In this report, the authors explore the equities of four middle powers — Australia, Canada, Japan, and the United Kingdom — and the roles that they might play in deterring or limiting conflict between China and Taiwan over the Taiwan Strait. A country's equities are its long-term interests in a scenario, such as a cross-Strait conflict. Middle powers are nations that are not small but lack the sheer size and influence to significantly disrupt the global order. However, middle-power countries can influence international affairs through mediation and institution-building, and middle powers can also play a balancing role between adversarial great powers. The authors use four countries — Australia, Canada, Japan, and the United Kingdom — to conduct a case-study analysis on how middle powers perceive China's interests and their own nations' interests in a cross-Strait conflict. The authors held discussions with analysts and policymakers from each middle-power nation on such topics as whether these nations would support Taiwan in a cross-Strait conflict, the threats that China might perceive from these nations, and whether the respondents think that China would initiate a conflict with Taiwan. The authors supplemented these discussions with an open-source literature review on how middle powers have been defined historically to support their analysis of each middle power's equities in a potential cross-Strait conflict. Finally, the authors offer several recommendations for future middle-power strategies that might be useful to policymakers in Taiwan, the United States, and middle powers with a stake in the Asia-Pacific region.

In this report, the authors explore possible future cooperation scenarios in which the Russian Armed Forces and the People's Liberation Army could operate together as coalition partners. The authors examine historical patterns of Russian and Chinese alliance behavior as well as current military-to-military engagements between these two militaries that include exercises, training events, such operational activities as joint maritime and air patrols, and high-level exchanges. Given these military engagement trends, three scenarios that illustrate how Russian and Chinese forces might operate together under different strategic and operational circumstances are then examined. These scenarios are then used to identify the prospects and pitfalls for future Russian and Chinese military cooperation in conflict and to explore implications for U.S. policymakers, commanders, and planners.

North Korea has been vastly increasing its nuclear weapon threat and plans to accelerate this process in the future. North Korea has also adopted an extremely hostile campaign of threatening the Republic of Korea (ROK) and the United States with nuclear attacks. China is also vastly increasing its nuclear weapon capabilities and is no longer trusted by most people in the ROK. To counter these threats, the United States provides extended deterrence for the ROK and promises a nuclear umbrella to cover the ROK so that the ROK does not need its own nuclear weapons. The United States wants a nuclear weapon–free Korean Peninsula to avoid imperiling the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the foundation of U.S. nuclear nonproliferation policy. The United States has constructed its nuclear umbrella on a high degree of strategic ambiguity in the belief that this ambiguity will achieve the most-effective deterrence of North Korean aggression. But this ambiguity, the growing North Korean threat, and U.S. withdrawal from other allied countries (e.g., Afghanistan) have caused many in the ROK to question the existing U.S. commitment and seek more-concrete assurance. Sensitive to this concern, President Joe Biden supported ROK President Suk Yeol Yoon with the Washington Declaration in April 2023. This report proposes options that the United States and the ROK could exercise to strengthen ROK nuclear assurance consistent with the Washington Declaration, including enhancing strategic clarity, coercing North Korea to freeze its nuclear weapons, and committing U.S. nuclear weapons to support the ROK.

Weapon exports and the provision of security and military services abroad by China and Russia serve as a means for both countries to extend their influence around the globe. How do such activities affect India — an emerging great power — and what do they mean for India-U.S. security cooperation? A conference held on June 30 and July 1, 2022, sponsored by the U.S. Department of State, was part of an ongoing project focusing on these questions. Participants explored Indian and U.S. views on important security issues across the Indo-Pacific and sought to identify areas of mutual interest and disagreement. Discussions were informed by six papers — three from the RAND Corporation and three from the Observer Research Foundation — that discussed common approaches to bilateral security cooperation, Russian arms sales to India, and the challenges posed by China to regional security. This report contains those papers, along with a summary of the issues discussed.

The U.S. and Chinese militaries have been shaped by a distinct set of direct and indirect experiences. The U.S. military has focused its energy and resources on combating terrorism and performing counterinsurgency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Even in 2023, U.S. emphasis on major power competition contends with other national security priorities, including current crises and continued deployments around the globe. The People's Liberation Army (PLA), on the other hand, has largely focused its military modernization and restructuring to prepare for a regional conflict that would likely involve U.S. military intervention. Despite having no combat experience since the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese War, the PLA has conducted an in-depth study of all aspects of the U.S. military's technological and operational capabilities — including its organization, command and control, logistics, joint operations, and concepts of operation — since the 1990s. The dichotomy presented by the experiences of both militaries raises several questions about how they are preparing for the possibility of a major power conflict. Since 2001, the U.S. military has gained significant direct combat experience, but has done so against technologically inferior, nonpeer adversaries. In contrast, the PLA had no direct combat experience. Even though its concepts of operation are designed to fight a major power, these concepts are largely derived from indirect observations and lessons from U.S. operations since 1991. The ways that each side gains and processes experience and incorporates it into training will heavily affect readiness for and performance in a future war.