In 2023, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) routinely deployed forces near Taiwan to demonstrate its capabilities, intimidate the people of Taiwan, and signal Beijing’s resolve to the United States and its allies.

Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense reported over 1,700 PLA aircraft flying into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone (ADIZ) in 2023, which is on par with the year before.

Of those, over 700 crossed the Taiwan Strait median line—a significant uptick from the previous year. Median line crossings are an intentional effort to delegitimize the line’s significance and to demonstrate the PLA’s willingness to operate closer to Taiwan than in the past.

China has engaged in provocative behavior on a near daily basis since then, and is employing new tactics like encircling Taiwan with drones and flying high-altitude balloons over the island.

In 2024, China will continue to use the PLA as a tool of coercion against Taiwan. On January 13, Taiwan elected Lai Ching-te of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) as its next president. Beijing strongly opposes Lai and the DPP and will likely ramp up pressure on Taiwan to isolate and punish his government. 

More Readings

1. The Fourth Taiwan Strait Crisis
2. Surveying the Experts: U.S. and Taiwan Views on China's Approach to Taiwan

Russian nuclear weapons have been a constant shadow over the war in Ukraine. As Russian forces crossed the border on February 24, 2022, Putin threatened, “No matter who tries to stand in our way or all the more so create threats for our country and our people, they must know that Russia will respond immediately, and the consequences will be such as you have never seen in your entire history.”

Kremlin officials have since maintained a steady drumbeat of nuclear threats, although the focus of these threats shifted over time. Russia appears to have initially relied on nuclear threats to deter direct Western intervention in Ukraine, but increasingly used them to deter support for Ukraine as the war dragged on.

The Kremlin also attempted to manipulate nuclear risk when it faced battlefield setbacks in the fall of 2022. Although the intensity of Russia’s current rhetoric is greatly reduced from that of the early months of the war, the Kremlin will likely continue to use nuclear threats to influence Western behavior.

A collapse of the Russian army in Ukraine appears unlikely, and there is no reason to expect nuclear escalation in the near future. However, continuing to monitor and analyze Russian nuclear signaling will be critical for understanding and controlling the risks of nuclear use as the war continues. 

More Readings

1. Deter and Divide: Russia's Nuclear Rhetoric & Escalation Risks in Ukraine

2. Russian Nuclear Calibration in the War in Ukraine

European defense is in a decrepit state. While European military spending saw its steepest year-to-year increase in at least 30 years and has risen by nearly a third since 2014, European countries are cooperating less in the defense realm. As a result, Europe’s military capabilities are less than the sum of its parts and remain far short of what is required to defend itself.

The fragmented spending landscape has also left Europe’s defense industrial base in a woeful state. The currently uncoordinated increases in European defense spending are thus unlikely to significantly reduce Europe’s reliance on the United States.

For decades, the standard demand from Washington has been for European countries to simply spend more on defense. In 2014, NATO leaders agreed to commit at least 2 percent of their GDP toward defense spending to help ensure the alliance's continued military readiness, but this figure has only been reached by a handful of European allies. With consensus building around the 2 percent mark as a floor rather than a ceiling and European countries accelerating their defense spending, the summit's priority should be to get the most out of these additional euros. The challenge now is about getting European defense industries to ramp up production, incentivizing joint procurement, and securing long-term aid to Ukraine. These endeavors require significant new funding and for Europeans to do something they rarely do in defense: coordinate and work together.

A new focus on strengthening European defense could benefit everyone: the United States can demonstrate leadership on burden sharing while Europe can benefit from political and practical support to strengthen its own security. In this regard, active and vocal support from the Biden administration will be crucial to getting staunchly transatlanticist and frugal European countries to agree to such a measure.

More Readings

1. Solving Europe’s Defense Dilemma: Overcoming the Challenges to European Defense Cooperation
2. Transforming European Defense: A New Focus on Integration
3. Why the Washington Summit Should Focus on Europe
4. Europe Needs a Paradigm Shift in How It Supports Ukraine

Groundwater depletion in the United States is  threatening  human lives and livelihoods. As water quantity levels drop to dangerously low levels due to excessive pumping, the United States Geological Survey (USGS) reports another alarming trend—the increasing levels of detected contaminants in groundwater.

The most notable increases have been with secondary contaminants- those that do not pose the same level of risk to public health as primary, such as uranium and lead. However, secondary maximum contaminants can still have signficant negative impacts on health, infrastructure, and the environment.

Groundwater monitoring across the past two decades found that sodium concentrations significantly increased in more than 47 percent of the tested sites, while chloride concentrations increased in nearly 37 percent of aquifers.

While US government agencies have not coalesced around enforceable safety thresholds for sodium and other secondary contaminants, these significant increases in contaminant levels are not a step in the right direction for public health and water security.

In decadal assessments spanning from 2002 to 2022, concentrations of several pollutants—including nitrate, sodium, chloride, sulfate—have also  significantly increased  in many aquifers across the United States.

Additionally, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has found no significant improvement in the number of  public water system violations  over the past decade, even reporting a slight increase in health-related violations in the past few years.

Taken together, these trends have significant implications for  the water and food security  of the United States, as domestic access to safe drinking water is already complicated by  historical racial and socioeconomic disparities. 

More Readings

1. Experts React: What Else Is Needed to Address Global Water Insecurity?
2. Water Stress in the U.S. with NYT's Chris Flavelle and CSIS's Caitlin Welsh

Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) is among the  most critical  regions in the world for the environment. Straddling three oceans, possessing vast  mineral resources  necessary for fueling the energy transition, and with harboring critical ecosystems such as the Amazon Rainforest, which alone houses contains an estimated  10 percent  of global biodiversity and vast  mineral resources  necessary for fueling the energy transition, LAC is an indispensable player in the fight against climate change.

However, the region's natural wealth has attracted a host of criminal players eager to exploit its bounty, placing this keystone region in a state of environmental siege. A range of criminal activities damage the environment, manifesting in forms as blatant as the  strip-clearing  of vast swathes of forest by illegal loggers, and as subtle as the small-scale, but highly profitable cultivation and  smuggling of insects  to foreign markets.

This challenge is further exacerbated by the existence of criminal regimes in the hemisphere like Venezuela and Nicaragua where governments work hand-in-glove with criminals to exploit the environment as a source of revenue. Such governments have incentives to obfuscate their activities, further hampering efforts to fully understand the scope of this challenge.

In all its forms, environmental crimes present three overarching threats: they  destroy  the natural environment upon which millions of lives and livelihoods depend, they  erode citizen security  in U.S. partner countries, and they generate illicit revenues which  empower  transnational criminal organizations (TCOs) throughout the hemisphere. However, compared to more traditional criminal enterprises, environmental crimes remain inadequately tracked and mapped. This in turn has rendered it difficult to marshal the political will needed to tackle deeply entrenched and ecologically devastating criminal practices.

Identifying, tracking, and mapping the range of environmental crimes is doubly important for the Western Hemisphere, where vast biodiversity combines with entrenched TCOs to form a dangerous concoction.  

More Readings

1. Development Solutions to Address Illegal, Unreported, and Unregulated Fishing in Latin America and the Caribbean
2. A Closer Look at Colombia’s Illegal, Artisanal, and Small-Scale Mining
3. Tracking Transatlantic Drug Flows: Cocaine's Path from South America across the Caribbean to Europe