2024.

122 Industry executive, “Supporting Ukraine’s Warfighting Efforts with Digital Capabilities” Roundtable, Embassy of Estonia and the Estonian Ministry of Defense, September 13, 2024.

123 Joe Marshall, “Project PowerUp – Helping to Keep the Lights on in Ukraine in the Face of Electronic Warfare,” Cisco Talos Intelligence blog, December 4, 2023, https://blog.talosintelligence.com/project-powerup-ukraine-grid/.

124 Joe Marshall, “Project PowerUp;” Interview with threat intelligence executive at US multinational digital communications technology corporation, July 26, 2024.

125 Sean Lyngass, “Exclusive: This Pizza Box-sized Equipment Could Be Key to Ukraine Keeping the Lights on This Winter,” CNN, November 21, 2023, https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/21/politics/ukraine-power-grid-equipment-cisco/index.html; Industry executive, “Tales from Ukraine” Roundtable, Embassy of Estonia and the Estonian Ministry of Defense, November 20, 2024; Industry executive, “Supporting Ukraine’s Warfighting Efforts with Digital Capabilities” Roundtable, Embassy of Estonia and the Estonian Ministry of Defense, September 13, 2024.

126 Industry executive, “Tales from Ukraine” Roundtable, Embassy of Estonia and the Estonian Ministry of Defense, November 20, 2024

127 World Bank Group, “MIGA Backs Industrial Park in Ukraine,” news release, September 28, 2023, https://www.miga.org/press-release/miga-backs-industrial-park-ukraine.

128 US International Development Finance Corporation, “DFC Announces $357 Million in New Political Risk Insurance for Ukraine,” news release, June 12, 2024, https://www.dfc.gov/media/press-releases/dfc-announces-357-million-new-political-risk-insurance-ukraine-russias.

129 “Your Business in Ukraine 2025,” KPMG Ukraine, March 2025, https://kpmg.com/ua/en/home/insights/2025/03/your-business-in-ukraine.html.

130 “Developments in War‑Risk Insurance Products for Investments in Ukraine,” Dentons, December 5, 2024, https://www.dentons.com/en/insights/articles/2024/december/5/developments-in-war-risk-insurance-products-for-investments-in-ukraine.

The post Building the digital front line: Understanding big tech decision-making in Ukraine appeared first on Atlantic Council.

The future of food in the Americas

Peter Engelke and Matias Margulis — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 14:00:00 +0000

Bottom lines up front

The Americas have traditionally been a food-secure region, but interlocking ecological, technological, and political trends could change that.
Ecological risks pose the greatest threat to hemispheric food production, though rising protectionism and the resultant market uncertainty also have a destabilizing effect.
There is little margin for error, as even moderate shocks can have profound consequences, and food insecurity raises the risk of political and social instability.

lea en español

leia em português

Introduction
Food, society, and politics
Food security in the Americas
Drivers of change in the Americas and beyond
Toward a food-secure future
Conclusion
About the authors

Introduction

Food security is at the core of national, regional, and global security. When societies are food secure, they stand a much greater chance of social and political stability; when they are food insecure, the opposite is true. Fortunately, the Western Hemisphere—the Americas—is a food-secure region. Although access to food is an ongoing challenge deserving greater attention in every country (as there are hungry people across the hemisphere), food abundance generally characterizes the Americas. Historically, the hemisphere has owed its unique position to several factors: a favorable natural resource base; equally benign geopolitical conditions; and extensive public and private cooperation to improve production methods and support innovation.

However, the future is not guaranteed to look like the past. Several key drivers of change are afoot that could alter the trajectory of hemispheric food security. These drivers bring with them uncertain outcomes, alternatively threatening the stability and productivity of current agrifood systems or offering hope that they could become even stronger and more resilient in the years to come.

This report assesses the future of food in the Western Hemisphere. It focuses on the major uncertainties that are driving change in the agrifood systems within the hemisphere and the world. These drivers represent risks or opportunities, and sometimes both. They include the decline of healthy and stable ecosystems, rapidly changing geopolitics, the erosion of multilateral institutions, increasingly inflationary and volatile food prices, the promise of innovation and emerging technologies, and generational shifts in farming and agricultural production.

These forces are not siloed. Rather, they intersect. There might be an awareness that these individual drivers of change represent obstacles to (or opportunities for) achieving durable food-security solutions in the future, yet many leaders see them as isolated challenges rather than as intersecting ones, obscuring the bigger picture.

The drivers discussed in this report therefore are not just accumulating layers of risks and opportunities. Rather, their interaction multiplies the system’s dynamism. This emerging dynamism will require policymakers, business leaders, investors, and farmers to find innovative solutions in the face of a rapidly changing, and not entirely predictable, agrifood landscape. Yet such outlooks may not arise. Complacency is a big risk, if leaders believe that the status quo will continue to improve, requiring changes only at the margins. In such a situation, the hemisphere would become far more vulnerable to unexpected shocks because there would not be enough appreciation for how ecological, technological, geopolitical, and institutional changes are reshaping the future.

This concern is not hyperbolic. A very recent external shock—the COVID-19 pandemic—erased major progress that the hemisphere had made on reducing hunger, which should remind us that the foundations of food security remain shaky. Looking ahead, there is little margin for error, as even moderate shocks can have profound consequences.

Flint corn, seeds, beans, peppers, and other dried goods are displayed on a wooden wall-mounted rack in the indigenous town of Zinacantán, México. (Unsplash/Alan De La Cruz)

Food, society, and politics

Food security is at the core of national, regional, hemispheric, and global security. When societies are food secure, they stand a much greater chance of social and political stability; when they are food insecure, the opposite is true.

This axiom, although a simple one, has been demonstrated time and again throughout history. High food prices occasioned by war, poor harvests, or high taxation of the peasantry (or all three) preceded the onset of the French Revolution in 1789 and the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917, to name just a couple of famous examples from history.

Today, despite far greater agricultural production at national and global levels, such disturbances still recur with alarming frequency: The 2007–2008 food riots across Africa followed commodity price spikes for agricultural inputs (oil, principally) that inflated the price of food; the 2010–2011 Arab Spring was preceded by food-price spikes owing to multiple breadbasket harvest failures across several world regions; and Russia’s war in Ukraine, which disrupted wheat, fertilizer, and natural gas exports, blocked the flow of agricultural inputs and outputs and dramatically raised food prices globally. Millions of additional people became food insecure around the world.

No other good has such an impact on society and politics as food because people need to eat every day. “Food riots are as old as civilization itself,” as one food security analyst summarized the impact of food on social and political stability. Often, it will only take a single big food-price shock to change social and political dynamics within a country or even an entire region. Although high food prices have a disproportionately negative impact on vulnerable, poor, and fragile countries, they also can have an outsized impact on otherwise wealthy and stable ones. Japan offers a recent example. In July 2025, soaring rice prices in Japan directly contributed to the defeat of Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba’s Liberal Democratic Party in parliamentary elections.

The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) adopted a definition of food security at the 1996 World Food Summit (see box 1 for the history of the concept), which has persisted with only slight revision:

Food security exists when all people, at all times, have physical, social, and economic access to sufficient safe and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life.

This definition contains four main dimensions, or pillars:

The physical, supply-side availability of food, typically assessed at the national level and consisting of domestic agricultural production plus food imports.
Household access to food, which is dependent on household incomes and food prices (set by a combination of market and nonmarket forces).
Nutritional intake by individuals, which is not the same thing as caloric intake; nutrition depends in part on dietary diversity.
Stability of the first three pillars over time.

A couple important pieces of the food security puzzle are missing from this formulation. One is ecological stability. Food security depends on the sustainability of the underlying Earth systems that are essential to food production. Maintaining the integrity of these Earth systems, including the integrity of the world’s soils, water, biodiversity, nutrients, and atmospheric conditions (precipitation and temperature, primarily), is critical. A second missing piece is the stability of the international systems, specifically stability of a rules-based trading order that ensures that food moves easily from food-surplus to food-deficit countries. Such a trading order improves food security through enhancing agriculture productivity and (under emergency conditions) enables swift distribution of humanitarian aid in the form of food. Such a system helps to avoid trade conflicts and establishes international norms for the notion that food security is in the collective interest and responsibility of all parties.

The capacity of the current international system to encourage global production and trade in food has increased over time, dramatically so over the past several decades: The FAO reported that in 2021, the world traded some 5,000 trillion kilocalories of food, more than double the amount that it did in 2000. A central piece of this equation has been the existence of key multilateral institutions that have had the credibility and authority to provide a forum for states to negotiate trade agreements, resolve trade disputes, and monitor and enforce commitments.

None of these conditions should be treated as a given. Looking ahead, the odds are high that the world will become more dynamic rather than less so, with no guarantee that dynamism will have more upside than downside. To adapt and thrive within changing conditions (with both positive and negative impacts), the world’s agrifood systems will need to become more resilient and adaptable. The good news is that humankind has the tools—or can develop the necessary tools—to ensure such outcomes.

Box 1: Food security: History of a concept
Although concerns surrounding hunger and famine are ancient, dating to human prehistory, the formal concept of food security is only about a half century old. Its institutional origins are often traced to a 1974 World Food Conference that defined the concept in terms of the global supply of food. The thinking at the time linked hunger with global supply (chiefly of staple crops, especially cereals), the idea being that hunger would be solved through adequate supply. Over the following decades, the concept of food security evolved in multiple key respects including: moving away from a sole focus on food supply and toward food distribution and access, especially by households and individuals; an acknowledgment that food security is not just a function of quantitative intake of calories but also of nutrition; the acceptance that importing food is a legitimate national means of achieving food security (as opposed to defining a food-secure country as one that domestically produces the entirety of its needs); an incorporation of social considerations (for example, inequalities in food access owing to ethnicity or gender). The definition adopted at the 1996 World Food Summit has become the default definition of food security: “Food security exists when all people, at all times, have physical, social, and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life.” (The word “social” in this definition postdates the 1996 summit.)

Food security in the Americas

The Western Hemisphere is in a fortunate position regarding agriculture and food. Its natural endowment is significant, consisting of arable soils and plentiful rainfall distributed across numerous regions suitable for agriculture (temperate, subtropical, and tropical). The hemisphere’s highly productive agriculture benefits from relatively stable political and economic environments, medium-to-high income levels, and reasonably well-functioning domestic and international markets, all stimulated by public, private, and academic sector investments in agricultural research and development (R&D).

As a result, the hemisphere’s aggregate production capacity in both staple and specialized crops gives it an indispensable role in providing domestic food security but also meeting the world’s food needs.

There are several caveats to this picture, which this report endeavors to make clear. First, several driving forces are changing baseline conditions that will alter the hemisphere’s future, for better or worse. Second, the Americas might be fortunate in many respects, but it is not a single bloc of countries acting in unison. Trade disputes, unfortunately, are becoming a sharper and more common part of the hemisphere’s diplomatic landscape, for example. Finally, as this report also makes clear, food security is not just about supply-side agricultural production. Food insecurity remains a problem in the Americas as it does everywhere in the world.

Supply side: Agricultural production
in the Americas

The five largest primary crop producing countries (by tonnage) in the world are all in the Americas: Brazil, the United States, Argentina, Mexico, and Canada. As shown in table 1 and figure 1, the hemisphere also contains top exporters of all four primary crops: soybeans, corn, wheat, and rice. The largest producers of food in the Americas are, therefore, critical for ensuring global food security. What happens in the region matters greatly, because developments in the Americas have an outsized effect on global trade in food.

In addition to the largest primary crop producers, the Americas also lead in the production of a wide range of specialty crops, including coffee, avocados, lemons, limes, oranges, blueberries, cranberries, quinoa, almonds, and more. Numerous countries in the hemisphere are leading producers of these crops. For example, Peru is in the top three global producers of avocados, blueberries, and quinoa, while Colombia is a leading global producer of coffee, sugar cane, avocados, and agave fibers.

For many countries in the Americas, agriculture continues to be a critical piece of their national economies. As shown in figure 2, agriculture’s share of gross domestic product (GDP) is above five percent in most countries and is above ten percent in a handful of countries in Central America, the Caribbean, and South America. Over the 2023–2024 period, agriculture’s share of Brazil’s GDP was 6.24 percent while its agricultural exports represented nearly half (49 percent, at $164 billion) of Brazil’s total exports by value. Both figures demonstrate the spectacular growth in Brazil’s intensive farming, especially of soybeans (see also box 2).

Box 2. Case study: Brazil
Brazil might be the single most interesting agrifood production story in the entire hemisphere, and perhaps the most important as well. Brazil today is one of the world’s great breadbaskets, being among the largest producers and exporters of primary crops and many specialized ones as well. Yet Brazil was a net food importer for much of its history, becoming a net exporter only over the past several decades. Starting in the 1960s, an agrifood production revolution occurred in Brazil, based on both extensification (expansion of agricultural land) and, just as critically if not even more so, an intensive modernization program based around research, capital investment, and technological development. Brazil’s modernization program included cutting-edge research conducted by universities and its now world-famous agricultural research agency, Embrapa, into tropical soybean and corn cultivation. These efforts led to new seed varieties and technologies that in turn enabled primary crop production to occur at scale in vast regions of Brazil including the Cerrado. Over roughly the same period, the liberalization of agricultural trade allowed Brazil to grow into a global agricultural exporter. On the demand side of the food security equation, a combination of rising wealth plus innovative social safety programs, including the Bolsa Familia and Fome Zero (zero hunger) programs, helped to reduce hunger among the poor in Brazil. Yet Brazil’s story has not been without its downsides, which in the past have included high deforestation rates in the Cerrado and Amazon regions, and related ecological damage.

Demand side: calories and nutrition

The FAO’s definition of food security, which is broadly accepted among experts, emphasizes that food security is as much about access and affordability, especially by vulnerable populations, as it is about the aggregate production of food. If people cannot access a nutritious diet at affordable and stable prices, they will not be food secure.

In recent decades, the Western Hemisphere has gradually decreased its level of food insecurity. In comparative terms, it has done well. Between 1990 and 2015, for example, Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) was the only region in the world to reduce hunger by half.

As shown in table 2, the FAO’s latest data indicates that the Western Hemisphere continues to be relatively food secure. Over 2022–2024, the two major subregions in the Americas, North America on the one hand and LAC on the other, performed better than the world average. This is reflected in several key metrics related to the reduction of caloric intake of food, in particular undernourishment (calorie deprivation over time), severe food insecurity (a measurement of households going without food for periods of time), and the prevalence of wasting in small children (an indicator of undernourishment). On metrics related to poor diets such as overweight and obesity (both of which are indicators of too many calories rather than too few), the Americas performed less well.

These outcomes are consistent with levels of wealth. Although an oversimplification, as national wealth increases, per capita consumption of food rises. Most countries in the Americas are classified by the World Bank as either high- or upper middle-income countries. (Note, however, that lower-income populations, including those within both lower- and higher income economies, are at increasing risk of obesity, in part due to easy availability of inexpensive processed foods with low nutritional value.)

There are several countries in the Americas that underperform. According to the FAO, over half (54.2 percent) of Haitians are undernourished, while just 10.7 percent of adults are obese (compared with over 40 percent of US citizens); Haiti is the most fragile state in the Americas. Although undernourishment is much lower across the hemisphere now than in previous decades, it nonetheless remains high in several countries including Bolivia (21.8 percent), Honduras (14.8 percent), Ecuador (12.1 percent), and Guatemala (11.8 percent).

There is a gendered dimension to deprivation, with women being more likely to be food insecure than men. This difference worsened during the COVID-19 pandemic, increasing to a 3.3 percent gap between the genders in Latin America in 2021, before reducing again by 2024. In North America, the gap has worsened every year since 2020, from 0.1 percent in 2020 to 0.5 percent in 2024.

Fully stocked shelves of packaged rice and beans for sale in a grocery store in Utiva, Costa Rica. (Unsplash/Bernd Dittrich)

Drivers of change in the Americas and beyond

Strategic foresight asserts that the future likely will not conform to our expectations. It is risky to assume that the future will consist of a simple linear extrapolation of one or two current trends. Hence, the discipline focuses as much on the intersections of the drivers that together will drive multiple possible futures. Food security in the Americas is no different, as there are several significant intersecting drivers of change that will
shape the hemisphere’s future.

Changing ecology

Ecological risks are among the greatest threats to food security in the Americas. A rapidly changing climate creates the primary set of risks, from rising heat and worsening drought and flooding. Other ecological risks exist as well in specific subregions, for example deforestation, biodiversity loss, and soil erosion and degradation.

Of these changing ecological conditions, perhaps the worst for agricultural production is the combination of drought and heat, or “dry-hot” conditions. Trend data show that such conditions are becoming more frequent and intense. An Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) study of drought patterns, released in July 2025, found that the share of land globally exposed to drought has doubled since 1900.

Dry-hot conditions threaten to become more frequent across the Americas. In North America, for example, scientists estimate that the now decades-long megadrought that has impacted northern Mexico and the southwestern United States might be the worst in 1,200 years. In South America, the frequency of dry, hot, and flammable weather has increased across much of the continent since the early 1970s. Such changes are highly consequential for agriculture. A 2021 study, for instance, showed that increases in Brazil’s dry-hot conditions, combined with the impacts of deforestation on temperature and rainfall, have already pushed 28 percent of the country’s agricultural land beyond its optimum productive range, with further projections of 51 percent by 2030 and 74 percent by 2060.

One of the more discouraging climate-driven outcomes is the possibility, even probability, of future multiple breadbasket failures (i.e., “simultaneous harvest failures across major crop-producing regions” around the world). Climate change likely will make such failures more common in the future. A 2021 study projected that the probability of multiple harvest failures globally was “as much as 4.5 times higher by 2030 and up to 25 times higher by 2050.”21 Another, focusing on the impacts that oscillations such as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) might have under future warming, concluded that shifting ENSO and NAO patterns might “expose an additional 5.1–12% of global croplands” to such oscillations, with strong ENSO/NAO negative phases “likely to cause simultaneous yield losses across multiple key food-producing regions.”

The Americas, home to several of the world’s major producers of staple crops including soybeans, corn, and wheat, faces the possibility of multiple breadbasket failures. It is entirely possible that in the years to come, severe dry-hot conditions could strike simultaneously in the United States, Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina. The consequences for agricultural production and global food security would be enormous.

A changing climate also will negatively impact most—perhaps all—of the other crops grown across the Americas. Coffee and banana production, to name just two examples, likely will be severely affected by increased heat and altered precipitation patterns. A recent scientific study conducted by the University of Exeter forecasts that 60 percent of the regions currently producing bananas—including regions in Central America—will be unable to do so before the end of this century, owing principally to increased temperature. The world will not have to wait nearly that long to see such effects because climate-driven impacts are already occurring. In 2024, the FAO reported a 38.8 percent annual increase in global coffee prices “primarily driven by supply-side disruptions, stemming from adverse weather conditions” including drought, heat, and flooding in major coffee-producing countries including Brazil, Vietnam, and Indonesia.

Because farmers are on the receiving end of changing ecological conditions, it is critical to understand how they are impacted by such change and how they process those changes.

Doing so will assist in defining the policy and investment options with the greatest likelihood of mass adoption on farms and in farming communities. Farmers will be impacted differently depending on where in the hemisphere they farm, their farm sizes and resources (financial and otherwise), whether they are subsistence farmers or integrated into national, regional, and global markets, and the types of crops they grow. Taken together, farmers do not experience changing ecological conditions in the same way at the same time. Smallholder farmers in poorer settings, for example, will be at greatest risk from climate-driven impacts given the small size of their landholdings and a lack of access to insurance and other sources of resilience. It follows that farmers’ perceptions of ecological impacts on their farming operations will not follow a straight line. Farmers will parse the impacts of environmental hazards such as drought, heat, or flooding differently.

In sum, ecological change dramatically increases the risk of declining crop yields while shifting the locations where crops can be grown. Potentially, ecological change with impacts at scale could generate significant shortfalls in global food supply, causing market panics, high prices, hoarding, and a breakdown of trade. Food insecurity would spike.

A tractor trailer fills seed boxes in a Michigan field. (Unsplash/Loren King)

Geopolitical and geoeconomic turbulence

A second set of risks stems from rising geopolitical and geoeconomic competition and uncertainty. An open, rules-based trading system has been essential to improving hemispheric and global food security. Trade in that system has precipitated more economic integration of the region—more bilateral trade and investment agreements, greater investment flows, and exchange of technical know-how—which benefits food security via higher economic growth, greater employment opportunities and rising incomes, poverty reduction, and general economic dynamism. It also has allowed governments to see that a set of policies, including more focus on innovation and competitiveness and less on trade distortions and protectionism, is the best path forward.

Yet this trajectory is now subject to geopolitical risk. Over the past two decades, the global food trading system has been disrupted by several significant events including wars and related phenomena (e.g., civil strife, terrorism). Such events generate (largely) unanticipated shocks to agricultural inputs, supply chains, and agrifood exports, resulting in higher production prices and, therefore, consumer prices. The most well-known and significant of these events is the full-scale war in Ukraine, which upon its onset in 2022 immediately resulted in higher global prices for key commodities including natural gas and nitrogen fertilizers (because Russia is the world’s third ranking natural gas exporter and natural gas is a critical input for nitrogen fertilizers); potash fertilizers (primarily from Russia and Belarus) and wheat (before the war, Ukraine was the world’s seventh-largest wheat exporter).

Although global input markets, for example for fertilizers, are broadly resilient, at the same time they also clearly are affected by geopolitical turbulence arising from trade policies, sanctions, shocks such as wars, and other phenomena. While the war in Ukraine is an important case, it hardly exhausts the list of current examples. In July 2025, the World Bank said that sanctions and restrictive trade policies “are playing an increasingly significant role in reshaping global fertilizer markets,” citing China’s discretionary export restrictions on nitrogen and phosphate fertilizers to protect its domestic agriculture, and the European Union’s (EU) June 2025 tariffs against Belarusian and Russian fertilizers to reduce EU dependence on these countries.

An even more difficult problem is the risk that the hemispheric and global agrifood trading system is returning to a protectionist order, which risks the benefits that have accrued since the emergence of a rules-based trading model in the 1990s for agriculture established under the World Trade Organization (WTO) 1994 Agreement on Agriculture. Under that model, countries tended to place high tariffs only on a few politically sensitive crops (such as sugar or cotton). Yet today’s rising protectionism is much broader, affecting a larger number of crops, including staple crops, and implemented by an ever-longer list of countries. The result is likely to undermine food security by increasing food prices—with impacts falling most harshly on poor households—and reducing profitability by raising both producers’ and exporters’ costs, lowering investment and decreasing productivity.

Over the past several decades, the largest agricultural producers in the Americas, including the United States and Brazil, have become the world’s largest agrifood exporting nations. Southern Cone states have pushed agricultural exports as key pieces of their export-led growth strategies, especially to China given its rapidly growing demand for commodities. With such a high dependence on global agricultural exports, the biggest agricultural producers in the Western Hemisphere ought to be the most heavily invested in a global agrifood free-trading regime. Tariff and nontariff barrier uncertainty negatively impacts agrifood producers, processors, distributors, and consumers.

These disruptions have other distorting effects. Trade patterns within the Americas, and between the Americas and the rest of the world, are shifting because of trade tensions. China’s behavior in international agricultural markets is a significant example, with direct relevance to the Western Hemisphere. A decade ago, China imported more agricultural goods from the United States than from Brazil; today, China imports almost twice as much from Brazil as from the United States, including in soybeans and corn. China’s shift toward non-US sources (including but not limited to Brazil) began even before the 2018 trade dispute with the United States. In addition to supply diversification, China also has dramatically increased its stockpiling of food (grains, soybeans, and frozen meat), which it defines as a strategic good.

Further, China’s decoupling from the US agricultural market has had major consequences for trade patterns in that it has helped Brazil become the world’s largest exporter of soybeans. Since the 2018 Sino-American trade dispute, Brazil’s global soybean exports have increased by 40 percent, while those from the US have remained flat.

Geopolitical and geoeconomic turbulence has distorting effects on global trade in food. The biggest concern for global food security is the impact on food prices, both in terms of inflation but also price variability. Such turbulence also can generate trade disputes and, therefore, contribute to fractured relations among states. After the United States levied tariffs in August 2025 of up to 50 percent against certain Brazilian agricultural goods including coffee, beef, and sugar, Brazil immediately asked the WTO for consultation, arguing that the tariffs violate international trade rules. A likely immediate effect of the tariffs is to hasten Brazil’s interest in developing alternative markets for its agricultural products, including with China. A second and (often) underappreciated concern is that unstable trade rules and fluctuating market access make it more difficult for farmers to plan and make production and investment decisions, increasing their economic uncertainty.

Geopolitical tensions and rising trade protectionism are also likely to lead to slower economic growth. This is important because in the Americas, as everywhere, economic growth coupled with rising incomes are keys to increased food security. If slower economic growth combines with higher food prices owing to increasing trade friction, then there is a greater risk of more food insecurity in the future. International food trade is being shaped increasingly by geopolitical considerations rather than market signals, thereby realigning trade patterns in unpredictable ways.

Institutional uncertainty

Multilateral institutions are a hallmark of the current international order. Most of the world’s biggest and most important institutions that exist today were created after 1945. Although not without criticism, much of it deserved, these institutions have been central to building a global order which has delivered unprecedented—if also uneven—prosperity. When it comes to trade, the data say as much: Today’s global trade is 45 times by volume and 382 times by value greater than it was in 1950. Moreover, since the mid-1990s, global trade growth has accelerated, averaging 4 percent growth by volume annually and 5 percent by value.

However, the multilateral institutions that have facilitated this growth in trade now are under enormous pressure from all sides. One reason is that the world’s largest trading powers as well as many smaller ones have been willing to bend or even break established norms and international trade law. China, for example, has taken advantage of its status as a developing country under the WTO to engage in unfair practices, including massive subsidies, heavy use of state-owned enterprises, forced technology transfer, and protection of its domestic market (for example, limiting foreign companies’ and investors’ access to its technology and financial markets).36 Further, the United States is preventing the WTO’s Appellate Body from functioning as designed, preventing the organization from enforcing its own rules.

Such developments are important because they create uncertainty surrounding trading rules and thereby increase friction among countries when it comes to trade. Even worse, these developments create space wherein the breaking of rules by some countries prompts others to believe they can as well. Both India and Indonesia, for example, recently have taken advantage of the lack of a functioning Appellate Body to
implement policies that likely are in violation; Indonesia instituted a ban on nickel exports (to induce nickel processors to relocate to Indonesia) while India heavily subsidized steel and pharmaceuticals. By some estimates, two-thirds of initial WTO rulings made about trade disputes have been appealed, but the Appellate Body cannot convene itself.

The decline of multilateral institutions is significant because the Americas benefit more than other regions from an open global trading system in agricultural goods, per table 1 above. Agriculture always has been a controversial topic in trade negotiations, extending back to the origins of the Global Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in the 1940s. Despite this fact, functional multilateral institutions are valuable because
they create a stable, rules-based global marketplace that in turn enables trade in food at scale.

In sum, a breakdown of multilateral institutions and rising protectionism portend headwinds for agriculture in the years to come, increasing risks and possibly disincentivizing investments by farmers. Such developments erode the open agrifood trading system that globalization made possible. The Americas have utilized open trade to expand agriculture production and exports and, therefore, is most at risk from the unraveling of that system

Price inflation and variability

The price of food is a core metric for food security: For the world’s consumers, the most desirable food prices are both low and stable over time. Food insecurity is made worse when the opposite applies: rapid price inflation combined with high price variability. Unfortunately, as shown in figure 3, the latter situation has characterized global food prices for much of the past quarter century.

Since the 2000s, shocks have occurred with such frequency that prices settle on a new higher baseline rather than returning to previous levels. The FAO noted this trend as early as 2009: Prior to the 2006–2008 global food-price shock, “real prices [in food had] shown a steady long-run downward trend punctuated by typically short-lived price spikes.” But by the mid-2000s, the FAO observed, this trend no longer held. As of 2008, its own food-price index “still averaged 24 percent above 2007 and 57 percent above 2006.” Indeed, as shown in figure 3, since the mid-2000s, global food prices have risen to a new and higher level after each exogenous shock. The most recent global shocks—the COVID-19 pandemic followed by the full-scale invasion of Ukraine—has had the greatest impact on sustained high food prices.

The upward trend in the price of food has important implications for food security around the world. Food is less affordable; households have more difficulty consuming a healthy diet, and they are forced to switch to less nutritious foods and/or reduce their total consumption of food. This cost-of-living crisis erodes food security gains and threatens to make societies less stable.

Food-price inflation and volatility is as problematic in the Americas as elsewhere in the world, increasing food insecurity and becoming a key social and political issue. In Latin America, rising food prices have been a major driver of inflation across the region. In some cases, such as Argentina, food prices have contributed to extreme inflation rates. In North America, food prices also continue to rise and are a major cause of the cost-of-living crisis experienced by many households.

Investment: Innovation, technology, and infrastructure

Public- and private-sector investments in on- and off-farm innovation and productivity have been critical enablers of modern agrifood systems. A question to be answered in the years to come is whether such investments will increase agricultural productivity and sustainability enough to match or exceed demand-side pressures for more food (from population and income growth), even as baseline conditions from other drivers—ecological, institutional, geopolitical—become more challenging.

Historically, on- and off-farm innovation and productivity increases, which stem from process and technological developments plus infrastructural improvements, have been fundamental to increasing the supply of food to meet rising demand. Since the 1990s, global efficiency gains have been the largest contributors to global growth in agricultural output. Efficiency gains have far outstripped the other contributors, including the use of more inputs per hectare of land, greater extension of irrigation to cropland, and expansion of new agricultural land (e.g., expansion of agriculture into previously forested lands).

In agriculture, efficiency is gauged using total factor productivity (TFP), a metric of inputs relative to outputs. If total on-farm output (e.g., volume of crops produced) is growing faster than inputs (defined as labor, capital, and material resources), then TFP is increasing.

That is the good news. The bad news is that global TFP growth is now slowing. After steadily increasing from a 0.55 percent annual growth rate during the 1970s to a peak of 1.97 percent annual growth rate in the 2000s, TFP has since fallen back to 1.1 percent annually (figure 4). Within the Americas, the picture is even more dire. Between 2011 and 2020, TFP increased by only 0.9 percent annually in Latin America and the Caribbean. In North America, typically at the global forefront in productivity and efficiency gains, TFP grew over the same period by just 0.2 percent annually. The Americas significantly lagged the global average (figure 5).

The decline in TFP over the past fifteen years is a worrisome development, as it threatens to undermine progress toward an elusive goal, which is to produce enough food to meet growing global demand while simultaneously retaining on-farm profitability and reducing environmental impact. Analysts at the US Department of Agriculture recently made this argument. “At the global level,” they wrote, “improvements in agricultural productivity have not been rapid or universal enough to make a significant dent in the effect of agriculture on the environment.” If TFP were to continue to slow down in the future, the impact “could [negatively] affect food prices, [lead to] the expansion of agriculture into more natural lands, and [threaten] global food security.”

Nor is underinvestment in innovation the only form of investment risk. Despite the hemisphere’s reliance on trade in agriculture and food, infrastructure across much of the Americas remains underdeveloped. The so-called infrastructure gap in the Americas refers to how the hemisphere’s ports, railways, bridges and roads, telecommunications, and other forms of infrastructure are insufficiently robust in kind, quality, and/or maintenance. In 2021, for example, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) estimated that countries in Latin America and the Caribbean alone would need to invest $2.2 trillion in “water and sanitation, energy, transportation, and telecommunications infrastructure” to meet the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. The IDB’s estimate included not just funds for new infrastructural investment but for maintenance and replacement as well (at some 41 percent of the total).

North America is not exempt from this problem, as both Canada and the United States face large infrastructure deficits. As is well-known, for decades the United States has largely underinvested in infrastructure. Despite passage of the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which directed the federal government to spend some $1.2 trillion over five years on infrastructure, investment levels in the United States will remain insufficient absent systematic changes in how funds are raised by local, state, and federal governments.

Likewise, in Canada, the infrastructure deficit, which is estimated at $196 billion, is of particular importance to that country’s globally important agricultural exports, which include foodstuffs such as grains (wheat, principally) and key agricultural inputs such as fertilizers, largely produced in the country’s vast interior. Getting bulky grains and inputs to external markets more cheaply and efficiently will require Canada to upgrade its transport infrastructure, including railway lines, bridges, and ports, which are key in all circumstances but especially so during periods when unexpected disruptive factors, such as recent port labor strikes or extreme weather events, create choke points that necessitate rerouting. The recent announcements by the government of Canada to expand the Port of Montreal is a step in the right direction. However, significantly greater ambition will be required to push Canada’s infrastructure investments to levels comparable to other leading OECD countries.

Policymakers, the private sector, farmers, investors, and the scientific and technological communities will need to find solutions to these challenges. Doing so will require some combination of enhanced public and private investment in on- and off-farm infrastructure, R&D, improved piloting and scaling of new technologies, and implementation of policies to encourage farmers to become more innovative, productive, and efficient.

A Colombian grocery store displays a variety of vegetables for sale. (Unsplash/nrd)

Demographic shifts

Agricultural employment as a share of global GDP has been trending downward for decades, owing to the ongoing mechanization of farmwork, increasing urbanization and industrialization, and other factors. According to the World Bank, in 1991, 43 percent of the world’s population was employed in agriculture. By 2023, that figure had fallen by almost half, to 26 percent.

The Western Hemisphere has followed this trendline. In Latin America and the Caribbean, agricultural employment fell over the same 1991–2023 period from 21 percent to 13 percent and in North America from 2.8 percent to 1.6 percent. As can be expected, given differences in income levels, structure of national economies, and crop specialization, there are widespread differences in agricultural employment across the hemisphere. In 2023, several countries still had employment levels in agriculture above 20 percent: Haiti (by far the most, at 45 percent), Ecuador, Guatemala, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Peru, and Honduras. In contrast, the hemisphere’s biggest producers of staple crops—the United States, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina—are all well below the global average of 26 percent, in most cases in low single digits.

This demographic transition underscores how agriculture is becoming more capital-intensive and productive: more food is being produced per person employed in the sector. The largest food producers also typically have the lowest share of farmers and agricultural workers employed in the national economy, as the United States, Canada, and Argentina all show (each is at less than 2 percent of their populations employed
in agriculture).

However, there is a generational downside to this demographic trend: farmers worldwide are aging in part because on-farm employment opportunities are declining. The trend appears to be worse in the wealthiest regions having the smallest share of employment in agriculture. In the EU, for example, only 11.9 percent of farmers were under forty years old in 2020.52 In the United States, only 9 percent were under thirty-five years of age in 2022.

Toward a food-secure future

The world needs a bold new way of thinking about food security, one that incorporates a comprehensive understanding of how divergent forces, including those identified in this report, are creating a dynamic and unsettled agrifood landscape that will shape the future in unpredictable ways. To avoid negative future scenarios and increase the odds of positive ones, what is needed is a shift in the prevailing debate about food security that incorporates all these driving forces. That debate should stress that these forces combine in important and not entirely predictable ways to disrupt agrifood systems.

Such an outlook recognizes, for example, that geopolitical tensions add risk to other phenomena such as climate change to make an already perilous situation more difficult.

Policymakers and other leaders across the Americas should recognize that these drivers intersect and combine, in turn reshaping the hemisphere’s agrifood outlook. The challenge is clear: They will need to develop strategies and design policies that will lead to resilient and sustainable food systems that minimize the impact of shocks—both natural and human-made—on the production, distribution, and access to food.

Ecology

As stated above in the introduction, a central challenge will be to ensure that food production can remain profitable and resilient in the face of disruptive change. Ecological changes and the environmental resources that the world relies upon for productive and healthy agriculture systems are critical pieces of this equation.

A key task concerns how best to frame this problem for policymakers, business leaders, and farmers, to relay that ecological changes threaten to undermine progress toward a food-secure future. How these stakeholders act through policies, investments, and practices to mitigate and adapt to ecological changes will go a long way to determining whether the hemisphere’s future is food secure or insecure.

Farming is inherently uncertain because of the vagaries of weather and disease, so efforts to minimize the instability caused by ecological changes, including climate change, extreme weather, disasters, and other phenomena, will help farmers to manage this complex set of risks. Integration across risks is an important way to frame the problem, not only because the problem itself is multifaceted but so too are the solutions. Synergies among healthy ecosystem services, robust agricultural production, and profitability can be found with the right application of imagination, creativity, policymaking, investment, and on-the-ground application by utilizing input and knowledge from farmers and farming communities.

Agriculture is a major driver of ecological change, including land-use patterns and carbon emissions. Yet at the same time, agriculture also holds enormous potential, under the right domestic and international conditions, to provide robust and lasting solutions. Doing so would require that policymakers, investors, farmers, scientists, and technologists and society writ large coordinate efforts toward effecting scalable change.

Synergistic approaches include a range of alternative farming techniques and practices as well as novel technologies that collectively hold great potential not only to perform at a high level of output but at the same time go some way toward repairing the natural world. These strategies, which overlap in practice, include regenerative agriculture, no-till farming, agroforestry, climate-smart agriculture, and 4R nutrient stewardship practices (referring to nutrient-management practices focusing on the right sources, right rates, right times, and right places for nutrients). Such approaches aim to improve resource efficiency, reduce waste, protect ecosystems and ecosystem services including freshwater sources, soils, and biodiversity, while retaining profitability. Through the more efficient use of resources, carbon sequestration in soils, land and forest conservation, and improved management (for example, of water and waste processes), these strategies also can mitigate the agricultural sector’s significant greenhouse gas emissions.

Although many of these approaches once were considered experimental, novel, and unproven, that is far less the case today. Regenerative farming, for example, now has more adherents (including farmers) who believe that the diverse methods falling under it deliver tangible environmental benefits without sacrificing on-farm yields—a claim that is also drawing greater financial-sector interest and investment. A global survey of farmers, conducted in 2024 by McKinsey and Company found that over three-quarters of farmers in Argentina, Brazil, Canada, and the United States were adopting no-till or reduced tillage practices. Farmers’ willingness to adopt these and other regenerative practices were “underpinned by economics,” according to McKinsey, with respondents in the Americas ranking increased yields as their primary motive for adoption, followed by lower production costs and additional revenue streams.

There is an enormous amount of land worldwide and in the Americas that could be revitalized through such approaches. Land degradation, which by extension means the degradation of the world’s soils, is a massive problem. The world is losing at least one hundred million hectares of productive land each year, with some forecasts suggesting up to 95 percent of the world’s arable land could be in some kind of degraded state
by 2050.

In the Americas, degradation is a serious problem but also a big opportunity for soil and land regeneration. Brazil alone has enormous swathes of degraded pastureland. Embrapa, Brazil’s agricultural research agency, estimated in 2024 that the country has approximately twenty-eight million hectares of degraded pastureland (classified as intermediately or severely degraded). Bringing this land back into production using regenerative methods would help alleviate forest conversion pressures in Brazil’s Cerrado and Amazon regions.

One important consideration for policymakers is that if trade in agriculture and food becomes more costly, there is a risk that the fiscal capacity to invest in policies to make agrifood systems more productive and resilient in the face of ecological change will be reduced. Hence, this report focuses on understanding how these issues are linked and addressing them through greater international cooperation to promote more sustainable and resilient agrifood systems.

Trade, geopolitics, and institutions

Rising protectionism and geopolitical competition undermine the incentives for states to cooperate. Trade tensions risk spilling over into diplomatic tension, eroding international trust. In such conditions, states will be less likely to collaborate, which can sour international relations. If the world’s biggest economies are becoming more protectionist and eschewing a rules-based trading system, a zero-sum world returns, with many states, concerned by protectionist measures placed on them from elsewhere, believing they must adopt such policies. More dialogue among states, not less, is an antidote.

An increasing number of governments around the world appear to no longer see the equation in these terms. China, for example, is seeking greater self-reliance in food through stockpiling and other measures. It also has weaponized tariffs for its own purposes, imposing large tariffs on grain imports from Australia and more recently on Canada. These are not isolated incidents but part of how China exercises its power, given its outsized impact on world markets.

As articulated in this report, global trade in food depends on the strength of multilateral institutions and international agreements. These institutions are often underappreciated contributors to global food security. Today these institutions are being eroded by rising geopolitical and diplomatic conflict and other forces. The rapid rate of their erosion is worrisome.

Despite the WTO’s flaws—of which there are many—it remains valuable because it has the reach and standing to create and enforce global trading rules. Yet the organization is failing at doing so, in large part because of its own rules (decisions are made by consensus) and even more so because the largest trading countries no longer want to abide by a rules-based system. The risk is a collapse of the entire multilateral trading system. “The reversal of global economic integration [if the multilateral trading system were to fail] would bring with it growing lawlessness, conflict, and disorder in the global economy,” one scholar writes, and with it “the international system at large.”

One aim should be to build alternative institutions within the hemisphere consisting of states having the critical mass to achieve desired outcomes. One such solution would be to mimic the Group of Seven and Group of Twenty, two examples of institutions that bring leaders from the world’s largest economies together to attempt to coordinate solutions to various global challenges. One possibility would be to start with just the largest agricultural producers in the hemisphere—an “A5” consisting of the United States, Brazil, Mexico, Canada, and Argentina—to bring agriculture ministers together for systematized dialogue about hemispheric trade. Dialogue outcomes might include regional food-security compacts that generate commitments to invest in agricultural research leading to breakthrough technologies (“agtech”), to avoid the most trade distorting policies (export bans, for example), and more.

A related idea is to construct a standing (as opposed to episodic) hemispheric food security council to bring willing governments together for discussing responses to future shocks, identifying pathways for greater scientific and technological cooperation, and buttressing the norm regarding the hemisphere’s responsibility to the rest of the world as a major food supplier. Hemispheric institutions such as the Organization of American States (OAS) and Inter-American Development Bank can be leveraged to convene this council, given their credibility in addressing hemispheric affairs, including in trade. Using the inter-American system to convene a hemispheric food security council consisting of foreign, environment, and agriculture ministers—alongside representatives from industry and producer groups—should appeal to a wide set of stakeholders.

A drone hovers above a field. (Unsplash/Job Vermeulen)

Investment in innovation, technology, and infrastructure

The constant improvement of on- and off-farm activities, including innovative use of new technologies and processes, and capital investment in the phenomena that enable them (including infrastructure), are central to ensuring that the hemisphere and the world are food secure. Innovation and investment also are critical components of agrifood systems that not only are productive but also sustainable and resilient, given
the need to prepare for climate-driven shocks in the future. Innovative technologies and processes, and the infrastructure that undergirds them, can build redundancy and efficiency into the agrifood system in anticipation of such shocks.

Regenerative agriculture and other agrifood systems focused on sustainability can be enhanced through the application of advanced technologies. Examples include:

Alternative energy sources can enhance on- and offfarm systems while reducing carbon footprints.
Geospatial remote sensing tools for precision farming can identify and help safeguard ecological assets.
Robotics and mobile digital technologies (including deeper integration of handheld devices into farming practices) can improve agricultural efficiencies while reducing environmental impact.
AI-driven analytics can integrate and utilize data streams from numerous applications.

Such technologies will become more critical in the future, as ecological changes make farming more difficult. Rising heat, for example, will create harsher working conditions for farm labor, in turn requiring machines and other technologies to alleviate workers’ outdoor exposure during periods of extreme heat.

Biotechnologies should be added to this list, given their promise to improve on-farm productivity and nutrient use efficiency while protecting ecological assets such as soils and water. Biofertilizers, for example, aim to improve soil fertility and nutrient use efficiency through application of living organisms including bacteria, fungi, and algae, with crop yields increasing by an estimated 10 percent to 40 percent. They also help
plants withstand abiotic stressors, some brought on by climate change, including drought, salinity, and extreme temperatures.

How can governments, the private sector, and other actors together ensure that the right mix and scale of investments are being made that will lead to innovative technologies and processes across the hemisphere’s agrifood systems? Additionally, how can they ensure that innovative technologies and processes are transformative at all scales, including for the hemisphere’s millions of smallholder farmers in addition to its largest producers? Some technologies and processes are more suitable for large-scale applications because of high cost or other considerations, for example. Improving access to the benefits of such technologies will require improved pathways for dissemination of knowledge, practical know-how, access to capital, and other services (e.g., training).

Every year, researchers at Virginia Tech produce the Global Agricultural Productivity Report, which tracks and analyzes TFP trends. The 2025 version asserts that reversing the decline in TFP growth—including low growth in the Americas—will require five “policy, investment and research priorities,” which are:

Invest more in strengthening and expanding multistakeholder dialogues, agriculture extension services, and incentive structures for technology transfer to smallholder farmers.
Expand access to markets for all participants in the agrifood value chain, including smallholder farmers.
Strengthen trade as it “enhances competitive prices” which incentivizes investment in improved inputs and technologies” while facilitating “the exchange of knowledge, innovations, and best practices across borders, driving productivity gains.”
Reduce food loss and waste.
Invest in public-private partnerships, joint ventures, knowledge sharing agreements and platforms, and interdisciplinary research.

These types of innovative practices have real impact on agrifood systems at every level, down to the farm itself. Innovation delivers new seeds and crop varieties, creates more efficient production methods, solves practical problems faced by farmers (pests and disease), and creates new markets for goods and services provided by farmers (such as using sugarcane to produce ethanol to reduce carbon emissions of transport
fuels).

Farmers are both users and creators of innovative technologies and processes, so their knowledge and experience should be included in robust feedback loops. Moreover, farmers must be able to adopt and utilize innovative technologies and processes to realize their full positive contributions. This is not an automatic process, as on-farm adoption is not the same thing as laboratory invention. When making investment decisions, farmers are businesspersons, concerned about the upfront costs and return on investment (ROI). Global surveys of farmers indicate they are hesitant to adopt new technologies and processes if the technologies and processes are unfamiliar or they face high initial investment costs or uncertain ROI.

Publicly funded agricultural extension programs, which connect researchers at universities and other institutions to farmers—in the process, enabling mutual learning and successful technology transfer—are critical to improving agtech adoption. Maintaining and strengthening extension services (including public funding) should be central to any country’s aspiration to build world-class agrifood systems based on widespread technology and process adoption by farmers.

Improving infrastructure to strengthen agrifood supply chains is also critical, especially as higher temperatures, changing precipitation patterns, more frequent and powerful disasters, and other problems will put more infrastructure—e.g., ports, bridges, roads, railroads, canals— at risk. Ports are especially at risk, with most food trade moving by cargo ships. The Panama Canal, which in recent years has had low water levels due to Central American drought, is a good example. (Chinese ownership of port facilities also has proven controversial in the United States.) Beyond adaptation measures designed to improve individual pieces of infrastructure, there is much need for strategies that will frame the challenge in terms of societal and even transboundary (international) resilience. Canada, for example, in 2023 released a whole-of-society National Adaptation Strategy that emphasizes the need to make physical infrastructure (and communities) more resilient to climate-driven impacts.

Three locomotives haul goods over the Ascotán Pass to the Bolivian border. (Wikimedia/Kabelleger)

Farmers for the future

Ensuring a food-secure future in the Americas must place human beings at its center. This formula long has been the focus on the demand side of the food-security equation: The goal always is to ensure that all humans always have access to affordable and nutritious food.

Yet the same logic also holds on the supply side of the equation. To avoid the demographic decline of farming amid the chronic aging of the world’s farmers, it is imperative that farming be made financially, socially, and culturally attractive to younger generations. Unfortunately, such conditions are not prevalent in many countries (perhaps most) around the world. The reasons for this are many. To young people, particularly those without a family heritage in agriculture, farming can be perceived as backward, unprofitable, difficult, alien, or uncool—or all the above.

There is no single set of recognized solutions to assist in turning the demographic trendlines around. However, evidence from around the world suggests that a combination of interventions, some obvious and others not so much, might suffice. The obvious ones are to make it easier to gain access to farming in the first place by reducing barriers to entry (access to affordable financing or access to farmland through ownership or long-term contract), and closing knowledge and skills gaps through on-farm training programs, scholarships, and apprenticeships. There are less obvious interventions, too. One such intervention is to incentivize nontraditional candidates to enter farming, for example, young women, in addition to traditional candidates (typically men). Another is to stress the increasingly important role played by digital technologies, robotics, big data and remote sensing, artificial intelligence, and other technical applications that appeal to tech-savvy and ambitious young people.

Although none of these solutions will guarantee a demographic rebound in farming, there are examples of where the curve has been bent toward youth. Brazil’s farmers are getting younger rather than older. They appear to be attracted by the prospect of getting rich in Brazil’s booming, forward-facing, and tech-savvy industry.

A combine harvests corn in a field in Southern Michigan. (Unsplash/Loren King)

Conclusion

The issues outlined in this report should be seen as a starting point for discussion. The challenges and the opportunities facing agrifood systems in the Americas in the coming decades will be profound. A central question is whether the hemisphere’s key actors—governments, farmers, the private sector, researchers, foundations, civil society groups, and the public—will be willing to invest in the transformative processes and approaches that will reduce risk while increasing prosperity, sustainability, and resilience.

This report has put great emphasis upon generating productive dialogues among key stakeholders. Promoting the diffusion of critical innovations for food security will be an important piece of this process. It is imperative that governments and multilateral institutions in the hemisphere find financing and pool technological know-how to support programs tailored to meet the needs of the region.

Beyond that, however, it is critical that nongovernmental stakeholders, including investors, the private sector, researchers, scientists, analysts, farmers, and farming communities, act in concert with one another. They must themselves build the transnational dialogues to assist in envisioning, creating, and strengthening the tools that will be needed to ensure a food-secure future.

Acknowledgments

This report was produced by the Atlantic Council with support from The Mosaic Company as part of the Food security: Strategic alignment in the Americas project.

About the authors

Peter Engelke is a senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security as well as a senior fellow with its Global Energy Center. His diverse work portfolio spans strategic foresight; geopolitics, diplomacy, and international relations; climate change and Earth systems; food, water, and energy security; emerging and disruptive technologies and tech-based innovation ecosystems; and demographics and urbanization, among other subjects, and he is the creator of the Council’s most widely read long-form publication series, Global Foresight. Engelke’s previous affiliations have included the Geneva Centre for Security Policy, the Robert Bosch Foundation, the World Economic Forum, and the Stimson Center.

Matias Margulis is associate professor of the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs and a faculty member of Land and Food Systems at the University of British Columbia. His research and teaching interests are in global governance, development, human rights, international law, and food policy. In addition to his academic research, Margulis has extensive professional experience in the field of international policymaking and is a former Canadian representative to the World Trade Organization, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization.

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It’s time to reckon with the geopolitics of artificial intelligence

Frederick Kempe — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 12:57:47 +0000

The headlines from Donald Trump’s recent meeting with Xi Jinping were all about the US and Chinese presidents reaching a trade truce. But what was lost in the news is a far more significant matter that will shape the high-stakes competition unfolding between the world’s two most significant powers: the contest for the commanding heights of artificial intelligence (AI).

The world has entered the most consequential tech race since the dawn of the nuclear age, but this time the weapons are algorithms instead of atoms. Rather than a race to obtain a single superweapon, this is one to determine how societies think, work, and make decisions. AI is transforming not only the distribution of power around the globe but also the very nature of that power and how it will be exercised.

A race with generational consequences

The Chinese government sees AI as a crucial driver for what it calls “comprehensive national power.” That’s why it is so focused on the rapid integration of AI into surveillance, consumer products and services, advanced manufacturing, military modernization, and even scientific discovery under a unified state strategy. As Tess deBlanc-Knowles, senior director with Atlantic Council Technology Programs, tells me, “One of the notable aspects of China’s approach is the prioritization of application, or what is called ‘AI-plus.’ China has an advantage over the US in terms of providing direction and incentives for the integration of AI across all sectors of the economy.”

When it comes to AI development and deployment, China’s private sector must be subservient to the will of the Communist Party. The cycle of innovation that results is distinct from Western conceptions of more loosely connected relationships among policymakers, industry, and academia.

The United States, by contrast, relies much more heavily on the singular dynamism of its private sector, open research culture, and international alliances. The US government struggles to coordinate its private stakeholders and universities at any national scale. The country remains hamstrung by weakening legal protections for privacy and intellectual property that tend to introduce ambiguity rather than clear running lanes.

And run the United States must. Failure to maintain US leadership on AI could have generational consequences. The outcome of this contest will determine which values—authoritarian efficiency or democratic dynamism—set global norms on everything from digital commerce to autonomous warfare.

“The escalating AI race is drawing comparisons with the Cold War, and the great scientific and technological clashes that characterized it,” write Josh Chin and Raffaele Huang in the Wall Street Journal today. “It is likely to be at least as consequential.” They write that both China and the United States “are driven as much by fear as by hope of progress.”

Helping the US and its allies mobilize, iterate, and deliver

There’s little doubt that who wins this race will depend on who can produce the most advanced chips, the best models, the most potent computers, and the cheapest and most sustainable energy for a proliferation of purposes.

More significantly, the emerging AI contest is about defining the world’s future standards in areas such as freedom, privacy, and even human dignity. The design of the internet—its core protocols and standards—reflected a bias toward openness, self-organization, and free speech that have shaped two generations of lives online and trillions of dollars in consumer technology. This moment in the AI era offers the same pivotal opportunity for influence. If the United States and its allies lose this race, that could produce a world in which AI becomes more of an instrument for political and autocratic control than one for individual and democratic empowerment.

With so much at stake, the Atlantic Council last week launched its GeoTech Commission on Artificial Intelligence as our flagship initiative to address this historic moment. It will bring together congressional leaders, top industry executives, and innovators across the AI ecosystem to ensure that the United States maintains its technological preeminence in an AI-defined world. Our aim is to help the United States and its allies mobilize more stakeholders, iterate faster, and deliver actionable strategies to ensure US and allied leadership—and a more enlightened, prosperous, secure, and democratic future.

The GeoTech Commission, of which I’m a member, will focus on overall competitiveness across six critical realms: AI innovation, supply chains, energy sources, government adoption and oversight, talent development, and international alliances. Rather than prioritizing some of these realms over others, it will integrate these pieces to address what asserting US leadership and winning the AI race should look like. The race for AI doesn’t boil down to one single measure or factor.

Los Alamos this isn’t

I began by writing that the current tech race is the most consequential for humanity since the beginning of the nuclear era. Some have gone further, drawing a direct comparison between the race for AI preeminence and the Manhattan Project that produced the first nuclear weapon. What’s true is that the AI race, like the Manhattan Project before it, will be decided to some extent by scientific breakthroughs. Both also share the potential for great good and catastrophic harm.

Yet this is also a misleading analogy. The Manhattan Project was a clandestine, centralized, US government-led sprint at a time of world war. The US government did have an important role in enabling the AI revolution through the development of technical foundations for deep learning and other advancements. But it has been private industry, not the government, that has leveraged and innovated to get to today’s capabilities.

To win this race, governments know they must work effectively with private companies such as Anthropic, Google, Nvidia, Microsoft, and OpenAI in the United States and Alibaba, DJI, High-Flyer, and Huawei in China. Such companies wield budgets and global reach that would make most defense ministries blush.

‘China is going to win the AI race’

The American edge is in its democratic, free market, innovative ecosystem, which at its best is an unmatched magnet for talent and capital. Yet that ecosystem is also a vulnerability in that Washington can’t control or leverage its tech champions for any overriding national security purpose in the manner Beijing does routinely.

“China is going to win the AI race,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told the Financial Times this past week, pointing to Beijing’s looser regulations, new energy subsidies, and direct intervention to assist its champions. Industry leaders worry that the Trump administration focuses more on restricting what US firms can sell to China than on energetically helping its companies win the race. “We need more optimism,” Huang said a week after Trump announced that he would stop China from gaining access to both Nvidia’s cutting-edge Blackwell chips and a less advanced chip designed explicitly for the Chinese market, and just a few days after the company reached an unprecedented market capitalization of five trillion dollars.

China’s system fuses state and private ambition in a manner that could be decisive, mobilizing government, private capital, and leading-edge science around common cause dictated by Xi and the Communist Party. The system intentionally aligns national goals with corporate incentives. While US companies focus on winning markets, competing with each other, and turning profits, Chinese companies that fail to serve the state and the party do so at their own peril.

In the United States, by contrast, the messiness of the free market could prove an enduring strength in directing capital, talent, and attention to cutting-edge technologies. Winning the race to adopt AI will require newly integrated thinking across the development, use, and consequences of the technology, rather than a narrow focus on how to build more chips or run faster models.

The Atlantic Council’s GeoTech Commission on Artificial Intelligence will grapple with this integrated question and identify how best to counter China’s capacity to leverage its entire society toward technological ends. The Manhattan Project changed history with an explosion. The demonstrations of success won’t be as dramatic with AI, but they will affect every person on the globe. And the outcome may be just as far-reaching in determining what group of countries and which set of values determine the future.

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on X @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points newsletter, a column of dispatches from a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

The GeoTech Commission on Artificial Intelligence

Enabling US and allied leadership in the age of AI

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Ukraine’s drone war lesson for Europe: Technology is nothing without training

David Kirichenko — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 00:47:02 +0000

As Europe races to strengthen its defenses against the mounting threat posed by Russian drones, more and more countries are looking to learn from Ukraine’s experience. Speaking in October, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen acknowledged that Ukraine is currently a world leader in drone warfare and called on her European colleagues to “take all the experiences, all the new technology, all the innovation from Ukraine, and put it into our own rearming.”

It is clear that Europe has much to learn. A spate of suspected Russian drone incursions during the second half of 2025 have highlighted the continent’s vulnerability to drone-based aggression and raised fundamental questions over whether European armies are currently preparing for the wrong kind of war. While Europe’s rearmament efforts continue to gain ground, even big spenders like Poland remain focused primarily on traditional weapons systems. This is fueling concerns that European defense policymakers may not fully appreciate the growing dominance of drones on the battlefields of Ukraine.

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Ukraine’s embrace of drone warfare since 2022 can provide Kyiv’s partners with a wide range of important insights. Following the onset of Russia’s full-scale invasion almost four years ago, Ukraine has turned to relatively cheap drone technologies in order to offset Moscow’s often overwhelming advantages in conventional firepower and reduce the country’s dependence on Western weapons supplies. As a result, the number of Ukrainian drone producers has skyrocketed from a handful of companies to hundreds, while overall drone output has shot up to millions of units per year.

Ukraine’s vibrant prewar tech sector has proved a major asset, serving as fertile ground for the dynamic expansion of the country’s defense sector. Meanwhile, Ukrainian initiatives like the government-backed Brave1 defense tech cluster have helped to empower innovators and optimize cooperation between the army, the state, and individual drone producers. In summer 2024, Ukraine became the first country to establish a separate branch of the military dedicated to drones with the launch of the Unmanned Systems Forces.

The results speak for themselves. Drones are now thought to be responsible for up to three-quarters of Russian battlefield casualties, with Ukrainian army units creating a “drone wall” around ten kilometers in depth along the front lines of the war. At sea, Ukraine has used naval drones to break the Russian blockade of the country’s ports and force Putin to withdraw the bulk of his fleet away from occupied Crimea to the relative safety of Novorossiysk on Russia’s Black Sea coast. Kyiv has also deployed an expanding arsenal of long-range drones to strike high-value targets with increasing frequency deep inside Russia.

In addition to these offensive roles, drones have become a vital element in Ukraine’s air defenses. Since 2024, Russia has dramatically increased the production of kamikaze bomber drones, making it possible to launch hundreds of drones at targets across Ukraine in a single night. The sheer scale of these attacks has meant that traditional missile-based air defenses are no longer practical due to the high cost and limited availability of interceptor missiles. Instead, Ukrainian defense companies have focused on developing and producing interceptor drones in large quantities.

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So far, European efforts to learn from Ukraine’s drone warfare experience have concentrated primarily on securing access to the latest Ukrainian drone innovations. This approach certainly makes sense. However, many Ukrainian specialists have stressed that as their European partners look to develop drone capabilities of their own, effective training programs will be just as important as advanced technologies.

Maria Berlinska, who heads Ukraine’s Victory Drones project, has argued that up to 90 percent of success in drone warfare depends on the training of the team behind the drone rather than the technology involved. “A drone on its own, without the coordinated work of the team, delivers nothing,” she commented in an October 2025 article addressing the need for skilled drone crews.

Training an effective drone pilot is a complex task that can take at least three months. Many categories of drone operators must also be able to act as engineers and mechanics with the ability to repair and reconfigure their systems in the field. To help meet this challenge, Ukraine has developed a strong network of volunteer organizations dedicated to training new drone pilots and preparing them for combat operations. By late 2024, the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense had certified over thirty training centers for drone operators. Novel innovations include a mobile drone school located inside a converted bus.

Speaking to Euronews in October, Ukrainian drone warfare expert Fedir Serdiuk warned that Europe was currently focusing too much on drone technologies while overlooking the need to train operators and commanders in the effective battlefield use of drones. “I don’t see as many training centers being built as factories. It’s a major mistake. Not only for technical skills but also for tactical skills,” he commented.

Ukraine appears poised to play a central part in the training of Europe’s drone forces. Ukrainian trainers have already reportedly begun sharing their expertise with a number of countries including Britain, Denmark, and Poland. This trend reflects an important eastward shift in Europe’s defense landscape, with Ukraine emerging as a key contributor to the continent’s future security. This contribution will draw heavily on technological innovations developed during the war with Russia, but it will also emphasize the importance of effective training.

David Kirichenko is an associate research fellow at the Henry Jackson Society.

Trade and investment: Vilnius sounds the alarm

Established in 1991, relations between Vilnius and Beijing were pragmatic, centered on trade and cultural exchange. In the early 2000s, Lithuania’s trade with China was negligible and imbalanced, with exports of $2 million versus $120 million in imports. As China’s presence in Europe grew and Lithuania integrated into EU supply chains, bilateral trade increased by 533 percent, from $122 million in 2001 to $760 million in 2023 (see Figure 1). In the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis, Lithuania viewed China as potential source of growth and investment, leading it to join the “16+1” initiative in 2012, a cooperation platform established by China that brought together Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao and leaders from sixteen Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries.¹ Functioning also as a regional extension of Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the “16+1” format allowed China to engage with CEE states outside the formal structures of the EU—a strategy that raised concerns in Brussels but was welcomed by participating governments as a potential avenue for economic opportunity.

Yet trade relations revealed persistent asymmetry. Between 2012 and 2024, China’s trade with CEE states grew from $64 billion to $167 billion, but deficits widened from $46 billion to $135 billion.² The bulk of trade was concentrated in Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary, accounting collectively for nearly 70 percent of total exchanges—$113 billion in 2024. Lithuania’s share remained marginal, at $2.26 billion in 2024 (1.35 percent of total trade), with a $1.82 billion trade deficit. Similarly, Chinese foreign direct investment (FDI) in Lithuania remained minimal, totaling less than $100 million since the early 2000s.³ The promised benefits of the “16+1” format—and later the “17+1” format, after Greece joined in 2019—never materialized. Instead, Vilnius increasingly viewed the platform as a vehicle for Chinese influence and a means to fragment EU unity.

In May 2021, Lithuania became the first EU member to withdraw from the “17+1” platform on the grounds of limited economic benefits and mounting political concerns. Vilnius called the initiative “divisive” and advocated for a “27+1” approach, in which all EU members engage with China collectively. The decision coincided with the European Parliament’s vote to freeze ratification on the EU-China Comprehensive Agreement on Investment. Later that year, in November 2021, the opening of a Taiwanese representative office in Vilnius⁴—the first in Europe to use “Taiwanese” rather than “Taipei” in its name—triggered a major diplomatic rupture. Beijing interpreted the decision as a direct offence, recalled its ambassador, and pressured Lithuania to do the same, although Vilnius and the EU emphasized that the step did not violate the “One China” policy.⁵ In December 2021, all Lithuanian embassy staff left Beijing after their diplomatic status was revoked—a move that many media outlets described as an “evacuation,” raising concerns over possible violations of both the Vienna Convention and Lithuanian law.⁶

In addition, Beijing retaliated with informal trade restrictions, blocking Lithuanian goods, halting freight trains, and targeting EU supply chains that included Lithuanian components.⁷ Although Lithuania’s direct exposure was limited—less than 1 percent of its exports and 4 percent of its imports—Beijing’s coercion had broader implications. It demonstrated how China can weaponize even modest economic ties for political leverage and exposed vulnerabilities across the EU, fueling debates about economic security. In response, Brussels launched a World Trade Organization (WTO) case and advanced the Anti-Coercion Instrument (ACI) to deter politically motivated trade measures, signaling a more assertive EU stance in defending sovereignty and reinforcing credibility.⁸ The ACI entered into force in December 2023 but has not yet been used.⁹

The United States stepped in, expressing strong support for Lithuania in the face of political pressure and economic coercion from China,¹⁰ extending a $600 million export credit through the US Export-Import Bank to boost trade in high-tech, services, and renewable energy.¹¹ Transatlantic solidarity was reinforced in a joint-statement by thirteen foreign affairs committee chairs from eleven European legislatures, backed by the US Senate, condemning China’s pressure. The Biden administration also dispatched a special eight-person State Department team, informally known as “the firm,” to help Lithuania diversify markets and mitigate supply chain disruptions.¹² These efforts enabled Lithuania to reorient its trade, with exports to the Indo-Pacific rising 60 percent in early 2022—effectively quadrupling the value of its former exports to China.

The crisis also marked Lithuania’s exit from China’s BRI, with rail services discontinued and proposals regarding Chinese investment into the Klaipėda port rejected by Lithuanian leaders on security grounds.¹³ Ultimately, Lithuania’s experience highlighted the risks of dependency and underscored a broader European shift: from viewing China as an economic partner to framing it as a systemic rival, testing the EU’s unity and resilience.

Technology: Phasing out Huawei

In 2018, Lithuania aligned with security concerns raised by the first Trump administration and restricted Huawei’s involvement in its 5G network development, especially in militarily sensitive installations, becoming one of the first EU member states to heed US warnings.¹⁴ This stance was formalized in September 2020 through a memorandum of understanding with the United States on secure 5G network development,¹⁵ after which Vilnius began phasing out Huawei equipment as a matter of national security and allied sovereignty. This positioned Lithuania as a frontrunner within the EU in taking concrete policy measures and implementing restrictions on Chinese technology. In late 2020, Telia Lietuva, the country’s largest telecom operator, announced it would replace Huawei 4G equipment with Ericsson equipment for its 5G rollout.¹⁶ Huawei was also excluded from military-sensitive infrastructure. By July 2025, the company’s market share in Lithuania had fallen to just 2.47 percent of the mobile vendor market—exceptionally low compared with its share in other European countries.¹⁷

Security: Beijing and Moscow are testing Baltic resolve

Lithuania’s security relationship with China has been marked by mistrust, shaped by Vilnius’s alignment with the West and particularly US security concerns over Beijing’s assertive behavior. In 2019, Lithuania became one of the first states to identify China as a national security threat in its National Threat Assessment, citing espionage and political interference alongside risks tied to technological dependence. The assessment highlighted that these risks extended beyond traditional issues such as Taiwan and human rights and included Chinese interference in Lithuania’s political landscape. That same year, Vilnius also embraced the EU’s framing of China as a “systemic rival.”

These concerns led to a series of restrictive measures bridging national and economic security: excluding Huawei and other Chinese firms from 5G networks, tightening scrutiny of Chinese investment in critical infrastructure, and banning Chinese remote access to renewable energy systems.¹⁸ Lithuania had already adopted its own FDI screening mechanism in 2018, two years before an EU framework was introduced.¹⁹ In 2024, the legislation was expanded to include cybersecurity. Today, Lithuania’s regulatory framework remains among the strictest in Europe, prioritizing national security alongside commercial considerations and reflecting Vilnius’s acute sensitivity to external influence and geopolitical vulnerabilities.

On this basis, Lithuania withdrew from the “17+1” initiative in 2021 and co-signed, with thirteen other countries, a joint EU statement criticizing China’s conduct during the COVID-19 pandemic, questioning the transparency of the World Health Organization’s investigation into the origins of the virus. Vilnius also supported Taiwan’s observer status at the World Health Assembly²⁰—and the Lithuanian parliament adopted a resolution condemning China for the genocide against Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang. Beijing retaliated with trade restrictions, including suspending Lithuanian wheat imports.²¹ That same year, the government authorized the opening of a Taiwanese representative office in Vilnius, prompting sweeping Chinese coercion and further embedding Lithuania’s security-driven, values-based foreign policy within a transatlantic framework.

Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine deepened these concerns, as Vilnius viewed the Sino-Russian “no limits” partnership as tacit support for Moscow’s aggression and a direct threat to NATO’s eastern flank. Lithuania increasingly framed China as an enabler of Russian aggression, underscoring the need for coordinated transatlantic policies.²² Beijing, in turn, depicted Lithuania as a US puppet and “the most anti-Russia country in Europe,”²³ rhetoric used to justify countermeasures.²⁴ Tensions escalated further in April 2023 when China’s ambassador to France questioned the sovereignty of the Baltic states, claiming that countries which emerged after the Soviet Union’s collapse “do not have effective status under international law,” provoking strong EU backlash.²⁵

Within the broader US-China strategic rivalry, Lithuania has firmly aligned with the United States, reinforcing its credibility within NATO and the EU while leveraging the dispute to deepen cooperation with the US administration on economic security. Importantly, Lithuania’s tougher stance on China predates the center-right government of former Prime Minister Ingrida Šimonytė (2020-2024). In fact, the initial shift toward a more defiant posture began in 2013 when President Dalia Grybauskaitė met with the Dalai Lama, prompting punitive actions from Beijing, and continued under Saulius Skvernelis’s center-left government (2016-2020). Today, Prime Minister Gintautas Paluckas signals cautious diplomacy with China while maintaining firm commitments to security and democratic standards.²⁶

Lithuania’s alignment with the EU’s China policy

Lithuania aligns closely with both the EU and the United States in framing China as a “systemic rival” and a “coercive power.” Standing firm on Taiwan and refusing to yield to economic pressure, it has emerged as a leading voice for a tougher and more coordinated China approach—and as a frontrunner in shaping the EU’s collective response, pushing for de-risking measures and the adoption of anti-coercion legislation. Its confrontation with China not only strengthened ties with the United States, where its principled stance drew political and economic support, but also reverberated across the EU. Beijing’s coercion against Lithuania exposed vulnerabilities even among member states with minimal ties to China, accelerating Brussels’ shift toward de-risking, supply chain diversification, and greater collective resilience.

The Lithuanian case became a test of EU unity at a pivotal moment for European security. Brussels condemned Beijing’s sanctions, backed Vilnius through WTO proceedings, and fast-tracked the adoption of the ACI—an instrument that had already been in development during the first Trump administration—sending a clear signal that no member state, however small, would face external pressure alone and reinforcing the EU’s credibility as a collective geopolitical actor.

Although relations with Beijing remain strained, Vilnius continues to champion Taiwan’s international participation and to push EU initiatives on economic security. For Lithuania, its China policy is now defined less by trade considerations and more by the imperatives of European unity and transatlantic coordination. What began as a bilateral dispute has evolved into a catalyst for stronger EU cohesion, turning Lithuania from an outlier into a trailblazer in Europe’s evolving approach to China.

Conclusion

Lithuania’s case provides a litmus test of whether a small liberal democracy can withstand Chinese economic coercion, with its dispute with Beijing reverberating throughout the EU-China relationship. By elevating the Taiwan issue and pushing Beijing higher on the EU agenda, Vilnius has accelerated Brussels’ shift from a trade-centered engagement to a more defensive posture, including the adoption of new anti-coercion instruments. Its experience reflects broader European concerns over dependence on China—from Huawei involvement to BRI projects to Chinese investment—and has prompted a wider reassessment of China as a systemic rival. In the process, Lithuania has positioned itself as both an early adopter of US security priorities and a policy influencer within the EU, amplifying transatlantic coordination at moments when larger member states hesitated.

As one of the EU’s most uncompromising voices on China, Vilnius has framed the challenge from Beijing alongside the threat from Moscow, presenting both as pillars of an authoritarian bloc. Lithuania’s alignment with the United States and the broader transatlantic community draws on its historical experience with authoritarian coercion and its acute sense of vulnerability. Politically, Vilnius casts itself as a values-driven actor. While the United States identifies China as its top security adversary, and Brussels seeks a more calibrated balance, Lithuania has helped bridge the gap by advancing US priorities within the EU, serving simultaneously as a driver of transatlantic coordination and as a moral compass in Europe’s evolving China debate.

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Valbona Zeneli

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1 Valbona Zeneli, “What Has China Accomplished in Central and Eastern Europe?” Diplomat, November 25, 2017, https://thediplomat.com/2017/11/what-has-china-accomplished-in-central-and-eastern-europe/.

2 Calculation of the author based on Trading Economics data.

3 Agatha Kratz, et al., “Chinese Investment Rebounds Despite Growing Frictions—Chinese FDI in Europe: 2024 Update,” Mercator Institute for China Studies and Rhodium Group, May 21, 2025, https://merics.org/en/report/chinese-investment-rebounds-despite-growing-frictions-chinese-fdi-europe-2024-update.

4 “Taiwan Opens Office in Lithuania, Brushing Aside China Opposition,” Reuters, November 18, 2021, https://www.reuters.com/world/china/taiwan-opens-office-lithuania-brushing-aside-china-opposition-2021-11-18/.

5 John Feng, “‘Crazy, Tiny Country’: China Media Lashes out at Lithuania over Taiwan,” Newsweek, August 10, 2021, https://www.newsweek.com/crazy-tiny-country-china-media-lashes-out-lithuania-over-taiwan-embassy-1617921.

6 “Lithuania Evacuates its Embassy in China,” Economist, December 18, 2021, https://www.economist.com/china/lithuania-evacuates-its-embassy-in-china/21806843.

7 “WT/DS610—China: Measures Concerning Trade in Goods and Services,” European Commission, last visited October 9, 2025, https://policy.trade.ec.europa.eu/enforcement-and-protection/dispute-settlement/wto-dispute-settlement/wto-disputes-cases-involving-eu/wtds610-china-measures-concerning-trade-goods-and-services_en.

8 The anti-coercion instrument is a set of countermeasures agreed by the European Commission, national governments, and European Parliament in order to retaliate against third countries imposing economic pressure on EU member states.

9 “Protecting Against Coercion,” European Commission, last visited October 9, 2025, https://policy.trade.ec.europa.eu/enforcement-and-protection/protecting-against-coercion_en.

10 “Senior U.S. Official to Visit Lithuania in Show of Support over Chinese ‘Coercion,’” Reuters, January 28, 2022, https://www.reuters.com/world/senior-us-official-visit-lithuania-show-support-over-chinese-coercion-2022-01-29/.

11 “EXIM Delegation Meets with Lithuania’s Ministry of Economy and Innovation,” Export-Import Bank of the United States, press release, January 31, 2022, https://www.exim.gov/news/exim-delegation-meets-lithuanias-ministry-economy-and-innovation.

12 Didi Tang, “China Has Threatened Trade With Some Countries After Feuds. They’re Calling ‘The Firm’ for Help.” Associated Press, May 27, 2024. https://apnews.com/article/china-trade-economic-firm-state-department-42655e067386a20b22f1317ce298f334.

13 Justas Karčiauskas, “Lithuania External Relations Briefing: Growing Geopolitical Rift Between China and the EU,” China-CEE Institute, November 2023, https://china-cee.eu/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/2023er11_Lithuania.pdf.

14 Ivana Karásková, et al., “Huawei in Central and Eastern Europe: Trends and Forecast,” Association for International Affairs, January 2021, https://chinaobservers.eu/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/briefing-paper_huawei_A4_03_web-1.pdf.

15 “United States-Republic of Lithuania Memorandum of Understanding on 5G Security,” US Department of State, press release, September 17, 2020, https://2017-2021.state.gov/united-states-republic-of-lithuania-memorandum-of-understanding-on-5g-security/.

16 “Telia to Remove All Huawei Equipment in Lithuania,” Reuters, November 30, 2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/business/telia-to-remove-all-huawei-equipment-in-lithuania-idUSKBN28A1KZ/.

17 “Mobile Vendor Market Share in Lithuania—July 2025,” StatCounter GlobalStats, last visited October 9, 2025, https://gs.statcounter.com/vendor-market-share/mobile/lithuania.

18 Patrick Jowett, “Lithuania Bans Chinese Remote Access to Energy Storage, Solar, Wind Devices,” ESS News, November 20, 2024, https://www.ess-news.com/2024/11/20/lithuania-bans-chinese-remote-access-to-energy-storage-solar-wind-devices/.

19 “Lithuania: FDI Screening: Situation and Tendencies,” BNT Attorneys in CEE, September 18, 2024, https://bnt.eu/news-and-events/lithuania-fdi-screening-situation-and-tendencies/.

20 Eunika Rejtová, “Chinese Media Watch: How ‘Crazy, Tiny’ Lithuania Enraged Beijing,” Central European Institute of Asian Studies, August 29, 2021, https://ceias.eu/chinese-media-watch-how-crazy-tiny-lithuania-enraged-beijing/.

21 Konstantinas Andrijauskas, “The Sino-Lithuanian Crisis: Going Beyond the Taiwanese Representative Office Issue,” Institut Français des Relations Internationales, March 8, 2022, https://www.ifri.org/en/memos/sino-lithuanian-crisis-going-beyond-taiwanese-representative-office-issue.

22 Denis Kishinevsky, “Why Little Lithuania Is Taking On Mighty China,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, November 29, 2021, https://carnegieendowment.org/posts/2021/11/why-little-lithuania-is-taking-on-mighty-china?lang=en.

23 Ieva Zvinakyte, “Cannon Fodder and ‘US Puppets: What Is Chinese Propaganda Saying about Lithuania?” LRT English, December 14, 2022, https://www.lrt.lt/en/news-in-english/19/1589153/cannon-fodder-and-us-puppets-what-is-chinese-propaganda-saying-about-lithuani.

24 “China, Russia Can Cooperate to Punish Lithuania,” Global Times, August 11, 2021, https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202108/1231251.shtml.

25 “Chinese Envoy to France’s Remarks on Ex Soviet States Provoke Outrage in Europe,” Le Monde, April 24, 2023, https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2023/04/24/chinese-ambassador-s-remarks-on-crimea-provoke-outrage-in-europe_6024027_4.html.

26 “If China Has Plans in EU, It’ll Be Interested in Having Relations with Lithuania Too—PM,” Baltic Times, April 15, 2025, https://www.baltictimes.com/if_china_has_plans_in_eu__it_ll_be_interested_in_having_relations_with_lithuania_too_-_pm/.

The post Lithuania’s policy on China: An unlikely EU trailblazer appeared first on Atlantic Council.

Recommendations for coordinating US-EU policy

Zoltán Fehér, Valbona Zeneli — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 15:00:00 +0000

This is the final chapter of the report “Is Europe waking up to the China challenge? How geopolitics are reshaping EU and transatlantic strategy.” Read the full report here.

In recent years, European institutions have elevated China to a key priority on the European Union (EU) agenda, developing a comprehensive set of policies and strategic documents aimed at aligning member states more closely and strengthening transatlantic coordination. As the previous chapters of this report have shown, the EU’s China policy emerges from both formal and informal negotiations involving a wide range of actors. Where the EU holds exclusive competencies—such as in customs, competition, and trade—the European Commission and the European Parliament take the lead, producing the most consistent policy strands. The Commission’s Directorate-General for Trade (DG Trade) and the Parliament’s International Trade Committee (INTA) are particularly influential. By contrast, the EU’s role in foreign and security policy is far more limited, with decisions primarily left to member states via the European Council. The Council’s unanimity rule in this area has hindered a common position on China in the past, prompting several member states to advocate a shift toward qualified-majority voting to strengthen cohesion.

As this report has highlighted, the evolving transatlantic agenda on China is driven by four distinct forces: US-China rivalry, growing doubts about US engagement in Europe, the deepening Russia-China partnership, and China’s growing competitiveness in key sectors. Together, these pressures make closer US-EU coordination both urgent and necessary—not only in words but also in action. The United States should prioritize building durable mechanisms of cooperation with the EU in the areas that matter most: economic security, supply chains, anti-coercion, and strategic investment. Aligning US economic power with EU regulatory clout would enable the United States and the EU, as transatlantic partners, to shape global competition and respond to China with greater unity and credibility. The recommendations below are aimed at achieving this goal. They should be accompanied by the reestablishment of the Transatlantic Trade and Technology Council, a consultation forum initially founded under the first Trump administration, to coordinate China-related issues between the US administration and the European Commission.

Recommendations for US policy and strategy

Trade and investment

1. Deepen joint supply-chain de-risking of critical minerals

The United States should partner with the EU to launch a coordination platform on critical minerals and supply chains—backed by co-financing, harmonized standards, and strategic stockpiles—to put the shared doctrine of de-risking into practice. This would involve:

Establishing a standing US–EU critical minerals coordination platform to jointly manage supply chains, reduce dependence on single suppliers, strengthen resilience, and align industrial policies. This platform could coordinate project pipelines, risk screening, and offtake calendars for lithium, cobalt, rare earths, and magnets, and would be led jointly by the European Commission’s DG Trade, the Enterprise Directorate-General (DG GROW), and US State Department officials, who oversee the US Minerals Security Partnership. It would reinforce transatlantic strategic alignment by creating a shared database, harmonizing risk assessments, synchronizing purchase schedules to prevent subsidy races, and conducting stress tests to establish buffer stock levels in critical sectors such as electric vehicles (EVs), renewable energy, and defense.
Setting up a co-financing mechanism between the US International Development Finance Corporation and the European Investment Bank to support projects that de-risk third-country mining, processing, and recycling, and to attract private capital, modeled on the US-Australia-Japan infrastructure partnership.
Harmonizing standards and supporting rare earth separation plants in Estonia and Sweden to expand EU processing capacity and secure US-EU offtake for defense and EV industries. Meanwhile, nickel- and cobalt-recycling hubs in Finland and Germany should be developed to reduce reliance on raw extraction and advance EU circular-economy goals—anchoring industrial cooperation in Germany and France.

2. Advance transatlantic convergence on investment screening

Inbound and outbound investment screening remain areas where US-EU cooperation has been attempted with limited success. While the EU has made progress, it has lagged behind US policy. One challenge is that, although the European Commission actively promotes strengthening investment screening, the authority ultimately rests with member states—and consensus among them is often lacking. Most recently, transatlantic parties discussed cooperation at the US-EU Trade and Technology Council meeting in April 2024.¹ Despite these challenges, signs of potential transatlantic alignment are emerging. These include growing EU recognition of the risks Chinese investments pose to critical sectors² and the almost simultaneous rollout of new US and EU outbound investment screening regulations in January 2025.³ Based on these developments, we recommend that the United States re-engage Brussels to establish common threat perceptions and to cautiously explore member states’ willingness to coordinate on fortifying Europe’s defenses against Chinese security risks.

The United States should work with the EU and member states to coordinate both inbound foreign direct investment (FDI) and outbound investment controls, safeguard critical technologies and sensitive data, reduce asymmetries between US and EU policies, and develop a coherent, dual-track US-EU screening regime to keep strategic technologies and infrastructure under trusted control. Key steps include:

Establishing a transatlantic investment screening forum to bring together the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), the European Commission’s DG Trade and Directorate-General for Financial Stability, Financial Services, and Capital Markets Union (DG FISMA), and national authorities to coordinate inward FDI. This forum could help expand intelligence sharing and integrate Financial Intelligence Units to track capital flows and investment structures linked to China.
Institutionalizing joint risk monitoring by producing annual US-EU risk assessments of Chinese investment patterns in strategic sectors—drawing on US intelligence, the European Commission, and national regulators—and sharing findings with industry to guide compliance and risk-management practices.
Advancing outbound FDI controls within the EU. The United States should work with the European Commission to develop future outbound investment restrictions aligned with shared definitions of sensitive technologies. This includes partnering with France and Italy as early adopters, engaging Germany to shape consensus, collaborating with the Netherlands on high-tech export-control expertise, and supporting Nordic, Central, and Eastern European states with best practices and capacity-building.
Enhancing legislative engagement through a US Congress-European Parliament working group, supported by national parliamentary dialogues, staff exchanges, and technical briefings, to ensure transparent and durable political consensus on investment screening.
Developing a transatlantic FDI monitoring instrument by proposing a US-EU mechanism that involves the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), CFIUS, Eurostat, and the European Central Bank, to track Chinese FDI systematically. This instrument would harmonize data methodologies, increase transparency, and provide timely intelligence on sectoral capital flows, thereby strengthening screening decisions and reducing regulatory arbitrage.

3. Discuss overcapacity and coordination of trade defenses

Both the United States and the EU face strikingly similar challenges from China’s industrial overcapacity and dumping, yet their approaches to trade are so divergent that no coordination under the current US administration has been possible. The EU approaches trade on the basis of the principles of free trade enshrined in the World Trade Organization, while US trade policy is based on an “America First” approach aimed at addressing decades of persistent “lack of reciprocity in our bilateral trade relationships.”⁴ Despite this gap, the challenges faced by both sides are nearly identical—and China exploits the loopholes created by incoherent US-EU policymaking to its advantage.

The United States and the EU should therefore re-engage to align their approaches to countering Chinese industrial overcapacity in critical sectors such as EVs, solar, and steel, where US broad tariffs and EU targeted duties currently diverge. This effort should include:

Establishing a transatlantic trade defense forum as a standing platform for US and EU officials to discuss trade defense tools, share evidence of Chinese state subsidies, and seek to synchronize remedies.
Aligning G7 messaging on Chinese overcapacity by leveraging the organization to issue unified warnings on destabilizing effects of Chinese overcapacity in EVs, solar, and steel. This could amplify deterrence, reassure industry of fair competition, and limit Beijing’s ability to exploit US-EU divisions.
Coordinating enforcement of forced-labor import bans under the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act with the EU’s forthcoming Forced-Labour Regulation to strengthen restrictions on goods linked to forced labor and enhance credibility.

Technology

1. Deepen US-EU coordination on semiconductors and the chip supply chain

Mirroring the 2025 US-EU trade framework, the United States should make semiconductors a top-tier track for transatlantic coordination—covering both advanced and “legacy” chips, fab tools and services, and subsidy rules—so that policy efforts reinforce each other and limit Chinese exploitation. Key measures should include:

Aligning licensing standards for advanced chipmaking tools and related services—including installation, maintenance, software updates, and spare parts—with the Netherlands⁵ and the European Commission’s DG TRADE and Directorate-General for Communications Networks, Content, and Technology (DG CONNECT). This would ensure mutually reinforcing controls consistent with the US-EU trade framework, in which the EU vowed to “work with the United States to adopt… [US] security requirements in a concerted effort to avoid technology leakage” to China.⁶
Piloting light outbound investment coordination with the Commission’s economic-security team using reciprocal notifications and shared risk categories for chips, supporting early alignment while the EU considers establishing a formal regime.

China is making rapid progress in advanced technologies, with implications for both military and commercial sectors. It is therefore in the interest of the United States and the EU to coordinate policies on artificial intelligence (AI), quantum, and defense-relevant technologies. However, several obstacles remain. First, the EU—pursuing “strategic autonomy”—is concerned about dependence on US tech companies as well as Chinese firms. Second, the United States currently leads in AI and quantum computing, while the EU has lagged behind. Third, the EU has established a comprehensive data protection regime and a binding AI framework, whereas the United States has not. Nevertheless, both sides have complementary capabilities, and containing China unilaterally is not feasible. Expanding transatlantic discussions and coordination in this area is urgent.⁷

The United States should treat AI, quantum, and defense-relevant technologies as a top-tier US-EU coordination track—covering safety rules and testing, aligned listings and sanctions, tighter controls on risky transfers including services and data, light outbound-investment coordination, and joint action against Russia-related diversion. To align rules and reduce pathways for Chinese evasion, the United States should:

Build an AI-governance bridge with the European Commission’s DG CONNECT to provide companies with a single set of expectations on high-risk uses, testing, transparency, and incident reporting, even if legal texts differ.
Synchronize listings and sanctions affecting AI, quantum technology, and defense-linked firms with the Commission and the European External Action Service (EEAS) to ensure common criteria and simultaneous timing for maximum impact.
Collaborate with the Commission’s DG TRADE to bring export controls into alignment with the Trump administration’s AI Action Plan objective to “align protection measures globally,”⁸ and encourage the creation of an EU-wide export control framework.
Pilot light outbound-investment coordination with the Commission’s economic-security team using reciprocal notifications and a simple shared-risk taxonomy for AI and quantum while the EU is considering a formal regime.

Security

1. Counter Chinese support for Russia’s war

While the EU has made notable progress in articulating its interests and tools regarding China in the economic domain, this strategic reflection has scarcely expanded to encompass global security and grand strategy. The March 2025 EU White Paper on Defense outlines in detail how China constitutes a “systemic challenge” for Europe, but navigating China’s grand strategy amid intensifying Sino-American competition and strengthening Sino-Russian partnership is complex, and the EU’s role as a security actor will hinge on the trajectory of these relationships. The United States should treat China’s support for Russia’s war in Ukraine as an urgent US-EU enforcement priority—covering synchronized listings, joint customs and financial targeting, shared industry advisories, coordinated border checks, outreach to key transit states, and rapid deconfliction. This approach would choke off procurement routes, close security gaps faster, and provide banks, shippers, and manufacturers with clear, consistent rules on both sides of the Atlantic. Key steps include:

Prioritizing China-enabled procurement coordination with the European Commission’s DG TRADE and the EEAS, aligning listings and timing so actions land together, known intermediaries are shut down, and a clear message is sent to banks, shippers, and manufacturers.
Building a small US-EU enforcement cell with the Commission and lead member states such as Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, and Lithuania to share real-time customs and financial red flags, match serial numbers and shipment data, and run coordinated end-use checks on high-risk consignments moving through hubs in Central Asia, the Caucasus, and the Middle East.
Issuing joint industry advisories with the Commission for freight forwarders, distributors, and university and lab partners, detailing China-related risks, simple screening steps, and reporting channels.
Coordinating financial measures with the Commission and key finance ministries to block China-based intermediaries from accessing dollar and euro channels—pairing listings with practical guidance to banks on names, addresses, and tradecraft.
Working with the Commission’s DG TRADE and customs authorities in priority member states—Poland, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia—to tighten border checks on items that originate from China and are rerouted to Russia through targeted inspection campaigns rather than blanket holds.
Expanding joint outreach to key transit governments—in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Armenia, Georgia, Türkiye, and the United Arab Emirates—offering training, scanners, and compliance toolkits while asking them to curb China-linked diversion networks.
Briefing the European Parliament’s Committee on Foreign Affairs (AFET) and its Committee on International Trade (INTA) leadership to secure political and budget support for enforcement tools and reinforce the transatlantic position on China-linked evasion.

2. Counter China-linked espionage and cyber operations

The United States and the EU should treat counter-espionage and cyber defense as a shared priority, focused on Chinese state and proxy activity. This would ensure that investigations, public attributions, and protective measures move in step and close gaps that adversaries can exploit. The United States should:

Coordinate counter-interference cases with the EEAS, the European Union Intelligence and Situation Center, and the European Commission, aligning investigative priorities on Chinese influence operations and overseas “police stations” and issuing joint guidance that universities, research councils, and local authorities can follow easily.
Align public attribution and response with the EEAS and the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity, agreeing on when to name Chinese actors, how to brief victims, and which immediate resilience steps operators should take across critical sectors.
Synchronize listings and penalties for Chinese surveillance and defense firms with the Commission and the EEAS, timing actions jointly and pairing them with clear guidance to banks and platform operators.
Run joint cyber-resilience sprints with the Commission and the EU Agency for Cybersecurity that focus on a few high-risk targets—government email, hospitals, ports, energy grid control systems—issuing straightforward hardening checklists and conducting follow-up scans to verify progress.
Issue coordinated advisories with the Commission to technology vendors, cloud providers, and managed-service firms on China-linked cyber intrusions or espionage activity, including easy-to-understand red flags and a single reporting path usable on both sides of the Atlantic.
The United States Congress and the European Parliament should establish a Transatlantic Legislative Forum on Countering Authoritarian Interference, with an initial focus on Chinese state and proxy activities. This forum would bring together members of the U.S. Congressional-Executive Commission on China and the European Parliament’s Committee Foreign Interference to strengthen coordination and ensure coherent transatlantic approaches to counter-espionage, cyber defense, technology security, and strategic communication through joint hearings, secure briefings, and structured staff-level exchanges.

3. Coordinate with Europe on an Indo-Pacific approach to China

The United States and the EU should pursue a coordinated Indo-Pacific strategy toward China that links freedom-of-navigation messaging, presence at sea, Taiwan Strait diplomacy, partnerships with regional allies (Japan, South Korea, Australia, the Philippines, and India), defense-industrial cooperation with willing EU members, and sanctions and export-risk messaging. To implement this strategy, key actions should include:

Aligning messages and actions on freedom of navigation and coercion at sea with the EEAS and key member states (France, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands), pairing US operations and exercises with European port calls and patrols on a shared schedule and unified public messaging.
Keeping Taiwan Strait diplomacy in lockstep with the EEAS by agreeing on standard phrasing regarding the status quo, coordinating high-level visits and parliamentary outreach, and establishing a quiet crisis-communications channel for rapid de-escalation messaging.
Using NATO, the G7, and synchronized outreach to partners in the region (Japan, South Korea, Australia, the Philippines, and India) to roll out joint statements, tabletop exercises, and practical maritime capacity building, working with the EEAS Indo-Pacific team to avoid duplicate initiatives and share costs efficiently.
Expanding practical defense-industrial ties with close US allies in the region while bringing in willing EU members where they add value (France, Italy, the Netherlands, and Germany), focusing on maintenance hubs, munitions availability, and interoperable communications rather than large new platforms requiring EU-wide consensus.
Briefing the European Parliament’s AFET and its Subcommittee on Security and Defence (SEDE) leadership ahead of major Indo-Pacific announcements to secure political backing and maintain consistent public messaging on China, maritime rules, and crisis stability.

The United States should work closely with the EU on China-related issues in defense technology and critical infrastructure. This includes coordinating on arms transfers, cooperation related to the Australia-United Kingdom-United States (AUKUS) security partnership with willing EU countries, protecting ports, energy and data hubs, addressing high-risk telecommunication vendors, and managing risks from military-civil-fusion. Doing so will strengthen resilience, close policy gaps, and give US and EU operators clear, predictable rules. To achieve this, the United States should take the following steps:

Strengthen protection of critical infrastructure from China-linked risks by working with the Commission’s Directorate-General for Energy (DG ENER), DG CONNECT, and the EU Agency for Cybersecurity to develop simple, practical checklists of actionable security steps for ports, power grids, and data centers, giving operators one clear, consistent message.
Coordinate with London and Canberra on AUKUS-related touchpoints and brief the Commission’s Directorate-General for Defence Industry and Space (DG DEFIS) and EU member states—such as France, Italy, the Netherlands, and Germany—early on potential spillovers from AUKUS workstreams that will touch EU standards, supply chains, and workforce, allowing Europe to contribute wherever it adds value without formal membership.
Explore the possibility of inviting EU NATO members to participate in future US Freedom of Navigation Operations, passing exercises, and the multilateral Rim of the Pacific Exercise alongside US allies in the Indo-Pacific region, while preserving their legal and operational integrity. The United States could establish a “Freedom of Navigation Partners Initiative” to facilitate parallel or sequential patrols by allies such as the United Kingdom, France, Australia, Japan, and Canada, ensuring a visible and sustained multinational presence in contested waters.
Deepen cooperation on China-related military-civil fusion (MCF) risks with the Commission’s Directorate-General for Research and Innovation and DG DEFIS, giving universities, labs, and research funders a short, shared risk screen and a dedicated entity list of companies and institutions posing MCF or dual-use risk, ensuring that sensitive projects with clear defense implications are identified and stopped early.
Establish a transatlantic mechanism (in cooperation with NATO) to identify and reduce Chinese investments in European strategic infrastructure that could undercut NATO’s ability to act both politically and militarily, especially in times of crisis. The starting point should be joint mapping of China-linked exposure in ports and logistics by working with the Commission’s Directorate-General for Mobility and Transport and coastal EU member states (the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, and Greece) to apply common risk tests for equipment, software, data access, and terminal stakes, and by coordinating review decisions and mitigation terms.

Conclusion

The research conducted for this report between November 2024 and October 2025 highlights several key findings regarding the EU’s evolving policies on China and their implications for US strategy and transatlantic unity.

The report finds that EU member states whose foreign policies are closely aligned with those of the United States tend to shape and support the European Commission’s approach to China, thereby influencing EU-level policy outcomes. This alignment strengthens transatlantic coordination but also exposes internal divisions within the EU, as not all member states share the same strategic outlook or level of risk tolerance toward Beijing.

Four geopolitical trends have collectively pushed the EU toward greater caution in its engagement with China: intensifying US-China strategic competition, uncertainty about continued US engagement globally and in Europe, Russia’s war on Ukraine backed by China, and China’s growing economic and competitiveness challenges to the EU. Together, these developments have prompted a shift toward balancing and de-risking strategies and a deeper recognition of the vulnerabilities and risks tied to economic dependence on Beijing.

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and the announcement of the China-Russia “no limits” partnership, most EU member states have adopted a more skeptical view not only of Moscow but also of Beijing, particularly given China’s support for Russia’s war effort. This shift has reinforced the European Commission’s position as a central actor in shaping EU-level policy on China and has prompted a gradual yet unmistakable movement toward a more unified strategic stance. Among the trends analyzed, this dynamic has had the most profound impact on the EU’s China policy.

Escalating US-China tensions represent the second most significant driver of change. As the rivalry between the two superpowers has intensified, the United States has increasingly encouraged its European partners to adopt complementary balancing measures. This has advanced transatlantic coordination, though differences remain regarding the extent—and the pace—of Europe’s alignment with US policy.

At the same time, the EU has become more attuned to China’s economic and competitiveness challenges. While the European Commission has taken the lead in crafting the EU’s economic security strategy, its success ultimately depends on implementation by member states. Progress has therefore been uneven, shaped by divergent national interests and persistent tensions between business communities seeking continued engagement with China and policymakers advocating stronger safeguards for economic resilience and security.

Overall, the EU is gradually moving toward a more strategic, cautious, and coherent approach to China. This evolution provides a renewed foundation for transatlantic cooperation—but only if the United States and Europe sustain close coordination to ensure that their respective China policies remain mutually reinforcing, forward-looking, and resilient in the face of a rapidly changing geopolitical environment.

About the authors

Fellow

Zoltán Fehér

Central Europe China

Fellow

Valbona Zeneli

Europe Center Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security

Albanian Corruption

Explore the programs

The Europe Center promotes leadership, strategies, and analysis to ensure a strong, ambitious, and forward-looking transatlantic relationship.

1 “U.S-EU Joint Statement of the Trade and Technology Council,” White House, April 5, 2024, https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2024/04/05/u-s-eu-joint-statement-of-the-trade-and-technology-council-3/.

2 “European Parliament Endorses New Screening Rules for Foreign Investment in EU,” European Parliament, press release, May 8, 2025, https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20250502IPR28218/european-parliament-endorses-new-screening-rules-for-foreign-investment-in-eu.

3 Bob Savic, “U.S. and EU Strengthen FDI Screening Rules,” Geopolitical Intelligence Services, March 26, 2025, https://www.gisreportsonline.com/r/fdi-screening/.

4 “Fact Sheet: The United States and European Union Reach Massive Trade Deal,” White House, July 28, 2025, https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/07/fact-sheet-the-united-states-and-european-union-reach-massive-trade-deal/.

5 The Netherlands is a crucial player in the global semiconductor industry, primarily due to ASML (Advanced Semiconductor Materials Lithography), the sole global supplier of EUV lithography machines needed for the most advanced chips.

6 “Joint Statement on a United States-European Union Framework on an Agreement on Reciprocal, Fair, and Balanced Trade,” White House, August 21, 2025, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/2025/08/joint-statement-on-a-united-states-european-union-framework-on-an-agreement-on-reciprocal-fair-and-balanced-trade/.

7 “Tech 2030: A Roadmap for Europe-US Tech Cooperation,” Center for European Policy Analysis, September 30, 2025, https://cepa.org/comprehensive-reports/tech-2030-a-roadmap-for-europe-us-tech-cooperation/.

8 “AI Action Plan,” White House, July 2025, https://www.ai.gov/action-plan.

The post Recommendations for coordinating US-EU policy appeared first on Atlantic Council.

Greece’s policy on China: Debt-era deals and recalibration

Valbona Zeneli — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 15:00:00 +0000

This is the eleventh chapter of the report “Is Europe waking up to the China challenge? How geopolitics are reshaping EU and transatlantic strategy.” Read the full report here.

Over the last two decades, Greece’s policy toward China has shifted from enthusiastic optimism to a more cautious approach—a shift that reflects broader transatlantic and European Union (EU) dynamics. The bilateral relationship deepened significantly during Greece’s sovereign debt crisis, when economic pressures reshaped Athens’ foreign and fiscal policy priorities. The privatization programs, mandated under Greece’s bailout agreements and driven by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), paved the way for major Chinese investments—most prominently the 2016 takeover of the port of Piraeus by state-owned China Ocean Shipping Company Limited (COSCO). This flagship project of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) secured Beijing a key gateway into Europe.

Athens formally joined the BRI in 2018 and the China-led “17+1” framework in 2019, signaling a pragmatic alignment with Beijing that at times tempered Greece’s support for EU criticism of China on issues such as human rights. Following the signing of major maritime port concessions and the sale of additional corporate assets to Chinese firms, however, concerns grew in Athens and Brussels over the national security ramifications of these acquisitions. These worries—combined with shifting geopolitical dynamics—prompted Greece to recalibrate its policy and move into closer alignment with its EU and NATO partners.

Trade and investment: From Thucydides to the port of Piraeus

Greece first established diplomatic ties with the People’s Republic of China in 1972, shortly after China’s entry into the United Nations. In the 1980s, Athens deepened its relations with Beijing both to secure political backing amid tensions with Turkey and to expand economic cooperation, particularly in shipbuilding. Sino-Greek trade was modest in the early 2000s, totaling about $900 million in 2001, but expanded significantly in the following decades, particularly after the global financial crisis, reaching nearly $8 billion by 2024. This growth, however, has been marked by a widening imbalance: Greek exports fell from more than $1 billion in 2018 to just $450 million in 2024, while imports from China almost doubled—from $4.2 billion to $7.5 billion—driving the trade deficit past $7 billion.¹

Greek exports to China account for roughly 0.9 percent of Greece’s total $53 billion in exports in 2024, consisting mainly of minerals, agricultural products, and pharmaceuticals.² Chinese imports are far more diverse, dominated by machinery, electronics, and other manufactured goods. China is now Greece’s second-largest import partner, representing 8.5 percent of the country’s $90 billion in total imports.

On investment, Greece has become a key entry point for Chinese capital into Europe. Between 2000 and 2024, cumulative Chinese foreign direct investment (FDI) in Greece totaled about $5 billion, according to the Mercator Institute for China Studies,³ concentrated in infrastructure, energy, shipping, and telecommunications. Other estimates are considerably higher: the China Global Investment Tracker reports $9.7 billion in investment and construction contracts between 2005 and 2025, underscoring the scale of Beijing’s economic footprint in the country.⁴

The port of Piraeus,⁵ COSCO’s flagship BRI project with investments exceeding $600 million, has become a centerpiece of Chinese engagement in Europe, a main gateway for Chinese goods, and a symbol of Sino-Greek cooperation.⁶ This investment reflects both Greece’s economic vulnerabilities and China’s maritime ambitions under the BRI.

Piraeus has been strategically important since antiquity. Modernized in 1930 with the founding of the Piraeus Port Authority as a state-owned company and expanded in the 1970s, it has remained central to Greece’s maritime role. China’s involvement began in 2008, when COSCO secured a thirty-five-year contract to operate two piers, despite labor strikes and public opposition. Following Greece’s debt crisis, as the country implemented privatizations mandated under its bailout agreements, COSCO acquired 51 percent of the Piraeus Port Authority for $310 million, making the port the “dragon head” of China’s presence in Greece. COSCO expanded its stake to 67 percent in 2021 with an additional $95 million investment.⁷ With shipping times of about twenty-two days from Shanghai—roughly ten days shorter than routes to Rotterdam or Hamburg—Piraeus has become a strategic BRI hub. Its role is reinforced by Greece’s global shipping dominance: the Greek merchant fleet, the largest in the world, controls 21 percent of global and 60 percent of EU capacity, with nearly five thousand vessels valued at $70 billion. Greek shippers transport an estimated 60 percent of China’s exports.

COSCO’s investment has brought substantial gains. Container traffic rose from 1.5 million twenty-foot equivalent units in 2009 to 6.2 million in 2025, making Piraeus the largest container hub in the Mediterranean.⁸ Revenues grew from a $37 million loss in 2009 to more than $250 million in 2024, alongside job creation and local development.⁹ Yet COSCO’s ambitions have also met resistance. In 2022, Greece’s Supreme Administrative Court blocked a planned $4.5 billion passenger port project for failing environmental review, highlighting tensions between large-scale foreign investment, domestic regulation, and security concerns.¹⁰ This shift reflects Athens’ adoption of a more cautious approach toward Beijing in recent years and its alignment with US and EU efforts to screen Chinese strategic investment. In May 2025, the Greek government enacted its first structured FDI screening law (Law 5202/2025),¹¹ modeled on Germany’s screening system and fully aligned with the corresponding EU regulation 2019/452.¹²

The BRI and the “17+1” format

Greece’s engagement with China deepened significantly in 2016, following Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras’ visit to Beijing. In the wake of his meeting with President Xi Jinping, Greece grew increasingly close to the BRI and the “16+1” cooperation format, a platform through which China engaged sixteen central and eastern European countries. Athens had already gained observer status in the “16+1” at the Riga Summit, alongside the EU, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, Austria, and Switzerland. In May 2017, Tsipras attended the inaugural Belt and Road Forum, signaling Athens’ ambitions to serve as a bridge between Europe and Asia.¹³ Two years later, in April 2019, Greece joined the initiative—by then rebranded as the “17+1”—at the Dubrovnik Summit.¹⁴

With regard to the BRI, Greece had already signed a memorandum of understanding in August 2018 during Foreign Minister Nikos Kotzias’s visit to Beijing, becoming the first developed European country to formally join. Athens stressed that cooperation would proceed “in full respect of EU rules and procedures,” framing the agreement as an instrument for growth rather than divergence.¹⁵ Italy and Luxembourg later followed with similar accords. High-level exchanges intensified in 2019. Tsipras visited Beijing again; President Prokopis Pavlopoulos attended the Conference on Dialogue of Asian Civilizations; and, in November, President Xi paid a state visit to Athens, marking the symbolic consolidation of Sino-Greek relations within the BRI framework.

Technology: Critical networks, critical choices

Over the past two decades, Chinese telecom giant Huawei has established a strong foothold in Greece’s telecommunications sector, supplying more than half of the country’s highly sensitive 4G radio access networks (RANs).¹⁶ This mirrors a broader European pattern, with Chinese vendors supplying over 50 percent of 4G RAN equipment in fifteen out of thirty-one countries.¹⁷ Huawei’s rise in Greece was closely tied to the 2008 global financial crisis, when its cost-competitive solutions enabled operators such as Wind Hellas to expand their network capacity. It later participated in early 5G pilot projects in Athens, Trikala, and Kalamata, though the Kalamata project—in partnership with Vodafone and Luxoft—was suspended after local opposition.¹⁸ Although Huawei’s consumer market share later plummeted—from 25 percent in 2017 to just 2.5 percent by 2025—due to sanctions, supply-chain disruptions, and shifting consumer preferences, it remains strategically embedded in Greece’s network infrastructure.¹⁹

Still, China’s broader tech footprint in Greece is relatively limited. This is partly because Greek regulators—in line with EU policy—have grown more cautious about Beijing’s involvement in critical technology infrastructure. While the Hellenic Police purchased twelve Chinese-made drones for border surveillance in 2020, subsequent tech cooperation has slowed.²⁰ In February 2025, the Hellenic Data Protection Authority launched an investigation into the Chinese chatbot DeepSeek over potential privacy violations, reflecting broader European concerns about digital sovereignty.²¹

Although Athens initially hesitated to join the first Trump administration’s Clean Network Initiative—a US-led effort to exclude Chinese technology from 5G and other critical digital infrastructure—Greece formally became a member in June 2020, demonstrating a careful balance between economic pragmatism and geopolitical considerations.²² Cosmote, Greece’s largest mobile operator, opted for Ericsson over Huawei for its 5G rollout, and Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs) have since been excluded from public tenders—even as Huawei equipment continues to operate in parts of existing 4G networks.

Amid this shifting landscape, Huawei has sought to diversify its footprint in Greece. In partnership with the Greek energy company Faria Renewables, it is developing up to 1 GWh of battery storage, beginning with a 49.9 MW/134 MWh project awarded in the country’s second battery auction. The $30 million investment—financed by Attica Bank and backed by the EU’s “Greece 2.0” recovery plan—illustrates Huawei’s effort to align with EU-funded energy priorities while maintaining a presence in Greece’s green transition.²³ In early 2025, the company also announced a logistics hub at the port of Piraeus, underscoring ambitions to expand supply-chain and digital infrastructure links across the Mediterranean.²⁴

Security: Navigating China’s mediterranean ambitions

Sino-Greek relations have taken on strategic weight due to Chinese investment in critical infrastructure, most notably in the port of Piraeus. While COSCO’s stake supported Greece’s post-crisis recovery, it also triggered concerns in Washington and Brussels over strategic dependence and NATO security. Chinese control of a major European port is widely viewed as a risk to supply-chain resilience and allied naval operations. Tensions escalated in January 2025 when the US Department of Defense listed COSCO among firms allegedly linked to China’s military. The listing carried no direct sanctions but fueled fears of “self-sanctioning” by companies and added uncertainty amid global shipping disruptions.²⁵

From a transatlantic perspective, Piraeus has become emblematic of the risks of strategic dependency, shaping EU de-risking policies, NATO security debates, and broader great-power competition. US officials have warned that Chinese control of critical infrastructure in a NATO member state could weaken alliance resilience.²⁶ Allies likewise fear Beijing might leverage Piraeus in ways that complicate allied naval operations and long-term strategic planning. These concerns are amplified by NATO’s reliance on Greek ports such as Souda Bay in Crete, a key base for US and allied naval forces.

To counterbalance Chinese influence, Washington and Brussels have backed the Alexandroupolis LNG terminal²⁷—a $380 million project launched in May 2022, largely financed by the EU—as both a strategic and political investment. Linked to regional pipelines, the terminal is designed to strengthen Europe’s energy resilience and anchor NATO’s presence in Southeastern Europe.²⁸ Its dual role in energy and defense makes it a linchpin of US-Greek cooperation and a counterweight to Chinese leverage at Piraeus.

Athens, for its part, has sought to balance openness to Chinese capital with its commitments to the EU and NATO. It aligns with EU positions on cybersecurity, maritime law, and human rights, while steering clear of security cooperation with China that might unsettle NATO—limiting engagement to symbolic gestures such as port visits and participation in multilateral exercises. Under Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, Greece has deepened ties with the United States and the EU, limiting Huawei’s role while maintaining pragmatic economic cooperation and high-level exchanges with Beijing.

Beyond the strategic and economic realm, China has also expanded its soft-power presence in Greece through education and research cooperation. Academic ties have grown since the opening of Greece’s first Confucius Institute in 2009. The 2008 global financial crisis accelerated cooperation, and today five universities host Confucius Institutes alongside joint degree programs, teaching centers, and EU-funded research projects.²⁹ Twenty-seven Greek institutions maintain over 135 partnerships with Chinese counterparts.“³⁰ Yet, the absence of a coherent research policy and limited transparency have fueled concerns over collaboration with authoritarian states in sensitive fields.

Greece’s alignment with the EU’s China policy

Over the past two decades, Greece has evolved from a frequent outlier in EU China policy to a cautious participant in Brussels’ de-risking agenda. Historically, Athens occasionally departed from the EU line on foreign policy—blocking, for instance, a 2016 statement on the Permanent Court of Arbitration’s ruling against Beijing’s maritime claims in the South China Sea.³¹ Likewise, Greece vetoed a 2017 EU statement at the United Nations Human Rights Council condemning human rights abuses in China,³² marking the first time such a joint resolution failed to pass. These moves reflected Athens’ close ties with Beijing, strengthened further when Greece joined the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the “17+1” format and hosted President Xi Jinping for a state visit in 2019.³³

Since 2020, however, Athens has adjusted course. A shifting geopolitical environment—including Turkey’s assertiveness in the Eastern Mediterranean, intensifying Sino-US rivalry, and deteriorating EU-China relations—has reinforced Greece’s dependence on US and NATO security guarantees.³⁴ While Piraeus remains the flagship BRI project, Chinese investment has waned³⁵ as Greece’s economy has recovered and diversified its sources of foreign capital, with annual FDI inflows rising from $330 million in 2010 to $7.3 billion in 2024.³⁶ Even in Piraeus, COSCO’s efforts to expand operations have met both bureaucratic³⁷ and local resistance.³⁸

Reflecting this recalibration, Greece declined to host the “17+1” summit in 2022 and has avoided positions that break EU consensus. Chinese SOEs have been increasingly sidelined in public tenders, and in 2020 Greece’s largest telecom operator chose Ericsson over Huawei for developing its 5G network. Under EU and US pressure, Greece also adopted a robust FDI screening mechanism and aligned with the EU’s derisking agenda. Its earlier reluctance stemmed from debt-crisis dependency on foreign capital, a political focus on recovery over security, and limited institutional capacity.³⁹ In October 2024, Greece’s abstention on EU tariffs against Chinese electric vehicles underscored its new pragmatic balancing act—supporting EU de-risking while preserving economic ties with Beijing.⁴⁰

Conclusion

Greece has adopted a measured and pragmatic stance toward China. It accepts the EU’s designation of China as a “systemic rival” but avoids direct confrontation, seeking to balance transatlantic commitments with the economic benefits of engaging Beijing. This balancing act is most visible at the port of Piraeus, where COSCO’s investment has become both a symbol of China’s presence in Greece and a pillar of Beijing’s economic diplomacy.

Within the US-China strategic rivalry, Greece remains firmly anchored in NATO and aligned with the United States on security, yet it does not treat China as an adversary. Athens emphasizes the importance of a strong US presence in the Mediterranean but avoids alienating Beijing to protect key national interests such as shipping, tourism, and foreign investment. It maintains a careful posture—committed to transatlantic security but cautious in managing economic ties with China.

On Russia’s war in Ukraine and Beijing’s alignment with Moscow, Athens has voiced criticism but refrained from the sharper rhetoric of Northern European states. It complies with EU export controls and recognizes the risks of dual-use technologies, though enforcement remains looser than in Baltic states. On economic competitiveness, Greece recognizes the risks of Chinese overcapacity and participates in EU debates on de-risking and FDI screening, but does so pragmatically. It continues to welcome Chinese investment in infrastructure, energy, and logistics while adapting cautiously to EU digital sovereignty initiatives. For Athens, resilience is understood more in economic than military terms—and it interprets the EU’s de-risking approach not as a rigid doctrine but as a flexible framework.

Greece thus walks a middle path: anchored in NATO and EU solidarity, yet unwilling to forgo the economic advantages of engaging China. Its approach remains pragmatic, shaped by regional security priorities and an enduring commitment to economic stability.

About the author

Fellow

Valbona Zeneli

Europe Center Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security

Albanian Corruption

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The Europe Center promotes leadership, strategies, and analysis to ensure a strong, ambitious, and forward-looking transatlantic relationship.

1 “Greece Exports to China,” Trading Economics, last visited October 9, 2025, https://tradingeconomics.com/greece/exports/china; “Greece Imports from China,” Trading Economics, last visited October 9, 2025, https://tradingeconomics.com/greece/imports/china.

2 “Greece Exports by Country,” Trading Economics, last visited October 9, 2025, https://ar.tradingeconomics.com/greece/exports-by-country.

4 “China Global Investment Tracker,” American Enterprise Institute, last visited October 9, 2025, https://www.aei.org/china-global-investment-tracker/.

5 Today, the container terminal and shipbuilding zone are based in Perama, the car terminal in Keratsini-Drapetsona, and the passenger port remains in central Piraeus.

6 “China, Greece Agree to Push Ahead with COSCO’s Piraeus Port Investment,” Reuters, November 11, 2019, https://www.reuters.com/article/business/china-greece-agree-to-push-ahead-with-coscos-piraeus-port-investment-idUSKBN1XL1LC/.

7 The rest of the shares are held by the Hellenic Asset Development Fund (7 percent) and non-institutional investors (26 percent). “Investors Information,” Piraeus Port Authority, last visited October 9, 2025, https://www.olp.gr/en/investor-relations/investors-information.

8 “Piraeus Port Authority: Annual Financial Highlights 2024,” Athens Exchange Group, May 2025.

9 Tasos Kokkinidis, “Greece’s Piraeus Port Achieves Record Revenues and Profits in 2024,” Greek Reporter, April 2, 2025, https://greekreporter.com/2025/04/02/greece-piraeus-port-record-revenues-profits-2024/.

10 Eleni Stamatoukou, “Greece: Administrative Court Blocks Expansion of China Backed Piraeus Port due to Lack of Environmental Assessment,” Business and Human Rights Resource Centre, March 15, 2022, https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/greece-administrative-court-blocks-expansion-of-china-backed-piraeus-port-due-to-lack-of-environmental-assessment/.

11 The FDI screening regime covers greenfield projects and acquisitions in sectors such as energy, healthcare, transport, telecommunications, and digital infrastructure, with stricter thresholds for defense, AI, cybersecurity, ports, underwater facilities, and border-area tourism.

12 Nicolas Tselikas Bouzeau, et al., “From Open Door to Watchful Gatekeeper: Greece Adopts a Foreign-Investment Screening Mechanism,” A&O Sherman, June 2, 2025, https://www.aoshearman.com/en/insights/from-open-door-to-watchful-gatekeeper-greece-adopts-a-foreign-investment-screening-mechanism.

13 Philippe Le Corre, “A Divided Europe’s China Challenge,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, November 26, 2019, https://carnegieendowment.org/posts/2019/11/a-divided-europes-china-challenge?lang=en.

14 “Greece Joins 16+1 Initiative for Regional Trade with China,” Ekathimerini, April 12, 2019, 2025, https://www.ekathimerini.com/news/239523/greece-joins-16-1-initiative-for-regional-trade-with-china/.

15 “Greece Joins China’s Belt and Road Initiative,” Ekathimerini, August 27, 2018, https://www.ekathimerini.com/economy/231908/greece-joins-china-s-belt-and-road-initiative/.

16 Eliza Gkritsi, “How Huawei Hooked Greek Telcos,” TechNode, December 9, 2020, https://technode.com/2020/12/09/how-huawei-hooked-greek-telcos/?.

17 “Understanding the Market for 4G RAN in Europe: Share of Chinese and Non-Chinese Vendors in 102 Mobile Networks,” Strand Consult, last visited October 9, 2025, https://www.strandconsult.dk/understanding-the-market-for-4g-ran-in-europe-share-of-chinese-and-non-chinese-vendors-in-102-mobile-networks.

18 “Kalamata Greece Suspends 5G Program,” Environmental Health Trust, December 3, 2019, https://ehtrust.org/kalamata-greece-suspends-5g-program/.

19 “Company Officials: Huawei Tops Smartphone Sales in Greece,” Tornos News, February 8, 2018, https://www.tornosnews.gr/en/tourism-businesses/new-investments/29959-company-officials-huawei-tops-smartphone-sales-in-greece.html.

20 Dimitrios Stroikos, “Head of the Dragon or Trojan Horse? Reassessing China—Greece Relations,” Journal of Contemporary China 32, 142 (2022), https://eprints.lse.ac.uk/114929/3/Head_of_the_Dragon_or_Trojan_Horse_Reassessing_.pdf.

21 Mary Drosopoulos, “Greece: DeepSeek and Technological Sovereignty,” Osservatorio Balcani e Caucaso Transeuropa, May 7, 2025, https://www.balcanicaucaso.org/eng/Areas/Greece/Greece-DeepSeek-and-Technological-Sovereignty-237607.

22 “Building a Clean Network: Key Milestones,” US Department of State, last visited October 9, 2025, https://2017-2021.state.gov/building-a-clean-network-key-milestones/.

23 Greece 2.0 is the Greek government’s national program implemented within the framework of the EU’s Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF), the main pillar of the NextGeneration EU initiative. It allocates more than €30 billion in grants and loans to support projects advancing digital transformation, the green transition, infrastructure upgrades, and innovation. “Faria Renewables, Huawei Setting Up Battery Partnership in Greece,” Balkan Green Energy News, January 24, 2025, https://balkangreenenergynews.com/faria-renewables-huawei-setting-up-battery-partnership-in-greece.

24 David Glass, “Huawei Eyes Logistics Hub in Piraeus,” Seatrade Maritime News, January 2, 2025, https://www.seatrade-maritime.com/ports-logistics/huawei-eyes-logistics-hub-in-piraeus.

25 Jonathan Saul, Yannis Souliotis, and Renee Maltezou, “Greece Examines Impact of US Blacklisting of Piraeus Port Owner COSCO—Sources,” Reuters, January 10, 2025, https://www.reuters.com/world/greece-examines-impact-us-blacklisting-piraeus-port-owner-cosco-sources-2025-01-10/.

26 “U.S. Expresses Concerns over Chinese Investments in Piraeus,” Ekathimerini, October 9, 2019, https://www.ekathimerini.com/economy/245818/us-expresses-concerns-over-chinese-investments-in-piraeus.

27 The Alexandroupolis LNG terminal is a floating storage and regasification unit (FSRU) located offshore southwest of Alexandroupolis, Greece.

28 Terysa King, “Port of Alexandroupolis Makes Sustainment History with Heavy Brigade Movement,” US Army, March 17, 2024, https://www.army.mil/article/274572/port_of_alexandroupolis_makes_sustainment_history_with_heavy_brigade_movement.

29 “Greece: The Overlooked Risks of Academic Cooperation with China,” Center for European, International and Security Studies, June 24, 2025, https://ceias.eu/greece-the-overlooked-risks-of-academic-cooperation-with-china.

30 China–Europe Academic Engagement Tracker: Greece,” Center for European, International and Security Studies, last visited October 9, 2025, https://academytracker.ceias.eu/map/eu/Greece.

31 Robin Emmott, “EU’s Statement on South China Sea Reflects Divisions,” Reuters, July 15, 2016, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-southchinasea-ruling-eu-idUSKCN0ZV1TS/.

32 Nektaria Stamouli, “Greece Vetoes EU Condemnation of China’s Human-Rights Record,” Wall Street Journal, June 19, 2017, https://www.wsj.com/articles/greece-vetoes-eu-condemnation-of-china-human-rights-record-1497858040.

33 Helena Smith, “Xi Jinping Comes to Greeks Bearing Gifts,” Guardian, November 12, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/nov/12/xi-jinping-comes-to-greeks-bearings-gifts.

34 Stroikos, “Head of the Dragon or Trojan Horse? Reassessing China—Greece Relations,” 602–619.

35 “Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) Inflows in Greece by Country of Origin,” Statista, last visited October 9, 2025, https://www.statista.com/statistics/1613585/fdi-inflows-in-greece-by-origin.

36 “Foreign Direct Investment: Inward and Outward Flows and Stock (Annual Data),” United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, last updated September 1, 2025, https://unctadstat.unctad.org/datacentre/dataviewer/US.FdiFlowsStock.

37 Tasos Kokkinidis, “Greek Archaeological Council Derails COSCO’s Investment Plan for Piraeus,” Greek Reporter, April 3, 2019, https://greekreporter.com/2019/04/03/greek-archaeological-council-derails-coscos-investment-plan-for-piraeus/.

38 Momoko Kidera, “‘Sold to China’: Greece’s Piraeus Port Town Cools on Belt and Road,” Nikkei Asia, December 9, 2021, https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Belt-and-Road/Sold-to-China-Greece-s-Piraeus-port-town-cools-on-Belt-and-Road.

39 Dimitrios Stroikos, “China–Greece Relations at 50: A Not So Happy Anniversary?” China Observers in Europe, September 20, 2022, https://chinaobservers.eu/china-greece-relations-at-50-a-not-so-happy-anniversary.

40 “How EU Governments Voted on Chinese EV Tariffs,” Reuters, October 4, 2024, https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/how-eu-governments-plan-vote-chinese-ev-tariffs-2024-10-04/?utm.

The post Greece’s policy on China: Debt-era deals and recalibration appeared first on Atlantic Council.

Italy’s policy on China: The Belt and Road gamble and its aftermath

Valbona Zeneli — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 15:00:00 +0000

This is the sixth chapter of the report “Is Europe waking up to the China challenge? How geopolitics are reshaping EU and transatlantic strategy.” Read the full report here.

Italy’s relationship with China is among the oldest in Europe, dating back to the Middle Ages, when Marco Polo and other Venetian merchants traveled east along trade routes that would later be known as the Silk Road. Modern engagement resumed when Rome recognized the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1970—ahead of many other Western nations—reflecting Italy’s ambition to diversify its foreign policy, serve as a bridge between East and West, and expand economic opportunities.¹ Economic ties grew steadily after China’s accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO), culminating in a comprehensive strategic partnership by 2004.

Until recently, the Sino-Italian relationship fluctuated considerably. Successive Italian governments, facing economic stagnation, viewed engagement with China as a potential lifeline for growth, which culminated in Italy’s decision to join the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in 2019. Yet a coherent and sustainable trade policy never fully materialized, constrained by Italian political volatility, global crises, and the hardening of China’s internal politics. The early promise of cooperation was repeatedly undermined by events such as the 2008 global financial crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic, and Beijing’s support for Russia in the wake of its invasion of Ukraine.

Under Prime Minister Mario Draghi, Italy reassessed its China policy, aligning more closely with European and transatlantic partners. Since the election of Giorgia Meloni in 2022, Italy has moved from BRI-era optimism to pragmatic realignment with the West. Rome now combines transatlanticist loyalty with economic caution, strengthening controls and formally exiting the BRI. Anchored in EU and NATO frameworks, the country pursues a measured and resilient approach that balances EU de-risking with national pragmatism, while acknowledging Beijing’s human rights violations and its support for Russia. Central to this approach has been a vocal commitment to the importance of transatlantic alliances and values.

Trade and investment: Made in Italy vs. Made in China

Sino-Italian economic ties expanded significantly from the late 1970s, accelerating after China joined the WTO. Italian exports emphasized high-quality manufacturing, while imports were dominated by low-cost goods, reflecting China’s rise as a global manufacturing hub and Italy’s comparative strength in design and high-value products. In 2004, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao elevated the bilateral relationship to a comprehensive strategic partnership, broadening cooperation in trade, investment, energy, culture, and politics.²

By 2007, China had become one of Italy’s top trading partners, with trade rising more than sevenfold, from $9.6 billion in 2001 to $70.3 billion by 2024.³ In the mid-2010s, Rome, seeking capital and export opportunities for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), deepened ties with China, drawing inspiration from the United Kingdom’s “golden era”.⁴ Prime Minister Matteo Renzi’s 2014 visit to Beijing produced the 2014-2016 Action Plan for Economic Cooperation and memorandums of understanding (MoUs) in key sectors, followed by high-level exchanges, including President Sergio Mattarella’s 2017 state visit and Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni’s participation in the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation. Optimism for closer ties grew in Italy, but the global context shifted dramatically by late 2017, with the first Trump administration’s confrontational stance toward China, Xi Jinping’s assertive 19th Communist Party Congress, and the onset of a US-China trade war in 2018.

Italy’s 2019 entry into the BRI was intended to boost “Made in Italy” exports. Trade, however, grew unevenly: Chinese exports to Italy jumped 50 percent, from $35 billion to $66 billion, while Italian exports to China rose only modestly, from $14.5 billion to $17 billion. Imports later fell amid the war in Ukraine, shifting geopolitical dynamics, and Italy’s withdrawal from the BRI. Despite these developments, the trade deficit reached $37 billion in 2024. These figures also include Italian exports to China routed through Germany as part of European supply chains.

Today, Italy’s exports to China—roughly $17 billion—pale in comparison to more than $54 billion in Chinese exports to Italy, making China the country’s third-largest import partner. While Italy is flooded with Chinese products (the PRC accounts for 8.8 percent of imports, second only to Germany), exports to China account for only 2.5 percent of Italy’s total exports, far below Germany (12 percent), the United States (11 percent), or France (10 percent).⁵ Italian products make up just 1.1 percent of China’s total imports.⁶

Chinese investments in Italy surged in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis, with Chinese entities quick to capitalize on vulnerable Italian firms. From a negligible $5 million in 2008, foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows rose to $100 million in 2010 and continued climbing, reaching $4.3 billion by 2024. Cumulatively, according to the Mercator Institute for China Studies,⁷ Chinese investment totaled $18 billion (€15 billion), making Italy the EU’s fourth-largest recipient after Germany, France, and the Netherlands. The American Enterprise Institute’s China Global Investment Tracker estimates the broader figure—including contracts and loans—at more than $24 billion in 2025, concentrated in transport ($8.7 billion), energy ($6.5 billion), and technology ($5.3 billion).⁸ Major deals include ChemChina’s $8 billion acquisition of a 17 percent stake of Pirelli in 2015, and over $4 billion in stock purchases in top Italian companies—including Intesa Sanpaolo, Unicredit, Eni, Enel, Telecom Italia, Generali, and Terna—via the People’s Bank of China. Beijing has shown particular interest in Italy’s financial and insurance sectors, with State Grid of China investing in Cassa Depositi e Prestiti Reti to acquire 35 percent stake ownership and help launch its “Panda” bond program.

BRI membership promised large infrastructure projects, notably at the port of Genoa and through the “Five Ports” initiative, which envisaged Chinese ownership stakes in the ports of Venice, Trieste, and Ravenna, as well as Capodistria (Slovenia) and Fiume (Croatia) under the North Adriatic Port Association (NAPA). Results were mixed: Trieste and Genoa initially expressed interest and signed cooperation agreements with China Communications Construction Company (CCCC) but eventually withdrew in 2023 amid political and administrative hurdles. Now serving as an EU-focused platform for sustainable and digital logistics, NAPA has supported EU and national investments in Trieste, Venice, and Ravenna—signaling the Adriatic strategy’s return to European oversight.⁹ Still, targeted investments continued, flowing into the GAC Design Center and a Geely Auto design studio in Milan, as well as China Ocean Shipping Company Limited’s 2024 acquisition of Trasgo, a major Italian logistics firm with an integrated international supply chain company. In 2020, Rome froze several agreements with Chinese state-owned companies due to security concerns, replacing CCCC in Trieste with a German firm and withdrawing from joint space cooperation on the Tiangong-3 space station. Yet Italy’s economic structure complicates security-driven decoupling from China: its SMEs are embedded in German supply chains, and around 60 percent of its regional industries are linked to China through these networks, particularly in the manufacturing and automotive sectors.

Since the mid-2000s, especially after the “bra war”¹⁰ that devastated textile manufacturers, many Italians have viewed China’s rise as a threat, citing cheap imports, job losses, and Beijing’s industrial policies undermining SMEs, the lifeblood of the Italian economy.¹¹ Public opinion has grown more critical of China, fueled by pandemic narratives and Chinese acquisitions linked to business closures. Tensions over values add another layer of friction: although Italian leaders rarely press China on human rights—a practice fairly common in Europe—public sympathy for Tibet and concerns about human rights violations have fueled negative perceptions.

Mask diplomacy and Italy’s BRI misstep

In March 2019, the signing of an MoU on the BRI during Xi Jinping’s state visit to Rome and Palermo proved controversial. The MoU, covering fifty agreements in economic, cultural, and infrastructural areas, made Italy the first G7 member—and the largest EU country—to join the BRI. Though legally non-binding, it was a major geopolitical win for Beijing and raised alarm in Brussels and Washington for breaking transatlantic unity. Strategically, Italy’s membership was crucial to China’s Twenty-First Century Maritime Silk Road.

The BRI deal, signed under the 2018-2019 Giuseppe Conte government—a coalition of the Five Star Movement and Lega—aimed at short-term gains but misread the broader strategic context. Ironically, it was finalized just one day after the European Council adopted a sharper China strategy, framing the PRC as a threefold challenge: negotiating partner, economic competitor, and systemic rival. Rome hoped the MoU would boost trade and attract investment to offset sluggish growth and mounting debt, with expectations of Chinese financing for infrastructure.

Before any traction was gained, however, the COVID-19 pandemic flipped the dynamic.¹² Italy, one of Europe’s hardest-hit countries, became the focus of what was later called China’s “mask diplomacy”—Beijing’s effort to bolster its image as a responsible global power and shape the narrative around the pandemic. While Italy did purchase planeloads of masks and medical supplies from China, Beijing deliberately distorted the nature of this exchange through media, diaspora networks, and disinformation channels, portraying itself as Italy’s rescuer while casting the EU as absent. Italian intelligence and parliamentary reports later confirmed the coordinated nature of these influence and disinformation efforts, highlighting how China, alongside Russia, sought to manipulate Italy’s domestic discourse and weaken European cohesion. By late 2020, public opinion shifted, with 62 percent of Italians holding a negative view of China and seeing the pandemic-aid narrative as political manipulation. Chinese disinformation campaigns undermined the Italian government’s enthusiasm toward Beijing. Amid this growing skepticism—and increasing supply chain vulnerabilities—the second Conte government (2019-2021) began reassessing Italy’s BRI membership.

In 2021, Mario Draghi’s technocratic government accelerated this policy shift, strengthening the so-called “golden power” rules, tightening scrutiny of Chinese investment, and aligning more firmly with transatlantic partners. Meloni’s election in 2022 reinforced this course. Calling BRI membership a mistake, she blocked ChemChina’s bid for control of Italy’s iconic tire maker Pirelli in June 2023—and in December of the same year she opted not to renew the BRI deal. Still, Italy diplomatically reaffirmed its economic ties with China under the broad “strategic partnership,” first signed in 2004 and renewed in 2014 and 2024.¹³ Its BRI-exit did not trigger Chinese retaliation, but it dismantled key symbols of Beijing’s influence, realigning Rome with the EU’s de-risking strategy.

Technology: Pivoting to a “buy transatlantic” strategy

Chinese investment in Italy’s tech sector has focused on acquiring manufacturing know-how, expertise, and established brands in specialized manufacturing clusters. Essentially, it aims to move into higher-value products by building on—and at times blatantly copying—Italy’s strengths in industrial design and branding.¹⁴ The Conte government exacerbated Italy’s risky ties with China in infrastructure and high tech, including Huawei’s role in 5G. Draghi later sought to reverse course but faced pro-China voices within his coalition. Under Meloni, however, Rome moved to cut dependencies, including plans for a full ban on Chinese information and communication technologies (ICT).

During the first Trump administration, Huawei was branded a security threat, with the United States pressing allies to exclude the company from their 5G networks as part of a broader campaign of “de-coupling” from China in critical technologies, including semiconductors and artificial intelligence (AI). Italy, like several other EU states, opted for tighter vetting rather than an outright ban. By 2021, Huawei’s role in European networks had already begun to shrink. Italy’s “golden powers” framework, introduced in 2012, gave the government authority to block or condition foreign takeovers in strategic sectors.¹⁵ Initially limited to defense and security, it was expanded in 2017 to energy, transport, and communications.

After parliamentary calls in 2019 to “very seriously” consider banning Huawei, Conte resisted but agreed to expand oversight under “golden power” rules.¹⁶ Under US pressure, the framework was eventually expanded in 2020 to cover 5G, finance, health, AI, and media. During Draghi’s term, it became one of Europe’s broadest and most closely coordinated measures for blocking Chinese acquisitions in high-tech industries, complementing the EU’s new FDI screening mechanism.¹⁷ Meloni further reinforced the “golden power” rules in 2023, restricting ChemChina’s influence over Pirelli and curbing Huawei and ZTE in the telecommunications sector. Huawei’s share in Italy’s 5G infrastructure has since fallen from over 50 percent in 2019 to about 35 percent in 2024.¹⁸ Yet dependence remains, as Huawei and ZTE built much of Italy’s 4G network.¹⁹ Today, the “golden power” framework has become central to Italy’s broader de-risking strategy. In May 2025, Italy adopted a “Buy Transatlantic” law, prioritizing procurement from Italy, the EU, NATO, and allied partners to secure ICT and cybersecurity supply chains. The law goes beyond the EU’s “Buy European” policy and the United States’ “Buy American Act,” fostering a transatlantic zone of trusted suppliers and potentially serving as a model for defense procurement.

Security: Chinese diaspora networks and covert activities

Italy’s view of China has shifted from economic optimism to strategic caution, with heightened concerns about security, covert influence, and geo-economic risks. Rome’s 2019 BRI decision alarmed both the United States and the EU, while at home, politicians and security experts warned about Chinese investment in strategic sectors and the implications for Italy’s Western alignment.

Chinese information operations, which intensified during the COVID-19 pandemic alongside Russian propaganda, aimed to undermine democratic debate, promote pro-China narratives, stoke anti-EU “Italexit” sentiment, and weaken societal cohesion.²⁰ Beijing also mobilized its diaspora network in Italy, one of the largest in Europe, with 309,000 people, including 50,000 students, blurring humanitarian engagement with influence operations.²¹ A report by the Italian parliamentary intelligence oversight committee confirmed these efforts, prompting Italy to strengthen counter-hybrid measures and align more closely with NATO and EU security frameworks to reinforce its transatlantic posture.²²

Amid broader concerns about Chinese influence operations,²³ reports of unofficial Chinese “police stations” in Italy—used to monitor the Chinese population abroad and force dissidents to return—drew scrutiny. Academic ties have also raised alarms: since the early 2000s, over one thousand agreements between sixty-four Italian and Chinese universities have included cooperative in sensitive dual-use fields such as biomedicine, robotics, and semiconductors. New agreements have declined since 2020 and the current government is preparing national research security guidelines to address security risks in research and academia. Still, sixteen Confucius Institutes operate in Italy without clear regulations.

Prime Minister Meloni has long criticized Beijing, denouncing authoritarianism, mismanagement of the COVID-19 pandemic, human rights abuses in Xinjiang and Hong Kong, and threats against Taiwan.²⁴ While staunchly condemning Russia’s war in Ukraine,²⁵ she has warned that aggression toward Taiwan could jeopardize China’s access to the EU market. Despite limited public support for military aid to Ukraine (currently at 39 percent), Meloni has firmly backed Ukraine while making NATO solidarity, EU strategic autonomy, de-risking efforts, and close ties with the United States the foundation of her China policy.²⁶

Italy’s alignment with the EU’s China policy

Italy’s stance toward China has shifted toward EU alignment, shaped by external pressures and internal political dynamics. In 2017, Rome joined Berlin and Paris in advocating for an EU investment screening mechanism but abstained from the final vote, reflecting internal political divisions that also contributed to its decision to join the BRI in 2019. Its exit from the initiative in December 2023, coupled with stronger enforcement of “golden power” rules, signaled cross-party skepticism of China and Giorgia Meloni’s commitment to transatlantic cooperation.

China’s support of Russia’s war effort in Ukraine further reinforced Italy’s cautious stance, embedding the country firmly within the EU’s de-risking strategy by balancing economic ties with security vigilance. The discreet BRI withdrawal emphasized continuity through the relaunch of the strategic partnership and was aimed at depoliticizing relations while restoring Western credibility. Italian foreign policy is traditionally reactive and fragmented, driven by short-term economic gains and party politics rather than long-term strategic vision. Therefore, Rome is also less inclined than Brussels to cast China as a rival. Under Meloni, however, Italy has aligned more closely with the United States and the EU on security, adopting a cautious approach to limit Chinese access to strategic sectors.

Conclusion

Italy’s China policy has shifted from BRI-era optimism over economic benefits to a pragmatic need for closer alignment with the EU and the United States. Blending transatlantic loyalty with economic caution is now the guiding principle. Rome has strengthened investment screening, blocked Chinese acquisitions in strategic sectors, and withdrawn from the BRI, while still avoiding overtly confrontational rhetoric to protect its exports. The result is a China policy that is less ideological than the European Commission’s systemic rival framing and less securitized than the United States’ rivalry-driven approach. Nonetheless, Italy’s path reflects growing awareness of the geopolitical and security risks of conducting business with China—especially compared with the value- and security-based partnership it enjoys with the United States and the EU.

The US-China rivalry and Beijing’s alignment with Moscow have considerably hardened Italy’s stance. NATO engagement has reinforced Rome’s cautious security posture, limiting Chinese access to critical infrastructure and technology, while Russia’s war in Ukraine has deepened its resolve against Moscow and reaffirmed its commitment to the EU and NATO security frameworks. In the Indo-Pacific region, Italy participates selectively in deployments, signaling solidarity rather than projecting power, and avoids labeling China a direct security threat, focusing instead on resilience and coordination with transatlantic partners.

Economically, Italy balances EU de-risking with national pragmatism. Chinese investment has shifted from major takeovers to smaller greenfield projects under stricter “golden power” rules and EU screening mechanisms. Meloni’s alignment with the tougher US stance on China has reinforced this cautious, de-risking approach. Yet structural constraints remain: many Italian SMEs are linked to German supply chains that ultimately serve China. These dependencies could create domestic political risks if Italy attempts a radical decoupling from China. Italy’s exit from the BRI was a necessary recalibration and geopolitical realignment, not a rupture, as Sino-Italian ties have been repositioned toward a more pragmatic and cautious partnership.

The challenge ahead for Italy is to turn its reactive, domestically driven adjustments into a coherent long-term strategy that reconciles its domestic economic interests with transatlantic alignment. Italy’s ability to successfully balance US and EU demands with domestic economic realities will test both the strategic clarity of its vision and its skill in managing China as a geopolitical rival.

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Valbona Zeneli

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1 Seamus Taggart, “Italian Relations with China 1978–1992: The Long Carnival Decade—Burgeoning Trade and Diplomatic Kudos,” Cahiers de la Méditerranée 88 (2014), 113–134, https://journals.openedition.org/cdlm/7512.

2 Nicola Casarini and Marco Sanfilippo, “Italy and China: Investing in Each Other,” in Mikko Huotari, et al., eds., “Mapping Europe–China Relations: A Bottom-Up Approach,” Mercator Institute for China Studies, October 2015, 46–50, https://www.iai.it/sites/default/files/2015_etnc_report.pdf.

3 “Italy Imports from China,” Trading Economics, last visited October 10, 2025, https://tradingeconomics.com/italy/imports/china.

4 The Conservative–Liberal coalition (2010–2015) pursued a liberal, finance-driven approach to China, laying the groundwork for the so-called “golden era” in bilateral relations. Coined around Xi Jinping’s 2015 state visit, the term reflected the David Cameron government’s effort to deepen engagement and attract Chinese investment in finance and infrastructure. William Matthews, “What the UK Must Get Right in Its China Strategy: Resilience, Flexibility and Autonomy as Core Principles for Engagement,” Chatham House, July 2025, https://www.chathamhouse.org/sites/default/files/2025-07/2025-07-08-uk-china-strategy-matthews.pdf.

5 “Italy Exports by Country,” Trading Economics, last visited October 10, 2025, https://tradingeconomics.com/italy/exports-by-country.

6 “China Imports by Country,” Trading Economics, last visited October 10, 2025, https://tradingeconomics.com/china/imports-by-country.

7 Agatha Kratz, et al., “Chinese Investment Rebounds Despite Growing Frictions—Chinese FDI in Europe: 2024 Update,” Mercator Institute for China Studies and Rhodium Group, May 21, 2025, https://merics.org/en/report/chinese-investment-rebounds-despite-growing-frictions-chinese-fdi-europe-2024-update.

8 “China Global Investment Tracker,” American Enterprise Institute, last visited October 9, 2025, https://www.aei.org/china-global-investment-tracker/.

9 Karin Smit-Jacobs, “Chinese Strategic Interests in European Ports,” Think Tank, European Parliament, February 27, 2023, https://www.europarl.europa.eu/thinktank/en/document/EPRS_ATA%282023%29739367.

10 Until 2005, global textile trade was governed by the Multi-Fibre Arrangement (MFA), but after its expiry on January 1, 2005, China’s low-cost textile exports surged—rising by more than 200 percent in Europe within six months. Italy’s textile industry was among the hardest hit, struggling to withstand the influx of cheap Chinese imports.

11 “The EU and China in ‘bra wars’ deal,” The Guardian, September 6, 2005, https://www.theguardian.com/business/2005/sep/06/politics.europeanunion.

12 Valbona Zeneli and Federica Santoro, “COVID 19 Pandemic and How It Affected Sino Italian Relations,” Orbis, Foreign Policy Research Institute, July 12, 2023, https://www.fpri.org/article/2023/07/covid-19-pandemic-and-how-it-affected-sino-italian-relations/.

13 Valbona Zeneli, “Italy’s ‘Arrivederci’ to China’s BRI Could Be a Template for Others,” Atlantic Council, December 11, 2023, https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/italys-arrivederci-to-chinas-bri-could-be-a-template-for-others/.

14 Carlo Pietrobelli, Roberta Rabellotti, and Marco Sanfilippo, “Chinese FDI Strategy in Italy: The ‘Marco Polo’ Effect,” International Journal of Technological Learning, Innovation and Development 4, 4 (2011), 277–291, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/264821612_Chinese_FDI_strategy_in_Italy_The_%27Marco_Polo%27_effect.

15 “Golden Power: The Italian Government’s Powers over Companies of Strategic Importance,” Rödl & Partner, May 10, 2024, https://www.roedl.com/insights/italien/golden-power-italian-government-powers-companies-strategic-importance.

16 Daniele Lepido, “Italian Lawmakers Urge Government to Consider Huawei 5G Ban,” Bloomberg, December 20, 2019, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-20/italian-lawmakers-urge-government-to-consider-huawei-5g-ban.

17 The “golden power” instrument has been used to prevent three Chinese takeovers, and undo one takeover that had been concluded during the previous government. These actions started with the blocking of the Chinese Shenzhen Investment Holdings from acquiring the Italian semiconductor enterprise LPE (specializing in epitaxy reactors). The prospective buyer had ties with the Chinese arms industry. The Italian government has blocked a Chinese robot maker’s 2-million euro investment in a domestic robotics company under the country’s “golden power law” for sensitive industries.

18 “Is There a Correlation between European Nations’ Level of Chinese Telecom Equipment, the Consumption of Russian Energy, and Military Aid to Ukraine?” Strand Consult, March 18, 2025, https://strandconsult.dk/is-there-a-correlation-between-european-nations-level-of-chinese-telecom-equipment-the-consumption-of-russian-energy-and-military-aid-to-ukraine/.

19 In 2020, the Italian government reviewed seventeen telecom-related cases; Huawei’s bid to supply Fastweb’s core 5G equipment was blocked, while the other sixteen proceeded under special conditions and monitoring.

20 Zeneli and Santoro, “COVID 19 Pandemic and How It Affected Sino Italian Relations.”

21 “ISTAT. Popolazione Residente e Dinamica Della Popolazione,” POP.ACLI, January 8, 2025, https://pop.acli.it/rubriche/post-it/759-istat-popolazione-residente-e-dinamica-della-popolazione.

22 Gabriele Carrer, “Hybrid Threats from Russia and China: Italy under Siege,” Decode39, March 4, 2025, https://decode39.com/10078/hybrid-threats-from-russia-and-china-italy-under-siege/.

23 Gabriele Carrer, “Chinese ‘Police Stations’ in Italy under US Scrutiny,” Decode39, April 3, 2025, https://decode39.com/10078/hybrid-threats-from-russia-and-china-italy-under-siege/.

24 Serena Console, “Come Potrebbe Comportarsi il Governo di Meloni con la Cina,” Today, September 23, 2022, https://www.today.it/politica/governo-meloni-rapporti-cina-taiwan-elezioni-25-settembre.html.

25 “Meloni si Schiera con Taiwan: ‘Ferma Condanna per l’Inaccettabile Condotta della Cina [Meloni sides with Taiwan. Strong condemnation for the unacceptable behavior of China],” Agenzia Nova, September 23, 2022, https://www.agenzianova.com/news/meloni-si-schiera-con-taiwan-ferma-condanna-per-linaccettabile-condotta-della-cina.

26 “Transatlantic Trends 2022: Public Opinion in Times of Geopolitical Turmoil,” German Marshall Fund of the United States and Bertelsmann Foundation, September 29, 2022, https://www.gmfus.org/sites/default/files/2022-09/Transatlantic%20Trends%202022.pdf.

The post Italy’s policy on China: The Belt and Road gamble and its aftermath appeared first on Atlantic Council.

Germany’s policy on China: From win-win to strategic competition

Valbona Zeneli — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 15:00:00 +0000

This is the fifth chapter of the report “Is Europe waking up to the China challenge? How geopolitics are reshaping EU and transatlantic strategy.” Read the full report here.

Germany’s relationship with China has evolved significantly over the past decades, with economic cooperation forming the backbone of bilateral ties. Its early posture toward Beijing mirrored its Cold War-era approach to trade with the Soviet Union—focused on pragmatic economic engagement despite political differences. As an outlier within the European Union (EU), Germany’s approach to China stood out for its industrial complementarity, mutual benefit, and limited political friction. This “win-win” model, formalized in a 2004 strategic partnership and upgraded to a comprehensive strategic partnership in 2014, fueled prosperity but also deepened dependency, shaping the EU’s broader asymmetry in dealing with China.¹

The first disagreements emerged over human rights issues in Tibet and Xinjiang, but economic interest prevailed under Chancellor Angela Merkel’s “Wandel durch Handel” (“change through trade”) doctrine, which assumed that engagement with authoritarian regimes would eventually spur political liberalization.² By 2016, China had become Germany’s largest trading partner, and its acquisitions of strategic firms such as Kuka and Aixtron triggered alarm over technological vulnerabilities. The Federation of German Industries (BDI) framed China as a systemic competitor in 2019, helping shape the EU’s “partner, competitor, rival” approach that same year. Merkel, however, continued to prioritize engagement, championing the Comprehensive Agreement on Investment (CAI) during Germany’s 2020 EU Council Presidency.³

The 2020s brought a reckoning. The pandemic, supply chain shocks, and Beijing’s increasing alignment with Moscow exposed the risks of overreliance. In 2021, Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government included the term “Taiwan” in its coalition agreement for the first time and openly framed China as a rival.⁴ Berlin’s 2023 China Strategy marked a cautious pivot—reducing dependencies and emphasizing competition while preserving cooperation on global challenges.

Under Chancellor Friedrich Merz, Germany has aligned more closely with the EU’s “de-risking” agenda, dropping the term “partnership” from its China rhetoric and stressing competition and rivalry.⁵ Yet domestic resistance and corporate lobbying have slowed this shift. Today, Germany’s China policy mirrors the EU’s broader evolution—from optimism to caution, and from partnership to rivalry. As Europe’s largest economy and a key driver of integration, Berlin’s choices shape the EU’s China policy, even as its approach remains reactive, constrained by economic dependence, transatlantic expectations, and European ambitions.

Trade and investment: From growth engine to rivalry

Germany’s engagement with China dates back to the late nineteenth century, when it seized Jiaozhou Bay—home to the city of Qingdao—and began investing heavily in the colony’s infrastructure and industry. After decades of turbulent relations, the two countries established diplomatic ties in 1972, with a primary focus on economic cooperation. In the years that followed, Germany and China built a close trade relationship, grounded in extensive exchanges of goods and industrial complementarity. The German industry supplied cars, machinery, chemicals, and engineering know-how that fueled China’s growth while sustaining high-paying jobs at home, making Germany the EU’s growth engine.

Trade has grown by more than 900 percent since 2001—from $27 billion to $273 billion in 2024—with Germany accounting for 35 percent of total EU-China trade. While the United States was still reeling from the surge of low-cost Chinese imports and China’s entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO), Germany thrived on Chinese demand, particularly in the automotive, machinery, and chemical industries.⁶ This complementarity allowed German firms to weather economic shocks better than their peers—a rare “win-win” scenario. As an outlier within the EU, Germany stood out for its emphasis on industrial cooperation and limited political confrontation. The “win-win” relationship—with Germany exporting advanced technologies, luxury cars, and high-end products, and China supplying inexpensive consumer goods—created a structural imbalance in Europe’s engagement with China.

The first major rift between Berlin and Beijing arose over human rights issues in Tibet and Xinjiang, as well as Chancellor Angela Merkel’s 2007 meeting with the Dalai Lama, after which China suspended the Sino-German Rule of Law Dialogue.⁷ Despite these tensions, Berlin’s China policy remained rooted in Merkel’s “Wandel durch Handel” approach, emphasizing broad cooperation agreements intended to balance economic interests with Germany’s values-driven foreign policy.⁸ In the years that followed, China surpassed the United States to become Germany’s largest trading partner—initially fueling cautious optimism but later prompting alarm over Chinese acquisitions of high-tech firms such as Kuka and Aixtron.⁹

By 2020, the tables had turned. Chinese imports to Germany jumped 98 percent between 2020 and 2022 (from $105 billion to $208 billion), while German exports fell by 10 percent (from $110 billion in 2020 to $98 billion in 2024).¹⁰ Import growth slowed in 2024 as Berlin ended electric vehicle (EV) purchase subsidies and the EU imposed tariffs of up to 45 percent on Chinese EVs. Yet Germany still posted a $77 billion trade deficit, marking the end of balanced trade. Today, China is Germany’s top import partner (13 percent of total imports) but only its fifth-largest export market (6 percent of total exports). By 2024, China’s cumulative foreign direct investment (FDI) in Germany reached $35 billion, making it Germany’s tenth largest investor. That same year, China ranked as Germany’s third largest source of new FDI projects, while German FDI in China climbed to $80 billion—accounting for nearly 60 percent of all EU investment there.

The strain of this new relationship is most visible in the automotive and machinery sectors, while industries where China still lags—such as measurement equipment and pharmaceuticals—remain relatively resilient for now. China’s imports of German auto parts fell 22 percent between 2021 and 2023, signaling a weakening of industrial linkages.¹¹ A partnership that was once mutually beneficial has become marked by asymmetry, intensified competition, and geopolitical strain.

As a result, Berlin has recalibrated its approach to China—a shift driven primarily by three factors: China’s rapid ascent up the value chain, its economic slowdown, and rising geopolitical risks.¹² Beijing’s industrial push, crystallized in its “Made in China 2025” plan, was reinforced by a surge of acquisitions of European firms. Chinese FDI in Europe peaked at nearly $40 billion in 2016, including $12 billion in Germany alone.¹³That year, Merkel warned that China was emerging as an economic rival, while Beijing pressed for WTO market-economy status to weaken European trade defenses.¹⁴

The European Parliament, European industry, and labor unions—led by the steel sector mobilized in opposition, marking the EU’s first coordinated pushback.¹⁵ In 2019, the BDI publicly labeled China as a “systemic competitor,” issuing fifty-four policy demands, which urged the EU to reduce its dependence on the Chinese market, strengthen industrial policy, and ensure trade reciprocity.¹⁶ Merkel nonetheless continued to pursue engagement, using Germany’s 2020 EU Council Presidency to advocate for the CAI.¹⁷ She worked closely with French President Emmanuel Macron, presenting the effort as “strategic autonomy,” partly to shield European industry from the unpredictability of the first Trump administration and in response to pressure from German corporations deeply invested in China. Although Merkel never called China a “rival,” the BDI’s leadership helped steer Europe toward a more sober and defensive stance.

As the 2020’s ushered in the COVID-19 pandemic and exposed global supply chain vulnerabilities, Russia’s war in Ukraine and Beijing’s alignment with Moscow underscored the need for “de-risking” and diversification. Germany began reducing vulnerabilities while avoiding full decoupling, seeking to preserve dialogue even amid growing tension. In 2021, the newly-elected German government introduced tougher language on China, referencing Taiwan in its coalition agreement and framing China as a rival.¹⁸ Moreover, Germany’s 2023 China strategy seeks to cut dependencies in critical sectors, protect infrastructure, and counter espionage, while maintaining cooperation on global challenges such as climate change. Chancellor Olaf Scholz has combined criticism of market barriers and Chinese industrial overcapacity with acknowledgment of China’s importance for energy transition and innovation—signaling a pragmatic balancing act between German economic interests and continuity.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s “de-risking” agenda aligns with Berlin’s rhetoric as codified in its 2023 strategy. Yet many multinationals interpret this approach as deeper localization in China rather than genuine diversification.¹⁹ The “Mittelstand”—Germany’s small and medium-sized enterprises—faces intense competition as Chinese firms, having mastered their technologies, now outcompete them. With limited government support, de-risking remains more slogan than strategy.

In November 2022, a group of leading German business executives warned in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that de-risking had gone too far, arguing that access to the world’s second largest market remains vital for competitiveness and jobs.²⁰ This position echoed Scholz’s emphasis on reducing one-sided dependencies without full “decoupling,” contrasting sharply with Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock’s much tougher stance on China—underscoring divisions within the coalition of the chancellor’s Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the foreign minister’s Green Party. Beijing, in turn, dismissed de-risking as “decoupling by another name,” while Premier Li Qiang assured German industrialists that “failure to cooperate was the biggest risk.”²¹

By 2025, awareness of risks had sharpened. Even trade unions such as IG Metall began pressing for measures once considered taboo.²² Protectionist instruments multiplied, signaling a major shift in industrial thinking. Still, divisions persisted. While the chemical and machinery sectors adjusted, the German automotive industry opposed tariffs on Chinese EVs, fearing the loss of key markets. As a result, Germany voted against broad EU tariffs.²³ Rather than retreating, German firms doubled down on an “in China, for China” strategy, embedding production, research and development (R&D), and supply chains in the People’s Republic to remain competitive and shield against political shocks. In its 2023/24 survey, the German Chamber of Commerce in China found that over 90 percent of its members planned to maintain operations, with more than half intending to expand.²⁴ In 2024, German firms invested €5.7 billion in China—accounting for 45 percent of EU and UK FDI in the country—with the automotive sector responsible for nearly three-quarters of the total investment.²⁵ In that sense, Germany’s China playbook is shifting from economic complementarity to managed exposure: selective corporate deepening inside China to stay competitive, paired with EU-German derisking at home.

Technology: Industrial innovation and strategic exposure

Germany’s technological ties with China are characterized by a mix of cooperation and competition. What began as one-way technology transfer has evolved into partnerships: German firms co-develop and localize advanced technologies in China—especially EVs, smart manufacturing, and green systems—while collaborating on Industry 4.0 standards and interoperability.²⁶ Chinese technological upscaling and import-substitution are displacing foreign suppliers and eroding German market share in EVs, batteries, machine tools, and industrial software driven by artificial intelligence (AI), both in China and in third markets.

Berlin has responded with de-risking, stricter investment screening, and trade defenses. Meanwhile, Germany’s large corporations have adapted through greater integration with the Chinese market, via “in China, for China” localization, “dual play” strategies, parallel supply chains, IP ring-fencing, and selective alliances. Viewing China as an innovation hub, German firms are localizing R&D and supply chains within the country to leverage scale and speed. Initiatives such as the Sino-German Standardization Innovation Center in Frankfurt, launched in 2025, promote industrial coordination and signal a commitment to building a joint technology ecosystem.²⁷ Still, there is no one-size-fits-all corporate strategy, as the case of Infineon, Germany’s leading semiconductor company, illustrates. Infineon is pursuing a strategy of “targeted deepening,” carefully expanding ties with China to meet market demand while navigating the strategic sensitivities of semiconductors.

With regard to foreign investment screening, the 2016 takeover of German robot maker Kuka by the Chinese Midea Group was a turning point for Germany and the EU, highlighting Europe’s lack of defenses against strategic acquisitions in robotics and Industry 4.0. This triggered a chain reaction: amendments to the Foreign Trade and Payments Ordinance in 2017 tightened the national screening regime, lowering the threshold for when foreign acquisitions must be reviewed. In 2021, the rules became even stricter—any attempt by a foreign buyer to acquire more than 10 percent of a sensitive company can now trigger government scrutiny.

The main concern is that US chip controls combined with China’s rapid AI advances are accelerating a global tech split, leaving Germany squeezed and potentially falling behind in key technology fields. In July 2024, Berlin decided to exclude Chinese companies such as Huawei and ZTE from its 5G network products, aligning its telecom security policy with EU guidance after years of delay.²⁸ A previous push by members of the Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU) to exclude Huawei from 5G, considering it a national security issue, had been blocked by Merkel, who maintained that no vendor should be barred if it met security requirements.²⁹ Ultimately, Berlin adopted the EU’s 5G Toolbox as the framework for its approach. However, the fact that Huawei still accounted for 59 percent of Germany’s 5G RAN equipment and 57 percent of its 4G network in 2022 shows how firmly Chinese technology remains embedded in the country’s critical infrastructure.³⁰

The German auto industry’s “China shock”

Many in Germany consider automakers the country’s economic lifeblood. With this in mind, it seemed rational to establish a market presence in China, entering the country in the 1980s through joint ventures that exchanged technology transfer for market access. There is little doubt that with this approach, Germany played a central role in developing China’s automotive sector. By 2009, China had overtaken the United States as the world’s largest automotive market, with German companies operating over 350 sites.

One outcome of Germany’s engagement in China was the transfer of technological knowledge and manufacturing expertise. Combined with Beijing’s heavy subsidies and industrial strategies—“Made in China 2025,” dual circulation, and dual carbon policies— China had built a complete EV value chain by 2015, while Germany remained largely tied to the combustion engine.³¹ By 2024, nearly half of China’s car sales were electric, representing two-thirds of global EV sales. Chinese brands like BYD, Geely, and NIO surged, with BYD surpassing Volkswagen as China’s best-selling brand.

The consequences for German firms were severe. Between 2022 and 2024, exports to China plunged 70 percent, while foreign automakers’ market share dropped from 53 percent to 33 percent. Yet since 2019, German companies had produced more cars in China than at home, increasingly relying on local suppliers and investing in Chinese EV and battery makers. In 1992, China produced approximately one million vehicles per year—by 2024, it reached 31 million, with roughly 40 percent (thirteen million units) classified as new energy vehicles (NEVs).³² China maintained its lead among major markets, with electric car sales exceeding 11 million—more than the global total just two years earlier.³³ By 2025, its annual NEV production capacity is projected to reach twenty-five million vehicles, surpassing the combined output of Germany, Japan, and the United States.

With domestic demand unable to absorb this output, Chinese automakers are targeting global markets, including Europe, where BYD and NIO are gaining ground. For Germany, long reliant on China as its largest automotive market, this shift is a direct threat. Chinese firms now dominate at home and are challenging German manufacturers in Europe. Germany’s automakers thus face a dual squeeze—shrinking margins in China and rising competition from Chinese EVs worldwide.

Security: Responding to China’s global ambitions

Germany’s security outlook has shifted markedly in recent years, shaped by growing concerns over espionage, cyberattacks, and Beijing’s global assertiveness. Chinese hacking campaigns targeting German institutions—from the Federal Agency for Cartography to CDU party headquarters—have become routine.³⁴ High-profile espionage cases in 2024 and 2025, including arrests of parliamentary aides, put Berlin’s security community on high alert. These incidents reinforced political support for stricter investment screening and raised doubts about whether China could still be treated as a straightforward “partner.”

In 2021, the Scholz administration signaled both continuity and change in its China policy. While building on Merkel’s approach, the coalition agreement adopted noticeably sharper language—describing China as a “partner, competitor, and systemic rival,” and making it the first official document to explicitly label Beijing a “rival.”³⁵ Moreover, the coalition agreement explicitly mentioned Taiwan, marking a significant departure from past practice. Under Merkel, Taiwan had been entirely absent from Germany’s so-called policy guidelines for the Indo-Pacific, which framed the region in economic and multilateral rather than security terms.³⁶ By contrast, the Scholz government’s 2024 progress report on the implementation of guidelines referenced Taiwan at least five times.³⁷

In July 2023, Germany published its first dedicated China strategy, despite internal disputes between the Greens’ Foreign Ministry and the SPD-led Chancellery. The Greens advocated a values-based, critical stance on China, while Scholz’s party favored a pragmatic, trade-oriented approach centered on stability and engagement.³⁸ The final document underscores China’s “systemic rivalry” but also notes that addressing global challenges requires cooperation with Beijing. Notably absent, however, is the EU’s “partner, competitor, rival” formula. Instead, the strategy omits any reference to “partner,” referring only to “cooperation.” The 2025 coalition agreement under Chancellor Merz commits to further revising the strategy “according to the principle of de-risking,” with greater emphasis on defense, cyber, infrastructure, and disinformation.³⁹

Germany’s understanding of “rivalry” has also evolved. While it initially referred primarily to China’s authoritarian governance, it now encompasses Beijing’s challenge to the international order itself. China is no longer seen as merely more assertive, but as actively seeking to reshape global rules, promote multipolarity, and advance Beijing-centric frameworks—as illustrated by its ten-point paper on Ukraine.⁴⁰ Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine exposed the dangers of dependency on autocratic powers, prompting Berlin to stress resilience in critical technologies, supply chains, and democratic institutions. Critics of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline—built to carry Russian gas directly to Germany through the Baltic Sea—were vindicated, recalling earlier warnings that Vladimir Putin would weaponize energy.⁴¹

Since then, military developments have added further urgency. German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul has warned that China’s assertive posture in the South China Sea threatens not only stability in Asia but also the international rules-based order and Europe’s economic lifelines.⁴² Beijing’s continued support for Russia throughout its war in Ukraine has deepened perceptions of systemic rivalry, fusing security concerns with the economic risks of overdependence on China.

New measures adopted in 2025 further illustrate this shift. The KRITIS law, implementing an EU directive, obliges operators of critical infrastructure in energy, transport, finance, health, and water to secure their installations against sabotage and cyberattacks. While prompted by Russia’s aggression and recent sabotage incidents, the law also reflects mounting concern over Chinese cyber operations.

Germany’s alignment with the EU’s China policy

While Germany’s China policy broadly aligns with the EU’s overall approach, Berlin has also played a pivotal role in shaping Brussels’ strategy from the outset—emphasizing economic engagement and industrial competitiveness. In response, Beijing has adopted a “twin-track” strategy, offering Germany reassurance and high-level access while simultaneously pushing back at the EU level with countermeasures when trade, defense and technology controls impinge on its interests.⁴³

On the economic front, Germany was instrumental in shaping the EU’s “partner, competitor, rival” framework on China. While Chancellor Merkel resisted the term “systemic rival,” preferring to emphasize competition alongside partnership and cautioning against demonizing China for its success, the BDI helped frame China as a competitor.⁴⁴ Berlin promoted a balanced approach—addressing unfair competition and limited market access without isolating Beijing.

Germany also shaped EU trade and investment policy, most notably by advancing the CAI after seven years of stalled talks. During Germany’s presidency of the Council of the EU in late 2020, Merkel made CAI a priority, urging the Commission to accelerate negotiations and securing an “agreement in principle” on 30 December, 2020.⁴⁵ While this demonstrated Berlin’s influence in EU policymaking, it also exposed divisions within the EU and with the European Parliament, which criticized weak labor provisions and the lack of coordination with the United States.⁴⁶ Merkel’s push for the deal appeared driven by Donald Trump’s “Phase One” agreement, transatlantic uncertainty, and pressure from German corporations heavily invested in China. Soon after, Merkel’s own party called for a stronger transatlantic approach to China, highlighting contradictions between her late push for CAI and the strategic consensus emerging within the EU and NATO.

In 2017, Germany, along with France and Italy, urged the European Commission to establish a common framework for investment screening, motivated by China’s 2016 takeover of Kuka. Berlin ultimately played a leading role in shaping the EU’s investment screening mechanism, formally adopted in 2019.⁴⁷ Germany’s national regime, the so-called Außenwirtschaftsgesetz, is among the strictest in Europe and has been used to block or condition Chinese acquisitions.⁴⁸ Pressure from German industry also helped steer the EU away from outright “decoupling” and toward a more moderate strategy of “de-risking,” later embraced by both Berlin and Brussels. Germany’s 2023 inaugural China strategy signaled a decisive shift from a business-centric posture to a strategic-industrial approach, aligning with the EU’s economic security narrative and lending political weight to Brussels’ new instruments.⁴⁹

On technology, the EU has increasingly defined China as a systemic rival, introducing protective measures such as semiconductor export controls, 5G security guidelines, and investment screening,—while coordinating closely with the United States on standards and governance in areas like AI and quantum computing. Germany has been central to this agenda yet has prioritized industrial competitiveness, initially delaying restrictions on Huawei and favoring de-risking over decoupling. Thus, the EU’s approach is more security-oriented, while Berlin’s strategy remains industry-oriented. Nonetheless, Germany’s 2023 China strategy shows growing convergence with the EU’s approach to China by recognizing digital infrastructure and supply chain vulnerabilities.

On security, Germany’s China policy has evolved significantly. During Merkel’s tenure, Berlin prioritized “Wandel durch Handel” and economic stability, often softening EU initiatives by downplaying security issues such as Taiwan, the South China Sea, and Beijing’s alignment with Moscow. Under Scholz, Germany adopted tougher language and cautiously endorsed de-risking while protecting corporate interests. Since Merz has taken office, Berlin has aligned more closely with Brussels, dropping “partnership” language, explicitly framing China as a “competitor and rival,” and emphasizing resilience, cyber defense, and critical infrastructure protection—though corporate dependence still tempers a radical strategic break.

Through its dual role as Europe’s largest economy and a key geopolitical actor, Germany has helped steer the EU toward a more balanced China strategy—neither purely values-driven nor narrowly security-focused, but grounded in strategic pragmatism.

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3 “Partner and Systemic Competitor—How Do We Deal with China’s State-Controlled Economy?” BDI, January 2019, https://www.wita.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/201901_Policy_Paper_BDI_China.pdf; Lily McElwee, “The Rise and Demise of the EU-China Investment Agreement: Takeaways for the Future German Debate on China,” Center for Strategic and International Studies, March 20, 2023, https://www.csis.org/analysis/rise-and-demise-eu-china-investment-agreement-takeaways-future-german-debate-china.

4 Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government (2021–2025) was commonly referred to as the Ampelkoalition (traffic light coalition) including the Social Democratic Party (SPD) (red), Free Democratic Party (FDP) (yellow), Alliance 90/the Greens (green). “Dare More Progress: Alliance for Freedom, Justice and Sustainability. Coalition Agreement 2021–2025,” SPD, Alliance 90/the Greens, and FDP, November 24, 2021, 144, https://www.spd.de/koalitionsvertrag2021.

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11 Barkin and Sebastian, “Tipping Point? Germany and China in an Era of Zero-Sum Competition.”

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13 Thilo Hanemann and Mikko Huotari, “Record Flows and Growing Imbalances: Chinese Investment in Europe in 2016,” Mercator Institute for China Studies and Rhodium Group, January 3, 2017, https://merics.org/en/report/record-flows-and-growing-imbalances-chinese-investment-europe-2016.

14 Arne Delfs, “Merkel Says China Increasingly Becoming Germany’s Economic Rival,” Bloomberg, June 14, 2016, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-06-14/merkel-says-china-increasingly-becoming-germany-s-economic-rival.

15 Jonathan Stearns and Ewa Krukowska, “Chinese Trade Threat Prompts Steel-Led EU Industry Protest,” Bloomberg, February 15, 2016, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-02-15/chinese-trade-threat-prompts-steel-led-eu-industry-demonstration?.

16 “Partner and Systemic Competitor.”

17 McElwee, “The Rise and Demise of the EU-China Investment Agreement.”

18 “Dare More Progress,” 144.

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20 “German Business Leaders Warn against Pulling out of China,” Associated Press, November 10, 2022, https://apnews.com/article/europe-business-china-beijing-germany-2b9ce7a1b492ac4ad708521a218697f4.

21 Geir Moulson, “German Foreign Minister Urges Caution in China Relationship,” Associated Press, October 18, 2022, https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-business-china-germany-152ada23c0bded3861d40cd55dd77169; “Chinese Premier Says Risk Prevention, Cooperation Not Opposites,” Xinhua, June 20, 2023, https://english.www.gov.cn/news/202306/20/content_WS6490d06dc6d0868f4e8dd003.html.

22 “Germany to Hold Steel and Automotive Summits: IG Metall Calls for Concrete Results,” Eurometal, September 9, 2025, https://eurometal.net/germany-to-hold-steel-and-automotive-summits-ig-metall-calls-for-concrete-results/.

23 “German Government Voted against EU Tariffs on EVs from China, Source Says,” Reuters, October 4, 2024, https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/german-government-voted-against-eu-tariffs-evs-china-source-says-2024-10-04/.

24 “German Firms Plan to Continue Operations in China,” Business Confidence Survey 2023/24, German Chamber of Commerce in China, January 24, 2024, https://china.ahk.de/en/download/business-confidence-survey.

25 Giulia Interesse, “China-Germany Economic Relations 2025: What Merz’s Leadership Means for Trade and Investment,” China Briefing, May 26, 2025, https://www.china-briefing.com/news/china-germany-relations-2025-merz-leadership-trade-investment/?utm.

26 Industry 4.0, or Fourth Industrial Revolution, refers to the ongoing transformation of manufacturing and industrial processes through digitalization, automation, and data-driven technologies. Henning Kagermann, Wolfgang Wahlster, and Johannes Helbig, “Recommendations for Implementing the Strategic Initiative INDUSTRIE 4.0,” National Academy of Science and Engineering and Forschungs Union, 2013, https://en.acatech.de/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2018/03/Final_report__Industrie_4.0_accessible.pdf.

27 “Frankfurter Innovationszentrum für Standardisierungskooperation Zwischen China und Deutschland Eröffnet,” Taicang Municipal People’s Government, June 25, 2025, https://www.globenewswire.com/de/news-release/2025/06/26/3105529/0/de/Frankfurter-Innovationszentrum-für-Standardisierungskooperation-zwischen-China-und-Deutschland-eröffnet.html.

28 Tim Nicholas Ruhlig, “The ‘Huawei Saga’ in Europe Revisited: German Lessons for the Rollout of 6G,” French Institute for International Relations, 2025, https://www.ifri.org/sites/default/files/2025-06/ifri_ruhlig_huawei_saga_europe_2025.pdf.

29 Ben Knight, “Angela Merkel Faces Party Revolt over Huawei in German 5G Rollout,” Deutsche Welle, November 22, 2019, https://www.dw.com/en/angela-merkel-faces-party-revolt-over-huawei-in-german-5g-rollout/a-51372875.

30 “The Market for 5G RAN in Europe: Share of Chinese and Non-Chinese Vendors in 31 European Countries,” Strand Consult, last visited October 14, 2025, https://strandconsult.dk/the-market-for-5g-ran-in-europe-share-of-chinese-and-non-chinese-vendors-in-31-european-countries.

31 “Made in China 2025” is a Chinese government strategy launched in 2015 to transform China into a global leader in high-tech industries and reduce dependence on foreign technology by 2025 and lead global manufacturing innovation by 2049. The plan focuses on ten priority sectors, using a mix of state planning, subsidies, investment funds, and joint venture requirements to achieve the plan’s goals. Notice of the State Council on the Publication of ‘Made in China 2025,’” Center for Security and Emerging Technology, March 10, 2022, https://cset.georgetown.edu/publication/notice-of-the-state-council-on-the-publication-of-made-in-china-2025/?utm; Dual Circulation is a focused economic strategy in which China prioritizes strengthening domestic demand and innovation (“internal circulation”) while still engaging in global trade and investment (“external circulation”), aiming to make the Chinese economy more self-reliant and resilient amid global uncertainties. In China’s context, “Dual Carbon” refers to the national goals of peaking carbon emissions by 2030 and achieving carbon neutrality by 2060, guiding its transition toward a low-carbon, sustainable economy. Hongquiao Liu, et al., “The Carbon Brief Profile: China,” Carbon Brief, November 29, 2023, https://interactive.carbonbrief.org/the-carbon-brief-profile-china/index.html.

32 Hank Bekker, “2024 (Full Year) China: Car Production and Exports by Brand,” Best-Selling Cars, January 16, 2025, https://www.best-selling-cars.com/china/2024-full-year-china-car-production-and-exports-by-brand/.

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35 “Dare More Progess.”

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37 “Progress Report on the Implementation of the Federal Government’s Policy Guidelines for the Indo-Pacific,” Federal Foreign Office of Germany, September 25, 2024, https://www.auswaertiges-amt.de/resource/blob/2677460/9fbc35a4f327e4cf6648fadb20e3b56d/240925-llip-fortschrittsbericht-data.pdf.

38 “Strategy on China of the Government of the Federal Republic of Germany.”

39 Esther Goreichy, Jacob Gunter, and Grzegorz Stec, “China’s Overcapacity and the EU + German China Policy under Merz + EU-China Trade,” Mercator Institute for China Studies, May 16, 2025, https://merics.org/en/merics-briefs/chinas-overcapacity-and-eu-german-china-policy-under-merz-eu-china-trade.

40 “China’s Position on the Political Settlement of the Ukraine Crisis,” Ministry of Foreign Affairs, People’s Republic of China, February 24, 2023, https://news.cgtn.com/news/2023-02-24/Full-text-China-s-Position-on-Political-Settlement-of-Ukraine-Crisis-1hG2dcPYSNW/index.html.

41 The Nord Stream 2 pipeline was a Russia-Germany natural gas project completed in 2021 but never operated, as Germany suspended it in 2022 following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The United States heavily criticized the pipeline, arguing that it would increase Europe’s dependence on Russian gas and undermine Ukraine’s transit role. In February 2022, two days before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Chancellor Olaf Scholz suspended certification of the pipeline.

42 “German Foreign Minister Criticises ‘Aggressive’ China Ahead of Trip to Japan,” Reuters, August 17, 2025, https://www.reuters.com/world/china/german-foreign-minister-criticises-aggressive-china-ahead-trip-japan-2025-08-17/?utm.

43 Kristin Shi-Kupfer, “Courting Berlin, Countering Brussels: China’s Twin-Track Approach to Germany and the EU,” Mercator Institute for China Studies, July 16, 2020, https://merics.org/de/kommentar/courting-berlin-countering-brussels-chinas-twin-track-approach-germany-and-eu.

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48 Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWi). Außenwirtschaftsgesetz (AWG) and Außenwirtschaftsverordnung (AWV), as amended 2020, https://www.bundeswirtschaftsministerium.de/Redaktion/DE/Artikel/Service/Gesetzesvorhaben/aenderungen-im-investitionspruefungsrecht.html.

49 “Strategy on China of the Government of the Federal Republic of Germany”, https://www.auswaertiges-amt.de/resource/blob/2608580/49d50fecc479304c3da2e2079c55e106/china-strategie-en-data.pdf; “European Economic Security Package,” European Commission, June 20, 2023, https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/api/files/document/print/en/ip_23_3358/IP_23_3358_EN.pdf?utm.

The post Germany’s policy on China: From win-win to strategic competition appeared first on Atlantic Council.

Hungary’s policy on China: Doing Beijing’s bidding

Zoltán Fehér — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 15:00:00 +0000

This is the seventh chapter of the report “Is Europe waking up to the China challenge? How geopolitics are reshaping EU and transatlantic strategy.” Read the full report here.

Among the varied China policies of European Union (EU) member states, Hungary’s position represents the extreme end of the spectrum. Under Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, the country has become China’s closest ally in the EU, effectively aligning its foreign policy with Beijing’s international priorities and repeatedly obstructing EU efforts to counter Chinese influence. In trade and investment, Hungary has welcomed sizeable Chinese investments, making it the largest recipient of Chinese foreign direct investment (FDI) in the EU in recent years. In technology, Budapest has embraced Huawei’s and ZTE’s participation in its telecommunications sector and partnered with China on numerous Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) projects, including several involving critical infrastructure. Since the start of Russia’s war on Ukraine, Hungary has even deepened its partnership with China on security matters—allowing Chinese police officers to work in the country and tolerating an expanding Chinese intelligence presence.

During the Cold War, Hungary’s relationship with China largely mirrored the trajectory of Soviet-Chinese relations. In the first decade after the establishment of the Hungarian People’s Republic and the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the Sino-Soviet partnership was close, and ties between Budapest and Beijing grew stronger in parallel. When the Sino-Soviet split emerged around 1959, Hungary’s relations with China likewise stagnated and then deteriorated through the 1960s and 1970s.

By the late 1970s, as Deng Xiaoping launched China’s “reform and opening up,” Beijing began to look to Hungary as a model for market-oriented reforms within a socialist framework. Chinese policymakers studied Hungary’s New Economic Mechanism—introduced in 1968 to decentralize economic decision-making—as well as its later reform experiments of the late 1970s and early 1980s. As Sino-Soviet tensions eased, Hungary and China gradually rebuilt and expanded their political and economic relations.

After Hungary broke free of the Soviet bloc in 1989, the focus of its foreign policy shifted toward Euro-Atlantic integration—particularly toward Western Europe and the United States—resulting in a period of neglect in relations with China, similar to that seen in other former Soviet bloc countries. Prime Minister Péter Medgyessy’s official visit to China in 2003 marked a renewed interest in developing Hungary-China relations in the 2000s, albeit within the limits of Hungary’s new membership in NATO and the EU.¹

Since 2014, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán—while distancing his country from the EU mainstream and the United States and championing “illiberal democracy”—has gradually transformed Hungary’s foreign policy and grand strategy to align more closely with the interests of China and Russia.²

The Hungarian government portrays its ties with China and Russia as part of a “connectivity” and “economic neutrality” strategy, under which Hungary seeks to maintain open channels with all major powers and avoid participation in bloc formation.³ However, this is largely rhetorical, as the Orbán government has strained relations with most of its EU and NATO allies while actively cultivating close ties with the EU’s and NATO’s competitors and adversaries.⁴

In reality, this represents a major strategic shift, as Hungary has intensified its engagement with Beijing and Moscow in economic, technological, and security affairs alike.⁵ Within the EU and NATO, the Hungarian government routinely advances Chinese and Russian interests in discussions on sensitive issues. In 2017, Hungary prevented the EU from joining a petition condemning China’s torture of detained attorneys.⁶ In 2021, it blocked a statement criticizing China’s crackdown on democracy in Hong Kong⁷—and in 2024, when NATO was considering labeling China as a “systemic challenge” to Europe, Hungary’s foreign minister protested, declaring that “Hungary does not want NATO to become an ‘anti-China’ bloc.”⁸

Hungary has faced growing criticism within the EU and from the United States for its democratic backsliding, pervasive corruption, and increasingly anti-Western foreign policy. In December 2021, the European Commission suspended a significant portion of Hungary’s cohesion funds due to the Orbán government’s undermining of the rule of law and judicial independence, as well as concerns over corruption.⁹ In response to the loss of Western funding and investment, Hungary has turned to China and Russia for its public financing and economic development—attracting huge industrial investments from Chinese manufacturers, awarding critical infrastructure projects to Russian and Chinese companies, and accepting a $1 billion loan from China on secret, government-classified terms.

Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to Hungary in May 2024 capped a decade of deepening Hungary-China relations.¹⁰ After Orbán received Xi with much pomp and circumstance, the two leaders agreed to establish an “all-weather comprehensive strategic partnership”¹¹ and embark on what they called a “golden voyage” in bilateral relations.¹² They signed several cooperation agreements in areas spanning railway and border infrastructure, oil pipelines, electric vehicle (EV) charging networks, and nuclear energy projects.¹³

Trade and investment: China’s gateway to EU markets

Over the past decade, as Hungary’s partnership with China has grown increasingly close, bilateral trade and investment have expanded significantly. The Orbán government has actively positioned Hungary as China’s regional gateway to EU markets and has sought to embed the country within China’s global supply chains.¹⁴ In 2024, trade between Hungary and China reached $16.2 billion—a 93 percent increase from 2013, when it stood at roughly $8.4 billion.¹⁵

Hungary’s cooperation with China also extends to infrastructure development. In 2015, Hungary became the first EU member state to join China’s BRI. Its flagship project is the Belgrade-Budapest high-speed railway, envisioned as a key segment of the BRI corridor connecting the Chinese-owned port of Piraeus in Greece to Duisburg, Germany.¹⁶ The construction of the railway has been contracted to Chinese and Hungarian companies since 2014, but it has yet to be completed.¹⁷ The project has proven controversial in Hungary, where the railway’s domestic segment is being built by a company owned by one of Orbán’s childhood friends. The Serbian section has drawn even greater criticism following the deadly collapse of the Chinese-renovated Novi Sad train station in November 2024, which sparked nationwide anti-government protests in Serbia.¹⁸

During Xi Jinping’s May 2024 visit, Beijing and Budapest agreed on two new railway projects: the V0 rail ring, designed to draw international transit freight traffic away from the Budapest bottleneck, and a new rail link connecting the country’s main aviation hub, Ferenc Liszt International Airport, with the capital. Xi and Orbán also agreed that Chinese companies would build “the most modern, largest, safest, and fastest border crossing between Hungary and Serbia,” near the town of Röszke.¹⁹ If completed, it would mark the first instance of a Chinese firm modernizing a border crossing within the EU’s Schengen Area.

Investment has been another key pillar of Hungary-China cooperation. In 2023, 44 percent of all Chinese FDI directed toward the EU flowed into Hungary.²⁰ Since 2020, China has been Hungary’s largest source of foreign investment.²¹ Beginning in 2022, several Chinese industrial giants—including Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Ltd. (CATL), BYD, EVE Energy, and XINWANDA—have established major factories in Hungary, especially in EV and EV battery production. CATL’s battery plant is considered the largest single investment in Hungary’s history.²²

BYD first opened an electric bus factory in Hungary in 2017, built a nearly $5 billion EV production base in Szeged in 2024, and relocated its European headquarters from the Netherlands to Hungary in 2025 after signing a strategic cooperation agreement with the Hungarian government.²³ However, China’s industrial expansion—especially its EV battery factories—has provoked controversy and opposition in Hungary, fueled by concerns over an influx of foreign workers, environmental degradation, and perceptions of “Chinese colonization.” Critics point to generous government subsidies, regulatory exemptions, and a lack of transparency or local benefit surrounding these Chinese investments.²⁴

Hungary and China have also deepened their financial ties over the past decade. Although the Bank of China has operated in Hungary since the mid-1980s, its Budapest branch received official legal authority in 2015 and was designated as the bank’s Central and Eastern European headquarters.²⁵ In 2014, the People’s Bank of China and the Central Bank of Hungary signed an agreement expanding the Renminbi Qualified Foreign Institutional Investor pilot program—allowing select foreign investors to invest directly in China’s bond and equity markets—to Hungary.²⁶ Moreover, the Budapest branch of the Bank of China was designated as the region’s first “RMB clearing bank.”

In 2016, Hungary became the first EU country to issue “panda bonds”—bonds denominated in renminbi (RMB) and issued by a non-Chinese borrower in China—to attract Chinese investors and diversify funding sources.²⁷ After an initial RMB 1 billion tranche, total issuance rose to RMB 2 billion in 2018, followed by the first-ever tranche of “green panda bonds” in 2021. In 2022, Hungary issued an additional RMB 2 billion tranche.²⁸ Because of its high public debt and restricted access to EU cohesion and reconstruction funds, Hungary took out a record-setting loan from China in 2024. The $1.17 billion loan—the largest in Hungary’s history—was intended to finance infrastructure and energy projects and was provided jointly by the China Development Bank, the Export-Import Bank of China, and the Bank of China’s Budapest branch. The deal has sparked controversy due to the government’s classification of its terms.²⁹

Technology: Defying EU and US pressure

Hungary’s cooperation with China in technology has intensified significantly over the past decade and, like its economic and security relations, has often run counter to EU and transatlantic policy priorities. Budapest has rejected calls from European nations and the United States to exclude Chinese firms from its telecommunications and critical infrastructure. Instead, it has welcomed Huawei’s investments throughout its telecommunications sector, including in the rollout of 5G infrastructure.

Huawei opened a research and development hub in Budapest in 2020 and, in 2023, signed a strategic cooperation agreement with 4iG—a company closely linked to the Orbán government—to develop 5G, fixed-line, and mobile networks across Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe.³⁰ Huawei has also established a data center in Hungary serving Chinese and other Asian firms operating in the region.

Moreover, the Orbán government has expressed interest in Huawei-made facial recognition technology powered by artificial intelligence and has purchased surveillance cameras from Hikvision, a Chinese state-owned company. These actions have sparked widespread criticism amid fears that the Hungarian government could use such tools to monitor anti-Orbán protestors.³¹ The United States has repeatedly raised concerns about this cooperation—both during the first Trump administration and the Biden administration.³² Defying allied pressure and ignoring security risks, Hungary has continued to double down on its partnership with Huawei.³³

The Orbán government has also permitted China to penetrate Hungary’s critical infrastructure. Beyond allowing Chinese firms to build railway networks and border crossings, Orbán and Xi agreed in May 2024 to cooperate on “the full spectrum of the nuclear industry.”³⁴ Such cooperation contradicts EU and US policy and prompted the Biden administration to openly criticize the partnership. The second Trump administration, which has maintained a friendly rapport with Orbán, similarly opposed Hungary granting China broad access to its telecommunications networks and critical infrastructure. In April 2025, the Trump administration’s Chargé d’Affaires in Hungary, Robert Palladino, issued a rare warning to the Orbán government: “President Trump is clear: China poses strategic challenges to the United States and our allies, challenges that require vigilance, transparency, and unity… Countering China’s malign influences is a top priority… Whether it’s about digital infrastructure, technology transfer, or critical sectors, we encourage all of our partners to make choices that support long-term sovereignty.”³⁵

Security: Intelligence cooperation and controversial agreements

As part of its grand strategic alignment, the Orbán government has established a security partnership with China, making Hungary the only EU and NATO country to do so—directly contradicting EU and transatlantic policy, which classifies China as a systemic rival. Hungary hosted the 2012 founding meeting of the Cooperation between China and Central and Eastern European Countries, formerly known as the “16+1” and “17+1” format. While other Baltic states withdrew from the grouping and Czechia and Romania became inactive following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Hungary remains a key proponent. The Orbán government regularly echoes Chinese talking points in EU and NATO discussions and vetoes resolutions critical of Beijing’s domestic or international conduct.³⁶ At the beginning of Hungary’s EU Presidency in July 2024, Orbán openly defied EU, NATO, and US positions by embarking on a series of “peace missions” related to the Ukraine war, including a visit to Beijing where he endorsed Xi Jinping’s peace plan.³⁷

Hungary’s security relationship with China extends beyond political alignment and rhetoric. In 2022, human rights organizations uncovered that the country is hosting China-operated “overseas police service stations,” tasked with providing “administrative support” for Chinese citizens in Hungary and pressuring them to return to the mainland.³⁸ In February 2024, the two countries signed a security cooperation agreement allowing Chinese police officers to patrol alongside Hungarian law enforcement—raising concerns that Beijing’s influence in this area could deepen further.³⁹ China’s extensive and often secret security agreements, combined with the spread of overseas police stations, have sparked fears that Chinese officers in Hungary might not only handle routine administrative tasks but also surveil Chinese citizens, pursue dissidents, and potentially even monitor Hungarian opposition.⁴⁰

Reports that Hungary and China are close to concluding an extradition agreement have intensified these concerns, as have signs of expanded Chinese intelligence activities in Hungary.⁴¹ Investigative journalists have revealed that the Chinese Communist Party’s external intelligence wing, the United Front Work Department (UFWD), is active in Hungary⁴²—and that one of its recent operations involved the Fudan Hungary project,⁴³ which aimed to establish a new campus of China’s Fudan University in Budapest. Ironically, while UFWD assets sought to quell local opposition, the suspicion that the campus would serve as a cover for Chinese intelligence agents fueled widespread protest and eventually forced the Hungarian government to abandon the project in 2021.⁴⁴

Hungary’s alignment with the EU’s China policy

Among EU member states, Hungary’s China policy is the most divergent from Brussels’ overall approach. The country seeks deeper engagement with China in trade, investment, technology, and security, without the guardrails the EU imposes to mitigate economic and national security risks. Moreover, Hungary actively opposes EU efforts to balance and de-risk relations with China, often working to undermine and reverse these policies.

During Xi Jinping’s May 2024 visit, Orbán pledged to advance closer EU-China relations and roll back EU de-risking measures. During Hungary’s EU Presidency (July-December 2024), he criticized EU tariffs on Chinese EVs as an “economic cold war”⁴⁵ and used Hungary’s veto power to block EU statements and decisions critical of China on Hong Kong, the Uyghurs in Xinjiang, Taiwan, and the South China Sea.⁴⁶ According to Andrzej Sadecki, “while Budapest’s limited political clout means it could not completely stop the EU’s de-risking approach to China or block increased tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles, Beijing has benefited from EU disunity and Orbán had been one of its key proxies.”⁴⁷

For more than a decade, Hungary has consistently advanced Beijing’s interests within the EU, opposing de-risking and balancing measures. In doing so, it has partially undermined EU cohesion and its alignment with the United States on China-related challenges.

Conclusion

In the three and a half decades since 1989, Hungary has transformed from a former Soviet bloc frontrunner in democratization and Euro-Atlantic integration into an electoral authoritarian country and China’s and Russia’s main ally within the EU and NATO. Under Viktor Orbán, the country has built a grand strategic alliance with Beijing and become the flagbearer of China’s interests, consistently blocking EU action addressing China’s challenges across all domains.

Hungary has developed a close economic relationship with China, facilitating substantial Chinese investments in EV and battery production, telecommunications, IT, and financial services. The country has welcomed Chinese companies like Huawei and ZTE into the telecommunications sector and allowed BRI projects to penetrate its critical infrastructure, from railways to the nuclear industry. Budapest has also aligned with Beijing on security matters. It is hosting Chinese overseas police stations and a significant and growing Chinese intelligence presence—and it has endorsed Xi Jinping’s Ukraine peace plan.

Not only has Budapest failed to align with EU China policies, but it has also actively sought to block EU-level de-risking and undermine European unity in addressing China’s strategic challenges.

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Zoltán Fehér

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1 Levente Horváth, “Magyar-Kínai Diplomáciai Kapcsolatok [Hungary-China Diplomatic Relations]” in Levente Horváth, ed., “Eredmények és Kihívások: A Magyar-Kínai Diplomácia 75 Éve [Achievements and Challenges: 75 years of Hungary-China diplomacy],” John von Neumann University, Eurasia Center, 2024, https://eurasiacenter.hu/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/75_evfordulo_online.pdf.

2 Zoltán Fehér, “The Implications of the Rise of Small and Middle Powers for U.S.-China Great Power Competition” in Philip Baxter, ed., Examining Perspectives of Small-to-Medium Powers in Emergent Great Power Competition (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2025), https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-86901-3_10.

3 Balázs Orbán, Hussar Cut: The Hungarian Strategy for Connectivity (Budapest: MCC Press, 2024).

4 Zoltán Fehér, “Hogyan Csináljunk Nagystratégiát? [How to Do Grand Strategy?],” Országút, September 23, 2024, https://orszagut.com/kozelet/hogyan-csinaljunk-nagystrategiat-6792.

5 Fehér, “The Implications of the Rise of Small and Middle Powers for U.S.-China Great Power Competition.”

6 Szabolcs Panyi, “Hungary in the Midst of a U.S.-Huawei War,” Direkt36, November 1, 2019, https://vsquare.org/hungary-in-the-midst-of-a-u-s-huawei-war/.

7 Hans von der Burchard and Jacopo Barigazzi, “Germany Slams Hungary for Blocking EU Criticism of China on Hong Kong,” Politico, May 10, 2021, https://www.politico.eu/article/german-foreign-minister-slams-hungary-for-blocking-hong-kong-conclusions/.

8 “Hungary Will Not Support NATO Becoming ‘anti-China’ Bloc, Minister Says,” Reuters, July 11, 2024, https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/hungary-will-not-support-nato-becoming-anti-china-bloc-minister-says-2024-07-11/.

9 Zselyke Csáky, “Freezing EU Funds: An Effective Tool to Enforce the Rule of Law?” Centre for European Reform, February 27, 2025, https://www.cer.eu/insights/freezing-eu-funds-effective-tool-enforce-rule-law.

10 Zoltán Fehér, “Xi Jinping Visited Europe to Divide It. What Happens Next Could Determine If He Succeeds,” Atlantic Council, June 1, 2024, https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/xi-jinping-visited-europe-to-divide-it-what-happens-next-could-determine-if-he-succeeds/.

11 James Kynge and Marton Dunai, “Xi Jinping Upgrades China’s Ties with Hungary to ‘All-Weather’ Partnership,” Financial Times, May 9, 2024, https://www.ft.com/content/563be6d0-ab62-47cc-9076-5dd20cac8cbd.

12 Csin-ping Hszi, “Kína és Magyarország Együtt Lép az ‘Arany Vízi Útra,’” Magyar Nemzet, May 7, 2024, https://magyarnemzet.hu/velemeny/2024/05/kina-es-magyarorszag-egyutt-lep-az-arany-vizi-utra#google_vignette.

13 Bela Szandelszky, “Hungary and China Sign Strategic Cooperation Agreement during Visit by Chinese President Xi,” Associated Press, May 9, 2024, https://apnews.com/article/chinas-xi-welcomed-hungary-talks-orban-0719880a351a5ef0763ae6a623a7798b.

14 Matt Boyse, “China Increasing Its Bets on Hungary and Serbia,” Geopolitical Intelligence Services, July 22, 2024, https://www.gisreportsonline.com/r/china-interests-central-europe/.

15 Tianyi Xiao, “China-Hungary Bilateral Relations: Trade and Investment Outlook,” China Briefing, June 27, 2024, https://www.china-briefing.com/news/china-hungary-bilateral-relations-trade-and-investment-outlook; “China and Hungary,” Ministry of Foreign Affairs, People’s Republic of China, 2024, https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/gjhdq_665435/3265_665445/3175_664570/.

16 Zoltán Kiszelly, “China’s European Bridgehead,” Geopolitical Intelligence Services, June 26, 2025, https://www.gisreportsonline.com/r/china-hungary.

17 Ibid.

18 Jens Kastner, “Botched Belt and Road Project Triggers Political Crisis in Serbia,” Nikkei Asia, December 19, 2024, https://asia.nikkei.com/spotlight/belt-and-road/botched-belt-and-road-project-triggers-political-crisis-in-serbia.

19 Ádám Bráder, “Historic Visit of Chinese President Xi Jinping to Hungary Yields Eighteen Significant Agreements,” Hungarian Conservative, May 10, 2024, https://www.hungarianconservative.com/articles/current/historic_visit_bilateral_agreements_china_hungary_airport_railway_oil-pipeline_szijjarto.

20 “Tavaly az Európába Irányuló Kínai Beruházások 44 Százaléka Magyarországra Érkezett,” Kormany, November 26, 2024, https://kormany.hu/hirek/tavaly-az-europaba-iranyulo-kinai-beruhazasok-44-szazaleka-magyarorszagra-erkezett.

21 Xiao, “China-Hungary Bilateral Relations.”

22 Ibid.

23 “BYD Moves European HQ to Hungary, Sets up €250mn Business and Development,” BNE Intellinews, May 16, 2025, https://www.intellinews.com/byd-moves-european-hq-to-hungary-sets-up-250mn-business-and-development-381453.

24 Amerikai Népszava, “Nem Leszünk Kínai Gyarmat, Mert Már az Vagyunk,” Amerikai Népszava, May 7, 2024, https://nepszava.us/nem-leszunk-kinai-gyarmat-mert-mar-az-vagyunk; “Szegedbe is Belemar a Kínai Gyarmatosítás,” Greenfo, https://greenfo.hu/hir/szegedbe-is-belemar-a-kinai-gyarmatositas/; Besenyei Zsolt, “Azt Nem Ígérték, Hogy Kínai és Orosz Gyarmat se Leszünk,” Szeged.hu, April 15, 2024, https://szeged.hu/cikk/azt-nem-igertek-hogy-kinai-es-orosz-gyarmat-se-leszunk-besenyei-zsolt-jegyzete; Karl Harenbrock, “Behind China’s Massive Bet on Hungary,” Deutsche Welle, YouTube video, July 4, 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fiCo0BASdkA.

25 “Interview: Hungary Looks Forward to Further Cooperation with China, Official Says,” Xinhua News Agency, May 5, 2024, https://eng.yidaiyilu.gov.cn/p/0DG0579C.html.

26 Choo Lye Tan, “The Renminbi Qualiﬁed Foreign Institutional Investor Program—Opportunities and Challenges for International Investors Interested in Direct Access to PRC Securities with Offshore Renminbi,” Investment Lawyer 21, 8 (2014), https://files.klgates.com/files/publication/a3986722-a0c2-436c-ad83-5474625d86d7/presentation/publicationattachment/04e0d5b1-d0f6-4bb1-a5a0-637065d6f6e9/the_renminbi_qualified_foreign_institutional%20investor_program.pdf.

27 “Panda Bonds Explained: Understanding China’s Growing Bond Market,” Deutsche Bank, February 28, 2025, https://www.db.com/news/detail/20250228-panda-bonds-explained-understanding-china-s-growing-bond-market?language_id=1.

28 “China and Hungary”; “Long-Term Cooperation between MBH Bank and Bank of China in Sight,” MTI-Hungary Today, September 27, 2024, https://hungarytoday.hu/long-term-cooperation-between-mbh-bank-and-bank-of-china-in-sight/.

29 Csongor Körömi, “Hungary Quietly Takes €1B Loan from Chinese Banks,” Politico, July 25, 2024, https://www.politico.eu/article/budapest-hungary-took-1-billion-loan-chinese-banks-peter-szijjarto/.

30 “Hungary MOU with Huawei Angers US,” Central European Times, November 2, 2023, https://centraleuropeantimes.com/hungary-mou-with-huawei-angers-us/.

31 Kiszelly, “China’s European Bridgehead”; Sebestyén Hompot, “Orbán Doubles Down on Turning Hungary into a Regional Hub of Chinese Influence,” China Observers in Central and Eastern Europe, November 9, 2023, https://chinaobservers.eu/orban-doubles-down-on-turning-hungary-into-a-regional-hub-of-chinese-influence; “Chinese-Made Surveillance Cameras Are Spreading Across Eastern Europe, Despite Security Concerns,” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, May 6, 2024, https://www.rferl.org/a/china-surveillance-cameras-europe-dahua-hikvision/32930737.html.

32 Tamara Gyurkó, “Hungary Cooperating with Chinese Huawei: Biden Cabinet Outraged,” Daily News Hungary, October 31, 2023, https://dailynewshungary.com/hungarys-cooperating-with-chinese-huawei-biden-cabinet-outraged.

33 Hompot, “Orbán Doubles Down on Turning Hungary into a Regional Hub of Chinese Influence.”

34 “Hungary and China Sign Nuclear Energy Cooperation Agreement,” World Nuclear News, May 10, 2024, https://world-nuclear-news.org/articles/hungary-and-china-sign-nuclear-cooperation-agreeme; David Rogers, “China, Hungary Agree Rail Schemes and ‘Full-Spectrum’ Nuclear Cooperation,” Global Construction Review, May 15, 2024, https://www.globalconstructionreview.com/china-hungary-agree-rail-schemes-and-full-spectrum-nuclear-cooperation.

35 US Embassy Budapest, “Chargé d’Affaires Robert Palladino’s Remarks at the Central European Summit,” YouTube video, April 15, 2025, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C__usttFASw.

36 Panyi, “Hungary in the Midst of a U.S.-Huawei War”; von der Burchard and Barigazzi, “Germany Slams Hungary for Blocking EU Criticism of China on Hong Kong.”

37 Zoltán Fehér, “‘What Will NATO Leaders Make of Orbán’s ‘Peace Missions?’ Live Expertise Blog on the Washington NATO Summit,” Atlantic Council, July 10, 2024, https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/live-expertise-and-behind-the-scenes-insight-as-nato-leaders-gather-at-the-washington-summit/#feher-hungary-orban-visits; Jon Jackson, “NATO Country Leader Endorses China’s Peace Plan for Russia-Ukraine War,” Newsweek, May 9, 2024, https://www.newsweek.com/nato-country-leader-endorses-chinas-peace-plan-russia-ukraine-war-1899102.

38 Akos Keller-Alant, Mila Manojlovic, and Reid Standish, “Reports Of China’s Overseas ‘Police Stations’ Spark Controversy, Denial in Hungary And Serbia,” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, November 9, 2022, https://www.rferl.org/a/reports-china-policestations-controversy-denial-hungary-serbia/32122899.html; “110 Overseas: 230,000 Chinese ‘Persuaded to Return,’” Safeguard Defenders, September 12, 2022, https://safeguarddefenders.com/en/blog/110-overseas-230000-chinese-persuaded-return.

39 Joseph Bebel, “Extradition Treaty Signals Beijing’s Wider Designs in Hungary,” Eurasia Daily Monitor, Jamestown Foundation, September 4, 2025, https://jamestown.org/program/extradition-treaty-signals-beijings-wider-designs-in-hungary; Liz Lee and Ryan Woo, “In Unusual Move, China Offers to Back Hungary in Security Matters,” Reuters, February 20, 2024, https://www.reuters.com/world/unusual-move-china-offers-back-hungary-security-matters-2024-02-19; Filip Jirouš, “PRC Exploitation of Russian Intelligence Networks in Europe,” China Brief 24, 8 (2024), https://jamestown.org/program/prc-exploitation-of-russian-intelligence-networks-in-europe.

40 Bebel, “Extradition Treaty Signals Beijing’s Wider Designs in Hungary.”

41 Jakub Janda and Richard Kraemer, “Orban’s Hungary: A Russia and China Proxy Weakening Europe,” European Values Center for Security Policy, December 8, 2021, 14, https://europeanvalues.cz/en/orbans-hungary-a-russia-and-china-proxy-weakening-europe.

42 Kamilla Marton, “How China’s United Front Extends Its Influence in Hungary,” Direkt36, October 5, 2024, https://vsquare.org/china-ccp-united-front-influence-hungary.

43 Ibid.

44 Ágota Révész, “The Pandora’s Box of Fudan Hungary,” Daedalus 153, 2 (2024), 207–216, https://direct.mit.edu/daed/article/153/2/207/121264/The-Pandora-s-Box-of-Fudan-Hungary.

45 Justin Spike, “EU Tariffs on Chinese Electric Vehicles Are Part of an ‘Economic Cold War,’ Hungary’s Orbán Says,” Associated Press, October 4, 2024, https://apnews.com/article/hungary-orban-eu-china-electric-vehicles-b255691c021fb901ceb2f1563e3a4346.

46 Samuel Dempsey, “The Sino-Hungarian Relationship’s Effects on the EU and NATO,” Blue Europe, August 2, 2024, https://www.blue-europe.eu/analysis-en/short-analysis/the-sino-hungarian-relationships-effects-on-the-eu-and-nato; Ramses A. Wessel and Viktor Szép, “The Implementation of Article 31 of the Treaty on European Union and the Use of Qualified Majority,” European Parliament, November 11, 2022, https://www.europarl.europa.eu/thinktank/en/document/IPOL_STU(2022)739139.

47 Andrzej Sadecki, “Hungary’s Orbán Walks US-China Tightrope,” Center for European Policy Analysis, April 3, 2025,
https://cepa.org/article/hungarys-orban-walks-us-china-tightrope.

The post Hungary’s policy on China: Doing Beijing’s bidding appeared first on Atlantic Council.

Czechia’s policy on China: Swinging between engagement and de-risking

Zoltán Fehér — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 15:00:00 +0000

This is the ninth chapter of the report “Is Europe waking up to the China challenge? How geopolitics are reshaping EU and transatlantic strategy.” Read the full report here.

Although Czechia emerged as one of the EU’s early hawks and whistleblowers on China, its overall stance has shifted markedly over the past two decades—oscillating between engagement and balancing. These fluctuations were largely driven by domestic political divisions and sustained Chinese influence efforts. Controversies surrounding Chinese investments accelerated Czechia’s rise as a leading advocate of economic security and “de-risking.” Within the EU, the country has distinguished itself through a forward-looking approach to technological risk management grounded in anticipatory policy principles, although implementation has been uneven. Over the past decade, its approach has alternated between neglect and assertiveness in response to political shifts, economic pressures, and changing perceptions of China’s role in Europe.

High-level engagement with Taiwan has remained a cornerstone of Czechia’s strategy to counter Beijing’s influence, while Czech civil and political actors have grown increasingly vigilant about Chinese interference. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—openly supported by China—Prague’s security posture has hardened further. The 2023 security strategy and the 2025 foreign policy framework codified this shift, defining China as a systemic challenge across economic, technological, diplomatic, and security dimensions. However, with the return of Andrej Babiš to power after the October 2025 elections, Czechia’s China policy could once again swing back toward engagement.

Early Czechia-China relations

Initial Czech perceptions of China were decisively shaped in 1989 by two pivotal and sharply divergent historical moments: Czechoslovakia’s anti-communist Velvet Revolution and China’s violent suppression of the Tiananmen protests. These twin events produced a lasting moral and political contrast. Over the following two decades, both the Czech public and political elite came to view China as a state that had abandoned liberalization and reverted to authoritarian Communism, while the newly independent Czech Republic defined its post-communist identity through democratization and human-rights advocacy. This divergence was personified by former dissident and first democratic President Václav Havel, whose foreign policy prioritized human rights and solidarity with political prisoners in China and elsewhere. Czechia’s frequent criticism of China’s human rights violations, along with the Dalai Lama’s 2009 visit to Prague, prompted China to freeze diplomatic communications with the country until 2012.¹

In the early 2010s, Czech policy toward China underwent a sharp reversal, driven by Beijing’s expanding influence efforts and the rise of pro-China forces within Czech politics. In 2012, Czechia joined the “16+1” format— a Chinese initiative to promote business and investment relations between China and Central and Eastern European countries—marking the start of a decade-long rapprochement. The election of Miloš Zeman as president in 2013, followed by his Social Democratic Party government in 2014, consolidated this pro-engagement trajectory. Under Zeman, Czechia joined the Belt and Road Initiative in 2016, coinciding with Xi Jinping’s landmark visit to Prague—the first by a Chinese head of state—which produced a “strategic partnership” agreement.² During the Zeman era, bilateral ties deepened through high-level visits—Zeman visited China seven times between 2013 and 2020—and high-profile Chinese investments, particularly by the Shanghai-based CEFC China Energy, whose chairman became one of Zeman’s economic advisers, and by the PPF Group, led by Czech billionaire Petr Kellner. Yet these ventures soon drew scrutiny over political influence and opaque financing, and both ultimately collapsed, underscoring the limits of the Czech-Chinese rapprochement.³

From the late 2010s onward, Czech policy toward China entered a new phase marked by growing skepticism and assertive distancing. During this period, Czechia emerged as one of Europe’s early advocates of “de-risking” from China, and its senior officials undertook high-profile visits to Taiwan and deepened bilateral cooperation with the island—moves that elicited sharp reactions from Beijing. In 2019, Prague’s mayor terminated the capital’s sister-city agreement with Beijing, symbolizing the shift in public and political attitudes. The 2021 parliamentary elections further consolidated this turn: voters ousted the traditionally pro-China Social Democrats and Communists from parliament, electing Petr Fiala’s center-right coalition— including the China-critical Pirate Party—which adopted a distinctly hawkish line toward Beijing. The election of Petr Pavel to the presidency in 2023 reinforced this orientation. His 2025 visit to Taiwan—the first by a European head of state—brought Sino-Czech relations to a historic low. Yet political volatility persists. Following the October 2025 elections, former Prime Minister Andrej Babiš is returning to power and is expected to form a coalition with far-right parties such as Freedom and Direct Democracy (SPD) and Motorists for Themselves, potentially steering Czechia’s China policy back toward engagement and continuing the cyclical pattern that has long characterized Czechia’s stance on Beijing.⁴

Trade and investment: Chinese acquisitions and domestic backlash

Trade between Czechia and China is substantial but highly asymmetrical. Imports from China reached €36.7 billion in 2024, compared to exports of €3.0 billion, leaving a deficit of €33.7 billion.⁵ Machinery, electronics, and consumer goods dominate imports, while Czech exports remain modest, concentrated in intermediate goods and automotive products. Large Czech manufacturers such as Škoda maintain operations in China, but policymakers have never treated these ties as strategically critical dependencies.

Czechia’s economic relations with China have mirrored the broader oscillation in its China policy between engagement and caution. During the Zeman era, two major Chinese investment episodes—initially promoted as symbols of strategic partnership—ultimately provoked domestic backlash and deepened skepticism toward Beijing. The first was CEFC China Energy’s 2015 move into the Czech market. With support from President Zeman, the Shanghai-based conglomerate—reportedly linked to the Chinese Communist Party and the People’s Liberation Army—rapidly acquired stakes in prominent Czech companies, including Czech Airlines, Lobkowicz Brewery, soccer club SK Slavia Prague, the Central European investment group J&T, the advertising firm Médea, and several landmark Prague properties. Zeman’s decision to appoint CEFC chairman Ye Jianming as his economic adviser further fueled controversy. Investigations by Czech media and think tanks soon raised concerns over opaque financing and political influence. These fears intensified in 2018 when Ye was detained in China for alleged economic crimes and CEFC was absorbed by the Chinese state-owned CITIC Group, giving Beijing indirect control over key Czech media holdings.⁶

The second case involved the PPF Group, a major Czech investment conglomerate led by billionaire Petr Kellner. PPF’s ventures channeling Chinese investments into Czech telecommunications, finance, and media—alongside cooperation with Zeman in cultivating business ties with China and Russia—were widely perceived as part of a broader influence network. Coverage in PPF-friendly media often portrayed Chinese investment favorably while adopting critical tones toward the United States and the EU. However, Kellner’s death in a 2021 helicopter crash ended the company’s China-focused expansion.⁷

Together, the CEFC and PPF cases came to epitomize the risks of politically driven economic engagement with China. Beyond these scandals, the Czech public was generally disappointed that most Chinese investment promises never materialized. The combination of these factors eroded the perception of economic partnership as a foreign-policy success and bolstered calls for a more guarded, security-focused stance toward Chinese capital.

Drawing lessons from the scandals surrounding CEFC and PPF, Czech authorities began to construct one of Central Europe’s most comprehensive frameworks for screening and managing foreign economic influence. As a result, Czechia had already taken its first concrete steps toward de-risking, well before the EU formally embraced the concept of economic security. In 2018, the Czech National Bank blocked CEFC’s planned $1 billion acquisition of a majority stake in the financial group J&T—which operated subsidiaries across Slovakia, Croatia, Russia, and Barbados—on the grounds of opaque funding sources. The intervention reflected a growing institutional awareness of financial and strategic vulnerabilities associated with Chinese capital—particularly since the European Central Bank had already approved the deal.⁸

Building on this experience, Czechia adopted the Foreign Investment Screening Act in May 2021, creating a robust national mechanism to vet acquisitions in sensitive sectors such as defense, critical infrastructure, and advanced data services.⁹ The law empowers authorities to approve, condition, or block transactions where risks cannot be mitigated, and its consistent enforcement has earned recognition as a model within the EU. The Mercator Institute for China Studies has cited the Czech FDI regime as an example for other member states to follow.¹⁰

Czechia has also extended this vigilance to the research domain: universities and funding agencies now apply strict research-security guardrails, systematically screening partnerships for dual-use and technology-transfer risks. Collectively, these measures have positioned Czechia as a regional frontrunner in translating early lessons from Chinese investment controversies into durable instruments of national and European economic security.

A central pillar of Czechia’s de-risking efforts has been the deepening of its economic ties with Taiwan, whose investments in the country now exceed China’s several times over. The flagship example of this growing relationship is the expansion of Taiwanese electronics manufacturer Foxxconn into Czechia, where its subsidiary Foxconn CZ employs five thousand workers and ranks as the sixth-largest corporation in the country by revenue.¹¹

Technology: De-risking amid uneven enforcement

Czechia has also stood out among EU member states for its pioneering efforts in technological de-risking, which are both anticipatory and risk-based, although the execution of its policies has shown inconsistencies. Cybersecurity emerged as a prominent concern in Czech efforts to strengthen technological resilience. In December 2018, the National Cyber and Information Security Agency (NÚKIB) issued a warning about potential risks associated with Chinese technology suppliers, including Huawei and ZTE. The decision to publish the alert without prior government clearance sparked a political controversy in Prague, involving President Zeman, Prime Minister Babiš, opposition leaders, and NÚKIB officials. Zeman called NÚKIB’s warning unsubstantiated—and Babiš eventually fired NÚKIB’s director. Although the agency had briefed the government and intelligence services prior to publication, it could never fully explain its unilateral decision to make the warning public without cabinet consent. The domestic tensions caused by this move quickly spilled into foreign policy, with the Chinese embassy denouncing the warning as unfounded and demanding an official apology. This, in turn, prompted a public exchange of statements between Babiš and the Chinese ambassador that further strained bilateral relations.¹²

As a result of the NÚKIB scandal, Czech media and the public turned on Huawei, and the backlash spilled over to affect PPF, which had made a deal with Huawei to build a 5G network for its telecom subsidiary O2. Public pressure forced PPF to withdraw from the agreement and instead contract Ericsson to build the 5G network. Czech telecom operators subsequently diversified their suppliers for 5G infrastructure.

Czech political actors have also played a role in European and international cybersecurity cooperation. Backed by Prime Minister Babiš, the city of Prague hosted the 5G Security Conference 2019—and during its EU Presidency in 2022, Czechia hosted a high-level cybersecurity conference with representatives from over eighty countries. Moreover, the country’s EU Commissioner Věra Jourová served as Commissioner for Values and Transparency between 2019 and 2024, overseeing portfolios on cyberspace security and the fight against disinformation.

However, implementation of technological de-risking from China has been uneven. Czechia’s leading telecom companies—T-Mobile, Vodafone, and O2—have continued to use Huawei technology. Czech state institutions, including the police and Czech state television, are bound by law to select the lowest bidder for technology procurement, and some have therefore accepted bids from Chinese companies such as Huawei and ZTE.

Nevertheless, Czechia has taken a series of proactive measures to limit its technological exposure to China’s coercive or opaque practices. For example, authorities excluded China from the public tender for the expansion of the Dukovany nuclear power plant. In 2025, Czech authorities attributed cyber operations targeting the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to Chinese actors and banned the use of any products by the Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) startup DeepSeek in state administration.¹³ That same year, NÚKIB issued a warning on personal-data transfers, expanding the scope of oversight to include data governance.¹⁴ Some of Czechia’s cybersecurity measures, including its computer emergency response teams, have set benchmarks within the EU and can serve as examples for other member states to follow.¹⁵

Czechia has also demonstrated a clear preference for working with trusted allies on technology issues. Partnerships with Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea are framed both as values-driven alliances and as practical vehicles for modernizing Czech industry. Cooperation spans semiconductors, precision machinery, and talent development, including Taiwanese semiconductor facilities in Prague and Brno.¹⁶ This networked approach reflects a long-standing Czech strategy: collaborate with trusted democracies on sensitive technologies while minimizing exposure to Chinese supply chains.

Security: China as a systemic challenge, Taiwan as an ally

Czechia’s security policy has evolved in tandem with broader government policy toward China over the decades. While pro-China governments historically did not regard Beijing as a malign actor in Central Europe, more recent administrations have adopted a balancing approach and actively pushed back against Chinese operations.

Taiwan has long been a pillar of Czechia’s strategic balancing against China. In 2019, the Prague city council canceled a partnership agreement with Beijing and signed a new pact with Taipei, despite retaliatory measures by China. A year later, Senate President Miloš Vystrčil visited Taiwan and delivered his “I am Taiwanese” speech, provoking Beijing and prompting threats against Czech companies operating in China. In 2023, lower-house Speaker Markéta Pekarová Adamová led a large delegation that signed eleven memoranda of understanding in Taipei, followed by additional agreements on industrial development and semiconductors in 2024 and 2025. The Taiwanese foreign minister visited Prague in both 2021 and 2023—and following his election in January 2023, President Petr Pavel accepted a congratulatory phone call from Taiwan’s president Tsai Ing-wen. This was a first for a European head of state and drew further criticism from Beijing. Pavel’s August 2025 visit with the Dalai Lama ultimately prompted China to sever ties with the Czech president entirely.¹⁷

Czech civil society has also engaged with the security challenges that China poses. Universities have tightened vetting of foreign partnerships, particularly with Chinese institutions, to reduce risks of espionage or undue influence. NGOs and think-tanks, such as China Observers in Central and Eastern Europe—a Czech organization focused on analyzing China’s political and economic influence—play a key role in sustaining informed debate on the risks posed by Chinese engagement.¹⁸ Academia, NGOs, municipalities, and media have collectively fostered a critical stance toward China, informed by historical memory of authoritarian great-power domination.

Czech intelligence has consistently flagged China as a source of espionage and influence operations. The annual reports of the Czech Security Information Service highlight Chinese use of academic and business channels to cultivate access. NÚKIB’s 2018 warning on Huawei and ZTE marked a milestone in European cybersecurity, compelling operators of critical infrastructure to assess risks well ahead of the EU’s 5G Toolbox. Subsequent actions extended vigilance to software and data: in May 2025, Prague attributed a multi-year cyber-espionage campaign against its foreign ministry to APT3, a network of Chinese state-sponsored intelligence officers, contract hackers, and support staff;¹⁹ in July 2025, the Czech telecom regulator restricted the use of the Chinese DeepSeek AI model in high-risk infrastructure;²⁰ and in September 2025, NÚKIB issued a warning on the transfer of personal data to China.²¹ Together, these measures demonstrate Czechia’s consistent treatment of China as a security and intelligence threat.

Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—which has been backed by China—Czech security policy has hardened further toward Beijing. The Czech government has deprioritized the Cooperation between China and Central and Eastern European Countries—in fact, Foreign Minister Jan Lipavský declared the “club” effectively dead for Central Europe in 2023.²² Czechia’s 2023 security strategy and the 2025 foreign policy framework codify what had already become the de facto guiding principle of Czech foreign and security policy under the Fiala government: namely, that China represents a systemic challenge across economic, technological, diplomatic, and security dimensions.

In the 2023 strategy, China is explicitly identified as a global “systemic challenge,” not only due to its influence operations in democratic states, but also because of its pursuit of alternative norms for the international order. The document situates China and Russia jointly as actors seeking to weaken European unity and the rules-based system, framing Czechia’s response in terms of resilience, institutional vigilance, and a whole-of-society approach. The strategy elevates economic security alongside cyber, internal, and defense domains as central arenas of strategic concern, signaling that techno-economic dependencies, supply-chain vulnerabilities, and investment-driven influence have become mainstream considerations in threat assessment.²³

The 2025 foreign policy framework builds directly on that security doctrine, embedding the logic of “security first” across diplomatic, economic, and normative fronts. It underscores that safeguarding the state and its citizens is now the central objective of Czech foreign policy and places economic and technological security at the heart of external relations. In mapping the strategic environment, the framework highlights that challenges today are not solely military but also technological, geoeconomic, and ideological—thereby linking security to both national interest and global competition. By doing so, the framework institutionalizes longstanding Czech practice: engagement with external actors is now assessed against resilience, reciprocity, and risk mitigation rather than purely economic or diplomatic opportunity.²⁴

Together, these documents signal a qualitative shift: China is no longer seen merely as a partner or competitor, but as a structural challenge intersecting with Europe’s strategic agenda. The integration of economic security into the core of Czech foreign and security doctrines reinforces the idea that Czechia aims to convert episodic reactive measures into a durable strategic posture toward China.

Czechia’s alignment with the EU’s China policy

Czechia’s stance on EU economic security and de-risking policies has shifted considerably over the past decade—alternating between periods of engagement and strategic balancing—reflecting the country’s polarized domestic politics, competing economic interests, and evolving perceptions of Chinese influence. These shifts are best understood across two distinct phases: the 2013-2021 period, shaped by Zeman’s pro-China governments and marked by selective alignment and strategic ambiguity, and the period since 2021, under more hawkish leadership, defined by closer convergence with Brussels and a pragmatic approach to balancing.

During Zeman’s decade in office, backed by Social Democratic and ANO-led coalitions, Czechia’s engagement with China complicated its alignment with EU-level de-risking efforts. While Prague voiced rhetorical support for bloc-wide instruments—such as investment screening and export-control coordination—implementation was uneven and politically contested, reflecting domestic divisions and entrenched Chinese influence networks. The government’s focus on attracting Chinese capital dampened advocacy for stricter economic-security safeguards, even as Czech institutions were among the first to develop regulatory tools later adopted at the European level. Analysts note that this duality—public endorsement of resilience frameworks combined with permissive domestic practice—left Czech policy Janus-faced, oscillating between security-driven caution and commercial opportunism.

Despite these inconsistencies, Czechia’s early encounters with CEFC and PPF’s opaque investments fostered an awareness of the risks inherent in strategic dependence and unclear ownership. This recognition informed Prague’s backing for emerging EU instruments such as foreign investment screening and anti-coercion mechanisms, even as political allies of Zeman resisted their enforcement at home. In this sense, Czechia under Zeman anticipated several elements of the EU’s later Economic Security Strategy, though it remained an unreliable advocate for their consistent implementation.²⁵

Since 2021, under more hawkish governments, Czechia has shifted decisively toward the European mainstream on de-risking, more closely aligning its rhetoric and instruments with the European Commission’s agenda. It now emphasizes that economic resilience and competitiveness must be advanced through EU-wide mechanisms—such as export controls, research-security standards, and anti-coercion measures—rather than bilateral initiatives.²⁶

Still, Czechia’s implementation of this strategy remains pragmatic rather than doctrinaire. In October 2024, the country abstained from a European Council vote on tariffs targeting Chinese electric-vehicle imports, aiming to balance its automotive sector’s exposure with its broader commitment to addressing structural distortions.²⁷ Officials maintained that only coordinated EU action—not unilateral Czech measures—could effectively counter Chinese state capitalism while preserving European competitiveness. Within Central Europe, Czechia thus occupies the security-conscious end of the policy spectrum, distinguishing itself from member states that initially favored engagement with Beijing.

Across both political cycles, Prague has played a meaningful role in shaping EU frameworks on investment screening, subsidy control, and anti-coercion tools. Yet while its strategic rationale has increasingly converged with Brussels, the consistency of national implementation still hinges on domestic political alignment. The evolution from Zeman’s pro-China engagement to the center-right’s structured balancing underscores how Czechia’s approach to China—and to EU economic-security governance—remains dynamic, adaptive, and politically contested.

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Zoltán Fehér

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1 Rudolf Fürst, “Czechia: Early Ideological Whistleblower Turned European Mainstream” in Patrik Andersson and Frida Lindberg, eds., “National Perspectives on Europe’s De-Risking from China,” European Think-Tank Network on China, 2024, https://merics.org/sites/default/files/2024-06/ETNC%202024_National%20Perspectives%20on%20Europe’s%20De-risking%20from%20China_FINAL_low.pdf; Matt Boyse, “China Increasing Its Bets on Hungary and Serbia,” Geopolitical Intelligence Services, July 22, 2024, https://www.gisreportsonline.com/r/china-interests-central-europe/.

2 Jason Hovet and Jan Lopatka, “Chinese, Czech Presidents Forge Strategic Partnership on Prague Visit,” Reuters, March 29, 2016, https://www.reuters.com/article/world/chinese-czech-presidents-forge-strategic-partnership-on-prague-visit-idUSKCN0WV1F0/; “Enlargement of Memorandum of Understanding,” Czech National Bank, March 29, 2016, https://www.cnb.cz/en/cnb-news/press-releases/Enlargement-of-Memorandum-of-Understanding-00001.

3 Olga Lomová, “The Two Faces of Czech China Policy,” Echowall, July 8, 2020, https://www.echo-wall.eu/china-through-european-lens/off/two-faces-czech-china-policy; Boyse, “China Increasing Its Bets on Hungary and Serbia”; Dalibor Rohac, “Chinese Influence in Central and Eastern Europe,” American Enterprise Institute, September 11, 2024, https://www.aei.org/research-products/testimony/chinese-influence-in-central-and-eastern-europe/; Fürst, “Czechia: Early Ideological Whistleblower Turned European Mainstream.”

4 Rohac, “Chinese Influence in Central and Eastern Europe”; Boyse, “China Increasing Its Bets on Hungary and Serbia”; Fürst, “Czechia: Early Ideological Whistleblower Turned European Mainstream.”

5 “China/Czechia,” Observatory of Economic Complexity, June 2025, https://oec.world/en/profile/bilateral-country/chn/partner/cze.

6 Tobiáš Lipold, “The Rise and Fall of China-Czechia Relations,” Diplomat, October 6, 2025. https://thediplomat.com/2025/10/the-rise-and-fall-of-china-czechia-relations/; Lomová, “The Two Faces of Czech China Policy”; Rohac, “Chinese Influence in Central and Eastern Europe”; Fürst, “Czechia: Early Ideological Whistleblower Turned European Mainstream”; “Chinese State-Controlled CITIC Takes over CEFC Assets in Czech Republic,” Alliance For Securing Democracy, last visited October 14, 2025, https://securingdemocracy.gmfus.org/incident/chinese-state-controlled-citic-takes-over-cefc-assets-in-czech-republic/.

7 Rohac, “Chinese Influence in Central and Eastern Europe”; Fürst, “Czechia: Early Ideological Whistleblower Turned European Mainstream”; Lomová, “The Two Faces of Czech China Policy.”

8 Robert Muller, “China’s CEFC Hits Regulatory Hurdle in Pursuit of Czech JTFG Stake: Source,” Reuters, January 3, 2018, https://sg.finance.yahoo.com/news/chinas-cefc-hits-regulatory-hurdle-pursuit-czech-jtfg-192725091–sector.html.

9 “Act on FDI Screening,” Parliament of the Czech Republic, January 19, 2021, https://mpo.gov.cz/assets/en/foreign-trade/investment-screening/legislation/2022/11/Act-on-FDI-Screening_unofficial-translation_1.pdf.

10 “Profiling European Countries’ Resilience towards China,” Mercator Institute for China Studies, October 31, 2024, https://merics.org/en/report/profiling-european-countries-resilience-towards-china.

11 Daniel McVicar, “How the Czech Republic Became One of Taiwan’s Closest European Partners and What It Means for EU-China Relations,” Council on Foreign Relations, April 24, 2023, https://www.cfr.org/blog/how-czech-republic-became-one-taiwans-closest-european-partners-and-what-it-means-eu-china.

12 Dušan Navrátil, “Report on the State of Cybersecurity in the Czech Republic in 2018,” National Cyber and Information Security Agency, 2018, https://nukib.gov.cz/download/publications_en/report-czech-cyber-security-2018-en.pdf; Fürst, “Czechia: Early Ideological Whistleblower Turned European Mainstream.”

13 “Czech Republic Says China Was behind Cyberattack on Ministry,” Reuters, May 28, 2025, https://www.reuters.com/world/china/czech-republic-says-china-was-behind-cyberattack-ministry-summons-ambassador-2025-05-28/; “Czech Government Bans DeepSeek Usage in Public Administration,” Reuters, July 9, 2025, https://www.reuters.com/world/china/czech-government-bans-deepseek-usage-public-administration-2025-07-09/.

14 “NÚKIB Warns against the Transfer of the Data to and Remote Administration from People’s Republic of China,” National Cyber and Information Security Agency, September 3, 2025, https://nukib.gov.cz/en/infoservis-en/news/2295-nukib-warns-against-the-transfer-of-the-data-to-and-remote-administration-from-people-s-republic-of-china/.

15 “Profiling European Countries’ Resilience towards China.”

16 Boyse, “China Increasing Its Bets on Hungary and Serbia.”

17 “China Scoffs at New Czech President’s Phone Call with Taiwan,” Associated Press, January 31, 2023, https://apnews.com/article/taiwan-politics-government-china-czech-republic-3cde81857dd712aaeb1dc34eb6346841; Robert Muller, “Czech Senate Speaker Leaves for Taiwan Visit, Angering China,” Reuters, August 29, 2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/world/czech-senate-speaker-leaves-for-taiwan-visit-angering-china-idUSKBN25P0LF/; Fan Chen, “China Cuts Ties with Czech President over His Birthday Visit to Dalai Lama,” South China Morning Post, August 13, 2025, https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3321694/china-cuts-ties-czech-president-over-petr-pavels-birthday-visit-dalai-lama.

18 “Unraveling Czech–China Relations: What’s Next?” China Observers in Central and Eastern Europe, October 2, 2024, https://chinaobservers.eu/choice-newsletter-unraveling-czech-china-relations-whats-next/.

19 “Czech Republic Says China Was behind Cyberattack on Ministry.”

20 “Czech Government Bans DeepSeek Usage in Public Administration.”

21 “NÚKIB Warns against the Transfer of the Data to and Remote Administration from People’s Republic of China.”

22 Stuart Lau, “China’s Club for Talking to Central Europe Is Dead, Czechs Say,” Politico, May 4, 2023, https://www.politico.eu/article/czech-slam-china-xi-jinping-pointless-club-for-central-europe/.

23 “Security Strategy of the Czech Republic 2023,” Government of the Czech Republic, 2023, https://mzv.gov.cz/file/5161068/Security_Strategy_of_the_Czech_Republic_2023.pdf.

24 “Government Approves New Foreign-Policy Framework,” Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic, May 28, 2025, https://mzv.gov.cz/jnp/en/issues_and_press/press_releases/czech_government_approves_new_foreign.html.

25 “European Economic Security Strategy,” European Commission, June 20, 2023; Andersson and Lindberg, eds., “National Perspectives on Europe’s De-Risking from China.”

26 Fürst, “Czechia: Early Ideological Whistleblower Turned European Mainstream”; Rohac, “Chinese Influence in Central and Eastern Europe.”

27 Agathe Demarais, “Divided We Stand: the EU Votes on Chinese EV Tariffs,” European Council on Foreign Relations, October 9, 2024, https://ecfr.eu/article/divided-we-stand-the-eu-votes-on-chinese-electric-vehicle-tariffs/.

The post Czechia’s policy on China: Swinging between engagement and de-risking appeared first on Atlantic Council.

The European Commission’s role in steering Europe’s strategic outlook

Zoltán Fehér — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 15:00:00 +0000

This is the third chapter of the report “Is Europe waking up to the China challenge? How geopolitics are reshaping EU and transatlantic strategy.” Read the full report here.

The European Commission has played a central role in the evolution of the European Union’s (EU) relationship with China since the 1970s. For more than four decades, it championed the normalization and strengthening of bilateral ties in the spirit of engagement. In the past decade, however, it has also emerged as the leading force behind the EU’s shift toward balancing and “de-risking.” In doing so, it has leveraged its trade authority to tackle the areas where China poses the greatest challenges to its member states.

While the EU—and particularly the Commission—initially supported China’s integration into the world economy, it became clear by the early 2010s that the hopes and expectations of the EU’s engagement strategy were not materializing.¹ Instead, China was rising to the status of a great power despite stalled liberalization and limited political integration. Its state-centered and protectionist economic policies presented the EU with structural issues: limited market access, industrial overcapacity and dumping, state subsidies, forced mergers, forced technology transfer, intellectual property theft, and currency manipulation. At the same time, Xi Jinping’s ascendance to power in 2012 ushered in an era of growing domestic authoritarianism and greater assertiveness abroad.

The Commission responded to this challenge in June 2016 with its document “Elements for a new EU strategy on China.” The strategy noted “a lack of progress in giving the market a more decisive role in the economy” and warned that “China’s authoritarian response to domestic dissent is undermining efforts to establish the rule of law and to put the rights of the individual on a sounder footing.” The Commission argued that the EU should therefore “promote reciprocity, a level playing field and fair competition across all areas of cooperation,” press Beijing to respect human rights and the rule of law, and ensure EU unity in dealing with China.² Responding to China’s industrial overcapacity, which posed significant challenges to the German steel industry, the Commission launched investigations and imposed anti-dumping duties on Chinese steel imports in July 2016.³

Building on growing concerns about China’s unfair economic practices, the Commission has driven the EU’s shift from the engagement strategy towards an engage-and-balance approach and later to a more explicit balancing strategy vis-à-vis Beijing. In response to the structural issues in the relationship with China, the Commission adopted a new strategy in 2019 under President Jean-Claude Juncker. Its joint communication titled “EU-China: A strategic outlook” broke with decades of engagement policy by framing China not only as a strategic partner but also as a competitor and a systemic rival in the so-called European triptych: “[China is] simultaneously… a cooperation partner with whom the EU has closely aligned objectives… an economic competitor in the pursuit of technological leadership, and a systemic rival promoting alternative models of governance.”⁴

Ursula von der Leyen was elected Commission president in July 2019—and her first Commission both followed the essence of the Juncker strategy and expanded upon it. Under her leadership, from 2019 to 2022, the von der Leyen Commission shifted EU strategy from engagement to an engage-and-balance posture. In 2020 and 2021, China’s reputation and EU-China relations suffered a major setback as a result of Beijing’s role in the COVID-19 pandemic and its crackdown in Hong Kong and Xinjiang. At the same time, the first Trump administration negotiated the “phase one” trade agreement with China, which the Commission assessed, “gives America advantages over the EU in terms of trade and investment with China.”⁵ As a result, the von der Leyen Commission negotiated the landmark Comprehensive Agreement on Investment (CAI) with the Chinese government, which was viewed “as a ‘leveling up” with the US on trade terms relating to China.”⁶ Through the CAI, the Commission sought to improve the investment environment for European and Chinese investors and to remedy “level playing field issues” with provisions addressing “Chinese state-owned enterprises, transparency of subsidies, and forced technology transfer as well as on authorisations and administrative procedures.”⁷ However, the CAI came under intense pressure from the incoming Biden administration, which saw the agreement as a fait accompli and a potential obstacle to its plans for a coordinated transatlantic approach to China.⁸ The European Parliament opposed the CAI on account of China’s bans against several of its members and decided to suspend its ratification.⁹ As a result, the EU ultimately abandoned the agreement.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and China’s support for the Russian war effort reshaped European attitudes toward China, prompting another shift in the Commission’s approach. Beginning in 2022, the Commission moved away from the EU triptych, increasingly viewing China as a systemic rival and shifting its strategy from an engage-and-balance posture toward explicit balancing. As von der Leyen underlined at the time, China’s “overcapacities in protected industries… can undermine our industrial base… China has increasingly resorted to trade coercion… China pursues a global order that is sino-centric and hierarchical… China’s assertive posture [in its neighborhood] affects… our own global interests… [We also have to look at China] as a technological competitor, a military power, a global player with a distinct and diverging idea of the global order.”¹⁰ In June 2023, the Commission unveiled its European Economic Security Strategy, which, although nominally country-ambivalent, was in practice largely aimed at addressing China‘s challenges.¹¹ In the following years, the Commission advanced this strategy by proposing new instruments targeting pressing structural issues with China, including the Anti-Coercion Instrument (ACI), the Foreign Subsidies Regulation (FSR), and the International Procurement Instrument (IPI).¹²

The second Trump administration’s turnaround on Ukraine, Russia, and trade tensions with the EU sent transatlantic relations into a tailspin beginning in February 2025, putting EU-China relations in a new context for many. Politicians and experts alike began floating the idea of rapprochement between the EU and China.¹³ Chinese leaders immediately courted EU officials, arguing that Brussels and Beijing could together defend “the rules-based order” from “unilateralism, protectionism and economic bullying,”—a not-so-veiled reference to President Trump’s tariff war. The Commission’s leadership initially showed openness to China’s overtures, hoping Beijing would make “the right offer” in the form of major concessions on long-standing structural issues threatening the EU’s economic and physical security.¹⁴ In March, EU Trade Commissioner Maroš Šefčovič met with Chinese leaders in Beijing to discuss ways “to improve and rebalance China-EU trade and investment relations.”¹⁵ In April, von der Leyen held a phone call with Chinese Premier Li Qiang to discuss improving bilateral relations.¹⁶ In May, China and the European Parliament agreed to lift restrictions on mutual exchanges, including China’s sanctions on some members of European Parliament.¹⁷

However, the Chinese leadership showed no willingness to significantly modify China’s positions on overcapacity dumping, market access, and other structural issues, as well as its support for Russia’s war effort. Meanwhile, the Trump administration and the European Commission continued negotiations, edging closer to a trade deal, and the US position on Ukraine began to converge with the earlier transatlantic consensus. In the changed geopolitical situation and the absence of a serious Chinese offer, the Commission concluded that the EU could not pursue a “grand deal” with China as long as Beijing remained unwilling to change its policies on structural economic issues or its role as an enabler of Russia’s war on Ukraine. Commission President von der Leyen and Council President António Costa communicated this stance to the Chinese leadership during the EU-China Summit in Beijing in July 2025.¹⁸

Trade and investment: Toward an economic security agenda

Trade and investment have been the focus of the European Commission’s China policy, both because of the Commission’s trade competence within the EU’s division of labor and because trade and investment are the core dimensions of EU-China relations. China is the EU’s largest trading partner for goods while the EU is China’s second largest trading partner, with China exporting €519 billion ($609 billion) to the EU and the EU exporting €213 billion to China in 2024. China accounts for 20.5 percent of the EU’s total imports.¹⁹

In EU-China trade and investment relations, the Commission has had to contend with a number of unfair practices through which China has repeatedly violated the rules of the international economic order, including overcapacity and dumping, state subsidies, restricting market access, forced mergers, public procurement, forced technology transfer, intellectual property theft, and currency manipulation. The von der Leyen Commission has attempted to address these issues in different ways, with tools aligned to its evolving posture. During the first period (2019-2023) when the Commission pursued an engage-and-balance approach, it sought to negotiate the CAI with China. During the second period (2023-2025), when the Commission shifted toward a balancing posture, it adopted an economic security and de-risking approach, designing the European Economic Security Strategy.

In the investment domain, the Commission has adopted the EU Foreign Investment Screening Regulation, which entered into force in October 2020.²⁰ It serves as the framework for EU-wide screening of foreign direct investment (FDI) to protect security across member states. As with other economic security measures championed by the Commission, implementation has been limited by member states’ uneven participation. Between 2019 and 2020, the Commission then negotiated the CAI with China, addressing some of the unfair practices in the investment area but purposefully excluding similar practices in the trade domain. Under pressure from the Parliament and the Biden administration, the Commission ultimately abandoned the CAI.

In the trade area, the Commission focused primarily on economic security, de-risking, and reducing dependencies. The von der Leyen Commission recognized that many of these issues not only gave China unfair advantages over the EU but also threatened European economic security by undermining the sustainability of EU industries. Accordingly, in 2023, the Commission introduced the European Economic Security Strategy.²¹ This document established the EU’s counterpart to the United States’ decoupling strategy: an EU de-risking approach toward China. The strategy called for reassessing risks, re-examining regulations on inbound and outbound investments, and fully implementing export-control regulations.

In recent years, the Commission has advanced this de-risking strategy by creating new instruments, each of which targets a different dimension of the EU’s economic exposure to China. In July 2023, the Commission introduced the FSR to address one of the most serious concerns about Beijing’s economic conduct: the unfair advantages generated by widespread state subsidies to Chinese companies competing globally.²² The FSR aims “to address distortions caused by foreign subsidies [and] allows the EU to ensure a level playing field for all companies operating in the single market.”²³

Complementing this effort, the ACI, adopted in December 2023, targets practices of economic coercion.²⁴ While it does not single out China, most of the practices it targets have been employed by Beijing. The regulation defines economic coercion “as a situation where a third country attempts to pressure the EU or a Member State into making a particular choice by applying, or threatening to apply, measures affecting trade or investment against the EU or a Member State.”²⁵ The instrument creates a process through which EU businesses or other stakeholders can report instances of economic coercion by third countries to a single point of contact. If the third country refuses to remove the coercion, the Commission can consider a broad spectrum of countermeasures, including “the imposition of tariffs, restrictions on trade in services and trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights, and restrictions on access to foreign direct investment and public procurement.” While this represents a significant step, its effectiveness will depend on actual implementation.²⁶

Finally, the IPI, established in December 2022, seeks “to promote reciprocity in access to international public procurement markets.”²⁷ Under this instrument, the Commission can “investigate alleged measures or practices negatively affecting the access of EU businesses, goods and services to non-EU procurement markets, and consult with the non-EU countries concerned.”²⁸ If a foreign country’s public procurement practices are found to violate EU and international norms, the Commission may exclude the country’s companies from the EU’s public procurement processes. In its first application, ahead of the EU-China Summit in 2025, the Commission excluded Chinese companies from EU public procurement of medical devices after finding that EU manufacturers were denied equal access to procurement in China.²⁹

Technology: Establishing resilience in critical industries

Technology has been a central pillar of the European Commission’s China policy because advanced technologies lie at the heart of Europe’s economic security, industrial competitiveness, and digital sovereignty. Since 2019, the Commission’s posture has shifted from an engage‑and‑balance approach to a more explicit de‑risking approach, framing China as “an economic competitor in the pursuit of technological leadership.”³⁰ This new strategy aims to reduce critical dependencies and limiting the leakage of sensitive know‑how while keeping Europe open and competitive.

During the engage-and-balance period (2019-2023), the Commission focused on technology protection. When it shifted toward a balancing posture (2023-2025), it adopted the European Economic Security Strategy, launched joint risk assessments for ten critical technology areas—with a particular focus on advanced semiconductors, artificial intelligence (AI), quantum, and biotechnologies—and introduced the January 2024 economic‑security package.³¹

In EU-China technology relations, the Commission has had to address a cluster of persistent risks and practices that mirror—and often intensify—the challenges seen in trade and investment: cyber‑enabled IP theft and espionage against EU networks and firms; leakage of dual‑use and frontier technologies through exports, outbound investment, and research ties; reliance on high‑risk suppliers in critical infrastructure (notably 5G/6G); influence in standards‑setting that can lock in non‑reciprocal advantages; platform‑level risks to users (minors, personal data, democratic processes); and strategic dependencies on critical raw materials that underpin clean‑tech and digital supply chains. These risks—and the “de‑risk, not decouple” approach to mitigate them—were codified in the 2023 European Economic Security Strategy and operationalized through its critical‑technologies list and follow‑on initiatives.³²

Hardening critical infrastructure began with the EU’s 5G Security Toolbox in 2020, a common risk‑based framework that allows member states to assess suppliers and apply restrictions or exclusions where warranted. In June 2023, the Commission urged full implementation and stated that member‑state decisions to restrict or exclude Huawei and ZTE from 5G networks are “justified and compliant with the 5G Toolbox.”³³ Together, these measures aim to reduce systemic exposure in core and access networks while supporting interoperable, secure deployments across the single market.³⁴

Controlling sensitive technology flows has proceeded on two tracks. First, the recast Dual‑Use Regulation modernized export controls, including a human‑rights‑focused “catch‑all” for certain cyber‑surveillance items, while the Commission pushed for tighter coordination and guidance for uniform practice.³⁵ Second, the January 2024 “White Paper on Export Controls” proposed short‑ and medium‑term steps to make EU controls more effective and more coordinated; the companion “White Paper on Outbound Investments” opened a structured path toward a risk‑based EU framework for outward investments in narrowly defined, security‑relevant technologies.³⁶ Building on this, the January 2025 recommendation asks member states to review recent and ongoing outbound investments in semiconductors, AI, and quantum technologies, and to share results to inform potential EU‑level action.³⁷ The problem with these regulations is that the Commission cannot implement them without the active participation of member states. As a result, putting them into practice has been a challenge.

The EU Chips Act forms the backbone of Europe’s effort to rebuild semiconductor capacity and resilience. It establishes a framework of measures to strengthen Europe’s semiconductor ecosystem, including a crisis response mechanism, funding instruments (the Chips Joint Undertaking), and support for design, fabrication, advanced packaging, and skills.¹¹ The aim is to reduce strategic dependencies across both leading‑edge and mature nodes while anchoring more of the value chain inside the EU.³⁸ Securing inputs for strategic technologies has advanced through the Critical Raw Materials Act, which sets benchmarks for domestic extraction, processing, and recycling by 2030 and, crucially, diversifies supply away from single‑country concentration. This directly addresses Europe’s exposure to Chinese dominance in several inputs essential to clean‑tech and digital industries and complements trade‑defense and industrial policies.³⁹ The Commission has also moved to protect Europe’s research base and knowledge flows. For instance, a 2022 research‑security toolkit provides universities and labs with practical due‑diligence measures on values, governance, partnerships, and cybersecurity when cooperating internationally.⁴⁰

Horizontal digital‑rule enforcement and baseline resilience complement these measures. Under the Digital Services Act, the Commission opened formal proceedings against TikTok in February 2024 on several risk‑management and transparency grounds, reflecting platform‑level concerns that also feature in EU–China relations.⁴¹ Earlier, EU institutions restricted TikTok on official devices as a protective measure.⁴² The EU Artificial Intelligence Act establishes market‑entry guardrails—prohibitions on certain uses, requirements for high‑risk systems, and an AI office—with phased application through 2026 and 2027.⁴³ In parallel, the NIS2 Directive and the Cyber Resilience Act raise cybersecurity baselines for essential and important entities, as well as for products with digital elements across the single market, reducing the attack surface for data exfiltration and supply‑chain compromise.⁴⁴ Finally, the Commission’s standardization strategy seeks to restore European leadership in global technical standards so that interoperability norms reflect EU security interests rather than entrench strategic dependencies.⁴⁵

Security: From partnership to systemic rivalry

The European Commission’s policy on China in the security area may have undergone the most significant transformation of any policy domain in the past few decades. From envisioning a “strategic security partnership” with China in its 2003 communication “EU-China relations: A Maturing Partnership,” the Commission in recent years has come to view China primarily as a “systemic rival.⁴⁶ Once focused mainly on the economic aspects of the EU’s external affairs—including trade, investment, aid, and energy—the Commission has shifted its outlook to emphasize the EU’s security interests as the world around Europe has become more complex and dangerous. In recent years, it has begun to look at the EU economy’s resilience in terms of “economic security” and the EU’s technological vulnerabilities in terms of cybersecurity and critical infrastructure security. Furthermore, the Commission has in recent years assumed a significant role in diplomatic, political, and military efforts to guarantee the EU’s physical security vis-à-vis Russia and China, in cooperation with the United States and other allies and partners.

This shift toward security and the process of securitization have been especially prominent since Russia’s unlawful invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The Commission has actively supported Ukraine’s self-defense by mobilizing EU resources and diplomatic efforts. Crucially, it considers China’s role in supporting Russia’s war effort as a direct threat to European security. In President von der Leyen’s words, “China’s unyielding support for Russia is creating heightened instability and insecurity here in Europe. We can say that China is de facto enabling Russia’s war economy. We cannot accept this.”⁴⁷ Since 2023, the Commission has introduced anti-circumvention tools and a contractual “no Russia” clause for exporters, banning EU exporters from re-exporting to Russia.⁴⁸ In December 2024, the EU’s fifteenth sanctions package listed Chinese entities and individuals that helped Russia procure sensitive components—and subsequent packages in 2025 tightened controls further.⁴⁹

The European Commission is increasingly concerned about Chinese intelligence and espionage activities, citing growing evidence of cyberattacks, human intelligence operations targeting EU institutions, and the infiltration of critical infrastructure by Chinese companies. It has therefore sharpened its response to suspected Chinese intelligence activity, raising the issue directly with Beijing, calling out malicious cyber operations, and urging Beijing to respect international norms.⁵⁰ On the issue of cyber espionage, it raised the EU institutions’ cyber baseline by proposing and implementing a new cybersecurity regulation that strengthens networks and boosts CERT-EU’s capacity. Moreover, the Commission ordered TikTok to be removed from staff work devices as a precaution.⁵¹ To address risks from human intelligence, it proposed the “Defense of Democracy” package, including a law requiring transparency from actors lobbying on behalf of foreign governments.⁵² On critical infrastructure, it pressed EU countries to apply the 5G Security Toolbox and helped launch an EU-NATO task force to bolster infrastructure resilience.⁵³

In response to China’s regional hegemonic ambitions, the Commission has also shifted its approach to Indo-Pacific security. In 2003, the Commission wrote that there was an “undeniable interest in acting as strategic partners” and that “China could play a fundamental role… in promoting peace and stability in Asia.⁵⁴ Nearly twenty years later, the Commission and the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy published “The EU strategy for cooperation in the Indo-Pacific.” The document framed the Indo-Pacific as the EU’s “natural partner region” and expressed concern about China’s aggressive posturing, arguing that “the display of force and increasing tensions in regional hotspots such as in the South and East China Sea and in the Taiwan Strait may have a direct impact on European security and prosperity.”⁵⁵ As the challenges posed by China in the region have increased, the connection between European security and Indo-Pacific security has grown. As Commission President von der Leyen recently stated: “Security is more interlinked between the Euro-Atlantic and the Indo-Pacific than it has been in several generations.”⁵⁶

The Commission has taken concrete steps to put this strategy into practice by partnering with Indo-Pacific countries to strengthen the region’s prosperity and security. It brought the EU-New Zealand trade agreement into force on May 1, 2024, and signed a digital trade agreement with Singapore in 2025.⁵⁷ It also launched the EU-India Trade and Technology Council to deepen cooperation on trade and digital policy with New Delhi.⁵⁸ Through its Global Gateway strategy, the Commission announced new projects with Southeast Asia in 2024, such as a Philippines Digital Economy Package and support for the rehabilitation of a national road in Laos.⁵⁹ Moreover, it funds maritime safety and information sharing in the region through the Critical Maritime Routes Indo Pacific program.⁶⁰ The Commission has also helped open air links by advancing a bloc-to- bloc air transport agreement between the EU and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.⁶¹ Together, these steps aim to strengthen Indo Pacific security and—given the interlinkage—Euro-Atlantic security.

Conclusion

The European Commission has played an outsized role in shaping the EU’s China policy over the past several decades. During the late Cold War and the post-Cold War period, it pursued an engagement strategy toward China and sought to integrate Beijing into the international economy and the rules-based world order. By the 2010s, however, it recognized—alongside the US government, other EU institutions, and member states—that its engagement with China had not led to Beijing becoming a “responsible stakeholder.”

Instead, China took advantage of its “partners,” violated the rules of the international economic system, and emerged as a global great power. In response, the European Commission has driven the EU’s gradual shift away from engagement with China—first to a mixed engage-and-balance posture and, more recently, to a strategy centered on balancing and de-risking. Intensifying US-China strategic competition—and the recalibration of US China policy under the Trump and Biden administrations—have significantly pushed the Commission (and the EU more broadly) in this direction. This shift was further accelerated by Russia’s unlawful aggression against Ukraine in February 2022 and by China’s support for the Russian war machine. While periods of perceived US disengagement from global affairs—and from Europe—have at times made the Commission hesitant to pursue a balancing approach toward China, these developments have nonetheless strengthened its resolve to defend EU interests more firmly.

Similarly, China’s economic practices have pushed the Commission toward a more assertive and security-conscious stance, aligning it more closely with US balancing efforts. By advancing this shift and shaping the EU’s de-risking strategy, the Commission—especially under President Ursula von der Leyen’s leadership—has assumed a central role in steering the EU’s China policy to protect the bloc’s economic, technological, and security interests.

About the author

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Zoltán Fehér

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The Europe Center promotes leadership, strategies, and analysis to ensure a strong, ambitious, and forward-looking transatlantic relationship.

1 Yoko Iwama, “The EU’s Reaction to the Rise of China,” Project for Peaceful Competition, February 21, 2022, https://www.peaceful-competition.org/pub/ry5b8lou/release/1.

2 “Elements for a New EU Strategy on China,” European Commission, June 22, 2016, https://eeas.europa.eu/archives/docs/china/docs/joint_communication_to_the_european_parliament_and_the_council_-_elements_for_a_new_eu_strategy_on_china.pdf.

3 “Commission, Implementing Regulation (EU) 2016/1328 of 29 July 2016 Imposing a Definitive Anti-Dumping Duty and Collecting Definitively the Provisional Duty Imposed on Imports of Certain Cold Rolled Flat Steel Products Originating in the People’s Republic of China and the Russian Federation,” European Commission, July 29, 2016, https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg_impl/2016/1328/oj/eng.

4 “EU-China—A Strategic Outlook,” European Commission, March 12, 2019, https://commission.europa.eu/system/files/2019-03/communication-eu-china-a-strategic-outlook.pdf.

5 David Hutt, “EU-China Deal May Give Biden’s Team More Options,” Asia Times, December 31, 2020, https://asiatimes.com/2020/12/eu-china-deal-may-give-bidens-team-more-options/.

6 Ibid.

7 Gisela Grieger, “EU-China Comprehensive Agreement on Investment (EU-China CAI),” Legislative Train Schedule, European Parliament, August 15, 2025, https://www.europarl.europa.eu/legislative-train/theme-a-global-europe-leveraging-our-power-and-partnerships/file-eu-china-investment-agreement.

8 Robert Delaney, “China-EU Investment Deal: Joe Biden Repeats Call for ‘Coordinated Approach’ to Handle Beijing,” South China Morning Post, December 31, 2020, https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3115917/china-eu-investment-deal-joe-biden-repeats-call-coordinated.

9 Grieger, “EU-China Comprehensive Agreement on Investment (EU-China CAI).”

10 Ursula von der Leyen, “Speech by Ursula von der Leyen at the European China Conference 2023,” Mercator Institute for China Studies, November 16, 2023, https://merics.org/en/speech-ursula-von-der-leyen-european-china-conference-2023.

11 “Joint Communication to the European Parliament, the European Council and the Council on ‘European Economic Security Strategy,’” European Commission, June 2023, https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/ALL/?uri=JOIN:2023:20:FIN.

12 “Anti-Coercion Instrument: New Tool to Enable EU to Withstand Economic Coercion Enters into Force,” European Commission, December 26, 2023, https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_23_6804; “Foreign Subsidies Regulation,” European Commission, July 12, 2023, https://competition-policy.ec.europa.eu/foreign-subsidies-regulation_en; “International Public Procurement Instrument,” European Commission, last visited September 5, 2025, https://trade.ec.europa.eu/access-to-markets/en/content/international-public-procurement-instrument.

13 Valbona Zeneli and Zoltán Fehér, “How the U.S. Is Pushing the EU Closer to China,” National Interest, May 13, 2025, https://nationalinterest.org/feature/how-the-u-s-is-pushing-the-eu-closer-to-china.

14 Huizhong Wu, “China Accuses US of Unilateralism, Protectionism and Economic Bullying with Tariffs,” Associated Press, April 7, 2025, https://apnews.com/article/china-us-tariffs-trade-trump-5dd928eabb83b9cc560e1d6971f52e7f.

15 “Read-out of the Meetings between Commissioner Šefčovič and Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng, Commerce Minister Wang Wentao and Customs Minister Sun Meijun,” European Commission, March 30, 2025, https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/read_25_923.

16 “Read-out of the Phone Call between President von Der Leyen and Chinese Premier Li Qiang,” European Commission, April 7, 2025, https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/read_25_1004.

17 “China to Lift Sanctions on Members of European Parliament,” Reuters, May 16, 2025, https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-lift-sanctions-eu-parliament-members-official-says-2025-04-30.

18 Zoltán Fehér and Valbona Zeneli, “The Great Wall Between China and the EU,” Diplomat, July 19, 2025, https://thediplomat.com/2025/07/the-great-wall-between-china-and-the-eu.

19 “China: EU Trade Relations with China,” European Commission, August 6, 2025, https://policy.trade.ec.europa.eu/eu-trade-relationships-country-and-region/countries-and-regions/china_en.

20 “EU Foreign Investment Screening Regulation Becomes Fully Operational,” European Commission, October 8, 2020), https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_20_1867.

21 “Joint Communication to the European Parliament, the European Council and the Council on ‘European Economic Security Strategy.’”

22 “Regulation (EU) 2022/2560 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 14 December 2022 on Foreign Subsidies Distorting the Internal Market,” European Union, December 23, 2022, https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2022/2560/oj/eng.

23 “Foreign Subsidies Regulation.”

24 “Regulation (EU) 2023/2675 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 22 November 2023 on the Protection of the Union and Its Member States from Economic Coercion by Third Countries,” European Union, November 22, 2023, https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2023/2675/oj/eng.

25 “Anti-Coercion Instrument.”

26 Ibid.

27 “International Public Procurement Instrument.”

28 “The EU’s International Procurement Instrument—IPI,” European Union, last visited September 8, 2025, https://eur-lex.europa.eu/EN/legal-content/summary/the-eu-s-international-procurement-instrument-ipi.html.

29 Andrea Figueras, “EU to Restrict China’s Participation in Medical Devices Procurement,” Wall Street Journal, June 20, 2025, https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/eu-to-restrict-chinas-participation-in-medical-devices-procurement-455f8d28.

30 “EU‑China—A Strategic Outlook.”

31 “European Economic Security Strategy”; “Commission Recommendation (EU) 2023/2113 of 3 October 2023 on Critical Technology Areas for the EU’s Economic Security for Further Risk Assessment with Member States,” European Union, October 11, 2023, https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reco/2023/2113/oj; “Advancing European Economic Security: An Introduction to Five New Initiatives,” European Commission, January 24, 2024, https://commission.europa.eu/system/files/2024-01/Communication%20on%20European%20economic%20security.pdf.

32 “European Economic Security Strategy”; “Commission Recommendation (EU) 2023/2113 of 3 October 2023 on Critical Technology Areas for the EU’s Economic Security for Further Risk Assessment with Member States.”

33 “Commission Announces Next Steps on Cybersecurity of 5G Networks in Complement to Latest Progress Report by Member States,” European Commission, press release, June 14, 2023, https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_23_3309.

34 “Secure 5G Deployment in the EU—Implementing the EU Toolbox,” European Commission, January 29, 2020, https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELEX:52020DC0050.

35 “Regulation (EU) 2021/821 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 20 May 2021 Setting up a Union Regime for the Control of Exports, Brokering, Technical Assistance, Transit and Transfer of Dual‑Use Items,” European Union, November 8, 2024, https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2021/821/oj/eng.

36 “White Paper on Export Controls,” European Commission, January 24, 2024, https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELEX:52024DC0025; “White Paper on Outbound Investments,” European Commission, January 24, 2024, https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELEX:52024DC0024.

37 “Commission Recommendation (EU) 2025/63 of 15 January 2025 on Outbound Investments in Technology Areas Critical for the Economic Security of the Union,” Official Journal of the European Union, January 15, 2025, https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=OJ:L_202500063.

38 “Regulation (EU) 2023/1781 of the European Union and of the Council of 13 September 2023 Establishing a Framework of Measures for Strengthening Europe’s Semiconductor Ecosystem and Amending Regulation (EU) 2021/694 (Chips Act),” European Union, September 18, 2023, https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2023/1781/oj/eng.

39 “Regulation (EU) 2024/1252 of the European Union and of the Council of 11 April 2024 Establishing a Framework for Ensuring a Secure and Sustainable Supply of Critical Raw Materials and Amending Regulations (EU) No 168/2013, (EU) 2018/1724 and (EU) 2019/1020,” European Union, May 3, 2024, https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2024/1252/oj/eng.

40 “Tackling R&I Foreign Interference,” European Union, January 18, 2022, https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/3faf52e8-79a2-11ec-9136-01aa75ed71a1/language-en.

41 “Commission Opens Formal Proceedings against TikTok under the Digital Services Act,” European Commission, press release, February 18, 2024, https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_24_926.

42 Foo Yun Chee, “European Parliament Latest EU Body to Ban TikTok from Staff Phones—EU Official Says,” Reuters, February 28, 2023, https://www.reuters.com/technology/european-parliament-ban-tiktok-staff-phones-eu-official-says-2023-02-28.

43 “Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 13 June 2024 Laying Down Harmonised Rules on Artificial Intelligence and Amending Regulations (EC) No 300/2008, (EU) No 167/2013, (EU) 168/2013, (EU) 2018/858 and (EU) 2019/2144 and Directives 2014/90/EU, (EU) 2016/797 and (EU) 2020/1828 (Artificial Intelligence Act),” European Union, July 12, 2024, https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2024/1689/oj/eng; “AI Act Enters into Force,” European Commission, August 1, 2024, https://commission.europa.eu/news-and-media/news/ai-act-enters-force-2024-08-01_en.

44 “Directive (EU) 2022/2555 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 14 December 2022 on Measures for a High Common Level of Cybersecurity across the Union, Amending Regulation (EU) No 910/2014 and Directive (EU) 2018/1972, and Repealing Directive (EU) 2016/1148 (NIS2 Directive),” European Union, December 27, 2022, https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dir/2022/2555/oj/eng; Regulation (EU) 2024/2847 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 23 October 2024 on Horizontal Cybersecurity Requirements for Products with Digital Elements and Amending Regulations (EU) No 168/2013 and (EU) 2019/1020 and Directive (EU) 2020/1828 (Cyber Resilience Act),” European Union, November 18, 2024, https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2024/2847/oj/eng.

45 “An EU Strategy on Standardisation—Setting Global Standards in Support of a Resilient, Green and Digital EU Single Market,” European Commission, February 2, 2022, https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELEX:52022DC0031.

46 ”European Commission, “EU-China Relations: A Maturing Partnership,” EUR-Lex, September 10, 2003, https://eur-lex.europa.eu/EN/legal-content/summary/eu-china-relations-a-maturing-partnership.html.

47 Ursula von der Leyen, “Speech by the President at the EP Plenary Joint Debate on EU-China Relations,” European Commission, July 7, 2025, https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/speech_25_1764.

48 “EU Adopts 11th Package of Sanctions against Russia for Its Continued Illegal War against Ukraine,” European Commission, press release, June 22, 2023, https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_23_3429.

49 Julia Payne, “EU Adopts New Russia Sanctions Targeting China, Shadow Fleet,” Reuters, December 17, 2024, https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/eu-adopts-new-russia-sanctions-targeting-china-shadow-fleet-2024-12-16; “EU Adopts 18th Package of Sanctions against Russia,” European Commission, press release, July 17, 2025, https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_25_1840.

50 “25th EU-China Summit,” European Commission, press release, July 23, 2025, https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_25_1901.

51 “Cybersecurity Regulation,” European Commission, March 18, 2022, https://commission.europa.eu/publications/cybersecurity-regulation_en; “New Rules to Boost Cybersecurity of the EU Institutions Enter into Force,” European Commission, press release, January 7, 2024, https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_23_6782; Kelvin Chan, “TikTok Banned from EU Commission Phones over Cybersecurity,” Associated Press, February 23, 2023, https://apnews.com/article/technology-politics-united-states-government-privacy-business-29a52f0eee4177f6c2a596d12459feec.

52 “New Measures Will Increase Transparency to Better Protect European Democracy,” European Commission, December 12, 2023, https://commission.europa.eu/news-and-media/news/new-measures-will-increase-transparency-better-protect-european-democracy-2023-12-12_en; “Documents on Defence of Democracy,” European Commission, December 12, 2023, https://commission.europa.eu/publications/documents-defence-democracy_en.

53 “Communication from the Commission: Implementation of the 5G Cybersecurity Toolbox,” European Commission, June 15, 2023, https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/library/communication-commission-implementation-5g-cybersecurity-toolbox; “Commission Announces Next Steps on Cybersecurity of 5G Networks in Complement to Latest Progress Report by Member States”; European Commission, “EU-NATO Task Force: Final Assessment Report on Strengthening Our Resilience and Protection of Critical Infrastructure,” European Commission, press release, June 28, 2023, https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_23_3564.

54 ”European Commission, “EU-China Relations: A Maturing Partnership,” EUR-Lex, September 10, 2003, https://eur-lex.europa.eu/EN/legal-content/summary/eu-china-relations-a-maturing-partnership.html.

55 Ramses A. Wessel, “The EU Strategy for Cooperation in the Indo-Pacific,” European Commission and High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, September 16, 2021, https://opil.ouplaw.com/display/10.1093/law-oeeul/law-oeeul-e66.

56 von der Leyen, “Speech by the President at the EP Plenary Joint Debate on EU-China Relations.”

57 European Commission, “EU-New Zealand Trade Agreement Enters into Force, Opening New Opportunities for EU Exporters,” May 1, 2024, https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/api/files/document/print/s/ip_24_2388/IP_24_2388_EN.pdf; “EU-Singapore Free Trade Agreement, Investment Protection Agreement and Digital Trade Agreement,” European Commission, May 7, 2025, https://policy.trade.ec.europa.eu/eu-trade-relationships-country-and-region/countries-and-regions/singapore/eu-singapore-agreements_en.

58 “First EU-India Trade and Technology Council Focused on Deepening Strategic Engagement on Trade and Technology,” European Commission, press release, May 15, 2023, https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_23_2728.

59 “Global Gateway: EU and ASEAN Strengthen Their Partnership on Sustainable Connectivity,” European Commission, February 2, 2024, https://international-partnerships.ec.europa.eu/news-and-events/news/global-gateway-eu-and-asean-strengthen-their-partnership-sustainable-connectivity-2024-02-02_en.

60 “CRIMARIO—Critical Maritime Routes Indo-Pacific,” European Commission, August 4, 2022, https://fpi.ec.europa.eu/projects/crimario-critical-maritime-routes-indo-pacific_en.

61 “EU–ASEAN Comprehensive Air Transport Agreement.” October 16, 2022. https://transport.ec.europa.eu/document/download/0cb904f0-7eee-4048-ad85-b00742f7e664_en?filename=2022_EU–ASEAN_Comprehensive_Air_Transport_Agreement.pdf.

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The geopolitical trends shaping the EU’s policies on China

Zoltán Fehér, Valbona Zeneli — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 15:00:00 +0000

This is the first chapter of the report “Is Europe waking up to the China challenge? How geopolitics are reshaping EU and transatlantic strategy.” Read the full report here.

China’s global ambitions, unfolding in an era of renewed great-power competition, pose significant challenges to the core interests of the United States and its Western allies—and have placed Beijing at the center of the transatlantic economic and security agenda. In the 1990s and early 2000s, the United States, the European Union (EU), and EU member states largely assumed that engagement with China would be mutually beneficial, with economic integration encouraging Beijing to align with the global rules-based order. Over time, that assumption has collapsed. Instead, both the United States and the EU increasingly regard China not just as a competitor but as a strategic rival and systemic challenger—a country determined to promote a model fundamentally at odds with Western principles of liberal democracy and market economy and to reshape the international order in its favor.¹

The United States was the first to make this decisive strategic shift. In its 2017 National Security Strategy (NSS), the first Trump administration formally redefined China as a “strategic competitor” and a “once-in-a-generation challenge.”² The Biden administration reaffirmed this stance in its 2022 NSS, noting that China “harbors the intention, and increasingly, the capacity to reshape the international order in favor of one that tilts the global playing field to its benefit.” Yet the focus on competition with China—and on the strategic importance of Asia—predates both US President Donald Trump and US President Joe Biden. The Obama administration’s “pivot to Asia” had already acknowledged China’s rising economic and strategic significance, with particular attention to the Indo-Pacific region.³

Europe’s recognition of the China challenge came more slowly. For decades, the EU approached Beijing primarily as an economic partner. The first major trade agreement between the EU and China in 1985, the initiation of annual EU-China summits in 1998, and European support for China’s accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001 all reflected the belief that trade would encourage cooperation. Even the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, which temporarily froze political ties and prompted an arms embargo, did not fundamentally alter the EU’s long-term calculus. It was only in March 2019 that the EU formally adopted a more skeptical stance, describing China as “simultaneously . . . a cooperation partner with whom the EU has closely aligned objectives . . . an economic competitor in the pursuit of technological leadership, and a systemic rival promoting alternative models of governance.”⁴

The EU’s growing skepticism of China has been driven by a series of shocks and geopolitical trends that have fundamentally reshaped how policymakers in Brussels and across member states view Beijing.⁵ These trends include:

US-China strategic competition;
Uncertainty about continued US engagement globally and in Europe;
Russia’s war on Ukraine, backed by China; and
China’s economic and competitiveness challenges to the EU.

A deeper understanding of these trends—the geopolitical pressures shaping Europe, the continent’s mounting sense of vulnerability, and the strategic responses they generate—can enable US policymakers to tailor outreach, design joint initiatives, and strengthen a unified transatlantic agenda to address the China challenge. Yet US officials often lack sufficient insight into how these dynamics influence EU decision-making. This report aims to bridge that gap.

To that end, it analyzes the four geopolitical trends in detail, assesses their impact on the EU’s and its member-states’ China policies—particularly across trade and investment, technology, and security—and offers recommendations to help US policymakers use this understanding to reinforce transatlantic coordination. After all, the United States can prevail in its strategic competition with China only by working in concert with its allies—especially the EU, Beijing’s second-largest trading partner.

1. US-China strategic competition

China’s expansionist global posture—and the resulting revival of great-power competition in the international system, most clearly manifested in US-China rivalry—has significantly reshaped European thinking about its role in the world. China’s increasingly assertive efforts to shape the international order to accommodate its authoritarian model have put it at odds with the EU and the United States.

This development is, in part, a result of a strategic US effort to integrate China into the international order and encourage liberalization through a long-standing engagement strategy following the end of the Cold War. Successive administrations maintained this approach despite mounting evidence that China was not integrating and was instead emerging as a challenger. By overlooking this reality, the United States facilitated China’s rise, effectively creating a peer competitor for itself and for Europe.

The first US president to recognize the failure of engagement and reframe China as a strategic competitor was Donald Trump during his first term.⁶ His policy shift reflected a broader bipartisan consensus in Washington to place strategic competition at the center of US grand strategy. Although adopting a different tone and emphasizing coordination with allies, the Biden administration upheld key elements of Trump’s China strategy, including trade restrictions, technology controls, and political and military efforts to counter China’s global influence.⁷ Although the second Trump administration is expected to continue the balancing strategy initiated during Trump’s first term, it has not yet articulated a clear strategy vis-à-vis China, oscillating between a balancing posture and a cooperative approach aimed at negotiating a “grand deal” with Beijing.

These mixed signals have made it harder for the EU and its member states to align with the United States’ stance on China—or to formulate their own strategy in response. Europe has consistently sought to avoid being drawn into a binary competition between the two superpowers. While recognizing the systemic challenges posed by Beijing’s global ambitions, it seeks to protect both its economic interests and strategic autonomy. However, mounting US-China competition is forcing the EU and European countries to pick a side.

2. Uncertainty over US engagement globally and in Europe

In the 2010s, the United States—the EU’s most important global ally—entered an era of heightened domestic polarization and international retrenchment. The rise of radicalism and populism in both major political parties, along with Trump’s election victories in 2016 and 2024, dramatically reshaped the political landscape. This period saw declining bipartisanship, rising identity politics and personal attacks, and the growing influence of radical and extremist forces.

Internationally, the Obama administration began retrenching the United States from its global leadership role, including reducing its presence and influence in Europe. US President Barack Obama’s strategic “pivot to Asia” signaled that the United States would shift its focus and resources away from Europe and the Middle East toward the Indo-Pacific. The first Trump administration accelerated this retrenchment, weakening US alliances and withdrawing from several multilateral institutions that previous US administrations had helped build after World War II. Europe was particularly affected, as Trump called US security guarantees into question—a concern magnified by the Ukraine war, which further exposed the continent’s dependence on the United States as a security provider.

While the Biden administration sought to restore US global leadership, mend alliances, and strengthen multilateralism, the forces driving retrenchment remain influential among both the US public and political elite, as evidenced by Trump’s second election victory. As a result, European citizens and leaders remain uncertain whether the United States will sustain its global leadership role and its position as guarantor of European security over the long term.

Continuing and accelerating these trends, the second Trump administration has rapidly scaled back US engagement, questioned support for Ukraine, pursued rapprochement with Russia, and imposed tariffs on EU exports. These moves have deepened political, economic, and security rifts between Washington and Brussels, prompting a strategic reassessment in Europe. While the United States eventually signed a trade deal with the EU in July, tensions over EU auto exports and Trump’s openness to engaging with Russian President Vladimir Putin continue to strain relations.

As a result of this transatlantic rift, some European leaders have called for a pragmatic reset and closer engagement with China, while others caution that China’s structural economic and political challenges make any “grand deal” unrealistic. The latter group argues that transatlantic cooperation remains the best path forward. Reflecting this stance, many EU representatives emphasized at the 2025 EU-China Summit that closer ties with Beijing would require China to change its behavior, end unfair trade practices, and cease actions that undermine the EU’s core interests.

3. Russia’s war on Ukraine—backed by China

While uncertainty about US global engagement has shaken Europe’s confidence in having a strong ally and external guarantor of security and the liberal international order, Russia’s war on Ukraine has shattered the European sense of physical security. Moscow’s aggression posed a direct challenge to the Western global order and the values underpinning it—international peace and security, national self-determination, representative government, and fundamental human rights. For Europeans, the war has demonstrated that an aggressor state exists in their immediate neighborhood, threatening democracy, the European way of life, and the continent’s security architecture.

At the same time, Beijing’s support for Russia’s war served as a further wake-up call for European policymakers. After recognizing China as a supporter and enabler of Russian aggression against Ukraine, Europe’s perception of Beijing shifted. European countries began to view China both as a security threat and as a liability in other areas, including critical infrastructure. In this sense, Russia’s war has exposed Europe’s vulnerabilities not only toward Moscow but also toward Beijing, highlighted its limited capabilities in countering its adversaries, and underscored the continued importance of US military assistance for European security.

Initially, the Ukraine war and China’s support for Russia unified the United States and the EU at a level unprecedented since the end of the Cold War. Under the Biden administration, the transatlantic partners supported Ukraine’s fight for independence and territorial integrity and sanctioned both Russia and China. During the first three years of the war, European narratives, attitudes, and policies on China continued to shift significantly—though unevenly across member states and EU institutions—increasingly converging with US approaches and positions.

However, the second Trump administration’s upending of transatlantic relations, combined with its tendency to favor Russia at times in negotiations over the Ukraine war, has created a deep divide between the United States and Europe. European leaders have made significant efforts to bridge this divide and revive transatlantic unity on Ukraine, with some success in the weeks following the August 2025 White House multilateral meeting on Ukraine. Many EU policymakers continue to view Beijing as a systemic rival posing long-term risks to European security and democratic values, while others are more open to strategic engagement, advocating a recalibration of EU-China relations. Nevertheless, from a European perspective, China’s continued support for Russia’s war remains a major obstacle to easing tensions.

4. China’s economic and competitiveness challenges to the EU

A crucial aspect of China’s global expansion has been its economic and technological pressure on the EU and its economic security. The Chinese economy has become more state-driven, with Chinese leaders increasingly disavowing Western liberal values.⁸ The rapid pace of China’s transformation and its advances in technological capabilities are unprecedented. Unfair business practices, state subsidies, forced or illegal technology transfers, economic coercion, and limited market access have negatively affected the US and EU economies. More recently, China has sought to ease its domestic economic struggles by dumping industrial overcapacity onto the European market and relocating some production to the EU and its periphery, threatening key sectors such as renewable energy and electric vehicles (EVs).⁹

In response, the European Commission, under President Ursula von der Leyen, has outlined an economic security agenda that goes further than some member states have been willing to embrace.¹⁰ Some countries have opposed this strategic shift because their economies are more open and trade-dependent—and therefore more exposed to China, particularly given that China is Europe’s largest source of imports at 21 percent and its third-largest export market at 8 percent. A major sign of the relative success of the Commission’s agenda—and its transatlantic relevance—has been that the terminology of “de-risking” has entered the transatlantic mainstream.

At the same time, the EU has been less aggressive in dealing with China than the United States. While the latter has rolled out more ambitious measures to restrict Chinese access to technology and investment, the EU has expanded its policy toolbox to counter Beijing’s distortive economic practices—through the EU Foreign Subsidies Regulation and its new Anti-Coercion Instrument, for instance—without explicitly identifying Beijing as the target.

Where the Commission has taken action, such as in its anti-subsidy investigation into Chinese EV imports, significant disagreements and pushback have arisen among member states, depending on how severely they are affected. These dynamics frequently leave room for skepticism or misunderstanding among US policymakers regarding the strengths and weaknesses of Europe’s strategies and their implementation.

In his 2024 report on European competitiveness, former President of the European Central Bank Mario Draghi highlighted the urgency of investing between €750 billion and €800 billion annually in innovation, artificial intelligence, and clean energy, while streamlining regulations and advancing a coordinated industrial policy to bolster the EU’s long-term economic resilience and strategic autonomy. Ironically, Europeans continue to rely on Chinese technology in areas where the EU still lags. The most pressing challenge remains the widening gap between policymakers’ security concerns and European industry actors’ vested economic interests in the Chinese market.

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Zoltán Fehér

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Valbona Zeneli

Europe Center Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security

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1 Valbona Zeneli, “The Trends Driving Transatlantic Convergence on China,” Diplomat, November 30, 2023, https://thediplomat.com/2023/11/the-trends-driving-transatlantic-convergence-on-china/.

2 The White House. 2017. National Security Strategy of the United States of America. Washington, DC: The White House. https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/NSS-Final-12-18-2017-0905.pdf.

3 Hillary Clinton. 2011. “America’s Pacific Century.” Foreign Policy, no. 189 (November): 56–63. https://foreignpolicy.com/2011/10/11/americas-pacific-century/.

4 “EU-China—A Strategic Outlook,” European Union, March 12, 2019, https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=JOIN%3A2019%3A5%3AFIN.

5 Zeneli, “The Trends Driving Transatlantic Convergence on China”; Zoltán Fehér, “Xi Jinping Visited Europe to Divide It. What Happens Next Could Determine If He Succeeds,” Atlantic Council, June 1, 2024, https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/xi-jinping-visited-europe-to-divide-it-what-happens-next-could-determine-if-he-succeeds/.

6 Zoltán Fehér. “The Rise and Fall of U.S. Engagement toward China,” Fletcher Center for Strategic Studies, August 17, 2020, https://sites.tufts.edu/css/?p=1198.

7 Zoltán Fehér, “Realism, Liberalism, and Strategic Competition: The Grand Strategy of the United States during the Biden Administration,” Foreign Policy Review [Külügyi Szemle—Hungary] 22, 4 (2023), 28–44, https://hiia.hu/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/3-Feher-Zoltan.pdf.

8 Michael Beckley and Hal Brands, “China’s Threat to Global Democracy,” Journal of Democracy, December 2022, https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/chinas-threat-to-global-democracy/.

9 Esther Goreichy, Jacob Gunter, and Grzegorz Stec, “China’s Overcapacity and the EU + German China Policy under Merz + EU-China Trade,” Mercator Institute for China Studies, May 16, 2025, https://merics.org/en/merics-briefs/chinas-overcapacity-and-eu-german-china-policy-under-merz-eu-china-trade.

10 Jörn Fleck, et al., “The ‘De-risk’ Is in the Details: A Look at Europe’s Ambitious New Economic Security Strategy,” Atlantic Council, June 22, 2023, https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/experts-react/the-de-risk-is-in-the-details-a-look-at-europes-ambitious-new-economic-security-strategy/.

The post The geopolitical trends shaping the EU’s policies on China appeared first on Atlantic Council.

France’s policy on China: Strategic autonomy and less naïveté

Zoltán Fehér — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 15:00:00 +0000

This is the fourth chapter of the report “Is Europe waking up to the China challenge? How geopolitics are reshaping EU and transatlantic strategy.” Read the full report here.

Over the past decade, France’s traditionally cooperative ties with China have evolved into a more complex and cautious relationship, as Paris increasingly shifts its policy toward balancing. This recalibration has been driven by France’s doctrine of strategic autonomy, its commitment to “de-risking” in response to Beijing’s distortionary industrial policies, and China’s growing influence in the Indo-Pacific. France initially benefited from booming trade with China—especially between 2005 and 2015, when exports of aerospace, luxury, and agri-food products flourished. In the recent past, however, China’s protectionist and state-driven policies have tilted the relationship sharply against France, eroding what was once a confident economic partnership.

In the technology domain, France’s policy embraces “de-risking, not decoupling,” tightening safeguards and investment screening for critical technologies, infrastructure, and data while preserving selective climate-related cooperation. This approach aligns with the EU’s economic-security agenda, prioritizing joint risk assessments for advanced semiconductors, artificial intelligence (AI), and quantum technologies. Meanwhile, France’s security posture toward China carefully balances engagement with cautious countermeasures, maintaining only limited alignment with the United States. Leveraging its permanent Indo-Pacific presence, France combines expanded naval operations and allied exercises with a structured military-to-military dialogue with Beijing, using inter-staff and theater-level contacts to manage risks, signal deterrence, and uphold the rules-based order. This approach underscores that dialogue complements—rather than undermines—its transatlantic and regional commitments.

France’s China policy and its approach to the EU’s policy on China illustrate a dual-track strategy: nationally, Paris balances engagement with safeguarding competitiveness, while at the EU level it supports de-risking and stronger balancing measures. Growing competitive pressures from China have prompted France to advocate for stricter EU policies on trade, investment screening, strategic technologies, and critical infrastructure.

Diplomatic relations with China have a long history. Paris established ties with the People’s Republic in 1964, following Europe’s lead. In 1973, President Georges Pompidou became the first Western European head of state to visit Beijing during the Cold War. Deng Xiaoping, then first vice premier, reciprocated in 1975 as the first Chinese leader to pay an official visit to a Western European country. In the 1980s, economic, technological, and cultural relations expanded rapidly, highlighted by President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing’s 1980 visit and the signing of multiple cooperation agreements, including in nuclear energy and other technological fields. During President Jacques Chirac’s visit in 1997, France became the first Western country to establish a comprehensive partnership with China.¹ In 2004, this agreement was upgraded to a comprehensive strategic partnership, with both countries vowing to work together on “strengthening the multilateral system for collective security” and “deepening bilateral cooperation on major international issues… [to establish] a safer and more stable international environment.”² During President Xi Jinping’s visit to France in 2014, marking the fiftieth anniversary of diplomatic relations, both sides expressed their intention to steer France-China relations toward “a new era of a close and lasting comprehensive strategic partnership.”³

Lately, however, French policy has steadily shifted toward balancing and de-risking—a trend that accelerated with President Emmanuel Macron’s 2017 election. Macron set out to pursue a more realist policy on China and, in 2019, declared that “the period of European naivety is over” with regard to Chinese investments in the EU.⁴ At the same time, Macron has sought to continue France’s legacy of open dialogue with China and cooperation on global issues, leveraging France’s historic role as an Indo-Pacific power. High-level diplomacy with Beijing has been sustained, avoiding unnecessarily confrontational language. Macron frames France as a “power of balances” (puissance d’équilibres), centering French and EU China policy around strategic autonomy and asserting independence from the United States.⁵

Efforts to strengthen the EU’s economic and technological resilience are central to Macron’s balancing agenda—and his advocacy of EU-level policies advanced by Ursula von der Leyen’s Commission has pushed ties onto a more confrontational trajectory.⁶ At the same time, the tension between engagement and the structural push for de-risking has left allies and partners uncertain about the true direction of France’s China policy.⁷

Trade and investment: From opportunity to strategic caution

France was an early beneficiary of China’s economic rise, enjoying a surge in exports from the 2000s—particularly between 2005 and 2015—when French aerospace, luxury, agri-food, and industrial goods found a receptive Chinese market. Recent years, however, have brought increasingly distortive Chinese economic practices—market barriers, state subsidies, and forced technology transfers—which have eroded earlier gains and shifted the balance against France. As a result, a once-optimistic commercial outlook in Paris has given way to frustration and strategic caution.

Over the six decades of France-China diplomatic relations, economic ties have deepened tremendously. Bilateral trade has grown eight hundredfold, from $100 million in 1964 to $81.2 billion in 2022. China is France’s fourth-largest trading partner, while France is China’s third-largest trading partner within the EU. China’s primary exports to France include energy components, boilers, electronics, furniture, prefabricated buildings, machinery, commodities, and vehicles.⁸ Moreover, consumer goods exports—including home appliances and toys—have grown by nearly 30 percent from 2023 to 2024.⁹

Meanwhile, France remains China’s largest source of agricultural imports within the EU. Pork, dairy, and wine dominate—but cosmetics, luxury goods, and medications are also in high demand. Bilateral trade is heavily imbalanced: Between 2022 and 2023, France’s trade deficit with China increased from €1.1 billion ($1.2 billion) to €2.92 billion ($3.14 billion).¹⁰ Investment has also expanded. While 1,100 French companies operated in China in 2019, this number jumped to more than 2,000 by 2023, across sectors including industry, retail, agriculture, transport, financial services, and urban development.¹¹

While France’s bilateral trade and investment with China have been increasing, structural challenges have begun to weigh on economic ties. Paris has pressed Beijing to reduce the country’s massive trade surplus—framing rebalancing as the priority—and has expressed frustration that China fails to adhere to the rules of the international economic order.¹² President Macron has criticized China’s unfair trade practices and industrial overcapacity, calling them a global economic concern.¹³ Similarly, Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot has underscored the need for compliance with international trade rules, highlighting the risks posed by Chinese subsidies—particularly in the electric vehicle (EV) sector.¹⁴ Paris remains especially concerned that heavily subsidized EVs could threaten its domestic auto industry.¹⁵

This issue has also sparked the latest trade dispute between France and China. Responding to Chinese dumping of EVs on the EU market, the European Commission imposed tariffs on Chinese EV producers. China retaliated by imposing tariffs of almost 40 percent on European brandy imports, specifically targeting French cognac.¹⁶ Macron called the move “pure retaliation.¹⁷ The dispute was eventually settled after prolonged negotiations in July 2025, shortly before the EU-China Summit.¹⁸

Technology: Guarding critical sectors amid selective cooperation

France’s China policy in the technology domain combines “de-risking, not decoupling” with tighter safeguards on critical technologies, infrastructure, and data—while preserving selective cooperation in climate-relevant sectors.¹⁹ Paris has strengthened inbound investment screening, permanently lowering the voting rights threshold for listed firms to 10 percent and expanding its scope to include low-carbon energy (including nuclear), photonics, and critical raw materials.²⁰ These measures align with the EU economic-security agenda, prioritizing collective risk assessments for advanced semiconductors, AI, and quantum technologies.²¹

In telecommunications, France applies a case-by-case authorization regime under the 2019 5G law. While not a blanket ban, time-limited licenses for high-risk vendors—primarily Chinese firms like Huawei and ZTE—will effectively phase them out by 2028.²² Industrial policy has also been recalibrated: the so-called ecological bonus (bonus écologique)—a state subsidy for buying or leasing a new or used electric or hydrogen vehicle—now uses an environmental score that effectively excludes most Chinese EVs. France has also supported EU trade defense actions against Chinese EVs.²³

Research security bodies—including the General Directorate for Internal Security and the Secretariat-General for National Defence and Security—have issued guidance and alerts to reduce technology leakage and undue influence in academia and research and development.²⁴ At the same time, civil nuclear cooperation endures: Électricité de France (EDF) and China General Nuclear Power Group cooperate at the Taishan Nuclear Power Plant, in which EDF holds a 30 percent stake—and France and China renewed and deepened their nuclear cooperation in 2023 and 2024.²⁵

Security: Dialogue without dependence

France’s security policy toward China reflects a carefully calibrated equilibrium. It combines strategic autonomy with a measured mix of engagement and balancing, while maintaining only limited alignment with the United States. As French officials noted in interviews for this report, Paris is willing to adopt a firm stance toward China—but on its own terms, not as a result of US pressure.

France’s historical identity as an Indo-Pacific power plays a central role in its security relations with China. On the one hand, Paris envisions an Indo-Pacific that is open, secure, and inclusive—grounded in respect for multilateral cooperation, international law, and sovereignty.²⁶ On the other hand, its emphasis on maintaining dialogue with China reflects a reluctance to engage in what it views as unnecessary confrontation.²⁷ The French government keeps communication channels with China open both to manage coexistence in the Indo-Pacific and because of China’s influence in the Global South, where France maintains an extensive network of relationships with its former colonies. France also seeks to maintain dialogue with China because the two countries share responsibility for international peace and security as permanent members of the UN Security Council and nuclear-armed states.

The Indo-Pacific features so prominently in French security policy that France was the first EU member state to adopt an Indo-Pacific strategy in 2018. Revised in 2025, the strategy rests on the premise that the Indo-Pacific is “a region vital to global prosperity,” yet increasingly tense due to “rivalries between great powers, China’s growing assertiveness, and strong trade tensions.” It maintains that France “is uniquely positioned in the region” as both “a European and Indo-Pacific nation.” The strategy’s four key priorities are:

Strengthening the central role of France’s overseas departments, regions and communities;
Consolidating sovereignty partnerships with Indo-Pacific countries;
Supporting multilateralism and the development of regional organizations; and
Contributing actively to the implementation of the EU Strategy for Cooperation in the Indo-Pacific.²⁸

In the military domain, France sustains a structured yet pragmatic dialogue with China—enabled by its permanent naval presence in the Indo-Pacific. Regular inter-staff consultations, defense-ministry meetings, and communications between theater commands facilitate exchanges on counter-proliferation, dual-use goods, the Ukraine war, and regional security flashpoints such as the South China Sea and Taiwan. Simultaneously, Paris seeks to reassure its transatlantic and Indo-Pacific partners that its dialogue with Beijing is intended to enhance mutual understanding of China’s strategic intentions, not to undermine alliance unity. France frames its military engagement with China as complementary to its broader regional commitments, reflected in multilateral formats such as Track 1.5 dialogues and joint naval task forces (for example, with Japan and the Philippines).

In recent years, France has expanded its naval presence in the Indo-Pacific in line with its Indo-Pacific Strategy and in response to China’s increasingly assertive regional posture. French deployments have included multiple frigate transits through contested waters, freedom-of-navigation operations in the South China Sea, and the Charles de Gaulle carrier strike group’s 2024-2025 Pacific deployment. These operations underscore France’s commitment to the rules-based maritime order and its intent to signal deterrence while avoiding escalation. In this context, maintaining direct military-to-military communication with Beijing has become a vital component of Paris’s risk-management and regional-stabilization strategy.²⁹

Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine—and China’s material and diplomatic support for Moscow—have become key drivers in the hardening of Paris’s China policy. For years, French governments believed that Beijing’s “no limits” partnership gave Xi sufficient leverage to act as a potential mediator with Putin.³⁰ President Macron repeatedly urged China to curb its support for Russia, use its influence to advance a settlement, and restrain North Korean involvement—warning that continued assistance or escalation could trigger broader allied responses beyond Europe.³¹ Successive Macron cabinets have stressed to Beijing that Russia’s war constitutes a direct assault on Europe’s security and that any actor aiding Moscow represents a grave threat to the European Union.³²

France’s alignment with the EU’s China policy

France’s China policy—and its approach to the EU’s broader China strategy—illustrate the interaction of EU-level and national policymaking. While France’s national policy seeks to balance engagement with the protection of its economic competitiveness, its stance within the EU strongly supports de-risking and strategic balancing toward China. Rising economic and competitiveness challenges have reinforced France’s backing for the EU’s approach and prompted Paris to press for tougher measures in trade, investment, technology, and critical infrastructure.

In trade, Paris has firmly shifted toward strengthening Europe’s resilience and economic sovereignty, supporting a more assertive EU trade policy within a wider economic-security framework.³³ Reflecting this stance, Macron has argued that the EU’s exceptionally open market must be paired with credible defenses of European interests.³⁴ In 2023, France spearheaded a coordinated effort that helped prompt the European Commission to open anti-dumping investigations into subsidized Chinese EV makers.³⁵

In investment, France has led efforts to reduce the EU’s strategic dependence on China and strengthen Europe’s economic autonomy and resilience. Paris has advocated reforming EU competition regulations to grant member states greater leeway to mobilize public investment, while promoting a strong industrial policy aimed at enhancing EU competitiveness in key strategic technologies.³⁶ Regarding Chinese investment in Europe, Macron—ahead of Xi Jinping’s state visit in March 2019—famously declared that “the period of European naivety is over,” emphasizing that “letting Chinese companies buy up EU infrastructure such as ports had been a ‘strategic error.’”³⁷

Regarding technology, Paris has championed the establishment of EU-level economic-security tools—including anti-subsidy measures, foreign investment screening, an anti-coercion instrument, public procurement safeguards, and a 5G Toolbox—to protect European technologies, strategic industries, and critical infrastructure.³⁸ Thanks in part to France’s support and the Commission’s swift implementation, the EU has rolled out all of these instruments in just a few years.

In security, France supports EU efforts to stop China from aiding Russia’s war in Ukraine. It also advocates a stronger European role in Indo-Pacific security and promotes expanded cooperation with Indo-Pacific democracies. France believes these objectives can only be achieved through close coordination and unity among EU member states and institutions on China policy. Macron underscored this conviction by inviting the European Commission president and the German chancellor to join him both times he hosted President Xi in the Élysée Palace—in March 2019 and in May 2024.³⁹

Conclusion

China’s increasing economic and competitiveness challenges to France and the EU have transformed the traditionally cooperative Sino-French relationship over the past decade. France’s China policy still emphasizes engagement on global issues, climate, and military-to-military communication, but its overall stance on trade and investment, technology, and security has gradually shifted toward balancing and de-risking. Since taking office in 2017, President Macron—once an optimist about constructive dialogue with Beijing—has recognized that the balance of power in Sino-French relations has tilted to France’s disadvantage. He has therefore begun to advocate for a more assertive economic-security approach, primarily through EU-level initiatives.

As a result, while France seeks to maintain communication and seeks to avoid direct confrontation with China, it has been one of the staunchest initiators and backers of the von der Leyen Commission’s de-risking agenda. The steady shift toward balancing is likely to persist through the remainder of Macron’s term. However, a potential far-right victory in the 2027 presidential election could upend this trajectory and usher in a more China-friendly stance at the Élysée Palace.

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Zoltán Fehér

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1 Jinling Zhang, 60 Years of China-France Relations: Extraordinary Friendship and Exemplary Cooperation, (Beijing: Chinese People’s Institute of Foreign Affairs, 2024), https://www.cpifa.org/en/cms/book/402.

2 “China, France Sign Joint Declaration,” Embassy of the People’s Republic of China in the United States of America, January 27, 2004, https://us.china-embassy.gov.cn/eng/zt/twwt/200401/t20040127_4912479.htm.

3 “Xi Says His State Visit to France Has Special Meaning,” Xinhua News Agency, March 28, 2024, https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/world/2014xivisiteu/2014-03/28/content_17387179.htm.

4 Kinling Lo, “EU Leaders Hold out Olive Branch to China over Belt and Road,” South China Morning Post, March 26, 2019, https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3003378/eu-leaders-hold-out-olive-branch-chinese-rival-hint-they-are.

5 Francois Godement, “France and China: Making the Best of an Unequal Relationship,” Institut Montaigne, May 7, 2024, https://www.institutmontaigne.org/en/expressions/france-and-china-making-best-unequal-relationship.

6 Céline Pajon, John Seaman, and Marc Julienne, “France Adapts to an Era of Strategic Competition with China,” Institut Français Des Relations Internationales, May 6, 2024, https://www.ifri.org/en/external-articles/france-adapts-era-strategic-competition-china.

7 Ibid.

8 Giulia Interesse, “France-China Relations: Trade, Investment, and Recent Developments,” China Briefing, May 15, 2024, https://www.china-briefing.com/news/france-china-relations-trade-investment-and-recent-developments.

9 “China, France to Advance Economic Exchanges with Deepening Cooperation in Emerging Fields amid 60 Years of Diplomatic Ties,” Global Times, May 5, 2024, https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202405/1311668.shtml.

10 Interesse, “France-China Relations.”

11 “China, France to Advance Economic Exchanges”; “France and China,” Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs, March 2019, https://www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/en/country-files/china/france-and-china; Lu Chen and Kelly Wang, “From ‘French Farms to Chinese Tables’: France’s Economy Minister Touts Trade Potential,” Global Neighbours, April 8, 2025, https://www.globalneighbours.org/from-french-farms-to-chinese-tables-frances-economy-minister-touts-trade-potential.

12 “France and China.”

13 “Biden, Macron Seek Joint Response on China Trade after Tensions,” Bloomberg, June 8, 2024, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-06-08/biden-macron-seek-joint-response-on-china-trade-after-tensions.

14 Necva Tastan Sevinc, “France Urges China to Respect Trade Rules, Warns against Supporting Russia,” Anadolu Ajansi, July 17, 2025, https://www.aa.com.tr/en/asia-pacific/france-urges-china-to-respect-trade-rules-warns-against-supporting-russia/3633744.

15 Marc Julienne, “Macron’s China Policy: Dropping Illusions and Bringing Back Realpolitik,” Prospect Foundation, May 14, 2024, https://www.pf.org.tw/en/pfen/33-10699.html.

16 Finbarr Bermingham, “China Says EU Brandy Being Dumped on Local Market, but Holds Fire on Duties,” South China Morning Post, August 29, 2024, https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3276453/china-says-eu-brandy-being-dumped-local-market-wont-impose-duties-now.

17 “China Says It Is Working with France on Trade Differences, No Sign Yet of a Cognac Deal,” Reuters, June 7, 2025, https://www.asiaone.com/world/china-says-it-working-france-trade-differences-no-sign-yet-cognac-deal.

18 Xiaofei Xu, “Why France Is Toasting China’s New Tariff on European Brandy,” South China Morning Post, July 7, 2025, https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3317176/why-france-toasting-chinas-new-tariff-european-brandy.

19 Michel Rose and Laurie Chen, “Ahead of Xi Meeting, Macron Warns against Shunning China,” Reuters, April 5, 2023, https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/between-reset-de-risk-eu-leaders-pay-rare-visit-china-2023-04-04.

20 Pascal Bine and Wesley Lainé, “France Strengthens Foreign Investment Controls, Expands Jurisdiction to ‘Commercial Establishments’ Registered in France,” Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP, January 16, 2024, https://www.skadden.com/insights/publications/2024/01/france-strengthens-foreign-investment-control; “Foreign Investment Screening in France—Annual Report 2023,” Ministère de l’Économie, des Finances et de la Souveraineté Industrielle et Numérique, 2023. https://www.tresor.economie.gouv.fr/Articles/c7ec36f3-6df0-4cf8-82aa-9c772917afeb/files/83865cf0-0ecd-4684-badf-3e39fa6bb833.

21 “Commission Recommends Carrying out Risk Assessments on Four Critical Technology Areas: Advanced Semiconductors, Artificial Intelligence, Quantum, Biotechnologies,” European Commission, press release, October 3, 2023, https://defence-industry-space.ec.europa.eu/commission-recommends-carrying-out-risk-assessments-four-critical-technology-areas-advanced-2023-10-03_en.

22 LOI N° 2019-810 Du 1er Août 2019 Visant à Préserver Les Intérêts de La Défense et de La Sécurité Nationale de La France Dans Le Cadre de l’exploitation Des Réseaux Radioélectriques Mobiles (1) (2019) https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/jorf/id/JORFTEXT000038864094; Mathieu Rosemain and Gwénaëlle Barzic, “Exclusive: French Limits on Huawei 5G Equipment Amount to de Facto Ban by 2028,” Reuters, July 22, 2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/technology/exclusive-french-limits-on-huawei-5g-equipment-amount-to-de-facto-ban-by-2028-idUSKCN24N26R.

23 “Ecological Bonus: Which New Vehicles Are Eligible?” Service Public, February 9, 2024, https://www.service-public.fr/particuliers/actualites/A17002?lang=en; “France’s Le Maire Welcomes EU Action against Chinese-Made Electric Cars,” Reuters, September 13, 2023, https://www.reuters.com/article/business/frances-le-maire-welcomes-eu-action-against-chinese-made-electric-cars-idUSS8N3A306F.

24 “Conseils aux Entreprises : Flash Ingérence,” Direction Générale de la Sécurité Intérieure, last visited September 14, 2025, https://www.dgsi.interieur.gouv.fr/dgsi-a-vos-cotes/contre-espionnage/conseils-aux-entreprises-flash-ingerence; “Protéger le Débat Public Contre les Ingérences Numériques Étrangères,” Secrétariat Général de la Défense et de la Sécurité Nationale, November 23, 2022, http://www.sgdsn.gouv.fr/nos-missions/proteger/proteger-le-debat-public-contre-les-ingerences-numeriques-etrangeres.

25 “China, France Expand Nuclear Cooperation,” World Nuclear News, April 11, 2023, https://world-nuclear-news.org/articles/china,-france-expand-nuclear-cooperation; “French and Chinese Firms Ink Deals on Sidelines of Xi’s Paris Visit,” Reuters, May 6, 2024, https://www.reuters.com/markets/french-chinese-firms-ink-deals-sidelines-xis-paris-visit-2024-05-06.

26 “France’s Indo-Pacific Strategy 2025,” Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs, July 2025, https://www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/IMG/pdf/france_s_indo-pacific_strategy_2025_cle04bb17.pdf.

27 Pajon, et al., “France Adapts to an Era of Strategic Competition with China.”

28 “France’s Indo-Pacific Strategy 2025”; “The Indo-Pacific: A Priority for France,” Ministère de l’Europe et des Affaires Étrangères, July 2025, https://www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/en/country-files/regional-strategies/indo-pacific/the-indo-pacific-a-priority-for-france/; “EU Indo-Pacific Strategy,” European External Action Service, November 6, 2024, https://www.eeas.europa.eu/eu-indo-pacific-strategy-topic_en.

29 “Annual Report 2024,” French Ministry of the Armed Forces, June 4, 2024, https://www.defense.gouv.fr/sites/default/files/dgris/DGRIS%20annual%20report%202024.pdf; Dzirhan Mahadzir, “French Carrier Charles de Gaulle Wraps First Pacific Deployment,” USNI News, March 7, 2025, https://news.usni.org/2025/03/07/french-carrier-charles-de-gaulle-wraps-first-pacific-deployment.

30 Pajon, et al., “France Adapts to an Era of Strategic Competition with China.”

31 Marc Julienne, “France’s Emmanuel Macron to Press Xi Jinping on China’s Support of Russia,” Institut Français Des Relations Internationales, May 4, 2023, https://www.ifri.org/en/media-external-article/frances-emmanuel-macron-press-xi-jinping-chinas-support-russia; Shane Croucher, “Macron Wants Bigger Ukraine Role for China,” Newsweek, March 27, 2025, https://www.newsweek.com/macron-wants-chinas-xi-do-more-russia-ukraine-war-2051421; Laura Kayali, “Macron to China: Keep North Korea out of Ukraine War or Risk NATO Coming to Asia,” Politico, May 30, 2025, https://www.politico.eu/article/macron-china-keep-north-korea-out-ukraine-nato-to-asia; Rory O’Neill, “China Slams Macron over ‘Unacceptable’ Comments on Taiwan and Ukraine,” Politico, May 31, 2025, https://www.politico.eu/article/macron-ukraine-taiwan-china-war-israel-gaza-shangri-la.

32 Sevinc, “France Urges China to Respect Trade Rules, Warns against Supporting Russia.”

33 Pajon, et al., “France Adapts to an Era of Strategic Competition with China.”

34 Sarah White, et al., “EU and France Press Xi for More Balanced Chinese Trade Ties,” Financial Times, May 6, 2024, https://www.ft.com/content/0728c778-4d5a-4dfc-8694-9c493e82df15.

35 Barbara Moens, et al., “France Puts Screws on EU Chief to Hit Back against Chinese Electric Vehicles,” Politico, September 11, 2023, https://www.politico.eu/article/france-breton-eu-chief-hit-back-against-chinese-electric-vehicles.

36 Pajon, et al., “France Adapts to an Era of Strategic Competition with China.”

37 Kinling Lo, “EU Leaders Hold out Olive Branch to Chinese ‘Rival’ over Belt and Road,” South China Morning Post, March 26, 2019, https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3003378/eu-leaders-hold-out-olive-branch-chinese-rival-hint-they-are.

38 Pajon et al., “France Adapts to an Era of Strategic Competition with China.”

39 Lo, “EU Leaders Hold out Olive Branch to Chinese ‘Rival’ over Belt and Road”; “Macron and von Der Leyen Press China’s Xi on Ukraine and Fair Trade at Paris Summit,” Le Monde, May 6, 2024, https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2024/05/06/macron-and-von-der-leyen-press-china-s-xi-on-ukraine-and-fair-trade-at-paris-summit_6670576_4.html; White, et al., “EU and France Press Xi for More Balanced Chinese Trade Ties.”

The post France’s policy on China: Strategic autonomy and less naïveté appeared first on Atlantic Council.

Poland’s policy on China: From partnership to skepticism

Zoltán Fehér — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 15:00:00 +0000

This is the eighth chapter of the report “Is Europe waking up to the China challenge? How geopolitics are reshaping EU and transatlantic strategy.” Read the full report here.

Poland has traditionally anchored its foreign policy in the transatlantic alliance, yet since the early 2000s, it also sought to expand economic engagement with China. By the late 2010s, however, Warsaw recognized that this approach had yielded few tangible returns. Polish exports gained little market access, and Chinese investment remained limited. From 2019 onward, Polish policy gradually hardened, aligning with the European Union’s (EU) own shift toward a hawkish stance on China. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and Beijing’s support for Moscow further accelerated Poland’s reassessment, reinforcing its alignment with the United States while exposing the absence of a coherent China strategy. President Andrzej Duda continued to advocate for selective economic cooperation with Beijing, albeit with limited results. Meanwhile, Warsaw’s application of investment-screening mechanisms and its response to US efforts to exclude Huawei and other Chinese firms from 5G networks remained cautious. At the EU level, Poland opposed the Comprehensive Agreement on Investment (CAI) and endorsed the Union’s emerging economic-security and “de-risking” agenda.

During the Cold War, as a Soviet bloc country, Poland’s ties with China fluctuated according to Sino-Soviet relations. Poland recognized the People’s Republic of China (PRC) shortly after its founding in October 1949, and diplomatic relations were established. Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai visited Poland twice, and several Polish leaders paid visits to China in the 1950s, signaling friendly relations. Following the Sino-Soviet split in the 1960s, the relationship between Poland and China significantly cooled. In the 1980s, however, Polish-Chinese ties were revived: Polish President and Communist Party leader Wojciech Jaruzelski visited Beijing in 1986, and China’s Premier and General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Zhao Ziyang reciprocated with a visit to Poland the following year. As with other former Soviet bloc countries that were now shaping their own external relations after decades of Soviet control, Poland turned its foreign policy toward Euro-Atlantic partners as well as EU and NATO membership. Consequently, its relationship with China remained limited and largely inactive during the first post-Cold War decade.

Poland’s relations with China intensified significantly in the early 2000s. At the time, the country saw great economic opportunity in closer ties with Beijing and followed an engagement strategy pursued by most North American and European countries after the Cold War. During Hu Jintao’s state visit to Poland in 2004, the two countries signed an agreement to establish “a friendly and cooperative partnership,” a formal designation emphasizing economic cooperation. In 2011, China upgraded its ties with Poland to a “strategic partnership,” reflecting Poland’s broader political and economic significance.¹ In 2012, Poland became a founding member of the Cooperation between China and Central and Eastern European Countries (initially the “14+1”, later the “16+1” format).

Throughout most of the 2010s, Polish policy on China remained cooperative. As a result of its earlier engagement posture, Poland continued to view Beijing primarily as an economic partner, avoiding confrontation and prioritizing opportunities for trade and investment. For the same reason, Poland largely stayed out of EU-level debates on China, focusing instead on bilateral engagement.

However, Poland’s policy toward China began shifting in 2019, driven by three factors: intensifying US-China strategic competition, Russia’s war on Ukraine (backed by China), and China’s growing economic challenge to the EU. These developments pushed Poland to adopt a firmer stance and align with the EU’s increasingly assertive China policy. After 2019, leaders of the two countries did not conduct mutual visits for several years, exchanging only phone calls and occasional meetings on the margins of international gatherings. By the end of the COVID-19 pandemic, the relationship had deteriorated further, as China’s pandemic policies, diverging interests, and trade imbalances effectively froze progress.²

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 made matters worse, pushing the bilateral relationship into crisis. As Poland focused on responding to Russia’s aggression, China’s support for Moscow deepened Warsaw’s mistrust. Even after the 2023 elections, in which the centrist Civic Coalition (KO) defeated the conservative-populist Law and Justice Party (PiS), Poland’s wariness of Beijing remained unchanged.

Still, Poland did not sever its economic ties with China. Instead, during the period of political cohabitation between 2023 and 2025, it adopted a dual-track approach: Donald Tusk’s KO-led government emphasized economic and national-security resilience, while President Duda of PiS pursued continued diplomatic and trade engagement. While this division of labor highlighted the lack of a coherent, unified China strategy, it also signaled that Polish leaders were increasingly recognizing that the country’s engagement approach had not yielded the results they had hoped for. Polish markets had not expanded, and the risks to both domestic companies and the broader EU economy had increased. Consequently, Poland began actively contributing to EU policy on China, supporting the European Commission’s tougher approach and its “de-risking” strategy.³

As of 2025, while the Tusk government’s commitment to balancing and de-risking is clear, the position of Poland’s new President Karol Nawrocki (PiS) remains uncertain. Nawrocki’s foreign policy combines transatlanticism, Euroskepticism, and a sovereignty-first approach. His alignment with US President Donald Trump and the MAGA movement may further complicate his China policy, given that the second Trump administration has not yet settled on a consistent strategy, oscillating between engagement and balancing. Nevertheless, his September 2025 meeting with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi suggests he may preserve elements of Duda’s engagement approach.⁴

Trade and investment: Lost illusions

Successive Polish governments, regardless of their ideological leanings, have pursued a cooperative strategy toward China in hopes of gaining economic benefits. Yet Poland remains one of the EU countries least dependent on China for trade and investment. Exports to China account for just 0.57 percent of gross domestic product and 1.03 percent of total exports.⁵ Still, Warsaw is Beijing’s top trading partner in Central and Eastern Europe, while Beijing ranks as Warsaw’s second-largest trading partner in the region, after Germany. The relationship, however, is highly imbalanced. In 2024, China exported €34.3 billion in goods to Poland, while Poland exported only €3.3 billion to China—creating a nearly €31 billion trade deficit. This was the EU’s largest deficit with China after the Netherlands and Italy, and the tenth largest globally. Poland’s exports to China are concentrated in copper, electronic equipment, optical instruments, machinery, vehicles, wood, charcoal, and nuclear reactors and boilers.⁶

Agriculture has been one of the sectors most eager for closer ties with China, hoping to secure access to the Chinese market. However, Polish agriculture has struggled to benefit from the China trade relationship. To make matters worse, Beijing’s new food security law, adopted in mid-2024, further complicated conditions for Polish producers.⁷

Chinese investment in Poland has remained modest, totaling only €2.5 billion between 2000 and 2024.⁸ Nonetheless, Warsaw has increasingly come to recognize that Chinese investments are a potential vulnerability. Poland was among the first EU countries to join the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), and its strategic role in the initiative is underscored by the fact that nine out of ten China-Europe Railway Express trains either transit through Poland or terminate there.⁹ Over the past two decades, Poland has sought to develop its own economic security toolkit. It adopted the Act on Competition and Consumer Protection in 2007, the Act on the Control of Certain Investments in 2015, and the Polish Competition Authority’s foreign investment screening mechanism in 2020. Implementation, however, has lagged. In 2017, the Polish Competition Authority approved the planned acquisition of Konsalnet, a leading Polish security firm, by China Security & Fire—only for the Beijing headquarters to halt the deal due to the company’s financial troubles. In 2021, the Polish regulator also investigated Changjiu Logistics’ investment in transportation company Adampol S.A, but found no violations, allowing the transaction to proceed. Although both investments involved potential risks to Poland’s national and economic security, the responses by the authorities and the public were limited, suggesting significant gaps in the country’s ability to manage such risks.¹⁰

Technology: De-risking in telecommunications

Poland’s stance on China in technological matters has also shifted considerably over the years. In telecommunications, Chinese companies Huawei and ZTE once played a prominent role in Poland’s economy. Between 2006 and 2019, Huawei helped build Poland’s 2G and 3G networks, leaving the telecommunications heavily reliant on Chinese technology and systems.¹¹ However, such cooperation has unraveled in recent years.

In 2019, Poland arrested a high-level Chinese Huawei employee, charging him with espionage on behalf of China. The individual had worked with Huawei for eight years and previously served at the Chinese Consulate, and he was charged alongside a Polish man who had previously worked for Polish security services. The scandal placed Huawei and 5G on the agenda as potential vulnerabilities in Polish critical infrastructure. As the first Trump administration pressured allies to exclude Huawei from their 5G networks, this issue became central to negotiations between the United States and Poland. During Vice President Mike Pence’s visit to Poland in September 2019, the two countries signed an agreement on 5G cooperation, which established criteria for vetting telecom equipment suppliers based on security risks. In August 2020, they concluded the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement, strengthening US-Polish defense cooperation and increasing US military presence in Poland—a development that would not have been possible without alignment on 5G.¹²

Guided by US initiatives and the EU’s 5G Toolbox, Poland decided to ban Huawei and ZTE from the country in 2020—a move that Huawei protested by sending a complaint to EU Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager.¹³ Despite the ban, Poland allowed the companies to maintain limited operations while diversifying its telecommunications market. In recent years, Warsaw has repeatedly considered legislation to phase out Huawei’s and ZTE’s equipment from its telecommunications sector, most recently in October 2024—and the Polish parliament ultimately adopted an amendment to the National Cybersecurity Certification Act, implementing the EU’s NIS2 Directive on the security of network and information systems.¹⁴ The amendment introduced a new certification system for telecommunications companies operating in critical sectors, potentially designating some firms as high-risk suppliers and requiring them to replace previously provided hardware or software.¹⁵

Security: The Ukraine war and hardening threat perceptions

In the security domain, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, China’s support for Moscow, and intensifying US-China strategic competition have heavily influenced Poland’s approach to China. Poland’s steadfast support for Ukraine and its advocacy for transatlantic unity against Moscow have shaped both its Russia and China policies. Leaders from both major political camps have consistently urged China to help end the war and halt economic and military support for Vladimir Putin’s regime.

In 2023, Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki (PiS) highlighted Poland’s policy shift in a speech at the Atlantic Council. He warned that European countries incur “a huge geopolitical cost” when selling goods to China, and that China and Russia obtain Western technology to eventually use it against the West. He also urged allies and partners to support Ukraine to protect the status quo in Taiwan, asserting that “if Ukraine gets conquered, the next day, China can attack Taiwan.”¹⁶ Beijing immediately protested the prime minister’s statements.¹⁷

The current Civic Platform-led government has continued this approach. During Chinese Foreign Minister Wan Yi’s visit to Poland in September 2025, Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski “called on China to step up diplomatic efforts to end the fighting in Ukraine” and “urged China to cease its exports of dual-use products to Moscow, including drones and navigation equipment.” Sikorski added, “without Beijing’s help, Russia’s economy would have collapsed by now.”¹⁸

Poland has also faced security concerns over Chinese involvement in its port infrastructure. A subsidiary of Hong Kong-based CK Hutchison, Hutchison Port Holdings, had leased a terminal in Gdynia since 2007. By 2024, the lease raised alarms due to its proximity to a dock where the United States and NATO unload military aid for Ukraine. At parliament’s urging, the Polish government eventually designated Gdynia port as critical infrastructure and required reporting on its operations. In an unexpected turn, the national security issue surrounding the port has since moved toward resolution. Encouraged by Trump, the US investment fund BlackRock purchased a majority share in the ports operating in the Panama Canal from Hutchison, with the deal also including equity in other ports, such as Gdynia, potentially bringing them under US ownership. However, the deal is still in flux, both because China has refused to approve it and because the Panamanian government has asked the Supreme Court to annul Hutchison’s previous contract for procedural flaws.¹⁹

Overall, Poland’s position has become more consciously aligned with the United States, centered on robust defense cooperation, while pursuing a measured disengagement from China in response to Beijing’s continued support for Russia’s war effort.²⁰

Poland’s alignment with the EU’s China policy

In the past six years, while China’s competitiveness has posed increasing challenges for the EU, Poland’s positions on China have hardened across key domains. During this period, Poland has increasingly recognized the interconnectedness of its bilateral and EU-level relations with China. Consequently, Polish governments of various ideological compositions have sought to participate more actively in EU policy debates, and Poland’s positions on EU China policy have evolved accordingly.

Poland has weighed in on the EU’s CAI with China. When the European Commission concluded negotiations with China on the agreement in December 2020, its failure to submit a draft to the Committee of Permanent Representatives—the body that prepares the Council of the EU’s work—prompted criticism from several member states, including Poland. To clarify Poland’s position, Foreign Minister Zbigniew Rau stated that the EU should pursue a mutually beneficial agreement with China and allow time to consult with the United States to find common ground on the CAI. Warsaw’s concerns included the deal’s implications for both Poland and the EU, as well as potential consequences for the United States. US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan echoed this view, noting that “the Biden-Harris administration would welcome early consultations with our European partners on our common concerns about China’s economic practices.” Facing pressure from EU member states, the European Parliament, and the United States, the CAI eventually collapsed.²¹

In recent years, Poland has recognized that China’s economic and competitiveness challenges cannot be effectively addressed solely at the bilateral level. EU-level policy must be strengthened to protect the Polish economy from China’s unfair practices and coercion. Polish policymakers acknowledge that, while many EU member states continue to emphasize bilateral engagement with China, the scale of asymmetry makes it impractical for any single state to manage Beijing’s challenges alone—underscoring the increasing need for collective, EU-level responses.²² As a result, the Polish government supported the Commission’s adoption of the European Economic Security Strategy in 2023 and has consistently backed its de-risking measures. Poland also voted in favor of the Commission’s proposal for the EU to impose tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles under the Foreign Subsidies Instrument in March 2025, arguing that Chinese state subsidies distort fair competition and create vulnerabilities in strategic industries.

Conclusion

Despite its traditionally transatlantic orientation and firm opposition to Russia, Poland maintained an engagement policy toward China from the early post-Communist transition until the late 2010s. For much of this period, Warsaw viewed China primarily through an economic lens: policymakers and business groups anticipated that greater Chinese market access would boost Polish agricultural and industrial exports, while Chinese capital inflows were expected to support domestic investment. These expectations gradually eroded in the 2010s, as China failed to provide substantive trade concessions or investment opportunities. At the same time, Russia’s increasingly aggressive behavior heightened Poland’s sense of strategic vulnerability.

The combination of unmet economic promises and Beijing’s alignment with Moscow following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine reshaped elite perceptions of China, framing it as a systemic challenge rather than an economic opportunity. In response, Poland has undertaken a pronounced policy adjustment—supporting EU-level instruments under the Economic Security Strategy and developing domestic mechanisms to enhance resilience against China-related economic and strategic risks. Although partisan polarization continues to complicate consensus on China policy, Warsaw’s overall trajectory now reflects a deliberate and measured shift toward balancing and de-risking vis-à-vis Beijing.

About the author

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Zoltán Fehér

Central Europe China

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1 Helena Legarda, “From Marriage of Convenience to Strategic Partnership: China-Russia Relations and the Fight for Global Influence,” Mercator Institute for China Studies, August 24, 2021, https://merics.org/en/comment/marriage-convenience-strategic-partnership-china-russia-relations-and-fight-global; Lukas Fiala; “How Are We to Understand China’s International Partnerships?” China-Global South Project, April 21, 2023, https://chinaglobalsouth.com/analysis/how-are-we-to-understand-chinas-international-partnerships/; Jacob Mardell, “Building Partnerships with China ‘for a New Era,’” Royal United Services Institute, December 17, 2024, https://www.rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/commentary/building-partnerships-china-new-era.

2 Marcin Przychodniak, “The Rough ‘Strategic Relationship’ Between Poland and China,” China Observers in Central and Eastern Europe, January 25, 2021, https://chinaobservers.eu/the-rough-strategic-relationship-between-poland-and-china.

3 “Poland’s Strategic Convergence with the United States and Managed Detachment from China,” Debug Lies News, July 19, 2025, https://debuglies.com/2025/07/19/polands-strategic-convergence-with-the-united-states-and-managed-detachment-from-china/; Alicja Bachulska, “Multi-Pole-Arity: How Poland Can Help Europe Think Big on China,” European Council on Foreign Relations, April 15, 2025, https://ecfr.eu/publication/multi-pole-arity-how-poland-can-help-europe-think-big-on-china; “Profiling European Countries’ Resilience towards China,” Mercator Institute for China Studies, October 31, 2024, https://merics.org/en/report/profiling-european-countries-resilience-towards-china.

4 Marcin Jerzewski, “Pragmatism Without Principles? Poland-China Relations under Karol Nawrocki’s Presidency,” China Observers in Central and Eastern Europe, June 10, 2025, https://chinaobservers.eu/pragmatism-without-principles-poland-china-relations-under-karol-nawrockis-presidency/; “Polish President Vows to Further Ties with China,” Xinhua News Agency, September 16, 2025, https://english.www.gov.cn/news/202509/16/content_WS68c8b355c6d00fa19f7a27b6.html.

5 Bachulska, “Multi-Pole-Arity.”

6 “China-EU—International Trade in Goods Statistics,” Eurostat, February 2025, https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=China-EU_-_international_trade_in_goods_stati; Konrad Rajca, “Poland External Relations Briefing: The State and Prospect of Polish-Chinese Relations,” China-CEE Institute, March 22, 2024, https://china-cee.eu/2024/03/22/poland-external-relations-briefing-the-state-and-prospect-of-polish-chinese-relations/; “China-Poland Bilateral Relations: Trade and Investment,” China Briefing, June 28, 2024, https://www.china-briefing.com/news/china-poland-bilateral-relations-trade-and-investment.

7 Bachulska, “Multi-Pole-Arity.”

8 Agatha Kratz, et al., “Dwindling Investments Become More Concentrated—Chinese FDI in Europe: 2023 Update,” Mercator Institute for China Studies and Rhodium Group, June 6, 2024, https://merics.org/en/report/dwindling-investments-become-more-concentrated-chinese-fdi-europe-2023-update.

9 Bachulska, “Multi-Pole-Arity.”

10 “Streamlining Foreign Investment and CFIUS Processes: What You Need to Know,” Clifford Chance, December 2023, https://www.cliffordchance.com/briefings/2022/04/streamlining-foreign-investment-and-cfius-processes–what-you-ne0.html; “Changjiu Logistics (603569.SH) to Buy 30-Pct Stake in Poland’s ADAMPOL S.A.,” Xinhua Silk Road, March 2, 2021, https://en.imsilkroad.com/p/320010.html; Bachulska, “Multi-Pole-Arity”; “China Security & Fire to Buy Konsalnet for up to 110 Mln Euros via Its Polish Unit,” Reuters, March 17, 2017, https://www.reuters.com/article/technology/china-security-fire-to-buy-konsalnet-for-up-to-110-mln-euros-via-its-polish-un-idUSL3N1GU3YO.

11 Bachulska, “Multi-Pole-Arity.”

12 Pawel Paszak, “Poland-China Relations in 2021: Current State and Prospects,” Warsaw Institute, January 29, 2021, https://warsawinstitute.org/poland-china-relations-2021-current-state-prospects; Bachulska, “Multi-Pole-Arity”; Christina Farr, “Huawei Fires an Employee in Poland, Following Charges of Espionage: Wall Street Journal,” CNBC, January 12, 2019, https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/12/huawei-fires-an-employee-in-poland-following-charges-of-espionage.html; “The Clean Network,” US Department of State, last visited September 12, 2025, https://2017-2021.state.gov/the-clean-network; “Home,” Clean Network, Krach Institute for Tech Diplomacy, last visited September 19, 2025, https://techdiplomacy.org/tech-statecraft; Andrzej Dąbrowski, “The Clean Network Initiative as an Element of the U.S.-China Competition,” Polish Institute of International Affairs, October 18, 2019, https://pism.pl/publications/The_Clean_Network_Initiative__as_an_Element_of_the_USChina_Competition; “U.S.-Poland Joint Declaration on 5G,” White House.” September 5, 2019, https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefings-statements/u-s-poland-joint-declaration-5g/; Jill Colvin, “US and Poland Sign Agreement to Cooperate on 5G Technology,” Associated Press, September 2, 2019, https://apnews.com/article/9a90e16d903947709998dd7a2dde8733; “New U.S.-Poland Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement Signed,” Ministry of National Defence, Republic of Poland, August 15, 2020, https://www.gov.pl/web/national-defence/new-us-poland-enhanced-defense-cooperation-agreement-signed.

13 Laurens Cerulus, “Huawei Challenges Legality of 5G Bans in Poland, Romania,” Politico, November 2, 2020, https://www.politico.eu/article/huawei-hints-at-legal-action-against-5g-bans-in-poland-romania.

14 Zoltán Kész, “Reducing Chinese Influence in the EU’s Telco: Poland Moves Ahead.” EU Tech Loop, October 14, 2024, https://eutechloop.com/reducing-chinese-influence-in-the-eus-telco-poland-moves-ahead/.

15 “New Polish Act on the National Cybersecurity Certification System and Its Key Assumptions,” Clifford Chance, August 5, 2025, https://www.cliffordchance.com/content/cliffordchance/briefings/2025/08/new-polish-act-on-the-national-cybersecurity-certification-syste.html; “Implementation of the Cybersecurity Directive (NIS2) in Poland,” Dentons, August 28, 2025, https://www.dentons.com/en/insights/newsletters/2025/august/8/powered-by-dentons/powered-by-dentons-august-2025/implementation-of-the-cybersecurity-directive-nis2-in-poland; “NIS2 Directive: Securing Network and Information Systems,” European Commission, December 2022, https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/nis2-directive.

16 Katherine Golden, “Poland’s Prime Minister: Western Europe Needs to Commit to Ukrainian Victory and Beware of China,” Atlantic Council, April 14, 2023, https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/polands-prime-minister-western-europe-needs-to-commit-to-ukrainian-victory-and-beware-of-china.

17 “China Accuses Poland of Meddling in Its Affairs after PM’s Taiwan Comments,” Reuters, April 14, 2023, https://www.reuters.com/world/china-accuses-poland-meddling-its-affairs-after-pms-taiwan-comments-2023-04-14/.

18 Natalia Ojewska, “Poland’s Sikorski Urges China to Help Secure Peace in Ukraine,” Bloomberg, April 23, 2025, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-04-23/poland-s-sikorski-urges-china-to-help-secure-peace-in-ukraine.

19 Jeremy Van der Haegen and Wojciech Kość, “Chinese Presence in a Polish Port Triggers Security Fears,” Politico, April 3, 2024, https://www.politico.eu/article/hong-kong-based-chinese-company-presence-polish-port-creates-security-worries-nato/; Elida Moreno, “CK Hutchison-Operated Panama Ports Could Be Taken over by State Partnerships, President Says,” Reuters, July 31, 2025, https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/ck-hutchison-operated-panama-ports-could-be-taken-over-by-state-partnerships-2025-07-31/; Arjun Neil Alim, Cheng Leng, and Chan Ho-Him, “Panama Ports Deal Will Not Close This Year, Warns CK Hutchison,” Financial Times, August 14, 2025, https://www.ft.com/content/8d5badf4-7b54-4094-8c26-ace5e9aca8f2.

20 “Poland’s Strategic Convergence with the United States and Managed Detachment from China.”

21 “Poland-China Relations in 2021”; Przychodniak, “The Rough ‘Strategic Relationship’ Between Poland and China”; Stuart Lau, “On Brink of China-EU Deal, Fresh Pressure Hits from US and Poland,” South China Morning Post, December 23, 2020, https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3115087/brink-china-eu-investment-deal-eleventh-hour-pressure-comes.

22 Bachulska, “Multi-Pole-Arity.”

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Is Europe waking up to the China challenge? How geopolitics are reshaping EU and transatlantic strategy

Zoltán Fehér, Valbona Zeneli — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 15:00:00 +0000

China’s ever-expanding global ambitions, unfolding amid renewed great power competition, pose a significant challenge to the strategic and economic interests of the United States and its European allies. Addressing these challenges will require strong and consistent transatlantic alignment and coordination—from countering Beijing’s unfair economic practices to confronting its assertive security posture.

Such alignment, however, has often been uneven. While the United States identified China as its primary strategic competitor and shifted from engagement to balancing as early as 2017, the European Union (EU) approach has evolved more slowly and inconsistently. This report explores the structural and political roots of that inconsistency—and offers guidance on how US policymakers can use these insights to foster unified transatlantic action.

In doing so, it traces the policy trajectories of individual member states, assesses the role of EU institutions in shaping China policy, and examines four key geopolitical trends that have nudged the EU toward a gradual move from engagement to balancing and “de-risking” vis-à-vis Beijing. Although significant differences persist between the United States and the EU in their broader trade posture, the findings indicate that Europe is increasingly waking up to the China challenge—and that the EU’s shifting stance could lay the groundwork for a more coherent, durable transatlantic strategy toward China.

Fellow

Zoltán Fehér

Central Europe China

Fellow

Valbona Zeneli

Europe Center Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security

Albanian Corruption

Acknowledgements

This report is the culmination of a year-long research project made possible through the generous support of the Smith Richardson Foundation.

The authors would like to express their gratitude to numerous individuals at the Atlantic Council for their hard work and dedication to the project, including:

Melanie Hart, senior director, Global China Hub
Samantha Wong, assistant director, Global China Hub
Jörn Fleck, senior director, Europe Center
James Batchik, associate director, Europe Center
Emma Nix, assistant director, Europe Center

The authors would also like to thank Jeff Fleischer, Daniel Malloy, Andrea Ratiu, and Kai Schnier for their editorial and digital assistance.

The project drew on the insights of numerous policymakers, experts, and scholars who participated in interviews and roundtables hosted by partner institutions, including the European Policy Centre in Brussels, the Institut Montaigne in Paris, the Equilibrium Institute in Budapest, the Institute for International Political Studies in Milan, and the Mercator Institute for China Studies in Berlin. Their contributions significantly informed the analysis presented here.

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Convergence and divergence in US and EU policies on China

Zoltán Fehér — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 15:00:00 +0000

This is the thirteenth chapter of the report “Is Europe waking up to the China challenge? How geopolitics are reshaping EU and transatlantic strategy.” Read the full report here.

Trade and investment

Technology

Security

While the United States and Europe were largely aligned in their approach toward China during the late Cold War and early post-Cold War years, the European Union (EU) has fallen behind the US shift from engagement to balancing. Although its policy toward Beijing has evolved considerably since 2019—and especially since 2023—moving steadily toward a firmer stance on China, the EU’s adjustment has been slower and more incremental. At the same time, persistent frictions between Brussels and successive US administrations over issues such as trade policy and Ukraine have complicated coordination.

Meanwhile, China’s increasingly assertive behavior—including unfair trade practices, support for Russia’s war in Ukraine, coercion in the Indo-Pacific, and efforts to reshape the international order along authoritarian lines—highlights the growing need for transatlantic action. If Europe and the United States want to effectively counter Beijing’s political influence and economic expansion, they will need to cultivate common policy principles—particularly in key domains such as trade and investment, technology, and security. Mapping existing areas of policy divergence and convergence can help decision-makers on both sides of the Atlantic strengthen cooperation.

Trade and investment

Technology

Security

About the author

Fellow

Zoltán Fehér

Central Europe China

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The post Convergence and divergence in US and EU policies on China appeared first on Atlantic Council.

How Europe deals with China in trade, technology, and security

Valbona Zeneli — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 15:00:00 +0000

This is the twelfth chapter of the report “Is Europe waking up to the China challenge? How geopolitics are reshaping EU and transatlantic strategy.” Read the full report here.

After several decades of trying to build a cooperative trade and political relationship with China, the EU came to recognize that this engagement strategy delivered limited economic gains while creating political tensions that ran counter to its own values and objectives. By 2019, optimism had given way to a new perception of China as partner, competitor, and systemic rival. This threefold framing—contradictory in theory but politically useful in practice—created enough ambiguity and common ground to allow maneuvering among member states with divergent priorities. At the same time, it provided a platform for a broader debate about Europe’s China policy.

Countries such as Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Hungary, which received significant Chinese investment in the aftermath of the Eurozone crisis, were able to proceed cautiously, avoiding confrontational language that could have had negative economic consequences. By contrast, northern and Baltic states favored a tougher approach, emphasizing the systemic-rival framing. France and Germany were internally divided but ultimately supported the EU policy, with France leaning toward a tougher line on trade and sovereignty and Germany under Chancellor Angela Merkel continuing to prioritize engagement. The European Council’s delayed endorsement of the triptych of cooperation, economic competition, and systemic rivalry in June 2023—four years after the European Commission had introduced this framing—highlighted Europe’s initial reluctance to acknowledge problems in EU-China economic relations. Ultimately, however, member states paved the way for gradual convergence on a common China policy.¹ By 2023, the EU recognized that the risks of engaging with China had begun to outweigh the benefits.

Because the EU is not a unitary actor, its China policy reflects the diverse relationships, preferences, vulnerabilities, and strategic cultures of its member states. Case studies of Germany, France, Italy, Greece, Hungary, Poland, Lithuania, and the Czech Republic underscore the complexity of EU-China relations and demonstrate how national trajectories shape or constrain Brussels’ evolving China strategy. France and Germany serve as the EU’s strategic anchors, with Paris emphasizing sovereignty and resilience and Berlin shifting from economic primacy toward a more strategic-industrial approach. Italy and Greece exemplify cautious strategic recalibration: once open to Chinese investment and the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), both now cautiously align with Brussels while preserving economic ties with Beijing. Meanwhile, Poland has moved from economic pragmatism to security awareness as limited trade benefits and Beijing’s alignment with Moscow eroded earlier optimism; the Czech Republic maintains a values-based approach, combining minimal trade exposure with one of the EU’s strictest investment-screening regimes; and Lithuania has emerged as a catalyst, translating bilateral confrontation into EU-wide resilience and transatlantic coordination. Hungary, by contrast, continues to act as a spoiler, deepening ties with Beijing and using its veto power to undermine EU unity.

Trade and investment: Between open markets and strategic control

Although trade and investment form the backbone of Europe’s relationship with China, they are also a principal source of friction. At the EU level, the tendency to favor “de-risking, not decoupling” may be too soft an approach to secure desirable trade flows while reducing strategic dependencies. Although this approach has spurred the rollout of the EU’s investment-screening mechanism, initiated anti-subsidy investigations into Chinese electric vehicles (EVs) and solar panels, and resulted in the freezing of the Comprehensive Agreement on Investment, it remains unclear whether these measures will suffice to counter Chinese influence.

Germany has historically been the most influential actor in shaping the EU’s China policy, especially in trade, and its globalization-driven economy—long tied to China in automobiles, machinery, and chemicals—faced the highest potential gains and risks. Under Chancellor Friedrich Merz, Berlin has abandoned partnership language and aligned more closely with Brussels’ emphasis on rivalry and critical-infrastructure protection. However, divisions within the German business sector continue to complicate policy coherence, and Merz has yet to demonstrate through action his intent to advance the EU’s agenda. Meanwhile, France has consistently pushed for stronger EU trade defenses and long advocated an assertive industrial policy to counter China’s overcapacity. Under President Emmanuel Macron, Paris pressed the European Commission to launch anti-dumping investigations into Chinese EVs in 2023.

Italy’s China stance has shifted from opportunistic engagement to closer EU alignment. Its decision to join the BRI in 2019 was emblematic of its short-term, partisan-driven policymaking aimed at quick economic gains. By December 2023, however, Rome withdrew from the BRI and strengthened its “golden power” rules, signaling broad skepticism toward China and Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s commitment to transatlantic cooperation—while still seeking to preserve economic opportunities. Similarly, Greece’s trajectory is one of gradual adjustment. In the aftermath of its debt crisis, Athens relied heavily on Chinese capital, most prominently through China COSCO Shipping Corporation Limited’s ownership of the port of Piraeus. Since 2020, diversification of foreign direct investment (FDI) and pressure from the EU and the United States have tempered Athens’ dependence on Beijing. Greece’s adoption of the EU’s FDI-screening mechanism, combined with its abstention from EU tariffs on Chinese EVs in October 2024, illustrates its hedging strategy.

Lithuania presents a strikingly different case. With little bilateral trade at stake, Vilnius has taken one of the EU’s toughest stances on China, portraying it as a coercive power and systemic rival. Its confrontation with Beijing over Taiwan in 2021 triggered Chinese retaliation but also accelerated Brussels’ adoption of the Anti-Coercion Instrument. Lithuania thus transformed a bilateral dispute into a catalyst for EU-wide resilience, reframing trade and investment policy as a question of collective security rather than purely economics.

For years, Poland prioritized economic ties with China over national security, even though—as elsewhere in Europe—trade and investment flows never fully materialized, leaving Warsaw with a significant trade deficit. However, China’s support for Russia’s war in Ukraine has eroded Warsaw’s desire for partnership. By 2020, Poland was ahead of the EU curve in creating an FDI-screening mechanism, though implementation has lagged. Meanwhile, the Czech Republic has maintained a values‑driven, security‑first approach to China. Rather than chasing short-term economic gains, Prague has developed one of the region’s most robust economic‑security frameworks, anchored by the 2021 Foreign Investment Screening Act.

Hungary stands alone in its defiance of EU norms, having consistently courted Chinese trade and investment while resisting EU restrictions. Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has denounced EU tariffs as an “economic cold war”—and Budapest’s willingness to openly align with Beijing has provided China with an important foothold within the EU.

Technology: Building resilience in the digital era

Technology has emerged as the sharpest arena of competition with China, encompassing 5G infrastructure, semiconductors, artificial intelligence, and dual-use goods. The EU response includes the 5G toolbox, tighter export controls, and coordination with the United States on technology governance, though the pace and scope of implementation vary widely across member states.

As in other sectors, Germany displays ambivalence toward China in technology. While its Foreign Trade and Payments Act—together with its implementing regulation, the Foreign Trade and Payments Ordinance—provides one of Europe’s strictest foreign-investment screening regimes, with a broad scope of sectors covered and low thresholds for review, implementation has at times lagged behind its rhetoric. Berlin was slow to curb Huawei and ZTE’s role in 5G networks, prioritizing industrial competitiveness and cost concerns. Only in July 2024 did the German government announce a full phase-out, aligning with EU and NATO partners. France, by contrast, has been the EU’s leading driver in technology policy, framing digital resilience as both an economic concern and a geopolitical imperative. Paris has consistently pressed for stronger protection of European innovation, critical infrastructure, and strategic industries, embedding technological sovereignty at the heart of Europe’s pursuit of strategic autonomy.

Similarly, Italy’s “golden power” rules have increasingly restricted Chinese participation in telecommunications and infrastructure. While Italian policy is often reactive, it has aligned more closely with Brussels on tech resilience. Greece, in turn, has moved toward the EU mainstream more gradually, even if its enforcement capacity remains weaker than in northern Europe. Athens noticeably shifted course in 2020, when its largest telecommunications operator chose Swedish multinational Ericsson over Huawei, signaling a symbolic alignment with Western preferences.

Hungary, in a pattern mirroring its approach on trade and investment, remains a holdout, deepening digital cooperation with Beijing by welcoming Huawei investment in direct contradiction to EU guidance. This divergence underscores Budapest’s role as a spoiler, slowing EU cohesion on technology. By contrast, Lithuania has taken a markedly different path, pushing for strong restrictions on Huawei and championing EU-level tech screening. Despite its small size, its alignment with US standards reflects its values-driven foreign policy and reinforces its role as a policy innovator.

Poland allowed Chinese companies a significant presence in its telecommunications sector until 2020. However, a series of events—including a Huawei employee’s arrest for espionage, US pressure, and the EU’s adoption of its 5G Toolbox—eventually pushed Warsaw to diversify the sector and reduce Huawei’s and ZTE’s activities to the bare minimum. Meanwhile, Czechia has pursued a proactive, risk-based approach to technology policy. Ahead of the introduction of the EU’s 5G Toolbox, the Czech National Cyber and Information Security Agency flagged Huawei and ZTE as high-risk actors, paving the way for sector diversification. Prague aligns with US efforts on 5G security and export controls and has deepened ties with Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea on semiconductors and advanced manufacturing, while curbing exposure to China-linked supply chains.

Security: Turning awareness into action

Security is the area in which China has most clearly been recast as a systemic rival, particularly since the announcement of its “no limits” partnership with Russia. Although China is officially defined as a systemic rival, few tangible measures have been adopted to operationalize this stance. The EU has tightened export controls, reinforced NATO coordination, and cautiously expanded its Indo-Pacific engagement. Member states’ responses again diverge, shaped by geography, threat perceptions, and alliance politics.

Germany’s security stance has evolved markedly. Under Merkel, Berlin downplayed concerns about Taiwan, the South China Sea, and Chinese alignment with Moscow. Under Olaf Scholz, it cautiously endorsed de-risking and adopted tougher rhetoric. Today, under Chancellor Friedrich Merz, Berlin has moved even further, dropping “partnership” language and framing China as part of an “axis of autocracies.” Still, economic dependence tempers full securitization. France, by contrast, has long promoted Europe’s role as a global security actor. It backs EU sanctions against Beijing for its support of Russia, deploys forces in the Indo-Pacific, and seeks partnerships with democracies in the region. Its approach fuses European sovereignty with transatlantic coordination, framing security in comprehensive geopolitical terms.

Italy’s posture is more cautious. NATO engagement has reinforced Rome’s limits on Chinese access to critical infrastructure, and the war in Ukraine has hardened its stance against Russia. Yet Italy avoids labeling China as a direct security threat, signaling solidarity in Indo-Pacific deployments without projecting power. Greece, in turn, interprets security primarily through a regional lens. Anchored in NATO and reliant on US guarantees amid tensions with Turkey, Athens avoids sharp rhetoric on China but complies with EU export controls and acknowledges risks in dual-use technologies. Here, resilience is understood more in economic than military terms.

Meanwhile, Hungary actively undermines EU security cohesion by blocking joint statements on Hong Kong, Xinjiang, and Taiwan, and by opposing broader de-risking. Its alignment with Beijing—especially during its 2024 presidency of the Council of the European Union—highlighted the risks of internal veto power in weakening collective security signaling. By contrast, Lithuania has been a catalyst for collective resilience. Its confrontation with China over the opening of a Taiwanese representative office in Vilnius, and Beijing’s ensuing de facto trade embargo, made Chinese coercion a European security issue. For Vilnius, China policy is inseparable from its existential confrontation with Russia, casting Beijing and Moscow as dual pillars of an authoritarian bloc.

The paramount and inescapable issue overriding all other issues is Russia’s war on Ukraine—and Beijing’s support for Moscow. While a shared concern of enormous gravity to all, it has had an acute effect on Central and Eastern European states, shifting their perspectives from an economics‑first toward a security-driven China policy. In Poland, this has meant tightening alignment with the United States, curtailing high‑exposure ties, and urging Beijing to end dual‑use exports that could aid Russia. Czechia, in turn, has taken a proactive stance, viewing China as a systemic challenge to European and transatlantic security. Taiwan remains central to Prague’s engagement in Asia, with cooperation in semiconductors and industry, while intelligence and public institutions consistently flag China as a source of foreign influence and espionage.

About the authors

Fellow

Valbona Zeneli

Europe Center Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security

Albanian Corruption

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1 “European Council Meeting (29 and 30 June 2023)—Conclusions,” European Council, June 30, 2023, https://data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/document/ST-7-2023-INIT/en/pdf.

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Angelina Jolie highlights the horrors of Russia’s ‘human safari’ in Ukraine

Peter Dickinson — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 14:41:39 +0000

Hollywood star Angelina Jolie paid a surprise visit to Ukraine in early November in a bid to help raise international awareness about escalating Russian war crimes against Ukrainian civilians.

Plenty of A-list celebrities have come to Ukraine since the outbreak of hostilities in 2022 to show their support for the country, but Jolie’s appearance was no mere photo opportunity. Instead, she traveled to the front line cities of Kherson and Mykolaiv in southern Ukraine to see for herself how Russia is systematically targeting the civilian population in a deadly campaign of drone strikes that has been likened to a ‘human safari.’

“The threat of drones was a constant, heavy presence. You hear a low hum in the sky. It’s become known locally as a ‘human safari,’ with drones used to track, hunt, and terrorize people, constantly,” the American actor wrote in a post describing the Ukraine trip to her 15.8 million followers on Instagram. “I was in protective gear, and for me, it was just a couple of days. The families here live with this every single day. They’ve moved their schools, clinics, and daycare into reinforced basements, determined that life will go on. It was hard but inspiring to witness. Many people spoke to me about the psychological burden of living under continual threat, and the deeper fear of being forgotten by the world.”

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Jolie’s visit struck a chord with the Ukrainian public at a time when concerns are mounting that the country’s fight for national survival is slipping out of the international headlines. With the fourth anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion now approaching, Ukrainians are painfully aware that global audiences have become jaded by endless war coverage and are now no longer shocked or even particularly surprised by reports of fresh Russian war crimes. The high-profile actor’s decision to personally visit some of the most dangerous places in Ukraine was therefore welcomed as a particularly timely and meaningful gesture.

Many Ukrainians praised Jolie for exposing herself to considerable risk in cities that few international guests dare to visit. “Much respect and many thanks for your kind heart, Angelina Jolie!” commented the deputy speaker of the Ukrainian parliament Olena Kondratiuk. “Angelina Jolie went to Kherson, where Russian drones hunt civilians daily. That takes courage,” wrote Ukrainian journalist Svitlana Morenets. “I can’t help but praise her selflessness and kindness in choosing to help draw attention to Ukrainian civilians, especially children, suffering from the war.”

Ukrainian human rights lawyer and Nobel Laureate Oleksandra Matviichuk called Jolie “one of Hollywood’s bravest hearts” and expressed her hope that press and social media coverage of the star’s trip could help educate international audiences about “the cynical drone safaris on civilians that the Russians love to do.” Fellow Ukrainian civil society activist Olena Tregub said she had been personally moved by Jolie’s visit and noted that it sent a “powerful message” to the local population that they have not been forgotten.

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Angelina Jolie is not alone in attempting to focus international attention on Russia’s ‘human safari’ tactics in Ukraine. A United Nations probe recently addressed the issue and confirmed that the Russian military is purposely targeting Ukrainian civilians in a coordinated campaign of drone killings with the aim of depopulating large parts of the country. In an October report by the UN Human Rights Council-appointed Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine, investigators concluded that Russia’s actions in southern Ukraine amount to the crimes against humanity of “murder and of forcible transfer of population.”

The UN investigation covered Russian drone activity across three provinces of southern Ukraine including the regions visited by Jolie. It found evidence of systematic attacks against civilians including drone strikes on pedestrians, public transport, essential infrastructure, and emergency services workers, leading to the deaths of at least 200 people since July 2024. As a result of this relentless and coordinated bombing campaign, some of the targeted areas are now said to be “almost entirely vacated.” Crucially, the drones used in these attacks all featured video cameras allowing operators to methodically select and track victims, leaving no room for doubt regarding the deliberate nature of the killings.

Russia stands accused of committing a staggering quantity of war crimes in Ukraine, ranging from the destruction of entire towns and cities and the bombing of vital civilian infrastructure, to the mass detention Ukrainian citizens and the torture of prisoners. The International Criminal Court in The Hague has issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin on war crimes charges for his personal involvement in the mass abduction and indoctrination of Ukrainian children, which may qualify as an act of genocide.

So far, there has been little concrete progress toward holding Russia legally accountable for the invasion. Ukraine and the Council of Europe signed an agreement in summer 2025 to establish a special tribunal, but is remains unclear when further steps can be expected. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has signaled that the United States will no longer back international efforts to prosecute Putin. Despite these setbacks, Russia’s ‘human safari’ is worthy of special attention as it provides such conclusive proof of the Kremlin’s intention to kill Ukrainian civilians.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is an attempt to shatter the existing international order and rewrite the rules of war. If Western leaders fail to impose additional costs on the Kremlin over the deliberate use of drones to hunt down civilian populations, this will set a potentially disastrous precedent that could soon be extended to the rest of Ukraine and beyond. Angelina Jolie’s efforts to highlight this crime against humanity will not prove decisive, but her celebrity intervention has at least made it more difficult for others to claim they did not know.

Peter Dickinson is editor of the Atlantic Council’s UkraineAlert service.

The Kremlin dictator is particularly fond of showcasing new weapons with nuclear capabilities. In late October, Putin announced the successful testing of the nuclear-powered and nuclear-capable Burevestnik missile. “This is a unique product that nobody else in the world has,” he commented. Days later, Putin hailed the similarly successful testing of the Poseidon drone, an atomic-powered and nuclear-capable underwater weapon. He trumpeted the Poseidon’s supposedly unmatched capabilities and stated that “there is no way to intercept it.”

It is impossible to independently assess the veracity of Putin’s claims or confirm the effectiveness of his latest alleged “wonder weapons.” Many have noted that neither weapon is entirely new, with the development of both being first announced back in 2018. In reality, the timing of these alleged tests is probably far more significant that the weapons themselves, and reflects Russia’s desire to engage in yet more nuclear saber-rattling.

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Russia’s latest bout of nuclear posturing reveals much about Moscow’s frustration over continued Western support for Ukraine, and is likely a direct response to strong energy sector sanctions imposed in recent weeks by US President Donald Trump. It is a tactic that could eventually backfire on the Kremlin. By threatening to renew nuclear tests and boasting of unstoppable nuclear-capable wonder weapons, Putin risks highlighting Russia’s inability to project strength via more conventional means. In other words, the Kremlin dictator’s increasingly frequent use of nuclear blackmail may actually be a sign of weakness rather than strength.

Like a geopolitical gangster, Putin has come to rely on Mafia-style intimidation tactics as he seeks to reassert Russia’s great power status amid mounting evidence of his country’s steadily eroding military capabilities. Putin’s nuclear threats are at least in part an attempt to distract attention from the lackluster performance of the Russian army in Ukraine. While Russian forces currently hold the battlefield initiative and continue to advance, they have only managed to seize around one percent of Ukrainian territory over the past three years while suffering exceptionally high losses. This underwhelming outcome led Trump to brand Russia a “paper tiger” in September. The insult is believed to have struck a particularly raw nerve with Putin.

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How Russia’s winter warfare strategy targets Ukrainian civilians

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By brandishing his nuclear arsenal on the international stage, Putin aims to menace risk-averse Western leaders and deter them from opposing Russia in Ukraine. He also hopes to underline that victory over Ukraine remains Moscow’s overriding goal. Putin seeks to demonstrate his readiness to prioritize this quest for victory above all other considerations, including the nuclear deterrence system established over decades by Russia and the United States.

So far, Trump has offered a fairly robust reaction to Russia’s nuclear saber-rattling. This has included ordering US nuclear submarines to be moved closer to Russia in response to “provocative statements,” and indicating a readiness to resume nuclear testing “on an equal basis.” The US leader’s stance is a welcome sign that he is no longer easily swayed by Putin’s dramatics and recognizes the dangers of allowing himself to be intimidated.

Other Western leaders should now follow Trump’s example and acknowledge that the only way to bring Putin’s reckless nuclear blackmail to an end is by demonstrating resolve and reviving deterrence. This must include regenerating sufficient European and American conventional forces to deter Russia from attacking its neighbors. In parallel, sanctions on Putin’s war economy should be tightened, while Ukraine must finally be provided with the weapons its needs to defeat Russia’s invasion.

Nobody can afford to to take the risk of nuclear war lightly, of course. Nevertheless, it is unfortunately necessary to remind the Kremlin that Russia is not the only country with a nuclear arsenal. Genuine conventional and nuclear deterrence must be restored to deprive gamblers like Putin of the ability, let alone the desire, to employ nuclear blackmail in order to enable further acts of international aggression. Unless this is achieved, Putin will continue to use nuclear threats as a tool to intimidate his opponents and disguise Russian weakness.

Stephen Blank is a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.

Learning the lessons from Ukraine’s fight against Russian cyber warfare

Oleksandr Bakalynskyi, Maggie McDonough — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 19:36:30 +0000

The ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine is among the most technologically advanced wars the world has ever seen. But while the rapid developments taking place in drone warfare tend to attract most attention, the cyber front of the conflict also offers important lessons for international audiences.

The Russian state and affiliated groups have been refining their cyber warfare tactics in Ukraine ever since the initial onset of Russian aggression in 2014. In January 2022, Ukrainian government sites and other critical elements of the country’s digital infrastructure experienced a series of major cyber attacks in a precursor to the full-scale invasion, which began weeks later.

This escalating cyber war has made Ukraine both a critical source of intelligence on Russia’s evolving cyber capabilities and a front line arena for cyber defense strategies. Cyber operations have become integral to Russia’s campaign of aggression, with cyber attacks and kinetic strikes frequently coordinated. Today’s Russian cyber strategy involves continuous, adaptive, and multi-vector operations encompassing malware, phishing, and disinformation.

Ukraine’s cyber defense is critical to international security and the stability of the global digital environment. As a testing ground for Russian cyber tools, Ukraine faces attacks that, once refined, can be directed against allied governments, critical infrastructure, and private sector entities. The question is not whether such attacks will occur, but when this will happen, how costly these attacks will be, and how quickly recovery can be achieved.

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Unlike conventional warfare, cyberspace has no borders. A criminal or adversary can strike targets in Kyiv, Washington, or New York with equal ease. Sustained collaboration between Ukrainian, United States, and allied cyber specialists is therefore critical, especially given the escalating cyber threat posed by China, North Korea, Iran, Belarus, and their state-backed proxy groups.

Despite the growing threat, institutional capabilities for a coordinated response by Ukraine, Europe, the US, and other allies are still underdeveloped. The NIS2 Directive, the legal framework that sets minimum cyber security standards across the EU, was an important step toward increasing coordination around risk management, threat sharing, and supply chain security. However, the process of building a dynamic cyber defense coalition has been slow, given the large number of jurisdictions in Europe.

To compound these challenges, Western governments have often been hesitant to share sensitive information with Ukrainian counterparts, or even with each other. Thankfully, there are measures that can be adopted to offer more effective support to Ukraine while still safeguarding classified information. These include sharing tiered or sanitized intelligence reports, conducting joint cyber security operations, and expanding advisory access to expertise. Sustained knowledge exchange, international assistance, and cooperative engagement remain essential to countering the breadth and sophistication of Russian cyber operations.

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