China and Russia formalized the New Sino-Russia Land Grain Corridor (NLGC) in 2022, a strategic bilateral initiative that synergistically dominates food supply chains across Eurasia and the Indo-Pacific. Anchored by a landmark 12-year, $25.7 billion grain supply contract signed in October 2023, the NLGC exploits China's structural food insecurity and Russia's need to circumvent Western sanctions. Left unchecked, the corridor will deepen regional dependence on Sino-Russian grain flows—undermining U.S. influence, threatening food security among key partners, and displacing American agricultural exporters. This paper recommends that the Trump Administration elevate global food security as a central pillar of Indo-Pacific strategy, strengthen agricultural trade and capacity-building partnerships across Central Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific Islands, and use grain diplomacy as a lever in ongoing negotiations with Russia.

Special Report by the BFF China Working Group

While discrediting the Ben Franklin Fellowship, the leaders of the American Foreign Service Association (AFSA) act as if no other foreign policy professional group is organizing inside Foggy Bottom. Specifically, AFSA has never voiced any concerns about the “politicizing” activities of Foreign Policy for America (FP4A), a liberal-left membership organization that has an entrenched network among former and active State Department officials. Many of us in BFF have concluded that AFSA leaders express no concerns about FP4A because they sanction what that organization does.

The recently released Farm National Security Action Plan, championed by Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins, rightly highlights vulnerabilities in the American agricultural system, including risks posed by Chinese ownership of U.S. farmland. While safeguarding the physical integrity of the agricultural sector is essential, U.S. policy must also clearly recognize the economic and geopolitical importance of agricultural trade with China. Expanding—not constricting—agricultural exports to China supports American farm viability, reduces the trade deficit, enhances economic leverage, and reinforces a strategic pillar of bilateral engagement, all of which are in the national interest of the United States.

Special Report by the BFF China Working Group

The architecture of American commercial diplomacy, built on decades of assumptions about the pacifying power of economic interdependence, now stands in ruins. Russia's defiance and China's weaponization of trade have exposed a fundamental flaw: carrots alone cannot secure national interests when adversaries are willing to absorb economic pain or turn American investments against the United States. As Washington recalibrates its approach to Moscow, a new doctrine is emerging: one that seeks to build leverage into the very infrastructure of commerce, creating relationships that can shift from cooperation to coercion at a moment's notice without destroying American corporate interests in the process.

By Ivan Grek, PhD, Director of the Russia Program at George Washington University’s Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies

Conservative career officials are fighting to break the globalist-woke mindset that is deeply ingrained in the U.S. foreign affairs bureaucracy.

By Phillip Linderman