Quotes of the Day:
"A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject."
- Winston Churchill
"I, for one, know of no sweeter sight for a man's eyes than his own country."
- Homer
"Effort and courage are not enough without purpose and direction."
- President John F. Kennedy
1. In Taiwan war game, few good options for U.S. to deter China
2. Ready to Fight Tonight? Not So Much, Some Army Troops Say
3. Opinion | America’s Crumbling Global Position
4. US, China sparring over Taiwan heats up anew
5. Our Nation Needs Leaders. Veterans Must Rise and Serve Again
6. Too Many Civilians? Pentagon Officials and House Lawmaker Disagree
7. Nearly 200 Americans and thousands of Afghans who seek visas remain in Afghanistan nearly two months after US troops pulled out
8. Terror Groups in Afghanistan Could Attack US Next Year, Pentagon Policy Chief Says
9. Beijing Says Taiwan Has 'No Right To Join The United Nations'
10. FDD | The Future Of Iran-EU Trade Is Not Bright
11. Erdogan’s Belligerence Has U.S., Greece Expanding Ties
12. FDD | Landmark Iran Sanctions Ruling Against Turkish Public Lender Builds U.S. Deterrence
13. FDD | US House’s one-sided approach to Yemen will only encourage violence, empower Iran
14. A long-delayed royal wedding reveals awkward truths about Japan
15. Facebook's Language Gaps Weaken Screening of Hate, Terrorism
16. Biden should end the confusion and say America will defend Taiwan
17. Five points for anger, one for a ‘like’: How Facebook’s formula fostered rage and misinformation
18. The Coming Democratic Revival
1. In Taiwan war game, few good options for U.S. to deter China
Excerpts:
The war game found that the best option was warning the Chinese ahead of time of consequences they would face for moving on the islands, with Japan playing a significant role, the report says.
“The U.S. and Taiwan teams made repeated inquiries about Japan’s position, suggesting that without Japan’s backing, the U.S. and Taiwanese negotiating position was weakened,” the report said. “In a potential conflict, a lack of unambiguous Japanese support for Taiwan in this context would undermine efforts to urge Chinese withdrawal and could set a precedent for future unchecked Chinese aggression in other territorial disputes, including those over Japanese territory, such as the Senkaku Islands.”
Asked about Biden’s remarks last week, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said, “Nobody wants to see cross-strait issues come to blows.”
“As we’ve done over multiple administrations, we’ll continue to help Taiwan with the sorts of capabilities that it needs to defend itself, and so we’ll stay focused on those things,” Austin said.
In Taiwan war game, few good options for U.S. to deter China
The United States has “few credible options” to respond if China were to seize a set of islands administered by Taiwan in the South China Sea, underscoring the need for Washington and Taipei to build deterrence “against limited Chinese aggression,” according to the results of a war game conducted recently by foreign policy experts in Washington and the Asia-Pacific region.
The scenario was examined by the Center for a New American Security, a Washington-based think tank, and detailed in a report published Tuesday. It supposes that Chinese forces invade the Pratas islands, capturing the 500 Taiwanese troops who are based there and establishing a military outpost.
It’s a theoretical dilemma for the Pentagon that “many China-watchers view as increasingly plausible” — and one that “reinforces the need for regular planning exercises between Taiwanese and U.S. personnel,” the report says.
The report comes at a moment of heightened tension between Washington and Beijing, with the United States opposing China’s military expansion in the region and China calling on the Pentagon to cut ties with Taiwan. The standoff has spotlighted the challenge U.S. commanders would face in responding to an incursion of the islands without provoking a full-blown war.
President Biden, speaking during a town hall event last week broadcast by CNN, said that “we have a commitment” to defend Taiwan, prompting the White House to issue a statement clarifying that “the U.S. defense relationship with Taiwan is guided by the Taiwan Relations Act.” Signed into law in 1979, it details an ambiguous policy in which the United States said it would be a matter of “grave concern” if Taiwan’s future was determined by “other than peaceful means.” It also promises to provide the island with defensive weapons, and states that it will maintain capacity to “resist any resort to force or forms of coercion” that would jeopardize security on Taiwan.
The rift between China and Taiwan dates back decades. Communists won a civil war in China in 1949, forcing their opponents to flee to Taiwan. Beijing has claimed the island as its own territory ever since.
Chris Dougherty, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, said U.S. officials have scrutinized what a full Chinese invasion of Taiwan might look like. For this exercise, he and his colleagues wanted to examine a scenario that was on a magnitude similar to Russia’s invasion and annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in 2014.
Dougherty, a former Army Ranger who served as a strategic adviser in the Pentagon for four years spanning the Obama and Trump administrations, said that seizing the land — also known as the Dongsha islands — would allow China to gauge the reaction of the international community. China’s status as an economic power, he said, makes it difficult for the United States to sanction Beijing on an open-ended basis.
“You either can play the game of the chicken and you can say, ‘I’m willing to get into a contest of risk-taking with you over Dongsha,’ which — let’s be honest — I don’t know that we are. Or, you can do this pillow-fighting policy, and you’re going to hit them, but not hard enough to deter them from doing what you want them to do,” Dougherty said.
The war game found that the best option was warning the Chinese ahead of time of consequences they would face for moving on the islands, with Japan playing a significant role, the report says.
“The U.S. and Taiwan teams made repeated inquiries about Japan’s position, suggesting that without Japan’s backing, the U.S. and Taiwanese negotiating position was weakened,” the report said. “In a potential conflict, a lack of unambiguous Japanese support for Taiwan in this context would undermine efforts to urge Chinese withdrawal and could set a precedent for future unchecked Chinese aggression in other territorial disputes, including those over Japanese territory, such as the Senkaku Islands.”
Asked about Biden’s remarks last week, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said, “Nobody wants to see cross-strait issues come to blows.”
“As we’ve done over multiple administrations, we’ll continue to help Taiwan with the sorts of capabilities that it needs to defend itself, and so we’ll stay focused on those things,” Austin said.
Karoun Demirjian contributed to this report.
2. Ready to Fight Tonight? Not So Much, Some Army Troops Say
It does not seem like the survey numbers are very useful. 56% not applicable because they are civilian respondents? Plus it is more than a year old.
The buried lede is highlighted below and the disconnect between senior officials pushing for a high tech military and troops training on the same equipment for decades!
Excerpts:
The survey, which was conducted around the time that the U.S. Navy faced the spread of COVID-19 aboard the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt, which was forced to suspend operations and return to port in Guam, also reflects the challenges that the Army and other U.S. military services had in maintaining training in large groups during the pandemic.
Even as the U.S. military put temporary limits on large gatherings last year, in line with guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about public events, 65 percent of soldiers surveyed by the Army said they had recently trained in groups of 35 or more troops at least four times. But the Army canceled the large-scale Defender Europe, its largest exercise on the continent, in 2020, before hosting a scaled-down version of the initiative later that year.
Experts said the findings also speak to a larger disconnect in the Army between the senior brass who are pushing a high-tech agenda for the service and enlisted troops who have been training on the same equipment for decades.
“If you go out to [the National Training Center] and you go out to the operational force and you try to ask them about multidomain operations, they’re like, ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about. I still have the same equipment for now,’” said John Spencer, the chair of urban warfare studies at the U.S. Military Academy’s Modern War Institute.
Ready to Fight Tonight? Not So Much, Some Army Troops Say
The U.S. military might not be as ready for a war with China or Russia as it lets on.
By Jack Detsch, Foreign Policy’s Pentagon and national security reporter.
NEW FOR SUBSCRIBERS: Click + to receive email alerts for new stories written by Jack Detsch
US army soldiers arrive at Morocco's Agadir military airport on June 9, 2021 to take part in the "African Lion" military exercise. Fadel Senna/AFP via Getty Images
It’s an age-old adage: The Pentagon has said for years that the U.S. Army forces stationed on the Korean Peninsula are ready to “fight tonight” if a war breaks out between North and South Korea—or almost anywhere else. But not everyone in the Army is so sure about that, according to an internal survey obtained by Foreign Policy, especially the grunts who could be doing most of the fighting—and dying.
In a survey of more than 5,400 soldiers and civilians of different ranks conducted by the U.S. Army in July and August 2020, 14 percent of respondents said their unit would be ready to deploy, fight, and win anywhere in the world immediately. Some 13 percent of those surveyed said they would need more time, while 3 percent said they would be ready to go in a week, and 4 percent in a month. Fifty-six percent of those surveyed said the question didn’t apply to them, likely owing to the fact that the majority of respondents were civilians.
But the figures are far more striking when broken down by rank. Under 20 percent of warrant officers, highly specialized enlisted troops who have deployed to Afghanistan and other U.S. battlefields during America’s post-9/11 wars, said they were confident their unit could win today. While fewer generals responded to the survey, about 40 percent of them were confident they could immediately deploy and win.
It’s an age-old adage: The Pentagon has said for years that the U.S. Army forces stationed on the Korean Peninsula are ready to “fight tonight” if a war breaks out between North and South Korea—or almost anywhere else. But not everyone in the Army is so sure about that, according to an internal survey obtained by Foreign Policy, especially the grunts who could be doing most of the fighting—and dying.
In a survey of more than 5,400 soldiers and civilians of different ranks conducted by the U.S. Army in July and August 2020, 14 percent of respondents said their unit would be ready to deploy, fight, and win anywhere in the world immediately. Some 13 percent of those surveyed said they would need more time, while 3 percent said they would be ready to go in a week, and 4 percent in a month. Fifty-six percent of those surveyed said the question didn’t apply to them, likely owing to the fact that the majority of respondents were civilians.
But the figures are far more striking when broken down by rank. Under 20 percent of warrant officers, highly specialized enlisted troops who have deployed to Afghanistan and other U.S. battlefields during America’s post-9/11 wars, said they were confident their unit could win today. While fewer generals responded to the survey, about 40 percent of them were confident they could immediately deploy and win.
“If war was to come today I think the Army would be in a difficult position,” said Thomas Spoehr, a retired Army lieutenant general who heads up the conservative Heritage Foundation’s defense program. “Some of the brigade combat teams are well trained, but there’s a fair number that are not.”
Foreign Policy obtained the survey, part of the 81-page “Army COVID-19 Campaign Plan” commissioned by the service last year, as part of a Freedom of Information Act request.
In a statement, Army spokesman Lt. Col. Terence Kelley said that Army senior leaders remain confident that the service is “ready to fight and win, both today and last summer.”
Kelley emphasized that the survey was taken in mid-2020. “At that time, 61 percent of relevant respondents said they were ready to deploy, fight, and win in a reasonable amount of time, today to one month,” he said. He pointed out that the Army has resumed normal training and provided vaccines to more than 93 percent of active-duty service members, and he added that the service’s combat training centers are at full capacity.
Spoehr and other experts see the findings as reflective of a worrying downward trend in the Army’s readiness, military jargon to describe the active-duty and reserve forces’ preparedness for combat, as service leaders have complained of inflation taking a bite out of flattening budgets. In an annual assessment of U.S. military power released last week, the Heritage Foundation cited Army figures that indicated 58 percent of brigade combat teams, the service’s premier close combat force, were at the highest levels of tactical readiness, 8 percentage points below the service’s goal and a drop of 16 percentage points from last year.
“Readiness for the Army has crested and started to come down, and if the budget is approved the way they submitted it, it will go down even further, I think,” Spoehr said.
But the Defense Department’s problems with readiness haven’t just been limited to the U.S. Army. The services have struggled to keep up their training tempo with the Biden administration seeking to flatten the Pentagon’s budget and invest in modern weapons systems that would be used in a future conflict with China or Russia. The Pentagon’s newest budget proposal would cut back on rotations to the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California, where troops train against a dedicated unit that can simulate U.S. adversaries such as Russia and China, instead calling on units to train at home stations, in less realistic conditions.
And the Navy and Air Force are struggling to keep new recruits proficient in basic skills and their ships and planes in service. The Navy’s investigation into the fire aboard the USS Bonhomme Richard last year found that sailors had no idea how to put the fire out because they hadn’t exercised together and didn’t know their roles and responsibilities. And the Government Accountability Office found in November 2020 that only three of 46 different types of U.S. military aircraft met their “mission capable rates,” a measure of whether an aircraft can conduct its full suite of missions.
Readiness figures are seen as prized by the Army, as well as by foreign militaries training for a possible future war with the United States, such as China and Russia, which are looking for clues about how prepared American forces would be to take them on.
Army leaders have suggested that those impacts deepened as some active-duty, reserve, and National Guard units were taken away from their everyday missions to distribute vaccines, administer tests, and provide help to state and local governments during the early months of the COVID-19 outbreak. In February, Army Chief of Staff James McConville said he was prepared to sacrifice the combat readiness of his units to help defeat the pandemic, including the elite 101st Airborne Division.
“The Army is committed to making this happen, and could it affect readiness? Sure,” McConville said at an event in February. “Those units that are doing this, they are not training the way they need to, but we’ve got to defeat this enemy.”
Asked whether the virus had affected the daily operations of Army units, 37 percent said they were handling it well, and another 34 percent said they had faced some impacts but that their units were “dealing adequately” with it.
The survey, which was conducted around the time that the U.S. Navy faced the spread of COVID-19 aboard the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt, which was forced to suspend operations and return to port in Guam, also reflects the challenges that the Army and other U.S. military services had in maintaining training in large groups during the pandemic.
Even as the U.S. military put temporary limits on large gatherings last year, in line with guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about public events, 65 percent of soldiers surveyed by the Army said they had recently trained in groups of 35 or more troops at least four times. But the Army canceled the large-scale Defender Europe, its largest exercise on the continent, in 2020, before hosting a scaled-down version of the initiative later that year.
Experts said the findings also speak to a larger disconnect in the Army between the senior brass who are pushing a high-tech agenda for the service and enlisted troops who have been training on the same equipment for decades.
“If you go out to [the National Training Center] and you go out to the operational force and you try to ask them about multidomain operations, they’re like, ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about. I still have the same equipment for now,’” said John Spencer, the chair of urban warfare studies at the U.S. Military Academy’s Modern War Institute.
Staff writer Amy Mackinnon contributed reporting for this story.
Jack Detsch is Foreign Policy’s Pentagon and national security reporter. Twitter: @JackDetsch
3. Opinion | America’s Crumbling Global Position
Excerpts:
Even the administration’s one genuine strategic accomplishment — the U.S.-British-Australian nuclear submarine deal, signed at France’s expense — was botched. Expect Paris to serve its diplomatic revenge cold the next time we need its help.
All of these errors are unforced. And all of them ultimately lie at the feet of the president — a painful reminder, as former Defense Secretary Robert Gates said pithily in 2014, that Biden has a long history of being on the wrong side of major foreign policy and national security issues. But it’s also true that the president is being badly advised.
America desperately needs the Biden presidency to succeed. And the world desperately needs a successful America. The alternative to a failed Biden presidency isn’t a change in administration. It’s a transformation of the global order that leaves us poorer, more vulnerable, and more susceptible to the siren songs of illiberal populists, including those at home.
Bottom-line advice to the president: Assemble a new national security team, now. Be the bigger man and invite people like Bob Gates to join it.
Opinion | America’s Crumbling Global Position
Bret Stephens
America’s Crumbling Global Position
Oct. 26, 2021
Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times
By
Opinion Columnist
A “complex, coordinated and deliberate attack,” was how John Kirby, the Pentagon press secretary, on Monday described a recent drone assault on a U.S. military outpost in Syria that helps train local allies to fight ISIS. It was conducted with as many as five Iranian drones, launched by Iranian proxies, and conducted with Iran’s aid and blessing.
We’ll see if there’s any kind of U.S. response. The Biden administration is still desperate to get Iran back to the negotiating table to sign a nuclear deal that would free up billions of dollars in funding that Tehran can use to conduct more such attacks.
Also on Monday, The Times’s David Sanger reported that a Russian intelligence agency, the S.V.R., is once again engaged in a campaign “to pierce thousands of U.S. government, corporate and think-tank computer networks,” according to Microsoft cybersecurity experts. This comes just a few months after President Biden personally warned Vladimir Putin against renewing such attacks — while also going easy on the penalties the U.S. imposed for previous intrusions.
Around the same time, Biden announced that “now is the time to de-escalate.” It would seem his Russian counterpart doesn’t agree.
Then there is the sharp and worrying uptick of Chinese military flights approaching Taiwan’s airspace. The idea that Beijing may seek to seize the island democracy by force has moved, in a matter of weeks, from a remote prospect to a distinct possibility.
Biden has claimed repeatedly that the United States has a treaty obligation to come to Taiwan’s defense in the event of an attack, most recently at his CNN town hall last week. Subsequent clarifications from the White House have acknowledged that the United States is obligated by the Taiwan Relations Act only to provide sufficiently for Taiwan’s self-defense, without an explicit guarantee of U.S. military intervention.
In other words, on one of the central foreign policy challenges of our time, the president can’t get his facts straight. On another, he can’t seem to get his message across. On the third, it’s unclear whether there’s any coherent policy at all. America’s position in the world as a credible ally to embattled friends and a serious foe to adventurist enemies is visibly crumbling.
The roots of this decline stretch back for years, and the blame to go around is nearly endless. But Biden was elected on a promise of wisdom, experience and competence. Can anyone seriously say that we’ve gotten that?
And it’s not just about Taiwan, Iran and Russia.
The administration entered office with a sense of where it thought the world was heading. Donald Trump’s exit would dramatically improve relations with our allies and at least facilitate diplomacy with our adversaries. A more humane policy on the southern border would ease the humanitarian crisis. The burden of the pandemic would substantially ease by the Fourth of July. We would make a safe and popular exit from Afghanistan by Sept. 11. The economy would prosper.
Now every expectation has gone sideways, with little indication that the administration did any thinking about what might go wrong, much less any planning in case it did.
Afghanistan? “There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of a embassy,” the president said in July, barely a month before the world saw thousands of Afghans begging to be airlifted from a country surrendering to fanatics.
Relations with allies? “President Biden says he hears no criticism from America’s allies about the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan and the collapse of the government,” The Times’s Steven Erlanger reported in August. “But the criticism in Europe, at least, is loud and persistent.”
Even the administration’s one genuine strategic accomplishment — the U.S.-British-Australian nuclear submarine deal, signed at France’s expense — was botched. Expect Paris to serve its diplomatic revenge cold the next time we need its help.
All of these errors are unforced. And all of them ultimately lie at the feet of the president — a painful reminder, as former Defense Secretary Robert Gates said pithily in 2014, that Biden has a long history of being on the wrong side of major foreign policy and national security issues. But it’s also true that the president is being badly advised.
America desperately needs the Biden presidency to succeed. And the world desperately needs a successful America. The alternative to a failed Biden presidency isn’t a change in administration. It’s a transformation of the global order that leaves us poorer, more vulnerable, and more susceptible to the siren songs of illiberal populists, including those at home.
Bottom-line advice to the president: Assemble a new national security team, now. Be the bigger man and invite people like Bob Gates to join it.
4. US, China sparring over Taiwan heats up anew
Excerpts:
China has recently upped its threat to bring Taiwan under its control by force if necessary by flying warplanes near the island and rehearsing beach landings.
China and Taiwan split during a civil war in 1949. The U.S. cut formal diplomatic relations with Taipei in 1979 in order to recognize Beijing. The U.S. does not openly contest China’s claim to Taiwan, but is committed by law to ensure the island can defend itself and to treat all threats toward it as matters of grave concern.
Under President Xi Jinping, who is also Communist Party leader and head of the armed forces, China has been stepping up military, diplomatic and economic pressure on Taiwan. Over its National Day weekend at the beginning of the month, China sent a record 149 military aircraft southwest of Taiwan in strike group formations, prompting Taiwan to scramble aircraft and activate its air defense missile systems.
China has also recently held beach landing exercises on its side of the roughly 160-kilometer-wide (100-mile-wide) Taiwan Strait, which, like the aircraft incursions, it described as a warning to Tsai Ing-wen’s administration.
The U.S. has reinforced its support for Taiwan with military sales.
US, China sparring over Taiwan heats up anew
WASHINGTON (AP) — The United States and China are stepping up their war of words over Taiwan in a long-simmering dispute that has significant implications for the power dynamic in the Indo-Pacific and beyond.
Amid a surge in Chinese military activity near the island that China regards as a renegade province and has vowed to reclaim by force if necessary, Washington and Beijing have launched new campaigns for global support for their respective positions, each using the stern and lofty language of sovereignty and international precedent. And neither is backing down.
While the disagreement over Taiwan isn’t new and has long vexed relations between the countries, recent developments suggest the two are coming closer to confrontation. Last week, President Joe Biden set off alarm bells in Beijing by saying the U.S. has a firm commitment to help Taiwan defend itself in the event of a Chinese attack.
China protested and the Biden administration sought to play down the comments. White House, State Department and Pentagon officials all said the president did not mean to imply any changes in the U.S. “one-China policy,” which recognizes Beijing but allows informal relations and defense ties with Taipei.
The officials took pains to say that America’s commitment to Taiwan remains steadfast but continues to be guided by a policy of “strategic ambiguity” over military-related specifics that falls short of a treaty-enshrined mutual defense pact. Since then, however, the administration has upped the ante on the diplomatic front.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Tuesday publicly urged other members of the United Nations to reject China’s assertion of absolute sovereignty over Taiwan and join the U.S. in supporting Taipei’s independent participation in international organizations related to transportation, health, climate change, culture and education.
“As the international community faces an unprecedented number of complex and global issues, it is critical for all stakeholders to help address these problems,” Blinken said in a statement. “This includes the 24 million people who live in Taiwan. Taiwan’s meaningful participation in the UN system is not a political issue, but a pragmatic one.”
He noted that Taiwan has been prevented from participating in meetings of the International Civil Aviation Organization despite being a major transit hub and the World Health Organization despite having fielded an effective response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Taiwan’s exclusion undermines the important work of the UN and its related bodies, all of which stand to benefit greatly from its contributions,” Blinken said. “That is why we encourage all UN Member States to join us in supporting Taiwan’s robust, meaningful participation throughout the UN system and in the international community.”
State Department spokesman Ned Price declined to elaborate on what the administration would define as “meaningful participation.”
Blinken’s statement came just five days after Biden’s remarks about Taiwan’s defense and only two days after the State Department announced that senior U.S. and Taiwanese officials met virtually to discuss expanding Taiwan’s participation in UN and other international groupings.
In that Oct. 22 meeting, administration officials “reiterated the U.S. commitment to Taiwan’s meaningful participation at the World Health Organization and UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and discussed ways to highlight Taiwan’s ability to contribute to efforts on a wide range of issues,” the State Department said.
Apart from complaining about Biden’s initial comments, China reacted angrily to that discussion, slamming the administration for making “irresponsible statements” that encourage Taiwanese independence and demanding a halt to U.S. “official contacts” with the island’s government.
“Taiwan’s participation in activities of the international organizations must be handled in accordance with the one-China principle,” foreign ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said. “Taiwan’s attempts to expand its so-called ‘international space’ with foreign support are in nature seeking to expand the space for ‘Taiwan independence’ and secession. It will surely end in failure.”
RELATED
China seeks to bring the strategically and symbolically important island back under its control, and the U.S. sees Taiwan in the context of broader challenges from China.
The back-and-forth is playing out against a backdrop of increasing belligerence by both sides toward the other, even as they profess to have common interests on issues ranging from trade to climate to North Korea. Relations have plunged to new lows since nosediving under the Trump administration, which adopted a confrontational approach on trade, visas, diplomatic representation and educational exchanges.
While both former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden have been firm in their opposition to Chinese activities in Tibet, Hong Kong, China’s western Xinjiang region and the South China Sea, the Taiwan issue pre-dates most of those irritants.
China has recently upped its threat to bring Taiwan under its control by force if necessary by flying warplanes near the island and rehearsing beach landings.
China and Taiwan split during a civil war in 1949. The U.S. cut formal diplomatic relations with Taipei in 1979 in order to recognize Beijing. The U.S. does not openly contest China’s claim to Taiwan, but is committed by law to ensure the island can defend itself and to treat all threats toward it as matters of grave concern.
Under President Xi Jinping, who is also Communist Party leader and head of the armed forces, China has been stepping up military, diplomatic and economic pressure on Taiwan. Over its National Day weekend at the beginning of the month, China sent a record 149 military aircraft southwest of Taiwan in strike group formations, prompting Taiwan to scramble aircraft and activate its air defense missile systems.
China has also recently held beach landing exercises on its side of the roughly 160-kilometer-wide (100-mile-wide) Taiwan Strait, which, like the aircraft incursions, it described as a warning to Tsai Ing-wen’s administration.
The U.S. has reinforced its support for Taiwan with military sales.
5. Our Nation Needs Leaders. Veterans Must Rise and Serve Again
The Starship Trooper argument for citizenship and the right to vote:
I know where to find leaders. They are the men and women I served with in uniform. Because unlike most career politicians, veterans have put their lives on the line for their country by supporting and defending our Constitution. Veterans know how to bring people together from all political stripes to accomplish a mission. And, perhaps most importantly, we run towards the fight.
Conclusion:
We have a new mission: a Mission for America. We must save American democracy from those that would prefer to see us divided and weak. We must reinstate the beacon of hope that is the shining city on the hill. We must fuel the pain of all the current crises into action. We must be us again, unshakable and fiercely united, just like we were on the day after 9/11. As we forge a path out of the pandemic and beyond the epic fall of Afghanistan, we must show each other and remind the world of the relentless American spirit.
America is the world leader, and as a veteran, I wholeheartedly answer the call to honorably help carry that mantle.
Our Nation Needs Leaders. Veterans Must Rise and Serve Again
I am a soldier and now I’m running for the U.S. Senate because that is where the battle is.
There are moments that change your life, and the fall of Afghanistan is one of them. It was a tipping point for me and why I am now running for the U.S. Senate in North Carolina.
I was disgusted watching the efforts of my brothers and sisters in arms and our Afghan allies swept away by an utter failure of strategic leadership two decades in the making.
This is personal. I served on the ground as a commander in Afghanistan during the harsh surge years of 2009 and 2010. I endured regular rocket attacks with my company, rendered four-second delayed salutes to our fallen heroes at sunrise ramp ceremonies, and held the hands of little Afghan girls who skipped alongside me in sheer joy when we delivered school supplies and other goodwill items from generous Americans.
Through the military’s ethos of selfless service, I had the good fortune of being transformed into the better version of myself—a path that began when I enlisted after 9/11, because of 9/11. When I watched the horrific terrorist attacks on our nation 20 years ago, I knew I needed to do something. No one does that to my country.
But this year, the anniversary of Sept. 11 hurt in new ways because of the fall of Afghanistan, ways that I never could have imagined or anticipated. Like many of my brothers and sisters, I have intense and lingering emotions, ranging from betrayal to rage and heartbreak. We, the American military, do not leave anyone behind on the battlefield. That is not us. It is contrary to our values. And yet this is exactly what happened in Afghanistan.
It's not just Afghanistan, though. Americans are surrounded by crises, from Russian cyberattacks on our energy infrastructure to our shrinking middle class and our crumbling education system—all exacerbated by a lack of leadership in Washington. Today, I find myself in the exact same place as I did on 9/11, compelled to do something, saying to myself, “No one does this to our country.”
America can and must do better. I refuse to put my lukewarm support behind lackluster career politicians who keep showing up on the ballot, year after year, making promises to us during their campaigns and then forgetting about us after Election Day. Like you, I am tired of being asked to choose between the lesser of two evils in the voting booth. We need leaders who have had their skin in the game.
I know where to find leaders. They are the men and women I served with in uniform. Because unlike most career politicians, veterans have put their lives on the line for their country by supporting and defending our Constitution. Veterans know how to bring people together from all political stripes to accomplish a mission. And, perhaps most importantly, we run towards the fight.
For all of these reasons, I am announcing my campaign for the U.S. Senate in North Carolina. I am a soldier, and that is where the battle is, where our nation’s progress tenuously hinges, and is at a deadlock. The slew of career politicians currently in the race are not only uninspiring, but dangerous. These are serious times and government is serious business for serious people. Our security, our economy, and our children’s futures are at stake. I believe a united America is worth fighting for and we need proven leaders in Washington who are committed to getting the job done.
I am among the first of many prior service members from the post-9/11 generation who are signing up for a new tour of duty because of the fall of Afghanistan. For us, it echoes the wave of World War II veterans who entered politics as a result of the embarrassment and tragic fall of Saigon. Back in the 1970s, Ronald Reagan was among that group of WWII veterans. He was mortified about the stain that Saigon left on America’s image around the world and the cut it made on the hearts of veterans and citizens at home. Sadly, I now know how he felt.
We have a new mission: a Mission for America. We must save American democracy from those that would prefer to see us divided and weak. We must reinstate the beacon of hope that is the shining city on the hill. We must fuel the pain of all the current crises into action. We must be us again, unshakable and fiercely united, just like we were on the day after 9/11. As we forge a path out of the pandemic and beyond the epic fall of Afghanistan, we must show each other and remind the world of the relentless American spirit.
America is the world leader, and as a veteran, I wholeheartedly answer the call to honorably help carry that mantle.
Marjorie K. Eastman is a GOP candidate for U.S. Senate in North Carolina. She is a U.S. Army veteran and award-winning author of The Frontline Generation: How We Served Post 9/11.
6. Too Many Civilians? Pentagon Officials and House Lawmaker Disagree
As an aside and not the focus of this article, what is civilian control of the military? Is it the President and Congress or is it the huge civilian bureaucracy of the Department of Defense?
The promise that technology can replace manpower:
Artificial intelligence could be used to eliminate human civilian jobs in military health care management, intelligence analysis, financial management, and supply chain logistics, Calvert said.
The changes could "save a lot of money -- billions of dollars -- and gradually, not having to fire anybody, but just gradually bringing down the workforce and closing obsolete systems and processes," he said.
Calvert didn’t provide details on his savings estimate, which could potentially come from an annual defense budget of over $700 billion.
Gil Cisneros, the under secretary of defense for personnel and readiness, told Calvert it is "just not proper" to direct cuts to the civilian workforce based on an arbitrary comparison to service members.
"I do not believe we can put a ratio or a number on the amount of civilians that we have," said Cisneros, who served as a Navy officer and lawmaker who sat on the House Armed Services Committee. "The civilian workforce that we have at the Department of Defense is an integral part in the defense of our nation. They play critical roles in the work that we do."
Too Many Civilians? Pentagon Officials and House Lawmaker Disagree
The number of civilian workers compared to military service members is the highest in the history of the Pentagon, and that's unsustainable, according to Rep. Ken Calvert of California, the top Republican on a key defense panel.
But the Pentagon begs to differ. Top personnel officials rebutted Calvert during testimony at a House hearing Tuesday and defended the department's 790,000 civilians as key to the defense of the country.
Calvert, the ranking member of the House Appropriations Committee's defense panel, said the Pentagon should reduce the number of civilians by automating a raft of jobs and responsibilities, similar to what's happened in private manufacturing and shipping across the country.
"I don't see how we can afford to maintain the current civilian workforce into the future if we're forced to balance those costs with procurement and research efforts, which are absolutely necessary," he said.
The House Appropriations panel was hearing Pentagon testimony on the defense workforce and considering ways the department could use funding to shore up training, recruitment and retention of troops, as well as how to sustain the defense industrial base.
Artificial intelligence could be used to eliminate human civilian jobs in military health care management, intelligence analysis, financial management, and supply chain logistics, Calvert said.
The changes could "save a lot of money -- billions of dollars -- and gradually, not having to fire anybody, but just gradually bringing down the workforce and closing obsolete systems and processes," he said.
Calvert didn’t provide details on his savings estimate, which could potentially come from an annual defense budget of over $700 billion.
Gil Cisneros, the under secretary of defense for personnel and readiness, told Calvert it is "just not proper" to direct cuts to the civilian workforce based on an arbitrary comparison to service members.
"I do not believe we can put a ratio or a number on the amount of civilians that we have," said Cisneros, who served as a Navy officer and lawmaker who sat on the House Armed Services Committee. "The civilian workforce that we have at the Department of Defense is an integral part in the defense of our nation. They play critical roles in the work that we do."
The Department of the Navy is always assessing its workforce to get the right mix, but the metric it's focused on is not the ratio of troops to civilians but whether the services can compete on the battlefield, said Meredith Berger, the senior official performing the duties of Navy under secretary.
"We capitalize Sailors, Marines, Civilians, and it is because of their contribution," Berger said.
The Army, the largest of the service branches, has a 4:1 ratio of soldiers to civilians, and that number has been relatively unchanged for the past five years, said Christopher Lowman, senior official performing the duties of Army under secretary.
The service plans to study how new technologies such as artificial intelligence could affect the civilian workforce. The Air Force is not currently incentivizing civilian retirements but plans to study whether it could be needed in some areas -- it's more focused on recruiting and keeping personnel with high-tech skills, said Gina Ortiz Jones, the under secretary of the Air Force.
Calvert said the Defense Department and military branches are among the largest enterprises in the world and should not be immune to the larger trends in the U.S. of companies streamlining workforces.
No one should argue that civilians are not important, but also no one believes they should outnumber troops, he said.
"But it's growing in that direction," he added. "It seems like there's always a reason not to look, especially at the middle-management structure within the Department of Defense."
-- Travis Tritten can be reached at travis.tritten@military.com. Follow him on Twitter @Travis_Tritten.
7. Nearly 200 Americans and thousands of Afghans who seek visas remain in Afghanistan nearly two months after US troops pulled out
There are still many who need to be evacuated exfiltrated. Our organisation continues to work this problem with some very committed patriots. If you want to take action please go to this web site: https://www.shonabashona.net/about
Nearly 200 Americans and thousands of Afghans who seek visas remain in Afghanistan nearly two months after US troops pulled out
U.S. airmen and Marines guide evacuees aboard an Air Force C-17 Globemaster III in support of the Afghanistan evacuation at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul on Aug. 21, 2021. (Senior Airman Brennen Lege/U.S. Air Force photo)
WASHINGTON – Nearly 200 Americans who want to leave Afghanistan remain in the country nearly two months after the U.S. military’s evacuation mission ended at the Kabul airport, Pentagon officials told senators Tuesday.
The State Department is now making arrangements to move the roughly 196 Americans from Afghanistan “either via air or over ground,” Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Colin Kahl said at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on security in Afghanistan. Since Sept. 1, about 240 American citizens and 57 U.S. green card holders have left the country.
On Aug. 30, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said between 100-200 — “but likely closer to 100” — Americans who wanted to leave Afghanistan remained there when the last U.S. troops withdrew from the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul. However, Blinken noted his agency was still “trying to determine exactly how many” Americans remained there.
The State Department also has contacted another 244 U.S. citizens in Afghanistan who “are not ready to depart either because they want to stay or aren’t ready” to leave yet, Kahl said.
Republican senators such as Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma have questioned the administration of President Joe Biden over its tallies of Americans in Afghanistan, claiming “we really don't know how many Americans were left in Afghanistan.”
“The administration by its own account left 600 Americans behind — over 400 of whom want to leave — not the 100 to 200 that has been referred to several times,” Inhofe, the ranking Republican on the committee, said at the hearing. “At the very least, it's confusing.”
Inhofe also criticized the military’s decision to leave Afghanistan before all Americans were evacuated.
“During the Aug. 18 interview with ABC, George Stephanopoulos asked President Biden whether US troops would stay beyond Aug. 31 if there were still Americans to evacuate. President Biden responded — and this is a quote — ‘if there are American citizens left, we are going to stay to get them out,’ ” Inhofe said. “Of course, this didn't happen.”
However, defense leaders have said staying any longer would have put more lives at risk as the Taliban pledged to restart its attacks on Americans if troops remained in the country past the promised Aug. 31 withdrawal date.
“It was the consensus of civilian and military leadership at the Department of Defense that we should stick to the Aug. 31 deadline that extended risk to mission enforcement would make it harder to get American citizens out beyond that date,” Kahl said.
In addition to the hundreds of Americans, thousands of vulnerable Afghans also remain in Afghanistan while they await special immigrant visas, which are given to allies who helped U.S. forces during their time in that country, Kahl said.
“The total number of SIV's in the pipeline is 28,000, according to our records, of which 8,555 have come out with their family members,” he said. “So that would suggest there's a significant number of SIVs still in Afghanistan.”
Kahl said the Biden administration is trying “to get them out and hold the Taliban to their pledge for safe passage with people with documents which should include SIVs.”
The problem, however, is “the SIV process was not designed for an emergency — it's very slow,” he said. “Typically it took a year or two [and] nothing was done in the previous administration to speed that up. At the beginning of the Biden administration, the State Department took some steps that shrunk the time to about eight months — still way too long.”
The Pentagon has also taken steps to help the State Department process SIV applications faster, creating “an enormous database … to try to speed up the confirmation of employment” necessary for special immigrant visas, Kahl said.
Meanwhile, about 53,000 Afghans are awaiting visa processing at eight military installations in the United States and about another 3,500 at bases in the Middle East and Europe, chief Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said Monday.
More than 6,000 have completed the process and have resettled in the U.S. since evacuation efforts began in late July, Kirby said.
Caitlin Doornbos
8. Terror Groups in Afghanistan Could Attack US Next Year, Pentagon Policy Chief Says
Excerpts:
Back at the Senate, some lawmakers asked Kahl why they should believe this assessment when the intelligence community has been so wrong on other issues in Afghanistan, including how quickly the country could fall to the Taliban after U.S. forces withdrew. The Afghan government in Kabul fell five days after intelligence officials predicted it would take 30 to 90 days for the Taliban to control the capital.
“I think this disconnect between the reality on the ground and what the Biden administration assessed would happen with respect to the collapse of the Afghan security forces is deeply troubling,” said Sen. Deb Fischer, R-Neb.. “How can you possibly assure us that such a disconnect isn’t happening between the reality on the ground and the Biden administration’s analysis of how long it’s going to take Al Qaeda or ISIS-K to gain the ability to attack the United States?”
Kahl acknowledged that the administration’s visibility into Afghanistan was lacking.
“I think we should all be humbled that we’ve all known less about Afghanistan than we thought we did,” he said.
Terror Groups in Afghanistan Could Attack US Next Year, Pentagon Policy Chief Says
Kahl says ISIS-K might be able to strike in less than 12 months; AQ in one to two years.
Islamic State terrorists in Afghanistan could be able to launch attacks against the United States within as few as six months, the Pentagon’s policy chief told senators Tuesday.
Lawmakers at the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing expressed concern at the short timeline, and asked Colin Kahl what the Pentagon is doing about it. Kahl, the defense undersecretary for policy, declined to answer in detail during the unclassified portion of his testimony. Broadly, he assured senators that the Defense Department is working to make sure the terrorist group and others do not regain their ability to attack abroad.
The 3,000 or so members of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria-Khorasan, or ISIS-K, have already been launching attacks in Afghanistan for some time; 13 Americans died in an August suicide bombing outside the Kabul airport.
But being able to carry out terrorist attacks outside the country is more complicated, and neither ISIS-K nor Al Qaeda can do so currently, Kahl said. He estimated that ISIS-K could be able to strike abroad within six to 12 months; for Al Qaeda, which was behind the 9/11 attacks, one to two years.
“We’re fairly certain that they have the intention to do so,” he said. “We have considerable evidence that they have the intent. The question at the moment is the capability.”
The Pentagon’s efforts to stop them include gathering intelligence in daily flights over Afghanistan and sharing the information with allies in the region and beyond, such as the United Kingdom, Kahl said, adding that he could go into more specifics in his classified session with senators.
It’s not clear whether the Taliban will help control the terrorist threat. Kahl said the Taliban is “highly motivated” to combat their “mortal enemy” ISIS-K, but that it’s unclear if the new government of Afghanistan has the ability to actually fight the insurgent group.
How the Taliban will react to Al Qaeda is even more complicated, Kahl said, since the two groups cooperated the last time the Taliban was in power. There are also some members of the new Afghanistan government with ties to the Haqqani network, which is linked to Al Qaeda.
ISIS-K’s Aug. 26 attack on Hamid Karzai International Airport raised the group’s profile, Christine Abizaid, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, said at a conference on Monday.
“The group has gained some notoriety in a way that could be quite compelling for them on the transnational stage. At the same time, they’re fighting the Taliban,” Abizaid said at the Cipher Brief conference in Sea Island, Georgia. “How that force on force engagement in Afghanistan will go will have some defining characteristics about what the transnational threat looks like.”
Abizaid said that the Taliban and Al Qaeda retain a relationship but pointed out that if the terror group were to again threaten the United States, that would have consequences that Afghanistan’s new rulers would like to avoid. That will require the U.S. government to be more sophisticated in the approach it takes to all of the groups, she said.
Back at the Senate, some lawmakers asked Kahl why they should believe this assessment when the intelligence community has been so wrong on other issues in Afghanistan, including how quickly the country could fall to the Taliban after U.S. forces withdrew. The Afghan government in Kabul fell five days after intelligence officials predicted it would take 30 to 90 days for the Taliban to control the capital.
“I think this disconnect between the reality on the ground and what the Biden administration assessed would happen with respect to the collapse of the Afghan security forces is deeply troubling,” said Sen. Deb Fischer, R-Neb.. “How can you possibly assure us that such a disconnect isn’t happening between the reality on the ground and the Biden administration’s analysis of how long it’s going to take Al Qaeda or ISIS-K to gain the ability to attack the United States?”
Kahl acknowledged that the administration’s visibility into Afghanistan was lacking.
“I think we should all be humbled that we’ve all known less about Afghanistan than we thought we did,” he said.
9. Beijing Says Taiwan Has 'No Right To Join The United Nations'
Not unexpected from the PRC.
Beijing Says Taiwan Has 'No Right To Join The United Nations'
Barron's · by AFP - Agence France Presse
Text size
Taiwan has "no right to join the United Nations", a Beijing official said Wednesday, after US Secretary of State Antony Blinken urged greater inclusion of the self-governing island in UN institutions.
The response came after Blinken -- in a statement marking 50 years since the UN General Assembly voted to seat Beijing and boot out Taipei -- regretted that Taiwan had increasingly been excluded on the world stage.
"The United Nations is an international governmental organisation composed of sovereign states," said Ma Xiaoguang, spokesman for the Taiwan Affairs Office in Beijing at a regular briefing, adding: "Taiwan is a part of China."
Beijing considers Taiwan -- where the mainland's defeated nationalists fled at the end of China's civil war in 1949 -- to be a province awaiting reunification, by force if necessary.
Ma said the People's Republic of China is the "only legal government representing the whole of China", urging politicians in Taipei to abandon the idea of relying on Washington for independence.
On Tuesday, Blinken said "Taiwan's meaningful participation in the UN system is not a political issue, but a pragmatic one".
He added that, as the international community faces an unprecedented number of complex and global issues, it is critical for all stakeholders to help address problems -- including the 24 million people living in Taiwan.
bys/rox/leg
Barron's · by AFP - Agence France Presse
10. FDD | The Future Of Iran-EU Trade Is Not Bright
Excerpts:
The greater volatility of EU imports from Iran stems from the impact of sanctions on the import of crude oil. Iran’s non-crude exports to the EU are neither considerable nor growing. They still have not returned to their 2007 level of 1.7 billion euros, and in 2020 were slightly above 600 million euros.
European governments opposed Trump’s unilateral sanctions and tried to convince European companies to trade with Iran. However, the private sector defied Brussels and complied with Washington’s sanctions. Despite loose enforcement of US sanctions by the Biden administration, the data for the first seven months of 2021 show no significant increase in trade between the EU countries and Iran. During this time period, EU’s imports from Iran rose to 480 million euros, slightly higher than 440 million euros during the same period last year, while its exports dropped from 2.21 billion euros to 2.11 billion.
FDD | The Future Of Iran-EU Trade Is Not Bright
fdd.org · by Saeed Ghasseminejad Senior Iran and Financial Economics Advisor · October 26, 2021
The EU invested considerable political and diplomatic capital in the long process that led to the 2015 accord, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). EU leaders had tried hard to convince former President Donald Trump not to abrogate the deal, and they have again invested considerable effort, since Joe Biden’s election, to serve as a middleman between Tehran and Washington. All of this diplomacy invites an economic question: What can the EU expect to gain if trade and investment become possible in Iran with the lifting of US sanctions?
The history of Iran-EU trade over the last 15 years shows a downward trend, with a high degree of correlation with the severity of sanctions. When US-initiated secondary sanctions are in place, whether multilateral or unilateral, they quickly affect Iran-EU trade. EU states opposed the Trump administration’s unilateral maximum pressure strategy, but Trump’s sanctions had the same impact on Iran-EU trade as multilateral sanctions did prior to the JCPOA.
In no small part, Iran-EU trade is so sensitive to sanctions because the EU can quickly replace Iran with other trade partners, while Iran can not do likewise. In 2013, at the height of the Obama administration’s sanctions campaign against Iran, EU imports from Iran dropped to 751 million euros from their zenith of 17 billion euros in 2011.
In 2019, the first full year that Trump’s maximum pressure strategy was in place, EU imports from Iran slid to 680 million euros, down from 9 billion euros in 2018. EU exports, while reduced due to US sanctions, have shown less volatility. The EU’s 2013 exports plummeted to 5.3 billion euros from their high of 11 billion euros in 2010. These exports went back up to 11 billion euros in 2017 while the JCPOA was in effect, but in 2020 descended to 3.7 billion euros. Non-Iranian trade partners filled the gaps.
By contrast, trade between the EU and Saudi Arabia, Tehran’s chief rival in the Persian Gulf, benefits from diplomatic stability. Since 2005, EU-Saudi trade has enjoyed a general upward trajectory, even though it is sensitive to volatile markets for oil. However, the Saudis have managed to expand their non-crude exports to the EU. In 2020, 7.2 billion euros — 46 percent of Riyadh’s exports to the EU — were from non-crude oil, up from 3.84 billion euro in 2005.
The greater volatility of EU imports from Iran stems from the impact of sanctions on the import of crude oil. Iran’s non-crude exports to the EU are neither considerable nor growing. They still have not returned to their 2007 level of 1.7 billion euros, and in 2020 were slightly above 600 million euros.
European governments opposed Trump’s unilateral sanctions and tried to convince European companies to trade with Iran. However, the private sector defied Brussels and complied with Washington’s sanctions. Despite loose enforcement of US sanctions by the Biden administration, the data for the first seven months of 2021 show no significant increase in trade between the EU countries and Iran. During this time period, EU’s imports from Iran rose to 480 million euros, slightly higher than 440 million euros during the same period last year, while its exports dropped from 2.21 billion euros to 2.11 billion.
Saeed Ghasseminejad is a senior advisor on Iran and financial economics at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD). Follow Saeed on Twitter @SGhasseminejad. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, non-partisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
fdd.org · by Saeed Ghasseminejad Senior Iran and Financial Economics Advisor · October 26, 2021
11. Erdogan’s Belligerence Has U.S., Greece Expanding Ties
Excerpts:
In remarks at the joint press conference, Blinken described Greece as a “reliable ally” and a “pillar of stability.” Greece is also becoming more capable militarily, undertaking a major military modernization effort and purchasing lots of U.S.-made military hardware. That builds Greek and NATO military readiness and capability, strengthens the U.S. defense industrial base, and increases the ability of U.S. and Greek forces to operate together.
In fact, Greece now spends a higher percent of its GDP on defense than any other NATO member, according to a report by the alliance. In 2014, Greece spent slightly above NATO’s 2 percent of GDP defense spending guideline. This year, Greece will spend an estimated 3.8 percent of its GDP on defense, the highest share in the alliance. Athens is also spending a significant portion of those expenditures on real military capability, allocating nearly 40 percent of defense spending on equipment. That compares favorably to NATO’s most capable militaries. Athens, however, will need to get military personnel costs under control and spend more on military operations and maintenance if it hopes to employ its new capabilities effectively and maintain readiness.
All things considered, Greece’s search for a hedge against Turkey also offers the United States a unique opportunity to better deter Moscow’s revisionist ambitions and raise the costs for Erdogan’s drift away from the NATO alliance. The defense agreement with Greece is a step in the right direction, but the U.S. Congress will need to monitor its implementation closely.
Erdogan’s Belligerence Has U.S., Greece Expanding Ties
An expert's point of view on a current event.
Growing military cooperation offers Washington a hedge against Ankara and Moscow.
By Bradley Bowman, the senior director of the Center on Military and Political Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and Aykan Erdemir, the senior director of the Turkey program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
Greek Foreign Minister Nikos Dendias watches as U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken speaks after signing the renewal of a defense cooperation agreement at the State Department in Washington on Oct. 14. JONATHAN ERNST/POOL/AFP via Getty Images
The Biden administration just inked a defense cooperation agreement with one NATO ally—Greece—that is trying to bolster its military deterrence against another NATO ally: Turkey.
The renewed and expanded defense protocol the United States and Greece signed on Oct. 14 amends their previously established Mutual Defense Cooperation Agreement. Both Washington and Athens are concerned by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s increasingly belligerent actions, underscored by his threat Saturday—since watered down—to expel 10 Western ambassadors. For the U.S. side, the deal extends and expands U.S. military access to Greek military bases, providing Washington a hedge against Moscow and Ankara as Russian President Vladimir Putin seeks to have Turkey play a spoiler role within the NATO alliance. The Greeks, for their part, hope stronger cooperation with the United States will help them deter Turkey.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Greek Foreign Minister Nikos Dendias signed the defense deal in Washington following the third round of the U.S.-Greek Strategic Dialogue. The Mutual Defense Cooperation Agreement represents a new phase in U.S.-Greek security cooperation. It enables, as Blinken said, “U.S. forces in Greece to train and operate from additional locations.” That will strengthen U.S. military power projection and readiness in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea regions. Initially in effect for five years, the agreement will afterward “remain in force indefinitely” unless either government terminates it, Blinken said.
The Biden administration just inked a defense cooperation agreement with one NATO ally—Greece—that is trying to bolster its military deterrence against another NATO ally: Turkey.
The renewed and expanded defense protocol the United States and Greece signed on Oct. 14 amends their previously established Mutual Defense Cooperation Agreement. Both Washington and Athens are concerned by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s increasingly belligerent actions, underscored by his threat Saturday—since watered down—to expel 10 Western ambassadors. For the U.S. side, the deal extends and expands U.S. military access to Greek military bases, providing Washington a hedge against Moscow and Ankara as Russian President Vladimir Putin seeks to have Turkey play a spoiler role within the NATO alliance. The Greeks, for their part, hope stronger cooperation with the United States will help them deter Turkey.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Greek Foreign Minister Nikos Dendias signed the defense deal in Washington following the third round of the U.S.-Greek Strategic Dialogue. The Mutual Defense Cooperation Agreement represents a new phase in U.S.-Greek security cooperation. It enables, as Blinken said, “U.S. forces in Greece to train and operate from additional locations.” That will strengthen U.S. military power projection and readiness in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea regions. Initially in effect for five years, the agreement will afterward “remain in force indefinitely” unless either government terminates it, Blinken said.
Similar to Greece’s recent deal with France, the protocol strengthens Athens’s position in light of the Erdogan government’s growing gunboat diplomacy and irredentist rhetoric aimed at revoking borders fixed by the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923 following a bitter Greco-Turkish war. In all of this, Erdogan is motivated by a toxic mix of Islamist, ultranationalist, and anti-Western ideologies. Erdogan’s embrace of ultranationalist and pro-Russian factions at home for political survival in the aftermath of Turkey’s failed coup attempt in 2016 put Athens and Ankara on a collision course. The Turkish president’s abandonment of conventional Turkish foreign-policy positions and his expansionist maritime claims in the Aegean and elsewhere, developed by a number of pro-Russian officers in the Turkish military, triggered European Union sanctions in 2019 and threats of further sanctions last year.
The deal could also offer Athens a much-needed hedge against Moscow and Beijing. Greece has traditionally been friendly to Russia, not least because of strong cultural and religious ties. But the two countries had a falling out in 2018, when Athens banned four Russian diplomats over attempts by Moscow to bribe Greek officials in order to derail reconciliation talks between Athens and Skopje that paved the way for North Macedonia’s NATO membership. Furthermore, in the wake of its 2010 debt and financial crisis, Greece turned to investments from China, providing Beijing coercive economic leverage to elicit political concessions from Athens. In 2017, the Greek government under then-Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras blocked the EU from condemning China’s human rights record at the United Nations, earning Athens justified criticism. While the current Greek government has reaffirmed Greece’s orientation toward the West, greater U.S. interest—especially investment in strategic infrastructure projects such as ports, shipyards, and cellular networks—could help reduce Athens’s reliance on Chinese capital.
Erdogan’s increasing belligerence is one reason Greece has taken a significant turn toward the United States, NATO, and the EU.
For the United States, the new agreement provides valuable additional basing and training opportunities to help hedge against Russian activities in the Black Sea and Eastern Mediterranean regions, facilitating greater U.S. military operational agility and flexibility. Increased U.S. military capabilities near the entrance to the Black Sea could present Russian military planners with fresh dilemmas, boosting NATO deterrence.
The agreement provides the U.S. military with access to a base at Alexandroupolis, a port city on the Thracian coast near the Turkish border. That bolsters NATO’s southeastern flank and provides an alternative means to transport military forces to NATO allies Bulgaria and Romania. These ground lines of communication augment the existing sea connection through the Bosphorus and could potentially replace it in a crisis if the United States were deprived of access to the Black Sea by either Turkey or Russia.
The Mutual Defense Cooperation Agreement’s extended duration will incentivize additional investment in Alexandroupolis’s port. That, in turn, could increase the port’s capacity and military utility. For Russia, the Black Sea provides a crucial naval pathway to the Mediterranean and beyond. Additional U.S. access to the Black Sea region via Greece—and an enhanced U.S. military presence near the Turkish Straits—will be unwelcome news in Moscow.
It is essential that Washington work with Athens to ensure that U.S. or European companies expand and run the Alexandroupolis port. It should not surprise anyone if Russian or Chinese companies apply for the job. Already, a Chinese state-backed company owns a majority share of the Piraeus Port Authority, the fourth-largest container port in Europe.
While Alexandroupolis is significant, the protocol’s extended duration will also be very valuable in providing U.S. forces more predictable and longer-term access to the naval port and air base at Souda Bay on Crete. That will incentivize Pentagon infrastructure investment there, which in turn could strengthen U.S. power projection in the Eastern Mediterranean, where China and Russia are increasingly coordinating military activities.
Terrorist threats to the Eastern Mediterranean’s expanding offshore energy infrastructure are growing as well. Hamas attempted to target gas installations off the Israeli coast during the Gaza conflict in May. Perhaps that is one reason why Blinken and Dendias’s joint statement reiterated a desire to “bolster cooperation through the 3+1 format (Greece, Cyprus, Israel, plus the United States) on energy issues, economic development, counterterrorism, and the climate crisis and associated humanitarian challenges which recently affected the region.”
The deal also reflects Washington’s concerns about Ankara’s drift toward Moscow. In December 2020, the Trump administration imposed sanctions on Turkey for its purchase of the Russian S-400 air defense system as required by the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act, which targets significant transactions with the Russian defense or intelligence sectors. Ankara’s recent threats to purchase a second batch of S-400s in addition to advanced Russian Su-35 and Su-57 combat jets would trigger further sanctions and create a significant new crisis with Ankara for the Biden administration and NATO to manage.
Just like Turkey, Greece used to stand out among NATO members for its strong anti-American sentiment—among both the political elite and the general public. Erdogan’s increasing belligerence and drift away from the West and its values are one reason Athens has taken a significant turn toward the United States, NATO, and the EU while also deepening regional cooperation in the Eastern Mediterranean and beyond. Athens’s shift has offered Washington an attractive way to mitigate the damage associated with Erdogan’s actions while simultaneously hedging against Moscow and Beijing. Meanwhile, the U.S. State Department is still trying to maintain its long-term balancing act between Greece and Turkey, which last year drew a sharp rebuke from U.S. Sen. Robert Menendez, who is known for his vocal criticism of the Erdogan government. While there is a bipartisan consensus in Washington regarding the problematic nature of Erdogan’s policies, there is a genuine debate whether he is an anomaly or a sign of Turkey’s long-term shift.
In remarks at the joint press conference, Blinken described Greece as a “reliable ally” and a “pillar of stability.” Greece is also becoming more capable militarily, undertaking a major military modernization effort and purchasing lots of U.S.-made military hardware. That builds Greek and NATO military readiness and capability, strengthens the U.S. defense industrial base, and increases the ability of U.S. and Greek forces to operate together.
In fact, Greece now spends a higher percent of its GDP on defense than any other NATO member, according to a report by the alliance. In 2014, Greece spent slightly above NATO’s 2 percent of GDP defense spending guideline. This year, Greece will spend an estimated 3.8 percent of its GDP on defense, the highest share in the alliance. Athens is also spending a significant portion of those expenditures on real military capability, allocating nearly 40 percent of defense spending on equipment. That compares favorably to NATO’s most capable militaries. Athens, however, will need to get military personnel costs under control and spend more on military operations and maintenance if it hopes to employ its new capabilities effectively and maintain readiness.
All things considered, Greece’s search for a hedge against Turkey also offers the United States a unique opportunity to better deter Moscow’s revisionist ambitions and raise the costs for Erdogan’s drift away from the NATO alliance. The defense agreement with Greece is a step in the right direction, but the U.S. Congress will need to monitor its implementation closely.
Bradley Bowman is the senior director of the Center on Military and Political Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a former advisor to members of the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees. Twitter: @Brad_L_Bowman
Aykan Erdemir is the senior director of the Turkey program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a former member of the Turkish parliament for the Republican People’s Party (CHP). Twitter: @aykan_erdemir
12. FDD | Landmark Iran Sanctions Ruling Against Turkish Public Lender Builds U.S. Deterrence
Excerpt:
A ruling by a U.S. court of appeals that FSIA does not grant public lenders or other instrumentalities of foreign sovereigns any immunity from U.S. prosecution will strengthen Washington’s deterrence against sanctions evasion by Iran and other rogue regimes. This will also discourage banks from pursuing costly delaying tactics and incentivize deferred prosecution and/or non-prosecution agreements with U.S. authorities. Last year, for example, the Industrial Bank of Korea, a state-owned bank, settled U.S. and New York state criminal and civil charges for allowing an illegal transfer of more than $1 billion to Iran in violation of U.S. sanctions. U.S. courts’ denial of impunity to accomplices of Tehran would also serve as a wakeup call for international financial institutions. The American justice system’s commitment to prosecute sanctions busters and money launderers to the full extent of the law would prompt banks to improve their anti-money laundering controls, while also deterring them from colluding with Iran or other state sponsors of terrorism.
FDD | Landmark Iran Sanctions Ruling Against Turkish Public Lender Builds U.S. Deterrence
fdd.org · by Aykan Erdemir Turkey Program Senior Director · October 26, 2021
A U.S. appeals court ruled on October 22 that Halkbank, a public lender majority-owned by Turkey’s sovereign wealth fund, cannot claim sovereign immunity under U.S. law to scuttle a federal criminal case for the bank’s alleged role in helping Iran evade U.S. sanctions. This landmark decision, which sets an important legal precedent, will build American deterrence against foreign financial institutions that facilitate Tehran’s evasion of U.S. sanctions.
In a six-count indictment in October 2019, U.S. attorneys for the Southern District of New York charged Halkbank with fraud, money laundering, and sanctions offenses related to the bank’s alleged participation “in a multibillion-dollar scheme to evade U.S. sanctions on Iran.” The prosecutors accused the Turkish public lender of helping Tehran transfer $20 billion worth of restricted funds, with at least $1 billion laundered through the U.S. financial system.
The previous year, Halkbank’s deputy general manager, Mehmet Hakan Atilla, was sentenced to 32 months in prison when a federal jury found him guilty on five counts related to that scheme, including sanctions evasion, bank fraud, and obstructing the actions of the U.S. Treasury Department. In the run-up to Atilla’s conviction, Reza Zarrab, the ringleader of Tehran’s Turkey-based sanctions-evasion schemes, pleaded guilty and turned state’s witness, confessing to having bribed senior Turkish ministers and top Halkbank executives. Zarrab even implicated Recep Tayyip Erdogan, saying that the then-prime minister had approved the sanctions-busting efforts.
Since October 2019, Halkbank has taken numerous actions to scuttle the case and delay a jury trial. At first, Halkbank and its lawyers refused to acknowledge the indictment or a legal summons to appear in court. After U.S. prosecutors in January 2020 asked U.S. District Judge Richard Berman to impose escalating fines that could total up to $1.8 billion after eight weeks if the bank failed to respond to criminal charges, Halkbank reversed course and pleaded not guilty two months later. The bank’s stalling tactics also included a June 2020 bid pressing Berman to recuse himself, which he refused in August 2020.
Halkbank then claimed that the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA) shielded the public lender from prosecution in the United States. In response, federal prosecutors warned that granting Halkbank immunity under FSIA would constitute an extension of sovereign immunity from civil to criminal cases. In a 16-page opinion issued in October 2020, Berman stated, “The court clearly has personal jurisdiction over Halkbank.” He ruled that FSIA “does not appear to grant immunity in criminal proceedings.” Halkbank immediately appealed the ruling.
Last week, a three-judge panel from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit stated in its ruling that even if the court were to assume that FSIA confers immunity in the criminal context, the offense with which Halkbank is charged “would fall under the commercial activity exception to FSIA.” The court also rejected Halkbank’s “contention that it was entitled to immunity from prosecution under the common law.”
Following that ruling, Halkbank issued a statement to the Istanbul stock exchange, saying that the bank will use all its legal rights to appeal the court’s decision. This is a sign that the Turkish public lender will continue its stalling tactics to delay a potentially embarrassing jury trial, which could further expose Erdogan’s and his close aides’ complicity in Iran’s sanctions-evasion schemes.
Since Zarrab and Atilla were arrested in 2016 and 2017, respectively, Erdogan has employed devious tactics to derail the U.S. prosecution of Turkey-linked sanctions-evasion schemes. The Turkish leader held U.S. Pastor Andrew Brunson hostage for two years, hoping to exchange him for Zarrab and Atilla. In 2017, Erdogan also asked former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who was one of President Donald Trump’s surrogates during the 2016 presidential campaign, to press the Trump White House for a Brunson-Zarrab swap. Ankara’s interference in the Halkbank prosecution became the subject of a probe launched by Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR). Giuliani, as Bloomberg reported in June, has since become “the subject of a Justice Department inquiry into possible foreign lobbying for Turkish interests.”
Erdogan not only has attempted to cover up the Halkbank scandal but has also rewarded individuals who facilitated Tehran’s sanctions-evasion schemes, by offering them cushy appointments. In 2019, three months after Atilla’s return to Turkey after serving his U.S. prison sentence, and only a few days after U.S. federal prosecutors indicted Halkbank, then-Turkish Finance and Treasury Minister Berat Albayrak, who is also Erdogan’s son-in-law, named Atilla as CEO of the Istanbul stock exchange. Nine days later, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, which had opposed Atilla’s appointment, announced that it would sell its 10 percent stake in the Istanbul stock exchange, a transaction the international bank finalized later that year.
Erdogan also appointed former Minister for European Union Affairs Egemen Bagis as Turkey’s ambassador to Prague. Bagis had resigned from the ministry after a 2013 corruption scandal implicated him in accepting bribes related to the scheme run through Halkbank.
The Erdogan government’s attempts to evade justice have been disastrous for Halkbank and, by extension, for the Turkish economy. Since the December 2013 graft probe that exposed the public lender’s role in Iran’s sanctions-evasion schemes, the bank’s shares have lost over 95 percent of their value in U.S. dollars, falling from an all-time high of $10.63 per share in 2013 to $0.45 as of October 25, 2021.
Halkbank also faces a civil lawsuit in the Southern District of New York. Eight hundred and seventy-six victims of Iran-sponsored terrorism, to whom Iran collectively owes $10 billion, took the bank to court, claiming the Turkish public lender helped Tehran avoid the financial consequences of its support for terrorist attacks. The court ruled in February 2021 that the plaintiffs, who are U.S. citizens or foreign employees of the U.S. government targeted during their service to the United States, should pursue their case before a Turkish court instead. In doing so, the court ignored substantial evidence that the plaintiffs cannot receive a fair hearing before a Turkish court, because Ankara is covering up the bank’s complicity in Iranian sanctions-busting schemes. The plaintiffs have appealed the court’s dismissal.
A ruling by a U.S. court of appeals that FSIA does not grant public lenders or other instrumentalities of foreign sovereigns any immunity from U.S. prosecution will strengthen Washington’s deterrence against sanctions evasion by Iran and other rogue regimes. This will also discourage banks from pursuing costly delaying tactics and incentivize deferred prosecution and/or non-prosecution agreements with U.S. authorities. Last year, for example, the Industrial Bank of Korea, a state-owned bank, settled U.S. and New York state criminal and civil charges for allowing an illegal transfer of more than $1 billion to Iran in violation of U.S. sanctions. U.S. courts’ denial of impunity to accomplices of Tehran would also serve as a wakeup call for international financial institutions. The American justice system’s commitment to prosecute sanctions busters and money launderers to the full extent of the law would prompt banks to improve their anti-money laundering controls, while also deterring them from colluding with Iran or other state sponsors of terrorism.
Aykan Erdemir is a former member of the Turkish parliament and senior director of the Turkey Program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), where he also contributes to FDD’s Center on Economic and Financial Power (CEFP). For more analysis from Aykan, the Turkey Program, and CEFP, please subscribe HERE. Follow Aykan on Twitter @aykan_erdemir. Follow FDD on Twitter @FDD and @FDD_CEFP. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
fdd.org · by Aykan Erdemir Turkey Program Senior Director · October 26, 2021
13. FDD | US House’s one-sided approach to Yemen will only encourage violence, empower Iran
Excerpt:
Finding a solution to the war in Yemen is imperative given the ongoing humanitarian catastrophe, for which Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates do deserve criticism. However, punishing Riyadh while ignoring Houthi misconduct will not end the conflict; it will only embolden the Houthis and decrease US leverage with the Saudis over the long-term. Iran’s weapons fuel the conflict, and as long as the Houthis receive external support, they will continue fighting. A more effective strategy would focus on disrupting the flow of Iranian arms to the Houthis as well as providing positive incentives for both sides to cease hostilities. Ending support for Saudi Arabia is intended to ameliorate the humanitarian situation in Yemen, but will only intensify the very harms it seeks to redress, since it takes two sides to make peace.
FDD | US House’s one-sided approach to Yemen will only encourage violence, empower Iran
fdd.org · by Hussain Abdul-Hussain Research Fellow Ryan Brobst Research Analyst· October 26, 2021
October 26, 2021 | Al Arabiya
The House of Representatives narrowly approved two amendments on September 23 that if included in the final version of the annual defense authorization bill, would prohibit US logistical support, including maintenance or transferring spare parts, to Saudi aircraft engaged in the war in Yemen. Rather than decreasing violence in Yemen, this one-sided approach will engender more human suffering and encourage intransigence on the part of the Iran-backed Houthi rebels.
The Yemeni civil war started in late 2014, when the Houthis marched on the country’s capital, Sanaa, forcing the head of Yemen’s recognized government, President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, to flee. In March 2015, Saudi Arabia, with US approval, intervened at the head of a coalition including the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar, and Bahrain, with the aim of reinstating Hadi’s government. The war has helped produce one of the world’s gravest humanitarian crises, with roughly half the population requiring aid, according to the United Nations. Civilian casualties have numbered in the tens of thousands and have rightfully drawn intense criticism and action from the international community.
For Iran, the conflict represents an opportunity to pressure Saudi Arabia. Tehran has armed the Houthis since at least 2009 and significantly increased its support in 2015. Small arms, anti-tank missiles, anti-ship missiles, drones, and ballistic missiles flow from Iran to Yemen. The Houthis have employed longer-ranged weaponry to bombard Saudi cities as well as to attack commercial and military vessels and oil installations. The rebels have used Iranian-provided small arms to kill civilians and arm child soldiers. Tehran, meanwhile, hopes that perpetuating the conflict will allow Iran to create a Hezbollah-style proxy that can threaten Saudi Arabia and project power into the Red Sea. The threat of such a group forming on Saudi Arabia’s borders is why Riyadh has been unable to make peace.
Iranian support for the Houthis complicates efforts to end the conflict, as shown by events earlier this year. After Washington terminated support for Saudi offensive operations, suspended arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, delisted the Houthis as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, and appointed a special envoy for Yemen, Saudi Arabia proposed a peace deal on March 22 that allowed humanitarian supplies to reach Yemen by air and sea. Yet the Houthis responded by dismissing the Saudi proposal as “nothing new,” refusing to take part in negotiations, and firing a barrage of missiles at Saudi Arabia days later. To strengthen their bargaining position, the Houthis also escalated their attack on Marib, a strategically important city housing approximately 1 million refugees. In other words, the Houthis dismissed the peace offer out of hand despite Saudi concessions and intensified the conflict to signal their resolve.
Congressional efforts to double down on this one-sided approach will yield the same results, as they fail to recognize that the Houthis’ main objective is to rule all of Yemen. There is no reason for the Houthis to compromise if Washington condemns only Riyadh while Tehran continues to arm the rebels. Case in point, while the House was debating its two amendments, the Houthis continued their attempt to capture Marib, a battle that has already killed thousands.
Ending logistical support for the Saudis could also incentivize Riyadh to buy even more weapons from US adversaries such as Russia and China, which do not take into account humanitarian concerns when selling arms. Riyadh and Abu Dhabi have bought Chinese Wing Loong II drones, which they already use to conduct strikes in Yemen. Russia has sold fighter jets to Egypt and would likely seize the opportunity to expand sales to the Gulf. If Chinese and Russian sales displace US arms, there will be less oversight regarding civilian casualties, not to mention the benefits for those country’s respective defense industries.
Controversial as coalition strikes have sometimes been, it is myopic to demand accountability from only one side, given the Houthis’ intransigence and attacks on Saudi civilian targets, not to mention the gruesome torture in Houthi prisons. Severely damaging the US-Saudi relationship is a disproportionate and counter-productive response that will not end the war but will undermine US efforts to stop Iranian aggression across the region.
Finding a solution to the war in Yemen is imperative given the ongoing humanitarian catastrophe, for which Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates do deserve criticism. However, punishing Riyadh while ignoring Houthi misconduct will not end the conflict; it will only embolden the Houthis and decrease US leverage with the Saudis over the long-term. Iran’s weapons fuel the conflict, and as long as the Houthis receive external support, they will continue fighting. A more effective strategy would focus on disrupting the flow of Iranian arms to the Houthis as well as providing positive incentives for both sides to cease hostilities. Ending support for Saudi Arabia is intended to ameliorate the humanitarian situation in Yemen, but will only intensify the very harms it seeks to redress, since it takes two sides to make peace.
Hussain Abdul-Hussain is a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, where Ryan Brobst is a research analyst. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy. Follow Hussain on Twitter @hahussain.
fdd.org · by Hussain Abdul-Hussain Research Fellow · October 26, 2021
14. A long-delayed royal wedding reveals awkward truths about Japan
Excerpts:
Last, it has brought the family’s tenuous future to the fore. Mako’s departure leaves just 17 royals. In any case, Japan limits imperial succession to men; and only three potential male heirs remain: the emperor’s uncle, Prince Hitachi, who is 85 years old; his brother, Crown Prince Akishino, who is 55; and Mako’s younger brother, Hisahito, who is 15. Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party has blocked moves to allow women to take the throne.
The affair also highlights how Japan’s politics, especially on social issues, are hostage to a vocal, conservative minority. Recent polls show that most Japanese are in fact supportive of Mako’s and Kei’s partnership. Some 85% favour allowing female succession. A similar dynamic—where the public is far more liberal than legislators—exists around gay marriage and the question of whether to allow couples to keep separate surnames, which Japanese law does not currently allow.
Like a certain British royal couple, the new Japanese royal couple have decided to make their future outside the stodgy confines of their homeland. Mako and Kei will soon join Harry and Meghan in America.
A long-delayed royal wedding reveals awkward truths about Japan
Women are still badly treated, politics is out of sync with the people and the monarchy is dwindling
Oct 27th 2021
TOKYO
PRINCESS MAKO and Komuro Kei were undergraduates when they first met in Tokyo back in 2012. Mako was drawn to Kei’s "smile that is like the sun". Kei saw Mako as “the moon watching over me tranquilly”. The couple began dating and kept in touch while Mako studied abroad; in 2017, the young lovers got engaged.
The problems began when Japanese tabloids dug into Mr Komuro, and discovered that his mother had reportedly taken a loan of ¥4m ($35,000) from her ex-fiancé that she did not return. Commentators called Mr Komuro, a commoner, a gold-digger. They questioned whether his love for Mako was real. The couple delayed the marriage and Mr Komuro left Japan to study law in America, but the furore did not die down. Upon his return earlier this year, Japanese media seized upon his ponytail as further evidence of his unsuitability for their princess. (Hairstyles in Japan are important signs of social conformity; many schools require students to have straight, black hair.)
By most measures, the accusations are not scandal-worthy. But they do reflect broader anxieties around the changing nature of family, marriage, and identity in modern Japan. They have also taken a toll on the young couple. Mako has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. Their wedding on October 26th was a subdued affair, without the typical formal ceremony. A small street protest against it was held on the same day, with citizens waving angry placards.
In order to avoid further questions about family finances, Mako decided not to take a lump-sum payment that royals leaving the family are entitled to, which in her case would have amounted to around ¥150m. This was the first time in Japan's postwar history that such a payment has not been made. Mr Komuro lopped off his ponytail. The princess, while detailing the pain caused to her and her partner, said she was “very sorry for the people to whom we gave trouble”. Some might say that on the contrary, it was the people who tried to stop her marrying the man she loved who gave trouble to her, and to Mr Komuro.
The couple’s ordeal highlights several challenges facing the world’s oldest surviving hereditary monarchy. One is the imperial household’s struggle to adapt to a modern media environment. While the Imperial Household Agency, known as the Kunaicho, is masterful at managing family archives and fussing over traditional rituals, it struggles with public relations. It did little to correct misinformation that spread about the couple online. When Mr Komuro was allowed to make a rebuttal of his own earlier this year, it came in the form of a legalistic 28-page document with 36 dense footnotes—hardly the kind of thing that is likely to break through on social media.
Another is the harsh treatment of royal women, a magnified version of the sexism that many Japanese women face on a daily basis. Mako is not the first to be afflicted. Empress Masako, the wife of the current emperor, Naruhito, also suffered from stress-related illness amidst intense pressure to produce a male heir. Empress Michiko, her predecessor, lost her voice and stopped speaking for several months under immense psychological pressure.
Last, it has brought the family’s tenuous future to the fore. Mako’s departure leaves just 17 royals. In any case, Japan limits imperial succession to men; and only three potential male heirs remain: the emperor’s uncle, Prince Hitachi, who is 85 years old; his brother, Crown Prince Akishino, who is 55; and Mako’s younger brother, Hisahito, who is 15. Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party has blocked moves to allow women to take the throne.
The affair also highlights how Japan’s politics, especially on social issues, are hostage to a vocal, conservative minority. Recent polls show that most Japanese are in fact supportive of Mako’s and Kei’s partnership. Some 85% favour allowing female succession. A similar dynamic—where the public is far more liberal than legislators—exists around gay marriage and the question of whether to allow couples to keep separate surnames, which Japanese law does not currently allow.
Like a certain British royal couple, the new Japanese royal couple have decided to make their future outside the stodgy confines of their homeland. Mako and Kei will soon join Harry and Meghan in America.
The Economist today
15. Facebook's Language Gaps Weaken Screening of Hate, Terrorism
Facebook's Language Gaps Weaken Screening of Hate, Terrorism
DUBAI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES —
In Gaza and Syria, journalists and activists feel Facebook censors their speech, flagging inoffensive Arabic posts as terrorist content. In India and Myanmar, political groups use Facebook to incite violence. All of it frequently slips through the company's efforts to police its social media platforms because of a shortage of moderators who speak local languages and understand cultural contexts.
Internal company documents from the former Facebook product manager-turned-whistleblower Frances Haugen show the problems plaguing the company's content moderation are systemic, and that Facebook has understood the depth of these failings for years while doing little about it.
Its platforms have failed to develop artificial-intelligence solutions that can catch harmful content in different languages. As a result, terrorist content and hate speech proliferate in some of the world's most volatile regions. Elsewhere, the company's language gaps lead to overzealous policing of everyday expression.
This story, along with others published Monday, is based on former Facebook product manager-turned-whistleblower Frances Haugen's disclosures to the Securities and Exchange Commission, which were also provided to Congress in redacted form by her legal team. The redacted versions received by Congress were obtained by a consortium of news organizations, including The Associated Press.
In a statement to the AP, a Facebook spokesperson said that over the last two years the company has invested in recruiting more staff with local dialect and topic expertise to bolster its review capacity globally.
When it comes to Arabic content moderation, in particular, the company said, "We still have more work to do."
But the documents show the problems are not limited to Arabic. In Myanmar, where Facebook-based misinformation has been linked repeatedly to ethnic violence, the company's internal reports show it failed to stop the spread of hate speech targeting the minority Rohingya Muslim population.
In India, the documents show moderators never flagged anti-Muslim hate speech broadcast by Prime Minister Narendra Modi's far-right Hindu nationalist group because Facebook lacked moderators and automated filters with knowledge of Hindi and Bengali.
Arabic, Facebook's third-most common language, does pose particular challenges to the company's automated systems and human moderators, each of which struggles to understand spoken dialects unique to each country and region, their vocabularies salted with different historical influences and cultural contexts. The platform won a vast following across the region amid the 2011 Arab Spring, but its reputation as a forum for free expression in a region full of autocratic governments has since changed.
Scores of Palestinian journalists have had their accounts deleted. Archives of the Syrian civil war have disappeared. During the 11-day Gaza war last May, Facebook's Instagram app briefly banned the hashtag #AlAqsa, a reference to the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem's Old City, a flashpoint of the conflict. The company later apologized, saying it confused Islam's third-holiest site for a terrorist group.
Criticism, satire and even simple mentions of groups on the company's Dangerous Individuals and Organizations list — a docket modeled on the U.S. government equivalent — are grounds for a takedown.
"We were incorrectly enforcing counterterrorism content in Arabic," one document reads, noting the system "limits users from participating in political speech, impeding their right to freedom of expression."
The Facebook blacklist includes Gaza's ruling Hamas party, as well as Hezbollah, the militant group that holds seats in Lebanon's Parliament, along with many other groups representing wide swaths of people and territory across the Middle East.
The company's language gaps and biases have led to the widespread perception that its reviewers skew in favor of governments and against minority groups.
Israeli security agencies and watchdogs also monitor Facebook and bombard it with thousands of orders to take down Palestinian accounts and posts as they try to crack down on incitement.
"They flood our system, completely overpowering it," said Ashraf Zeitoon, Facebook's former head of policy for the Middle East and North Africa region, who left in 2017.
Syrian journalists and activists reporting on the country's opposition also have complained of censorship, with electronic armies supporting embattled President Bashar Assad aggressively flagging dissident posts for removal.
Meanwhile in Afghanistan, Facebook does not translate the site's hate speech and misinformation pages into Dari and Pashto, the country's two main languages. The site also doesn't have a bank of hate speech terms and slurs in Afghanistan, so it can't build automated filters that catch the worst violations.
In the Philippines, homeland of many domestic workers in the Middle East, Facebook documents show that engineers struggled to detect reports of abuse by employers because the company couldn't flag words in Tagalog, the major Philippine language.
In the Middle East, the company over-relies on artificial-intelligence filters that make mistakes, leading to "a lot of false positives and a media backlash," one document reads. Largely unskilled moderators, in over their heads and at times relying on Google Translate, tend to passively field takedown requests instead of screening proactively. Most are Moroccans and get lost in the translation of Arabic's 30-odd dialects.
The moderators flag inoffensive Arabic posts as terrorist content 77% of the time, one report said.
Although the documents from Haugen predate this year's Gaza war, episodes from that bloody conflict show how little has been done to address the problems flagged in Facebook's own internal reports.
Activists in Gaza and the West Bank lost their ability to livestream. Whole archives of the conflict vanished from newsfeeds, a primary portal of information. Influencers accustomed to tens of thousands of likes on their posts saw their outreach plummet when they posted about Palestinians.
"This has restrained me and prevented me from feeling free to publish what I want," said Soliman Hijjy, a Gaza-based journalist.
Palestinian advocates submitted hundreds of complaints to Facebook during the war, often leading the company to concede error. In the internal documents, Facebook reported it had erred in nearly half of all Arabic language takedown requests submitted for appeal.
Facebook's internal documents also stressed the need to enlist more Arab moderators from less-represented countries and restrict them to where they have appropriate dialect expertise.
"It is surely of the highest importance to put more resources to the task to improving Arabic systems," said the report.
Meanwhile, many across the Middle East worry the stakes of Facebook's failings are exceptionally high, with potential to widen long-standing inequality, chill civic activism and stoke violence in the region.
"We told Facebook: Do you want people to convey their experiences on social platforms, or do you want to shut them down?" said Husam Zomlot, the Palestinian envoy to the United Kingdom. "If you take away people's voices, the alternatives will be uglier."
16. Biden should end the confusion and say America will defend Taiwan
Excerpts:
It remains to be seen if this was a spontaneous intervention by Putin to lower U.S.-China tensions or was done in coordination with Beijing. In any event, while Biden will welcome the breather, he and his administration should not feel any obligation to divert from the course he said he is on: “I don’t want a cold war with China. I just want to make China understand that we are not going to step back. We are not going to change any of our views.”
Ceasing China’s multiple violations of Taiwan’s air defense identification zone — which should not have occurred — does not entitle Beijing to any reward on Taiwan, trade, maritime freedom, human rights, or other issues. Offering concessions, such as paying ransom, will simply encourage future pressure for more. Biden needs to proceed with the Taiwan Representative Office name change, and with inviting Taiwan to the Summit for Democracy, the RIMPAC 2022 naval exercise, and humanitarian assistance/disaster relief joint exercises.
Publicly declaring America’s intention to defend Taiwan will end the need to consult administration oracles, eliminate any lingering doubts or confusion in Beijing, and advance the cause of regional peace and stability.
Biden should end the confusion and say America will defend Taiwan
The Hill · by Joseph Bosco, opinion contributor · October 26, 2021
Joe Biden has just become the third president in 20 years to declare or strongly imply that the United States will defend Taiwan against an attack from China. He also became the third president to stand corrected by the foreign policy establishment within and outside government.
In April 2001, George W. Bush answered affirmatively when asked whether America would protect Taiwan. When pressed, he said we would do “Whatever it took.” In August 2020, Donald Trump was asked the same question in a Fox interview. He responded, “China knows what I’m gonna do. China knows.” His tone suggested firm action.
During a CNN Town Hall last week, Biden was asked about China’s test of a hypersonic missile. “What will you do to keep up with them militarily, and can you vow to protect Taiwan?” Biden replied, “Yes, and yes.” Host Anderson Cooper followed up, “So are you saying that the United States would come to Taiwan’s defense if China attacked?” Biden answered, “Yes. Yes, we have a commitment to do that.”
The three-yes response aroused immediate attention in Washington, Taipei and Beijing. Two weeks before, the president had reported on his 90-minute telephone conversation with Chinese leader Xi Jinping and made this curious statement: “I’ve spoken with Xi about Taiwan. We agree ... we’ll abide by the Taiwan agreement. We made it clear that I don’t think he should be doing anything other than abiding by the agreement.” He did not specify what U.S.-China “agreement” he meant. And in an ABC interview in August, Biden mentioned the U.S. pledge to protect NATO allies and added, “Same with Japan, same with South Korea, same with Taiwan.”
After each of these comments, questions were raised about whether Biden was simply confused or was indicating that America’s policy toward Taiwan and the strategic ambiguity surrounding it had changed. In each case, the stock official reply was that the U.S. position remains as is. The State Department said last week, “The president was not announcing any change in our policy and there is no change in our policy.”
But the pattern presents a perplexing question for Americans and interested foreign observers. Why have presidents of both parties periodically, and emphatically, made slips of the tongue indicating that the United States will go to war with China over Taiwan if necessary to save it?
The obvious follow-up question is this: Did Washington decide secretly at some point that it will defend Taiwan if China attacks — and even made that clear privately to Beijing, as Trump’s tone implied? If China has been sternly warned, why are U.S. officials averse to uttering the words and declaring the commitment publicly? There are at least three reasons, two of which relate to anticipated Taiwanese behavior, the third to China’s.
The most common speculation is that Washington does not want to give independence-minded Taiwanese any encouragement to push ahead and provoke Beijing into responding militarily. The core “red line” in China’s Anti-Secession Law is a declaration of independence by Taiwan. The last time Taiwan even considered such an action was in 2003, when then-President Chen Shui-bian proposed a referendum on the question. Irate Washington officials warned that if Taiwan precipitated conflict with China, it could not count on American support and would be on its own. Taiwan’s voters decided not to take the chance and declined even to formalize the referendum.
The second scenario Washington wishes to avoid would have Taiwan, knowing the U.S. would intervene, failing to take the necessary measures to bolster its own defenses. This concern about a “free-rider” mentality is not unique to Taiwan. Trump made it a point of contention with America’s more formal allies, such as Japan, South Korea and NATO. He was criticized for abrasiveness, but it got results, as Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg acknowledged. The fear is misplaced with President Tsai Ing-wen, who has committed Taiwan to its own strong self-defense posture, with or without American backup.
The third basis for finessing an explicit U.S. warning to China is to avoid throwing down a gauntlet to Beijing that China’s hardliners would consider a direct challenge to Chinese sovereignty and nationalist pride. As long as the deterrent message is conveyed and understood privately, it is argued, the public ambiguity saves China’s face and relative stability is preserved.
Adherents to that view can point to a recent speech by Xi after a week of sharply heightened tensions because 150 Chinese combat aircraft had entered Taiwan’s Air Defense Identification Zone. On Oct. 9, Xi used more conciliatory language about Taiwan, saying “peaceful unification” is China’s goal. He did not mention that the default position in China’s Anti-Secession Law provides for the use of “non-peaceful means” whenever China decides it has waited long enough for Taiwan to submit “peacefully.”
Interestingly, Vladimir Putin, whose Russian forces recently have been exercising with China’s, chimed in a few days later, saying he sees no reason that China and Taiwan cannot unify without the need to use force. He said Beijing could achieve its goal of “peaceful reunification” using its economic leverage over Taiwan: “China is a huge powerful economy, and in terms of purchasing parity, China is the economy No. 1 in the world, ahead of the United States now.”
It remains to be seen if this was a spontaneous intervention by Putin to lower U.S.-China tensions or was done in coordination with Beijing. In any event, while Biden will welcome the breather, he and his administration should not feel any obligation to divert from the course he said he is on: “I don’t want a cold war with China. I just want to make China understand that we are not going to step back. We are not going to change any of our views.”
Ceasing China’s multiple violations of Taiwan’s air defense identification zone — which should not have occurred — does not entitle Beijing to any reward on Taiwan, trade, maritime freedom, human rights, or other issues. Offering concessions, such as paying ransom, will simply encourage future pressure for more. Biden needs to proceed with the Taiwan Representative Office name change, and with inviting Taiwan to the Summit for Democracy, the RIMPAC 2022 naval exercise, and humanitarian assistance/disaster relief joint exercises.
Publicly declaring America’s intention to defend Taiwan will end the need to consult administration oracles, eliminate any lingering doubts or confusion in Beijing, and advance the cause of regional peace and stability.
Joseph Bosco served as China country director for the secretary of Defense from 2005 to 2006 and as Asia-Pacific director of humanitarian assistance and disaster relief from 2009 to 2010. He is a nonresident fellow at the Institute for Corean-American Studies and a member of the advisory board of the Global Taiwan Institute. Follow him on Twitter @BoscoJosephA.
The Hill · by Joseph Bosco, opinion contributor · October 26, 2021
17. Five points for anger, one for a ‘like’: How Facebook’s formula fostered rage and misinformation
Five points for anger, one for a ‘like’: How Facebook’s formula fostered rage and misinformation
Yesterday at 7:00 a.m. EDT|Updated yesterday at 1:04 p.m. EDT
Facebook engineers gave extra value to emoji reactions, including ‘angry,’ pushing more emotional and provocative content into users’ news feeds
Five years ago, Facebook gave its users five new ways to react to a post in their news feed beyond the iconic “like” thumbs-up: “love,” “haha,” “wow,” “sad” and “angry.”
Behind the scenes, Facebook programmed the algorithm that decides what people see in their news feeds to use the reaction emoji as signals to push more emotional and provocative content — including content likely to make them angry. Starting in 2017, Facebook’s ranking algorithm treated emoji reactions as five times more valuable than “likes,” internal documents reveal. The theory was simple: Posts that prompted lots of reaction emoji tended to keep users more engaged, and keeping users engaged was the key to Facebook’s business.
Facebook’s own researchers were quick to suspect a critical flaw. Favoring “controversial” posts — including those that make users angry — could open “the door to more spam/abuse/clickbait inadvertently,” a staffer, whose name was redacted, wrote in one of the internal documents. A colleague responded, “It’s possible.”
The warning proved prescient. The company’s data scientists confirmed in 2019 that posts that sparked angry reaction emoji were disproportionately likely to include misinformation, toxicity and low-quality news.
That means Facebook for three years systematically amped up some of the worst of its platform, making it more prominent in users’ feeds and spreading it to a much wider audience. The power of the algorithmic promotion undermined the efforts of Facebook’s content moderators and integrity teams, who were fighting an uphill battle against toxic and harmful content.
The internal debate over the “angry” emoji and the findings about its effects shed light on the highly subjective human judgments that underlie Facebook’s news feed algorithm — the byzantine machine-learning software that decides for billions of people what kinds of posts they’ll see each time they open the app. The deliberations were revealed in disclosures made to the Securities and Exchange Commission and provided to Congress in redacted form by the legal counsel of whistleblower Frances Haugen. The redacted versions were reviewed by a consortium of news organizations, including The Washington Post.
“Anger and hate is the easiest way to grow on Facebook,” Haugen told the British Parliament on Monday.
In several cases, the documents show Facebook employees on its “integrity” teams raising flags about the human costs of specific elements of the ranking system — warnings that executives sometimes heeded and other times seemingly brushed aside. Employees evaluated and debated the importance of anger in society: Anger is a “core human emotion,” one staffer wrote, while another pointed out that anger-generating posts might be essential to protest movements against corrupt regimes.
An algorithm such as Facebook’s, which relies on sophisticated, opaque machine-learning techniques to generate its engagement predictions, “can sound mysterious and menacing,” said Noah Giansiracusa, a math professor at Bentley University in Massachusetts and author of the book “How Algorithms Create and Prevent Fake News.” “But at the end of the day, there’s one number that gets predicted — one output. And a human is deciding what that number is.”
Facebook spokesperson Dani Lever said: “We continue to work to understand what content creates negative experiences, so we can reduce its distribution. This includes content that has a disproportionate amount of angry reactions, for example.”
The weight of the angry reaction is just one of the many levers that Facebook engineers manipulate to shape the flow of information and conversation on the world’s largest social network — one that has been shown to influence everything from users’ emotions to political campaigns to atrocities.
Facebook takes into account numerous factors — some of which are weighted to count a lot, some of which count a little and some of which count as negative — that add up to a single score that the news feed algorithm generates for each post in each user’s feed, each time they refresh it. That score is in turn used to sort the posts, deciding which ones appear at the top and which appear so far down that you’ll probably never see them. That single all-encompassing scoring system is used to categorize and sort vast swaths of human interaction in nearly every country of the world and in more than 100 languages.
Facebook doesn’t publish the values its algorithm puts on different kinds of engagement, let alone the more than 10,000 “signals” that it has said its software can take into account in predicting each post’s likelihood of producing those forms of engagement. It often cites a fear of giving people with bad intentions a playbook to explain why it keeps the inner workings under wraps.
Facebook’s levers rely on signals most users wouldn’t notice, like how many long comments a post generates, or whether a video is live or recorded, or whether comments were made in plain text or with cartoon avatars, the documents show. It even accounts for the computing load that each post requires and the strength of the user’s Internet signal. Depending on the lever, the effects of even a tiny tweak can ripple across the network, shaping whether the news sources in your feed are reputable or sketchy, political or not, whether you saw more of your real friends or more posts from groups Facebook wanted you to join, or if what you saw would be likely to anger, bore or inspire you.
Beyond the debate over the angry emoji, the documents show Facebook employees wrestling with tough questions about the company’s values, performing cleverly constructed analyses. When they found that the algorithm was exacerbating harms, they advocated for tweaks they thought might help. But those proposals were sometimes overruled.
When boosts, like those for emoji, collided with “deboosts” or “demotions” meant to limit potentially harmful content, all that complicated math added up to a problem in protecting users. The average post got a score of a few hundred, according to the documents. But in 2019, a Facebook data scientist discovered there was no limit to how high the ranking scores could go.
If Facebook’s algorithms thought a post was bad, Facebook could cut its score in half, pushing most of instances of the post way down in users’ feeds. But a few posts could get scores as high as a billion, according to the documents. Cutting an astronomical score in half to “demote” it would still leave it with a score high enough to appear at the top of the user’s feed.
“Scary thought: civic demotions not working,” one Facebook employee noted.
The culture of experimentation ran deep at Facebook, as engineers pulled levers and measured the results. An experiment in 2012 that was published in 2014 sought to manipulate the emotional valence of posts shown in users’ feeds to be more positive or more negative, and then observed whether their own posts changed to match those moods, raising ethical concerns, The Post reported at the time. Another, reported by Haugen to Congress this month, involved turning off safety measures for a subset of users as a comparison to see if the measures worked at all.
A previously unreported set of experiments involved boosting some people more frequently into the feeds of some of their randomly chosen friends — and then, once the experiment ended, examining whether the pair of friends continued communication, according to the documents. A researcher hypothesized that, in other words, Facebook could cause relationships to become closer.
In 2017, Facebook was trying to reverse a worrying decline in how much people were posting and talking to each other on the site, and the emoji reactions gave it five new levers to pull. Each emotional reaction was worth five likes at the time. The logic was that a reaction emoji signaled the post had made a greater emotional impression than a like; reacting with an emoji took an extra step beyond the single click or tap of the like button. But Facebook was coy with the public as to the importance it was placing on these reactions: The company told Mashable in 2017 that it was weighting them just “a little more than likes.”
The move was consistent with a pattern, highlighted in the documents, in which Facebook set the weights very high on new features it was trying to encourage users to adopt. By training the algorithm to optimize for those features, Facebook’s engineers all but ensured they’d be widely used and seen. Not only that, but anyone posting on Facebook with the hope of reaching a wide audience — including publishers and political actors — would inevitably catch on that certain types of posts were working better than others.
At one point, CEO Mark Zuckerberg even encouraged users in a public reply to a user’s comment to use the angry reaction to signal they disliked something, although that would make Facebook show similar content more often.
Replies to a post, which signaled a larger effort than the tap of a reaction button, were weighted even higher, up to 30 times as much as a like. Facebook had found that interaction from a user’s friends on the site would create a sort of virtuous cycle that pushed users to post even more. The Wall Street Journal reported last month on how Facebook’s greater emphasis on comments, replies to comments and replies to re-shares — part of a metric it called “meaningful social interactions” — further incentivized divisive political posts. (That article also mentioned the early weight placed on the angry emoji, though not the subsequent debates over its impact.)
The goal of that metric is to “improve people’s experience by prioritizing posts that inspire interactions, particularly conversations, between family and friends,” Lever said.
The first downgrade to the angry emoji weighting came in 2018, when Facebook cut it to four times the value of a like, keeping the same weight for all of the emotions.
But it was apparent that not all emotional reactions were the same. Anger was the least used of the six emoji reactions, at 429 million clicks per week, compared with 63 billion likes and 11 billion “love” reactions, according to a 2020 document. Facebook’s data scientists found that angry reactions were “much more frequent” on problematic posts: “civic low quality news, civic misinfo, civic toxicity, health misinfo, and health antivax content,” according to a document from 2019. Its research that year showed the angry reaction was “being weaponized” by political figures.
In April 2019, Facebook put in place a mechanism to “demote” content that was receiving disproportionately angry reactions, although the documents don’t make clear how or where that was used, or what its effects were.
By July, a proposal began to circulate to cut the value of several emoji reactions down to that of a like, or even count them for nothing. The “angry” reaction, along with “wow” and “haha,” occurred more frequently on “toxic” content and misinformation. In another proposal, from late 2019, “love” and “sad” — apparently called “sorry” internally — would be worth four likes, because they were safer, according to the documents.
The proposal depended on Facebook higher-ups being “comfortable with the principle of different values for different reaction types,” the documents said. This would have been an easy fix, the Facebook employee said, with “fewer policy concerns” than a technically challenging attempt to identify toxic comments.
But at the last minute, the proposal to expand those measures worldwide was nixed.
“The voice of caution won out by not trying to distinguish different reaction types and hence different emotions,” a staffer later wrote.
Later that year, as part of a debate over how to adjust the algorithm to stop amplifying content that might subvert democratic norms, the proposal to value angry emoji reactions less was again floated. Another staffer proposed removing the button altogether. But again, the weightings remained in place.
Finally, last year, the flood of evidence broke through the dam. Additional research had found that users consistently didn’t like it when their posts received “angry” reactions, whether from friends or random people, according to the documents. Facebook cut the weight of all the reactions to one and a half times that of a like.
That September, Facebook finally stopped using the angry reaction as a signal of what its users wanted and cut its weight to zero, taking it out of the equation, the documents show. Its weight is still zero, Facebook’s Lever said. At the same time, it boosted “love” and “sad” to be worth two likes.
It was part of a broader fine-tuning of signals. For example, single-character comments would no longer count. Until that change was made, a comment just saying “yes” or “.” — tactics often used to game the system and appear higher in the news feed — had counted as 15 times the value of a like.
“Like any optimization, there’s going to be some ways that it gets exploited or taken advantage of,” Lars Backstrom, a vice president of engineering at Facebook, said in an emailed statement. “That’s why we have an integrity team that is trying to track those down and figure out how to mitigate them as efficiently as possible.”
But time and again, Facebook made adjustments to weightings after they had caused harm. Facebook wanted to encourage users to stream live video, which it favored over photo and text posts, so its weight could go as high as 600 times. That had helped cause “ultra-rapid virality for several low quality viral videos,” a document said. Live videos on Facebook played a big role in political events, including both the racial justice protests last year after the killing of George Floyd and the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.
Immediately after the riot, Facebook frantically enacted its “Break the Glass” measures on safety efforts it had previously undone — including to cap the weight on live videos at only 60. Facebook didn’t respond to requests for comment about the weighting on live videos.
When Facebook finally set the weight on the angry reaction to zero, users began to get less misinformation, less “disturbing” content and less “graphic violence,” company data scientists found. As it turned out, after years of advocacy and pushback, there wasn’t a trade-off after all. According to one of the documents, users’ level of activity on Facebook was unaffected.
correction
An experiment that sought to manipulate the emotional valence of posts shown in users’ feeds to be more positive or more negative, and then observed whether their own posts changed to match those moods, took place in 2012, not 2014. It was published in 2014. This article has been corrected.
18. The Coming Democratic Revival
I hope so.
Excerpts:
Progress in the democratic resurgence is less likely to be sudden than gradual and more likely to be spotty than universal. A pendulum, after changing direction, takes a while to gain velocity. In his later years, Vaclav Havel counseled freedom’s friends against impatience. If democracy can be compared to a flower, he said, gardeners may use fertilizer and water to speed its growth but will only cause harm should they become anxious and yank at the stem from above.
The importance of patience, however, is no excuse for idleness or cynicism. Small-d democrats cannot compete successfully with the likes of China and Russia by mimicking their methods, for that would concede the match before it begins. Democracy has its faults, but so, too, does every variety of despotism. Democracy’s assets are superior, however, because they demand the best from everyone and are grounded in respect for human rights, individual freedom, and social responsibility. By contrast, dictators seek only obedience, and there is nothing inspiring about that.
After too many years of handwringing, the time is right for democratic forces to regain the initiative. Democracy is fragile, but it is also resilient. In every region, the generation coming of age is smart, outspoken, and fearless. Worldwide, people are demanding more, while authoritarian leaders are tiring and running out of answers. The Biden administration has before it an opportunity it must seize. Although tattered and torn, freedom’s flag is ready to rise.
The Coming Democratic Revival
America’s Opportunity to Lead the Fight Against Authoritarianism
For two centuries, American leaders have quarreled about how high to place support for democracy on the list of U.S. foreign policy priorities. The Biden administration’s recent tragedy-marred withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan reinforced the view of skeptics from across the domestic political spectrum that actively promoting democracy overseas is naive and less likely to advance the country’s core interests than to embroil it in no-win quagmires. They point as well to a steady decline in global freedom over the past 15 years as evidence that emphasizing democratic values is out of touch with prevailing trends and therefore a losing strategy, one that actually detracts from the country’s international standing. With the United States confronted by partisan divisions at home and fierce adversaries abroad, these critics assert that U.S. leaders can no longer afford to indulge in Lincolnesque fantasies about democracy as the last best hope on earth. They must instead shift their focus inward and accept the world as it is.
This thesis, although in keeping with the emotions of the hour, is shortsighted and wrong. It would be a grave error for the United States to waver in its commitment to democracy. Historically, the republic’s claim on the global imagination has been inseparable from its identity—however imperfectly embodied—as a champion of human freedom, which remains a universal aspiration. The more disturbing events of the twenty-first century, for all their complications, have dented, but not destroyed, what remains a unique foreign policy asset. Nothing would be more foolish than to toss away this comparative advantage or to flee the global stage entirely due to past disappointments and self-doubt.
The United States still has immense resources it can deploy for purposes that serve both its immediate needs and its enduring ideals. Should the country conclude otherwise, however, and decide to absent itself from the democratic struggle, it would disappoint its friends, aid its enemies, magnify future risks to its citizens, impede human progress, and compromise its ability to lead on any issue. What is more, American leaders would be sounding the call for retreat at precisely the moment an opportunity has arisen to spark a democratic resurgence. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, the momentum is not with the enemies of democracy. It’s true that in recent years, some authoritarians have grown stronger. But in many cases, they are now failing to deliver, including in countries where people increasingly expect accountable leadership even in the absence of democratic rule. This is a key point that few observers have yet grasped. Democracy is not a dying cause; in fact, it is poised for a comeback.
Democracy Strikes Back
According to Freedom House, authoritarian leaders took advantage of international indifference amid the COVID-19 pandemic last year to crush opponents and shrink the space available for democratic activism. As a result, “countries experiencing deterioration outnumbered those with improvements by the largest margin recorded since the negative trend began in 2006. The long democratic recession is deepening.”
There is, however, a silver lining in this cloud: it is easier to move upward from a valley than from a peak. Measurements of democracy’s slump typically start with the period following the breakup of the Soviet Union, when newly free democratic governments emerged in almost every region. Many states whose democracies are now troubled were under authoritarian rule until about 30 years ago. Today, the world takes note when authorities in Tanzania arrest an opposition leader, leaders in Sri Lanka consolidate their power, the president of Brazil threatens to cancel elections, or the prime minister of Hungary rules by decree. Yet there was a time in recent memory when those countries were not democracies at all. Despite their current distress, the forces of freedom have an enlarged platform from which to mount a revival.
Democracy is not a dying cause; in fact, it is poised for a comeback.
Observers should also note that democracy’s decline coincided with the rise of international terrorism, the 2008 global financial meltdown, the Syrian civil war, a global refugee crisis, and a worldwide public health catastrophe. These events stoked a host of popular frustrations and fears, with most blame settling on elected leaders. The next 20 years can hardly be less conducive to liberty’s growth than the last.
This is the case in part because the world’s two most prominent authoritarian states, China and Russia, have squandered their best chance to offer an appealing alternative to liberal democracy. With the United States missing in action during President Donald Trump’s four years in office, and Europe preoccupied with Brexit and other intramural disputes, the governments in Beijing and Moscow had their opportunity to establish themselves as global models. They blew it. According to a 2021 survey of people in 17 developed countries conducted by the Pew Research Center, unflattering views of China are at a historic high, and a median of 74 percent of those polled reported that they had no confidence in Russian President Vladimir Putin to do the right thing in world affairs. The results are easily explained. The Chinese government’s transactional approach, lack of transparency, and tendency to bully have left it with more contracts than friends. The regime in the Kremlin, meanwhile, is widely thought to be corrupt, untrustworthy, and a one-man show rapidly approaching its final curtain. Russia, a country that according to the World Health Organization ranked 97th in average life expectancy in 2019, does not have much to brag about.
Further, the outcome of the 2020 U.S. presidential election was a blow to autocrats everywhere. Trump’s belly flop demolished the myth he helped create that relentless egotism is a political winner. Many of Trump’s most outspoken international admirers have also suffered losses or are under siege. These include Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, Viktor Orban in Hungary, and France’s Marine Le Pen. The Philippines is one of the few countries where a charismatic strongman still has an appreciative audience. But the 76-year-old Rodrigo Duterte’s term as president ends next May.
Pushback
For all these reasons, a democratic comeback is possible. But should one begin, it will meet resistance. Although some authoritarians are self-obsessed amateurs, many are skilled at shaping public perceptions and checkmating potential opponents. Their ranks are split between those who insist that they are democrats—albeit “illiberal” ones—and those who openly scoff at even the most basic democratic norms. All of them assert that in a dangerous and amoral world, leaders must be able to act decisively to impose order, repel threats, and foster national greatness. In recent years, authoritarians have provided cover for one another through their influence in multilateral bodies and by insisting that governments not be criticized by outsiders for doing whatever they wish within their countries’ borders. National sovereignty, they assert, is a sufficient defense against any allegation.
Dictators also have the advantage of intimidation. Few are above using force to harass political rivals and disrupt protests. Their goal in so doing is less to change minds than to convince women and men yearning for freedom to surrender that aspiration. Sometimes, this works.
But people should not abandon hope. There was a period late in the Cold War when it was fashionable to conclude that Soviet-style governments would last forever because of their willingness to quash dissent before it could take hold. That proposition was used to justify U.S. support for anticommunist dictators on the grounds that if only despots could survive in countries lacking a democratic tradition, Washington should want them to be pro-Western despots. Then the Iron Curtain lifted, and the theory of totalitarian permanence collapsed.
Could something similar happen again? That depends on what metaphor one prefers. If history moves like a locomotive, in a single direction, today’s trends will become tomorrow’s reality. But if the human desire for change causes history’s course to swing back and forth like a pendulum, a reversal can be expected.
Some vulnerable heavy-handed governments are already facing intensifying pressure from below.
Because people today are more connected and demanding than ever before, governing is harder than it has ever been. Compared to in the past, younger generations have easier access to education, more awareness of one another, less respect for traditional hierarchies, and an ingrained belief in their own autonomy. People of all ages observe what others have—and want more. Technology has created in many a thirst for speed and a dearth of patience. Citizens increasingly question what leaders say and are drawn to voices that reject present conditions and promise something better.
These factors have fueled the rise of demagogues, but they can also undermine the staying power of authoritarian regimes old enough to embody the status quo. There is a limit to how long an autocrat can sustain popularity simply by comparing himself to a despised predecessor. In Russia, Putin is rarely contrasted anymore with the hapless Boris Yeltsin; in Venezuela, few remember the ineffectual civilians who governed before Hugo Chávez; Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega can hardly justify his broken promises by pointing to Anastasio Somoza, who was deposed in 1979. Hungary’s Orban has ruled for more than a decade, and Turkey’s Erdogan for nearly two, so neither can easily escape responsibility for the beleaguered condition of his country.
Some of the more vulnerable heavy-handed governments are already facing intensifying pressure from below. In Belarus, a major protest movement has emerged because a growing number of citizens consider President Alexander Lukashenko to be a Russian puppet and want him to leave. In Cuba, where for the first time since 1959 neither of the Castro brothers holds power, the street demonstrations last July were the largest in decades. Although it is true that repression may work for a time, that strategy has to fail only once. Should a well-known authoritarian leader be forced out, there is a good chance that others will be too, as happened during the last democratic wave, when the triumph of Poland’s Solidarity movement led rapidly to democratic transitions throughout central Europe and the ouster of a strongman in Manila was followed by similar departures in Chile, South Africa, Zaire, and Indonesia. In a world where most people are able to peer beyond national borders, a trend of any kind can gather strength quickly.
Protesting in Minsk, Belarus, October 2020
Stringer / Reuters
It helps as well that the techniques the current generation of phony democrats rely on may already be suffering from overuse. In their lexicon, “constitutional reform” is code for evading term limits, diminishing the clout of parliaments, and seizing control of the courts. They issue emergency decrees not to safeguard the public but to criminalize opposition and silence the press. They employ patriotic appeals to equate pro-democracy agitation with foreign subversion. They rig elections to hide the ugly visage of despotism beneath a veneer of respectability. Although still harmful, these efforts no longer fool anyone—which makes them easier to discredit and oppose.
Even more important, despite the battering that democracy has endured, most people want to strengthen, not discard, their democratic systems. According to the German scholar Christian Welzel, support for democracy has increased since the mid-1990s in more countries than it has declined in, and it remains steady overall at roughly 75 percent. Similarly, the research institution Afrobarometer reports that those surveyed this year in 34 African countries still overwhelmingly prefer democracy when compared to single-party or one-man rule. This is true even for the minority of Africans who see China as a better model for their countries than the United States. Arab attitudes are less clear, but democracy has recently made modest gains in some tough neighborhoods—Algeria, Iraq, and Sudan—while somehow surviving almost nonstop chaos in Lebanon.
Today, more talented women and men are striving in more places on behalf of democratic principles than ever before. The National Democratic Institute, a nongovernmental U.S. organization that supports democratic institutions overseas, is working with around 28,000 local partners in more than 70 countries on five continents. Despite democracy’s struggles, popular participation in shaping public agendas is up, not down. Strides toward gender equality have contributed to this rising level of commitment, as has the fact that a record percentage of today’s young adults grew up in relative freedom. They consider self-expression a right to be exercised regularly and regardless of obstacles. Far from giving up on democracy, they are generating a steady stream of proposals for its improvement, including more rigorous term limits, reforms of campaign financing, equal access for candidates to the media, ranked-choice voting, citizen assemblies, referendums, shorter campaigns, and steps to make it simpler or more complicated to establish new political parties. Not all such ideas are likely to prove both practical and beneficial, but the energy they attract is evidence of a hunger that no dictator can satisfy.
America’s Chance
Another reason to be optimistic is that U.S. President Joe Biden is better positioned than any American president in 20 years to argue on behalf of democracy. George W. Bush saw himself as a champion of freedom, but he wrapped that mission so thoroughly around his invasion of Iraq that denigrators equated his stance with violent American overreach. Wary of the association, Barack Obama was less outspoken than he might have been in advocating democratic ideals. Trump, of course, had the most antidemocratic instincts of any president. Having replaced him, Biden faces an international pro-freedom constituency that has learned to be skeptical about the steadiness of U.S. leadership but is also anxious for Washington to regain its voice on matters of liberty and human rights.
In his inaugural address, Biden characterized his election as a victory not of a candidate or a cause but of democracy itself. He has since stressed the benefits of political freedom; condemned specific acts of repression in such places as Cuba, Ethiopia, Hong Kong, and Myanmar; and invited democratic leaders to an important and timely summit. The challenge he must address next is how to build on this start.
One good way to begin would be to draw a clear line separating past U.S. military interventions from U.S. support for democracy. The distinction is important because many observers at home and abroad still confuse the two. The U.S. mission in Afghanistan, launched toward the end of 2001, was prompted by the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The invasion of Iraq 16 months later was triggered by faulty intelligence concerning that country’s weapons programs. Both were military operations. In neither instance was the buttressing of democracy a primary motivating factor, and neither experience should discourage the United States from pursuing future civilian initiatives on democracy’s behalf.
There are, after all, numerous examples of successful nonmilitary American engagement in support of freedom. These include the Marshall Plan, the Point Four Program, Radio Free Europe, the Alliance for Progress, the Peace Corps, and overseas technical assistance on topics as varied as public health and digital access. Projects such as these create, at modest expense, a reservoir of respect that can serve the United States well in times of crisis. Washington should invest far more in them than it does, because that is how democracy is best promoted—with an outstretched hand, not a pointed gun.
Biden is better positioned than any American president in 20 years to argue on behalf of democracy.
The Biden administration should also defend the American example while acknowledging that U.S. democracy, although the world’s oldest, remains a work in progress. Numerous commentators point to the bitterness surrounding recent U.S. elections to suggest that the country’s democracy is unraveling and therefore no longer a suitable model for others. Such claims are exaggerated. Despite widespread fears and false allegations, the 2020 balloting was free of both significant locally engineered fraud and disruptions traceable to foreign disinformation campaigns. The high voter turnout was a sign of robust democratic health, as were the actions of courts and state officials to uphold the results. As for the storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, less than one-fourth of Trump voters approved of the tactics that the protesters employed, and a recent effort to organize a follow-up demonstration fizzled. The debates currently underway regarding election standards and early and mail-in voting mostly involve issues that were not even under consideration a decade or two ago. The important question now is not whether the country has made progress toward more liberal electoral norms but whether those gains can be preserved and enhanced. A positive answer—delivered via legislative debate and, if necessary, the judicial branch—will only strengthen the country’s democratic system. U.S. leaders should speak about American democracy with humility, but dictators overseas who claim that the United States’ long experiment with freedom is nearing its end will be proved wrong.
Even while working to set the record straight about U.S. democracy, Biden should launch a multipart strategy aimed at sparking a renewal of faith overseas in the power of collaboration among free governments, workers, enlightened corporations, and civil society. His core message, exemplified by his planned Summit for Democracy, should be that democratic leaders must support one another and use their combined influence to bolster civil discourse, due process, fair elections, and the essential freedoms of speech, worship, and the press.
For this strategy to attract followers, the United States must show the way by integrating its commitment to democracy into all aspects of its foreign policy. In national security decision-making, when other interests appear to conflict, the benefit of the doubt should be given whenever possible to the backers of political openness and the rule of law. In bilateral diplomacy, considerations of human rights should be at the top of the agenda, instead of an afterthought. The most courageous democratic leaders, whether of countries large or small, should be acknowledged, supported, and invited to the White House. Through the UN and regional bodies, the United States should strive to hold countries accountable to the principles proclaimed in multilateral declarations and charters.
Biden and his team should also stress the economic advantages of democracy. In the late 1990s, when I was serving as U.S. secretary of state, I assured people everywhere that democracy would enable them not only to vote without fear but also to better provide for their families. What I said was reinforced by what audiences saw. Aside from the oil-rich Arab states, most prosperous nations were free. The reason was plain: open societies were more likely to generate good jobs by encouraging new ideas and innovative thinking. In the time since, China’s domestic rise and subsequent increase in foreign commercial engagement have, to some minds, undercut this thesis. Consider, however, that even today, the per person income in the authoritarian People’s Republic is around one-third of that in democratic Taiwan.
Since ancient times, authoritarian leaders have masqueraded as modernizers, building great works that invariably double as advertisements for themselves. Current examples of such leaders include Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Although there is obvious merit in looking forward, there are flaws in the notion that a single all-powerful leader is best for driving progress. In Egypt, Sisi has allowed the military to sink its teeth into virtually every part of the economy, thereby inhibiting opportunities for the private sector. Saudi Arabia remains overly dependent on oil revenue and continues to spend vast sums on vanity projects. Meanwhile, in Turkey, the “economic miracle” touted by Erdogan has given way to rising poverty, joblessness, currency devaluation, and debt. The troubles intensified after 2016, when Erdogan assumed emergency powers.
GETTING THE MESSAGE RIGHT
U.S. officials must also deal aggressively with problems that can chip away at support for democracy. For instance, few factors do more damage to the appeal of free institutions than the perception that leaders who claim to be democratic are in fact ripping off their countries. The message from Washington must be that open government is the remedy for, not the breeding ground of, crooked, self-serving regimes. The point is harder to establish than it should be because many demagogues confuse the issue by arguing that only a single powerful leader can clean house—or “drain the swamp”—to get rid of corrupt politicians and bureaucrats. Consider that one of Putin’s favorite tactics is to accuse opponents of corruption, arrest them in front of government cameras, and then prosecute them in puppet courts. The most compelling answer to this brand of deception is the truth. Real democrats, such as Presidents Zuzana Caputova of Slovakia and Maia Sandu of Moldova, are showing that free institutions can be used to purge graft through honest investigations, judicial reform, and incentives to reduce bribery at every level. The international press has often done a good job of exposing corrupt practices, and so democratic leaders should do all they can to ensure that the rights of journalists are fortified and their freedoms preserved. Meanwhile, the United States should mobilize a global effort to seize the overseas assets of rulers who have been pillaging their countries and return them to those countries. By serving as agents of justice, democracy’s caretakers can thwart greedy foes and win lasting friends.
The Biden administration must act, too, on its understanding that democracy’s future is linked to how well societies handle the promise and perils of cyber-capabilities and emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence. That, in turn, demands effective solutions to an array of puzzles: how to establish a consensus on balancing freedom of expression with protection of the public good; how to counter the ability of authoritarian governments to spread lies, block communications, and criminalize even private indications of dissent; how to derail the use of ransomware; how best to regulate Big Tech platforms to ensure competition and honor individual privacy; and how to shield democracies from the security threat posed by cyberwar.
Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg testifying on Capitol Hill, October 2019
Erin Scott / Reuters
The last time a new technology raised such profound questions was at the dawn of the nuclear age. Back then, a small cadre of diplomats, scientists, and military strategists devised ways to prevent the worst outcomes; the solutions were necessarily top down. The dilemma created by digital threats cannot be resolved so narrowly. Any successful approach must incorporate not only better cyberdefenses but also more transparency for consumers, responsibility from high-tech companies, scrutiny from legislatures, input from academia, and research into the design of enforceable regulatory regimes. Over time, the answers must take into account the interests of all stakeholders (not just governments), including the millions of entrepreneurs and billions of consumers who live in nondemocratic states and who use, or would like to use, online technology to learn, shop, grow their businesses, and vent their opinions. As the world develops new rules for the digital road, it is essential that the United States join with allies to prevent authoritarian states from dictating those norms.
Biden can accomplish much by rallying friends of freedom from across the globe, highlighting the tangible and moral benefits of open government, and pushing for fairness in the regulation of new technologies. Past efforts to do so, however, have stumbled when democracy’s advocates have done a poor job of framing the issue. If the alternatives presented are freedom or repression, freedom clearly wins. The odds become less favorable, however, when the choice advertised is between “the common people” and “arrogant elites.” As has been shown in recent years, popular demagogues feed eagerly on the condescension that many in academia, the arts, and the press exhibit toward the less well educated and others they deem culturally backward. The notion that despots care most about the welfare of the average family is nonsense, and they should not be allowed to create that impression. For democracy to prosper, its champions must do a better job of defending and justifying their beliefs in an inclusive manner.
THE TIME IS NOW
Progress in the democratic resurgence is less likely to be sudden than gradual and more likely to be spotty than universal. A pendulum, after changing direction, takes a while to gain velocity. In his later years, Vaclav Havel counseled freedom’s friends against impatience. If democracy can be compared to a flower, he said, gardeners may use fertilizer and water to speed its growth but will only cause harm should they become anxious and yank at the stem from above.
The importance of patience, however, is no excuse for idleness or cynicism. Small-d democrats cannot compete successfully with the likes of China and Russia by mimicking their methods, for that would concede the match before it begins. Democracy has its faults, but so, too, does every variety of despotism. Democracy’s assets are superior, however, because they demand the best from everyone and are grounded in respect for human rights, individual freedom, and social responsibility. By contrast, dictators seek only obedience, and there is nothing inspiring about that.
After too many years of handwringing, the time is right for democratic forces to regain the initiative. Democracy is fragile, but it is also resilient. In every region, the generation coming of age is smart, outspoken, and fearless. Worldwide, people are demanding more, while authoritarian leaders are tiring and running out of answers. The Biden administration has before it an opportunity it must seize. Although tattered and torn, freedom’s flag is ready to rise.
V/R
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Phone: 202-573-8647
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
