Assemblage: How American Strategy Is Made

VII. The Hearing as Wartime Mobilization

The April 21 hearing, in light of the documentary record assembled in Part I, was a wartime political-mobilization event — an articulation of the assemblage on the public record. Several specific exchanges land differently in light of the actual context.

Senator Reed’s opening — “President Trump’s war of choice in Iran has resulted in significant military posture changes in the Indo-Pacific region… the president has transferred major military capabilities out of your theaters to Central Command, including a carrier strike group, an amphibious ready group, various missile defense capabilities, and other munitions” — is not a hypothetical concern. It is a real-time accounting of force-posture damage caused by an active war the senator opposes.

Senator Ernst’s question to Paparo — “When Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, it directly threatened the energy security of a number of our allies in the Indo-Pacific” — is past tense not because she’s projecting forward but because Iran had closed the Strait seven weeks earlier. Paparo’s response — naming Malacca, Lombok, Sunda, alongside Hormuz, and affirming “the United States increasingly to be a net energy provider also in the Indo-Pacific to escape the vulnerability of those key choke points” — is wartime-doctrinal improvisation. The 2026 NDS has no chokepoint chapter; this exchange is writing that chapter into existence in real time.

Senator Sullivan’s Alaska LNG advocacy — for a project the federal government has tried to advance for nearly two decades without final investment decision — reads completely differently with the war as backdrop. Alaska LNG was, in normal conditions, a struggling project. With Brent at $110, the Strait closed, and Indo-Pacific allies’ LNG reserves at “single and low double-digit weeks” (Paparo’s phrasing^[1]), it has political tailwinds it has lacked since the project was first proposed. As of early May 2026, the White House is backing the Dunleavy administration’s Alaska LNG tax bills, the legislature is racing to finalize them before the session ends, and the Defense Production Act is being considered as a tool to fast-track the project.^[2] The hearing’s exchange between Sullivan and Paparo was not constituency pork — it was the legislative-political function working in real time to retrofit national doctrine to an unfolding crisis.

Two procurement asks fit the same pattern at different scales. Senator Fischer’s request for 200 B-21 Raiders against a program of record of 100, and Senator Tuberville’s request for 16 Columbia-class ballistic-missile submarines (SSBNs) against a program of record of 12, are both numerical bumps to the nuclear triad’s strategic air and undersea components. Both correspond directly to RAND 2019 measures: Air & Space Measure 3 (“Increase Air and Missile Components of the Nuclear Triad”) and Maritime Measure 3 (“Shift Nuclear Posture Toward SSBNs”). Both senators come from states that do not manufacture the systems they ask for — Nebraska doesn’t build B-21 (Northrop Grumman, primarily California); Alabama doesn’t build Columbia (General Dynamics Electric Boat, Connecticut and Rhode Island). The asks are not constituency capture in the simple sense. They are doctrine-driven procurement requests surfaced through the hearing’s political channel. Fischer’s question is leading; Paparo answers in lockstep (“I would favor 200 B-21 bombers”). The strategy needs the hardware; the hearing produces the political consent.

VIII. The Donor Pattern: Two Mechanisms, Not One

A standard left-of-center critique of military procurement holds that defense primes — Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon (RTX), General Dynamics, Huntington Ingalls — buy senators by the donation dozen. The empirical record from this hearing refines that picture rather than confirming or falsifying it.

OpenSecrets industry-rollup data for the seven highest-leverage senators in the hearing — Fischer, Tuberville, Sullivan, Sheehy, Blumenthal, Cotton, Slotkin — shows defense industries ranked between 7th and 12th of 13 sectors for every one of them. (One methodological caveat: OpenSecrets’ v2 site presents single-cycle data only — career rollups would require manual aggregation across cycles. The pattern below uses the most recent completed cycle for each senator.^[3]) No defense prime appears in the top 20 organizations contributing to any of these senators. Senator Fischer, who asked for the doubled B-21 program, has no Northrop Grumman PAC presence in her top 20 contributors. Senator Tuberville, who asked for the expanded Columbia program, has no General Dynamics, no HII, no Lockheed.

Direct campaign funding is one of two capture mechanisms, and it is not the dominant one for the defense primes. Defense primes capture through structural-economic embedding: in-state production facilities that mean jobs, supplier chains, and base economies in a senator’s district. Senator Cotton’s state hosts Lockheed Martin’s massive Camden facility (which produces LRASM, PAC-3, GMLRS, JAGM, HIMARS); Senator Blumenthal’s state contains General Dynamics Electric Boat, Pratt & Whitney, and Sikorsky — perhaps the densest defense-prime concentration of any state. The senators do not need to take direct PAC money from these primes to be aligned with them; the jobs and tax base in their districts are the embedding. The low direct-funding ranks are not evidence of independence from defense-prime interests — they are evidence that the primes’ capture vector runs through district economies rather than through the FEC.

Ideological PACs capture through the other vector — direct campaign funding — because they do not have the district-jobs alternative. Senator Fischer’s number-one contributor in the most recent cycle is the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), at $430,658 — more than her entire Defense sector total of $220,000. Ideology / Single-Issue PAC giving is the top sector for Fischer, Tuberville, Cotton, and Sheehy, by ratios of two to seven times the Defense sector. Slotkin’s Senate run drew $14.3 million from Ideology / Single-Issue PACs. AIPAC and similar entities have to dominate direct funding because they cannot promise constituency-jobs; that asymmetry produces the inverse pattern visible in the donor data.

The two mechanisms are complementary, not substitutable. AIPAC funding underwrites a senator’s reelection in exchange for the rhetorical reproduction that justifies the procurement; the procurement flows to primes whose plants are in the senator’s district; the district jobs underwrite the senator’s local political base. Each capture mechanism reinforces the other. The “not captured by defense primes” reading the direct-funding numbers might suggest in isolation is the wrong reading; the data shows defense-prime capture operating through embedding rather than through PAC checks, with ideological-PAC funding doing the rhetorical-mobilization work that activates the embedded interests into specific procurement asks.

This finding does not exonerate the senators, the defense primes, or the ideological PACs. It refines the mechanism. The captured-Senate question is not really about who pays for what weapon. It is about which rhetorical frames get reproduced — and the AIPAC-aligned ideological-PAC pattern correlates strongly with senators willing to do that rhetorical reproduction, while the defense-prime district-embedding pattern correlates with senators willing to ratify the procurement that follows. The rhetoric is the load-bearing element; the procurement asks are downstream; the district economies are the underlying structural ground both rest on.

IX. The “Axis” That Isn’t

Chairman Wicker opened the hearing with a phrase: “China is the leader of the axis of aggressors.”^[4] The phrase is not in the 2026 NDS. The NDS uses the more careful formulation “potential opponents… in a coordinated or opportunistic fashion.” Wicker’s framing, and the broader rhetorical apparatus of the hearing, deserves substantive scrutiny — both because it is doing political work and because it does not match the legal-evidentiary picture.

What is genuinely confirmable, across legal frameworks both Western and adversary-aligned:

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is unambiguous aggression under any legal framework. UN General Assembly Resolution ES-11/1 condemned it 141–5 in 2022. The International Court of Justice ordered provisional measures.^[5] The International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin.^[6] Russia has not articulated a coherent international-law defense; its “denazification” framing meets neither UN Charter Article 51 nor the Caroline test for anticipatory self-defense.^[7]

The DPRK’s military support to Russia — millions of artillery shells, thousands of containers of munitions, more than 10,000 troops in the Kursk region — is verified by United Nations Panel of Experts reports, Republic of Korea National Intelligence Service public testimony, and U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence statements.^[8] This is co-belligerence in Russia’s aggression and is not seriously contested.

Iran’s relationship with regional resistance groups that have engaged in armed action is more complicated. Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on Israel was a war crime under International Humanitarian Law; Iran’s connection to Hamas is funding and training, not effective control under the Nicaragua test.^[9] Hezbollah’s long-running cross-border exchanges with Israel are bidirectional armed conflict; Israel’s cross-border ground operations into southern Lebanon since September 2024 invoke a contested post-9/11 “unwilling or unable” doctrine for non-state actors that the international-law academy is divided on.^[10] Ansar Allah attacks on Red Sea commercial shipping invoke a recognized legal duty (the 1948 Genocide Convention’s Article I obligation to prevent, given the ICJ’s January 2024 “plausible” finding in South Africa v. Israel^[11]) but use methods that violate IHL distinction; Ansar Allah’s agency, not Iran’s effective control, is the primary attribution.

Operation Epic Fury — the joint U.S./Israeli campaign against Iran — is, by the same legal frameworks applied above, unambiguous aggression. The opening strikes on February 28, 2026 occurred during ongoing U.S.-Iran nuclear negotiations; Iran was not engaged in armed attack against the United States or against Israel; no UN Security Council authorization was sought or granted. UN Charter Article 2(4) prohibits the use of force against the territorial integrity of another state; Article 51’s self-defense exception requires armed attack, which had not occurred; the Caroline test for anticipatory self-defense — that the threat be “instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation” — was not met by any public account of Iran’s pre-strike posture.^[7:1] The assassination of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei alongside other senior officials would, under the same framework that produces ICC warrants against Russian officials, qualify as targeted killing of a head of state and of protected persons. The framework that condemns Russia’s invasion of Ukraine also condemns the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran. The strategic-doctrine documents and the political-mobilization apparatus described in this essay do not apply the framework symmetrically. This essay does.

China’s behaviors in its near abroad require careful framework-naming. PLA exercises in the Taiwan Strait and ADIZ incursions are characterized as “aggression” only if Taiwan is treated as a separate state. Under the legal frameworks the United States itself officially endorses — the 1972 Shanghai Communiqué, 1978–79 normalization, the 1982 August 17 Communiqué, and UN General Assembly Resolution 2758 (1971) seating the People’s Republic of China as the legitimate UN representative of China — Taiwan is not a separate state. PLA activity in what the U.S. officially acknowledges as Chinese sovereign territory is, in international-law terms, internal coercion within contested sovereignty rather than cross-border aggression.^[12] PRC activity in the South China Sea against the Philippines is aggression under UNCLOS plus the 2016 Permanent Court of Arbitration ruling — a ruling the PRC rejected and refused to participate in. International support for the ruling is not as one-sided as either side claims: as of January 2025, CSIS’s Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative tracker recorded 27 governments publicly calling for the ruling to be respected, 17 noting it positively without calling for compliance, and 8 publicly rejecting it; PRC claimed support from approximately 60 states but only roughly 10 made public statements to that effect.^[13]

The “axis” claim — that these four states constitute a coordinated multilateral threat with shared strategic vision, joint planning, mutual defense commitments, and unified intent — is not supported by the public evidence in the strong form. Bilateral cooperative relationships exist (RU-DPRK has a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership Treaty signed June 2024; CN-RU has a “no limits” partnership statement from February 2022^[14]). Quadrilateral coordination has not been publicly documented. China’s relationship with Russia is uneven; China has been notably cautious about direct involvement in DPRK weapons proliferation. Iran’s quarrel is regional and primarily directed at Israel rather than the U.S.-led order more broadly. Admiral Paparo himself, in his own testimony, says: “Historical issues of mistrust, non-aligned goals, and resource constraints limit the type and level of support they will provide each other.”^[15] The witness’s framing is “convergent opportunism”; the chairman’s framing is “axis of aggressors.” The witness is more accurate.

The convergent opportunism the four states display is, at least in part, a reaction to integrated Western pressure across all three operational tracks. The simultaneity of pressure (Russia in Ukraine, Iran in regime-decapitation strikes, China in supply-chain decoupling and First Island Chain posture buildouts running Japan–Taiwan–Philippines–Indonesia) produces the simultaneity of cooperation. In 2009, none of these states had the bilateral cooperative density they have now. The “axis” the Western strategy now warns of is partly the Western strategy’s own product. This is not a moral indictment of the strategy; it is a structural observation about feedback loops in great-power competition. But a strategy that creates the enemies it then mobilizes against poses a moral question of its own — one the strategy systematically declines to ask.

X. The Energy Crisis the Doctrine Has No Answer For

The 2026 NDS contains no significant energy chapter. The IndoPacom hearing, conducted in week eight of an active war that had reduced Strait of Hormuz traffic by 70 percent and pushed Brent crude past $110, contains the live attempt to retrofit doctrine to crisis. This retrofit is incomplete and visible.

Several things about the energy dimension matter substantively.

First, the Strait of Hormuz handles approximately 20–21 percent of global petroleum trade.^[16] The Strait of Malacca handles approximately 25 percent of global trade and roughly 80 percent of China’s oil imports.^[17] The two chokepoints have asymmetric strategic implications: U.S. interruption of Hormuz hurts U.S. allies in East Asia (especially Japan, Korea, Taiwan) more than the U.S. itself; interruption of Malacca, by any party, would hurt China most — and the U.S. is the only party in position to credibly threaten such an interruption. The strategic geography of energy chokepoints favors the U.S. asymmetrically: U.S. allies are exposed at Hormuz; China is exposed at Malacca; the U.S. is exposed at neither, given domestic energy production.

Second, the Iran war’s Strait closure is doing what ten years of U.S.-Saudi-UAE-Israel-Egypt diplomatic effort has not done: forcing East Asia to confront the price of dependence on Persian Gulf supply. Alaska LNG, U.S. Gulf Coast LNG exports, and a broader “energy Belt and Road” counter-narrative all gain political traction the moment the Strait closes. Sullivan’s “virtual pipeline to Japan and Korea” framing is the discursive embodiment of this shift. The crisis advances the energy-supply-chain reorientation that economic policy has not been able to advance.

Third, this means the Iran war’s energy consequences functionally serve the China track of the integrated strategy. East Asian allies that diversify from Persian Gulf supply toward U.S. supply become more economically tied to U.S. interests in any Pacific contingency. The crisis is producing the dependence the doctrine wants. Whether this dependence was a deliberate consequence or an opportunistic outcome is less important than the fact that the strategic effect is favorable to the U.S. position.

Fourth, the doctrinal silence in the 2026 NDS about energy is consistent with two readings: either the document was written by people who didn’t know the war was coming and therefore couldn’t anticipate the crisis (unlikely given the pre-war Netanyahu-Trump lobbying timeline^[18]), or the document was written to be readable independent of the operations its silence permits. The latter reading is more consistent with the document’s broader rhetorical structure.

XI. The Assemblage Visible

Pull the components together. They are numbered for legibility, not for ordering — the arrows run in multiple directions, and the procurement of weapons (5) shapes the menu development (1) as much as the menu shapes the procurement.

Component 1 — Strategic-option development. RAND, Brookings Saban Center, and similar institutions, funded by U.S. government contracts (Army G-8, OSD), allied-lobby donors (Saban Center / AIPAC alignment), or foundation money, produce menus of operational options. The Pollack et al. and Dobbins et al. documents are the visible record of this component; many more menu-style analyses exist for China^[19], the Korean peninsula, the South China Sea, and the broader Indo-Pacific.

Component 2 — Doctrinal cover. Strategic-doctrine documents — National Security Strategy, National Defense Strategy, service-specific strategic guidance — provide the public-facing rhetorical frame. These documents are calibrated to be readable independent of specific operations; their tense choices, modal qualifications, and silences matter as much as their explicit claims. The 2026 NDS is an unusually overt example: its Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, its explicit naming of operations, its renaming of the Pentagon to Department of War — these features are themselves rhetorical moves with specific political-mobilization purposes. The Department of War styling is presentational rather than statutory; the legal entity remains the Department of Defense.

Component 3 — Operational execution. Intelligence community + special operations + diplomatic channels execute the menu’s options. Khamenei’s assassination is closer to a Mossad-CIA targeted-killing operation than to anything described in any of the doctrine documents. This component’s products do not appear in the strategic-doctrine documents until after they have happened, and even then are framed in past-tense operational language rather than as present-tense doctrine.

Component 4 — Political mobilization. Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations Committees, supported by ideological-PAC infrastructure (AIPAC, J Street, Heritage, CNAS, Hudson, etc.), reproduce a rhetorical frame that justifies appropriations to support operational execution and preparation for future operational execution. The April 21 IndoPacom hearing is one example of this component at work.

Component 5 — Congressional appropriation. The procurement asks (200 B-21, 16 Columbia, accelerated munitions, expanded Pacific basing) become budget line items, defended by senators whose ideological-PAC funding correlates with willingness to defend them.

The assemblage is observable without positing a single planning body or a hidden conspiracy. It is emergent — built incrementally, in plain sight, over decades — and the documents that constitute it are explicitly cross-administration in their own framing. RAND 2019 says it is providing menus durable across administrations; the Brookings 2009 conclusion says the doctrine it proposes is for the next administration to adopt and the one after that to extend. This self-description by the documents is what distinguishes intentional doctrinal continuity from mere bureaucratic inertia. The strategy is not accidental. It is also not a conspiracy. It is a planned-and-documented continuity that operates across partisan transitions because the planning is done by institutions that outlast any single administration.

XII. What the Hearing Was Actually About

The April 21, 2026 IndoPacom hearing, read with the assemblage in view, is not primarily about deterring China.

It is primarily about moving political consent into a configuration that supports the next operational track. Russia is in mid-execution. Iran has just been executed in its most aggressive form (regime decapitation, sustained 67-day campaign, energy crisis). China is the next track. The hearing’s role is to use the political potency of an active wartime moment — when adversary-bundling rhetoric lands hardest, when burden-sharing arguments are most persuasive, when frontline-ally-arming logic seems most necessary — to mobilize the appropriations needed for the China track’s infrastructure-build phase.

The 200 B-21 and 16 Columbia asks are the visible procurement signatures of that build. The Alaska LNG advocacy is the visible energy-track adjustment. Several other build components run alongside them: accelerating Foreign Military Sales (FMS) weapons transfers to Taiwan; the Philippines basing expansion under the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA), which grew from five to nine U.S.-accessible sites in 2023; AUKUS Pillar I (transfer of nuclear-powered submarine technology to Australia) and Pillar II (cooperation on AI, hypersonics, cyber, electronic warfare, and quantum technologies among the U.S., UK, and Australia); the Quad-plus formations expanding the core U.S.-Japan-India-Australia Quadrilateral Security Dialogue to include Korea, the Philippines, and Vietnam on selective issues; and the newer U.S.-Japan-Australia-Philippines “SQUAD” quadrilateral now meeting at defense-minister level on South China Sea maritime security. All of these are the China track’s architecture being built under the political cover of the wartime moment.

The chairman’s “axis of aggressors” rhetoric is not a description. It is a unification frame that allows three operationally distinct tracks (Russia, Iran, China) to share a single political mobilization. AIPAC-aligned funding is one mechanism by which that unification frame gets reproduced. The senators who reproduce the frame are not necessarily lying or even necessarily aware they are reproducing a frame; they are operating within a discursive system that has produced them as senators. The frame is constitutive, not merely strategic.

XIII. What This Analysis Does Not Conclude

Honesty requires naming what this analysis does not conclude.

It does not conclude that the threats are fabricated. China is the world’s largest navy by hull count.^[20] PRC shipbuilding capacity is approximately 50 percent of global capacity.^[21] Russia did invade Ukraine and is conducting an unambiguously aggressive war. DPRK did send troops and munitions to Russia. Iran did pursue a nuclear program past the threshold the U.S. and Israel deemed acceptable. Salt Typhoon and Volt Typhoon are PRC state cyber operations confirmed by Five Eyes intelligence services.^[22] These are not threat fabrications. They may, in some cases, be threat creations — §IX argues that the convergent opportunism among the four states is at least partly a reaction to integrated Western pressure. That a strategy creates the enemies it then mobilizes against is a separate question from whether the enemies, once created, are real. They are both.

It does not conclude that the doctrine is illegitimate. Sovereign states pursue their interests; large states with global reach face genuine threats; great-power competition is not invented by think tanks. The integrated strategy this essay describes may be the right strategy, the wrong strategy, or some mixture; that judgment is downstream of the structural description offered here.

It does not conclude that any particular senator has been bought. The donor data shows correlations between ideological-PAC funding and rhetorical alignment, not causal proof of capture. Many of the senators reproducing the rhetorical frame may be doing so out of sincere conviction. The structural finding is that the frame’s reproduction is durable across senators, administrations, and electoral cycles, and that durability is consistent with the funding-rhetoric correlation pattern. That is a structural observation, not a personal indictment.

It does not conclude that the alternative is identifiable. If the integrated strategy is wrong — for the U.S., for the world, for the people who pay for it in lives, treasure, energy markets, displacement — what would the right strategy be? This essay does not offer one. The analytical work of describing the assemblage is distinct from the political work of building consent for an alternative one. The latter is downstream of the former.

XIV. What Remains

What this analysis does conclude is that the documents tell a more coherent story than the news cycle does. The IndoPacom hearing is one small chapter of a much longer book whose authors are mostly not in the room. The book has been written incrementally for thirty years, in commissioned think-tank reports, in National Security and National Defense Strategies, in classified war games, in operational planning documents that surface only after the operations have been conducted. The book’s chapters get implemented across administrations regardless of partisan control. The book is not a conspiracy; it is an accumulation. It is also, in important senses, the actual U.S. grand strategy.

The assemblage is designed to maintain U.S. primacy across the globe by actively weakening real and rhetorically-constructed threats alike. The design is indifferent to which is which. Real threats serve the hegemonic frame; created threats also serve it. The frame is the constant; the question of which threats are real and which are made real by the strategy is variable, and answering it case by case is the analytical work this essay has undertaken.

The assemblage operates precisely because each of its components functions in a discursive space the public is largely outside of. The doctrine documents are written in the discreet language of professional strategy — modal qualifications, past-tense descriptions of operations after they have happened, present-tense framings of restraint that survive contradiction by future action. The think-tank menus are technical, long, and not widely read; their footnotes name the perceptions of bad faith they will produce in adversaries and proceed to recommend the strategies anyway. The intelligence-and-special-operations execution is classified during planning and only narrated, partially, after the fact, in language (“targeted-killing operation,” “kinetic action,” “strategic strike”) that manufactures the appearance of moral and legal novelty for acts the existing frameworks categorize plainly. The acts are not in a blank space. Assassination of a head of state is assassination. Use of force against another state’s territory without Security Council authorization is aggression under UN Charter Article 2(4). Killing civilians in the course of those operations is, depending on the case, a war crime or a crime against humanity under the Rome Statute. The euphemisms do not fill a gap the law has left open; they work to obscure the categories the law has always provided. The senators reproduce the rhetorical frame because reproducing it is the political act for which their funding infrastructure rewards them; the frame allows the procurement; the procurement supports the next execution; the next execution becomes the past from which the next doctrine document writes. None of these components is itself secretive. Each is publicly documented in the form appropriate to its function. What is publicly inaccessible is the integration — the reading of the components together that this essay attempts. That integration is the work the assemblage is structured to make difficult.

The assemblage produces what it produces. Ukrainian lives spent — by RAND’s own phrase — to bleed Russia. Iranian lives taken in surprise airstrikes on a state the U.S. was at the negotiating table with the prior week, including 168 schoolchildren killed in the opening days. Lebanese lives taken in decapitation strikes and the renewed bombing of Beirut. Palestinian lives lost in the genocidal campaign the strategy’s “model ally” frame helps sustain. Yemeni lives ended by Saudi-coalition warfare the U.S. armed and intelligence-supported. Russian soldiers who died in a war the document’s authors named as their objective.

What follows from naming this — if anything is to follow — the essay does not answer. The descriptive work and the political work are not the same. This essay has attempted only the first.

The 2026 IndoPacom hearing was a public document. The 2026 National Defense Strategy is a public document. The RAND 2019 Russia menu is a public document, sponsored by the U.S. Army, available on RAND’s website. The Brookings 2009 Iran menu is a public document. The Wikipedia article on the 2026 Iran War is current as of yesterday. Reading these documents alongside one another is not classified work. It is reading. The findings of this essay are available to anyone who reads.

That they are not widely read — that the integrated strategy operates in a discursive space the public is largely outside of — is itself part of how the assemblage operates. The work of reading is therefore the work that makes the assemblage visible. This essay is one such reading. There is room for many more.

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Acknowledgments

The analytical entry point of this essay is owed to Brian Berletic and The New Atlas YouTube channel. Berletic’s ongoing video work surfaced the Which Path to Persia? (Brookings 2009) and Extending Russia (RAND 2019) documents as the operational menus they actually are, and his coverage of the April 21 IndoPacom hearing pointed us toward reading them alongside it. The reading and framing here are ours; the insight that these are the right documents to read together is his.

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The methodology and supporting documents for this analysis — claims and asks ledgers, donor crosswalk, primary-source corroboration files, the legal-framework matrix on aggression vs defense framings, the think-tank-pipelines reading — are available on request. The analysis is revisable; the documents are not.

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1. Adm. Samuel Paparo, IndoPacom posture hearing transcript, line 2243. ↩︎

2. Anchorage Daily News, “Senators express skepticism about passing Alaska LNG bill before session’s end,” May 5, 2026. https://www.adn.com/politics/alaska-legislature/2026/05/05/senators-express-skepticism-about-passing-alaska-lng-bill-before-sessions-end/. Petroleum News, “Defense Production Act and AK LNG project,” May 10, 2026. https://www.petroleumnews.com/story/2026/05/10/government/defense-production-act-and-ak-lng-project/50138.html. ↩︎

3. OpenSecrets data for the listed senators, accessed via https://www.opensecrets.org/ on May 8, 2026. Per-senator industries pages: Fischer (cid N00033443), Tuberville (N00044434), Sullivan (N00035774), Sheehy (N00053174), Blumenthal (N00031685), Cotton (N00033363), Slotkin (N00041357). All OpenSecrets data is single-cycle (2022, 2024, or 2026 depending on the senator’s last completed cycle); career rollup is not available in the post-2024 OpenSecrets v2 site interface. ↩︎

4. Wicker opening, op. cit. ↩︎

5. International Court of Justice, Allegations of Genocide under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (Ukraine v. Russian Federation), provisional measures order, March 16, 2022. https://www.icj-cij.org/case/182. ↩︎

6. International Criminal Court, “Situation in Ukraine: ICC judges issue arrest warrants against Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin and Maria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova,” March 17, 2023. https://www.icc-cpi.int/news/situation-ukraine-icc-judges-issue-arrest-warrants-against-vladimir-vladimirovich-putin-and. ↩︎

7. On the Caroline test and self-defense in international law: Christine Gray, International Law and the Use of Force, 4th ed. (Oxford University Press, 2018); Mary Ellen O’Connell, “The Myth of Preemptive Self-Defense,” American Society of International Law Task Force Paper, 2002. ↩︎ ↩︎

8. Final reports of the United Nations Panel of Experts on the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, accessible via https://www.un.org/securitycouncil/sanctions/1718/panel_experts/reports. ROK NIS public testimony covered in Yonhap News Agency, October 2024. ODNI public statements: https://www.dni.gov/. ↩︎

9. International Court of Justice, Military and Paramilitary Activities in and against Nicaragua (Nicaragua v. United States of America), Merits, Judgment, June 27, 1986 (the Nicaragua effective-control test). ↩︎

10. On the post-9/11 “unwilling or unable” doctrine: Ashley Deeks, “‘Unwilling or Unable’: Toward a Normative Framework for Extraterritorial Self-Defense,” Virginia Journal of International Law 52 (2012): 483. The ICJ’s treatment of Article 51 in Wall Advisory Opinion (2004) is contrary to the doctrine in significant respects. ↩︎

11. International Court of Justice, Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v. Israel), Order on Request for the Indication of Provisional Measures, January 26, 2024, with subsequent orders March 28, 2024 and May 24, 2024. https://www.icj-cij.org/case/192. UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, Anatomy of a Genocide, A/HRC/55/73, March 25, 2024. https://www.ohchr.org/en/documents/country-reports/ahrc5573-anatomy-genocide. International Criminal Court, “Situation in the State of Palestine: ICC Pre-Trial Chamber I rejects the State of Israel’s challenges to jurisdiction and issues warrants of arrest for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant,” November 21, 2024. ↩︎

12. Texts of the three U.S.–PRC joint communiqués (1972 Shanghai, 1978 Joint Communiqué on Establishment of Diplomatic Relations, 1982 August 17 Communiqué) and the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act. UN General Assembly Resolution 2758 (XXVI), October 25, 1971, “Restoration of the lawful rights of the People’s Republic of China in the United Nations.” https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/192054. ↩︎

13. Permanent Court of Arbitration, The Republic of the Philippines v. The People’s Republic of China, PCA Case No. 2013-19, Award, July 12, 2016. https://pca-cpa.org/en/cases/7/. Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative (CSIS), Arbitration Support Tracker, https://amti.csis.org/arbitration-support-tracker/, is the canonical accounting of international position-taking on the ruling. As of January 2025, 27 governments have publicly called for the ruling to be respected; 17 have issued positive statements without calling for compliance; 8 have publicly rejected it. The widely-circulated “60 states support China” figure originated from PRC public statements in mid-2016 and was not corroborated by independent verification. ↩︎

14. Joint Statement of the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China on the International Relations Entering a New Era, February 4, 2022. http://en.kremlin.ru/supplement/5770. RU-DPRK Comprehensive Strategic Partnership Treaty, June 2024, signed in Pyongyang. ↩︎

15. Adm. Samuel Paparo, prepared statement to Senate Armed Services Committee, April 21, 2026, lines 92–99. ↩︎

16. U.S. Energy Information Administration, World Oil Transit Chokepoints. https://www.eia.gov/international/analysis/special-topics/World_Oil_Transit_Chokepoints. ↩︎

17. Ibid. Chinese reliance on Malacca: Andrew Erickson and Lyle Goldstein, “Gunboats for China’s New ‘Grand Canals’? Probing the Intersection of Beijing’s Naval and Oil Security Policies,” Naval War College Review, 2009. ↩︎

18. UK House of Commons Library briefing CBP-10521, op. cit., on the pre-war lobbying timeline. ↩︎

19. Examples in the China-track equivalent space include: Andrew Krepinevich, Maritime Competition in a Mature Precision-Strike Regime (CSBA, 2014); Hal Brands and Toshi Yoshihara, Strategy in the Gray Zone (CSIS, 2017); RAND Corporation, War with China: Thinking Through the Unthinkable (David Gompert, Astrid Cevallos, Cristina Garafola, RR-1140-A, 2016). ↩︎

20. International Institute for Strategic Studies, The Military Balance 2024 and 2025. U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence unclassified PLAN reports. ↩︎

21. UNCTAD, Review of Maritime Transport 2024; Clarksons Research data. ↩︎

22. U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, joint advisories on Volt Typhoon (initial disclosure May 2023) and Salt Typhoon (initial disclosure October 2024). Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center reporting on both campaigns. ↩︎