Quotes of the Day:
"Every man should be born again on the first day of January. Start with a fresh page."
- Henry Ward Beecher
“It would seem as if the rulers of our time sought only to use men in order to make things great; I wish that they would try a little more to make great men; that they would set less value on the work and more upon the workman; that they would never forget that a nation cannot long remain strong when every man belonging to it is individually weak; and that no form or combination of social polity has yet been devised to make an energetic people out of a community of pusillanimous and enfeebled citizens.”
- Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America Volume 2
'Politics, it seems to me, for years, or all too long, has been concerned with right or left instead of right or wrong.'
- Richard Armour
1. Opinion | China’s Ban on ‘Sissy Men’ Is Bound to Backfire
2. Insiders reveal the shameful truth about Afghanistan: the war wasn't 'doomed', just bungled
3. Russia-Ukraine Conflict Lies in the Bones of an 11th-Century Prince
4. How a Wartime Newspaper Article Changed Australia Forever
5. Taiwan and Ukraine are underdogs, but is it wise to fight China and Russia?
6. A dozen national security “Green Swans” for 2022!
7. Using and abusing Djibouti: How the US transformed a tiny African state into a hub of imperial aggression
8. China implements new border law, India concerned
9. China unveils plan to 'take over' Latin America
10. China to replace US as world's leading empire, says hedge fund star
11. Cyber attack on UK's Defence Academy had 'significant' impact, officer in charge at the time reveals
12. Pirates: The US Military's Big Plan to Beat China In a War?
13. Why Moscow Sees Biden As the Key to Avoiding War in Ukraine
14. Bashar Assad’s Dangerous Game
15. Conspiracy theories paint fraudulent reality of Jan. 6 riot
16. Majority of Americans think Jan. 6 attack threatened democracy: POLL
17. Republicans and Democrats divided over Jan. 6 insurrection and Trump’s culpability, Post-UMD poll finds
18. Militaries are among the world’s biggest emitters. This general wants them to go green.
1. Opinion | China’s Ban on ‘Sissy Men’ Is Bound to Backfire
As I sit here conducting my daily news and information arbitrage and listening to Fareed Zakaira's special report on China's iron fist, I thought this article would be an appropriate one to send out.
Opinion | China’s Ban on ‘Sissy Men’ Is Bound to Backfire
Guest Essay
China’s Ban on ‘Sissy Men’ Is Bound to Backfire
Dec. 31, 2021
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Ms. Gao is a writer based in Beijing, focusing on Chinese education, culture and society.
The Chinese government, you see, has been fighting what state news outlets have called a “masculinity crisis” for the past few years, with one top official warning that “effeminate” men in popular culture were corrupting “a generation.” The Chinese Communist Party mouthpiece decreed that young men need to have “toughness and strength” and censors have blurred out male celebrities’ earrings in television and online appearances.
That campaign has now taken a harsher turn. In recent months, the government has dialed things up into a full-blown culture war against unorthodox masculine expression, policing it in earnest.
Stars like Cai Xukun, one of China’s most famous singers, went from sporting makeup and blond bangs on social media to biceps and baggy jeans on a magazine cover just two weeks after the September decree.
The stated goal of this campaign is to ensure that China stays on its path toward so-called “national rejuvenation” — President Xi Jinping’s plan for the country to regain its standing as a great power. The pressure to deliver on that plan is mounting ahead of the next Communist Party congress, likely to be held in 2022.
The party appears to believe that national rejuvenation is only possible if young men work diligently toward its orders and priorities: Mr. Xi has said “a nation is strong if its youth are strong.” By that (flawed) logic, femininity is a sign of weakness that, if unchecked, bodes ill for the nation’s future.
So while the prevalence of “effeminate” males was previously a source of general concern, it is now seen as a roadblock for Mr. Xi to clear. But the campaign, including the newly restrictive and more heavy-handed phase of recent months, is completely misguided and self-defeating. As the restrictions proliferate, they become impossible to enforce without undermining other governance priorities, like economic growth, that are vital components of national rejuvenation. Never mind that the objective of the campaign itself is ludicrous.
The crusade against what the party sees as unorthodox masculinity might be a way for the party to distract from the fact that it is failing to deliver for its people and is unable to address serious economic and social issues — a lack of upward mobility, career opportunities and affordable urban housing in some of the main cities.
But in trying to regulate gender expression as it does governance goals like G.D.P. figures, the party is pushing its control too far. And the masculinity mandates will almost certainly backfire.
The biggest target of this campaign is “little fresh meat,” a term of endearment for massively popular makeup-wearing male entertainers. In a society where discussing politics is largely off limits and traditional media is tightly controlled, popular culture is the rare realm where individualism can thrive. And so the “little fresh meat” phenomenon is about more than fashion and aesthetics; it offers an outlet for Chinese men and women at a time of economic uncertainty and a shifting power dynamic between sexes.
The cultural power of “little fresh meat” stars is indisputable. What the party appears to ignore, though, in blaming them for allegedly corrupting young men is that their fan base is predominantly female and in wealthy metropolises like Beijing and Shanghai.
These women’s embrace of a more fluid form of masculinity is not a phenomenon the party should dismiss. Well-educated and financially independent, these women are bucking gender norms themselves by turning away from matrimony and motherhood and are proving to be resistant to the party’s push to boost marriages and births to offset the effects of an aging population.
To this end, the party would do well to heed these women’s preferences. As some fans put it, the seemingly gentle manner and mild temper of “little fresh meat” offer a welcome contrast to the chauvinistic attitude they can encounter in Chinese men.
“Having men be tender and thoughtful like women improves them,” one woman going by the name Jiangzi wrote in an online essay explaining her fondness for “little fresh meat.” “In dating and marriage,” she asked, “who likes to be scolded?”
Men in China face a number of social challenges too. The difficulties of finding employment and affording urban living have tended to weigh more heavily on men, who shoulder society’s expectations to earn and provide. Chinese men also vastly outnumber women in the marriage marketplace, thanks to decades of family planning policies. When taken with the constraints of living in a society with rigid ideas regarding masculinity, pop culture is a form of escape — and a place where different identities can be explored.
Shaming and blocking these individuals’ preferred means of expression is not a way to motivate them toward “valiant struggle” in the name of national rejuvenation. Rather, it’s a recipe for diving deeper into despair.
The government’s idea of the ideal male reads like an outdated description of 1950s gender norms: Muscular, reliable, career-oriented providers. The “masculine spirit” requires physical and mental fitness as well as “strong will power,” the Ministry of Education said earlier this year. An editorial published by a party mouthpiece said it is alive in those who “set high goals in life, dare to take on responsibilities, tackle difficulties head-on, and never give up easily.”
Indeed, what the party seeks sounds less like Rambo than assiduous scientists and industrious engineers. When viewed alongside other recently-introduced and draconian cultural policies, it’s clear that what the party wants is productive socialist workers devoted single-mindedly to its own development priorities — not distracted by what the party considers cultural deviance or excess.
So why then is the party demanding those attributes of only half the population? In its quest for economic supremacy, surely the party should not exclude the contributions of women, whom Mao Zedong once dubbed “half the sky.” And it can’t afford to: China’s work force is dwindling at an alarming rate.
The party must be aware of the glaring contradictions between its claims and its practice. Despite insisting that masculinity has to do with inner qualities in editorials and policy documents, it continues to target outer appearances in patrolling its public expression.
That could very well be because while hollow propaganda may travel far and wide, authoritarian tools have limits. They can draw boundaries within people’s lives but not dictate what grows within. And so the party is tethering itself to sensational labels, though even those can only go so far.
As the party’s draconian rules begin to cancel each other out, they also take their toll on young people, choking off the very vitality that is the true basis of national rejuvenation.
Helen Gao (@yuxin_gao) is a writer based in Beijing and a native of the city. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Foreign Policy, and The Atlantic.
2. Insiders reveal the shameful truth about Afghanistan: the war wasn't 'doomed', just bungled (book review)
This book should generate some real discussion.
But this essay is worthy reading (by "tweedy armchair generals") for this conclusion:
This book is a well-written and timely inquest into the West’s Afghanistan fiasco, and while it may be of greatest interest to policy wonks, it is equally ideal for those who know little of Afghanistan. On which note, those tweedy armchair generals may also wish to stick it up their proverbial pipe and smoke it.
Insiders reveal the shameful truth about Afghanistan: the war wasn't 'doomed', just bungled
The Ledger by David Kilcullen and Greg Mills, two of the coalition's most experienced advisors, claims the task 'was absolutely achievable'
Britain’s armchair generals may have mixed feelings on reading The Ledger, David Kilcullen and Greg Mills’s new book on the West’s botched mission in Afghanistan. On the one hand, it’s probably the best insider account yet on why the mission failed, written by two of the coalition’s most experienced advisers. On the other, the authors are no fans of the “tweed-wearing, pipe-smoking” commentariat who opined witheringly as Kabul fell to the Taliban last August.
Few of the pundits who spouted lofty clichés about Afghanistan being the “graveyard of empires” had ever spent much time there, they say. For if they had, they would never describe the coalition mission as being doomed from the outset. Instead, the authors argue, the truth is far worse: the task in Afghanistan “was absolutely achievable… but we screwed up the effort from start to finish”.
This is a bold claim, but the authors have the credentials to make it. Kilcullen, a former Australian infantryman, is regarded as one of the world’s leading counter-insurgency experts, having advised US General David Petraeus in Iraq. Mills, a South African academic, is a governance expert who has served four terms advising the coalition mission in Kabul.
Both have the ear of world leaders – not that Joe Biden will appreciate their comments. The US pull-out was, they say, “one of the most egregiously incompetent self-inflicted debacles in modern military history”, carried out in the “ridiculously lame” hope that the Taliban might have softened its ways. Arguably the most damning quote, though, comes from Biden himself – who, the authors acidly point out, warned in 2002 that history would judge America if it did not “stay the course” in Afghanistan.
True, staying the course could have meant being there until at least 2040, according to the authors. They argue that in any broken, war-ravaged state, building institutions can easily take 20 years, with another 20 again to create “the necessary culture and respect” for the rule of law. Yet while that might seem like an eternity – especially in terms of US election cycles – it would have been no different to America’s long-running troop commitments in Germany or Korea.
The problem, though, wasn’t just lack of will. Nation-building in Afghanistan was always going to be tough. Divided by ethnicities, religion and mountains, it had little modern history of central government, beyond the disastrous Soviet-backed Communist regime in the 1980s. Any attempt, therefore, to build up Kabul’s writ was always going to meet resistance, be it from tribal chiefs, warlords, or the Taliban – who, the authors point out, were more popular than many Westerners realise. The rough and ready justice offered by the Taliban’s rural courts, for example, was far cheaper and less corrupt than anything offered by Kabul. And anyone with a Taliban court judgment in their favour – be it over a marriage, inheritance, or grazing rights – had a vested interest in the group remaining powerful.
Instead, the vast influx of Western development cash often merely fuelled corruption, administered by a sprawling, civil-military NGO-cracy with little more business nous than Kabul’s Communist-era rulers. An industrial park in Kandahar was built with no electricity supply, while a British tax-payer-funded airport in Helmand Province handled only one flight every two days. A focus on throwing cash at the more restive south also meant that northern areas felt neglected, allowing the Taliban to gain a foothold there shortly before Kabul’s fall.
Had the new Afghan National Army enjoyed continued coalition support, it might just have prevailed: its best troops were not short on fighting spirit. Alas, that very Afghan warrior culture was also their undoing. Too many of the army’s best fighters were recruited into its elite Special Operations Forces, where they fought valiantly but suffered horrendous casualty rates. The authors argue that it would have been wiser to spread them out more widely among the regular units – who might then have fared better against the Taliban in those final years.
This book is a well-written and timely inquest into the West’s Afghanistan fiasco, and while it may be of greatest interest to policy wonks, it is equally ideal for those who know little of Afghanistan. On which note, those tweedy armchair generals may also wish to stick it up their proverbial pipe and smoke it.
The Ledger: Accounting for Failure in Afghanistan by David Kilcullen and Greg Mills is published by Hurst at £14.99. To order your copy for £12.99, visit Telegraph Books
3. Russia-Ukraine Conflict Lies in the Bones of an 11th-Century Prince
WSJ News Exclusive | Russia-Ukraine Conflict Lies in the Bones of an 11th-Century Prince
Yaroslav the Wise’s legacy is contested by Ukraine and Russia; a search for his remains is under way
WSJ · by Brett Forrest | Photographs by Brendan Hoffman for The Wall Street Journal
Finding them would be a notable if symbolic victory, bolstering Ukraine’s case for sovereignty at a moment of significant tension with its neighbor. Yaroslav’s legacy is contested ground, forming a historical underpinning to Russia’s current military buildup near Ukraine that U.S. officials see as a potential prelude to a Russian invasion.
Russia and Ukraine each claim to be the political heir of the Kievan Rus federation he founded. Ukraine awards the order of Prince Yaroslav the Wise for service to the state. A Russian frigate carrying his name patrols the Baltic Sea. Yaroslav’s image appears on a bank note from each country.
For Russian President Vladimir Putin, Kievan Rus is part proof that Russia and Ukraine are “one historical and spiritual space,” as he put it in a July essay, and that Ukraine has no basis to exist as a sovereign state. He pointed to their common medieval linguistic roots, a shared Orthodox Christian faith and their rule starting in the ninth century by the Rurikid dynasty, of which Yaroslav was a part.
A wall fresco in St. Sophia Cathedral depicting the family of Vladimir the Great, including his son, Yaroslav, second from left.
For Ukraine, Yaroslav’s name has been invoked in an independence day speech by President Volodymyr Zelensky. The Ukrainian government has searched for Yaroslav’s remains as a tangible sign of nationhood, pursuing leads across Europe to America.
Ukrainian officials have plumbed German war archives and traveled to New York in their quest. Department of Homeland Security agents joined the effort, searching a Russian Orthodox church in Brooklyn.
“As direct descendants of ancient Rus, we don’t deny the right of modern Belarus and Russia to honor their historic ties to it as well,” said Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba. “What we categorically oppose is current Russian attempts to instrumentalize the history of Rus in order to serve modern Putinist myths and illegitimate territorial claims.”
A Kremlin spokesman didn’t respond to a request for comment, nor did the government-backed Institute of Russian History.
St. Sophia Cathedral in Kyiv, Ukraine. Yaroslav the Wise named and patterned the church after the one in Constantinople, present-day Istanbul.
Shocking Find
As grand prince of Kiev, also known as Kyiv, Yaroslav handed down one of the first sets of codified laws in eastern Slavic lands and promoted public education. He traded with France, Norway and Persia. He married his children to Central and Western European courts, including a daughter, Anna, who became the queen of France.
After his passing in 1054, his remains were laid in a carved white-marble sarcophagus in Kyiv’s St. Sophia Cathedral, a church he named and patterned after the colossus in Constantinople, present-day Istanbul.
His Kievan Rus federation declined with the Mongol conquest in the 13th century. Portions of what is now Ukraine were for centuries part of what became the Russian empire. Ukraine declared independence in the chaos of the Russian civil war a century ago, yet then spent decades as part of the Soviet Union. With the Soviet collapse, Ukraine again declared its independence in 1991.
Ukraine’s relationship with Russia has since been a defining issue for many Ukrainians, at times fueling nationalist protest movements.
Nelia Kukovalska, an architect and historian, said she was politically awakened by one such movement. The director general of St. Sophia Cathedral and its surrounding historic buildings, Ms. Kukovalska and her colleagues planned to open the tomb of Yaroslav the Wise in 2009 to study the remains.
Nelia Kukovalska, director general of the national conservation area St. Sophia of Kyiv, has been searching for the remains of Yaroslav the Wise.
They wanted to compare the bones’ DNA to that of known descendants in France, Germany and Hungary, she said, hoping to bolster Ukraine’s claim to a pan-European, rather than a Russian heritage, and stir support across the continent for the country’s independence.
Decades had passed since the sarcophagus of Yaroslav the Wise had been opened. Soviet officials had removed its lid in 1936 to examine its contents and reopened the crypt in 1939. The two skeletons inside, one male, one female, were taken to Leningrad (present-day St. Petersburg), where scientists carbon-dated the bones to the 11th century, according to a 2013 paper published by the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.
The remains were later returned to Kyiv and placed in storage at St. Sophia, with a plan to display them publicly. The project was later abandoned, and officials reopened the crypt in 1964, reinstalling the bones, according to Ukrainian historical records.
A nearly complete skeleton was found in 2009 in a wooden box from inside the sarcophagus of Yaroslav the Wise. It was presumed to be the remains of Yaroslav's second wife.
Photo: Irina Trush
On Sept. 10, 2009, as Ms. Kukovalska watched, a winch lifted the coffin’s two-ton stone cap, releasing a sharp odor. Inside was an oblong wooden box roughly 4 feet long.
At a Kyiv lab, Ms. Kukovalska and her colleagues discovered a nearly complete skeleton inside the box, the remains of a woman presumed to be Ingegerd, Yaroslav’s second wife, which matched the description of the female skeleton taken to Leningrad in 1939. Yaroslav’s remains had vanished.
“I was completely shocked,” Ms. Kukovalska said. “I promised myself I would do everything I could to find out the truth and explain it to all Ukrainians.”
Finding Relics
Sifting through archival records and interviewing Ukrainians abroad, Ms. Kukovalska pieced together a narrative that dated to World War II and had been whispered about among some inside the Orthodox church and other Ukrainians displaced by the war.
After Nazi forces occupied Kyiv in September 1941, many Ukrainian Orthodox clergy in exile from the Soviet regime returned. Two years later, as Soviet tanks approached from the east, the clergy fled.
Nazi soldiers in Kyiv, Ukraine, in 1941 during World War II.
Photo: Associated Press
A 1954 Ukrainian-language newsletter Ms. Kukovalska found said that Nazi soldiers had taken Yaroslav the Wise’s remains from Kyiv ahead of the Soviet advance. In the newsletter, a senior prelate in the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of Canada and a leading church historian wrote that the bones had been bundled with an 11th-century icon of St. Nicholas the Wet, which had hung in St. Sophia Cathedral for nearly a thousand years.
Both items, the article said, were in the possession of a person in New York who claimed they were in good hands.
Another article Ms. Kukovalska turned up in a Ukrainian-American periodical from 1967 also pointed to the U.S. Petro Odarchenko, a linguist and historian who had survived the Nazi occupation of Kyiv, wrote that the senior cleric at St. Sophia under the Nazis had given the bones to a German major, who transported them to Warsaw.
There, Mr. Odarchenko wrote, the officer passed the bones to a Ukrainian priest who later took them to the U.S. “They are believed to be in the possession of Archbishop Palladius to this day,” Mr. Odarchenko wrote.
The accounts provided no corroborating evidence, and both authors were long deceased by the time Ms. Kukovalska read their pieces.
A contact of hers in New York identified Palladius, the priest named in Mr. Odarchenko’s article, as Father Pallady Rudenko, a Ukrainian church leader who had immigrated to the U.S. after the war.
Holy Trinity Ukrainian Orthodox Church in Brooklyn, N.Y.
Photo: Ariel Zambelich/The Wall Street Journal
In 1961 in New York, Father Pallady had led the purchase of an 1899 beaux-arts building in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn that had previously served as a courthouse and bank, turning it into the Holy Trinity Ukrainian Orthodox Church, according to a church periodical.
In the fall of 2010, decades after Father Pallady’s death, Ms. Kukovalska traveled to New York and arrived at Holy Trinity, located in the shadow of the Williamsburg Bridge a short walk from Peter Luger Steak House.
Once inside, she recognized an item hanging on a wall, the icon of St. Nicholas the Wet, last seen at St. Sophia in Kyiv during World War II.
Nelia Kukovalska in Brooklyn’s Holy Trinity Ukrainian Orthodox Church near the icon of St. Nicholas the Wet, last seen at St. Sophia in Kyiv during World War II.
Photo: Irina Trush
Clergy at the Holy Trinity Church, however, stonewalled when asked about Yaroslav’s remains, Ms. Kukovalska said. She said that since the Ukrainian president at the time, Viktor Yanukovych, maintained close relations with Moscow, leaders of the New York church may have feared that the remains, if repatriated to Ukraine, would fall into Russian hands.
Father Victor Vronsky, the church’s presiding cleric, declined to comment, as did the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the USA, which has authority over the Brooklyn church.
Substantial Risk
After Mr. Yanukovych fled Ukraine amid political and social unrest in 2014, Russia annexed Crimea and fomented rebellion in the Ukrainian east, and a pro-Western government came to power in Kyiv. The new Ukrainian government lent further impetus to the search for the relics.
The new president, Petro Poroshenko, mounted a case with the Orthodox Christian ecumenical authority in Istanbul to grant the Ukrainian Orthodox Church self-governance, releasing it from centuries of fealty to the Russian Orthodox Church.
Mr. Poroshenko charged his staff with finding and retrieving Yaroslav’s remains. “He wanted to get them,” said Oleksandr Danylyuk, who served as a deputy head of Mr. Poroshenko’s administration.
Ukrainian officials including Ms. Kukovalska contacted Interpol and Federal Bureau of Investigation agents who specialized in crimes concerning artifacts.
In 2016, Mr. Poroshenko’s office wrote the Justice Department for assistance, claiming to have evidence that the bones were in possession of the Williamsburg church. It warned of a “substantial risk of a new disappearance of the relics,” according to a copy of the letter.
The Ukrainian appeal eventually reached the New York office of the Department of Homeland Security.
On a fall morning in 2017, three DHS agents appeared at a different Brooklyn cathedral, the Holy Trinity Russian Orthodox Church, in East New York. They searched the church, rifling through liturgical tomes and a display case containing the purported remains of Herman of Alaska, the Russian Orthodox patron saint of North America, the church’s priest said.
The DHS investigators found nothing, an agency spokeswoman said, and the agents declined to open a formal case. She declined to say if investigators searched the Williamsburg church. The FBI and State Department also declined to comment.
Moscow has grown increasingly concerned in recent years that Ukraine is moving closer to the West and beyond Russian influence. Ukraine’s current president, Mr. Zelensky, has cracked down on pro-Russian politicians and media, giving the Kremlin less leverage on Ukraine’s domestic politics.
Mr. Zelensky has also pressed the search for Yaroslav’s bones, with his government keeping in contact with Washington and Ukrainian communities in the U.S. and elsewhere, according to his foreign minister and Ms. Kukovalska.
--Lisa Schwartz contributed to this article.
WSJ · by Brett Forrest | Photographs by Brendan Hoffman for The Wall Street Journal
4. How a Wartime Newspaper Article Changed Australia Forever
A fascinating bit of history. One more reason why we must study history is because decisions made long ago can still influence events today.
Excerpts:
With Japanese troops marching down the Malayan Peninsula in the closing days of 1941 and Singapore soon to be overrun, Australia’s then-Prime Minister John Curtin abandoned the notion that the UK would be the island continent’s protector. The bedrock principle of security since the founding of a penal colony in the 18th century was jettisoned. Washington became the fulcrum around which defense and diplomacy was organized — architecture that shapes Australia today.
Asked to contribute an article to the Dec. 27 edition of the Melbourne Herald newspaper, Curtin wrote: “Without any inhibitions of any kind, I make it quite clear that Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the United Kingdom.” The column, titled “The Task Ahead,” also called for a revolution in Australian life to gear up industry and finance to meet the demands of the war.
Daniel Moss - How a Wartime Newspaper Article Changed Australia Forever
Australian foreign policy was dramatically recast 80 years ago in ways that still reverberate today. It went hand-in-hand with a far-reaching overhaul of economic life, the contours of which lasted long enough to help drive a recovery from the pandemic recession. These wartime military and financial arrangements live on, in what detractors call an over-dependence on Washington and the Reserve Bank of Australia’s quantitative easing.
With Japanese troops marching down the Malayan Peninsula in the closing days of 1941 and Singapore soon to be overrun, Australia’s then-Prime Minister John Curtin abandoned the notion that the UK would be the island continent’s protector. The bedrock principle of security since the founding of a penal colony in the 18th century was jettisoned. Washington became the fulcrum around which defense and diplomacy was organized — architecture that shapes Australia today.
Asked to contribute an article to the Dec. 27 edition of the Melbourne Herald newspaper, Curtin wrote: “Without any inhibitions of any kind, I make it quite clear that Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the United Kingdom.” The column, titled “The Task Ahead,” also called for a revolution in Australian life to gear up industry and finance to meet the demands of the war.
John Edwards, author of the two-volume biography “John Curtin’s War,” spoke to me about what Curtin intended to convey in the remarks and how the sentiments came to be canonized in Australian history and politics. Edwards is a non-resident fellow at the Lowy Institute in Sydney. He worked as an adviser to former Prime Minister Paul Keating, was chief economist for Australia and New Zealand at HSBC Holdings Plc and served on the board of the Reserve Bank from 2011 to 2016.
Daniel Moss: You called “The Task Ahead” the most celebrated document in Australian foreign policy. Why was it so important?
John Edwards: The significance arose because of what happened subsequently. Turning to the United States had, at the time, a very limited validity. It was limited to the circumstances of World War II. The significance arose from postwar circumstances: The British exit from India, Malaya, Burma, the Middle East and the UK’s impoverishment. Britain’s entire role in the world changed. The Empire vanished and Australia found itself in a world of new nations where Britain was absent. Had the UK emerged from the war differently, Curtin’s remarks may have been just been another wartime speech.
The awkwardness and controversy the text created was not so much Australia turning to America, because Britain had already turned to America. The real annoyance to Britain in the article was its demand that Australia share with the US the direction of allied efforts in the Pacific, rather than going through the UK as imperial arrangements would have dictated. It was awkward for UK Prime Minister Winston Churchill as he was in Washington conferring with President Franklin D. Roosevelt on this very issue. Curtin demanded that the Pacific conflict be treated as a new war and a war of equal status to that waged against Germany, which was contrary to British policy, and the US approach as well.
DM: Is Australia as lopsidedly dependent on America now as the country was on the UK prior to 1941?
JE: Curtin didn’t intend such a shift. Publicly and privately, he urged Britain to return to the Indo-Pacific as a major presence. He wanted a big base for the UK reopened in Singapore after the war with a fleet to support it. He didn’t understand that what had happened temporarily was to become something permanent. In a certain sense it is true that Australian foreign policy and defense is driven by a fear of abandonment by the great powers. We are not comfortable in our own region unsupported by a large external security guarantor. It’s particularly pertinent today. We fear China’s defense capacity, the size of its economy, its regional ambitions and we have re-emphasized our links with the US and, in a limited sense, the UK.
Underlying your question is: Are we doing enough for our own defense? In a way, what we are doing is underrated. We are spending a little more than 2% of gross domestic product on defense. We have quite a formidable undersea and air defense and offense capacity. We have a small but efficient army. Despite the controversy over China, we do not have a threat. And it’s certainly not China, in an offensive sense. China does not have that capability or that intention. It’s not so much that we don’t do enough, but we wrongly imagine American interests are our own.
DM: This leads us to AUKUS — a trilateral security pact between Australia, the UK and the US — and the fracas a few months ago over abandoning the French-built diesel submarines for a deal on nuclear-powered subs. Can you draw a direct line between the debates in Australia in late 1941 and the sub accord?
JE: It’s evocative, but the circumstances are radically different. AUKUS ultimately gives us very little more than our existing defense understandings. It doesn’t add much to our treaty with the US or our understandings with the UK, other than the aspect of agreeing to Australian access to nuclear-propelled sub construction. It’s very, very specific. Were it to come to fruition — we are talking about a program that won’t be completed until 40 years hence — would it be a major addition to our defense capability? Nuke subs are designed for long distance offensive tasks that relate more to our alliance with US than our actual home defense needs.
DM: Curtin talked in his article about a “revolution” in society. What did he mean by that?
JE: Curtin was a bit of a scold at that point in his life. He was offended that Australians continued to go the races and drink beer and so forth. He was incensed by strikes on the waterfront and in coal mines. Curtin wanted a greater appreciation of the challenge Australia faced. He required a mobilized society in the same way that we have edged much closer to during the pandemic: Adherence to the rules in which behavior determined to be for the greater good is the rule. There are resonances with that rhetoric and what politicians have been saying over the last couple of years. Metaphorically, we often describe ourselves as being in a war against Covid. There are links in a kind of mental attitude. But I wonder whether they will be any more permanent this time than during an actual war? People do revert pretty quickly to what they wish.
DM: Curtin overhauled the tax system and central banking during the war. Did he lay the ground for the modern Australian economy?
JE: This was, in a sense, the real revolution that Curtin wrought. Prior to Curtin, the central bank, which was then the Commonwealth Bank, had quite limited powers, limited authority and a limited vision of how it would use those powers. With his treasurer, Ben Chifley, Curtin brought in legislative changes that created a true central bank. More or less, with some organizational and structural changes, it has the same authority over financial institutions as the Reserve Bank today exercises. In fiscal policy, we rely on another wartime innovation that became permanent. That was the effective monopolization of personal income tax and company tax by the federal government. It gave Canberra great revenue and spending power that Curtin’s successors never saw fit to reverse.
DM: Has this federal authority been eroded by Covid? The state governments appear to have been ascendant, establishing their own rules.
JE: It’s true the federal government has had to fight to get its way. On the other hand, our recovery has depended on the RBA and the federal government. We moved from near-balanced budget to the biggest deficit. We have gone from a position where the RBA wouldn’t contemplate buying government debt to one where it is a major bond holder. The exercise of those powers, won by Curtin, has supported our economic resilience and recovery today.
Bloomberg
5. Taiwan and Ukraine are underdogs, but is it wise to fight China and Russia?
I know of no serious person who is "gung ho" to pick a fight with China or Russia.
Letters to the Editor: Taiwan and Ukraine are underdogs, but is it wise to fight China and Russia?
To the editor: Thinking about Ukraine against the backdrop of Washington’s endless wars, columnist Nicholas Goldberg comes to what seems to be a logical conclusion, namely “after trillions of dollars and thousands of lives” spent over decades, “Americans are tired of war.”
Maybe, but that is not what recent polling from the Chicago Council of Foreign Affairs shows. It found that at least 50% of the public is willing to commit U.S. forces to defend Ukraine and Taiwan against Russia and China, respectively.
Many Americans evidently feel an affinity for the underdogs, but the gung-ho ought ask how “vital” each is to U.S. security. More fundamentally, where should the U.S. draw the line to risk its survival for others against the nuclear-armed predators?
Bennett Ramberg, Los Angeles
The writer was a foreign affairs officer in the State Department Bureau of Politico-Military Affairs during the George H.W. Bush administration.
6. A dozen national security “Green Swans” for 2022!
A unique way to think about the future. We rarely plan contingencies for when success occurs or positive things happen.
I would just take some exception to number 5. On the one hand if this green swan occurred I think the US would be most prepared for it because we have long made plans based on China deciding to use its influence to get north Korea to denuclearize. I truly hope for this green swan. Unfortunately, I don't think China will ever believe the north's nuclear weapons are an existential threat to China. I do not think China will help us to achieve north Korean denuclearization unless it fears that the US will take action which is something the Chinese do not want to happen. This is why I think China supported the 2017 UNSC Resolutions and sanctions. Not that it was concerned about north Korea's nuclear and missile tests but because they were afraid the US might take military action against the north because of those programs. But as I said, if China does decide to help us denuclearize the north, it is one green swan I think we will be most prepared for.
And of all these green swans I truly hope for number 12. It is the biggest threat to our great American experiment.
A dozen national security “Green Swans” for 2022!
“If only…”is a mind game that often ruminates on the past, but “What if…?” allows us to speculate on the future, to hope, to look not for make-believe unicorns but instead to keep watch for national security “Green Swans.”
We’ve all seen green swans and experienced them but may not even have realized it. The term “green swan” is a metaphor for an event that is unexpected but has a positive effect. In a 2018 post, Lawfire first applied the term “green swan” in the national security context.
That previous post highlighted several possible “green swans.” In this post, we will identify some new possibilities as well as revive (or revise) some examples previously suggested. Remember: these haven’t happened – yet, but let’s be hopeful!
Consider these potential “Green Swans” for 2022 and imagine “what if?”:
3.) The US uses its enormous airdrop capability to bring relief directly to starving Afghans without working through the Taliban. As discussed here, this use of American strategic (airlift) airpower would not only bring relief to millions, but also demonstrate the reach of American military power. In addition, it would help restore America’s reputation for global leadership, and prove to Afghans that America’s true intention was always to help them.
6.) Congress turns the tragedy of the recent tornado disaster into an opportunity to set a new bipartisan tone by ensuring that relief flows to those who need it. Doing so could help restore public confidence in it as an institution, A respected legislature that can act in a bipartisan way inevitably strengthens national defense.
11.) A combination of developments in , and artificial intelligence allows American manufacturers to construct a number of highly-automated plants to economically build essential components for U.S. weaponry in the States, helping to preclude any need to buy foreign arms. Continued reshoring of key industries can help assure national security.
12.) Americans realize that hyper-polarization is harming our national security by distracting us from the things we need to do to counter the truly existential threats posed by foreign actors. Citizens temper their rhetoric, see the light in each other, find common ground, and work together to build a stronger, more virtuous nation.
Sure, a feature of the “swan” concept is to accept that their occurrence is unlikely, and maybe extremely unlikely – but let’s start 2022 with optimism!!!
7. Using and abusing Djibouti: How the US transformed a tiny African state into a hub of imperial aggression
Excellent anti-American propaganda (note sarcasm).
Conclusion:
As the Pentagon takes the brute-force approach to countering China’s Africa presence, the US increasingly relies on old proxy outfits like NATO while developing new ones, like allied forces in the Horn of Africa. Given that all three major powers have nuclear weapons, Western concerns over pandemics and climate change could prove ephemeral in the face of a miscalculation or worse, a deliberate military action.
Using and abusing Djibouti: How the US transformed a tiny African state into a hub of imperial aggression - The Grayzone
From Djibouti, the US trains proxies and bombs strategically-important countries in the name of democracy and counterterrorism. To justify the country’s militarization, Washington hypes fears over China’s regional ambitions.
In a blatant threat to China’s presence, Djibouti recently hosted the US-led “Allied Appreciation Day,” in which Britain, France, and Japan showcased “a variety of equipment that is part of their military operations in the Horn of Africa” (HOA). The Pentagon’s Combined Joint Task Force-HOA reported that the events fused Armistice, Remembrance, and Veterans’ Days. Attendees participated in “demonstrations featuring a variety of allied military capabilities to include a military flyover.”
Successive Djiboutian regimes have clung to power by promoting their small country in the Horn of Africa as a vital tool in the West’s quest for global dominance. During Europe’s late-19th century Scramble for Africa, the French colonists understood the strategic importance of the region for trade ships and naval deployments. After the Second World War and particularly after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the US, the Pentagon seized France’s imperial mantle and expanded a major military base, Camp Lemonnier (which, for many years, the US misspelled by leaving out an “n”).
Today, American military and political planners fear the presence of China in what they consider to be “their” African territory. In 2017, China opened its first, and at the time of writing, only confirmed foreign military base — the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Support Base — 30 minutes northwest of Camp Lemonnier.
As the right-wing NY Post cited dubious warnings by unnamed US officials about China’s construction of a secret base in Equatorial Guinea (EG) on the other side of Africa, the US Africa Command has quietly expanded its operations in Djibouti.
A former colonial power maintains its grip on Djibouti
Between 600 and 1000 migrants and asylum seekers pass through Djibouti daily, nearly half of whom are children. The US Department of Labor (DoL) says: “Children in Djibouti are subjected to the worst forms of child labor.” In addition to begging and selling drugs, “[s]treet work, such as shining shoes, washing and guarding cars, cleaning storefronts, sorting merchandise, collecting garbage, begging, and selling items” is common. In addition to human trafficking, Djiboutian children are at risk of rape and other forms of sexual abuse. The country hosts “the largest number of foreign military installations in the world, including thousands of military personnel and security contractors.” The DoL concludes: “This foreign military presence heightens the risks of commercial sexual exploitation of girls.”
Western colonial rule in what is now Djibouti began in the mid-1800s. France purchased land on which it established stations for the steamships that passed through Egypt’s Suez Canal, north of the territory. In the decades that followed the Second World War, the broader region was known as French Somaliland. A likely-rigged vote in 1958 saw the population choose to remain under French control. In response to several factors including domestic independence movements, Somali claims to the territory, and continued Ethiopian usage of the ports, the French established the Territory of the Afars and the Issas in 1967.
A decade later, and following negotiations with the colonial power, Hassan Gouled Aptidon of African People’s League for Independence, became President, forming the People’s Rally for Progress. Gouled governed the one-party state until his alleged nephew, Ismaïl Omar Guelleh, replaced him in 1999. With France’s Indian Ocean navy squadron based there, the Franco-Djiboutian Defense Treaty 1977 granted the “former” colonial power unimpeded access to air and maritime facilities.
Enter America: “Use Djibouti,” maintain a “pro-Western course”
Basing his assessment on a commissioned CIA report in 1979, Paul B. Henze of the National Security Council Staff advised President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, that the French military presence in Djibouti would be enough to prevent the Soviet-backed Ethiopian government from invading. “[I]f we are going to continue to use Djibouti (and there are good reasons for doing this), we need to be frank with the French about our need for their alertness and support there.”
President Gouled saw foreign de facto occupation as a bulwark against potential aggression by Djibouti’s neighbors, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Somalia. A heavily-redacted CIA Intelligence Estimate from 1986 describes the country as basically a city-state. “Largely because of its excellent deepwater port and chokepoint location on the Bab el Mandeb Strait (sic),” which separates the Gulf of Aden from the Red Sea, “Djibouti has long been subject to competing African, Arab, Soviet, and Western interests.” Indicative of Cold War paranoia, the Soviet “interests” highlighted at the outset of the report are later revealed to be scholarship programs and a maritime visit.
The CIA lauded Gouled’s “pro-Western course,” rejecting, for instance, aid packages offered by Libya’s then-ruler, Muammar Gaddafi. “[I]n a region dominated by Marxist and military regimes, the Gouled regime enjoys French security protection and supports Western interests,” particularly by providing the US with a port, airfield, and reconnaissance airspace.
When Ethiopia’s ruler was deposed in 1991, Eritrea gained independence. Robbed of its port, Ethiopia turned to Djibouti, but Afar rebels known as the Front for the Restoration of Unity and Democracy (FRUD) based themselves in Ethiopia. The Dini faction of FRUD later claimed that Ethiopia was supporting Djibouti’s Issa-majority government. A Civil War ensued leading to a peace agreement in 1994, when a small number of Afar were given token positions in Gouled’s government.
Post-9/11: “The primary base for US operations”
Significant elite US interests in Djibouti began after 9/11, when the Navy and the Central Command (CENTCOM) effectively took over the old French Foreign Legion fort, Camp Lemonnier, and established a permanent presence. In 2002 under President George W. Bush, the Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa (CJTF-HOA) began surveillance and reconnaissance of alleged “al-Qaeda” operatives in neighboring Somalia from Lemonnier.
By the end of that year, at least 800 US Special Operations Forces were present. The period also saw the launch of exercises by the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit.
In November 2002, six Yemeni “al-Qaeda” suspects were killed by a CIA Predator operator whose drone was launched from Djibouti. In a rare moment of honesty, the New York Times article exposing the attack added: “The sea lanes near Djibouti are particularly crucial since they are used for commercial shipping and to transport American war matériel to the Persian Gulf.” In May 2003, CJTF-HOA personnel had arrived.
Lemonnier is described by the US Center for Naval Analysis (CNA) as “the largest U.S. military installation in Africa.” The CNA highlights Djibouti’s importance to rival powers: its regional “stability,” “strategically important position next to the Bab el Mandeb (sic), a critical maritime chokepoint[,]” while serving “as the main port for landlocked Ethiopia.” The oddly-named “Commander, Navy Installations Command” describes Lemonnier as “the primary base of operations for U.S. Africa Command in the Horn of Africa.”
Between 2004 and 2011, Presidents Bush and Barack Obama respectively sold Djibouti a total of $68 million-worth of arms and services under a single program. In late-2006, the US and Britain used Ethiopia as a proxy to invade Somalia and replace the moderate Islamic Courts Union government with an extremist entity called the Transitional Federal Government. Djibouti later posed as a peace-broker between the warring Somali and Ethiopian factions, but behind the scenes the Franco-American-backed Djiboutian Armed Forces were training hundreds of Somali military officers.
Besides using Djibouti as a base for the CIA, Special Forces, the Navy, and other operations, the US trains domestic enforcement units in the country. In 2007, as domestic tensions simmered with the Afar people and potential conflicts brewed with neighbors, the Marines were pictured instructing the Djibouti National Police “on basic weapons procedures and room clearing.”
US soldiers at Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti celebrate the birthday of MLK Jr. in 2021
US psy-ops in the Horn of Africa: celebrating MLK on a military base and “the gift of hope”
In 2008, the newly-created US military alliance known as AFRICOM took over operations in Djibouti from CENTCOM. That June, the French and British joined with the militaries of 10 African nations to cooperate on maritime operations.
At the time, countering Somali “piracy” was a widely-used pretext for regional dominance. As the transfer to AFRICOM was arranged, CJTF-HOA continued its propaganda offensive against Djiboutians by painting US military personnel in a positive light. Staff “donated more than 50 book bags containing school supplies, flip flops, shampoo, soap and treats to girls at Center Aicha Bogoreh [sic],” in Djibouti City.
As he rang in Christmas in 2008 with the lighting of trees and singing of festive songs, Rear Admiral Philip Greene said of the Navy: “We are sharing our time and talents with the people of Eastern Africa, giving them the gift of hope for a better, more secure future.” The “gift of hope” is part of US psychological operations, soft power, or political warfare as the tactic is interchangeably called.
In January 2009, in a prime example of the soft power tactic, CJTF-HOA personnel “celebrated” Martin Luther King Day with a program entitled, “Realizing the Vision,” in which AFRICOM highlighted King’s life through speeches, a slideshow, and a performance of the somber Sam Cooke ballad, “A Change is Gonna Come.”
A “Hollywood Handshake Tour” later that year took the “gift of hope” to new heights with visits by industry b-listers Christian Slater, Zac Levi, Joel Moore, and Kal Penn, who each “personally thank[ed] members for their sacrifice.” In July, the Navy Seabees and CJTF-HOA built a canteen for the newly-constructed Douda de Ecole Primary School. A year later, the US hosted a meeting by the Djiboutian Chamber of Commerce in an effort to present the de facto US occupation as an investment opportunity for the business class.
Actor Kal Penn signs autographs for troops at Camp Lemonnier in 2009
As the PR-friendly pleasantries continued, so too did the military training. In September, officers of the Ugandan Senior Command and Staff College visited Djibouti to study with the CJTF-HOA. Facilitated by the Lemonnier-based 449th Air Expeditionary Group (or Flying Horsemen), Ethiopian Air Force officers convened with Djiboutian forces to discuss operations including airdrops.
Remote warfare: overcoming “the tyranny of distance”
In addition to acting as a hub for the training of Ethiopian, Somali, Ugandan, and other forces, Djibouti hosts regional propaganda broadcasters and privatization outfits that operate as aid agencies.
A 2010 US Embassy cable notes that Djibouti is home to “[US government] broadcasting facilities used by [the] Arabic-language Radio Sawa and the Voice of America Somali Service, the only USAID Food for Peace warehouse for pre-positioned emergency food relief outside [the continental U.S.], and naval refueling facilities for U.S. and coalition ships.”
That same year, Lemonnier hosted Africa’s first Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Summit Conference. Basing forces near strategic locations and using digital relays to aid drone strikes defeats what the Pentagon calls “the tyranny of distance.”
Seated in joint operations rooms, at least three British officers in the Camp assisted CJTF-HOA-led drone operations against targets in Yemen. By the mid-2010s, drone killings had been committed from Djibouti against people in Afghanistan, Mali, Libya, Somalia, and Yemen.
In 2012, BT (formerly British Telecom) built a $23m fiber-optic cable for the US Defense Information Systems Network and National Security Agency. The cable ran from the US Air Force-run Royal Air Force Croughton (north of London) to Naples (Italy) and onto Camp Lemonnier. The broadband service was 30 times faster than commercial capacity and could carry live drone video.
Describing Lemonnier and by extension Djibouti as “a sun-baked Third World outpost,” the Washington Post reported that the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) was instrumental in setting up Lemonnier and its crucial drone component, with at least 300 JSOC personnel working secretly at the base.
Enter China: threats are “exaggerated”
The Trump-era Secretary of State’s Policy Planning Staff kept a close eye on China’s presence in Djibouti. It wrote: “In 2017, China established in Djibouti its first foreign military base. The base looks out on the Bab-el-Mandeb Straits in the Gulf of Aden, through which passes nearly 10 percent of the world’s total seaborne-traded petroleum.” The report highlighted the perceived threat to US energy market dominance. “This comprises 6.2 billion barrels per day of crude oil, condensate, and refined petroleum. Together with China’s anti-piracy activities in the Gulf of Aden and growing presence in the Gulf of Guinea,” it concluded, “the base has extended China’s military reach off Africa’s coasts and into the Indian Ocean.”
China and Djibouti established diplomatic relations in 1979 but did not expand militarily until 2009, with China’s counter-piracy operations in the nearby Gulf of Aden. In 2015, China announced plans to join seven other countries, including the US, to establish its first and only foreign base in Djibouti.
Under the subheading “Don’t Believe the Headlines,” the US Center for Naval Analysis wrote: “media reporting on Chinese economic ties is sometimes exaggerated.” It does not list threats to US “interests” or allies in the context of China’s military expansion, but rather China’s intentions to launch counter-piracy, intelligence collection, evacuation missions, counterterrorism, and peacekeeping operations (i.e., China’s contribution to UN forces).
In July 2015, the Pentagon reported that the 1st Marine Regiment, the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU), the Navy Battalion Landing Team 3rd Battalion, and the USS Anchorage exercised on Arta Beach, Djibouti. Executing attack and maneuver drills with machine guns, squads, and night attacks, the 15th MEU went ashore “for sustainment training to maintain and enhance [their] skills.” Between September and October 2015, the 15th MEU participated in a bilateral training exercise with the French 5th Overseas Combined Arms Regiment.
The 15th MEU’s reconnaissance element trains Rapid Response Teams to send ashore in Djibouti, Hawaii, Iraq, and Singapore and to “push secure voice, video, and data back to the ship with a very small foot print.” Maj. Matthew Bowman of the Communications Department, said: “we have … to be able to project power ashore quickly.”
What US forces do with the training
Much of the US-led allied training traces back to Djibouti. So-called violent extremist organizations are entities that operate outside domestic law and make local environments unsafe for US operations and unstable for US investors. For these reasons, the Pentagon seeks to counter VEOs.
Through military information support operations (MISOs), the Lemonnier-based CJTF-HOA oversees the Ohio-based 346th Tactical Psychological Operations Company (Airborne). Under the rubric of the African Union Mission in Somalia to counter al-Shabaab, the MISO operations involve training the Ugandan People’s Defence Force (UPDF). Because locals tend to broadly support extremist groups as leverage against US imperialism, PSYOPs try to propagandize locals into backing the US.
Another example is the Sicily-based Special Purpose Marine Air Ground Task Force 12 (SPMAGTF-12), which worked with the California-based 4th Force Reconnaissance Company to train the UPDF to counter the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a cohort of bandits which seeks to overthrow the US-backed government of Uganda.
The continued existence of the LRA gives the US military an excuse to maintain a troop presence, or at least proxy presence, in Democratic Republic of Congo, the Central African Republic, and South Sudan, where LRA leader Joseph Kony is supposedly hiding. He is a “Christian” version of the omnipresent Osama bin Laden, who for many years offered the US a pretext to invade multiple nations from the Middle East to Central Asia. The SPMAGTF-12 relies on support from Marines in Lemonnier.
Much of the US activity in Djibouti is either covert and therefore not reported or confined to press releases by the Pentagon. Recently, however, CNN painted the Pentagon as the Lone Ranger riding to the rescue in its coverage of the presence of the US Army 1st Battalion 75th Ranger Regiment in Djibouti, which was ready to deploy for supposed evacuations in Ethiopia.
Beyond the growing deployment of ground and special forces in the Horn of Africa, the US Navy is making waves. In August 2021, Comorian and Somali personnel worked with US service members as part of Cutlass Express at L’Escale Marine, Djibouti, to practice “visit, board, search and seizure” procedures and simulate various scenarios, including counter-piracy.
A de facto occupation
The US presence in Djibouti is a de facto occupation which ensures American naval dominance of the region, as well as continuing training of regional forces and growing surveillance operations. European militaries are also benefiting from shared, US-led exercises in the region. The build-up exacerbates a power struggle between what the US hopes is a unified West against what they are trying to turn into an increasingly isolated China.
In recent years, the US has sought to weaponize Japan by pushing successive governments to drop the Peace Clause of their constitution and turn up the heat on China. In September, the Japanese Ambassador to Djibouti, Umio Otsuka, met with the US Army Commander at Lemonnier, Maj. Gen. William Zana, “to discuss future plans for combined cooperation.” Under CJTF-HOA, the so-called Japanese Self-Defense Forces trained in target practice at the Djiboutian Police Range.
In November, a US Air Force B-1B Lancer from the 9th Expeditionary Bomb Squadron and a C-130 Hercules, two F-35 Lightning IIs from the UK Carrier Strike Group’s HMS Queen Elizabeth, two French Dassault Mirage 2000s, and a Japanese P-3 Orion flew missions over Djibouti. In December, it was reported that, as part of Exercise Bull Shark, Spanish forces had trained with the 82nd Expeditionary Rescue Squadron in the Gulf of Aden, “to strengthen personnel recovery capabilities in support of the Warfighter Recovery Network initiative throughout Africa.”
As the Pentagon takes the brute-force approach to countering China’s Africa presence, the US increasingly relies on old proxy outfits like NATO while developing new ones, like allied forces in the Horn of Africa. Given that all three major powers have nuclear weapons, Western concerns over pandemics and climate change could prove ephemeral in the face of a miscalculation or worse, a deliberate military action.
8. China implements new border law, India concerned
Excerpt:
The law lays the path for the development of the border region. It states that the People’s Republic of China will take up education and propaganda to “solidify the sense of community of China, to promote the spirit of China, to defend the unity and territorial integrity of the country, strengthen citizens’ sense of the country and homeland security, and build a common spiritual home for the Chinese nation” amongst citizens in the border region.
China implements new border law, India concerned
Prime News, National and International, New Delhi, January 1:- India is likely to face more challenges at the northern border as China implements its new border law from Saturday (January 1).
Sources said from now on China is likely to dig in its heels at the current disputed positions at the Line of Actual Control and will come up with more model border villages — to be used both for military and civilian purposes. Making a provocative assertion, China on December 30, 2021 renamed 15 places of Arunachal Pradesh in their map.
Major General Ashok Kumar (retired) told IANS, “The new land border law is the latest attempt by China to unilaterally delineate and demarcate territorial boundaries with India and Bhutan.”
Explaining how this law has huge implications for India, Major General Kumar said that by bringing in such a law, and in conjunction with accelerated construction of 624 “Xiaokong” known as model villages along and inside the disputed land boundaries with India, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has created conditions for a ‘militarised solution’ to the boundary issue.
“It is a hybrid unconventional warfare methodology, applied for taking over illegal control of sovereign spaces of other states and gets converted into a legalistic nation-building exercise which brooks no opposition,” he said.
On October 23, the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, China’s top legislative body, passed a new law citing “protection and exploitation of the country’s land border areas”. The committee had stated that the new law will come into effect from January 1.
The law is not meant specifically for the border with India. China shares its 22,457-km land boundary with 14 countries including India, the third longest after the borders with Mongolia and Russia. The new border law has 62 articles and seven chapters. As per the law, the People’s Republic of China shall set up boundary markers on all its land borders to clearly mark the border. The type of marker is to be decided in agreement with the relevant neighbouring state.
The law further stated that People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and Chinese People’s Armed Police Force will maintain security along the border. This responsibility includes cooperating with local authorities in combating illegal border crossings.
The law prohibits any party from indulging in any activity in the border area which would “endanger national security or affect China’s friendly relations with neighbouring countries”. It includes the construction of any permanent buildings by any person without authorisation from the concerned authority.
Further, it stated that citizens and local organisations are mandated to protect and defend the border infrastructure, maintain security and stability of borders and co-operate with government agencies in maintaining border security.
The law lays the path for the development of the border region. It states that the People’s Republic of China will take up education and propaganda to “solidify the sense of community of China, to promote the spirit of China, to defend the unity and territorial integrity of the country, strengthen citizens’ sense of the country and homeland security, and build a common spiritual home for the Chinese nation” amongst citizens in the border region. (MR, Inputs: Agencies)
9. China unveils plan to 'take over' Latin America
Excerpts:
Chinese officials offered a more elaborate preview of their ambitions for the region just a few days before Nicaragua cut ties with Taipei. The China-CELAC ministerial on Dec. 3 culminated in the adoption of a plan not only to tighten economic ties but to enhance “political and security cooperation” while deepening China’s involvement in high-tech spheres — from cyberspace and artificial intelligence to “space science, satellite data sharing, satellite applications, construction of ground infrastructure,” and even nuclear energy.
“There are absolutely ambitions for China to become the dominant influence in Latin America,” Haydar added. “The challenge is comprehensive, and there's absolutely a security and military interest there. ... That threat is growing, and it’s a different kind of threat than what we saw with the Soviet threat.”
China unveils plan to 'take over' Latin America
Chinese Communist Party officials have unveiled an “action plan for cooperation” with Latin American countries that amounts to a “comprehensive” plan to cultivate influence and threaten American interests, following a new ministerial with the nearest neighbors of the United States.
“The Chinese don’t say, ‘We want to take over Latin America,’ but they clearly set out a multidimensional engagement strategy, which, if successful, would significantly expand their leverage and produce enormous intelligence concerns for the United States,” U.S. Army War College research professor Evan Ellis, a former member of the State Department policy planning staff, told the Washington Examiner.
Chinese officials outlined their ambitions following a ministerial with the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States. This intergovernmental forum was launched in 2011 under the auspices of the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who wanted a venue to rival the Organization of American States and challenge U.S. influence in Latin America, and it now stands to furnish Chinese General Secretary Xi Jinping with a platform to gather a coalition of leftist and authoritarian leaders congenial to Beijing’s interests.
“The Chinese Communist Party and government are actively looking to strengthen their ties throughout the Western Hemisphere, in particular with anti-American elements,” Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, a senior Senate Intelligence Select Committee Republican, said in a statement to the Washington Examiner. “Beijing is seeking to surpass the United States in every sector, and we must take this threat seriously.”
China’s exploitation of ideological fault lines in Latin America was thrown into sharp relief earlier this month, when Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, just weeks after the OAS General Assembly rebuked him for overseeing elections that “were not free, fair, or transparent and have no democratic legitimacy,” opted to close the Taiwanese Embassy in favor of a new relationship with Beijing.
“The Ortega-Murillo regime has announced it has severed diplomatic relations and ended official contact with Taiwan, but the sham election on Nov. 7 did not provide it with any mandate to remove Nicaragua from the family of American democracies,” State Department spokesman Ned Price said in a Dec. 9 response. “Without the mandate that comes with a free and fair election, Ortega's actions cannot reflect the will of the Nicaraguan people, who continue to struggle for democracy and the ability to exercise their human rights and fundamental freedoms.”
Rubio, who also leads the GOP side of the Senate foreign relations subcommittee for the Western Hemisphere, was unsatisfied with that response and President Joe Biden’s broader approach to Latin America.
“The Ortega-Murillo regime sees the CCP as a better ideological ally than the U.S. because Ortega’s long list of crimes and human rights violations are of no concern to the genocidal regime in Beijing,” he wrote in an op-ed published Tuesday. “Ortega also wants continued Chinese funding for the construction of an Atlantic-to-Pacific canal through Nicaragua, which People’s Liberation Army warships can then use to access the Caribbean.”
Nicaraguan Foreign Minister Denis Moncada has expressed interest , according to Chinese state media, in joining China’s Belt and Road Initiative, the overseas infrastructure investment that U.S. officials regard as a predatory lending scheme to buy an empire . Some economic projects in the region already have caught the attention of U.S. national security officials, especially as then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s global campaign to warn allies that Chinese telecommunications infrastructure represented an espionage threat.
“The region is ripe for investment, for engagement, with a partner of China's size in different sectors,” Heritage Foundation research assistant Mateo Haydar said. “And [China is] capitalizing on that in ways that I think we're failing to recognize and at a speed that I think we’re failing to respond to.”
Chinese officials offered a more elaborate preview of their ambitions for the region just a few days before Nicaragua cut ties with Taipei. The China-CELAC ministerial on Dec. 3 culminated in the adoption of a plan not only to tighten economic ties but to enhance “political and security cooperation” while deepening China’s involvement in high-tech spheres — from cyberspace and artificial intelligence to “space science, satellite data sharing, satellite applications, construction of ground infrastructure,” and even nuclear energy.
“There are absolutely ambitions for China to become the dominant influence in Latin America,” Haydar added. “The challenge is comprehensive, and there's absolutely a security and military interest there. ... That threat is growing, and it’s a different kind of threat than what we saw with the Soviet threat.”
10. China to replace US as world's leading empire, says hedge fund star
Excerpts:
He has attracted criticism for a fascination with China, writing in his book of how its policymakers have achieved “remarkable advances”. Is an authoritarian regime becoming the global dominant power not a concern?
Dalio bats away the question: “They wisely believe that occupying and controlling an area is not a good thing because you can’t fight against an indigenous population.”
And what does Dalio see in this turbulent future for post-empire, post-Brexit Britain? Very little of global importance.
Britain will be “not a great world power” but sidelined to the role of a US ally, providing “unique but not especially big support”. Neither, he believes, will the UK be at risk of the same explosive domestic political strife as the US.
“There’s a lot of political tension [in the UK] and pulling in both directions. However, the risks of actually the democratic system breaking down are less than those in the United States.”
Some may think Dalio’s starkest warnings for the US are overblown. But ignore them at your peril: he’s made a lot of money getting it right.
China to replace US as world's leading empire, says hedge fund star
Billionaire Ray Dalio, one of America's richest men, predicts tough times ahead
To make money betting on the future, Ray Dalio delves into the past. As one of America’s richest men, and founder of the world’s biggest hedge fund, being well versed in history has proved lucrative.
“Studying the Great Depression in the 30s allowed me to anticipate the 2008 financial crisis and do very well in it,” says Dalio who, at the age of 72, remains co-chief investment officer of Bridgewater Associates.
If the past can provide valuable insight, then trouble is brewing for the global economy - or so Dalio believes.
He puts the risk of US civil war in the next decade at 30pc, believes stock markets are soon headed for difficult times and predicts the Chinese “empire” will become the dominant global power, leapfrogging America and transforming the geopolitical landscape.
His book, Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order published in November, is a 500-page study of how empires have risen and fallen. The US is the next to decline, according to Dalio, who is starry-eyed about China.
After launching Bridgewater out of his two-bedroom New York apartment at just 26, Dalio himself has amassed a $20bn fortune, according to Forbes, built on spotting big geopolitical and economic trends. It makes him the 36th richest person in America and within the top 100 globally, while Bridgewater still holds the record for hedge fund returns.
Little about Dalio’s first investment, at 12 years old, suggested he was going to become a hedge fund titan managing around $150bn in assets. The son of a jazz musician, he made money as a child doing odd jobs in New York state, including a newspaper round and caddying. The cash made from the latter went towards his first stock market investment.
“I bought a company that was the only company that I’d heard of, that was selling for less than $5 a share,” the somewhat gaunt Dalio says, sitting in front of black and white wallpaper of an opera house. “It was a company that was about to go broke but some other company acquired it, and it tripled. Because it tripled I thought: this game is easy.”
It was a “naive strategy”, Dalio admits, but it got him “hooked on the game”.
Despite admitting he is still hooked, the finance pioneer signalled last September that he will bow out “in a year or two”.
It may come at a good time. Dalio cemented his status on Wall Street by outperforming during the 2008 financial crisis, but coronavirus has proven trickier to navigate.
Bridgewater suffered hefty losses of $12.1bn in 2020, according to LCH Investments, as many other hedge funds shone amid pandemic-induced market volatility. Meanwhile, former co-chief executive Eileen Murray filed a lawsuit against the Connecticut-based hedge fund over compensation, alleging it attempted to “silence her voice”. A settlement was reached in October 2020.
Reports suggest the first half of 2021 proved to be stronger for Bridgewater, however, putting it on track to be in the black for the full year.
According to Dalio’s crystal ball, stock markets are set for a strong 2022, before faltering come 2023.
Powered by huge Covid stimulus, global stocks have come out of the pandemic relatively unscathed - the MSCI World Index has surged 33pc since the start of 2020. Dalio predicts 2022 will be a “transition year” with “less volatility, less up, less down and growing pressures”. But he warns that 2023 will be the “beginning of a more difficult year” as pressures mount on a number of fronts, namely inflation.
While economies in the West are expected to continue a brisk post-Covid recovery in 2022, as long as omicron doesn’t spoil the party, the surge in inflation is becoming a headache for policymakers.
Central banks initially insisted that rapid price rises would be ‘transitory’, yet many now fear inflationary pressures will be more persistent and dangerous. In December the Bank of England and US Federal Reserve took hawkish turns in response to inflation worries, with the former hiking interest rates and the latter quickening the pace of its tapering. The Fed’s rate-setters now forecast six rate rises in the next two years, a sharp increase to tackle inflation that could roil markets.
“Right now stocks have more attractive yields than bonds but as interest rates rise, that’ll begin to squeeze the difference,” Dalio says.
“In 2023 the effects of the stimulation are going to fade so we’re going to have slower growth and more inflation, and that has political consequences.
“We’re in a relatively euphoric period, because of all the money and credit that has been created.”
But that will “wear off” and market conditions will soon “be less good”. When that happens, Dalio adds: “it’ll be difficult for the central banks to be able to balance the economic trade offs with the monetary inflation trade offs at that point in time, and so there’ll be more political conflict too. That’ll be setting itself up for the 2024 [US] elections.”
Pivoting to politics, Dalio warns the next presidential vote will “be the elections in which neither side accepts losing”.
He believes there is a 30pc chance of civil war erupting in America in the next decade, given the huge political polarisation that has poisoned the country, crescendoing in pro-Trump supporters storming Capitol Hill last January.
“In the United States, there’s real reason to believe that the populists of the left and populists of the right are gaining greater control, and will not respect and work toward the common answers, the rules of the game.
“The January 6 incident is only the tip of the picture, so there are significant risks in which rule of law and decision by the courts on how to handle that could be abandoned.”
Dalio’s book estimates that the US is about 70pc through the same rise and fall cycle that previous empires have suffered, such as Britain’s. And, historically speaking, it is time for a new superpower.
The period around the second world war is the last time the investor observes similar conditions that established a new global order and US hegemony: large debts with low interest rates and money printing, big political conflict due to large inequality and the rise of a new world power - this time in China.
At times Dalio sounds in awe of Beijing. Bridgewater manages $5bn in investments for the state and is looking to expand in the world’s second largest economy, according to Bloomberg.
He has attracted criticism for a fascination with China, writing in his book of how its policymakers have achieved “remarkable advances”. Is an authoritarian regime becoming the global dominant power not a concern?
Dalio bats away the question: “They wisely believe that occupying and controlling an area is not a good thing because you can’t fight against an indigenous population.”
And what does Dalio see in this turbulent future for post-empire, post-Brexit Britain? Very little of global importance.
Britain will be “not a great world power” but sidelined to the role of a US ally, providing “unique but not especially big support”. Neither, he believes, will the UK be at risk of the same explosive domestic political strife as the US.
“There’s a lot of political tension [in the UK] and pulling in both directions. However, the risks of actually the democratic system breaking down are less than those in the United States.”
Some may think Dalio’s starkest warnings for the US are overblown. But ignore them at your peril: he’s made a lot of money getting it right.
11. Cyber attack on UK's Defence Academy had 'significant' impact, officer in charge at the time reveals
I think our defense education institutions could be a wealth of information for our adversaries. I wonder if they are given sufficient priority for cyber defense. We should learn from this.
Cyber attack on UK's Defence Academy had 'significant' impact, officer in charge at the time reveals
Air Marshal Edward Stringer, who has since retired, says the "sophisticated" hack on the MOD's Defence Academy in March 2021 had "consequences for operations". He spoke to Sky News for his first television interview since leaving the military.
A cyber attack – possibly by China or Russia – hit the academic arm of the UK's Ministry of Defence and had a "significant" impact, the officer in charge at the time has revealed.
Air Marshal Edward Stringer, who retired from the armed forces in August, said the "sophisticated" hack - discovered last March - prompted the Defence Academy to accelerate plans for its entire network to be rebuilt and made more resilient.
The targeting of an academic institution is a sign of how the frontline in modern warfare can be anywhere, the former director general of the academy told Sky News.
"The consequences for the operations were significant, but then manageable," Air Marshal Stringer said, in his first television interview since leaving the military.
"But only manageable because your people work incredibly hard to keep things going and find back-up methodologies."
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IT staff had to "find back-up ways to use regular internet, etc, etc, to keep the courses going, which we managed to do - but not as slickly as previously, that would be fair".
Image: Air Marshal Edward Stringer says there appeared to be 'nefarious reasons' behind the hack
He said he did not know whether criminals or a hostile state were responsible, but a primary concern had been if the hackers had tried to use the Defence Academy as a "backdoor" to penetrate much more secret parts of the MOD's IT systems.
Asked whether the cyber spies had been successful, Air Marshal Stringer said: "No, I was quite confident... that there hadn't been any other breaches beyond the Defence Academy."
It is the first time a senior - albeit now former - official has spoken on the record about the cyber attack and its impact on the academy, which is based in Shrivenham, Oxfordshire, and teaches thousands of British and overseas military officers every year.
"It doesn't look like a violent attack, but there were costs," said Air Marshal Stringer, who also held the title of director general of joint force development, leading the military's thinking on the future of warfare and how the armed forces need to adapt.
"There were costs to... operational output. There were opportunity costs in what our staff could have been doing when they were having to repair this damage. And what could we be spending the money on that we've had to bring forward to rebuild the network? There are not bodies in the streets, but there's still been some damage done."
The digital branch of the MOD launched an investigation into the cyber attack but any results - such as who was behind it - have not been made public.
The National Cyber Security Centre, a branch of GCHQ, was also made aware of the hack.
Sky News understands that a hostile state such as China or Russia is suspected, though it could also have been the work of criminals.
Asked who he suspected, Air Marshal Stringer noted that states like China, Russia, Iran and North Korea have the capability to launch such a hack in what is seen as a grey zone of harm under the threshold of war.
"It could be any of those or it could just be someone trying to find a vulnerability for a ransomware attack that was just, you know, a genuine criminal organisation," he said.
The Defence Academy, based on a sprawling campus, teaches about 28,000 military personnel, diplomats and civil servants a year.
Any British officer moving up through the ranks will spend at least a year on a course at the academy - returning if they plan to rise to the top echelons of the armed forces.
Image: British officers spend at least a year at the academy
The academy's IT infrastructure, including its website, is managed by Serco, an outsourcing company. Its contractors first spotted some "unusual activity" one weekend last March.
They soon realised there were "external agents on our network who looked like they were there for what looked pretty quickly like nefarious reasons", Air Marshal Stringer said.
"Alarm bells rang, and at that point, we start to really dive in and see what's going on."
He said that the academy was immediately alert to the possibility that it might have been targeted by a hostile state in a grey zone-style cyber attack.
However, not all parts of the MOD seemed as quick to appreciate what might be going on, perhaps initially wondering instead whether it was just an IT problem.
"Moving from the analogue and the industrial age to the information age, there are three tipping points," Air Marshal Stringer said.
"There is a tipping point in the thinking, tipping point in the talking and then the tipping point in the doing, including everybody's instinctive reactions. I think generally we're somewhere between those latter two."
As well as concerns about whether the hack had breached the wider MOD network, there were also worries about the security of personal data.
However, no particularly sensitive information is thought to be stored on the academy's network.
Teachers and students were impacted though as the IT infrastructure - the equivalent of the online domain for a university - had to be examined and then ultimately rebuilt, a task yet to be finished.
This was particularly disruptive as even more study material than normal had been moved online because of the pandemic.
A tag on the Defence Academy's website still reads: "New website coming soon... please bear with us while we continue to update our site."
The MOD did not respond to questions about who it thought was responsible for the hack.
A spokesperson said: "In March 2021 we were made aware of an incident impacting the Defence Academy IT infrastructure. We took swift action and there was no impact on the wider Ministry of Defence IT network. Teaching at the Defence Academy has continued."
12. Pirates: The US Military's Big Plan to Beat China In a War?
Excerpts:
The concept of issuing letters of marque to American privateers was recently discussed by retired Marine Colonel Mark Cancian and Brandon Schwartz in the U.S. Naval Institute’s publication, “Proceedings.” Although the idea seems almost ridiculous in the 21st Century, the legal framework outlined by Cancian and Schwartz is sound, and one could argue that their assertions about the viability and strategic value of privateer fleets are as well.
Cancian and Schwartz argue that privateering is not piracy, as there are laws governing it and precedent for the practice established in past U.S. conflicts, including the American Revolutionary War and the War of 1812.
“Privateering is not piracy—there are rules and commissions, called letters of marque, that governments issue to civilians, allowing them to capture or destroy enemy ships. The U.S. Constitution expressly grants Congress the power to issue them (Article I, section 8, clause 11).”
-“Unleash the Privateers!” In Proceedings
However, despite their argument being technically right, it’s difficult to dismiss how the piracy narrative would almost certainly affect public perception of the use of privateers, and potentially even the conflict at large.
Pirates: The US Military's Big Plan to Beat China In a War?
Pirates, or what many call privateers, could help defeat China: After nearly two decades of counter-terror operations the world over, the United States military is now shifting its focus back toward great power competition with the likes of China and Russia. Unfortunately, as is so often the case, the past two decades have left the U.S. military particularly well suited for the Global War on Terror, but not very well positioned for the wars that are feasibly to come.
During this era of counter-terror operations, China has had the opportunity to seek higher degrees of technological and tactical parity, while having the benefit of not being actively engaged in expensive combat operations on the same scale. That has allowed China’s sea-faring power to grow at an exponential rate in recent years, with an active fleet of more than 770 vessels sailing under the banners of the People’s Liberation Army-Navy, their militarized Coast Guard, and a maritime miitia that takes its orders from the Chinese military as well.
The addition of China’s massive ballistic missile stockpile, including hypersonic anti-ship platforms the U.S. Navy currently has no means to defend against, has further established China’s advantage in the Pacific. Even if the U.S. Navy leveraged every vessel in its 293-ship fleet, American forces would still be outnumbered by Chinese ships by more than two to one. Importantly, however, the United States likely couldn’t devote its entire fleet to any single conflict due to its global commitments to security and stability, especially regarding essential shipping lanes.
Today, the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps are both actively seeking ways to mitigate China’s numbers advantage, as well as the area-denial bubble created by China’s anti-ship platforms. Multiple possible solutions are being explored, ranging from hot-loading Marine Corps F-35Bs on austere airstrips on captured islands in the case of the Marines, to the Navy’s ongoing development of the MQ-25 aerial refueling drone that aims to extend the reach of America’s carrier-based fighters. Still, thus far, there has been no magic bullet. In fact, concerns about a near-peer conflict with China has even prompted several high-ranking defense officials to question the practicality of America’s fleet of super-carriers, both because of their immense cost, and because of the likelihood that they could be sunk by China’s hypersonic missiles long before they could get close enough to Chinese shores to begin launching sorties of F-35Cs and F/A-18 Super Hornets.
The fundamental challenges a war with China would present are clear: Finding a way to mitigate the risks posed by advanced anti-ship missiles and offsetting the significant numbers advantage Chinese forces would have within the region. In the past, we’ve discussed the possibility of arming commercial cargo ships with modular weapons systems in a “missile barge” fleet as a means to bolster American numbers and capabilities. Another feasible option that could even work in conjunction with this strategy would be issuing “letters of marque” to private operations, effectively allowing non-military forces to serve as privateers for the U.S. government.
American Privateers or Pirates?
The concept of issuing letters of marque to American privateers was recently discussed by retired Marine Colonel Mark Cancian and Brandon Schwartz in the U.S. Naval Institute’s publication, “Proceedings.” Although the idea seems almost ridiculous in the 21st Century, the legal framework outlined by Cancian and Schwartz is sound, and one could argue that their assertions about the viability and strategic value of privateer fleets are as well.
Cancian and Schwartz argue that privateering is not piracy, as there are laws governing it and precedent for the practice established in past U.S. conflicts, including the American Revolutionary War and the War of 1812.
“Privateering is not piracy—there are rules and commissions, called letters of marque, that governments issue to civilians, allowing them to capture or destroy enemy ships. The U.S. Constitution expressly grants Congress the power to issue them (Article I, section 8, clause 11).”
-“Unleash the Privateers!” In Proceedings
However, despite their argument being technically right, it’s difficult to dismiss how the piracy narrative would almost certainly affect public perception of the use of privateers, and potentially even the conflict at large.
While the United States could argue that privateers operate with specifically outlined rules and commissions, even the American public would likely see American privateers as pirates. And because America has found itself trailing behind nations like China and Russia in terms of manipulating public narratives, that narrative could indeed hurt not only public support for the conflict; it could even jeopardize some international relationships.
Privateers are not pirates in the literal sense only because a government is sanctioning their piracy. In the eyes of those who don’t recognize America’s authority to grant such permissions in far-flung waterways, the two terms would be interchangeable.
Regardless of vernacular, the United States has used this approach to great success in the past. Although the last time American privateers set sale was more than 200 years ago, their approach was modern enough to set precedent for a return to the concept.
“The privateering business was thoroughly modern and capitalistic, with ownership consortiums to split investment costs and profits or losses, and a group contract to incentivize the crew, who were paid only if their ship made profits. A sophisticated set of laws ensured that the capture was ‘good prize,’ and not fraud or robbery. After the courts determined that a merchant ship was a legitimate capture, auctioneers sold off her cargo of coffee, rum, wine, food, hardware, china, or similar consumer goods, which ultimately were bought and consumed by Americans.”
In the event of a large-scale conflict with a nation like China, that potential narrative blowback may be a necessary evil. However, the ramifications of that evil could be mitigated through a concerted narrative effort to frame privateer actions in the minds of the populous as an essential part of a broader war effort that has the American people’s best interests in mind.
In the War of 1812, privateering saw such public support (in large part thanks to the profits it drove) that some took to calling the conflict the “War of the People.” Managing the narrative surrounding American privateers could make the concept far more palatable to the American people.
As for the legal aspects of privateering, you can read a thorough legal justification for the practice in a separate piece written by Schwartz called “U.S. Privateering is legal.”
The role of American privateers at war
China’s massive fleet of vessels in the Pacific can be broken down into their three command groups, all of which ultimately answer to China’s People’s Liberation Army. China’s maritime militia accounts for approximately 300 vessels, the militarized Coast Guard has 135 more, and the PLA-Navy itself boasts an ever-growing roster expected to reach 450 surface vessels by the end of the decade.
In the event of a war with China, the American Navy would have more than its hands full engaging with such a massive force, limiting its ability to cut China off from one of its most significant revenue sources, overseas trade. China’s reliance on shipping products to other nations has helped its economy grow rapidly, but it also represents a strategic disadvantage, as Cancian and Schwartz point out, if America can find the means to disrupt this exchange.
“Thirty-eight percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) comes from trade, against only 9 percent of U.S. GDP. Chinese social stability is built on a trade-off: The Chinese Communist Party has told the people they will not have democratic institutions, but they will receive economic prosperity.”
-“Unleash the Privateers!” In Proceedings
In 2018, China’s merchant fleet was already approaching 2,200 total vessels, thanks to massive external demand for inexpensive Chinese exports. America’s Navy would likely be stretched too thin to actually blockade such an expansive merchant fleet. Like with aircraft, America’s preference for large and expensive ships that are capable of fulfilling multiple roles has offered increased capability but significantly decreased numbers. At its peak during World War II, the U.S. Navy boasted more than 6,000 ships. Today, the Navy has 293 far more capable vessels, but none can be in more than one place at a time.
American Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyers, for instance, are too big and expensive to task with waiting out Chinese ships hiding in foreign ports, and would likely largely be assigned to Aegis missile defense operations. This is where American privateers could offer an important service.
American privateers wouldn’t be tasked with engaging the Chinese Navy or even with sinking merchant ships. Instead, they would be tasked with capturing Chinese cargo vessels, offering them a multi-million dollar bounty on each, and quickly compromising China’s ability to sustain its export sales.
“Since the goal is to capture the hulls and cargo, privateers do not want to sink the vessel, just convince the crew to surrender. How many merchant crews would be inclined to fight rather than surrender and spend the war in comfortable internment?”
-“Unleash the Privateers!” In Proceedings
Of course, despite Cancian and Schwartz’ dismissive take on how apt Chinese crews would be to fight to maintain control of their ships, it’s important to remember that these privateers would likely be engaging in close-quarters fighting with Chinese crews or security on board. As American privateers proved more costly to the Chinese government, an increased emphasis on protecting these cargo ships would almost certainly follow.
This begs an essential question: Where do you find privateer crews?
Private infrastructure already exists
While the concept of American privateers seems borderline fantastical, the truth is, the United States has already leveraged the premise of using non-military personnel for security and defensive operations the world over. American security firm Blackwater (now Academi) is perhaps the highest-profile example of America’s use of private military contractors. In fact, contractors in Iraq have reached numbers as high as 160,000 at some points, nearly equaling the total number of U.S. military personnel in the region. At least 20,000 of those private contractors filled armed security roles.
So while the term “privateer” or even pirate suggests an entirely unconventional approach to modern warfare, the premise is already in play. Terminology may dictate perception to a significant degree, but in practice, privateering wouldn’t be all that different from existing relationships the United States maintains with private security outfits. Further, private security firms, including Blackwater, have already operated at sea in a similar manner to privateers, from Blackwater’s armed patrol craft policing Somali pirates off the Horn of Africa to countless armed and privately owned boats patrolling the Indian Ocean today.
Many such organizations, with existing infrastructure and established relationships with the U.S. government, would likely seek and win contracts, or letters of marque, in the early days of a burgeoning Sino-American war, and stand up their own forces far more quickly than the United States could expand its naval force in the same volume. Rather than building ships and enlisting crews, the United States could simply authorize existing ships with existing crews to go on the offensive against China’s commercial fleets.
The American government’s experience with military contractors throughout the War on Terror means these relationships would not be as without precedent as they may seem, and the existing private military industry would make American privateers a quick and effective means to grow America’s offensive capabilities.
A complicated solution to a complex problem
Of course, there are many variables at play when discussing a future conflict with China. Incorporating privateers into such a strategy admittedly seems rather extreme from our vantage point in 2020, but it’s important to note that there is no precedent for what something like a 21st Century Sino-American war might look like. The massive sea battles of World War II may offer some sense of scale, but the rapid advancement of technology in the intervening decades creates a hypothetical war that is simply incongruous with the World War II models.
America does boast the largest and most powerful military in the world, but China’s rapidly expanding and modernizing force has not been growing in a vacuum. From space operations to warship construction, China has been developing its war-fighting apparatus with America specifically in mind. China isn’t interested in competing with the United States on its terms and instead has been focused on identifying potential American vulnerabilities and tailoring new capabilities to leverage those flaws.
Large scale warfare between technological and economic giants would play out differently than any conflict we’ve ever seen. In order to emerge from such a conflict successfully, America has to do much more than win. Once the price of victory begins to compromise America’s ability to sustain its way of life thereafter, that victory becomes less pronounced.
In order to win in such a conflict, the United States will need to dig deep into its bag of tricks. On the home front, it would mean finding ways to rapidly expand America’s industrial base to replenish vehicles, supplies, and equipment as they’re expended or destroyed on the front lines. The U.S. Navy, Marine Corps, Army, Air Force, and Space Force will all be required to communicate and rely on one another in ways never before accomplished on a battlefield.
And China’s massive numbers advantage would have to be mitigated somehow. American privateers, or pirates as the press would surely call them, might just do the trick.
Alex Hollings is a writer, dad, and Marine veteran who specializes in foreign policy and defense technology analysis. He holds a master’s degree in Communications from Southern New Hampshire University, as well as a bachelor’s degree in Corporate and Organizational Communications from Framingham State University. This first appeared in Sandboxx News.
13. Why Moscow Sees Biden As the Key to Avoiding War in Ukraine
Excerpt:
All of this would come as a bitter pill to Ukraine itself. But neither Europe nor the United States appears to have much of an appetite for engaging in protracted economic and military standoff with Russia over Ukraine. The last thing that Biden needs is a Russian invasion of Ukraine that would drive up oil prices and add to the sense of siege surrounding his presidency. In coming weeks, he may well seek to score a diplomatic success abroad.
Why Moscow Sees Biden As the Key to Avoiding War in Ukraine
Can Biden pull off a diplomatic coup that bolsters his sagging political fortunes?
Has President Joe Biden become Russia’s most trusted foreign interlocutor? Donald Trump was widely portrayed as the Kremlin’s cat’s-paw by the Western media, but he proved to be erratic and unreliable in foreign affairs, careening almost daily from bombastic threats to emollient language. Enter Biden.
When it comes to Russia policy, Biden has sought to promote what might be called détente-lite with Moscow without using the dreaded word “reset.” The governing theory of the Biden administration—or, to put it more precisely, national security adviser Jake Sullivan—has been that China, not Russia, poses the gravest foreign policy challenge to America. In the Interim National Security Strategic Guidance, the White House mentioned China fifteen times, Russia five, and Ukraine not at all. Biden himself is working through the National Security Council (NSC) to attempt to craft a new policy towards Moscow. Biden, in other words, is the Decider.
This is why Russian president Vladimir Putin requested a second phone conversation with Biden. The Russians believe that absent Biden’s personal involvement any potential progress would likely be sabotaged by the State Department bureaucracy, which is highly sympathetic to Ukraine. Indeed, at a recent foreign ministry meeting, Russian sources indicate, Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov specifically referenced Biden—to praise his positive role in dealing with the Ukraine crisis.
No doubt the official rhetoric between the two sides remains fierce. Russian ambassador Anatoly Antonov warned in a recent Foreign Policy piece, “European security is at a crossroads.” Biden warned Putin that there would be a “heavy price to pay” should Moscow invade Ukraine, while Putin spoke of a potential “complete rupture” in relations. What’s more, on Sunday Biden intends to talk with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. According to the White House, he will “reaffirm U.S. support for Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.”
In some instances, however, the divide between Moscow and Washington may not be all that stark. Moscow’s concerns do not center on military supplies that the West is sending to Ukraine, including helicopters that were diverted from Afghanistan or the prospect of bolstering the Ukrainian Navy. All these things were already in the pipeline. Then there is the issue of medium-range missiles. In his Foreign Policy essay, Antonov wrote, “It is important that Washington joins the Russian unilateral moratorium on the deployment of ground-based intermediate-range missiles. Our proposals to withdraw exercise areas from the Russia-NATO contact line as well as those aimed at increasing the predictability of actions and reducing dangerous military activities require serious consideration.” But once again, there may be less than meets the eye. The blunt fact is that the Biden administration currently has no plans to emplace such missiles in Ukraine.
The real crux of the issue is Russia’s demand not to bring any new neighbors, including Ukraine and Georgia, into NATO. Biden says he is not publicly negotiating, but on the issue of NATO enlargement, there doesn’t seem to be much, if any, progress. The key question will be how central this issue is to Putin. If it is central, there doesn’t seem to be potential for a deal.
Or is there? Sometimes negotiations can take on a momentum of their own—and the risks of actually invading Ukraine are clear to Putin, who has never been a foreign policy gambler but always a shrewd opportunist. To some degree, Putin has already scored a victory by forcing the administration to accede to his demand for successive calls with Biden. Now three upcoming diplomatic parleys will take place. Biden’s goal will not be to propitiate Putin but to allay his vociferously expressed national security concerns.
One possible road ahead might center on an “Austrian solution” for Ukraine. After World War II, Austria, like Germany, was occupied by the four powers. But in May 1955, the Soviet Union signed the Austrian Independence Treaty guaranteeing its neutrality and withdrew its troops. Austria became a buffer state between East and West. Just as Austria officially sacrificed South Tyrol, so would Ukraine have to renounce its claims to Crimea. If Putin is willing to accede to Ukrainian neutrality rather than attempting to transform it into a puppet state or claim full suzerainty over it, then the Austrian model might serve as a possible solution to the vexed status of Ukraine.
All of this would come as a bitter pill to Ukraine itself. But neither Europe nor the United States appears to have much of an appetite for engaging in protracted economic and military standoff with Russia over Ukraine. The last thing that Biden needs is a Russian invasion of Ukraine that would drive up oil prices and add to the sense of siege surrounding his presidency. In coming weeks, he may well seek to score a diplomatic success abroad.
Jacob Heilbrunn is the editor of the National Interest.
Image: Reuters
14. Bashar Assad’s Dangerous Game
Excerpts:
Israel has remarkable achievements in damaging Iran’s military build-up in Syria, but in order to displace Iran from Syria, Israel and the West need the cooperation of Assad, who does not want to, and even if he were willing, it will be very difficult for him to break free from the Iranian embrace.
Israeli security officials say that Assad is playing a “dangerous game” by allowing Iran and Hezbollah to continue their military build-up in Syria. Israel will continue to fight this phenomenon with all its might.
According to them, the attacks on the container terminal in Latakia weaken Assad’s stature. The port was considered one of the safest strongholds of the Alawite community, but Israeli bombings also undermine its commercial activities, including smuggling and the import of basic commodities.
Israel’s struggle against Iran’s military build-up in Syria appears to be a long one, even though it has great achievements so far.
Bashar Assad’s Dangerous Game
by Yoni Ben Menachem / JNS.org
Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad addresses the new members of parliament in Damascus, Syria in this handout released by SANA on August 12, 2020. Photo: SANA/Handout via REUTERS
JNS.org – The resumption of nuclear talks in Vienna between Iran and world powers does not appear to affect Israel, which continues its actions to curb Iran’s militarily entrenchment in Syria and transfer of advanced weapons to Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Syrian media on Dec. 28 accused Israel of a second attack that month on the container terminal in Syria’s port of Latakia. The official Syrian news agency, SANA, claimed that the attack was carried out by missiles launched by Israeli Air Force planes flying over the Mediterranean. The commercial container complex in Latakia Port was bombed, causing “significant material damage” and fires, Syrian media reported.
Earlier in December, Syria also blamed Israel for attacking Latakia, the largest naval port in the country. Syrian state TV reported on Dec. 7 that Israel had attacked the port’s container terminal with missiles and claimed that Syria’s air-defense systems had been activated and intercepted most of them.
The SANA news agency also reported at that time that the attack caused fires in several containers in the port, but that there were no casualties. This was the first time Syria accused Israel of attacking the naval port of Latakia, Lebanese commentators said, noting that it was an attack on advanced weapons that came to Syria from Iran for Hezbollah. So far, the Syrians have accused Israel of attacking airports and land routes in the country several times.
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Iranian-reserved areas at Damascus International Airport have been frequent targets. On Nov. 24, Syria accused Israel of attacking targets in the central city of Homs, killing two civilians and wounding six Syrian soldiers.
Foreign officials confirmed the Israeli airstrikes on the port of Latakia, saying sensitive weapons, such as components of Hezbollah’s medium-range missile-precision project, had been delivered by Iran to Syria by sea.
This is the 11th attack in the last month-and-a-half that is also intended to send a message to the Syrian president.
Under terms of a Russian-Israeli “deconfliction agreement,” Moscow was updated on the attack shortly before it was carried out. The Russians have large naval and air bases nearby in Hmeimim and Latakia. Syrian sources charge that the Russians’ powerful radars and anti-aircraft batteries “did not move,”1 and anger is being expressed by Syrian commentators.
The city of Latakia is the capital of the Alawite community to which President Bashar Assad belongs.
Israel’s defense plan
Israel apparently chooses to attack the shipments from Iran as soon as they reach land in Syria to avoid a naval war with Iran.
The outgoing head of the Israel Defense Forces’ Military Intelligence Department, Maj. Gen. Tamir Hayman, claimed that Israel had succeeded in “preventing the Iranians from trying to take root in Syria.”
In an interview on Dec. 2 with the Journal of Intelligence and Security Affairs at the Center for Intelligence Heritage, Hayman explained: “We have carried out a great deal of operations and disruptions of the transfer of money and weapons. The highlight of these efforts is preventing the Iranians from trying to take root in Syria.”
However, the attack on the Latakia Port indicates that there is still much work to be done to prevent Iran’s military build-up in Syria. The Iranians continue the transfer of weapons to Hezbollah by land, air and sea. Clearly, Assad has not internalized the Israeli message.
Al-Sharq al-Awsat reported on Dec. 26 that Hezbollah had increased its military presence in the Syrian desert, dozens of kilometers east of the city of Homs. In recent days, dozens of Hezbollah vehicles and a large number of its operatives were seen at five sites and military positions in the area.
Has Iran overstayed its welcome in Syria?
In November, the Saudi news channel Al Hadath reported on an unprecedented rift between Assad and Tehran.2
According to the report, Assad expelled the commander of the Quds Force of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in Syria, Gen. Javad Ghaffari, in light of his activities against the United States and Israel and due to his financial corruption.
Ghaffari “became a liability,” an official Syrian source told the publication Al-Monitor. “The time has changed, and he still wants to act as per the rules of [the civil] war, when the war is almost over. … [H]e was regarded by the Syrian regime and the Russians as a troublemaker who was not ready to compromise his power and influence for any price.”3
According to an Al Hadath source inside the Syrian regime, Damascus expressed outrage at the “over-activity” of the pro-Iranian militias, apparently in operations against the US and Israel, and claimed that the Iranian general’s conduct violated Syria’s sovereignty.
The source also claimed that the general had admitted to his Syrian counterparts that he had ordered weapons and people to be deployed in places where the Syrian regime had explicitly banned it.
According to the source, the Syrians were outraged by the commerce conducted by the heads of the pro-Iranian militias on the black market. They are taking advantage of Syria’s economic woes and the severe shortage of basic goods in the country in order to enrich the coffers of the organizations and their commanders.
The source added that the militias used Syria’s natural resources to systematically fill their pockets with money.
Optimism about a change in Syria’s orientation is premature
Excitement over a Syrian reorientation is premature, with Assad unwilling to surrender Iran’s military and economic aid, which has helped him throughout the country’s civil war beginning in 2011.
The assessment at the top of the Syrian regime is that despite the assistance of the Russian military, Assad would not last in power without Iranian assistance. He will not forego it.
The Syrian regime relies on Iranian militias to ensure its control over large parts of Syria that are difficult to access, making Iranian militias the tip of the spear for Assad’s regime.
The Iranians managed to seep into the command ranks of the Syrian Army’s Fourth Division, headed by Maher al-Assad, the president’s brother, who is considered the executive arm of the Iranian agenda in Syria.
Iran has a military and economic stake in Syria and does not intend to leave it, to the disappointment of both Israel and Russia, which feel that Iranian activity is also harming their interests.
Israel has remarkable achievements in damaging Iran’s military build-up in Syria, but in order to displace Iran from Syria, Israel and the West need the cooperation of Assad, who does not want to, and even if he were willing, it will be very difficult for him to break free from the Iranian embrace.
Israeli security officials say that Assad is playing a “dangerous game” by allowing Iran and Hezbollah to continue their military build-up in Syria. Israel will continue to fight this phenomenon with all its might.
According to them, the attacks on the container terminal in Latakia weaken Assad’s stature. The port was considered one of the safest strongholds of the Alawite community, but Israeli bombings also undermine its commercial activities, including smuggling and the import of basic commodities.
Israel’s struggle against Iran’s military build-up in Syria appears to be a long one, even though it has great achievements so far.
Yoni Ben Menachem, a veteran Arab affairs and diplomatic commentator for Israel Radio and Television, is a senior Middle East analyst for the Jerusalem Center. He served as director general and chief editor of the Israel Broadcasting Authority.
15. Conspiracy theories paint fraudulent reality of Jan. 6 riot
The reality is by all definitions of the word an insurrection took place.
Conspiracy theories paint fraudulent reality of Jan. 6 riot | AP News
AP · by DAVID KLEPPER · January 1, 2022
January 1, 2022 GMT
Millions of Americans watched the events in Washington last Jan. 6 unfold on live television. Police officers testified to the violence and mayhem. Criminal proceedings in open court detailed what happened.
Yet the hoaxes, conspiracy theories and attempts to rewrite history persist, muddying the public’s understanding of what actually occurred during the most sustained attack on the seat of American democracy since the War of 1812.
By excusing former President Donald Trump of responsibility, minimizing the mob’s violence and casting the rioters as martyrs, falsehoods about the insurrection aim to deflect blame for Jan. 6 while sustaining Trump’s unfounded claims about the free and fair election in 2020 that he lost.
Spread by politicians, broadcast by cable news pundits and amplified by social media, the falsehoods are a stark reminder of how many Americans may no longer trust their own institutions or their own eyes.
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Several different conspiracy theories have emerged in the year since the insurrection, according to an analysis of online content by media intelligence firm Zignal Labs on behalf of The Associated Press. Unfounded claims that the rioters were members of antifa went viral first, only to be overtaken by a baseless claim blaming FBI operatives. Other theories say the rioters were peaceful and were framed for crimes that never happened.
Conspiracy theories have long lurked in the background of American history, said Dustin Carnahan, a Michigan State University professor who studies political misinformation. But they can become dangerous when they lead people to distrust democracy or to excuse or embrace violence.
“If we’re no longer operating from the same foundation of facts, then it’s going to be a lot harder to have conversations as a country,” Carnahan said. “It will fuel more divisions in our country, and I think that ultimately is the legacy of the misinformation we’re seeing right now.”
An examination of some of the top falsehoods about the Capitol riot and the people who have spread them:
CLAIM: THE RIOTERS WEREN’T TRUMP SUPPORTERS
In fact, many of those who came to the Capitol on Jan. 6 have said — proudly, publicly, repeatedly — that they did so to help the then-president.
Different versions of the claim suggest they were FBI operatives or members of the anti-fascist movement antifa.
“Earlier today, the Capitol was under siege by people who can only be described as antithetical to the MAGA movement,” Laura Ingraham said on her Fox News show the night of Jan. 6, referring to Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan. “They were likely not all Trump supporters, and there are some reports that antifa sympathizers may have been sprinkled throughout the crowd.”
The next day, Ingraham acknowledged the inaccuracy when she tweeted a link to a story debunking the claim.
Another Fox host, Tucker Carlson, has spread the idea that the FBI orchestrated the riot. He cites as evidence the indictments of some Jan. 6 suspects that mention unindicted co-conspirators, a common legal term that merely refers to suspects who haven’t been charged, and not evidence of undercover agents or informants.
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Yet Carlson claimed on his show that “in potentially every single case, they were FBI operatives.”
Carlson is a “main driver” of the idea that Jan. 6 was perpetrated by agents of the government, according to Zignal’s report. It found the claim spiked in October when Carlson released a documentary series about the insurrection.
Members of Congress, including Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., have helped spread the theories.
“Some of the people who breached the Capitol today were not Trump supporters, they were masquerading as Trump supporters and, in fact, were members of the violent terrorist group antifa,” Gaetz said.
Spokespeople for Carlson and Gaetz say they stand by their claims.
One was a recently elected state lawmaker from West Virginia, a Republican Trump supporter named Derrick Evans who resigned following his arrest. Evans streamed video of himself illegally entering the Capitol.
“They’re making an announcement now saying if Pence betrays us you better get your mind right because we’re storming the building,” Evans said on the video. “The door is cracked! … We’re in, we’re in! Derrick Evans is in the Capitol!” Vice President Mike Pence was in the building to preside over the Senate’s certification of Democrat Joe Biden’s election victory. Pence went ahead despite Trump’s pleas to get Pence to block the transfer of power.
During testimony before Congress, FBI Director Christopher Wray was asked whether there was any reason to believe the insurrection was organized by “fake Trump protesters.”
“We have not seen evidence of that,” said Wray, who was appointed by Trump.
___
CLAIM: THE RIOTERS WEREN’T VIOLENT
Dozens of police officers were severely injured. One Capitol Police officer who was attacked and assaulted with bear spray suffered a stroke and died a day later of natural causes.
Former Metropolitan Police Officer Michael Fanone, who rushed to the scene, said he was “grabbed, beaten, tased, all while being called a traitor to my country.” The assault stopped only when he said he had children. He later learned he had suffered a heart attack. Fanone resigned from the department in December 2021.
Rioters broke into the Senate chamber minutes after senators had fled under armed protection. They rifled through desks and looked for lawmakers, yelling, “Where are they?” In House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office, staffers hid under desks while rioters called out the name of the California Democrat.
That’s not how some Republican politicians have described the insurrection.
Appearing on Ingraham’s show in May, Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., said he condemned the Capitol breach as well as the violence, but said it was wrong to term it an insurrection.
“By and large it was a peaceful protest, except for there were a number of people, basically agitators, that whipped the crowd and breached the Capitol,” Johnson said.
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Johnson has since said that he doesn’t want the violent actions of a few to be used to impugn all.
Rep. Andrew Clyde, after watching video footage of rioters walking through the Capitol, said it resembled a “normal tourist visit.” Other video evidence from Jan. 6 showed Clyde, R-Ga., helping barricade the House doors in an attempt to keep the rioters out.
Rioters also broke windows and doors, stole items from offices and caused an estimated $1.5 million in damage. Outside the Capitol someone set up a gallows with a noose.
“The notion that this was somehow a tourist event is disgraceful and despicable,” Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., said in May. “And, you know, I won’t be part of whitewashing what happened on Jan. 6. Nobody should be part of it. And people ought to be held accountable.”
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CLAIM: TRUMP DID NOT ENCOURAGE THE RIOTERS
Trump may now want to minimize his involvement, but he spent months sounding a steady drumbeat of conspiracy theory and grievance, urging his followers to fight to somehow return him to power.
“Big protest in D.C. on January 6th,” Trump tweeted on Dec. 19, 2020. “Be there, will be wild!”
Immediately before the mob stormed the Capitol, Trump spoke for more than an hour, telling his supporters they had been “cheated” and “defrauded” in the “rigged” election by a “criminal enterprise” that included lawmakers who were now meeting in the Capitol.
At one point, Trump did urge his supporters to “peacefully and patriotically make your voice heard.” The rest of his speech was filled with hostile rhetoric.
“We fight. We fight like hell,” he told those who would later break into the Capitol. “And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”
Now, Trump says he had nothing to do with the riot.
“I wasn’t involved in that, and if you look at my words and what I said in the speech, they were extremely calming actually,” Trump said on Fox News in December.
Nearly two-thirds of Americans believe Trump bears some responsibility for the Capitol breach, according to a survey last year by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
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CLAIM: ASHLI BABBITT WAS KILLED BY AN OFFICER WORKING FOR DEMOCRATS
Babbitt died after being shot in the shoulder by a lieutenant in the Capitol Police force as she and others pressed to enter the Speaker’s Lobby outside the House chamber.
The Capitol Police Department protects all members of Congress, as well as employees, the public and Capitol facilities. The officer wasn’t assigned to any particular lawmaker.
Trump falsely claimed the officer was the head of security “for a certain high official, a Democrat,” and was being shielded from accountability. He also misstated where Babbitt was shot.
“Who is the person that shot ... an innocent, wonderful, incredible woman, a military woman, right in the head?” Trump asked on Fox News.
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CLAIM: THE JAN. 6 SUSPECTS ARE POLITICAL PRISONERS AND ARE BEING MISTREATED
No, they are not, despite some assertions from members of Congress.
“J6 defendants are political prisoners of war,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., tweeted in November. She said she had visited some suspects in jail who complained about the food, medical care and “re-education” they were receiving in custody.
Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., said the Justice Department was “harassing peaceful patriots” by investigating their involvement in the insurrection.
While it’s true some of the suspects have complained about their time in jail, it’s wrong to argue they’re being held as political prisoners. Authorities have said the suspects in custody are being given the same access to food and medical care as any other inmate.
One of the most notorious rioters, Jacob Chansley, known as the QAnon Shaman, was given organic food in his jail cell after he complained about the food options.
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AP · by DAVID KLEPPER · January 1, 2022
16. Majority of Americans think Jan. 6 attack threatened democracy: POLL
Unfortunately the majority is not large enough.
Majority of Americans think Jan. 6 attack threatened democracy: POLL
Most Americans condemn it and believe Trump is at least partially to blame.
January 2, 2022, 9:09 AM
• 5 min read
Nearly a year after the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, a strong majority of Americans condemn it and believe former President Donald Trump is at least partially to blame. But partisan splits have hardened over time, with Republicans still largely backing Trump's version of events, a new ABC/Ipsos poll finds.
An overwhelming majority (72%) of Americans believe the people involved in the attack on the Capitol were "threatening democracy," while 1 in 4 Americans believes that the individuals involved were "protecting democracy." Broken down by party identification, Democrats are nearly unanimous (96%) in believing that those involved in the attacks were threatening democracy. Republicans are more split, with 45% saying it was a threat and 52% saying those involved in the riot were "protecting democracy."
The ABC/Ipsos poll, which was conducted by Ipsos in partnership with ABC News using Ipsos' KnowledgePanel, also shows strongly aligned views among Democrats regarding Trump's responsibility for the attack, with 91% believing Trump bears either "a great deal" or "a good amount" of responsibility for it. On the other hand, a strong majority (78%) of Republicans believe the former president bears "just some" or no responsibility for the day's events.
Jose Luis Magana/AP, FILE
Insurrectionists loyal to President Donald Trump climb the west wall of the Capitol, Jan. 6, 2021.
These figures are strikingly consistent with polling taken in the immediate aftermath of Jan. 6, despite efforts by Trump to recast the narrative and block the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack from obtaining records from his administration.
Overall, in this poll, 58% of Americans think Trump bears a "great deal" or a "good amount" of responsibility for the events, unchanged from an ABC News/Washington Post poll conducted on Jan. 13, 2021, in which 57% of Americans said he was responsible.
Trump has since defended his perceived involvement, claiming as recently as this month in an interview with Fox News that a speech he gave on the National Mall preceding the attack was "extremely calming." He also maintains that what transpired was not an insurrection but rather a "protest."
Trump's persistent and baseless claim that the election was stolen from him doesn't appear to be changing minds with Americans, according to this ABC/Ipsos poll.
John Minchillo/AP, FILE
Insurrectionists loyal to President Donald Trump swarm the Capitol, Jan. 6, 2021.
Sixty-five percent of Americans believe Biden's victory in the 2020 election was legitimate, which is similar to the results of a January 2021 ABC News/Ipsos poll (68%). Nearly all Democrats -- 93% -- think the election results were legitimate while most Republicans do not. Among Republicans, 71% sided with Trump's false claims that he was the rightful winner.
This ABC News/Ipsos poll was conducted using Ipsos Public Affairs' KnowledgePanel® Dec. 27 to 29, 2021, in English and Spanish, among a random national sample of 982 adults with oversamples of Black and Hispanic respondents. Results have a margin of sampling error of 3.5 points, including the design effect. Partisan divisions are 29-25-36%, Democrats-Republicans-independents. See the poll's topline results and details on the methodology here.
ABC News' Dan Merkle and Ken Goldstein contributed to this report.
17. Republicans and Democrats divided over Jan. 6 insurrection and Trump’s culpability, Post-UMD poll finds
Although a slightly different context, I am reminded of Lincoln's words:
Under the operation of that policy, that agitation has not only, not ceased, but has constantly augmented.
In my opinion, it will not cease, until a crisis shall have been reached, and passed.
"A house divided against itself cannot stand."
I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.
I do not expect the Union to be dissolved -- I do not expect the house to fall -- but I do expect it will cease to be divided.
It will become all one thing or all the other.
Republicans and Democrats divided over Jan. 6 insurrection and Trump’s culpability, Post-UMD poll finds
The Washington Post · by Dan Balz, Scott Clement and Emily Guskin Today at 6:00 p.m. EST · January 1, 2022
One year after the deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol, Republicans and Democrats are deeply divided over what happened that day and the degree to which former president Donald Trump bears responsibility for the assault, amid more universal signs of flagging pride in the workings of democracy at home, according to a Washington Post-University of Maryland poll.
Partisan divisions related both to the Jan. 6 assault and the 2020 presidential election color nearly every issue raised in the survey, from how much violence occurred at the Capitol that day to the severity of the sentences handed down to convicted protesters to whether President Biden was legitimately elected. Only on a question about injured law enforcement officers is there broad bipartisan agreement.
The percentage of Americans who say violent action against the government is justified at times stands at 34 percent, which is considerably higher than in past polls by The Post or other major news organizations dating back more than two decades. Again, the view is partisan: The new survey finds 40 percent of Republicans, 41 percent of independents and 23 percent of Democrats saying violence is sometimes justified.
On Jan. 6, the day Congress was to ratify the 2020 electoral college vote, Trump claimed at a rally near the White House that the election had been rigged and urged his followers to “fight like hell” to stop what he said was a stolen outcome. Many of his supporters walked to the Capitol from the rally and took part in the violence.
Overall, 60 percent of Americans say Trump bears either a “great deal” or a “good amount” of responsibility for the insurrection, but 72 percent of Republicans and 83 percent of Trump voters say he bears “just some” responsibility or “none at all.”
Trump’s attacks on the legitimacy of the election have spawned ongoing efforts in some states to revisit the results. No such inquiry has turned up anything to suggest that the certified results were inaccurate. That has not blunted a persistent belief by most of his supporters that the election was somehow rigged.
Overall, the Post-UMD survey finds that 68 percent of Americans say there is no solid evidence of widespread fraud but 30 percent say there is.
Big majorities of Democrats (88 percent) and independents (74 percent) say there is no evidence of such irregularities, but 62 percent of Republicans say there is such evidence. That is almost identical to the percentage of Republicans who agreed with Trump’s claims of voter fraud a week after that Capitol attack, based on a Washington Post-ABC News poll at the time.
About 7 in 10 Americans say Biden’s election as president was legitimate, but that leaves almost 3 in 10 who say it was not, including 58 percent of Republicans and 27 percent of independents. The 58 percent of Republicans who say Biden was not legitimately elected as president is down somewhat from 70 percent in a January Post-ABC poll shortly after the Capitol attack.
Among those who say they voted for Trump in 2020, 69 percent now say Biden was not legitimately elected, while 97 percent of Biden voters say the current president was legitimately elected.
Republicans’ rejection of Biden’s victory is not novel. In a fall 2017 Post-UMD poll, 67 percent of Democrats and 69 percent of Hillary Clinton voters said Trump was not legitimately elected president. The current poll was conducted Dec. 17-19 by The Post and the University of Maryland’s Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement.
Overall, the new survey reflects how much the partisan wars continue to rage across the country a full year after the Jan. 6 riot. Trump has fueled the discord with falsehoods about election irregularities, and most Republican elected officials have turned their backs on any serious investigation of the roots of the attack and exactly what transpired that day. Hopes for unity have largely faded as doubts about democracy have grown.
The Jan. 6 attack left one police officer and four others dead and scores injured, particularly those in law enforcement who were overwhelmed for a time as the mob of protesters broke into the Capitol. Since then, some Republicans have sought to play down the violence, with one member of Congress even saying the mob resembled ordinary tourists rather than attackers.
Trump also has sought to minimize the violence of the day, contending falsely in December that “remember, the insurrection took place on November 3rd, it was the completely unarmed protest of the rigged election that took place on January 6th.”
Today, 54 percent of Americans characterize the protesters who entered the Capitol as “mostly violent,” while 19 percent call them “mostly peaceful” and another 27 percent say they were equally peaceful and violent. Broken down by party, 78 percent of Democrats describe the protesters as mostly violent compared with 26 percent of Republicans. Thirty-six percent of Republicans say the protesters were mostly peaceful, compared to 5 percent of Democrats.
A bare majority overall (51 percent) say the legal punishments for those who broke the law that day are not harsh enough, with 19 percent saying they are too harsh and 28 percent saying overall they have been fair. The partisan differences are virtually identical to perceptions about how violent the protesters were, with 77 percent of Democrats calling the penalties not harsh enough compared with 26 percent of Republicans. Seven in 10 Republicans say the penalties have been either fair (38 percent) or too harsh (32 percent).
An estimated 140 law enforcement personnel were injured during the attack, a fact that overwhelming majorities of Democrats, Republicans and independents agree happened. The survey finds that 96 percent of Democrats, 81 percent of Republicans and 84 percent of independents say that protesters injured police during the attack.
Partisan divisions also largely disappear on a question about pride in democracy itself, with 54 percent saying they are either “very” or “somewhat” proud of the way democracy is working in the United States. That includes 60 percent of Democrats, 58 percent of Republicans and 51 percent of independents.
But that finding, while narrowly in positive territory, highlights what has been a dramatic and steady two-decade decline in how Americans feel about their democracy. In the fall of 2002, a year after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, 90 percent of adults expressed pride in the workings of American democracy. Twelve years later, it had fallen to 74 percent and, in the fall of 2017, it had dropped again to 63 percent.
Notably, in 2002, 49 percent of adults said they were “very proud” of the way democracy was working in this country. In the new survey, that number had plunged to 11 percent as both sides found reasons for dismay.
Two decades ago, Republicans and Democrats were uniform in their pride in democracy, with more than 9 in 10 in each party expressing positive views. That trend continued throughout the following decade or more, though overall pride in democracy was sliding down among both groups and independents. In 2017, a partisan division opened, with Republicans more positive than Democrats in the wake of Trump’s election. Today, as the percentage who express pride has fallen further, Republicans and Democrats are closer together in their views; about 4 in 10 of each say they are not proud.
A majority of most demographic groups in the survey expressed pride in democracy. But two somewhat overlapping groups stand out for their pessimism. Among independents who say they do not lean to either party, 58 percent say they are not proud of the current workings of U.S. democracy. Similarly, among those ages 18-29, 54 percent have a negative perception of democracy as it exists in this country today.
There is little difference in perceptions depending on which cable news sources they watch. Those who watch Fox News and those who watch CNN have almost identical views about how they feel about democracy today. In both cases, nearly 6 in 10 say they have some pride about democracy’s workings, while among those who watch MSNBC, just over 6 in 10 are positive.
The past year has seen an intense debate over the rules and regulations governing elections. In some Republican-controlled states, new laws have been passed that would restrict voting, with some provisions seen as falling hardest on African Americans, Hispanics and the elderly. Democrats nationally have championed federal legislation designed to expand voting rights but have not been able to get their bills through the Senate.
Looking ahead, more than 1 in 3 Americans say they are not confident that their votes will be counted in the 2022 elections, including nearly 6 in 10 Republicans and under 2 in 10 Democrats. Similarly, about 1 in 3 adults overall say they are not confident that all eligible citizens will have an opportunity to vote, with Democrats more pessimistic in this case than Republicans.
Majorities of Democrats and Republicans doubt the other party will accept election results in states they control, though Democrats are more skeptical of Republicans than vice versa. Among Republicans, 56 percent say they are not confident that state officials in Democratic-controlled states will accept election results if their party loses, while 43 percent are confident in this.
Among Democrats, 67 percent are not confident that officials in Republican-controlled states will accept a losing result, while 32 percent are confident. Among independents, 71 percent are confident that officials in Democratic-led states will accept a losing result, compared with 51 percent who say the same about Republican-controlled states.
The poll was conducted among 1,101 U.S. adults. They were interviewed through the AmeriSpeak Panel, the probability-based survey panel of nonpartisan research organization NORC at the University of Chicago. Interviews were conducted online and by phone; overall results have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus four percentage points.
The Washington Post · by Dan Balz, Scott Clement and Emily Guskin Today at 6:00 p.m. EST · January 1, 2022
18. Militaries are among the world’s biggest emitters. This general wants them to go green.
Militaries are among the world’s biggest emitters. This general wants them to go green.
Richard Nugee, a three-star general, knew armed forces must adapt to a
warming world. So one of the most senior officers in the British army
asked for a new job: Drawing up a climate change strategy for the military.
Story by Michael Birnbaum
Illustration by Stef Wong
Dec. 30, 2021
GLASGOW, Scotland — It was July 2003, and Richard Nugee, a British army officer, was baking inside the sweltering brick building that Saddam Hussein’s sons used as a smuggler’s hideout.
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Until a few months prior, it had been a port authority office in Saddam’s Iraq. Now it was Nugee’s headquarters and living space as he commanded British troops across a strategic stretch of southern Iraq. But with the thermometer routinely topping 120 degrees, a harsh wind blowing humid air from the Persian Gulf and no air conditioning, he had a big problem. His troops were drinking so much water that they were flushing away their vitamins. It was nearly too scorching to fight. And he was getting a lesson that extreme weather could be as dangerous to soldiers as any insurgent.
Nearly two decades later, Nugee was a three-star general at the peak of his career, after a long string of deployments in the world’s conflict zones, including Northern Ireland, Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan. He had risen to become one of the most senior officers in the entire British armed forces — an elite club charged with commanding continents. And in the final fight of his military life, he decided to take on one of the wiliest adversaries: climate change. Militaries are both enormous emitters and facing fearsome new conflicts sparked by global warming. Nugee resolved to fight a lonely battle to address both problems.
Militaries are not known as bastions of tree-huggers. Fighting a war burns prodigious quantities of fossil fuels. The Pentagon, by some counts, is the world’s largest institutional consumer of oil. And military leaders have often resisted anything they fear would blunt their edge, including cutting back on emissions.
On his own time, Nugee was a convert on climate issues. He covered his house with solar panels. He replanted native trees across his fields. But when he put on his medal-bedecked uniform every morning and went to work, he found himself surrounded by colleagues he felt did not appreciate how a warming world was going to affect them.
“Having really seen defense from the heart of it, I had drawn the conclusion that it was not paying any attention to climate change at all, and I wanted to change that,” Nugee said last month in a crowded hotel bar in Glasgow, Scotland, where world leaders, ministers and titans of industry had gathered for a United Nations climate conference.
Nugee had retired from active duty a few months earlier, trading his trim officer’s dress uniform for a civilian’s blue suit. Every now and then, he glanced down to check the time on his phone. He didn’t want to miss a climate gala hosted by Prince Charles, a fellow nature-loving Englishman, in the ballroom next door. He spoke crisply, and with purpose: the speech of a man who is accustomed both to his orders being followed — and to being met with skepticism from the fellow gray-haired clan of officers and ministers who oversee Britain’s powerful military.
Lt. Gen. Richard Nugee, a retired senior British army officer, stands near his home in Devizes, England, on Dec. 4. He has replanted native trees across his fields. (Tori Ferenc for The Washington Post)
Lt. Gen. Richard Nugee, a retired senior British army officer, stands near his home in Devizes, England, on Dec. 4. He has replanted native trees across his fields. (Tori Ferenc for The Washington Post)
Convinced that someone needed to shake awake Britain’s security establishment about the risks of climate change, Nugee asked to be tasked with one final mission before he turned in his stars and retired: preparing a strategy for the British military to adapt to a dangerously warming world. To do so, he gave up command of a staff of more than 600 as the head human resources officer of the British military. Instead, he would be in command of his own desk. Shorn of resources, he was forced to beg and borrow brainpower.
He assembled a step-by-step plan to slash military emissions and prepare the armed forces for a hotter planet. Wars may be fought over access to water. Millions could be forced to migrate because of extreme weather. Emboldened rivals such as China and Russia are already starting to plow their warships across the melting Arctic. The strategy was published earlier this year.
“This is not doing it for moral reasons. This is not doing it because it’s about emissions. It’s about our own capability, it’s about our ability to be the most successful and the most credible force that we can,” Nugee said in Glasgow, where he was one of few with a military background amid the galaxy of people trying to fight for a cooler planet.
“Anybody who ignores it would be foolish,” he said.
Spending time in Glasgow meant sharing a city with fellow travelers who, at least outwardly, had a far different style from his upright soldier’s mien. Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg led protesters in angry chants. Other demonstrators staged die-ins at the conference’s gates. Nugee favored suits over protest signs. But what he was proposing was revolutionary: a British military that by 2050 would reduce its net emissions to zero and transform into a sharper fighting force in doing so.
Nugee said his challenge was to explain to skeptical defense officials that addressing climate change improves military effectiveness, rather than sapping it.
“If we fight a war and we come second, but we can proudly say we’re the greenest army on the battlefield, we’ve still come second in the war,” said Nugee, adjusting his horn-rimmed glasses on his nose. “That’s not what we’re paid to do.”
Nugee, 58, grew up the youngest of four brothers, part of a sprawling English family in which he was always the baby. During World War II, his mother was a code-breaker at Bletchley Park, the British intelligence hub. His father was a lawyer, and Nugee’s brothers followed their father into that profession. But Nugee himself took inspiration from his grandfather, an army officer who fought in both world wars. A conversation the two of them had about his grandfather’s wartime experiences, three days before his grandfather died, inspired Nugee to sign up for the army at age 16.
End of carousel
“My parents were astounded,” Nugee said in a later conversation on a clanking train from Glasgow to Edinburgh, where he was staying during the climate conference with a childhood friend. He stared out the window at the Scottish countryside that was speeding by. “I don’t think they knew what I was going to do at all,” he said.
His career reflected the hot spots of the day. In the waning years of the Cold War, he was posted to West Germany. Then there were repeated deployments to Northern Ireland, which was still consumed by the sectarian insurgency known as the Troubles. In the 1990s, he went to the former Yugoslavia as it fell apart in bloody wars.
But it was his post-2001 deployments that helped drive his belief that adapting the military to climate change would improve its ability to do its core job.
The heat in Iraq, for instance: In 2003, Nugee had to call in an airlift of bananas because so many soldiers’ potassium levels were plunging to dangerous lows. Colleagues back in Britain laughed at him, but the need was deadly serious, he said. Eventually the British troops responsible for securing southern Iraq managed to get air-conditioned living quarters — which was a battlefield advantage if their opponents lacked similar facilities, Nugee said.
“You’d be drenched going to the shower. You’d have a shower. You dry off. You’d be drenched before you got out of the shower cubicle because of the sweat,” Nugee said. “One of my soldiers got through 16 liters of water and still was dehydrated.”
Members of the British Armed Forces examine a concept demonstrator version of the Jankel Fox Rapid Response Vehicle at Dorset Innovation Park in England on Dec. 14. (Rhiannon Adam for The Washington Post)
Members of the British Armed Forces examine a concept demonstrator version of the Jankel Fox Rapid Response Vehicle at Dorset Innovation Park in England on Dec. 14. (Rhiannon Adam for The Washington Post)
Armed forces can be overlooked targets in efforts to go green. Under international climate treaties, militaries haven’t been required to be transparent about their emissions, one factor in a Washington Post investigation this year that found that countries are significantly underreporting their climate footprint to the United Nations. Armies have typically been exempted from national requirements to trim the heat-trapping gases they put into the atmosphere, since national security has trumped environmental issues.
“Usually people who care about climate change, the environmental movement and so on, they are not big fans of the military at all. They’re pacifistic in nature,” said Louise van Schaik, the head of European Union and global affairs at the Clingendael Institute, a Dutch international affairs think tank.
That culture clash can leave a big gap when it comes to addressing emissions. The British military emits as much as the rest of the British central government combined. As the second-largest landholder in the United Kingdom, it controls more territory than the queen, almost 2 percent of the nation’s landmass. The Pentagon has a similarly large footprint: It accounts for 52 percent of federal electricity use and 56 percent of the federal government’s emissions.
Yet environmental activists have often focused elsewhere, most typically on places where governments are obligated to be fully transparent about the environmental impact of their activities.
Military emissions “disappeared from the statistics, but it didn’t disappear from the atmosphere,” NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said in an interview during a visit to the U.N. climate conference, the first time a NATO leader came to the annual gathering. He had been lured to an event that Nugee helped organize, speaking alongside British Defense Secretary Ben Wallace about the urgent need for the world of defense to take steps to address climate change.
Concept designs of foldable solar blankets are displayed at the Bovington Future Power Symposium in England — an event created to bring members of the military together with industry heads for discussions about sustainable technology development. (Rhiannon Adam for The Washington Post)
President Biden has also pushed for more thinking about the intersection of climate change and security, ordering the Pentagon, the National Security Council, the intelligence community and the Department of Homeland Security to consider how a warming world will affect U.S. strategic interests. They released landmark — and somewhat apocalyptic — reports in October.
Nugee’s strategy stretches across 107 pages of dense, step-by-step analysis of what the British military needs to do about a warming world. He put it together during the course of 2020, at the height of the pandemic, hosting Skype and Zoom calls from his home near one of the British Army’s main training grounds in southwest England. When his laptop crashed, he would run over to a nearby base to get help.
The report suggests reducing military emissions to get in line with broader British climate targets. One recommendation is to fly military aircraft on 50 percent sustainable aviation fuel. Another is to increase the use of fuel-efficient hybrid electric armored vehicles — like Priuses, but for armored personnel carriers.
It warns that if the rest of society switches away from fossil fuels for cars and electricity, militaries can’t risk being the last ones who are reliant on them.
“If you want to be climate neutral in 2050, this sector can no longer be left off the hook,” said van Schaik, the Dutch climate security expert, who has reviewed the report.
It also aims to start preparing the armed forces for the harsher environment of the future: hardened hulls on warships that will need to spend more time in the ice-filled Arctic. Re-engineered ships will not be able to rely on seawater to cool their engines in the Persian Gulf if surface-level temperatures rise as sharply as they are forecast in the coming decades.
Perhaps most ominously, it lists the many ways global warming will destabilize nations and alliances across the world. Oil-rich nations such as Saudi Arabia will be upended if they have no takers for their main product and they become less strategically important. Access to the rare earth elements needed for batteries and circuitry could lead to clashes between China and the United States in places such as the Democratic Republic of Congo and Greenland. Countries where water shortages are likely — such as Iraq and Somalia — will probably face even more conflicts.
An Extreme E vehicle, powered by water, on view at the Bovington Future Power Symposium. (Rhiannon Adam for The Washington Post)
An Extreme E vehicle, powered by water, on view at the Bovington Future Power Symposium. (Rhiannon Adam for The Washington Post)
Top British defense officials say they are committed to addressing Nugee’s warnings.
“We have a strong obligation to make sure that our forces deliver a sustainable deployment and indeed make sure they move from traditional energies and fuel requirements to more modern requirements,” said Wallace, the British defense secretary. “But also we will have to deal with the consequences of a failed climate change policy, if that happens. We have to deal with the consequences of migrant flows, of breaking down of communities, of fights over rare resources, border frictions which will increase as climate change increases.”
The global efforts typically focus on two entangled issues: how to reduce the emissions of the national security establishment, and how to get ready for a world that will be more dangerous and unpredictable as the mercury creeps up in everyone’s thermometers.
“As the climate hazards have become more acute, and we’re seeing that more regularly, there’s a recognition on the security side, ‘Yeah, we’re going to have to deal with this, whether we like it or not, because it’s already here,’ ” said Erin Sikorsky, who until last year led analysis on climate change and security for the U.S. intelligence community and is now the director of the Center for Climate and Security, a Washington-based think tank, where she has worked with Nugee. “And on the environmental side, you’re seeing, ‘Yeah, this poses real risks of conflict.’ ”
Some of the old-line security establishment in the United States and Europe is waking up to the challenge.
“Preventing climate-induced security risks, that’s a Nobel Prize-winning enterprise,” said Wolfgang Ischinger, the chairman of the Munich Security Conference, Europe’s main conclave for security-related discussions.
A demonstration of the Rheinmetall Mission Master, a hybrid electric load carriage platform operated by remote control or via autonomous driving modes. (Rhiannon Adam for The Washington Post)
A demonstration of the Rheinmetall Mission Master, a hybrid electric load carriage platform operated by remote control or via autonomous driving modes. (Rhiannon Adam for The Washington Post)
And during Nugee’s repeated deployments to Afghanistan, climate-related considerations hit him from multiple directions. When farmers’ crops failed because of drought or other challenges, they became easy recruiting targets for the Taliban, which paid them roughly $5 a day to fight, and more if they killed enemy soldiers, he said.
Many of the Taliban’s targets were tied to the military’s dependence on fossil fuels. Diesel fuel is the key to much of modern war-fighting: It goes in Humvees and armored personnel carriers, and it gives remote outposts their electricity and communications when it is burned in generators.
But carrying the fuel to the places it needed to go was a perilous endeavor. Fuel tankers are hulking, slow-moving targets. They were sitting ducks, needing protection from vehicles on the ground and from helicopters in the air as they winded their precious cargo down contested mountain highways. The highest-ranking British officer killed in Afghanistan died in a roadside bomb attack on a resupply convoy. A U.S. Army study found that in 2007, there was one casualty for every 24 fuel convoys in Afghanistan.
So any effort to reduce the consumption of fossil fuels during deployments, whether by improving the fuel efficiency of tanks and transporters or through powering posts with solar power, can actually make soldiers better at their core job: fighting wars.
“There’s a military advantage in reducing all this logistic resupply. And then there’s a life advantage in reducing the number of people being killed. So there’s all sorts of advantages in going for more self-sufficiency,” Nugee said.
The SupaCat Missions Master is an electric vehicle developed for extreme terrain. In the close-up photo, a look inside the engine of a Jankel Fox Rapid Response Vehicle. (Rhiannon Adam for The Washington Post)
The SupaCat Missions Master is an electric vehicle developed for extreme terrain. In the close-up photo, a look inside the engine of a Jankel Fox Rapid Response Vehicle. (Rhiannon Adam for The Washington Post)
Nugee has had to battle skepticism inside the military, as opponents say that the focus on climate detracts from their core business.
Doubters can be dismissive of anything that, in their view, could make it more difficult to deploy speedily and effectively, Nugee said.
He also said they sometimes have an attitude that their willingness to die to defend their country means that they should not need to think about their carbon footprint: “‘We’re prepared as individuals to make the ultimate sacrifice. Surely we’re prepared to have a few emissions to protect our citizens,’” Nugee described his detractors as saying.
He said that for years, he had been raising the issue of climate change in informal conversations with people working on military issues: his superiors, ministers, members of Parliament, colleagues. Often, he felt as though the challenge simply didn’t register for the people he was talking to, or that the military’s small pilot projects related to green technology were not nearly ambitious enough to meet the problem.
“There’s a very strong military lobby which turns around and says we shouldn’t be doing this, because we have a really clear purpose: that we will do whatever it takes to defend our nation,” he said.
Part of the challenge has been generational, he said: The older ribbon-bedecked officers at the top of the military chain of command weren’t paying enough attention to environmental issues. That stifled younger officers who might be more green-focused.
About two years ago, Nugee went to the defense secretary and to the British equivalent of the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who is a friend.
“I said, ‘Look, I’ll do you a report, because I don’t think you’re taking it seriously enough. And I’ll tell you why you’re not taking it seriously enough and I’ll tell you what to do about it,’ " he said. “My argument has consistently been: This is about enhancing capability. This is about thinking of doing things differently. This is about working with the green technology, not against it.”
Nugee retired from the military this summer — he was overdue after passing the typical retirement age of 55 — but he has stayed on to oversee climate work. Inaction now will lead to problems later, he said, as the rest of society moves away from using fossil fuels and Britain reduces its overall emissions, making the military an increasingly large target by comparison.
Nugee in his home with his medals and a knife with his name engraved on the blade — a gift from one of the troops he commanded. (Tori Ferenc for The Washington Post)
Nugee in his home with his medals and a knife with his name engraved on the blade — a gift from one of the troops he commanded. (Tori Ferenc for The Washington Post)
At home, Nugee said he is trying to do his part. After installing Tesla’s home battery, the Powerwall, his solar panels are able to keep him off the grid from April until October. He is investigating whether he can install a miniature hydropower system in a brook on his property to generate enough electricity to last him through the year.
And this month he set off on an expedition to Antarctica to commemorate the centenary of Ernest Shackleton’s final journey there. The mostly military and ex-military scientists on the trip will conduct climate and pollution research on Antarctica’s Forbidden Plateau.
Nugee said he hoped his climate efforts would be his legacy.
“It was what I was passionate about, in an environment where nobody was talking about it, and in an environment where actually, I could make a difference,” he said.
About this story
Story editing by Dayana Sarkisova. Photo editing by Olivier Laurent. Illustration animation by Emma Kumer. Design and development by Andrew Braford. Copy editing by Annabeth Carlson.
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.
