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Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un, the leader of North Korea, met this week at a conference of historical importance. It brought the global conflict, which started two years ago with the conflict in Ukraine, all the way to the southeast region of the Asian continent, where the Cold War began in 1950. It could have inexplicable consequences.

It also exposes decades of diligently pursuing different options to an unsolvable issue: a insecure, autocratic, and nuclear-armed hermit polity that is a blockade of economic powerhouses like South Korea, Japan, and China.

Here, there is a northern bend. Trying to recover russia glory in Europe, Putin was obliged to bend the leg to Kim’s degrading things. The irony wo n’t be lost in Russia&nbsp, and might have a long- lasting impact. The second Czars resurrected Asia and wiped out the Mongol collar, according to Russian history.

The exchange of military systems from Russia to North Korea, however, may cause unanticipated world fallout, causing tensions in East Asia.

Experts are specially concerned. Former US Ambassador Joseph DeTrani, who served as George W. Bush’s special envoy to North Korea and US representative to the Korea Energy Development Organization (KEDO ), has sounded the alarm that things may spiral out of control.

This partnership with Russia does stifle Mr. Kim from making provocative remarks toward South Korea. &nbsp, It has also emboldened Mr Putin to persist with his war in Ukraine, with the prospect that he wo n’t stop, regardless of the outcome.

But, diplomacy may still have a prospect. DeTrani describes how he first saw North Korea’s desire to discuss partial nuclear disarmament in his late published memoir.

DeTrani met Jang Song Thaek, the following in charge in Pyongyang and the brother-in-law of then-leader Kim Jong Il, during a secret 2011 trip there to consider resuming the disarmament talks. At the highest level, Jung welcomed the British approach, praising the United States for “removing its angry plan toward North Korea and working to improve relations through dialogue” in a gentle and non-violent voice.

DeTrani states this:

In formal conversations with North Korean counterparts, I was told repeatedly that North Korea desired a typical relationship with the US. This was frequently repeated at Track 1.5 meetings with the evil foreign ministers of North Korea and at the former presidents Kim Jong Un’s summit in Singapore in 2018. &nbsp,

The problem was and still is that North Korea wants to deal with Pakistan’s radioactive conflict in a manner that is acceptable. North Korea was informed that the United States would never permit them to possess nuclear weapons. &nbsp, Complete and credible disarmament is the way to normal connections, they were told.

Coming out of DeTrani’s encouraging 2011 conference with Jang Song Thaek, the two flanks failed to reach deal. At the conclusion of that year, Kim Jong Il passed away. In 2013 Kim Jong Un, who had succeeded his parents, had Jang – his brother and former coach – tried and executed for alleged crime.

Jang’s horrible passing may serve as a reminder that political autism is not just a hallmark of North Korea. Propelled by its local plan, the US can be indifferent of its international obligations, driving states away.

For example, Muammar Ghaddafi’s Syrian experience is never forgotten in Pyongyang. In 2003, Ghaddafi gave up his plan to create weapons of mass destruction. The cost that Syrian leader Saddam Hussein was making weapons of mass destruction was made in the midst of September 11 and the subsequent US assault on Iraq. Haddafi only recently resigned from his position as leader. In 2011, he was toppled and killed in a US- backed revolutionary.

The US would not have stepped in to help with those situations if North Korea had followed those situations and drew an eerie lesson from them. Thus, the North Korean nuclear system is seen as a life plan for the government, and it’s unwavering about it. However, DeTrani argues, it’s necessary to talk with North Korea and try to find ways forth:

Utilize the tools at our disposal to reconnect with Kim Jong Un, either formally or with China’s assistance, now.

A thorough review of US international policy should be the result of the North Korean jungle. Greater duties are inherent in great authority, and they cannot be ignored or stifled by them all at once. Had Ghaddafi had a better death, and if Saddam and Iraq had not been turned into embers, US diplomacy would have had more room to argue with Kim.

This environment is not lost on larger, more difficult places like Iran, Russia, or China. Their analysts does possess reasons to question the US’s true long- term commitments.

Home turmoil

However, geological changes in North Korea appear to be having an impact on international relations even more. North Koreans were asked to pledge fealty to Kim Jong Un at the start of the time. On January 8th, a meeting allegedly commemorating the leader’s turning 40 is thought to have taken place. In April, the land stopped marking the” Day of the Sun”, the birth anniversary of its foundation head, Kim Il Sung.

Russia, which supported the father eight years ago, then pleads for his son’s support. All of this projects 40- year- ancient Kim to a larger period than the hereditary regime’s founder, in fact, there are indications that Kim the 3d is steering his kingdom in a unique direction.

Kim Yo Jong ( born September 26, 1987 ), who came to prominence in 2020 after her brother Jong Un mysteriously vanished amid rumors about his health, is the real number two in the government.

The heir- apparent is not male but” Respected Daughter” Kim Ju Ae ( born possibly in 2012–2013 ). Kim Ju Ae is said to have two older brothers, one of whom was born in 2010, and the other of whom was a younger child, both of whom were unmarried in 2017. Both appear to have been left out of the inheritance decision. In male-dominated East Asia, it is unusual to have two girls as the head of the organization. Kim II I’s statement of authority may signal a major change in the North Vietnamese leadership.

The Kims ‘ law is referred to as “blood right” in the North Korean law. There are semi- spiritual rituals performed in honor of Kim’s extended- dying father and grandfather. One of Central Asian mysticism, where women are thought to have more energy than men, is echoed throughout North Korea’s methods and hallmarks.

This may suggest Kim Jong Un’s readiness for more absurdities and surprises, whose significance only the US and the world can identify with.

Francesco Sisci, an analyst and pundit on elections with over 30 years of practice in Asia, is the director of Appia Institute, which actually published this article. It is republished with authority.

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The highly orchestrated imagery of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin standing next to his North Korean counterpart, Kim Jong Un, on the reviewing stand in Pyongyang’s main parade square is bound to evoke disturbing thoughts of the past. It reminds us of the historical turning point when Joseph Stalin, with Mao Zedong’s support, gave the green light to Kim’s grandfather to invade South Korea.

This time, China’s Xi Jinping was not present, as the Chinese have kept a distance from this recreation of the Cold War past. But China remains the principal backer of North Korea and echoes Russia’s embrace of the regime as a common victim of Western pressure and US hegemony. Perhaps uncomfortably, China is drawn again – as it was in 1950 – to backing Russia’s strategic miscalculations.

The one-day visit unveiled a new agreement to form a “comprehensive strategic partnership” between North Korea and Russia that includes a range of economic and cultural ties but, importantly, offers a pledge of “mutual aid” in the event of aggression. The new treaty replicates the language – in an even more detailed fashion – of the 1961 Soviet-North Korean treaty, creating an alignment that goes beyond anything seen since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

“In the event that either party falls into a state of war due to armed aggression from an individual state or multiple states, the other party shall immediately provide military and other assistance by all means available,” Article 4 of the treaty states, according to the text carried by the Korean Central News Agency.

The North Korea-Russia-China triangle faces off against another echo of the start of the Cold War in Korea – the tightening partnership between the United States, Japan, and South Korea. Following up on the Camp David Summit last year, the three countries have tried to institutionalize their security cooperation. This summer, the three militaries will carry out a joint multi-dimensional exercise codenamed “Freedom Edge,” a level of integration that would have been unthinkable even a year ago. The leaders of Japan and South Korea will attend the NATO Summit in July, perhaps offering their own version of collective security.

The sense of a looming confrontation, with echoes of 1950, has been embraced in the rhetoric of some expert observers. The Kim-Putin summit presents “the greatest threat to US national security since the Korean War,” wrote Georgetown University professor and former national security official Victor Cha.

South Korean commentary has also warned of the possible dark consequences of this, even tying it to the possible return to power of Donald Trump. “A meeting between Kim and Putin – who both seek to break the status quo through instability, chaos, and disorder – is dangerous,” editorialized Seoul daily Donga Ilbo on June 18. “For the two leaders, the return of Donald Trump, who hit it off with them, is a golden opportunity.”

The imminence of a collision that might lead to war cannot be dismissed. But it ignores other dynamics in the region that reveal a far more complicated reality. Alongside these two triangles, there is also a third triangle – one between China, Japan, and South Korea – animated by an increasingly urgent search for stability rather than conflict.

In May, the three Asian neighbors convened a trilateral summit meeting in Seoul, the first leader-level gathering of this grouping since before the Covid-19 pandemic struck. While Kim and Putin were meeting in Pyongyang, a South Korea-China diplomatic and security dialogue was being held in Seoul for the first time since 2015.

Both these events took place after China dropped its resistance to resuming these dialogues, clearly reflecting its newfound desire to restore communication and even cooperation with Japan and South Korea. This is widely seen in part as a Chinese effort to drive wedges between its neighbors and the United States. But it also reflects a shared concern about the drift toward confrontation, driven also by economic warfare, that could undermine all three countries.

The Chinese have signaled their unease with the Kim-Putin embrace in small but significant ways. The trilateral summit in Seoul issued a joint declaration that notably included a common interest and responsibility to maintain “peace, stability, and prosperity” in Northeast Asia and referred to the positions on the “denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.” This drew an unusually public rebuke from the North Korean regime.

The Kim-Putin summit is not an entirely happy event for Beijing. As the Wall Street Journal reported, Putin had hoped to visit North Korea on the heels of a visit to Beijing last month, but the Chinese nixed that idea, apparently wary of the image of a trilateral alliance at work. “The picture that emerges is less of a neat authoritarian axis and more of a messy love triangle,” wrote The Economist.

As Putin made clear in his press statement in Pyongyang, Russia is eager to get US attention and rattle Western support for Ukraine – even opening the door to North Korean soldiers joining the fighting there. For Putin, the goal is to divide and limit Western support for Ukraine, and heightening inter-Korean confrontation may push South Korea to limit its indirect military flows to Ukraine.

Looking more closely at the Kim-Putin public display of affection, however, there are also reasons to question its depth and even durability beyond the imperative created by the Ukraine war. Rather than a declaration of shared hatred for the United States – although that clearly exists –  this is a desperate pact between two deeply isolated regimes.

The North Korean regime sits atop an impoverished populace that suffers from malnutrition and economic malaise. Pyongyang siphons off vital resources into an expensive nuclear and missile program, and creates showcase projects to maintain loyalty among its elite.

Russia, despite the tenuous recent success of its invasion forces, has become a military economy, funneling a large portion of its state-run economy into its defense buildup. And while Moscow can claim some pockets of support – or at least neutrality – in the Global South, even China is wary of offering open backing for the Russian war of aggression and clings to a mythical status as a potential peacemaker.

For Russia, the open support from Pyongyang is a rare exception. “We highly value North Korea’s unwavering support for Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine, its solidarity with us on key international issues and its willingness to uphold our shared priorities and views at the United Nations,” Putin wrote in an op-ed published in the North Korean communist party daily, Rodong Sinmun, just ahead of his arrival.

North Korea also offered something more concrete. As Russia’s stocks of ammunition dwindled last year and its defense industry was not able to ramp up production, the North Koreans emptied vast stores of artillery ammunition and short-range rockets, many of which are decades old and of questionable utility. US officials estimate some 10,000 containers of munitions flowed from the North’s caves to the frontlines, amounting to millions of rounds of shells.

In return, Kim Jong Un got similar gifts, not least a moment in the sun that broke his isolation. The Russians also offered means to crack the UN sanctions regime, from a move to dismantle the international body that monitors sanctions against North Korea to opening the taps on the flow of oil and other inputs and allowing North Koreans to be used as cheap labor in Russia (and in China). The North Koreans are being merged into Russia’s sanctions-evasion system, including financial settlements that hide their transactions.

Perhaps more ominously, the Russians have almost abandoned their previous commitment to non-proliferation and denuclearization. Russian diplomats used to be staunch guardians of these principles, all through the years of the Six-Party talks. Now, they are providing active help to North Korea’s long-range missile development, thinly clothed as aiding satellite launches but in reality allowing Pyongyang to threaten the continental United States with nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles.

This is a serious shift and one with potentially dangerous consequences, as the South Korean editorial pointed out. But it should also be understood that the Russians – and their Chinese partners – are contemptuous of the North Korean regime, something this writer heard in no uncertain terms in visits to Russia before the war. In conversations Russian experts on the region made fun of the regime, seeing it as an extreme throwback to the worst days of Stalin’s personality cult and an unreliable actor.

There may be limits to their cooperation, though for now, this is a bargain that meets the needs of both. Beijing, uneasy as it may be, is not ready to block it.

For the US-Japan-South Korea triangle, the challenge will be to offer one another enhanced security and reassurance against the threat of conflict while being supportive of the efforts, fragile as they may be, of the South Korea-Japan-China triangle to avoid war.

Daniel Sneider is a lecturer on international policy and East Asian studies at Stanford University and a non-resident distinguished fellow at the Korea Economic Institute of America (KEIA). The views expressed here are the author’s alone.

This article was first published on KEIA’s blog The Peninsula. It is republished here with kind permission.

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After his BJP was re-elected, Narendra Modi recently won a third term as prime minister of India, leading the National Democratic Alliance ( NDA ) coalition in a minority government. Modi will have to work within the constraints of a significantly reduced mandate because he anticipated to get another majority from which to follow his Hindu nationalist or Hindutva agenda.

His government, which is known as” Modi 3.0″ in India, has a lot to do, including completing its reform programme and changing foreign investment scheme. The BJP lieutenant governor of New Delhi was given the go-ahead for the trial of the well-known writer and open academic Arundhati Roy for comment she made about the disputed territory of Kashmir abia when the new government was sworn in.

Former Central University of Kashmir professors Sheikh Showkat Hussain and Roy Hussain have been charged under the unlawful activities prevention act ( UAPA ), an anti-terror law. The allegations relate to “provocative” statements they reportedly “promoted the isolation of Kashmir from India” at a conference in October 2010.

All of this, however, was done 14 decades earlier, before the BJP won the election for president. Why is the Modi state risking losing a determine who is well-known abroad for what she said years ago?

The answer is that Modi’s Hindu nationalism’s argument about Kashmir is winnable. People who insists on raising the various problems of military, mismanagement, human rights abuses and repression in Kashmir tends to be accused of being anti- nationwide, seditious, pro- Muslim or criminal.

The BJP under Modi has been in power for ten years and has made significant constitutional changes in the Jammu & Kashmir place. However, the government has not addressed the conflict in the area or India’s significant territorial lost to China along the actual control line.

In the 2024 election, the BJP opted not to field any candidates in Kashmir with a majority of Muslims ( it had two in Jammu with a minority Hindu population ). At the polls voters rejected candidates from Kashmir’s major pro- India parties, preferring native independents who had opposed the Modi administration’s decision to withdraw Jammu and Kashmir’s unique status. One of the applicants chosen has been imprisoned in Delhi since the election in February 2019.

As a result, the BJP is evidently ultra- delicate about Kashmir. In a multi-layered political strategy intended to bait and discredit Modi’s Hindu nationalist ambitions, Roy is using a tool like Roy to target a popular figure in a cruel manner.

‘Anti-national’

The BJP wants to use the persecution of Roy and other progressives and Kashmiris as leverage against its main political rival, the Congress party-led Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance ( India ), which performed better than expected in the most recent election. If the empire makes a statement about such stunts, it runs the risk of being delegitimized as “anti-national.” If it stays passive, it risks alienating its unique liberal followers.

However, for proper- aircraft Hindu nationalists, any conversation of Kashmir is something of a doggie whistle. They believe that any mention of Kashmir’s human rights and freedoms reflects subversive tendencies.

The BJP’s unique help center is also intended to be galvanized by the prosecution of Roy and Sheikh Showkat Hussain for speaking out on the topic. And it’s a message to another Modi reviewers: if someone with Roy’s page can be targeted, so can you.

Becoming a specific

Its a sign of a wider structure in Modi’s political system. This kind of targeting is especially severe for those who have spoken out in support of the right or aspirations of the Kashmiri people at any time in the past and who not only support political values and criticize Modi’s authoritarian regime.

I know this from terrible experience. I’m an intellectual and artist, of Kashmiri nature, focusing on democracy and human rights in India and above. At a US legislative hearing on Kashmir in 2019, I testified at a reading that pro-Modi state newspapers attempted to control.

I was invited by the Congress-run state of Karnataka to a constitutional protocol in February 2024. However, when I arrived in India, emigration denied me passage despite the fact that I had all of the necessary documents. ” Directions from Delhi” was all I was told. I was detained while being watched by military watch. I received a notice of intent to withdraw my Indian citizenship while I was abroad several days later.

All the while, I was the target of planned and vicious assaults on social media from popular right-wingers and Modi-supporting records. The topic of the virtual outcry was a 2010 message I sent about Kashmir, which was used as evidence of my anti-national views. When Congress officials spoke in my help, the Karnataka BJP referred to me as a” Muslim sympathiser who wants India’s split up” and criticized “#AntiNationalCongress” for having invited me.

Since 2010, I have visited India several days. The issue for the BJP was n’t my 2010 tweet – which I explained in some detail. My more recent research focused on issues like the BJP government’s cure of dissention and the growing dictatorship under Modi. Although I was born in India and currently work there, I’m not sure when I’ll see my only living parent, my ailing mother, who ca n’t travel to me.

Several other authors, journalists, scientists and campaigners have been targeted also. Some people who have contacted us from Delhi or Srinagar have been imprisoned.

Roy’s oppression is a part of a wider pattern that tries to vilify any condemnation of Modi and his administration and impose restrictions on free speech while trying to confound the opposition into being called anti-national. Roy’s and Showkat’s oppression is a game maneuver that is a component of a plan to continue the undermining of politics in India.

At the University of Westminster, Nitasha Kaul is a head doctor.

The Conversation has republished this post under a Creative Commons license. Read the original content.

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Since October 2023, American Jews have been engaged in an intense, fractious debate over Israel’s war in the Gaza Strip.

Media reports say that American Jews are experiencing “the great rupture” and widening “rifts,” and that they stand at a “moral, political crossroads.”

While most American Jews remain broadly supportive of Israel, others have protested vigorously against US support for Israel and are demanding a cease-fire in the Gaza war. They carry signs saying “Not in Our Name.”

Their slogan highlights the fact that American foreign aid to Israel has long relied on the support of American Jews. Unqualified US support for Israel was built, in part, on the promise that Israel kept American Jews – and all Jews – safe, especially after the Holocaust.

But American Jews have never been entirely unified in their support for Israel or in their visions of what role Israel and Palestine should play in American Jewish life.

No consensus

My new book, The Threshold of Dissent: A History of American Jewish Critics of Zionism, analyzes a century of debates among American Jews over Zionism and Israel.

My account begins in 1885, when elite Reform Jews, with a goal of full integration in Jim Crow America, composed the Pittsburgh Platform, which rejected Jewish nationalism out of fear that it would make them targets of antisemitic accusations of dual loyalty.

Two years later, Austrian journalist Theodor Herzl founded the modern Zionist movement, relying on European powers for support for a modern Jewish state.

The genocide of Europe’s Jewish population in the Holocaust fundamentally altered American Jews’ perspectives on Zionism.

Many believed that only a Jewish national homeland in what was then Palestine could prevent another genocide. Others insisted that the lessons of the Holocaust meant that Jews must not contribute to making refugees of another group of people: the Palestinians who were then living on the land.

There were other issues that contributed to a new understanding of Zionism in the 1950s and 1960s within American Jewish communities. Among them:

• the Nakba, which was the expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians during the 1948 founding of Israel;
• Israel’s treatment of immigrant Jews from the Arab and Muslim world known as Mizrahi Jews; and
• the rise in Israel’s militarism.

Across the 20th century, mainstream Jewish leaders manufactured an American Jewish so-called consensus on Zionism and Israel, in part by silencing American Jewish critics of Zionism.

From the late 1940s through 1961, journalist William Zukerman edited The Jewish Newsletter, a publication that captured some of the voices of Jewish dissent from Zionism, including his own. He reported on Israel’s human rights abuses against Palestinians and documented how American Jewish funds fueled Israel’s military campaigns instead of supporting vibrant American Jewish communities.

Because Zukerman dared to publish this criticism, he faced campaigns of steep resistance, eventually losing funding and support from Jewish communal organizations.

Anxious that Zukerman’s dissent would cause “increasing trouble” for American support for Israel, Israeli diplomats wrote to American Jewish leaders, and together they convinced some Jewish journalists to exclude Zukerman’s writings from their publications.

Liberation movements, American Jews and Zionism

Into the 1960s, as mainstream Jewish leaders emphasized the urgency of Jewish unity on Israel and Zionism and showed growing intolerance for dissent, anti-colonialist activists gained momentum across the world. From 1948 through 1966, Israel held all Palestinian citizens under martial law, limiting their movement and access to opportunities and resources. Across the 1950s, Israel excluded Palestinian workers from the Histadrut, the state’s largest labor union federation.

Activists allied with the cause of Palestinian rights noted Israel’s alliance with colonial power France during the Algerian war of independence from 1954 to 1962 and criticized Israel as an occupier after the 1967 war. They spoke, too, of Israel’s growing alliance with apartheid South Africa in the 1970s.

Black and Arab leaders in the US taught within, and learned from, these anti-colonial movements. Civil rights and anti-war activists offered new perspectives to debates over Israel and Zionism.

Raised in a liberal Zionist family, student Marty Blatt was learning to fight for justice. Blatt was born in 1951 in Brooklyn, New York. His grandfather had died in a Nazi prison camp. In 1970, he joined the anti-war movement at Tufts University in Massachusetts.

“The Vietnam war was a horrible injustice,” Blatt said. From the movement and from members of the Israeli left, he learned that “Israel/Palestine was another great injustice.”

With no access to the history of Palestinians in school, at home or at the synogogue, young American Jews like Blatt who joined the civil rights and anti-war movements learned these lessons for the first time. When they then criticized Israel and American Zionism, they, too, met with hostility from the mainstream Jewish world.

Blatt sought to teach his fellow students at Tufts with a course in 1973 titled Zionism Reconsidered. In it, he taught the history of Zionism, Palestinian resistance and Israel’s Cold War alliance with the United States. He taught students that anti-Zionism was not antisemitism.

On March 13, 1973, in the midst of the semester, members of the Jewish Defense League, a far-right, anti-Arab, Jewish nationalist group founded by Rabbi Meir Kahane,disrupted Blatt’s class. They called the course an “anti-Jewish outrage” and passed out a flyer that read, “Not since Germany in the days of Hitler has any university dared to offer a course presenting a one-sided view of any national movement.”

Boston-area Jewish leaders urged community members to write to Tufts leadership to shut down Blatt’s class. These letters used apocalyptic language to describe the damage wrought by his course, likening it to the destruction of the Jewish people. During this controversy, Blatt picked up the phone one day to hear someone who clearly knew his family history in the Holocaust tell him: “Your parents should not have been saved.”

An article about Blatt and his course in Boston’s Jewish Advocate was headlined “Tufts Anti-Zionist Course Seen as Abuse of Academic Freedom.” Though Tufts stood behind Blatt’s right to teach the class for another term, a fact that it still touts on the university website, angry responses to the class appeared in community forums for years.

Divided on campus and beyond

In the current moment, college campuses have been riven with debates over the boundaries between student safety and free speech and whether criticism of Israel constitutes antisemitism.

Young Jews dismayed by the unconditional Zionist agenda of Jewish campus organization Hillel and who founded Open Hillel in 2013 are now active in Gaza protests as “Judaism on Our Own Terms.” They might be surprised to learn that in late 1972, even before his course began, Blatt and others founded the Tufts Hillel Non-Zionist Caucus. Hillel subsequently expelled them from the organization.

For over a century, some American Jews have modeled the idea that unqualified support for Israel and Zionism was “not in our name.” They prioritized justice as a Jewish value and were motivated not by self-hatred or antisemitism but by abiding commitments to human rights and to Jewish safety and community.

Today’s activists protesting over the devastation in Gaza are testing the threshold of dissent and the limits of free speech and academic freedom. They embrace what they view as more just visions of Israel and Palestine and more inclusive visions of an American Jewish community, one with space for dissent and earnest conversations about Israel and Zionism and one in which Jews stand in solidarity with groups working for justice in Palestine, Israel and around the world.

Marjorie N. Feld is a professor of history and society at Babson College.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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The US plans to provide Taiwan with more suicide drones, a sale that would seek to bolster the self-governing island’s defenses against a possible Chinese invasion.

But high costs per unit, concerns about the drones’ range and effectiveness in the Pacific and questions about the US’s ability to produce sufficient advanced explosives to arm the weapons could hinder the sale’s deterrent effect.   

The US has approved a potential arms sale to Taiwan involving over a thousand loitering munitions, also known as kamikaze drones, The War Zone reported. The proposed sale includes the AeroVironment Switchblade 300 and Anduril ALTIUS 600M types, both of which have been combat-tested in Ukraine.

The report says the drones could target Chinese landing craft during an amphibious invasion, extending Taiwan’s defensive reach and potentially overwhelming China’s defenses.

The deal, valued at US$60.2 million for Switchblade 300s and $300 million for ALTIUS 600Ms, also encompasses training, support and logistics. The sales are still prospective and formal contracts have yet to be signed, the War Zone report says.

The potential deal highlights the increasing significance of unmanned systems in contemporary warfare, as evidenced by their widespread utilization in Ukraine. Taiwan’s acquisition of the US drones would align with its “porcupine strategy,” which aims to create a formidable asymmetric defense against a numerically superior Chinese military.

The plan comes amid rising tensions in the Indo-Pacific, with both US and Taiwanese authorities cautioning about the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) growing capacity to launch a successful takeover of Taiwan by 2027.

The War Zone states that the drone deal reflects a broader trend of leveraging uncrewed capabilities in defense strategies and underscores the pivotal role such systems could play in future high-end conflicts in the Pacific.

Such prospective sales may also be part of the US Replicator program, which aims to enhance US military capabilities swiftly through the integration of autonomous technology and thus deter China. In May 2024, Asia Times reported that the Switchblade 600 drone is part of the Replicator program.

The initial group of Replicator technologies comprises a range of drones and unmanned systems developed by conventional and pioneering defense firms. Details of the weapons are often kept confidential for security purposes.

The Switchblade drone packs a tank-killing punch in a very small warhead due to its use of CL-20, an explosive 40% more potent than RDX or HMX. Both have been extensively utilized in US military munitions since World War II. However, the US faces significant challenges in procuring enough CL-20 for itself and its allies.

In March 2023, Asia Times reported that most of the military explosives used by the US are manufactured at a single US Army facility in Holston, Tennessee, using outdated mixing systems and production methods from World War II.

Modern explosives like CL-20 cannot be produced using such old-fashioned techniques and can only be manufactured in limited quantities using chemical reactors.

In contrast, China had surpassed the US in developing new explosive technologies, particularly its version of CL-20, which it now produces on a large scale.

The US currently produces 10 tons of CL-20 annually but needs to increase production to 1,000 tons to support widespread use. It may take three to five years for US industries to scale up to meet this demand.

Additionally, the US  relies on China as the sole supplier of six chemical components essential for its military explosives and propellants, casting doubt on the security of US logistics chains.

Cost may also be an issue in supplying Switchblade drones to Taiwan. David Hambling points out in a July 2023 article for 1945 that the cost of a Switchblade drone system consisting of one drone and its sensors, integrated guidance, warhead, data link and launcher was $58,063 in 2022.

Hambling points out that the cost doesn’t include the guidance kit of around $30,000, fielding costs, spares, support, training rounds and simulators. He says that when all costs are considered each Switchblade may cost $80,000.  

Such costs may not be sustainable for Taiwan. In April 2024, Newsweek reported that Ukraine had changed its use of drones in its ongoing conflict with Russia, veering away from costly US models that have not been effective against Russian defenses.

Because of US drones’ high prices and susceptibility to detection by Russian electronic warfare systems, Ukraine has acquired large quantities of drones and components from China despite Beijing’s strong ties with Moscow, the Newsweek report said. It notes that reasonably priced Chinese drones have proven effective in combat, with Ukraine utilizing approximately 10,000 of them per month.

The Newsweek report states that the US Department of Defense (DOD) has recognized these issues and is working with company partners to improve drones’ performance and resilience in combat and electronic warfare environments.

Still, US drones such as Switchblade may not have sufficient range and firepower to be an effective conventional deterrent in the Taiwan Strait. In a March 2024 Proceedings article, Sam Tangredi points out that the Replicator initiative relies on unproven technology and components from China, the country it seeks to counter.

Tangredi says that Replicator’s emphasis on systems over weapons may not provide the strategic advantage needed in a conflict, particularly in the Western Pacific where distances and environmental conditions pose significant challenges to small, inexpensive uncrewed vehicles.

He says that focusing on producing more powerful weapons, such as Long-Range Anti-ship Missiles (LRASM) and sophisticated sea mines, would serve as a more effective deterrent against Chinese aggression, including in the Taiwan Strait.

Despite the potential tactical uses of drone swarms in specific scenarios, Tangredi argues Replicator’s current trajectory is insufficient to overcome the threats posed by the PLA.

He argues that a collection of sensing drones cannot overcome the expanding mass, lethality and reach of the PLA-Navy (PLA-N), PLA Air Force (PLA-AF), and PLA-Rocket Forces (PLA-RF). He says that conventional deterrence in the Taiwan Strait may fail unless Replicator drones such as Switchblade pack more firepower and range.

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