Quotes of the Day:
“History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unloved, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.”
- Maya Angelou, American poet, author
“There is frequently more to relearned from the unexpected questions of a child than the discourses of men..”
-John Locke, English philosopher, physician
"One doesn't recognize in one's life the really important moments — not until it's too late."
- Agatha Christie
1. Why Did Russia Escalate Its Gray Zone Conflict in Ukraine?
2. Canada deploys special forces to Ukraine amid rising tensions with Russia
3. Textbook dilemma traps US, China in a war spiral
4. Russia Thins Out Its Embassy in Ukraine, a Possible Clue to Putin’s Next Move
5. Milley, Berger, test positive for COVID-19
6. Autocracies outdo democracies on public trust - survey
7. Melvin Bowling, retired two-star and original ‘Early Bird’ contributor, dies at 88
8. Millions of Tricare Beneficiaries Left Out of COVID-19 Test Reimbursement Plan
9. A Synagogue Shouldn’t Be a Fortress
10. Investigating who betrayed Anne Frank and her family to the Nazis
11. Senate candidate Mike Durant says Afghanistan was ‘political failure’
12. Is a US-China Cold War Really Inevitable?
13. As Biden Relaxed Pressure, Iran Took Advantage
14. Warnings of ‘Civil War’ Risk Harming Efforts Against Political Violence
15. Artificial Intelligence, Real Risks: Understanding—and Mitigating—Vulnerabilities in the Military Use of AI
16. Opinion | Even if Putin doesn’t seize all of Ukraine, he has a larger strategy. The U.S. needs one, too. by John R. Bolton
17. The Overstretched Superpower
18. The Big Business of Uyghur Genocide Denial
19. Biden’s Misguided Blame Game on Iran
20. It’s Not ‘Woke’ for Businesses to Think Beyond Profit, BlackRock Chief Says
21. Russia’s Possible Invasion of Ukraine
22. US senses opportunity in fraying Taliban-Pakistan ties
23. Hidden gap between US, Japan defense views
24. The U.S. and China: How to get back from the brink
25. China is owning the global battery race. That could be a problem for the U.S.
26. What Biden’s competition crusade tells us about globalisation
1. Why Did Russia Escalate Its Gray Zone Conflict in Ukraine?
Excerpts:
But the basic problem remains. Gray zone tactics on the border of Russia have not worked, and posturing has not resulted in the kinds of concessions Putin can brag about at home or abroad. The political problem for him at this point is that the concessions he needs from the United States to justify drawing down Russian forces must be tangible, especially in light of his very public efforts to mobilize Russian public opinion. De facto neutrality for Ukraine would achieve his nominal objectives, for the time being, but Putin will have no piece of paper or public declaration from Washington to show for his brinkmanship. Even more disconcerting for Moscow, Kyiv will continue its reorientation to the West, and gray zone conflict will continue indefinitely.
Putin may be able to snatch compromise from the jaws of quagmire. Yet, he may also be forced to fight by his own decision to escalate Russian coercive diplomacy by mobilizing the same forces that make invasion more feasible. Whereas gray zone conflict is attractive in lieu of war, war becomes more likely in a brinkmanship contest due to path dependence and uncertainty. A limited war might enable Putin to save face, but even limited wars must run some risk of turning into larger cataclysms. It would not be the first time that nations found themselves involved in a conflict that, ex ante, they seemed intent on avoiding.
Why Did Russia Escalate Its Gray Zone Conflict in Ukraine?
Editor’s Note: Russia appears to have taken so-called gray zone warfare to a new level, using subversion and clandestine operations to undermine its neighbors and expand its influence. Scholars J. Andres Gannon, Erik Gartzke, Jon Lindsay and Peter Schram contend, however, that Russia’s use of these methods is often ineffective and that Russia’s latest buildup shows the limits of gray zone warfare.
Daniel Byman
***
Russia’s escalation in its long-simmering conflict with Ukraine, much like its decision to start the shadow war in the first place, is a symptom of its relative weakness. The military conflict between Ukraine and Russia began in the aftermath of the Euromaidan crisis. Russian forces in disguise, dubbed “little green men,” moved to occupy Crimea in early 2014. This thinnest of veils appears to have been designed less to conceal the identity of Russian forces and more to equip leaders in the United States and Europe with a pretext for inaction. Since then, Russian-backed separatists in Eastern Ukraine have exchanged sniper and artillery fire with the Ukrainian army, and Russian intelligence agencies have conducted aggressive cyber and information operations targeting Ukrainian systems and public opinion. The Russian intervention in Ukraine has become the epitome of so-called gray zone conflict, a form of limited military competition that simmers chronically beyond peace but short of full-scale war.
The Russian buildup now threatens to transform this gray zone conflict into a much larger, open war. In early December 2021, U.S. intelligence sources revealed that “the Kremlin is planning a multi-front offensive as soon as early next year involving up to 175,000 troops.” This move is puzzling if, as many pundits and defense experts have assumed, Russia possesses important advantages in gray zone conflicts. Cautious revisionists such as Russia, China and others should be able to gain concessions without the need to go to war, assuming that more traditional conceptions of deterrence are inadequate to address gray zone threats, and if defenders are ill equipped to respond to gray zone revisionism. Why then would Russian President Vladimir Putin incur the costs of mobilization, and the risks involved in major war, if he can get what he wants on the cheap?
Rethinking the Gray Zone in Ukraine
In fact, gray zone conflict has not been the panacea for Russia’s aspirations that pundits have imagined. Russian-backed separatists have been gradually losing in Ukraine. Ukrainian military capabilities to combat Russian separatists have markedly improved owing to better weapons, training and significant experience. The United States has committed $2.5 billion in lethal and nonlethal defensive aid to Ukraine since 2014, including more than $400 million in 2021 alone. Russian cyberattacks have had little effect on battlefield events, and Russian subversion has failed to politically weaken Ukraine. On the contrary, Kyiv now leans further toward Western Europe and the United States. And the NATO alliance has been galvanized with a sense of purpose not seen since the Cold War. In short, Russian efforts in the gray zone have proved counterproductive, at least in Ukraine, and at least for now.
Heading toward a long, slow defeat on its border, Russia is confronted with three stark options. It can abandon the field and accept its loss of influence in Ukraine. This is no doubt unpalatable for Putin and his key domestic constituencies. Russia can also maintain its subversive activities, but this amounts to kicking the can of eventual defeat further into the future, even if it enables Putin to save face for the time being. Alternatively, Russia can acknowledge, in effect, that its strategy of gray zone warfare was a mistake and start treating Ukraine as something worth a direct, overt military intervention. The Ukrainian military might be better at gray zone conflict now, but it would be overwhelmed by a Russian invasion without substantial outside support.
Russia’s potential invasion should prompt a serious reassessment of gray zone conflict. Rather than a clever and effective tool for Russia to get its way in the world without having to pay full price, gray zone conflict is perhaps better understood as a second-best option, a half-hearted way of pursuing foreign policy goals while avoiding risky consequences.
Russia could have chosen to invade Ukraine in 2014, much as it did Georgia in 2008. No doubt, this would have been the quickest and most emphatic way to lock Ukraine into Moscow’s sphere of influence. But it also would have been an extremely confrontational move on the frontier of the nuclear-armed NATO alliance. Instead, Russia relied on limited means and anonymity to lessen the risks of retaliation. Russia adopted a limited approach to conflict in Ukraine because of its desire not to confront NATO. Yet, this second-best option has proved an even worse strategy than Putin expected, especially as the Kyiv government and its backers increasingly learned how to counter this particular type of Russian aggression.
Gray Zone Conflict as a Symptom of Deterrence Success
In other types of limited warfare, such as insurgency or terrorism, conflict is limited by the actors’ capabilities. In the gray zone, by contrast, conflict is limited because capable actors want it to be so—they are intentionally pulling their punches. Rather than overt military actions that attempt to resolve issues or disputes, gray zone conflict involves destabilization, disruption and subversion. Similar ideas have been described under the rubric of hybrid war, nonlinear war, salami tactics, limited war, hassling or military operations other than war.
The conventional wisdom is that gray zone conflict constitutes a deterrence failure. To paraphrase this perspective, revisionist states practicing aggression in the gray zone can “have their cake and eat it too,” gaining concessions from adversaries while avoiding most of the costs associated with war.
Our research challenges this convention by viewing gray zone conflict as a symptom of deterrence success, not failure. Just as conflict is a continuum, so too is deterrence. An enemy that pulls its punches to avoid triggering a larger contest is deterred from fighting as effectively as it might in unconstrained circumstances. Gray zone conflict is thus the second-best option to open warfare for a challenger that is deterred from engaging in the latter. We find qualitative and quantitative evidence that Russian behavior is consistent with this perspective. Russia is more likely to show restraint in the means and severity of its aggression as the credibility of U.S. and NATO deterrence increases.
Pessimistic Implications of Deterrence Optimism
Our research also suggests that emphasizing low-level defensive capabilities may lead to further instability and war. Certainly, it would be wise for the United States to ensure more successes in the gray zone with more effective gray zone capabilities—including cyber defenses, special operations forces and Coast Guard forces. However, gray zone conflict is distinguished by mutual and deliberate restraint. Countries that become better at responding to gray zone conflict make it a worse option for the adversary, which may push adversaries into even riskier behaviors.
It is reasonable to want the United States to be as willing and able to best its adversaries in gray zone contests as it is for full-scale wars. In some situations, however, it may be prudent to tolerate conflict in the gray zone as a way of relieving pressure without war, particularly if other alternatives are more destabilizing. If strategic stability is a desirable goal, it may be necessary to tolerate instability in the gray zone. But if the objective is to deny the adversary additional gains, rather than preserving stable continuity, then it is prudent to oppose gray zone activity more vigorously while at the same time preparing for the possibility of conventional conflict. The goals of stability and influence, and the military means used to pursue them, are often in tension.
It is a dangerous fantasy to imagine that any deterrence policy can prevent conflict altogether. At best, deterrence channels aggression, shaping where and how an adversary decides to compete, not whether it competes at all. In Ukraine, Russian aggression in the gray zone appears to have been symptomatic of successful deterrence by NATO. Now, possible Russian escalation out of the gray zone is symptomatic of successful gray zone conflict by Ukraine and its supporters.
Ukrainian success in the gray zone, and Russian intransigence, has transformed the contest into a brinkmanship crisis, for now. As of this writing, it remains unclear whether Russia’s mobilization is an opportunistic effort at influence peddling or a serious threat. A dilemma for Russia is that the same mobilization that provides a costly signal of resolve also improves the prospects for a successful invasion, which creates commitment problems. Coercive diplomacy becomes indistinguishable from military preparation, making it hard for Russia’s adversaries to trust any agreement to deescalate, and tempting Russia to act on its preparations.
Can We Agree to Disagree?
It is also unclear how the United States and NATO would ultimately respond to a Russian invasion, should one occur. The Biden administration has signaled that overwhelming sanctions are a likely reaction to an overt Russian invasion of Ukraine but also that large numbers of U.S. boots will not be deployed to Ukrainian ground. Putin appears willing to absorb economic retaliation and risk war to halt the eastward expansion of NATO. The irony, of course, is that Russian annexation of Crimea and de facto control over the Donbass has pushed the rest of Ukraine toward the West. Putin now appears to be willing to salvage his losing gray zone strategy by gambling on open warfare.
The silver lining to the gray zone is that it reveals the limits of commitment on all sides. Clarity on the Russian side helps to explain the escalation of the crisis, but clarity on the side of the United States and its partners helps to explain the limits of Russian influence. The diplomatic challenge, as always, is to avoid overcommitment in the intermediate areas of declining political interests. In this case, Russia is demanding a halt to NATO expansion in a region where it is not in NATO’s interest to expand. Because Russian escalation in Ukraine is a symptom of relative weakness, the United States and its allies are simultaneously strong enough to reassure Russia about the future of Ukraine and deter further aggression beyond it.
As Putin threatens war and makes demands, the United States and NATO look for off-ramps. Although Putin’s public demands for unconditional guarantees from NATO and the redeployment of its forces have been met with scorn, private discussions with the Biden administration are ongoing. While a public U.S. commitment to end eastward expansion of the NATO alliance is probably not in the cards, a quiet agreement to not move forward on formal accession for Ukraine might be viable. De facto neutrality and autonomy for Ukraine may not be every state’s first preference, but it is preferable to war. The eruption of civil unrest in Kazakhstan and the Russian-led peacekeeping intervention there may even provide a face-saving distraction to enable compromise on Ukraine.
But the basic problem remains. Gray zone tactics on the border of Russia have not worked, and posturing has not resulted in the kinds of concessions Putin can brag about at home or abroad. The political problem for him at this point is that the concessions he needs from the United States to justify drawing down Russian forces must be tangible, especially in light of his very public efforts to mobilize Russian public opinion. De facto neutrality for Ukraine would achieve his nominal objectives, for the time being, but Putin will have no piece of paper or public declaration from Washington to show for his brinkmanship. Even more disconcerting for Moscow, Kyiv will continue its reorientation to the West, and gray zone conflict will continue indefinitely.
Putin may be able to snatch compromise from the jaws of quagmire. Yet, he may also be forced to fight by his own decision to escalate Russian coercive diplomacy by mobilizing the same forces that make invasion more feasible. Whereas gray zone conflict is attractive in lieu of war, war becomes more likely in a brinkmanship contest due to path dependence and uncertainty. A limited war might enable Putin to save face, but even limited wars must run some risk of turning into larger cataclysms. It would not be the first time that nations found themselves involved in a conflict that, ex ante, they seemed intent on avoiding.
2. Canada deploys special forces to Ukraine amid rising tensions with Russia
An allied effort to assist Ukraine.
Excerpt:
Neither the government nor the Canadian Forces would officially confirm the special forces presence in Ukraine when contacted by Global News, other than to say special forces operators have been involved in Canada’s broader assistance to Ukraine.
Canada deploys special forces to Ukraine amid rising tensions with Russia - National | Globalnews.ca
Canadian special forces operators have been deployed to Ukraine amid rising tensions between the NATO military alliance and Russia, Global News has learned.
Story continues below advertisement
The deployment of a small contingent from the Canadian Special Operations Regiment comes as diplomatic talks aimed at staving off an armed conflict in Ukraine have faltered, and an estimated 100,000 Russian troops remain camped on Ukraine’s border.
Sources told Global News that the Canadian special operations presence is part of an attempt by NATO allies to deter Russian aggression in Ukraine, and to identify ways to assist the Ukrainian government.
The unit has also been tasked with helping to develop evacuation plans for Canadian diplomatic personnel in the event of a full-scale invasion, sources said.
Neither the government nor the Canadian Forces would officially confirm the special forces presence in Ukraine when contacted by Global News, other than to say special forces operators have been involved in Canada’s broader assistance to Ukraine.
Story continues below advertisement
“(The Canadian Special Operations Forces Command) is part of the broader Armed Forces’ efforts to support Ukraine’s Security Forces,” wrote Maj. Amber Bineau, a spokesperson for special operations command, in a statement to Global News.
Bineau noted that Canadian special forces have been providing training, as well as “instructor and leadership expertise,” to Ukrainian counterparts since 2020 — although sources told Global News the latest special forces contingent, which left for Ukraine around Jan. 9, is not conducting training.
Diplomatic talks between the U.S., European allies and Russia ended last week without a clear path to deescalate tensions along the Ukraine-Russia border. Russia’s deputy foreign minister, Sergei Ryabkov, called the talks a “dead end.”
In a statement Friday, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said NATO and the U.S. remain committed to a diplomatic solution and urged Russia to scale back its operations on Ukraine’s border. But the U.S. also warned Russia may look for a pretext to invade Ukraine should diplomatic talks falter, including engaging in “false flag” operations to precipitate a conflict.
Story continues below advertisement
The Kremlin has denied the U.S. accusations.
Russia has demanded a guarantee that Ukraine will not be permitted to join the NATO alliance — a demand that both U.S. and NATO officials have flatly rejected.
Canada’s foreign minister, Mélanie Joly, departed Sunday for a week-long visit to Kyiv and bilateral meetings to reaffirm Ottawa’s support for Ukrainian sovereignty.
“The amassing of Russian troops and equipment in and around Ukraine jeopardizes security in the entire region,” Joly said in a statement.
“These aggressive actions must be deterred. Canada will work with its international partners to uphold the rules-based international order and preserve the human rights and dignity of Ukrainians.”
Canada has consistently backed Kyiv in its dealings with Russia since Putin annexed Crimea in 2014. According to the Canadian government, Ottawa has committed roughly $700 million in assistance to Ukraine since Jan. 2014, including provision of non-lethal military equipment and sending rotations of 200 Canadian Armed Forces troops every six months to train Ukrainian security forces.
Story continues below advertisement
The opposition Conservatives have urged Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the Liberals to reject Putin’s demands, but instead to “stand shoulder to shoulder” with Ukraine and Canada’s European allies.
Aurel Braun, an international relations professor at the University of Toronto, said in an interview Monday that while Canada’s support does “make a difference,” the West’s central player around the negotiation table is the U.S.
“It depends a great deal what the Americans do,” said Braun, who is also associated with Harvard’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies.
Braun said Canada and its allies need to continue to support Ukraine — not only from a military perspective, but also economically and diplomatically — as Russia’s goal is to isolate Kyiv and present Ukraine as a failed democratic experiment.
“What Mr. Putin fears is a successful Ukraine, because if there would be a successful democratic state emerging on (Russia’s) borders … that would present an alternate vision to the kind of ultra-nationalistic kleptocracy that is running inside Russia itself,” Braun said.
Story continues below advertisement
On Friday, Canada’s deputy minister of foreign affairs, Marta Morgan, met with U.S. deputy secretary of state, Wendy Sherman, to pledge “continued close coordination to deter further Russian aggression against Ukraine.”
According to U.S. officials, Morgan also agreed that “further Russian invasion of Ukraine would result in massive consequences and severe costs including coordinated, restrictive economic measures for the Russian Federation.”
© 2022 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.
3. Textbook dilemma traps US, China in a war spiral
Excerpts:
President Joe Biden even briefly strayed into “strategic clarity” in October 2021 when he answered “yes” to the question of whether the United States would intervene to defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese attack.
The stated goal is convincing Beijing that unification through military means is not feasible – as US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan puts it, “avoiding any kind of scenario where China chooses to invade.”
From Beijing’s standpoint, the status quo is Taiwan being part of China, and the United States challenges that status quo by legitimizing the Taipei government through closer relations, treating Taiwan as a de facto state and making Taiwan more defensible against a possible PRC takeover attempt.
The US government has taken several actions in recent years that play on PRC fears over Taiwan. Congress has enacted laws to deepen US-Taiwan cooperation, including the Taiwan Travel Act (2018), the Taiwan Allies International Protection and Enhancement Initiative Act (2019) and the Taiwan Assurance Act (2020).
Conclusion:
Instead of staving off the Taiwan independence scenario, which Beijing characterizes as a security threat to China, PLA warplane incursions and other military exercises near Taiwan not only have generated renewed US support for the Taipei government but, more broadly, have helped galvanize America to maintain its strategic position in Asia by adjusting its posture to meet the “pacing challenge” of China.
Similarly, US assurances to Taiwan and warnings to Beijing have not caused the PRC to back down. Rather, China has reiterated the argument that US support for Taiwan makes war more likely and has repeated threats to “attack US troops who come to Taiwan’s rescue” and to inflict an “unbearable price” on the US.
There is a way out of the negative spiral. China’s continued prosperity and security do not depend on incorporating Taiwan as a province of the PRC, and the Party’s legitimacy at home does not hang on immediately resolving the issue. Nor is a de jure independent Taiwan essential to the US remaining the pre-eminent strategic power in the Asia-Pacific region.
Both Beijing and Washington should be able to agree that a decisive war can wait.
Textbook dilemma traps US, China in a war spiral
The problem starts with clashing views on Taiwan where each side sees the other as the aggressor
In international politics, two mutually suspicious states are often trapped in what theorists call the “security dilemma.”
Each of the two states thinks itself supportive of the status quo, but thinks the other state is aggressive. Accordingly, each state sees its own actions as defensive and the other’s as threatening. The bilateral relationship descends in a negative spiral as each state’s action does not increase its own security but, rather, pushes the situation closer to war.
This dynamic applies to China-US tensions over Taiwan. Both Beijing and Washington frame the other side as an aggressor trying to change the status quo in its own favor. Each attempts dissuasion through military means. Each reacts to the other side’s military moves with alarm and believes it must respond with a show of resolve. The result: worsening tensions.
The problem starts with clashing worldviews.
The United States sees the status quo as de facto Taiwan independence unless and until Taiwan’s people decide, free of coercion, to politically unify with mainland China.
Although Washington does not officially consider Taiwan an independent state, it also does not take a position on whether the People’s Republic of China (PRC) government or the Republic of China government has rightful sovereignty over Taiwan.
The US government has reacted with alarm to China’s recent military pressure on Taiwan, which mainly consists of a large increase of People’s Liberation Army (PLA) warplane sorties into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone (ADIZ) since 2020.
The US response includes strengthening Taiwan’s ability to defend itself against a PRC attack and reiterating – within the scope of the policy of “strategy ambiguity” – the strong possibility that America would militarily intervene to protect Taiwan.
Taiwanese soldiers on an armored vehicle in Taipei during the National Day Celebration, following Chinese President Xi Jinping’s vow to unify Taiwan by peaceful means. Photo: AFP / Ceng Shou Yi / NurPhoto
President Joe Biden even briefly strayed into “strategic clarity” in October 2021 when he answered “yes” to the question of whether the United States would intervene to defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese attack.
The stated goal is convincing Beijing that unification through military means is not feasible – as US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan puts it, “avoiding any kind of scenario where China chooses to invade.”
From Beijing’s standpoint, the status quo is Taiwan being part of China, and the United States challenges that status quo by legitimizing the Taipei government through closer relations, treating Taiwan as a de facto state and making Taiwan more defensible against a possible PRC takeover attempt.
The US government has taken several actions in recent years that play on PRC fears over Taiwan. Congress has enacted laws to deepen US-Taiwan cooperation, including the Taiwan Travel Act (2018), the Taiwan Allies International Protection and Enhancement Initiative Act (2019) and the Taiwan Assurance Act (2020).
In 2020, unusually high-ranking US officials – the undersecretary of state and the secretary of health and human services – visited Taiwan. The outgoing Trump administration lifted previous restrictions on US-Taiwan government contacts in January 2021.
Publicized US Navy transits of the Taiwan Strait increased to near-monthly in 2021. Throughout that year, some analysts in the United States publicly advocated changing US policy to an explicit commitment to defend Taiwan.
In addition to offering to sell Taiwan a large arms package, the Biden administration has reportedly approved three vital pieces of high-technology equipment for sale to Taiwan’s submarine-building program.
According to a September 2021 report, the US government “was seriously considering” changing the name of Taiwan’s quasi-embassy in Washington from “Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office” to “Taiwan Representative Office.”
The Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office in Washington, DC. Photo: Wikipedia
In November the same year, two US Congressional delegations visited Taiwan.
The US government recently not only acknowledged but increased the presence of US troops in Taiwan. Although the number remains small, the Chinese government has in the past specified foreign soldiers in Taiwan as one of the triggers for a cross-Strait war.
Particularly distressing for the Chinese are any indications that America is committed to keeping Taiwan out of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) hands. Such have appeared in both the Trump and Biden administrations. A declassified 2018 strategic framework document mentioned a US intention to “defend the first island chain nations, including Taiwan.”
In 2021, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs Ely Ratner told a Senate committee that a Taiwan outside of PRC control is “a critical node within the first island chain … anchoring a network of US allies and partners,” and is “critical to the defense of vital US interests in the Indo-Pacific.”
These statements and events support a narrative in the PRC that the US’ goal is to “use Taiwan to contain China” by preventing unification and by incorporating Taiwan into a strategy of militarily encircling China.
Beijing is surely aware by now that Taiwan is not naturally gravitating toward voluntary unification. The anti-unification Democratic Progress Party (DPP) now controls the presidency and the legislature. The DPP refuses to characterize Taiwan as part of China, a point Beijing says is non-negotiable.
Public opinion surveys show a steady rise in “Taiwanese” identity at the expense of “Chinese” identity and a decline of interest in politically uniting with the PRC. The offer of “one country, two systems” never had much appeal in Taiwan. Not surprisingly, recent events in Hong Kong only deepened distrust of the CCP across the Taiwan Strait.
To keep Taiwan from drifting toward permanent and de jure independence, the PRC government increasingly relies on coercion because kinder and gentler means have failed. Hence the military signaling via PLA aircraft pointedly flying near Taiwan.
According to Chinese government media, the purpose of these flights is to prevent independence: to “deter Taiwan secessionist provocations and foreign interference attempts” by demonstrating that “the PLA has an overwhelming advantage over the armed forces on the island … even if foreign forces interfere” – that is, that Taipei should not declare de jure independence from China because the PRC could and would militarily overturn it.
A Taiwanese F-16 fighter aircraft (left) flies alongside a People’s Liberation Army Air Force bomber south of Taiwan on May 11, 2018. Photo: Handout / Taiwan Defense Ministry / AFP
The two tragic aspects of the security dilemma are apparent in the case of US-China tensions over Taiwan. One is that neither side wants a military conflict. American policy has long been to set aside a definitive solution to Taiwan’s status and instead promote “stability.”
Enduring a de facto but not de jure independent Taiwan is much preferable to a war that could create such economic and social disruption inside China as to threaten Xi Jinping’s leadership position. It is highly plausible that China’s recent military activity near Taiwan is, as Chinese media say, a warning against independence, not an indication that Xi has already decided to settle the question by force.
The second tragic aspect is that the additional efforts to make themselves stronger and to demonstrate resolve do not make the players more secure.
Instead of staving off the Taiwan independence scenario, which Beijing characterizes as a security threat to China, PLA warplane incursions and other military exercises near Taiwan not only have generated renewed US support for the Taipei government but, more broadly, have helped galvanize America to maintain its strategic position in Asia by adjusting its posture to meet the “pacing challenge” of China.
Similarly, US assurances to Taiwan and warnings to Beijing have not caused the PRC to back down. Rather, China has reiterated the argument that US support for Taiwan makes war more likely and has repeated threats to “attack US troops who come to Taiwan’s rescue” and to inflict an “unbearable price” on the US.
There is a way out of the negative spiral. China’s continued prosperity and security do not depend on incorporating Taiwan as a province of the PRC, and the Party’s legitimacy at home does not hang on immediately resolving the issue. Nor is a de jure independent Taiwan essential to the US remaining the pre-eminent strategic power in the Asia-Pacific region.
Both Beijing and Washington should be able to agree that a decisive war can wait.
Denny Roy is a senior fellow at the East-West Center. Follow him on Twitter: @Denny_Roy808
4. Russia Thins Out Its Embassy in Ukraine, a Possible Clue to Putin’s Next Move
Perhaps this is a positive sign. Given my limited understanding of Putin I would not be surprised if he left diplomats in place and sacrificed them in order to be able to conduct a surprise attack. I doubt he has any humanitarian concerns even for his own government officials. As counterintuitive as it seems, maybe this is an indication that he still wants to negotiate.This Is upping the ante to make it appear he is willing to go to war and this action is something that fits in well with our mirror imaging - after all if we thought our diplomats were going to be at too great a risk we would withdraw (or most of them). This is part of his pressure campaign to make the US, NATO, and the west acquiesce to his demands. The question of course is what will Putin do when his demands are not met.
Excerpts:
Ukrainian officials say they saw the Russians leave.
But that leaves open the question of what, if anything, the Russians were signaling.
It is possible they were trying to bolster the case that the United States and its Western allies should take seriously their demands that Ukraine can never join NATO, and that troops, nuclear weapons and other heavy weaponry must be removed from former Warsaw Pact states, like Poland, that were once allied with the Soviet Union.
It could also be that the Russians were trying to indicate that an attack was brewing, though there were no other signals. In fact, the buildup of Russian troops on the Ukrainian border is not increasing at a rate that Pentagon officials expected a month ago.
Russia Thins Out Its Embassy in Ukraine, a Possible Clue to Putin’s Next Move
By Michael Schwirtz and David E. Sanger
Published Jan. 17, 2022
Updated Jan. 18, 2022, 4:59 a.m. ET
The slow evacuation may be part propaganda, part preparation for a conflict or part feint, Ukrainian and U.S. officials say. It could be all three.
Send any friend a story
As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. Anyone can read what you share.
The Russian Embassy in Kyiv, Ukraine, in April.
Published Jan. 17, 2022Updated Jan. 18, 2022, 4:59 a.m. ET
KYIV, Ukraine — The week before intensive diplomatic meetings began over the buildup of Russian troops on the Ukrainian border, American and Ukrainian officials watched from afar as Russia began emptying out its embassy in Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital.
On Jan. 5, 18 people — mostly the children and wives of Russian diplomats — boarded buses and embarked on a 15-hour drive home to Moscow, according to a senior Ukrainian security official.
About 30 more followed in the next few days, from Kyiv and a consulate in Lviv, in western Ukraine. Diplomats at two other Russian consulates have been told to prepare to leave Ukraine, the security official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss national security matters.
How to interpret the evacuation has become part of the mystery of divining the next play by President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. Thinning out the Russian Embassy may be part propaganda, part preparation for a looming conflict or part feint, Ukrainian and U.S. officials say. It could be all three. Russia’s Foreign Ministry said on Tuesday that its embassy in Kyiv was “operating as usual,” the Interfax news agency reported.
In recent days, the slow departures — which the Russians most likely knew that the Americans and the Ukrainians would see — have become part of the puzzle of what happens next. They are a more ominous data point, in addition to cyberattacks on Ukrainian ministries last week, and reports from Microsoft and the U.S. government that far more destructive malware has been planted in Ukrainian networks but not activated.
Enormous train convoys loaded with tanks, missiles and troops continue to push west through Russia, apparently heading for the Ukrainian border. Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, the authoritarian leader of Belarus, announced on Monday that Russian forces and equipment had begun arriving in his country for a joint military exercise that would be held in two places: on Belarus’s western edge, near Poland and Lithuania, two NATO countries; and along the Ukrainian border, which could prove another pathway for invasion.
The exercise has been given a very American-sounding name: Allied Resolve. But in Kyiv, Ukrainian officials fully expect any Russian troops deployed to Belarus for the exercises to remain in place indefinitely, leaving Ukraine open to attack from the north, the east and the south.
“We’ll be fully surrounded by equal forces,” the senior Ukrainian security official said.
In Washington, U.S. officials say they still assess that Mr. Putin has not yet made a decision to invade. They describe him as more a tactician than a grand strategist, and they believe that he is constantly weighing a host of different factors. Among them is how well he could weather the threatened sanctions on his banks and industry, and whether his demands that Ukraine stop veering toward NATO — and that NATO stop spreading toward Russia — are receiving enough attention.
But the U.S. officials say Mr. Putin may also have concluded that with the United States and other countries arming Ukraine, his military advantage is at risk of slipping away. Britain’s defense secretary, Ben Wallace, announced in an address to Parliament on Monday that the country would begin providing Ukraine with light, anti-armor defensive weapons. Mr. Putin may become tempted to act sooner rather than later.
U.S. officials saw Russia’s embassy evacuations coming. “We have information that indicates the Russian government was preparing to evacuate their family members from the Russian Embassy in Ukraine in late December and early January,” a U.S. official said in a statement.
Ukrainian officials say they saw the Russians leave.
But that leaves open the question of what, if anything, the Russians were signaling.
It is possible they were trying to bolster the case that the United States and its Western allies should take seriously their demands that Ukraine can never join NATO, and that troops, nuclear weapons and other heavy weaponry must be removed from former Warsaw Pact states, like Poland, that were once allied with the Soviet Union.
It could also be that the Russians were trying to indicate that an attack was brewing, though there were no other signals. In fact, the buildup of Russian troops on the Ukrainian border is not increasing at a rate that Pentagon officials expected a month ago.
The latest U.S. estimates are that about 60 battalion tactical groups, known as B.T.G.s and each with an average of 800 soldiers, are now in place at the border with Ukraine. Combined with other local forces, the Russians have about 77,000 troops at the border, with more on the way. Others put the figure at closer to 100,000 — much depends on how different forces are counted — but that is well short of the Pentagon’s estimate more than a month ago that the total number could rise to 175,000.
U.S. and European intelligence and military officials say Mr. Putin may be waiting for the ground to freeze, making it easier to get heavy equipment over the border. Or he may be building up slowly, for diplomatic advantage, as he awaits a written reply from the Biden administration and NATO to his demands that they roll back NATO’s military posture to what it was 15 years ago — much farther from Russia’s borders.
While U.S. officials still believe Mr. Putin is undecided about his next move, officials in Kyiv are assessing what an attack may look like, if it happens. It could come in the form of a full-on invasion, the Ukrainian security official said. Or Russia could launch a cyberattack on the Ukrainian energy grid — far larger than the ones conducted in 2015 and 2016 — combined with military escalation in Ukraine’s east, where Russian-backed separatist forces remain deeply entrenched.
No one but the leaders in the Kremlin seem to know for sure how the next days and weeks might play out.
Against this backdrop, a senior delegation of U.S. senators arrived in Kyiv on Monday. Their trip followed a visit to Kyiv last Wednesday by the C.I.A. director, William J. Burns, who consulted with intelligence officials and met with Mr. Zelensky to discuss efforts to de-escalate tensions with Moscow, a U.S. official said. Mr. Burns’s trip was reported earlier by CNN.
Understand the Escalating Tensions Over Ukraine
Card 1 of 5
Ominous warnings. Russia called the strike a destabilizing act that violated the cease-fire agreement, raising fears of a new intervention in Ukraine that could draw the United States and Europe into a new phase of the conflict.
The Kremlin’s position. President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, who has increasingly portrayed NATO’s eastward expansion as an existential threat to his country, said that Moscow’s military buildup was a response to Ukraine’s deepening partnership with the alliance.
The senators’ visit was a bipartisan show of support from Ukraine’s most powerful ally, even if they brought few specific proposals for staving off a Russian attack.
“Russia’s actions in eastern Ukraine and Crimea, and the actions that they are planning today, represent the most serious assault on the post-World War II order in our lifetime,” Senator Christopher S. Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat who sits on the Foreign Relations Committee, said at a news conference in Kyiv.
Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula in 2014 and instigated a violent separatist uprising that effectively cleaved away two Ukrainian provinces. More than 13,000 people were killed in the fighting.
At the news conference, Mr. Murphy said he hoped legislation that outlines punishing sanctions against Russia’s leadership, including Mr. Putin, would reach President Biden’s desk before any Russian action and possibly help deter it. In a meeting with the senators late Monday, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine urged them to impose sanctions quickly “to counter the aggression” from Russia.
The senators’ pledges to defend democracy and vanquish tyranny seemed a throwback to the Cold War. Indeed, observers have argued that Mr. Putin’s threats against Ukraine are rooted in a desire to reconstitute a Moscow-led Eastern bloc reminiscent of Soviet times.
Similarly, Mr. Lukashenko, the Belarusian leader who is close to Mr. Putin, made his own argument that the Russians were responding to the Americans.
“What are the Americans doing here?” Mr. Lukashenko said. “There are these hotheads who are calling for war.”
It is possibly in that spirit that Russian troops will begin military exercises in Belarus next month. Security officials fear that the exercises could become a pretext for long-term deployment of Russian forces in the former Soviet republic, which shares a lengthy western border with the European Union and NATO.
Mr. Lukashenko has pledged to follow Mr. Putin’s lead on any action in Ukraine.
Julian E. Barnes and Anton Troianovski contributed reporting.
5. Milley, Berger, test positive for COVID-19
And I guess Laura Ingraham was quite ecstatic to hear this news as she apparently applauded with joy on her program.
Milley, Berger, test positive for COVID-19
Army Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Commandant of the Marine Corps, Gen. David Berger, have tested positive for COVID-19, officials say.
Milley tested positive Sunday, according to Army Col. Dave Butler, Milley’s spokesman.
Milley “is working remotely and isolating himself from contact with others after a positive COVID-19 test yesterday,” Butler said in a statement. “He is experiencing very minor symptoms and can perform all of his duties from the remote location. He has received the COVID-19 vaccines including the booster.”
Berger also tested positive, Marine Col. Kelly Frushour, a spokewoman, told Military Times.
“The performance of his duties will remain unaffected,” she said.
Commandant of the Marine Corps Gen. David H. Berger receives the COVID-19 vaccine as part of Operation Warp Speed at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, Maryland, Dec 22, 2020. (photo by Lance Cpl. Tyler W. Abbott, Marine Corps)
Milley’s most recent contact with President Joe Biden was on Jan. 12 at retired Gen. Raymond Odierno’s funeral. He tested negative several days prior to and every day following contact with the President until yesterday.
Milley and Berger the most recent top military leaders to test positive for COVID-19 in recent weeks.
In a statement released that evening, Austin said he took the test after “exhibiting symptoms” related to the fast-spreading virus. He described his symptoms as mild and said he was working with his doctors to limit any health complications.
Austin said he received both the COVID-19 vaccination early last year and a booster shot in early October. He said doctors told him that “my fully vaccinated status … have rendered the infection much more mild than it would otherwise have been. And I am grateful for that.”
Howard Altman is an award-winning editor and reporter who was previously the military reporter for the Tampa Bay Times and before that the Tampa Tribune, where he covered USCENTCOM, USSOCOM and SOF writ large among many other topics.
6. Autocracies outdo democracies on public trust - survey
And we, citizens of democratic countries (or our federal democratic republic), have only ourselves to blame.
Autocracies outdo democracies on public trust - survey
Visitors watch a flag-raising ceremony as the sun rises at Tiananmen Square, on the founding anniversary of Chinese Communist Party, in Beijing, China July 1, 2018. REUTERS/Stringer
Jan 18 (Reuters) - Public trust in governments running the world's democracies has fallen to new lows over their handling of the pandemic and amid a widespread sense of economic pessimism, a global survey has found.
The Edelman Trust Barometer, which for two decades has polled thousands of people on trust in their governments, media, business and NGOs, conversely showed rising scores in several autocratic states, notably China.
It also highlighted that business, thanks to its role developing vaccines and adapting workplace and retail practices, had retained strong levels of trust globally, albeit with reservations about its commitment to social fairness.
"We really have a collapse of trust in democracies," said Richard Edelman, whose Edelman communications group published the survey of over 36,000 respondents in 28 countries interviewed between Nov. 1-24 of last year.
"It all goes back to: 'Do you have a sense of economic confidence?'" he added, noting high levels of concern about job losses linked either to the pandemic or automation.
The biggest losers of public trust over the last year were institutions in Germany, down 7 points to 46, Australia at 53 (-6), the Netherlands at 57 (-6), South Korea at 42 (-5) and the United States at 43 (-5).
By contrast, public trust in institutions in China stood at 83%, up 11 points, 76% in United Arab Emirates (+9) and 66% in Thailand (+5).
The trillions of dollars of stimulus spent by the world's richest nations to support their economies through the pandemic have failed to instil a lasting sense of confidence, the survey suggested.
In Japan, only 15% of people believed they and their families would be better off in five years' time, with most other democracies ranging around 20-40% on the same question.
But in China nearly two-thirds were optimistic about their economic fortunes and 80% of Indians believed they would be better off in five years.
Edelman said higher public trust levels in China were linked not just to economic perceptions but also to a greater sense of predictability about Chinese policy, not least on the pandemic.
"I think there is a coherence between what is done and what is said...They have had a better COVID than the US for example."
According to the Reuters pandemic tracker, the United States currently leads the world in the daily average number of new deaths reported, while China has regularly been reporting no new deaths for months as it pursues strict "zero-Covid" policies.
The results of the latest Edelman survey are in tune with its findings in recent years that charted rising disillusionment with capitalism, political leadership and the media.
Concerns about "fake news" were this time at all-time highs, with three-quarters of respondents globally worried about it being "used as a weapon". Among societal fears, climate change was now just behind the loss of employment as a major concern.
The burden of expectation on business leaders remains heavy, with strong majorities saying they bought goods, accepted job offers and invested in businesses according to their beliefs and values.
Around two-fifths, however, also said that business was not doing enough to address climate change, economic inequality and workforce reskilling.
Reporting by Mark John in France; Editing by Frank Jack Daniel
7. Melvin Bowling, retired two-star and original ‘Early Bird’ contributor, dies at 88
And for the "rest of the story" on the Early Bird.
In 1969, while working as deputy chief of the Internal Information Division in the Secretary of the Air Force Office of Information, Bowling is credited with contributing to the rise of the “Early Bird” newsletter. Hugh Stanley, a friend of Bowling’s for decades, told Military Times one of Bowling’s responsibilities was to aggregate defense-related news and distribute it across Northern Virginia and Washington, D.C. At the time, it was printed using mimeograph machines, which predated copiers, and the daily newsletter was hand-carried to its various destinations.
While the Early Bird Brief is now digital and published by Military Times and Defense News, it was originally compiled by officers and public affairs officials, such as Bowling, working at the Pentagon for decades. According to USA Today, Military personnel worldwide came to depend on the Early Bird for information that ranged from geopolitics to what was impacting individual troops at the unit level.
In 2013 the government-funded and Defense Department-produced version of the Early Bird fell victim to budget cuts surrounding sequestration. Military Times and Defense News, which had been publishing an adapted version of the Early Bird, began independently publishing the daily defense-related newsletter. Called the “Early Bird Brief,” Military Times continues to provide an early morning preview of the days’ top defense news and information to this day.
Melvin Bowling, retired two-star and original ‘Early Bird’ contributor, dies at 88
Melvin Bowling, a retired Air Force major general, Silver Star recipient, and one of the creators of the original Early Bird compilation of military-themed stories in the media, passed away on Jan. 10.
He was 88.
After graduation from the University of Alabama in 1954, Bowling accepted a commission in the U.S. Air Force. A fighter pilot by trade, Bowling accrued over 6,500 flight hours on several different aircraft during his 28-year career.
Bowling also had the unique distinction of being one of only a handful of Air Force pilots who conducted carrier operations with the Navy. In 1961 Bowling was selected to be an exchange officer with the sea service. While assigned to the Navy, Bowling completed cruises as an operations officer with both the Navy’s 6th and 2nd fleets.
In January 1968, Bowling was assigned to the 12th Tactical Fighter Wing, which was located at Cam Rahn Bay Air Base, Republic of Vietnam. From January, 1968 to February, 1969, Bowling flew more than 200 combat missions over Vietnam and flew in support of the Banner-class environmental research ship Pueblo crisis in Korea. Bowling would earn the Silver Star on one of those missions over Vietnam, the U.S military’s 3rd highest award for gallantry.
On Aug. 29, 1968, Bowling, then a colonel, flew a mission in direct support of Americans in contact near Duc Lap Special Forces Camp. According to his citation for bravery, Americans on the ground were in heavy contact and in danger of being overrun by a numerically superior enemy. Showing “complete disregard for his personal safety, Bowling made repeated passes through the lethal envelope of heavy hostile weapons fire to deliver his ordnance with devastating accuracy.
That day, his actions helped lead to hostile forces and their equipment being “completely destroyed” and ground units conducting an organized withdrawal.
Following Vietnam, Bowling held multiple commands throughout the Air Force, including the 68th Bombardment Wing at Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in North Carolina and Strategic Air Command’s 4th Air Division at Frances E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming, Commander of the U.S. Air Force Recruiting Service, and deputy commander of the 6th Allied Tactical Air Force.
Bowling also served two stints at the Pentagon, working both in the Secretary of the Air Force’s Office and then later on the staff of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
In 1969, while working as deputy chief of the Internal Information Division in the Secretary of the Air Force Office of Information, Bowling is credited with contributing to the rise of the “Early Bird” newsletter. Hugh Stanley, a friend of Bowling’s for decades, told Military Times one of Bowling’s responsibilities was to aggregate defense-related news and distribute it across Northern Virginia and Washington, D.C. At the time, it was printed using mimeograph machines, which predated copiers, and the daily newsletter was hand-carried to its various destinations.
While the Early Bird Brief is now digital and published by Military Times and Defense News, it was originally compiled by officers and public affairs officials, such as Bowling, working at the Pentagon for decades. According to USA Today, Military personnel worldwide came to depend on the Early Bird for information that ranged from geopolitics to what was impacting individual troops at the unit level.
In 2013 the government-funded and Defense Department-produced version of the Early Bird fell victim to budget cuts surrounding sequestration. Military Times and Defense News, which had been publishing an adapted version of the Early Bird, began independently publishing the daily defense-related newsletter. Called the “Early Bird Brief,” Military Times continues to provide an early morning preview of the days’ top defense news and information to this day.
Bowling’s last active duty billet was as Chief of Staff for Allied Forces Southern Europe. He retired in 1982, settling in Huntsville, Ala, so that his children would have stability during their teenage years, according to his obituary. He is survived by his wife, Joan; sons, Mike Bowling and Jim Bowling; and grandchildren, John Michael, Lucy, Jake, Sam, Mathew, and Johnathan.
Bowling’s military decorations and awards include the Silver Star, Defense Superior Service Medal, Legion of Merit, Distinguished Flying Cross, Bronze Star Medal, Meritorious Service Medal, Air Medal with seven oak leaf clusters, Joint Service Commendation Medal, Air Force Commendation Medal with oak leaf cluster and Navy Commendation Medal.
James R. Webb is a rapid response reporter for Military Times. He served as a US Marine infantryman in Iraq. Additionally, he has worked as a Legislative Assistant in the US Senate and as an embedded photographer in Afghanistan.
8. Millions of Tricare Beneficiaries Left Out of COVID-19 Test Reimbursement Plan
Excerpts:
Tricare spokesman Peter Graves said Thursday that policy remains in place but the Department of Defense is reexamining its rules.
"The Defense Health Agency is reviewing the latest guidance on at-home testing kits in order to identify whether any changes to the current policy are warranted," Graves said in an email to Military.com.
The new insurance reimbursement plan also does not apply to Medicare, which provides the primary coverage for military beneficiaries who use Tricare For Life – meaning those patients are also excluded under the initiative.
Despite not being covered under the federal program's reimbursement plan, Tricare users should still be able to get access to free tests.
As part of the announcement, the government will establish "thousands of locations," according to Biden, to distribute free take-home tests and will create a website for anyone to order free rapid antigen tests for delivery.
Millions of Tricare Beneficiaries Left Out of COVID-19 Test Reimbursement Plan
The Biden administration's plan to cover the cost of home COVID-19 tests does not apply to Tricare beneficiaries.
Beginning Saturday, private and group health insurers will be required to reimburse the cost of eight take-home COVID tests per month under an initiative announced by President Joe Biden on Jan. 10.
But as a federal health program, Tricare's nearly 8 million beneficiaries who aren't on active duty will not have the same access, although the military health system is reviewing its policies, according to a Defense Health Agency spokesman.
Under Tricare, tests are covered only when ordered by a doctor for patients with symptoms; who have had prolonged exposure but no symptoms; are having surgery; or are overseas and need to be tested.
All other reasons -- personal concern, workplace safety, returning to work or school, travel or access to services -- are not covered.
In a major effort to broaden access to testing across the U.S., Biden ordered insurers to cover the cost of eight COVID-19 test kits per month for people with health insurance starting Jan. 15.
The initiative requires insurers to reimburse for the full cost of take-home tests at their network pharmacies and at out-of-network retailers for a $12 copayment per test.
And under the directive, patients with an underlying health condition or other factors will not be limited on the number of tests they can be reimbursed for if they have a doctor's order.
Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Tricare beneficiaries have been able to have their COVID-19 tests covered only if they have symptoms or have been in contact with a person who has tested positive and they have a doctor's order.
Tricare spokesman Peter Graves said Thursday that policy remains in place but the Department of Defense is reexamining its rules.
"The Defense Health Agency is reviewing the latest guidance on at-home testing kits in order to identify whether any changes to the current policy are warranted," Graves said in an email to Military.com.
The new insurance reimbursement plan also does not apply to Medicare, which provides the primary coverage for military beneficiaries who use Tricare For Life – meaning those patients are also excluded under the initiative.
Despite not being covered under the federal program's reimbursement plan, Tricare users should still be able to get access to free tests.
As part of the announcement, the government will establish "thousands of locations," according to Biden, to distribute free take-home tests and will create a website for anyone to order free rapid antigen tests for delivery.
Some states like Vermont already have programs in place that require insurers to reimburse for tests. Other states, including Colorado, Connecticut, Iowa, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey and Washington, as well as the District of Columbia, already have been giving away free tests at COVID-19 test sites, community centers, libraries and community health clinics.
With the spread of the Omicron variant of the illness, test kits have remained in short supply at retailers and via community distribution.
Earlier this month, the Defense Department awarded contracts to a number of rapid antigen test makers, including Abbott, maker of the BinaxNOW test; iHealth Lab; and Roche Diagnostics for the purchase of 380 million over-the-counter tests, and to Goldbelt Security for distribution of a planned 500 million tests.
The DoD is the contracting agency because it has the infrastructure and capability to "acquire goods and services as rapidly and effectively as possible for the federal government in support of the American public," according to Pentagon spokeswoman Jessica Maxwell.
There have been more than 460,000 cases of COVID-19 diagnosed in the military community since the beginning of the pandemic, including military personnel, family members, civilian employees and contractors.
Nearly 650 have died, including 88 troops, 34 dependents, 394 civilians and 133 contractors, according to the DoD.
9. A Synagogue Shouldn’t Be a Fortress
A powerful essay. Aside from the terrible tragedies that have occurred and the importance of our religious institutions, this short article illustrates what all those whose job is advising and assisting, in whatever capacity, must consider: the culture. Ms. Kayyem is very forthcoming with her own shortfall as she provided security advice and assistance. We should learn from her.
A Synagogue Shouldn’t Be a Fortress
About the author: Juliette Kayyem, a former assistant secretary for homeland security under President Barack Obama, is the faculty chair of the homeland-security program at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. She is the author of the forthcoming book The Devil Never Sleeps: Learning to Live in an Age of Disasters.
A few years ago, in response to the deadly 2018 attack on the Tree of Life congregation in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the synagogue where my children and husband are members asked me to advise its new security committee. Easy enough. It is what I do for companies, public entities, schools, and sports teams. My job is to assess risk and buttress defenses in response to those risks. That’s it. I do cold calculations, not emotion. On that occasion, however, dispassion was a liability.
My relationship to the synagogue, as an Arab American raising Jewish children, is less complicated than the debates of our time would suggest. The synagogue is a progressive place, open to the stranger and the non-convert. Enough interfaith families belong that the congregation long ago shed any formal notion of what it means to be a “Jewish family.” It changed its calendar, even, and canceled Hebrew school on Easter Sunday to accommodate its diverse members. When my three kids were preparing for their bar and bat mitzvahs and the social events surrounding them, the division of labor was clear: Their father would focus on their souls, and I would focus on logistics.
The very existence of the security committee was a sign of concern about anti-Semitism and hate crimes. That concern was and is rational. Jews have been targeted with deadly violence recently in Pittsburgh; Poway, California; Jersey City, New Jersey; Monsey, New York; and, this weekend, Colleyville, Texas, where a British national took hostages at the Congregation Beth Israel during an 11-hour ordeal. Today, one in four American Jews says that their cultural or religious institutions have been attacked, threatened, or defaced over the past five years. The Jewish community is menaced by both right-wing extremists and Islamic jihadists.
The members of the committee were of course aware of the threat, but they had no background in how to counter it. I explained that, generally, the overall goal is to minimize risks while maximizing defenses. But minimizing risks is not easy for one temple to do alone, so the community would have to focus on building defenses.
I provided a checklist: exterior protections, such as fencing or walling off areas exposed to busy streets; contracting security guards during the High Holidays; video cameras; active-shooter training. Again, no emotion. The committee members nodded along. “And you should consider some entry-access security, so people have to identify themselves with badges before they can come in,” I continued. That, it turns out, was too much. The historical significance of asking Jews to carry badges had been lost on me; so was the idea that access is both a vulnerability and essential to the institution.
At airports, stadiums, even schools, safety and security procedures are put in place to protect the essence of the institution itself: travel, recreation, education. We may not like the fortress aesthetic, but we’ve come to accept it.
But what if the essence of a place is that it is defenseless? What if its ability to welcome others, to be hospitable to strangers, is its identity? What if vulnerability is its unstated mission? That is the challenge I hadn’t considered. I tread carefully here speaking of a religion that I know only through marriage. I have strong feelings about Israel, not recently known for its peaceful stance toward its Arab residents. But in the U.S., for a Jewish congregation to become a fortress would seem too militaristic, too aggressive. To make a soft target harder would more likely change the target than deter the attacker.
In security, we view vulnerabilities as inherently bad. We solve the problem with layered defenses: more locks, more surveillance. Deprive strangers of access to your temple, I urged the committee members, and have congregants carry ID. They would have none of it. Access was a vulnerability embedded in the institution, and no security expert could change that—we do logistics, not souls.
The standoff in Colleyville ended with the attacker dead and the hostages unharmed. But all around the country, synagogues are no doubt convening their security committees, wondering what more they can do to defend their members without losing their essential vulnerability. A synagogue is not like an airport or a stadium. When it becomes a fortress, something immeasurable is lost.
Juliette Kayyem, a former assistant secretary for homeland security under President Barack Obama, is the faculty chair of the homeland-security program at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. She is the author of the forthcoming book The Devil Never Sleeps: Learning to Live in an Age of Disasters.
10. Investigating who betrayed Anne Frank and her family to the Nazis
A powerful story for those who did not see this on Sunday night. The video is at this link and the transcript is below.
A friend who flagged this for me provided these comments which should be of interest to Korea watchers:
This video is emotional. The parallels to North Koreans suffering in the world's most biased and brutal regime are stark.
Note the record-keeping. Is there any doubt such records exist in North Korea? The NK investigators have to show how thorough they are just like the Nazi investigators.
Just tragic.
To add to it, it struck me just how far people are willing to dgo to survive, to include betraying your countrymen. The Nazis then and the north Koreans today make this a fundamental part of their security structure.
Investigating who betrayed Anne Frank and her family to the Nazis
Seventy-five years after its publication, "The Diary of Anne Frank" remains among the most widely-read books in the world. Blinkering between hope and despair, the account of a Jewish teenager's life in hiding in an annex behind an Amsterdam warehouse, gave voice and a face to millions of victims of the Nazi genocide, yet one question has gone stubbornly unanswered all these years: who alerted the Nazi search team, in 1944, to Anne Frank and her family's hiding place? Two Dutch police inquiries and countless historians have come up with theories, but no firm conclusions… Then, in 2016, a team of investigators, led by a veteran FBI agent, decided to bring modern crime-solving techniques and technology to this cold case. And now, they believe they have an answer—one we'll share with you tonight—to a question that's bedeviled historians, and haunted Holland: who was responsible for the betrayal?
Anne Frank
Vince Pankoke had turned in his badge and gun. He was two years into a comfortable Florida retirement, when his phone rang in the spring of 2016.
Vince Pankoke: I received a call from a colleague from the Netherlands who said, "If you-- if you're done laying on the beach, we have a case for you."
Jon Wertheim: Were you laying on the beach?
Vince Pankoke: I-- I was actually driving to the beach. I w-- (LAUGH) I wasn't quite there yet.
Pankoke spent three decades as an FBI special agent, targeting Colombian drug cartels. His work had also taken him to the Netherlands, where his investigative chops left an impression.
Jon Wertheim: Were you looking to get back when he told you what it was about?
Vince Pankoke: After he told me it was to, you know, try to solve the mystery of what caused the raid-- for Anne Frank and the others in the annex. I needed to hear more.
Vince Pankoke
Four-thousand miles away, in Amsterdam, Thijs Bayens a Dutch filmmaker and documentarian, had been asking around for a credentialed investigator to dig into a question that he feels Holland has never quite reckoned with, one that gets to the essence of human nature.
Thijs Bayens: For me, it was really important to investigate what makes us-- give up on each other. The area where Anne Frank lived is very normal. And it's a very warm area with the butcher and the doctor and the policeman. They worked together. They loved each other. They lived together. And suddenly people start to betray on each other. How could that happen?
Jon Wertheim: Of the millions, literally millions of stories to come out of the Holocaust, why do you think this one resonates the way it does?
Thijs Bayens: I think right after the war people were shown-- the concentration camps, the atrocities that took place, the horror. And, suddenly you find this innocent, beautiful, very smart, funny, talented girl. And she as a lighthouse comes out of the darkness. And then I think humanity said, "This is who we are.
Betraying fellow Dutch to the Nazis was a criminal offense in the Netherlands, but two police probes and a whole library of books dedicated to the Anne Frank case, yielded neither convictions nor definitive conclusions.
Jon Wertheim: This question of who betrayed Anne Frank, that had been investigated for years. What was gonna make your investigation different than the ones before it?
Thijs Bayens: If it's a criminal act, it should be investigated by the police. So we set it up as a cold case.
Thijs Bayens
Like so many, Pankoke had read the diary in middle school in Western Pennsylvania and it left a mark. There would be no perp walks or busted crime syndicates here, but he was intrigued… cautiously.
Jon Wertheim: You hear, "We're gonna go back and look at Anne Frank." And that might have the ring of some schlocky media creation. Did that worry you?
Vince Pankoke: Oh, it did. It did. Because as a career investigator, I didn't wanna be associated with any type of a tabloid type investigation.
Jon Wertheim: You had to make sure this was serious.
Vince Pankoke: Let's face it. I mean, the honor of the diary, the honor of-- Anne Frank, we had to treat this with utmost respect.
What ultimately sealed it for Vince Pankoke, the guarantee of absolute autonomy. The ground rules: Thijs Bayens would oversee the operation and could film the process for a documentary he's been making. There would be a book about it, which helped finance the project along with funding from the city of Amsterdam, but this was going to be an independent undertaking with serious investigators. And Vince Pankoke was going to take the lead digging in.
Jon Wertheim: You'd done cold cases before. Before this, what was the biggest gap in time between when you were approached and when the-- the crime occurred?
Vince Pankoke: It was about a five year crime at that point.
Jon Wertheim: It's 75 years. So a little different.
Vince Pankoke: It's a lot different--
Jon Wertheim: This is more than cold.
Vince Pankoke: This-- yeah. This was frozen.
To chip away, Pankoke had to draw up his own blueprint. He knew that there was going to be more information to plow through than any human could handle and that artificial intelligence could be a secret weapon.
An FBI man's dream team was assembled… an investigative psychologist, a war crimes investigator, historians, criminologists plus an army of archival researchers.
Jon Wertheim: What did all these people with disparate skills bring to this?
Vince Pankoke: They brought a different view. It was all of these skills that help us understand and put into context, a crime that happened, you know, in 1944. We have to look at things differently.
Together, they dove into a familiar story: the Frank family had moved to Amsterdam from Germany to escape the rise of Hitler. They found safety in Holland, where Otto Frank ran a manufacturing business. But then the Nazis invaded in 1940, two years later, the Franks—Otto, wife Edith, Anne and her sister Margot—along with four other Jewish friends of the family went into hiding in an annex behind Otto's warehouse. Today, it's preserved as a museum. Dr. Gertjan Broek, a historian at the Anne Frank house, showed us in.
Correspondent Jon Wertheim and Dr. Gertjan Broek in front of the bookcase that hid the entrance to the Franks' hiding place.
Jon Wertheim: Oh, wow. This-- this is the famous--
Dr. Gertjan Broek: This is the bookcase–
Jon Wertheim: --bookcase.
Dr. Gertjan Broek: Th-- this is the bookcase. It was used to camouflage the entrance to the hiding place.
The bookcase helped protect the Franks, as did a handful of Otto's close colleagues at the warehouse who were in on the secret.
Dr. Gertjan Broek: We go inside, mind your head.
Jon Wertheim: Oh, wow.
After the raid, the Nazis took anything that wasn't nailed down. Recreations show what it looked like. Two crammed floors, 761 days, more than two excruciating years indoors. The office workers brought food and supplies, but the eight in hiding couldn't make a sound during the day. By night they could listen to the radio, desperately plotting updates from the front on this map.
Dr. Gertjan Broek: Here's a newspaper clipping from shortly after-- D-Day, so June, 1944. With the pins that tried to follow the advances of the allied troops in the days and weeks probably after.
Jon Wertheim: This is June, 1944--
Dr. Gertjan Broek: 4 June--
Jon Wertheim: --so--
Dr. Gertjan Broek: So there's hope because allied forces are on the way. Their life depended on what would happen.
Anne's bedroom walls, familiar to any teenager, preserved from the day she was taken away. Here, she chronicled the monotony and the horror of life in hiding. "Outside things are terrible, day and night," she wrote in January 1943. "These poor people are being dragged away, with nothing but a backpack and a little bit of money."
Her last entry was dated August 1st, 1944. She was 15.
Jon Wertheim: Take me to the day of the raid. It's the summer of 1944 and what happens that day?
Dr. Gertjan Broek: It's a warm day, sunny. And around 10:30, between 10:30 and 11:00, a couple of men walk in.
They were detectives with a Dutch police unit working with the Nazis. An SS officer named Silberbauer led the team. They demanded to be shown around the warehouse.
Dr. Gertjan Broek: They end up in front of the bookcase, which is hiding the entrance to the annex. And it's important I think to realize that two of the policemen present had been seasoned detectives, well experienced. They had been searching this type of building in the inner city of Amsterdam before.
They knew there was likely something behind that bookcase. The stunned inhabitants they found were marched out. On the floor behind them, Anne's diary - which a quick-thinking office worker, loyal to the Franks, preserved. Of the eight taken away, Otto Frank was the only survivor. The others were among the 100,000 Dutch Jews - 3/4ths of the country's Jewish population - to die at the hands of the Nazis. In an interview with CBS in 1964, Otto recounted what happened when his family was put on the cattle cars to Auschwitz a month after their capture.
Otto Frank: On September 4th, 1944, the last transport went to Auschwitz. Well, when we arrived at Auschwitz there were men standing there with clubs — women here, men there. We were separated right on the station, so women went to Birkenau Camp and we went to Auschwitz Camp from the station and I never saw my family again.
After the war, Otto Frank was determined to find out who betrayed the hiding place to the Nazis. It was the question many readers asked after he published his daughter's diary in 1947. But after a couple of years, Otto abruptly stopped looking—more on that curious decision, later. When Vince Pankoke went to Amsterdam to begin his search, his first stop, naturally, was the scene of the crime.
Vince Pankoke: I called this the most visited crime scene in the world because so many people from all over the world, you know, millions of people come here.
Jon Wertheim: So when you come here for the first time, what are you looking for?
Vince Pankoke: Well, as an investigator I wanna see what's in the area. Of course I wanna see inside the building. I wanna reconstruct how the actual arrest took place, and who participated in it.
Pankoke and his team spent hours in the annex looking for any clue, however remote.
He also cased the exterior —today almost exactly as it was then.
Vince Pankoke: This is the courtyard that is behind the annex. And it's-- as you can see, it's totally enclosed. This courtyard area is surrounded by the buildings of the neighborhood.
Jon Wertheim: I'm thinking one cough that gets overheard, one window that happens to be open at the wrong time, the sheer risk factor here is extraordinary.
Vince Pankoke: It is extraordinary. When we first started the case, one of the theories that was out there is that the raid may have been caused by somebody in the immediate area seeing something, hearing something, and reporting it. So, therefore, we tracked and identified every resident that lived in this block and adjacent streets.
Using the artificial intelligence program, Pankoke and his team mapped potential threats. In the courtyard surrounding the annex, they found Nazi party members and even known informants.
Vince Pankoke: All living just a wall or two away from one another. When you take a look at the threats the question isn't, you know, what caused the raid. The question might be: how did they last more than two years without being discovered?
Jon Wertheim: It strikes me in a case like this, anyone could be a suspect. A Nazi sympathizer, an informant, someone who happens to walk by and hear a cough. How did you navigate that?
Vince Pankoke: We had to consider all those options. The team and I sat down and we compiled a list of ways in which the annex coulda been compromised. You know, was it carelessness of the people occupying the annex maybe making too much noise or being seen in the windows? You know, was it betrayal?
Jon Wertheim: There is a theory out there that no one betrayed the Frank family. This was coincidence, or this was good detective work. You buy that at all?
Vince Pankoke: No. No. I mean, we took that theory apart, you know, bit by bit.
Jon Wertheim: This doesn't play out the way it does, but for a specific tip.
Vince Pankoke: Exactly.
Vince Pankoke, the 30-year FBI veteran, had worked plenty of cold cases, but none this cold. It had been more than seven decades since Anne Frank and her family had been discovered in their hiding place in central Amsterdam and ultimately put on cattle cars to Auschwitz. As to the question of who betrayed the family to the Nazis, all the witnesses were long dead, their evidence thinned by time, but Pankoke leaned on decades of experience and intuition, starting with the old case files.
Vince Pankoke: In a normal cold case, you go to a file. You pull it out. You read through everything that the previous investigation did. Interviews, leads that were followed up on.
Two previous Dutch police investigations into the raid on Anne Frank's hiding place - one in 1948 and another in 1963 - were not exactly masterclasses in detective work. And a lot of time had passed.
Vince Pankoke: The files were incomplete. And they were scattered about in probably a dozen different archives. Reports were missing. Witnesses had passed on. Memories had failed.
Pulling from the standard cold case playbook, Vince Pankoke followed up on what leads he could. Otherwise he and his team had to take a fresh approach. They spent years in places like the Amsterdam city archives, where the meticulous Dutch record-keeping used so brutally by the Nazis proved a major asset to the investigation.
Wertheim, Pieter van Twisk and Pankoke
Along with Pieter van Twisk— a veteran dutch journalist who co-founded this project and led the research team—they showed us a trove of items they dug up. Including a residence card belonging to Anne frank.
Pieter van Twisk: You can see here her name: her first name, second name, and her surname; and the date of birth. Here you see "N.I.", which stands for Nederlands (PH) Israelis (PH)-- which is her religion.
Jon Wertheim: "Netherland Israeli." So this–
Pieter van Twisk: Yeah, I don't--
Jon Wertheim: --she's "Jewish."
Pieter van Twisk: --know why-- that's Jewish, she was Jewish, yeah,
Jon Wertheim: Every Dutch resident had to have one of these?
Pieter van Twisk: Yah. Yah.
Jon Wertheim: This is – This is very detailed, and this has her-- her parents' birthdates on it.
Pieter van Twisk: Yah. That's, of course, also why it was quite easy for the Nazis to find people in the Netherlands, and to know if who was Jewish, or who was not Jewish.
Jon Wertheim: One piece of paper in the '40s, and you've got everything you could want to know about someone.
Pieter van Twisk: Yah.
The team fed every morsel they could - letters, maps, photos, even whole books - into the artificial intelligence database, developed specifically for the project. Then they let machine learning do its thing.
Vince Pankoke: It would identify relationships between people, addresses that were alike. And we were looking for those connections. Clues to solving this.
Jon Wertheim: Quantify how much time that saved you.
Vince Pankoke: Oh-- thousands and thousands of man hours.
Jon Wertheim: This also tells you what's garbage, what's excluded, what isn't gonna help your case.
Vince Pankoke: Oh, yeah, because much of what we do is eliminating the unnecessary.
The team paid particular attention to arrest records from the time. The Nazis were hellbent on ridding the Netherlands of all Jews, part of the Final Solution. By 1942, the Franks were among some 25,000 Jews in hiding across the country. The Nazis were coldly skilled at getting people to talk.
Vince Pankoke: Their typical MO was once they arrested somebody, the first question that was posed to them, "Do you know where any other Jews are in hiding?" So what we did is we chronicled all the arrests prior to and just after the annex raid to try to find any connection, any loose thread that would show us that they went from one arrest to another and then ultimately to the annex.
Jon Wertheim: And the implication is, "I'll make your sentence more lenient if you give up some names."
Vince Pankoke: Yeah.
Jon Wertheim: Effective?
Vince Pankoke: Oh, it was very effective.
Before long, suspects emerged. Dozens of them, like Willem van Maaren, an employee in the warehouse where the Franks were hiding, whom the Dutch police had interviewed in their investigations.
Vince Pankoke: He was prime suspect number one after the war. He's working downstairs in the warehouse. He was very shifty, suspicious. Actually a thief.
Jon Wertheim: So you say shifty, suspicious, thief. And yet, you eliminated him as a suspect.
Vince Pankoke: Not a betrayer, though. He was not antisemitic. He had incentive n-- not to betray them because if he did, he woulda lost his job, the business woulda been closed.
Jon Wertheim: What specifically are you looking for when you're considering suspects?
Vince Pankoke: We're looking at, did they have the knowledge? We look at their motive. You know, what would the motive be? Were they antisemitic? Were they trying to do this for money? And then opportunity. Were they even in town?
Jon Wertheim: So this -- knowledge, motive, opportunity, that's I'm guessing what you were using when you're infiltrating drug cartels. I mean, this is standard FBI technique--
Vince Pankoke: It's standard law enforcement technique.
Bram van der Meer
Jon Wertheim: What kind of a person would betray the Frank family?
Bram van der Meer: You would expect maybe that a very bad person did this, a person with-- I would say-- a psychopathic mind would- would do this.
Bram van de Meer knows psychopathic minds. He had been an investigative psychologist with the national police force in the Netherlands. On Vince Pankoke's team, he analyzed the behavior and mindsets of suspects they were considering.
Jon Wertheim: That's your first instinct? So it had to be a psychopath to do this?
Bram van der Meer: Yeah. But you have to be so very careful. It's war. You're surviving. Your day-to-day life is filled with fear. Your family might be arrested the next day. You're thinking everyday about your own survival. So that's the context.
Jon Wertheim: In a vacuum it had to be a psychopath to do this. But given the context--
Bram van der Meer: That's right.
Jon Wertheim: Then what kinda person might do this?
Bram van der Meer: Yeah, and then-- and then you end up in-- in a situation where it could be anybody.
Over time, their focus shifted to someone who, on the surface, might not have raised suspicions. This suspect wasn't a neighbor of the Franks and didn't work for them. But the FBI man's sixth sense kicked in. Arnold van den Bergh was a prominent Jewish businessman with a wife and kids in Amsterdam. After the invasion, he served on the Jewish council, a body the Nazis set up, nefariously, to carry out their policies within the Jewish community. In exchange for doing the Nazis' bidding, members might be spared the gas chambers.
Vince Pankoke: We know from history that the Jewish Council was dissolved in late September of 1943 and they were sent to the camps. We figured, well, if Arnold van den Bergh is in a camp somewhere, he certainly can't be privy to information that would lead to the compromise of the annex.
Jon Wertheim: Was he in a camp somewhere?
Vince Pankoke: Well, we thought he was. So due diligence, we started a search. And we couldn't find Arnold van den Bergh or any of his immediate family members in those camps.
Jon Wertheim: Why not?
Vince Pankoke: Well, that was the question. If he wasn't in the camps, where was he?
Turned out, he was living an open life in the middle of Amsterdam, Vince Pankoke says, only possible, if Van den Bergh had some kind of leverage.
Jon Wertheim: To my ears, you're describing an operator. Is that fair?
Vince Pankoke: I'd call him a chess player. He thought in terms of layers of protection, by obtaining different exemptions from being placed into the camps.
As it happened, Van den Bergh—who died in 1950— had come up before, in a report from the 1963 investigation. Though astonishingly, there was little apparent follow up by police.
Vince Pankoke: We read just one small paragraph that mentioned that during the interview of Otto Frank, he told them that shortly after liberation, he received an anonymous note identifying his betrayer of the address where they were staying, the annex, as Arnold van den Bergh.
Jon Wertheim: Wait, wait. So, in the files, there's reference to a note that Otto Frank received that mentions this specific name?
Vince Pankoke: Remarkably so. Yes. It's listed right there.
The note was so striking to Otto Frank that he typed up a copy for his records. Naturally, the veteran FBI man wanted to know: where was that note? Any seasoned investigator will tell you that, ideally, good shoe leather comes garnished with good luck. In 2018, Vince Pankoke and team located the son of one of the former investigators. There in the son's home, buried in some old files: Otto's copy of the note.
Jon Wertheim: I just wanna get this straight. You're talking to the son of an investigator. He says, "Yeah, 50 years ago my dad looked into this and I might have some material."
Vince Pankoke: Yeah. We were lucky.
Jon Wertheim: You've held the metaphorical smoking gun in your hand before in the FBI. This anonymous note. Does it feel like a smoking gun?
Vince Pankoke: Not a smoking gun, but-- it feels-- like a warm gun with the evidence-- of the bullet sitting nearby.
Back at the archives, they showed it to us, Otto's copy. The team used forensic techniques which they say authenticates it. That handwriting you see: the scribblings of the 1963 detective. The anonymous note informed Otto that he'd been betrayed by Arnold van den Bergh who'd handed the Nazis an entire list of addresses where Jews were hiding.
Vince Pankoke: Whoever it was that authored this anonymous note knew so much that-- knew that lists were turned in.
Jon Wertheim: And this is information you were able to corroborate.
Vince Pankoke: Pieter was able to locate, in the national archive, records that indicated that in fact somebody from the-- Jewish Council, of which Arnold Van Den Bergh was a member, was turning over lists of addresses where Jews were in hiding.
Jon Wertheim: So what's your theory of the case here? How and why would Arnold van den Bergh have betrayed the Frank family?
Vince Pankoke: Well, in his role as being a-- founding member of the Jewish Council, he would have had privy-- to addresses-- where Jews were hiding. When van den Bergh lost all his series of protections exempting him from having to go to the camps, he had to provide something valuable to the Nazis that he's had contact with to let him and his wife at that time stay safe.
Jon Wertheim: Is there any evidence he knew who he was giving up?
Vince Pankoke: There's no evidence to indicate that he knew who was hiding at any of these addresses. They were just addresses that were provided that-- where Jews were known to have been in hiding.
We contacted the foundation Otto Frank started in Switzerland and the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam - neither of which formally participated in the investigation - to try to find out whether they could provide any other evidence that might implicate or clear Arnold van den Bergh. The Anne Frank house said they could not. The foundation is reserving comment until they've seen the entire results of the investigation.
The cold case team began to confront the real possibility that Otto Frank might have known the identity of the betrayer. What reason, they wondered, would Otto have had to keep this to himself?
Vince Pankoke: He knew that Arnold van den Bergh was Jewish, and in this period after the war, antisemitism was still around. So perhaps he just felt that if I bring this up again, with Arnold van den Bergh being Jewish, it'll only stoke the fires further. But we have to keep in mind that the fact that he was Jewish just meant the he was placed into a untenable position by the Nazis to do something to save his life.
The team wrestled with these ethical questions. Thijs Buyens, the filmmaker and documentarian who conceived of the project, wondered whether the revelation would be fodder for bigots and antisemites.
Jon Wertheim: The conclusion was that this culprit was a Jewish man who by all accounts was doing what he did to protect his own family.
Thijs Bayens: Yeah.
Jon Wertheim: What was your emotion when you heard this?
Thijs Bayens: I found it very painful. Maybe you could say I even hoped it wouldn't be something like this.
Jon Wertheim: Why?
Thijs Bayens: Because I feel the pain of all these people being put in-- in-- in a situation which is very hard for us to understand.
Jon Wertheim: I suspect when this is revealed people around the world are gonna be uncomfortable with the idea that a Jew betrayed another Jew.
Thijs Bayens: I hope so.
Jon Wertheim: You hope they will be?
Thijs Bayens: Yes. Because it shows you how bizarre the Nazi regime really operated, and how they brought people to do these terrible things. The-- the real question is, what would I have done? That's the real question.
Menachem Sebbag
Throughout the project, Bayens sought counsel from Menachem Sebbag, an orthodox rabbi in Amsterdam who also serves as Chief Jewish Chaplain in the Dutch Army.
Jon Wertheim: Is a greater good being served here?
Menachem Sebbag: I hope so. I truly hope so. I hope that people will understand that one of the things that the Nazi ideology did during the Holocaust was to dehumanize Jewish people. And going back into history and looking for the truth and attaining truth is actually giving the Jewish people back their own humanity. Even if that means that sometimes Jewish people are seen as not acting morally correct. That gives them back their own humanity, because that's the way human beings are when they're faced with existential threats.
After years of investigating this seven-decade-old cold case, we had a hypothetical for Vince Pankoke.
Jon Wertheim: You're back to being an FBI agent. You've got this case you've built. You've got your evidence and you hand it over to the prosecutor, the U.S. attorney. You think you're getting a conviction?
Vince Pankoke: No. There could be some reasonable doubt.
Jon Wertheim: To be clear, it's a circumstantial case.
Vince Pankoke: It is a circumstantial case, as many cases are. In today's crime solving, they want positive DNA evidence or video surveillance tape. We can't give you any of that. But in a historical case this old, with all the evidence that we obtained, I think it's pretty convincing.
Now back in retirement, Vince Pankoke thinks he's glimpsed a new way to thaw cold cases. He marvels that an investigation that put no one behind bars, turned out to be the most significant case of his career and one, he believes, brought an answer to a painful historical question.
Produced by David M. Levine. Associate producers, Jacqueline Kalil and Elizabeth Germino. Broadcast associates, Annabelle Hanflig and Eliza Costas. Edited by Michael Mongulla.
Download our Free App
For Breaking News & Analysis Download the Free CBS News app
11. Senate candidate Mike Durant says Afghanistan was ‘political failure’
Senate candidate Mike Durant says Afghanistan was ‘political failure’
Alabama.com · by Paul Gattis | pgattis@al.com · January 15, 2022
For Mike Durant, the objective is still making sure people know who he is rather than what he would do if elected to the U.S. Senate.
Speaking Saturday to an overflow crowd of more than 200 people at the Republican Men’s Club in Huntsville, Durant spent the majority of his 19-minute address recounting his decorated service in the U.S. Army.
And even if you don’t know Durant’s name, you may well know his story that was documented in the 2001 hit movie “Black Hawk Down” that told of the helicopter he was piloting being shot down in Somalia in 1993.
“I’ve been telling people since I joined the campaign, we need to get the name ID up,” Durant said. “People need to know who I am. So we talk about ‘Black Hawk Down’ because people remember, even though it’s been almost 30 years.”
While that convenient calling card perhaps makes Durant instantly relatable to those who don’t know him, he also made the point that it shortchanges who he is.
“I had a 22-year career (in the Army),” Durant said. “And that’s one day that went really bad. So it isn’t what I’m proud of. It’s just something that I experienced because I was part of the operation. But every other day of that 22-year career went really, really well. And unfortunately, the one day that went really, really bad is the one that people will remember.”
Durant is one of three candidates vying for the Republican nomination in the May 24 primary. U.S. Rep. Mo Brooks has served in Congress for six terms, announced his candidacy almost 10 months ago and has the endorsement of former President Donald Trump. Katie Britt, former chief of staff for Sen. Richard Shelby, is running for office for the first time and has been on the campaign trail for seven months and has billboards scattered throughout the state.
Durant is the race’s newcomer, announcing his candidacy in October. He’s sought to boost his ID through a wave of television ads.
An independent poll last month in the GOP Senate primary race had Brooks with 31 percent support, followed by Britt at 26 and Durant at 16. The asterisk to those numbers is nearly 22 percent said they were undecided and the 4 percent garnered by businesswoman Jessica Taylor – who dropped out of the race and endorsed Durant.
Durant also touched on his life after the Army. The president and CEO of Pinnacle Solutions in Huntsville, Durant built the business from the ground up and now has about 500 employees with locations throughout the world.
Durant did not address Alabama issues he would tackle if elected to the Senate, instead repeating familiar GOP talking points of opposing vaccine mandates and concern over the issues on the U.S.-Mexican border. He also declared himself an “outsider” to Washington politics – an effort to distinguish himself from his opponents in the race.
Durant did not mention Trump’s name nor the questions over the results of the 2020 election the former president continues to raise more than 14 months later. There has been no evidence of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential race.
President Joe Biden, though, received a heavy dose of criticism from Durant – particularly over the military withdrawal last year from Afghanistan.
“If you need a better example of why veterans all over this country that are absolutely beside themselves about this administration, whether we’re more worried about inclusion and woke culture than we are about mission readiness, whether it’s about how we withdrew from Afghanistan,” Durant said. “If you want to get my anger really up, you tell me that Afghanistan was a military failure. You’re liable to get physically assaulted because it was not a military failure. It was a political failure.”
The U.S. has lost credibility under Biden, Durant said, and that was a motivation for him to run for office.
“A huge weapon we have as a nation is our credibility,” Durant said. “People fear us. They know we’re going to do what we say we’re going to do until you got somebody like Joe Biden in office. They don’t believe a thing he says and they shouldn’t believe a thing he says because he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. And he abandoned our allies, he abandoned our mission. And no one is going to believe at any point in the future that what he says is actually what we’re going to do as a nation and that makes everything we try to do in the future 10 times harder. That’s why our credibility is so important. And it’s it has been compromised.”
Alabama.com · by Paul Gattis | pgattis@al.com · January 15, 2022
12. Is a US-China Cold War Really Inevitable?
Excerpts:
A cold war between the US and China seems increasingly likely. Chinese President XI Jinping has taken his government in a significantly more hawkish direction than his predecessors’ more moderate rule. China’s stonewalling on covid has produced an enormous backlash in the US; the American business community is souring the on relationship; the US foreign policy community is increasingly hawkish on Beijing; and Xi’s pressure on China’s Muslims, Hong Kong, and Taiwan are frightening.
But a cold war would be a disaster, for most of the world, including China and the US as well. We should do the best we can to avoid it if possible. The four shared interests suggested here provide at least a few possible offramps before full-blown great power competition is locked in.
Is a US-China Cold War Really Inevitable?
Shared Sino-American Interests Could Slow the Slide toward Cold War: It is now fairly obvious that the United States and China are sliding toward some kind of lengthy geopolitical contest. The Biden administration has spoken of ‘great power competition.’ International relations academics see a drift from post-Cold War American unipolarity to a new bipolarity between China and the US. More colloquially, it looks like a cold war, the sort of ‘twilight struggle’ President John Kennedy invoked.
It should go without saying that this is a potential catastrophe. The US-Soviet cold war did not result in a third world war, but it was otherwise terrible. It was hugely expensive. Decades of weapons development drew resources away from poverty alleviation all over the planet. It was hugely risky. Two heavily armed adversaries and their allies pointed massively destructive weapons at each other for decades and had several near-misses of a major war. US-Soviet great power competition may not have exploded in Europe or Northeast Asia, but it spilled into the rest of the planet, dramatically exacerbating the stresses and tensions of decolonization. Multiple post-colonial conflicts were overlain by cold competition, becoming far longer, more violent, and deadlier. Vietnam and Afghanistan are the most obvious examples, but superpower competition worsened events in the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa. The USSR sent so many AK-47 rifles to third-world clients, that it is on multiple countries’ flags.
If the US must fight a cold war like that with China also, then of course it should. The Free World should not accept Chinese regional hegemony in East Asia, and the democracies will find many partners to support that goal. But the US should not spoil for a fight. A Sino-American cold war may still be avoidable because the US shares at least four major interests with China:
North Korea
Both wish to know basic information: the shape of the program; the number of missiles, warheads, and launchers; doctrine on their use; and other data nuclear states commonly share with each other to reduce paranoia and errors. America and China wish to cap or, ideally, rollback the North Korean program, at least somewhat. Here, China and the US share an interest in pulling North Korea into some kind of arms control regime. Both worry about nuclear safety and proliferation in North Korea. The North is deeply corrupt and dysfunctional with a long history of overseas criminality. The US and China share an interest in preventing a North Korean Chernobyl or Pyongyang selling missile or warhead designs.
Trade
The US and China trade a lot. They are the two largest economies in the world. Both want market access to the other. Both want their companies in the other country to enjoy basic protections and nondiscrimination. China’s entry into the WTO has been a huge boon to both. It helped China grow rapidly, while pushing down prices for American consumers for two decades. The relationship has grown more fraught; the US business community is not as bullish on China as it once was, and intellectual property protections have become a major issue. But given just how deep the relationship is, unwinding it because of geopolitical pressure would be very costly for both parties.
Finance
To finance their trade in goods and services, the US and China buy a lot of paper assets from each other too. China is the second-largest holder of US securities in the world. If the two ‘de-coupled,’ it would impact the currency value for both partners. A China restricted from US markets would see the value of its dollar holdings slide. In a panic, it would likely try to sell them. A trillion dollars of Chinese holdings suddenly entering the global capital market would drive inflation of the dollar. As with a severing of trade, both sides would lose.
Climate Change
By now it is apparent that wealthy democracies alone cannot slow climate change enough. China’s cooperation is necessary (as is that of other large polluters like Brazil and India). Sino-US shared interests are obvious. Both have long coastlines with tens of millions of citizens facing flooding in the future. Both have complex economies designed around the current climate. And both are the world’s worst emitters. If anyone is to lead on climate change, it must be the US and China, ideally working in tandem
A Cold War is Still Likely
A cold war between the US and China seems increasingly likely. Chinese President XI Jinping has taken his government in a significantly more hawkish direction than his predecessors’ more moderate rule. China’s stonewalling on covid has produced an enormous backlash in the US; the American business community is souring the on relationship; the US foreign policy community is increasingly hawkish on Beijing; and Xi’s pressure on China’s Muslims, Hong Kong, and Taiwan are frightening.
But a cold war would be a disaster, for most of the world, including China and the US as well. We should do the best we can to avoid it if possible. The four shared interests suggested here provide at least a few possible offramps before full-blown great power competition is locked in.
Dr. Robert E. Kelly (@Robert_E_Kelly; website) is a professor of international relations in the Department of Political Science at Pusan National University. Dr. Kelly is now a 1945 Contributing Editor as well.
13. As Biden Relaxed Pressure, Iran Took Advantage
As Biden Relaxed Pressure, Iran Took Advantage
Supporters of the JCPOA are unconvincing in blaming Iranian nuclear expansion on withdrawal from the 2015 deal.
WSJ · by Jan. 16, 2022 5:44 pm ET
Jeremy Ben-Ami, President, J Street, speaking at the J Street National Conference in Washington in 2019.
Photo: Michael Brochstein/Zuma Press
Jeremy Ben-Ami has been an opponent of pressure on the Islamic Republic of Iran and a supporter of the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement. That 2015 deal, with nuclear and missile restrictions that sunset between 2023 and 2031, gave Tehran patient pathways to nuclear weapons and the intercontinental missiles to deliver them. In his letter “Diplomacy, Not War, With Iran” (Jan. 14), Mr. Ben-Ami attacks us personally, but we all want a nuclear-free Iran so let’s look, instead, at the facts.
His main argument is that Iran’s nuclear expansion occurred because President Trump withdrew from the 2015 nuclear agreement and imposed a campaign of “maximum pressure.” The problem is that the timelines don’t support that belief. Mr. Trump withdrew from the agreement in May 2018 and imposed severe sanctions from November 2018 until he left office. While Tehran took preliminary steps to expand its nuclear program in May 2019, the most significant steps took place after President Biden’s election in November 2020. These include enriching uranium first to 20% purity and then to 60% (a stone’s throw from weapons-grade), the production of uranium metal for nuclear warheads, the operation of more advanced centrifuges, and massively increasing stockpiles of enriched uranium.
These nuclear moves took place after it was clear to Iran that Mr. Biden had abandoned the pressure of his predecessor by easing sanctions enforcement and leaving military options off the table, thereby strengthening Iran’s economy and negotiating position.
Mr. Ben-Ami falls back on tropes in attacking us as “war hawks.” But we join several past presidents, including Barack Obama, who made it clear that an Iranian nuclear weapon was unacceptable and that all options, including military force, must be on the table. We agree with those presidents, and not with Mr. Ben-Ami, that economic and military pressure are necessary ingredients for successful diplomacy with the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Mark Dubowitz and Matthew Kroenig
Washington
Mr. Dubowitz is chief executive of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. Mr. Kroenig is a professor of government at Georgetown and a former senior policy adviser at the Pentagon (2017-21).
Copyright ©2022 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
WSJ · by Jan. 16, 2022 5:44 pm ET
14. Warnings of ‘Civil War’ Risk Harming Efforts Against Political Violence
Excerpts:
Recent work demonstrates that exaggerated misperceptions about rivals’ support for violence can make groups more likely to support violence — put another way, if you believe that your political rivals are actively seeking a civil war, you, too, may become more committed to violent strategies. But, if the political violence of today has echoes through American history, then so, too, do transitions out of crisis moments. Treating these forms of political violence as dynamic leaves open the possibility that the actions Americans take now could reverse the course on which the United States finds itself — especially because conflict research also shows us that even processes as extreme as genocide, ethnic cleansing, and lynching are never inevitable because they rest, ultimately, on the choices individuals make. When people choose differently, they can resist or interrupt violent processes. Choice by choice, a different, less violent politics can emerge.
A year ago, the United States lost the peaceful transfer of power — a core attribute of democracy itself. Democracy in the United States is at its most perilous moment in a hundred years, and analysts, journalists, and scholars should be clear-eyed about the forces that threaten the country. When they do so, however, they should avoid doing so by asking whether the United States is on the brink of a civil war and should instead ask who is in danger of what from whom. This might make for a poor tagline, but it is a more whole assessment of the threats the United States actually faces. The stakes are too high for Americans to be anything less than precise.
Warnings of ‘Civil War’ Risk Harming Efforts Against Political Violence - War on the Rocks
A year on from the Jan. 6 insurrection, experts warn of catastrophic political violence, while political commentators invoke the specter of the 1860s and throw out sensationalist headlines about a second U.S. Civil War. “The unimaginable has become reality in the United States. … [T]he basic truth is the United States might be on the brink of [a civil] war today,” read one such argument.
The emerging cottage industry of speculation and alarm specifically about a civil war in the United States worries us. The shape and content of this debate — covered in venues as mainstream as NPR — risks mis-framing an urgent problem for non-specialist audiences. Rather than asking whether the United States will have a new civil war, commentators ought to be asking: What kinds of risks for political violence does the United States face? What forms might that political violence take? Who might perpetrate this violence, and which communities will be most affected by it? Retraining our focus on political violence allows us to consider the real risks ahead for the country, to work alongside the many groups already actively trying to push back illiberal violence, and to protect its most likely victims.
Scholars of civil war typically understand the concept as one specific manifestation of violence among many. Although researchers may disagree on the particulars, they agree broadly that civil wars are conflicts within a country between the ruling government of that country and named, politically motivated armed groups that commit violence against one another above some threshold of battlefield casualties. For expert audiences, civil war violence is not one-sided violence — where an armed group targets civilians or the government with no organized retaliation — nor is it simply one-directional state repression. It is not indiscriminate terrorism aimed at the population, or even systematic, targeted campaigns of violence against minorities or specific groups. Rather, to be categorized as a “civil war,” violence must be part of a meaningful contest over the central government of the country, or a meaningful effort at secession.
Civil war scholar Barbara Walter, who has been a prominent voice in this debate, has been careful to note she wants to avoid “an exercise in fear-mongering.” When she warns of a civil war, she points not to something akin to the U.S. Civil War — still the most destructive war in the country’s history — but rather to something with the intensity of Northern Ireland’s Troubles or Italy’s Years of Lead. “The next war is going to be more decentralized, fought by small groups and individuals using terrorism and guerrilla warfare to destabilize the country,” Walter told Vox’s Zack Beauchamp, adding that “We are closer to that type of civil war than most people realize.”
In our own work, we have researched political violence that can occur in the absence of civil wars, or alongside them. Our concern with the frame Walter and others offer — and with the attached “civil war or not” headlines — is that it misses the wide array of other kinds of political violence the United States has not only historically experienced, but is currently experiencing. Crisp scholarly definitions belie the lived experience of political violence, which can be pervasive without ever rising to the level of civil war. And these forms of violence tend to fall disproportionately on specific sectors of the population while leaving absolutely no mark on other sectors. Political violence can also become easily and slowly normalized over the course of years. It is exactly this normalization that civil war scholars are trying to guard against when they raise the alarm, as warning signs from weakening democratic institutions to increasing societal polarization indicate that political violence could be on the rise.
We think the question of “civil war or not” is simply the wrong question to ask. When observers speculate about an imminent civil war, they risk steering the terms of our debate away from resurgent currents of subnational violence and repression, and toward a popular conception of civil war as an altogether distinct and incontrovertible shift in the nature of our lives. We do not think a clearly identifiable, explosive moment of crisis that suddenly breaks with ongoing trends is imminent — but priming people to expect a spectacular, ultimate calamity could obscure the ongoing slow boil of political violence. Focusing on the rates, forms, and targets of political violence provides important nuance. Indeed, just shifting the terms of our conversation toward political violence — which includes, but is not limited to, civil war — allows us to consider our present political crisis as more clearly continuous with other strands of American history.
In the past, Americans have faced indiscriminate violence or terrorism against civilians (such as the Oklahoma City Bombing), electoral violence (the 1898 Wilmington Coup), the assassinations of civil rights workers, mob violence and riots (like the Tulsa Massacre), and interpersonal violence (including lynchings and hate crimes). Today, according to the Washington Post, “dozens of religious institutions — including mosques, synagogues and Black churches — as well as abortion clinics and government buildings, have been threatened, burned, bombed and hit with gunfire over the past six years.” CNN reports that, in 2020, hate crimes in the United States rose to the highest rates in 12 years, with Black and Asian persons the primary targets. According to research from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, “the number of domestic terrorist attacks and plots increased to its highest level since at least 1994” and “White supremacists, extremist militia members, and other violent far-right extremists were responsible for 66 percent of domestic terrorist attacks and plots in 2020.” Both researchers and U.S. government officials point to the rising threat of white supremacist, right-wing extremists, and militias as “the greatest domestic terrorism threats in 2021 and likely into 2022.” Together, these data suggest that political violence is creeping upward and also tell us who the most likely victims of future violence are likely to be.
These forms of violence could become even more pervasive and could stay that way for decades without ever rising to anything either scholars or lay people would call civil war. They are worth naming and attempting to address in their own right, not as waystations to an all-out conflagration — particularly because international relations research tells us that priming people to expect a civil war could actually increase political violence. Canonical models indicate that rhetoric overstating the threat of violence — such as fear-inducing claims about the onset of a new civil war or mass violence — can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Recent work demonstrates that exaggerated misperceptions about rivals’ support for violence can make groups more likely to support violence — put another way, if you believe that your political rivals are actively seeking a civil war, you, too, may become more committed to violent strategies. But, if the political violence of today has echoes through American history, then so, too, do transitions out of crisis moments. Treating these forms of political violence as dynamic leaves open the possibility that the actions Americans take now could reverse the course on which the United States finds itself — especially because conflict research also shows us that even processes as extreme as genocide, ethnic cleansing, and lynching are never inevitable because they rest, ultimately, on the choices individuals make. When people choose differently, they can resist or interrupt violent processes. Choice by choice, a different, less violent politics can emerge.
A year ago, the United States lost the peaceful transfer of power — a core attribute of democracy itself. Democracy in the United States is at its most perilous moment in a hundred years, and analysts, journalists, and scholars should be clear-eyed about the forces that threaten the country. When they do so, however, they should avoid doing so by asking whether the United States is on the brink of a civil war and should instead ask who is in danger of what from whom. This might make for a poor tagline, but it is a more whole assessment of the threats the United States actually faces. The stakes are too high for Americans to be anything less than precise.
Alexandra Stark, Ph.D., is a senior researcher for New America’s Political Reform program. She was previously a research fellow at the Middle East Initiative of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and was a Minerva/Jennings Randolph Peace Scholar at the United States Institute of Peace. Follow her on Twitter.
Megan A. Stewart, Ph.D., is an assistant professor at American University’s School of International Service. She has published original research in peer-reviewed journals, and her work focuses on civil wars, especially the intersection between social transformation and political violence. In 2021, Cambridge University Press published her book, Governing for Revolution. Follow her on Twitter.
15. Artificial Intelligence, Real Risks: Understanding—and Mitigating—Vulnerabilities in the Military Use of AI
Excerpts:
Artificial Intelligence is a tool. Like any other tool, it has inherent strengths and weaknesses. Through a deliberate and realistic evaluation of those strengths and weaknesses, the United States can find the optimal balance between the risks and rewards of AI. While AI may not deliver the maximum asymmetric advantage the United States is looking for in strategic competition, neither can we cede the technology to our adversaries who are investing heavily in the field. Instead, the United States can, and should, support the ethical use of AI, promote research into robust AI, and develop defensive best practices for AI systems. Implementing these actions and others, based on an understanding of the vulnerabilities and limitations of AI systems, will lead the United States to more effectively situate artificial intelligence into a strategy for the era of great power competition.
Artificial Intelligence, Real Risks: Understanding—and Mitigating—Vulnerabilities in the Military Use of AI - Modern War Institute
No one likes to wake up in the morning, but now that artificial intelligence–powered algorithms set our alarms, manage the temperature settings in our homes, and select playlists to match our moods, snooze buttons are used less and less. AI safety-assist systems make our vehicles safer and AI algorithms optimize police patrols to make the neighborhoods we drive through, and live in, safer as well. All around us, AI is there, powering the tools and devices that shape our environment, augment and assist us in our daily routines, and nudge us to make choices about what to eat, wear, and purchase— with and without our consent. However, AI is also there when our smart devices start deciding who among us is suspicious, when a marginalized community is disproportionately targeted for police patrols, and when a self-driving car kills a jaywalker.
AI is becoming ubiquitous in daily life, and war is no exception to the trend. Reporting even suggests that the November 2020 assassination of the top Iranian nuclear scientist was carried out by an autonomous, AI-augmented rifle capable of firing up to six hundred rounds per minute. Russia and China are rapidly developing, and in some cases deploying, AI-enabled irregular warfare capabilities and it is only a matter of time before the same fissures, biases, and undesirable outcomes that are occurring with the AI systems that power our daily lives begin appearing in the AI systems used to wage war and designed to kill.
Given the role of AI and machine learning in strategic competition, it is critical that we understand both the risks introduced by these systems and their ability to create a strategic advantage. By exploring adversarial methods, it is possible to begin building such an understanding. An examination of four categories of adversarial methods offers a window into the vulnerabilities in these systems. In this article, we will use the problem of target identification as the base example and explore how an AI system’s learning and thinking can be attacked. Although this example occurs in conflict, the methods we describe can also be used during competition. This analysis leads to two important conclusions: First, a human must remain in the loop in any use of artificial intelligence. And second, AI may not provide a strategic advantage for the United States in the era of great power competition, but we must continue to invest and encourage the ethical use of AI.
Adversarial Methods
Like other military systems, AI systems go through multiple distinct lifecycle phases—development (data collection and training), testing, operation, and maintenance. In each of these phases there are unique vulnerabilities that must be identified and for which we much account. We will proceed through the development of a hypothetical AI target identification system that is learning to identify enemy armored vehicles. At each stage we will explore the associated class of adversarial methods—poisoning, evasion, reverse engineering, and inference—as well as how we might protect our systems from each.
Poisoning
The first step in the development of any AI system is problem identification and data collection. With our challenge to identify enemy armored vehicles, we must define our problem. Do we want to identify all enemy armored vehicles, or only a certain type from a specific adversary? This problem definition informs the collection and preparation of a set of related data, which in this case would include a large number of images of the enemy armored vehicles of interest. Not only must we accumulate images of all the vehicles of interest, but we also need images in a variety of conditions—varying light, differing angles, limited exposure, and alternate channels (e.g., infrared, daylight), for example. The data is then prepared by data analysts for use in the training of the AI system. However, the sheer amount of data required to develop an AI system creates a vulnerability. The volume of data means that analysts do not have the capacity to verify that each collected image is actual enemy armored vehicle or that the images represent the full range of types of armored vehicles.
This stage of development is the first point at which an adversary can attack the AI system through a technique called poisoning. The goal of poisoning is to alter the data the AI system uses in training so that what the AI learns is flawed. This process attacks the integrity of the system before it ever goes into operation.
The underlying methodology of crafting malicious raw data to induce a flawed analytical outcome is the same as in traditional military deception. Operation Quicksilver, a deception operation prior to the Allied invasion of Normandy during World War II, sought to attack the German defensive analytic model. To accomplish this attack, the Allies created a ghost army (poisoned data) led by Lt. Gen. George Patton to skew the Germans’ analysis (the model) of where they should focus their defenses (model output).
Such large-scale deception operations may be more difficult to achieve in today’s interconnected society, but poisoning data is feasible. Our adversaries know that we are pursuing AI-enabled target identification. Knowing that such an AI system would need training images of their current armored vehicles, an adversary could poison those training images by manipulating their vehicles’ appearance. This could be as simple as the addition of a distinctive symbol like a red star on vehicles that they suspect may be under surveillance. Our AI system would then be trained on these poisoned images of deliberately manipulated vehicles and “learn” that all enemy armored vehicles have red stars.
Though such a poisoning attack would occur during a state of competition, the impact would manifest in conflict when the adversary deploys armored vehicles without red stars to avoid detection. Further, the adversary could paint red stars on civilian vehicles to induce our AI system to falsely identify the civilians as combatants.
Ensuring our systems learn correctly can be accomplished in many ways. Detailed data curation could help alleviate risk but would consume valuable time and resources. Rather, a scalable solution includes data governance policies to improve the integrity and representativeness of the data used for AI systems. The proper placement of technical controls and well-trained personnel remaining in the loop during all phases of the AI lifecycle will further reduce the risk of a poisoning attack.
Evasion
The next type of attack, evasion, relies on similar fundamental attack principles but deploys them when the AI system is in operation. Instead of poisoning what the AI is learning, an evasion attack targets how the AI’s learning is applied. This may sound like a trivial difference; however, it has significant implications on the resources an attacker needs to be successful and conversely what actions a defender needs to take. In the poisoning attack, the attacker needs the ability to control or manipulate the data used to train the model. In an evasion attack, the attacker needs, at a minimum, the ability to control the inputs to the AI system during operation.
Evasion attacks are well suited to computer vision applications such as facial recognition, object detection, and target recognition. A common evasion technique involves slightly modifying the color of certain image pixels to attack how the system applies what it has learned. To the human eye, it may appear as if nothing changed; however, the AI may now misclassify the image. The effects of this technique were demonstrated by researchers when an AI that previously correctly identified an image of a panda was shown what looked to be the same image but had been manipulated with added colors throughout the image that are imperceptible to the human eye. The AI not only misidentified the panda as a gibbon but did so with remarkably high confidence.
An attacker that also gains access to the system’s outputs or predictions could develop a more robust (all images of pandas are misidentified) or targeted (all pandas are seen as another specific animal) evasion method.
The evasion attack principles can also be employed in the physical world—for example, wearing specially made sunglasses to obscure or alter your image on a facial recognition camera. This is the same principle behind camouflage. In this case the adversary is targeting the model’s perception rather than a human’s. In a military context, if an adversary knew that our AI targeting system was trained on tanks with desert camouflage, the adversary’s tanks could simply be repainted in woodland camouflage to deliberately evade detection by our AI systems. An AI-enhanced autonomous scout system may now be unable to effectively recognize targets and fail to provide commanders with timely and accurate intelligence.
Evasion attacks are some of the most widely researched adversarial methods, so defending against all possible attack vectors will prove challenging. Steps to harden our AI systems, however, can increase our overall confidence that they function as intended. One such step would be implementing evaluation tools prior to deployment. These tools test the AI system against a variety of known adversarial methods to give us a quantitative measure of its robustness. Maintaining a human in the loop where possible during operation can also mitigate against evasion attacks.
Reverse Engineering
The previous two classes of attacks shared similar fundamental principles for targeting AI systems during development and operation. These attacks also had natural analogs to traditional military concepts like deception and camouflage. However, the risks to AI systems are not all so straightforward and potential vulnerabilities exist outside of development and operation. What are the vulnerabilities in AI systems while they are in maintenance or storage? What are the risks if an adversary gains access to an AI system through a network intrusion or by capturing a next-generation, AI-enabled drone on the battlefield?
In the class of attacks known as reverse engineering, an adversary attacks an AI system with the goal of extracting what the AI system has learned and, ultimately, enable the model to be reconstructed. To conduct a reverse engineering attack, an adversary needs to be able to send inputs to a model and to observe the outputs. This attack bypasses any encryption or obfuscation of the model itself. For our hypothetical target identification AI, this attack could be conducted by an adversary sending out vehicles of different types (the inputs) and observing which elicit a response from the AI (the outputs). While such an attack would take time and risk the loss of resources, eventually an adversary would be able to learn what the target identification model considered to be a threat.
With this information, the adversary would be able to develop its own version of our AI system. In addition to making other adversarial attacks easier to develop, direct knowledge of how the AI is making its decisions enables an adversary to predict our responses or avoid them entirely. Such an insight into our AI-enhanced decision-making processes would pose a significant threat to our operational security across the conflict continuum.
Protecting our systems against reverse engineering can prove difficult, especially because mission requirements may require the system to allow for many queries or weighted outputs as opposed to simple binary decisions. This highlights a need for a range of tailored policies to manage the risks associated with adversarial methods. These may include strict accountability of AI-enabled systems, especially those deployed at the edge like drones or smart goggles. Further, we could impose access limitations by only allowing authorized users to view system outputs.
Inference Attacks
The final class of attack, known as inference attacks, is related to reverse engineering. Rather than trying to recover what the AI system learned, an adversary is trying to extract what data the AI system used in its learning process. This is a subtle but meaningful distinction that has significant implications for models trained on sensitive or classified data.
To conduct an inference attack, as with reverse engineering, the adversary needs the ability to send inputs to a model and to observe the outputs. With a set of inputs and outputs, the adversary can train an adversarial AI that predicts if a given data point was used to train our friendly model.
Imagine our target identification AI is trained on classified images of an adversary’s new weapons system. Using an inference attack, the adversary could learn that the secrecy of this weapon system had been compromised. In other words, an inference attack on our AI systems could facilitate the compromise of classified intelligence. If this is done during competition, it can have big implications for crisis and conflict.
Much like reverse engineering, managing risk associated with inference attacks will mostly be handled through policy decisions. In addition to the access policy decisions, there will be difficult decisions about when to use sensitive or classified date in the training of AI systems, what type of data to use, and in what quantity. These decisions will need to balance performance against risks to develop AI systems that can still meet mission requirements.
Implications for Great Power Competition
Of course, this is clearly not an exhaustive explanation of the full range of adversarial methods. However, this framework should provide a sufficient overview with which leaders can explore the full implications, both positive and negative, of the integration of AI systems into our formations. Both the United States and our adversaries are pursuing this technology for an asymmetric advantage in the strategic competition to come, and both sides cannot win such an advantage.
Data Asymmetry
When we think about technology and asymmetric advantage, it is useful to begin with first principles and consider relative access to the “raw” materials. In AI systems, the raw materials are data—vast amounts of data. Does the United States have access to the same quality and quantity of data as our adversaries? Given the legal factors and social norms around privacy and data security in national security in the United States—critical topics in their own right—the answer is not obviously “yes.” This suggests that the United States would be at an inherent disadvantage in the development and deployment of AI systems.
Development Capacity
Well-trained personnel are the other critical resource for AI systems. As the Army has identified with its “People First” strategy, having the right personnel will be critical to the United States’ success in strategic competition. The United States has talent in industry, academia, and the military. Whether these personnel can be recruited, retained, and directed toward hard national security problems is an open question that is worthy of dedicated thought. In the short term, the talented individuals that are already within our formations should be identified and the disparate efforts across organizations working on AI should be synchronized.
AI is Only a Tool
Artificial Intelligence is a tool. Like any other tool, it has inherent strengths and weaknesses. Through a deliberate and realistic evaluation of those strengths and weaknesses, the United States can find the optimal balance between the risks and rewards of AI. While AI may not deliver the maximum asymmetric advantage the United States is looking for in strategic competition, neither can we cede the technology to our adversaries who are investing heavily in the field. Instead, the United States can, and should, support the ethical use of AI, promote research into robust AI, and develop defensive best practices for AI systems. Implementing these actions and others, based on an understanding of the vulnerabilities and limitations of AI systems, will lead the United States to more effectively situate artificial intelligence into a strategy for the era of great power competition.
Captain Nick Starck is a US Army cyber officer currently assigned as a research scientist at the Army Cyber Institute. His research focuses on information warfare and data privacy.
Captain David Bierbrauer is a signal officer in the US Army. He earned a master of science in engineering degree for applied mathematics and statistics from the Johns Hopkins University in 2021. Captain Bierbrauer is currently a data engineer and data scientist at the Army Cyber Institute.
Dr. Paul Maxwell was commissioned as an armor officer in 1992 and served as a battalion XO/S-3, brigade S-4, company commander, scout platoon leader, company XO, and mechanized infantry platoon leader. At the United States Military Academy, he has served as an instructor, assistant professor, and associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. His current position is the deputy director at the Army Cyber Institute at West Point.
The views expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.
Image credit: Naval Information Warfare Center Pacific (adapted by MWI)
16. Opinion | Even if Putin doesn’t seize all of Ukraine, he has a larger strategy. The U.S. needs one, too. by John R. Bolton
Excerpts:
These threats are likely inadequate, largely because of alliance failures to make good on prior threats. Accordingly, the United States and its allies must quickly change Putin’s cost-benefit calculus before Russian troops begin hostilities.
Germany and the European Union should be strongly pressed to state now that the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia won’t operate until Putin withdraws all troops from states objecting to their presence. The United States and NATO should surge shipment of lethal military assistance to Ukraine (and possibly Georgia and others), and redeploy substantial additional forces there — not to fight, but to train and exercise with Ukrainian counterparts. Let Russian generals, looking through their field glasses, see American flags in Ukraine and wonder what it means.
If we fail Kyiv (again), thereby endangering nearby NATO members, Putin will have perfected a road map to further erode NATO’s deterrence and its entire collective defense rationale. He not only has a strategy, which the West doesn’t, he has also proven himself an adroit tactician. Today, he is still calling the shots. That needs to change.
Opinion | Even if Putin doesn’t seize all of Ukraine, he has a larger strategy. The U.S. needs one, too.
Russia’s focus on Ukraine is certainly intense. The Kremlin has massed troops and equipment along their common border; launched major cyberattacks against Kyiv’s government computer systems; planted operatives in the eastern Donbas region who could stage false-flag operations as pretexts for Russian invasion; and escalated a long-standing insistence that Ukraine is not a legitimate sovereign state.
In high-profile meetings with Western diplomats, Moscow has called for extensive revision of Europe’s post-Soviet political order and even beyond, threatening to deploy troops to Venezuela and Cuba. The West’s consensus is that Russian President Vladimir Putin is readying to invade Ukraine, finishing what he started in 2014 with Crimea, this time annexing all of Ukraine.
To deter Moscow, the United States and other NATO members have threatened significant economic sanctions. Whether this will suffice is unclear. Russia has already violated European borders this century (Georgia, 2008, and Ukraine, 2014) and sustained “frozen conflicts” across the former U.S.S.R. Even if President Biden is serious, Putin may not believe it, based on past U.S. performance, including the United States’ recent Afghanistan withdrawal. The risks of miscalculation are high.
But is Russia really planning an all-out attack on Ukraine? Putin himself may not know his final objective. His challenge to Biden may be a political “reconnaissance in force” across a front much broader than Ukraine, precisely to develop better cost-benefit analysis of his options. Will the West show lack of resolve, and where? Will it start to fragment, with members attaching lower priority to some territories or issues than Russia does?
Stakes this high are risky for Putin, but he may be willing to gamble out of a fear that Russia’s long-term prospects are weaker than today’s. He thus may be induced to act from relative weakness, not strength. Even so, that doesn’t make him any less dangerous in the here and now.
Consider Russia’s options from its decision-makers’ perspective. Totally annexing Ukraine may not be what they want or need. Putin could order Russian columns to approach Kyiv, making its vulnerability obvious, as Russia did with Georgia in 2008, nearing Tbilisi before withdrawing on its own timetable to Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Toppling Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s government and hoping for (or assisting) a Moscow-aligned leader to appear are eminently feasible.
Russia could seize and hold significant territory in eastern and southern Ukraine, beyond Crimea and the Donbas, with only marginal fears of guerrilla war or anti-Russian terrorism later. Amid reports that the Biden administration might support an insurgency, in addition to imposing massive sanctions, if Russia seizes Ukraine, would the White House take those steps if the seizure were “merely” partial? Would Europe? Or would the West breathe a collective sigh of relief, saying, “It could have been much worse,” and do next to nothing?
Putin might bet on this scenario. Or maybe the pea is under a different walnut shell. Russia could suddenly proclaim an enhanced “union” with Belarus, binding the two far closer than at present. By strengthening Moscow’s hand in Minsk, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, unhappily perhaps, but willingly enough, would effectively overmatch Belarus’s citizen-opposition.
What would Europe and the United States do then? What if Moscow tries to reinforce its puppet Transnistria’s position in Moldova’s frozen conflict through bogus negotiations? What if Russia concocts a pretext for further aggression against Georgia?
The United States and NATO must urgently develop strategies for “gray zone” countries caught between NATO’s eastern and Russia’s western borders, determining the alliance’s interests in each country and how to protect them. Simultaneously, on the fly, NATO must do better in deterring Russia from taking belligerent actions in the current Ukraine crisis, including below the level of full-up invasion. So far, NATO’s threatened responses all involve steps the West could take only after Russian troops cross the border.
These threats are likely inadequate, largely because of alliance failures to make good on prior threats. Accordingly, the United States and its allies must quickly change Putin’s cost-benefit calculus before Russian troops begin hostilities.
Germany and the European Union should be strongly pressed to state now that the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia won’t operate until Putin withdraws all troops from states objecting to their presence. The United States and NATO should surge shipment of lethal military assistance to Ukraine (and possibly Georgia and others), and redeploy substantial additional forces there — not to fight, but to train and exercise with Ukrainian counterparts. Let Russian generals, looking through their field glasses, see American flags in Ukraine and wonder what it means.
If we fail Kyiv (again), thereby endangering nearby NATO members, Putin will have perfected a road map to further erode NATO’s deterrence and its entire collective defense rationale. He not only has a strategy, which the West doesn’t, he has also proven himself an adroit tactician. Today, he is still calling the shots. That needs to change.
17. The Overstretched Superpower
As they say, " a target rich environment?"
Excerpts:
To be clear, military power is hardly the only thing that matters in global affairs. But it is a necessary component of an effective foreign policy, if only because force remains the ultimate arbiter of international disputes. Xi, Putin, and other U.S. adversaries are unlikely to be swayed by Biden’s “relentless diplomacy” unless they are also awed by the military power that backs it up.
Historically, overstretched superpowers have eventually faced hard choices about how to address mismatches between commitments and capabilities. When the United Kingdom found itself with more rivals than it could handle in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it began appeasing those that were less dangerous and proximate—including the United States—to concentrate on containing Germany. When the Korean War revealed that Washington’s containment policy outstripped its military resources, the United States was forced to undertake a significant defense buildup to close the gap.
The Biden administration may try to skirt this dilemma by managing tensions with Iran, Russia, and other challengers while encouraging allies in Europe and partners in the Middle East to take greater responsibility for their own defense. That’s an understandable instinct. In the near term, both the geopolitical costs of true retrenchment and the financial costs of rearmament may seem to exceed the difficulties of muddling along. Yet Biden’s first year has already shown that overstretch inflicts damage on the installment plan. Eventually, the world will punish a superpower that allows its strategic deficit to grow too big for too long.
The Overstretched Superpower
Does America Have More Rivals Than It Can Handle?
The first year of Joe Biden’s presidency ended as it began, with the United States facing crises on multiple fronts. In the spring of 2021, there were simultaneous war scares in eastern Europe and the western Pacific, thanks to a Chinese intimidation campaign against Taiwan and a Russian military buildup on the Ukrainian border. At the start of 2022, the world was no calmer. China’s menacing maneuvers near Taiwan continued. Russian President Vladimir Putin, having mobilized an even bigger force near Ukraine, was threatening to start Europe’s largest war in decades. Meanwhile, Tehran and Washington looked to be headed for a renewed crisis over Iran’s nuclear program and its drive for regional primacy. Being a global superpower means never having the luxury of concentrating on just one thing.
That is a rude lesson for Biden, who took office hoping to reduce tensions in areas of secondary importance so that the United States could focus squarely on the problem that matters most: China. It also indicates a larger weakness in Washington’s global posture, one that Biden now owns but did not create.
The United States is an overstretched hegemon, with a defense strategy that has come out of balance with the foreign policy it supports. Biden’s first year has already shown how hard it is to manage an unruly world when Washington has more responsibilities—and more enemies—than it has coercive means. Over the longer term, a superpower that fails to keep its commitments in line with its capabilities may pay an even heavier price
ASIA FIRST
Biden’s initial theory of foreign policy was straightforward: don’t let smaller challenges distract from the big one. Of all the threats Washington faces, Biden’s interim national security strategy argued, China “is the only competitor” able to “mount a sustained challenge to a stable and open international system.” That challenge has become greater as China has accelerated its efforts to overturn the balance of power in Asia. When Biden took office, U.S. military leaders publicly warned that Beijing could invade Taiwan by 2027. Biden was not naive enough to think that other problems would simply vanish. With trouble brewing on this central front, however, he did seek a measure of calm on others.
Biden avoided another doomed “reset” with Russia, but held an early summit with Putin in a bid to establish a “stable and predictable” relationship. He also sought to find a path back to the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, thereby reducing the growing risk of confrontation in the Middle East. Finally, Biden ended the U.S. war in Afghanistan, a decision he justified by arguing that it was time to refocus attention and resources on the Indo-Pacific. Relations with U.S. allies followed the same pattern: the administration dropped U.S. opposition to the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline linking Russia and western Europe, wagering that ending a contentious dispute with Germany would make it easier to win Berlin’s cooperation vis-à-vis Beijing.
Biden’s emerging defense strategy has a similar thrust. The Trump administration made a major shift in U.S. defense planning, arguing that the Pentagon must relentlessly prepare for a conflict against a great-power challenge—particularly from China—even though that meant accepting greater risk in other regions. Biden’s Pentagon likewise spent 2021 focusing on how to deter or defeat Chinese aggression, withdrawing scarce assets such as missile defense batteries from the Middle East, and making longer-term budgetary investments meant to “prioritize China and its military modernization as our pacing challenge.”
TROUBLE EVERYWHERE
Biden is undoubtedly right that the Chinese challenge overshadows all others, despite unresolved debates in Washington over exactly when that challenge will become most severe. His administration has made major moves in the Sino-American competition during its first year—expanding multilateral military planning and exercises in the western Pacific, focusing bodies such as NATO and the G-7 on Beijing’s belligerence, and launching the AUKUS partnership with Australia and the United Kingdom. Yet Biden hasn’t enjoyed anything resembling a respite on other fronts.
The U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan precipitated the collapse of the government there, generating a near-term crisis that consumed Washington’s attention and leaving longer-term legacies—strategic and humanitarian—that are likely to do the same. Meanwhile, a brutal internal conflict in Ethiopia destabilized one of Africa’s most important countries. Most problematic of all, U.S. relations with Iran and Russia became worse, not better.
The United States is an overstretched hegemon, with a defense strategy out of balance with the foreign policy it supports.
Iran has taken a hard-line stance in negotiations on a revived nuclear deal while steadily decreasing the amount of time it would need to produce a potential weapon. Tehran’s proxies have also conducted periodic attacks against U.S. personnel and partners in the Middle East as part of an ongoing effort to force an American withdrawal from the region.
Putin, for his part, has authorized or at least permitted significant cyberattacks against critical infrastructure in the United States. He threatened war against Ukraine in the spring and has now mobilized forces for what U.S. officials fear could be a major invasion and prolonged occupation of that country. To preserve the peace, Moscow has demanded an acknowledged Russian sphere of influence and the rollback of NATO’s military presence in eastern Europe. What exactly Putin has in mind for Ukraine is uncertain, but “stable and predictable” is clearly not how he envisions his relationship with the United States.
These are ominous signs for 2022. The United States could find itself facing grave security crises in Europe and the Middle East in addition to persistent and elevated tensions in the Pacific. And these possibilities hint at a deeper problem in U.S. statecraft, one that has been accumulating for years: strategic overstretch.
MORE WITH LESS
Facing trouble on many fronts is business as usual for a global power. U.S. foreign policy—and the defense strategy that buttresses it—has long been designed with that problem in mind. After the Cold War, the United States adopted a “two major regional contingencies” approach to defense planning. In essence, it committed to maintaining a military large and capable enough to fight two serious wars in separate regions at roughly the same time. U.S. planners were under no illusion that Washington could fully indemnify itself against all the threats it faced if they happened to manifest simultaneously. Their aim was to limit the risk inherent in a global foreign policy by ensuring that an enemy in one theater could not wage a successful war of aggression while the Pentagon was busy with a crisis in another. Just as the United Kingdom, the superpower of its day, had a two-power naval standard in the nineteenth century, a unipolar United States had a two-war standard for a generation after 1991.
Over time, however, the two-war standard became impossible to sustain. The defense spending cuts associated with the Budget Control Act of 2011 (later compounded by the sequestration cuts of 2013) forced the Pentagon to adopt a somewhat stingier “one-plus” war standard aimed at defeating one capable aggressor and stalemating or “imposing unacceptable costs” on another. Meanwhile, the number of threats was increasing. During the post-Cold War era, the Pentagon worried mostly about potential conflicts in the Persian Gulf and the Korean Peninsula. But the events of 2014 and 2015—the Islamic State’s rampage through Iraq and Syria, Russian aggression in Ukraine, and China’s drive for dominance in the South China Sea, along with ongoing operations in Afghanistan—showed that U.S. allies and interests were now imperiled in several regions at once.
Leaders in Moscow and Tehran see that the United States is stretched thin and eager to pay more attention to China.
Washington’s enemies were also growing more formidable. The two-war standard was primarily focused on rogue states with second-class militaries. Now, the United States had to contend with two near-peer competitors, China and Russia, that boasted world-class conventional capabilities alongside the advantages that would come from fighting on their own geopolitical doorsteps. By the end of Barack Obama’s presidency, it was an open question whether the United States could defeat China if Beijing assaulted Taiwan, or Russia if Moscow invaded the Baltic region. What was clear was that any such war would require the overwhelming majority of the Pentagon’s combat power, along with virtually all of its airlift and sealift capabilities.
This realization prompted a major change in U.S. defense planning. The Trump administration’s defense strategy declared that the two-war standard was history. The U.S. military would henceforth be sized and shaped to win one major war against a great-power competitor. The United States would still be capable of “deterring” aggression in other theaters, but, as a bipartisan commission that included several current Biden administration officials pointed out, how exactly the Pentagon would do so without the capability to defeat such aggression remained ambiguous.
Shifting to a one-war standard was a sensible way to motivate the lethargic Pentagon bureaucracy to find creative solutions to the urgent, daunting challenge of war with a near-peer rival. It involved a sober recognition that losing a great-power war could inflict a death blow on the U.S.-led international order. Yet the 2018 defense strategy was also an acknowledgment of overstretch: the United States could focus on its primary challenge only by reducing its ability to focus on others. This limitation is the root of the problem Biden has inherited, and it has some dangerous implications.
THE CREDIBILITY GAP
The most glaring danger, highlighted by the concurrent crises in eastern Europe and East Asia, is that the United States could have to fight wars against China and Russia simultaneously. This would indeed be a nightmare scenario for a one-war military. But it wouldn’t take a global security meltdown to reveal the problems caused by Washington’s predicament.
First, overstretch limits U.S. options in a crisis. Where the United States should draw the line against Russian aggression in eastern Europe, how hard it should push back against Tehran’s provocations in the Middle East, and whether it should use force to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear threshold state are matters that reasonable people can debate. But the fact that the United States increasingly has a China centric defense strategy has a constraining effect in other theaters. If a U.S. president knows that the Pentagon will need everything it has for an all-too-plausible war with China, he or she will be less inclined to use force against Iran or Russia, lest Washington be caught short if violence erupts in the Pacific.
This issue leads to a second problem: the loss of diplomatic influence in situations short of war. Since the Taiwan and Ukraine crises of early 2021, some observers have speculated that Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping are coordinating their coercion as a way of threatening Washington with a two-front war. The reality is that explicit coordination is hardly necessary to profit from U.S. overextension.
Historically, overstretched superpowers have eventually faced hard choices.
Leaders in Moscow and Tehran can see that the United States is stretched thin militarily and eager to pay more attention to China. This gives them an incentive to push Washington harder in hopes of achieving gains at the expense of a distracted superpower. As the Russia expert Michael Kofman has written, Putin’s strategy of using military coercion to revise the post-Cold War order in Europe is premised on his belief that the “greater threat from China” will eventually “force Washington to compromise and renegotiate.” The more intense its focus on China, the higher the price the United States may be willing to pay for restraint in other places.
The perils of overstretch, however, are not confined to secondary theaters. Weakness at the periphery can ultimately cause weakness at the center. A decade ago, the United States withdrew its forces from Iraq to economize in the Middle East and pivot toward the Pacific. Iraq’s subsequent collapse forced Washington to reengage there, fighting a multi-year conflict that devoured resources and attention.
Similarly, if the United States finds itself in a showdown with Iran or if Russia attempts to revise the status quo in eastern Europe, Washington may once again find itself pivoting away from the Pacific to reinforce under-resourced regions that still matter to U.S. security. America’s defense strategy is increasingly focused on the Indo-Pacific, but its foreign policy remains stubbornly global. That’s a recipe for trouble all around.
TOUGH CHOICES
To be clear, military power is hardly the only thing that matters in global affairs. But it is a necessary component of an effective foreign policy, if only because force remains the ultimate arbiter of international disputes. Xi, Putin, and other U.S. adversaries are unlikely to be swayed by Biden’s “relentless diplomacy” unless they are also awed by the military power that backs it up.
Historically, overstretched superpowers have eventually faced hard choices about how to address mismatches between commitments and capabilities. When the United Kingdom found itself with more rivals than it could handle in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it began appeasing those that were less dangerous and proximate—including the United States—to concentrate on containing Germany. When the Korean War revealed that Washington’s containment policy outstripped its military resources, the United States was forced to undertake a significant defense buildup to close the gap.
The Biden administration may try to skirt this dilemma by managing tensions with Iran, Russia, and other challengers while encouraging allies in Europe and partners in the Middle East to take greater responsibility for their own defense. That’s an understandable instinct. In the near term, both the geopolitical costs of true retrenchment and the financial costs of rearmament may seem to exceed the difficulties of muddling along. Yet Biden’s first year has already shown that overstretch inflicts damage on the installment plan. Eventually, the world will punish a superpower that allows its strategic deficit to grow too big for too long.
18. The Big Business of Uyghur Genocide Denial
Excerpts:
His recent portfolio, too, overlaps with pro-China philanthropy.
In 2019, the Justice and Education Fund contributed $876,000 to a new group registered in Madison, Wisconsin, called People’s Welfare Association. One of the board members of that organization is Daniel Tirado Behrens, an employee at Shanghai Luoweixing.
In five years a web of organizations and individuals that promote apologetics for Beijing has emerged around Singham, and it all started with his sale of Thoughtworks in 2017. Details of the sale were not disclosed, but in a blog post Thoughtworks’ chief scientist, Martin Fowler, offered an explanation as to why Singham wanted to sell the company he had run for nearly two decades: “With the money that selling Thoughtworks would bring,” it would enable Singham to “accelerate” his activism. Yet, for an activist, Singham has remained elusive. He isn’t active on social media; and it seems he has made few public appearances since 2018. For someone linked to tens of millions of dollars going to pro-China causes, it would seem Singham prefers to keep a low profile.
Just as this investigation was winding down, the Twitter account for The People’s Forum published a thread in which it confirmed receiving money from Singham.
“A few years ago we met Roy Singham, a Marxist comrade who sold his company & donated most of his wealth to non-profits that focus on political education, culture & internationalism,” the thread began. “It seems to bother some folk that we receive funding that furthers our anti-imperialist politics. It seems to bother them even more that our funder is also a staunch anti-imperialist whose work goes back to the Black Panthers & the [League of Revolutionary Black Workers] in Detroit. Ultimately our solidarity with the peoples & countries at the epicenter of the struggle against US Imperialism will not be moved by the racist allegations made by people who loudly echo State Dept and Pentagon discourse.”
This thread, published on Dec. 21, followed New Lines’ request for an interview with the leadership of The People’s Forum. As of publication date, the request remained unanswered.
The Big Business of Uyghur Genocide Denial
A New Lines investigation reveals a network of charities funneling millions into left-wing platforms that take Beijing’s side on the genocide allegations — and they’re all connected to an American tech magnate
Alexander Reid Ross, Ph.D., is a senior fellow at the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right and senior data analyst at the Network Contagion Research Institute
Courtney Dobson is a senior editor at Newlines
A monthslong investigation by New Lines can reveal that over the past five years almost $65 million has filtered through various entities connected with people who have defended the Chinese government and downplayed or denied documented human rights violations committed by Beijing against the Uyghur and Turkic Muslim minorities.
This funding has moved through a complex series of mostly tax-deductible investment funds and charities, all linked by virtue of their governance structures to one man: the 67-year-old American tech magnate Neville Roy Singham.
Of mixed Sri Lankan and Cuban heritage, Singham has long held an ideological affinity with the Chinese Communist Party, dating to his youthful membership in the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, a Mao-influenced group based in Detroit, Michigan. In his capacity as a cadre of the organization, which advocated revolutionary unionism in opposition to racist policies within reformist unions, Singham took a job at the Detroit Chrysler plant in 1972 at the age of 18.
After attending Howard University, Singham spent the next several years cobbling together a consulting firm for equipment-leasing companies out of a basement in Chicago. In 1993, he named his company Thoughtworks, then expanded its focus to incorporate what Singham calls “Agile” software development, which involves adaptive management, decentralized systems, and close collaboration between developers and users.
In many ways Singham’s radical evolution from an evangelist of the Black industrial working class into a luminary of the information age embodies the high-flown dreams of the transformative ’90s.
According to a biographical note on the Chinese recruitment platform Boss Zhipin, Singham worked with Chinese tech monolith Huawei from 2001 to 2008 as a strategic technical consultant. During that period, he raved about China’s economic model, telling Fortune magazine’s senior editor David Kirkpatrick in 2008, “China is teaching the West that the world is better off with a dual system of both free-market adjustments and long-term planning.” Two years later, Thoughtworks’ Fifth Agile Software Development Conference was held in Beijing, with Singham proclaiming his own influence on Huawei in his opening speech.
Thoughtworks has since expanded to 17 countries, taking on clients in the business world while showing an interest in pro bono work for progressive media such as the news organization Democracy Now! and the Grameen Foundation, a well-regarded nonprofit focusing on microloans to the world’s poor.
In 2017, Singham sold Thoughtworks to Apax, a British private equity fund, for an undisclosed price (although thought to be in the hundreds of millions) and left the company altogether. Apax recently took Thoughtworks public on the Nasdaq stock exchange, in September 2021, with a valuation that nearly reached $9 billion.
Singham did not respond to multiple attempts to reach him via email and phone.
Singham is in a relationship with Jodie Evans, one of the founders of the women’s group Code Pink. New Lines was unable to confirm whether they are officially married, but in February 2019, Evans posted photos on Facebook of the couple celebrating their anniversary and referred to Singham as her husband. Code Pink was formed in 2002 as an activist group for progressive women united in their opposition to the Bush administration’s impending invasion of Iraq.
In September 2020, Evans was one of the speakers at an online conference of far-left activists convened under the slogan of “No Cold War.” The speakers contended that the United States escalates conflict with China, which, according to them, continues to wish for rational, peaceful relations with the West. “Today the U.S. elite are obviously terrified at the tremendous economic success of China,” Evans insisted, arguing that “China is not threatening the U.S. militarily.” Also, she said, “China’s success stands in the way of U.S. domination of the world.”
American history, says Evans, “begins with what is called original sin. China, beginning in the 1400s, has not sought to be a maritime power. Sections of the U.S. capital and the deep state,” a term popularized by the pro-Trump right to characterize the U.S. intelligence community, “sadly have concluded that … China [is] an existential threat.”
Pitting the virtually irredeemable U.S. against the innocent and besieged China has become something of a narrative mainstay among segments of the anti-imperialist left in North America. Ostensibly rooted in ideological conviction, this line of thinking is also incredibly well financed.
One of the primary conduits for these donations, the People’s Support Foundation (PSF), was co-founded by Evans; documents describe her as its president. With an avowed mission to empower people through education, research and community, the PSF appears harmless, like any other philanthropic organization seeking to do good in the world. Capitalized to a tune of $163.7 million, PSF, which is registered in the U.S. as a 501(c)(3) organization that grants its funders tax-deductible status for their donations, invests heavily in corporate stocks and securities and uses its revenue to disburse grants to other like-minded funds and educational projects. An unmistakable bias in favor of the Chinese government runs throughout the activities of PSF, which has no website.
Samuel Raby / New Lines
The year 2017 appears to have been pivotal for those employed by, or personally close to, Singham. Not long after he sold his company to Apax, Thoughtworks employees began jumping ship only to turn up at PSF — and, conveniently, PSF’s headquarters is only a five-minute walk away from Thoughtworks.
PSF was established with the help of Chad Wathington, Thoughtworks’ chief strategy officer, who served as the foundation’s treasurer and director until late 2017, according to financial statements seen by New Lines. Jason Pfetcher, the treasurer and director of PSF from 2017 to 2019, is Thoughtworks’ former general counsel.
Neither Wathington nor Pfetcher responded to New Lines’ repeated efforts to contact them, and PSF’s financial filings for 2020 are not yet publicly available. (The extent of this investigation carries through 2019.)
Nevertheless, overlapping personnel and a carousel of large disbursements of funding going to like-minded and interlinked organizations remains a constant in all the tax and financial data that New Lines analyzed, as does the pro-China bias of the recipients of tens of millions in largesse.
While PSF has no public profile, Code Pink has generated its fair share of controversy in the intervening period for being less focused on specific acts of U.S. foreign policy and more sympathetic to authoritarian governments considered hostile to the U.S.
In 2014, the Anti-Defamation League revealed that Medea Benjamin, one of Code Pink’s founders, had attended a conference in Tehran that included German neo-Nazi Manuel Ochsenreiter and Kevin Barrett, who has claimed that “al Qaeda is Israeli and the state of Israel is a branch of al Qaeda.” When one fellow attendee, the journalist Gareth Porter, expressed regret for participating in the conference, Benjamin, a former Green Party candidate for California’s governorship, doubled down and insisted that she had no qualms with the conference.
In 2020, Code Pink initiated a campaign titled “China Is Not Our Enemy” in which the organization advocates for the U.S. to adopt a thoroughly conciliatory approach toward China. It calls on supporters to lobby members of Congress and hosts podcasts and webinars advancing the same argument.
Code Pink’s website also includes an FAQ section on the Uyghurs. “Our concern is that it is being used as a tool to drive the U.S.’s hybrid war on China,” it states, “instead of a human rights issue that needs to be addressed as such.” This page provides links to “helpful resources” on the topic, one of which appears to treat the plight of the Uyghurs as a human rights nonissue: A video featuring Evans and British academic John Ross shows the latter characterizing the Uyghur genocide allegation as “farcical” and a “total lie.”
Elsewhere, Ross, who was previously an economic and business adviser to Ken Livingstone, the controversial former mayor of London, has written, “If the real meaning of the term ‘human rights’ is used, it is evident that China has the best human rights record in the world — and those words are carefully chosen. … What is particularly striking is the factual contrast between what China has achieved and the laughable claim of the U.S. to a superior human rights record.”
According to Brian Hioe, editor of the Taiwan-based, left-wing news and commentary site New Bloom, this form of defense is part of an old playbook that uses anti-imperialist tropes to “paper over genocide.”
“The Chinese government, as well as its defenders, sometimes try to insist that Western powers are exaggerating or exoticizing what is taking place within Chinese borders,” Hioe told New Lines. “What is ironic, however, is that China’s rhetoric justifying the detention of Uyghurs was in many ways originally drawn from the U.S. War on Terror.”
“This is one means by which one can point to convergent behavior between the U.S. and China in terms of police or surveillance states, though certainly there are not vast detention camps on the scale of China in the U.S.,” Hioe continued. “One can otherwise point to, for example, China’s use of Israeli technology for its surveillance of Uyghurs. But the strategy taken by the Chinese government is to relativize the issue, while also deflecting blame back on the U.S. and other Western powers.”
Evans is a staunch advocate of the Palestinian cause and a fierce opponent of Israel. She and Benjamin support the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement that seeks to bring about economic consequences for Israel’s mistreatment of the Palestinians living under military occupation. Oddly, though, this doesn’t seem to apply to investments made by Evans’ PSF organization. According to the tax forms examined by New Lines, PSF has invested heavily in Israeli companies that openly work with the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF).
In 2017, for instance, PSF held $59,424 in corporate stock in the firm Israel Chemicals Ltd. — a holding whose worth fell to just over $48,000 the following year but grew to over $72,000 in 2019. On its website, Israel Chemicals, Ltd. describes an ongoing collaboration with the IDF in “erecting a salt wall opposite the border with Jordan.” The nearly 10-foot-high wall “will form a natural and innovative engineering obstacle, contributing to Israel’s security in an area that will suffer no major environmental impact and will not be visible from the nearby hotels area or road.”
PSF also holds stocks in Caterpillar, the U.S.-based construction vehicle company that is vociferously opposed by pro-Palestinian activists for aiding in the demolition of Palestinian homes in the Occupied Territories. The BDS movement’s website hosts a number of articles condemning Caterpillar’s fleet of vehicles for participating in these acts. Yet according to its 2019 Form 990 filings, PSF had an investment worth about $200,000 in the company that year, down from its peak value of $291,365 in 2017.
PSF further invests in other major BDS targets including Hewlett Packard ($139,129 in 2019), which has provided technology to aid in the biometric monitoring of Palestinians by the Israeli military, according to multiple articles on the BDS Movement website. Another PSF investment is in Atlas Copco ($114,222 in 2019), which sold materials “used in the construction of the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem railway, which is partially built on occupied Palestinian territory,” according to the American Friends Service Committee’s website Investigate, which maintains a list of corporations and banks targeted by BDS.
These investments are not flukes but appear to be the result of conscious choices by PSF.
Out of 216 companies recommended for divestment by Investigate, PSF is invested in 51 of them, totaling over $13.5 million, approximately 8% of the foundation’s initial capital fund.
Neither Evans nor PSF responded to numerous attempts by New Lines to comment.
The proceeds from PSF’s investments are used to fund a variety of other organizations, ostensibly for charitable purposes. But here, too, a striking pattern emerges — this one leading back to Singham and his sprawling global portfolio.
A large portion of the grants disbursed by PSF has gone to the New York-headquartered United Community Fund, New Lines has found. PSF’s 2019 tax filings itemized some $6.7 million in wire transfers to that fund and their 2018 filings showed $6.17 million. According to 2019 Form 990 filings, the United Community Fund, a non-tax exempt 501(c)(4) corporation, is focused on “education and advocacy programs that promote human rights and social justice.” It is run by Franziska Kleiner, the former social and economic justice lead of the German subsidiary of Thoughtworks, the Singham-founded IT company. Like PSF, the United Community Fund has no website.
In a strange labyrinth of money funneling, some of the money that PSF gave the United Community Fund was redistributed to other entities that have ties to both organizations.
In 2019, for example, the United Community Fund gave $700,000 to an organization called Tricontinental, whose deputy director, Renata Porto Bugni, also happens to be the co-director and treasurer of the United Community Fund.
Another of the fund’s co-directors is Tings Chak, who is also head of Tricontinental’s art department. Thus, out of the United Community Fund’s four co-directors, two hold positions with Tricontinental and one was previously employed at Thoughtworks.
Chak, meanwhile, is a board member and co-director at the Justice and Education Fund. Her colleague from Tricontinental, researcher Manolo De Los Santos, is also a co-director at the Justice and Education Fund. The two organizations share an organizational secretary, Nancy Taylor.
Samuel Raby / New Lines
The New York-based Justice and Education Fund describes its mission as raising “awareness through education and dissemination of information about pressing problems of society to effect social change.” Public records obtained by New Lines show that in 2019, the Justice and Education Fund gave $8.33 million to the United Community Fund.
Established in 2017, Tricontinental presents itself as an “institute for social research,” hosting articles on global issues and bringing together conferences like the one titled “No Cold War” in September 2020 where Evans spoke in defense of China.
Tricontinental’s founder, Vijay Prashad, is a former professor of international studies at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, whose work focuses on the Non-Aligned Movement during the Cold War and on the development of the BRICS countries: Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. He resigned from Trinity College in 2017, and now serves as a senior fellow at the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, a think tank affiliated with Beijing’s Renmin University, which is jointly financed by China’s Ministry of Education and the Beijing municipal government. One of Prashad’s colleagues at the institute is Ross, who is listed on the website as a senior resident fellow.
Earlier this year, the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, along with two other think tanks based in China, Taihe Institute and Intellisia Institute, published a polemical and awkwardly worded report titled “‘America Ranked First’?! The Truth about America’s fight against COVID-19,” which reads as if it had been translated from Chinese into English using a Google algorithm. “Objective facts have shown,” the report stated, “that the U.S. is well deserved to be the world’s No. 1 anti-pandemic failure, the world’s No. 1 political blaming country, the world’s No. 1 pandemic spreader country, the world’s No. 1 political division country, the world’s No. 1 currency abuse country, the world’s No. 1 pandemic period turmoil country, the world’s No. 1 disinformation country, and the world’s No. 1 origin tracing terrorism country.”
Prashad’s own corpus has lately tended toward defending the Chinese government with respect to one of its worst human rights abuses: the mass internment, reeducation, forced labor and sterilization campaigns waged in the northwest province Xinjiang against ethnic Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslim populations. The Biden administration recently labeled this ongoing gross human rights abuse a genocide and cited it as the reason the U.S. — along with the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand — is diplomatically boycotting next month’s Winter Olympics in Beijing.
In April 2021, Prashad co-authored an article for an organization called Globetrotter, which was then published in Asia Times and Peoples Dispatch. It presented the diplomatic boycott as part of an American disinformation campaign to ratchet up hostilities with China. “The U.S. government’s information warfare against China has produced the ‘fact’ that there is genocide in Xinjiang,” the article said. “Once this has been established, it helps develop diplomatic and economic warfare.”
Such articles appear to be part of a broader strategy to cultivate media outlets where pro-China propaganda can filter through.
Globetrotter is an international syndication service that produces articles focused on “the struggle for democracy and equitable societies across the planet,” according to its website, and Prashad is listed as its “chief correspondent.” Globetrotter has also partnered with the Peoples Dispatch to bring in additional writers who report on “people’s movements” around the world. Chak and De Los Santos are among Globetrotter’s inaugural writing fellows for 2020-2021.
Formerly known as The Dawn News, the Peoples Dispatch bills itself as “an international media project with the mission of bringing to you voices from people’s movements and organizations across the globe.” Like Globetrotter, contributors to the Peoples Dispatch include a familiar cast of characters in Singham’s constellation of friends, colleagues and family members including Kleiner and Singham’s son Nathan, and again Prashad, De Los Santos and Chak.
The registered address of Peoples Dispatch is the same New York address given on tax forms for the Justice and Education Fund.
Around the time that Prashad denied the Uyghur genocide in the article for Globetrotter, he also appeared on a YouTube channel called The Zero Hour with RJ Eskow, casting doubt on the plight of the Uyghurs, which human rights monitors had by that time labeled a genocide. “What’s the evidence?” he asked rhetorically. “Well, there’s none, really.”
There is plenty, according to Amnesty International.
“Amnesty has documented how Uyghurs, Kazakhs and other predominantly Muslim ethnic minorities in Xinjiang face systematic state-organized mass imprisonment, torture and persecution amounting to crimes against humanity,” Amnesty International U.K. campaigns manager Kristyan Benedict told New Lines.
Media reporting has corroborated Amnesty’s findings.
In November 2019, The New York Times published a major exposé based on 403 pages of leaked internal Chinese state documents, which, as the paper noted, “provide an unprecedented inside view of the continuing clampdown in Xinjiang, in which the authorities have corralled as many as a million ethnic [Uyghurs], Kazakhs and others into internment camps and prisons over the past three years.” And in 2020, BuzzFeed News won a Pulitzer Prize for its four-part investigation into the infrastructure of this internment program in Xinjiang based on satellite footage and interviews with former detainees.
That Prashad’s denial of atrocities against the Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslim minorities should coincide with mounting evidence that implicates the Chinese government is particularly noteworthy because, until recently, his organization was on record lending credence to the fact that these abuses existed.
Early into its existence, in 2018, Prashad’s Tricontinental highlighted key “problems” with Beijing, which it characterized as “very grave,” namely, “the detention of unknown numbers of China’s Uyghur minority — and the arrests of Marxist students.” By Prashad’s current standards, his own newsletter from this time would be guilty of “information warfare” in tandem with the U.S. military-industrial complex.
So why the remarkable about-face?
The answer may lie in Prashad’s closeness to Singham, whom, as recently as Nov. 24, 2021, he described on Twitter as “[o]ne of my oldest [and] dearest friends.”
In 2017 Prashad abandoned academia in favor of a Chinese think tank, and he inaugurated Tricontinental, which is also bankrolled in part by the United Community Fund.
In an email, Prashad told New Lines that he quit Trinity College in 2017 “because it was clear that neither the [administration] wanted me nor did I really want to spend the rest of my life there. When the opportunity afforded to do new things, for which I am grateful, I took it.”
Prashad declined to address New Lines’ questions about the sources of funding to Tricontinental, and he did not comment on Singham’s alleged financial involvement in his organization.
The majority of Tricontinental’s donor money remains unknown because funds are disbursed as pass-through donations by a major Wall Street investment bank. According to tax filings, Tricontinental received $12.45 million from Goldman Sachs Philanthropy Fund, a donor-advised charity that conceals its funders from the public record, making it a convenient clearinghouse for moving dark money to politically sensitive or controversial organizations.
Prashad’s outspoken pro-China bent coincides with a nadir in U.S.-China relations, precipitated by the growing evidence that bolsters Uyghur genocide accusations and a host of geopolitical disputes like Chinese industrial cyberespionage; the Chinese navy’s brinkmanship in the South China Sea; the Hong Kong police’s violent suppression of pro-democracy protesters in 2019; and Beijing’s increased belligerent rhetoric toward Taiwan, a U.S. ally.
Tricontinental isn’t the only organization in this network to benefit from the Goldman Sachs Philanthropy Fund’s anonymous contributors. The Justice and Education Fund also received a generous $15,255,000 — amounting to 99.5% of its total revenue for 2019. Another group, which took in $12 million from the Philanthropy Fund in 2019, is a cultural center in Manhattan called The People’s Forum. Featuring a coworking space, theater, media laboratory and café on its premises at West 37th Street, The People’s Forum characterizes its mission as being an “incubator for working class and marginalized communities to build unity across historic lines of division at home and abroad.”
One event hosted on Sept. 18, 2021, by The People’s Forum titled “China and the Left: A Socialist Forum,” was co-sponsored by Evans’ Code Pink and jointly keynoted by Prashad and the Qiao Collective, a self-described Marxist group of “ethnic Chinese people living across multiple countries” whose Twitter account routinely promotes the Chinese government narrative on most any topic, including denying the Uyghur genocide.
New Lines contacted the Goldman Sachs Philanthropy Fund to ask whether it’s aware that Tricontinental and The People’s Forum promote and amplify the narrative of Uyghur genocide denial, as well as what ethical standards the fund has in place to assess grant recommendations from donors to such organizations. The fund declined to comment.
Meanwhile, De Los Santos is a co-director at The People’s Forum, and the organization’s operations manager, Rita Henderson, also holds the position of director at Tricontinental, according to the organization’s 2019 Form 990 filings. Henderson’s bio on The People’s Forum states that she sits on the board at Tricontinental. In yet another overlap in personnel, Evans serves as a co-director and secretary of The People’s Forum.
The People’s Forum took in more than $3 million from the United Community Fund in 2019, which is not very surprising since De Los Santos’ Justice and Education Fund gave more than $8 million to the United Community Fund that same year.
Prashad and De Los Santos have collaborated outside of New York’s socialist milieu. The duo are travel companions.
In a photo taken in Venezuela on Nov. 21, 2021, De Los Santos is shown alongside Prashad and Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro giving the thumbs up on the day of regional and local elections in which several Venezuelan opposition politicians had been banned from participating. The European Union, which for the first time in 15 years was invited to send election observers to Venezuela, cited improvements in the country’s voting system but could not characterize the elections as free and fair. Prashad’s tweet embedding the image reads, “sovereignty against imperialism.”
Housed within The People’s Forum New York office is yet another media organization called Breakthrough News. Also pressing Uyghur genocide denial, this project is spearheaded by Rania Khalek, an apologist for Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, whose previous media ventures, Redfish and Soapbox, were both exposed by journalists as cutouts of Russian state-funded media. Soapbox’s parent group, Maffick, sued Facebook for libel in the U.S. District Court in California after the social media company labeled its subsidiaries “Russia state-controlled media.” But the case was dismissed, because the court agreed that Facebook “tendered a substantial amount of evidence in support of its view that Maffick is linked to the Russian government.”
“It’s completely unsurprising that this network turned to things like Delaware shell companies and U.S. accountancy firms, both of which don’t require any checks on the sources of income or what the funds might be used for,” said Casey Michel, author of “American Kleptocracy: How the U.S. Created the World’s Greatest Money Laundering Scheme in History.” Casey added, “Without increased oversight, expect far more networks like this to emerge — especially those networks that are spinning disinformation to cover up some of the most heinous crimes on the planet.”
Singham and others in his personal and professional network may be sincere in their belief that no abuses are taking place in Xinjiang and that human rights monitors and the U.S. government have exaggerated or mischaracterized Chinese state policy in pursuit of national interests. But Singham has his own bottom line to consider in fostering favorable relations between the U.S. and China.
Huawei, the company he worked closely with for seven years, was sanctioned by the U.S. by restricting American hardware manufacturers from exporting certain technology, including those used in superfast microchips, to the company, one of the world’s largest smartphone makers. Relatedly, Huawei, its chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou, and two of the company’s U.S. subsidiaries were indicted by a federal grand jury in New York in 2019 on 18 counts of conspiracy to violate the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO, including bank and wire fraud and conspiracy to defraud the U.S. through industrial espionage. (After being detained in Vancouver in December 2018, Wanzhou was released; she returned to China following an agreement she struck with the U.S. Department of Justice.)
The U.S. intelligence community considers Huawei a prominent national security threat: In 2020, the Federal Communications Commission formally designated the telecom giant as such, alleging it maintains close ties to the Chinese Communist Party and Chinese military establishment.
Huawei has also been implicated in China’s repression of the Uyghurs: It tested facial recognition software in 2018 that, according to The Washington Post, “could trigger a ‘[Uyghur] alarm’ — potentially flagging them for police in China, where members of the group have been detained en masse as part of a brutal government crackdown.”
Since being slapped with U.S. sanctions, Huawei’s returns have diminished: In October 2021, The Wall Street Journal reported that its “revenue fell 38% in the most recent quarter,” the fourth straight quarter of such American-induced losses.
Singham’s role as a strategic technical adviser with Huawei may have ended more than a decade ago, but he has continued to bank on Chinese development. He is invested in two companies in the country’s consultancy and food industries: Shanghai Luoweixing, with a registered capital contribution of $20 million; and Gondwana Foods, with one of $32.5 million. Singham is also listed as the legal representative of a third company, Shanghai Shinong Company Ltd., registered in January 2020.
His recent portfolio, too, overlaps with pro-China philanthropy.
In 2019, the Justice and Education Fund contributed $876,000 to a new group registered in Madison, Wisconsin, called People’s Welfare Association. One of the board members of that organization is Daniel Tirado Behrens, an employee at Shanghai Luoweixing.
In five years a web of organizations and individuals that promote apologetics for Beijing has emerged around Singham, and it all started with his sale of Thoughtworks in 2017. Details of the sale were not disclosed, but in a blog post Thoughtworks’ chief scientist, Martin Fowler, offered an explanation as to why Singham wanted to sell the company he had run for nearly two decades: “With the money that selling Thoughtworks would bring,” it would enable Singham to “accelerate” his activism. Yet, for an activist, Singham has remained elusive. He isn’t active on social media; and it seems he has made few public appearances since 2018. For someone linked to tens of millions of dollars going to pro-China causes, it would seem Singham prefers to keep a low profile.
Just as this investigation was winding down, the Twitter account for The People’s Forum published a thread in which it confirmed receiving money from Singham.
“A few years ago we met Roy Singham, a Marxist comrade who sold his company & donated most of his wealth to non-profits that focus on political education, culture & internationalism,” the thread began. “It seems to bother some folk that we receive funding that furthers our anti-imperialist politics. It seems to bother them even more that our funder is also a staunch anti-imperialist whose work goes back to the Black Panthers & the [League of Revolutionary Black Workers] in Detroit. Ultimately our solidarity with the peoples & countries at the epicenter of the struggle against US Imperialism will not be moved by the racist allegations made by people who loudly echo State Dept and Pentagon discourse.”
This thread, published on Dec. 21, followed New Lines’ request for an interview with the leadership of The People’s Forum. As of publication date, the request remained unanswered.
19. Biden’s Misguided Blame Game on Iran
This illustrates the confusion we sometimes have over "political warfare." In one context (this one) it is about the internal political divides and infighting. In another context (e.g., George Kennan's) it is about using all instruments of power short of war to accomplish a nation's objectives (and a lot more). One use is internally focused and the other is externally focused.
Conclusion:
Staying the political warfare route would not only be tantamount to a retreat from the promise of “nonpartisanship” in U.S. foreign policy that Blinken promised in his first major speech in 2021, but a true fool’s errand to begin 2022 with.
Biden’s Misguided Blame Game on Iran
After a year in office, the president now owns the policy impasse.
Jan 17
Photograph by John MIchillo/AFP/Getty Images.)
“A fool throws a stone into a well and a hundred wise men can’t get it out,” is a popular Persian expression stressing the lasting consequence of actions taken by unlearned or inexperienced people for the rest of society.
The Biden administration is channeling this maxim—with former President Trump as the “fool” and the 2015 Iran nuclear deal as “the stone”—as its go-to response for why things have gone from bad to worse on Iran policy under President Joe Biden’s watch despite his promise of a “smarter” approach.
On the sidelines of a conference in Rome last October, Biden blamed his predecessor for the deadlock in negotiations and Iran’s atomic advances. “We’re continuing to suffer from the very bad decisions President Trump made to pull out of the JCPOA,” he said, using the acronym for the 2015 agreement, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. Less than two months later, Secretary of State Antony Blinken amplified that assessment, saying, “we are where we are because of what I consider to be one of the worst decisions made in American foreign policy in the last decade, and that was getting out of the Iran nuclear agreement.”
While the former president did indeed cease U.S. participation in the JCPOA on May 8, 2018, the Islamic Republic’s enmity with America far predates this decision. Moreover, the main vectors for Iranian escalation since 2018—nuclear, missile, regional, maritime, and cyber—have all been problem areas in the past and are what make it such an outsized threat. They are not new aggressions Iran has chosen to develop or employ, as White House press secretary Jen Psaki incorrectly alleged days ago.
Should Iran’s post-2018 heightened uranium enrichment levels, growing uranium stockpile, use of advanced centrifuges, and other activities be seen as the problem, then it is worth recalling that Trump merely expedited what the JCPOA already ordained, just on more favorable financial terms for Washington. The JCPOA was at best, a time-out temporarily halting select Iranian nuclear activities. Leaving the JCPOA simply meant not choosing to pay for that time-out, which the longer the deal is in place, reads more like a permissive time-in.
While some non-proliferation scholars have called the JCPOA “a miracle,” one of the deal’s myriad shortcomings were these nuclear time-outs, technically known as “sunset clauses,” which pave the way for a rapid expansion of Iranian nuclear capacity. One example pertains to advanced centrifuges, which can be gradually employed starting six years after the deal is in effect. President Obama invoked these machines when he famously said that starting from year 13 of the deal, Iran’s “breakout” time could be near zero.
As indirect nuclear talks to resurrect this less than miraculous deal lurch into the new year with no agreement to date, a recent revelation by Axios confirms that the administration is predictably embarking on a domestic political messaging campaign that can be summarized as follows: We failed in our objectives because of Trump.
This strategy is likely to be employed for a range of suboptimal outcomes, which might include an agreement worse than the JCPOA, or a collapse in the talks that leads to war, a potential Iranian nuclear weapon, or a threshold capability in which the regime could end-up being a screwdriver’s turn away from the bomb.
The irony: Amid the political blame game, the administration cannot see how its conciliatory approach toward Iran over the past year has underwritten both Iranian diplomatic intransigence as well as “irreversible” nuclear knowledge and capabilities. After a year in office, Biden now owns the Iran policy impasse. The administration consciously chose to denigrate and shed leverage created by the coercive and punitive economic pressure policy of its predecessor. And throughout 2021, it failed to take a range of actions like diplomatic censure in multilateral forums or vigorous enforcement of existing U.S. oil sanctions that could have improved the chances of even its stated aim of resurrecting the JCPOA.
Year one of the Biden administration’s Iran policy on non-nuclear matters has similarly failed to convince Tehran that Washington means business. The administration’s delisting of the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen has not brought peace to the Arabian Peninsula. Allowing Iran to pay U.N. dues using frozen funds has only emboldened its desire to access these revenues and press U.S. allies holding them to violate sanctions. And Washington’s vacillation between occasional military responses and turning a blind eye to increasing Iran-backed escalation and attacks on U.S. positions in the heartland of the Middle East has not deterred Iran and its constellation of proxies, the “Axis of Resistance,” from engaging in more attacks. Iranian officials continue to desire and work toward evicting America from the region through a thousand cuts.
Rather than squander precious time laying the groundwork for a domestic political blame game, the administration should be developing tools that can make diplomacy more efficacious and its military deterrence more credible. This means enforcing existing sanctions on the Islamic Republic, including on its oil sales, smuggling, and regional trade networks, as well as convening a previously threatened special session of the U.N. nuclear watchdog to censure Iran. On the military front, this means working with regional partners to make sure they have the necessary air and missile defense systems to devalue and offset Iran’s growing long-range and precision-strike capabilities and those of its proxies, as well as actively interdicting the flow of arms from Iran that continue to keep regional hotspots like Yemen, Syria, and Iraq engulfed in conflict.
Staying the political warfare route would not only be tantamount to a retreat from the promise of “nonpartisanship” in U.S. foreign policy that Blinken promised in his first major speech in 2021, but a true fool’s errand to begin 2022 with.
Behnam Ben Taleblu is a senior fellow of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) in Washington D.C., where he focuses on Iranian political and security issues.
20. It’s Not ‘Woke’ for Businesses to Think Beyond Profit, BlackRock Chief Says
The yin-yang of business? moral respsonbility and fair pursuit of profit.
Excerpts:
In this year’s letter, Mr. Fink urged chief executives to continue embracing their moral responsibility as the pandemic reshapes society and business, and as consumers and workers demand more from companies.
But in perhaps the most telling sentence, he said that what drove his push for companies to have purpose was creating profits. “Make no mistake, the fair pursuit of profit is still what animates markets; and long-term profitability is the measure by which markets will ultimately determine your company’s success,” he wrote.
It’s Not ‘Woke’ for Businesses to Think Beyond Profit, BlackRock Chief Says
Mr. Fink has delivered his words in annual letters that have drawn remarkable attention, but also criticism from all corners: that he is beholden to politically correct antibusiness activists, or that he is co-opting these issues for marketing purposes.
On Monday night, he used his latest letter to corporate America to clarify — and defend — his approach.
“Stakeholder capitalism is not about politics,” Mr. Fink wrote to the chief executives of businesses that BlackRock has invested in. “It is not ‘woke.’ It is capitalism.”
ADVERTISEMENT
Mr. Fink’s annual letter is widely followed, and this year’s 3,300-word edition is sure to be read in boardrooms and beyond.
The DealBook Newsletter Our columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin and his Times colleagues help you make sense of major business and policy headlines — and the power-brokers who shape them. Get it sent to your inbox.
On Friday, BlackRock said it managed more than $10 trillion in assets, across an array of index funds, pension plans and other investment products, cementing the firm’s position as the world’s largest asset manager. That gives Mr. Fink a huge amount of influence: If a public company that BlackRock has invested in ignores his calls, his firm could seek to oust its directors or, among its actively managed funds, sell its shares.
So when Mr. Fink began urging chief executives four years ago to consider how they contributed to society, his words carried weight. Within weeks of his telling leaders in 2020 that climate change would become a “defining factor” in how BlackRock assessed their companies, many blue-chip businesses announced plans to become carbon-neutral or carbon-negative.
In this year’s letter, Mr. Fink urged chief executives to continue embracing their moral responsibility as the pandemic reshapes society and business, and as consumers and workers demand more from companies.
But in perhaps the most telling sentence, he said that what drove his push for companies to have purpose was creating profits. “Make no mistake, the fair pursuit of profit is still what animates markets; and long-term profitability is the measure by which markets will ultimately determine your company’s success,” he wrote.
Much of this year’s letter was devoted to Mr. Fink’s belief that a focus on environmental, social and corporate governance issues — E.S.G., for short — does not conflict with making money. Reducing a company’s carbon footprint, for example, makes the business more resilient in the long term, which is in investors’ interests.
“We focus on sustainability not because we’re environmentalists, but because we are capitalists and fiduciaries to our clients,” Mr. Fink wrote.
He suggested that E.S.G. was not a fad but a permanent feature of the corporate world. Business leaders who do not adapt to the new reality, he suggested, risk being overtaken by younger and more innovative rivals in step with the times.
ADVERTISEMENT
“Capital markets have allowed companies and countries to flourish. But access to capital is not a right,” he wrote. “It is a privilege. And the duty to attract that capital in a responsible and sustainable way lies with you.”
But some critics say Mr. Fink and BlackRock are not pushing companies hard enough to go green. Environmental groups have called out what they see as shortcomings in Mr. Fink’s approach: BlackRock’s Big Problem, a collection of nonprofits and other advocates, accuses the firm of failing to exclude major polluters from its investment funds, even in E.S.G.-focused products.
In his latest letter, Mr. Fink defended his more gradual approach, including a refusal to force BlackRock to divest holdings in fossil-fuel companies. (He has said in the past that the firm cannot rid many of its mainstream funds of holdings in companies that are part of major stock indexes.)
“Divesting from entire sectors — or simply passing carbon-intensive assets from public markets to private markets — will not get the world to net zero,” he wrote. Focusing solely on cutting down on the supply of oil and gas, and not reducing the demand for fossil fuels, would simply drive up energy prices and encourage more of a backlash against green-energy efforts, he argued.
ADVERTISEMENT
BlackRock has also faced pressure from the opposite end of the climate spectrum. Last year, Texas lawmakers passed a bill that, on paper, would block the state’s agencies from investing public money with financial companies, like BlackRock, if they were to “boycott energy companies.”
“If Wall Street turns their back on Texas and our thriving oil and gas industry, then Texas will not do business with Wall Street,” Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, a supporter of the bill, posted on Twitter last year.
Mr. Fink’s letter did not address the Texas bill, and to date the state has not cut off BlackRock. He also said the firm would offer individual investors more ability to vote its shares, something BlackRock has been under pressure to do, especially by Republican lawmakers who have complained that the firm has too much influence. BlackRock is making it easier for institutions to vote themselves as well.
“We are pursuing an initiative to use technology to give more of our clients the option to have a say in how proxy votes are cast at companies their money is invested in,” Mr. Fink wrote. “We now offer this option to certain institutional clients, including pension funds that support 60 million people.”
ADVERTISEMENT
Along with his push for companies to focus more on climate, he repeated a call on governments and multinational organizations like the World Bank to be more supportive of investments in green energy.
“Businesses can’t do this alone,” Mr. Fink wrote, “and they cannot be the climate police.”
Andrew Ross Sorkin is a columnist and the founder and editor-at-large of DealBook. He is a co-anchor of CNBC’s Squawk Box and the author of “Too Big to Fail.” He is also the co-creator of the Showtime drama series Billions.
Michael de la Merced joined The Times as a reporter in 2006, covering Wall Street and finance. Among his main coverage areas are mergers and acquisitions, bankruptcies and the private equity industry.
21. Russia’s Possible Invasion of Ukraine
Russia’s Possible Invasion of Ukraine
Philip G. Wasielewski
January 13, 2022
The Issue
If peace talks fail, the Russian military has several options to advance into Ukraine through northern, central, and southern invasion routes. But a Russian attempt to seize and hold territory will not necessarily be easy and will likely be impacted by challenges from weather, urban combat, command and control, logistics, and the morale of Russian troops and the Ukrainian population. The United States and its European allies and partners should be prepared for an invasion by taking immediate economic, diplomatic, military, intelligence, and humanitarian steps to aid Ukraine and its population and shore up defenses along the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) eastern flank.
Introduction
Russian president Vladimir Putin continues to threaten an invasion of Ukraine with a major military buildup near the Russian-Ukrainian border and aggressive language. Russia has deployed offensive weapons and systems within striking distance of Ukraine, including main battle tanks, self-propelled howitzers, infantry fighting vehicles, multiple launch rocket systems, Iskander short-range ballistic missile systems, and towed artillery, as highlighted in Figures 1a and 1b. Putin has complemented this buildup with blunt language that Ukraine is historically part of Russia and that Kiev needs to return to the Russian fold.1 Russia’s threat is particularly alarming for at least two reasons. First, Russia could move its pre-positioned forces into Ukraine quickly. If fully committed, the Russian military is significantly stronger and more capable than Ukraine’s military, and the United States and other NATO countries have made it clear they will not deploy their forces to Ukraine to repel a Russian invasion. Even if diplomats reach an agreement, Putin has shown a willingness to dial up—and down—the war in Ukraine and threaten to expand the war, making the Russian threat persistent. Second, an invasion would mark a significant change in international politics, creating a new “Iron Curtain” that begins along Russia’s borders with Finland and the Baltic states and moves south through Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Central and South Asia, and finally to East Asia along China’s southern flank.
Consequently, it is important to understand how Russia could invade Ukraine, how specific political objectives may influence an invasion plan, the challenges an invasion may face, and what options the United States and its European partners have to respond. To help understand these dynamics, this brief asks several questions. What are Russian president Vladimir Putin’s objectives? What military options does Russia have, and what might an invasion look like? How should the United States and its allies and partners respond?
The brief makes two main arguments. First, if Russia decides to invade Ukraine to reassert Russian control and influence, there are at least three possible axes of advance to seize Ukrainian territory: a northern thrust, possibly attempting to outflank Ukrainian defenses around Kiev by approaching through Belarus; a central thrust advancing due west into Ukraine; and a southern thrust advancing across the Perekop isthmus. Second, if the United States and its European partners fail to deter a Russian invasion, they should support Ukrainian resistance through a combination of diplomatic, military, intelligence, and other means. The United States and its European partners cannot allow Russia to annex Ukraine. The West’s appeasement of Moscow when it annexed Crimea in 2014 and then orchestrated an insurgency in Eastern Ukraine only emboldened Russian leaders. In addition, Russian annexation of some or all of Ukraine would increase Russian manpower, industrial capacity, and natural resources to a level that could make it a global threat. The United States and Europe cannot make this mistake again.
The rest of this brief is divided into three main sections. First, it examines Russian political objectives. Second, the brief analyzes Russian military options. Third, it explores options available to the United States and its allies and partners.
Figure 1a: Russian Military Buildup near Yelnya, Russia
Figure 1b: Close-Up of Russian Military Buildup near Yelnya, Russia
Russian Political Objectives
The Kremlin wants what it says: an end to NATO expansion, a rollback of previous expansion, a removal of American nuclear weapons from Europe, and a Russian sphere of influence. However, Putin may accept less. The Kremlin’s primary goal is a guarantee that Belarus, Ukraine, and Georgia will never belong to a military or economic bloc other than the ones Moscow controls and that Russia will be the ultimate arbitrator of the foreign and security policy of all three states. In essence, this conflict is about whether 30 years after the demise of the Soviet Union, its former ethnic republics can live as independent, sovereign states or if they still must acknowledge Moscow as their de facto sovereign.
Ostensibly, the demand for an exclusive sphere of influence in Eastern Europe and the south Caucasus is to meet Russian security interests. The Kremlin has portrayed NATO expansion to the east as the original sin of post-Soviet international relations with the West that now must be rectified. Facts, alternate interpretations, and the security concerns of equally sovereign nations notwithstanding, Moscow claims that without such guarantees, it will use military force to protect its security interests.
Russian Military Options
Based on these political objectives, the Kremlin has at least six possible military options:
1. Redeploy some of its ground forces away from the Ukrainian border—at least temporarily—if negotiations are successful but continue to aid pro-Russian rebels in Eastern Ukraine.
2. Send conventional Russian troops into the breakaway regions of Donetsk and Luhansk as unilateral “peacekeepers” and refuse to withdraw them until peace talks end successfully and Kiev agrees to implement the Minsk Accords.
3. Seize Ukrainian territory as far west as the Dnepr River to use as a bargaining chip or incorporate this new territory fully into the Russian Federation. This option is represented in Figure 2a.
4. Seize Ukrainian territory up to the Dnepr River and seize an additional belt of land (to include Odessa) that connects Russian territory with the breakaway Transdniestria Republic and separates Ukraine from any access to the Black Sea. The Kremlin would incorporate these new lands into Russia and ensure that the rump Ukrainian statelet remains economically unviable.
5. Seize only a belt of land between Russia and Transdniestria (including Mariupol, Kherson, and Odessa) to secure freshwater supplies for Crimea and block Ukraine’s access to the sea, while avoiding major combat over Kiev and Kharkiv. This option is represented in Figure 2b.
6. Seize all of Ukraine and, with Belarus, announce the formation of a new tripartite Slavic union of Great, Little, and White Russians (Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians). This option would involve operations represented in Figure 2a as “phase one,” with Figure 2c representing “phase two” of this option.
Of these six options, the first two are the least likely to incur significant international sanctions but have limited chance of achieving a breakthrough on either NATO issues or the Minsk Accords due to their coercive nature. All other options bring major international sanctions and economic hardship and would be counterproductive to the goal of weakening NATO or decoupling the United States from its commitments to European security.
Options three through six could achieve another goal—the destruction of an independent Ukraine—whose evolution toward a liberal democratic state has become a major source of contention among the Kremlin’s security elites. Option three would have Russia control a substantial amount of Ukrainian territory but still leave it as an economically viable state. Option four leaves only an agrarian rump Ukraine but precludes occupying its most nationalistic areas. Option five leaves more of Ukraine free but still cuts its access to the sea and incurs fewer occupation costs. Options four and five—seizing a belt of land from Tiraspol to Mariupol—are complicated by the fact that there is no east-west running natural feature, river, or mountain range that could serve as a natural line of demarcation for this occupied land. The new border along this territory would run across countless fields and forests and be difficult to defend. Option six means occupying the entire country and dealing with the assimilation of a population of 41 million that may resist occupation actively and passively for years. It would require an occupation force of considerable size to control the population and man the new borders with NATO countries. Ukrainians in any occupied territory can expect forced Russification that the nation experienced under such rulers as Catherine the Great, Alexander II, Stalin, and Brezhnev.
Possible Invasion Routes
Ideological preparation of Russian society for a conflict with Ukraine has been ongoing since at least 2014, with Kremlin propaganda portraying Ukraine as a proto-fascist, neo-Nazi state. In July 2021, a public letter by President Putin asserted that Russians and Ukrainians are the same people and castigated Ukraine’s authorities for justifying independence by denying its past.2 The Russian military made President Putin’s article compulsory reading for its soldiers.3 This was followed in October by a letter in the newspaper Kommersant by Russian Security Council vice-president Dmitry Medvedev, which used antisemitic tones to delegitimize the current Ukrainian leadership as extremist, corrupt, and foreign controlled.4
With an ideological basis for action in place, the next step is to create a casus belli—justification for war—consistent with the Kremlin-manufactured image of Ukraine. Pretexts for an attack could range from a straightforward breakdown of security talks to a stage-managed incident similar to the provocations at Mukden, Gleiwitz, and Mainila that provided justification for Japan’s invasion of Manchuria, Germany’s invasion of Poland, and the Soviet Union’s attack on Finland, respectively. This is why the bizarre claim of Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu posted on the Kremlin’s official website of American mercenaries preparing a “provocation” with chemical weapons in Ukraine is ominous and might foreshadow just the type of “incident” the Kremlin would prepare.5
Once there is a casus belli, cyberattacks will likely follow to degrade Ukraine’s military command and control systems and public communications and electrical grids. Next, kinetic operations will likely begin with air and missile strikes against Ukraine’s air force and air defense systems. Once air superiority is established, Russian ground forces would move forward, slightly preceded by special operations to degrade further command and control capabilities and delay the mobilization of reserves by conducting bombings, assassinations, and sabotage operations.
The scheme of maneuver of a Russian military invasion of Ukraine will likely be influenced by which of the above political goals the Kremlin wishes to achieve, the geography of the land and cities to be fought over, and the transportation routes to bring up logistics. If the Kremlin wishes to exercise options three, four, or six, and taking into consideration primary geography and logistics, there are three likely axes of advance to seize Ukrainian territory east of the Dnepr River, with the river as either a limit of advance or the first phase line of a larger invasion.
- Northern Route: Russia could advance toward Kiev along two routes. The first would be 150 miles by road through Novye Yurkovichi, Russia; Chernihiv, Ukraine; and into Kiev, Ukraine. The second would be a 200-mile thrust through Troebortnoe, Russia; Konotop, Ukraine; Nizhyn, Ukraine; and into Kiev.6 If Minsk were to acquiesce to the use of its road and rail networks, the Russian army could outflank Ukrainian defenses around Kiev and approach them from the rear via a 150-mile axis of advance from Mazur, Belarus, to Korosten, Ukraine, and finally to Kiev.
- Central Route: Russia could also advance due west along three routes. The first might include a 200-mile axis that moves through Belograd, Russia; Kharkiv, Ukraine; Poltava, Ukraine; and finally to Kremenchuk, Ukraine. The second might include a 140-mile axis thrust through Donetsk, Ukraine to Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine; and possibly also another thrust from Donetsk to Dnipro, Ukraine. The third might involve Russian forces advancing along the coastline toward Mariupol, Berdyansk, and the Perekop isthmus connecting Crimea to Ukraine.
- Southern Route: Russia could also advance across the Perekop isthmus to take Kherson and the source of freshwater for Crimea and simultaneously toward the vicinity of Melitpol to link up with Russian forces advancing along the coast of the Sea of Azov. If Russia was to attempt option five, this would be the main attack coupled with the assault along the coastline toward Mariupol and Berdyansk. But it would be hardest to sustain logistically due to the lack of a railway running along the Sea of Azov coast and the main direction of advance.
Figure 2 highlights possible invasion routes. All of these routes, except the coastal one, parallel existing rail lines. This is essential since Russian army logistics forces are not designed for large-scale ground offensives far from railroads.7 If Russia’s objectives include denying Ukraine future access to the sea, it will have to seize Odessa. Some predict that this would be accomplished via amphibious and airborne landings near Odessa, which link up with mechanized forces approaching from the east. If Russia intends to conquer the entire country, its forces would need to seize Odessa (whose port facilities would ease Russian logistics) and also cross the Dnepr River at several points to march and fight an additional 350 to 700 miles further west to occupy all of Ukraine up to its borders with Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Moldova.
Figure 2: Possible Russian Invasion Routes
Russian Prospects of Success
Mechanized attacks are not always as rapid as attackers hope. Two of the quickest movements of armored forces in history—German general Heinz Guderian’s punch through the Ardennes and seizure of Dunkirk in May 1940, and the U.S. and coalition advance from the Kuwait border to Baghdad in 2003—each averaged approximately 20 miles per day. Movement against a determined foe in winter conditions with limited daylight could reduce that rate of advance significantly.
With enough troops, firepower, logistics, time, and national will, as well as no outside interference, Russia could grind forward until its military achieves the Kremlin’s political objectives. Russia’s military outnumbers Ukraine’s military in the air and on the ground, Russia gained extensive experience in conducting combined-arms operations in Syria, and the terrain favors offensive mechanized warfare. However, the true calculation of military success can only be taken after a clash of arms begins. In addition, there are several intangibles—such as weather, urban combat, command and control, logistics, and morale—that may play a significant role in the initial stages of a war.
Weather: An invasion that begins in January or February would have the advantage of frozen ground to support the cross-country movement of a large mechanized force. It would also mean operating in conditions of freezing cold and limited visibility. January is usually the coldest and snowiest month of the year in Ukraine, averaging 8.5 hours of daylight during the month and increasing to 10 hours by February.8 This would put a premium on night fighting capabilities to keep an advance moving forward. Should fighting continue into March, mechanized forces would have to deal with the infamous Rasputitsa, or thaw. In October, Rasputitsa turns firm ground into mud. In March, the frozen steppes thaw, and the land again becomes at best a bog, and at worst a sea of mud. Winter weather is also less than optimal for reliable close air support operations.
Urban Combat: While much of the terrain east of the Dnepr River includes rural fields and forests, there are several major urban areas that a Russian mechanized force would have to either take or bypass and besiege. Kiev has almost 3 million inhabitants, Kharkiv has roughly 1.5 million, Odessa has 1 million, Dnipro has almost 1 million, Zaporizhia has 750,000, and even Mariupol has almost 500,000.9 If defended, these large urban areas could take considerable time and casualties to clear and occupy. In the First Chechen War, it took Russian forces from December 31, 1994, to February 9, 1995, to wrestle control of Grozny, then a city of less than 400,000, from a few thousand Chechen fighters.10 In the Second Chechen War, the siege of Grozny also took six weeks.
Therefore, the best course of action for Russian troops would be to bypass urban areas and mop them up later. However, Kharkiv is just over the border from Russia and is a major road and railroad junction. If Russian forces did not control Kharkiv, it would seriously diminish their logistical capability to support a central thrust toward the Dnepr River and beyond. Furthermore, Kiev poses a similar challenge and, as the nation’s capital, possesses great symbolic value for whichever side holds it. Russia may be unable to avoid sustained urban combat in several major metropolitan areas (and the resulting high casualties) if it attempts more than a punitive incursion into Ukraine.
Command and Control: There is a Russian expression: “the first blini is always a mess.” In the case of an invasion of Ukraine, Russia will be conducting its largest combined arms operation since the Battle of Berlin in 1945. The 2008 Russo-Georgian War saw just five days of combat and engaged 70,000 Russian soldiers.11 In Syria, the primary maneuver forces included Syrian ground units, with help from Lebanese Hezbollah, militia forces from neighboring countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan, private military companies such as the Wagner Group, and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Quds Forces. But Russia did not deploy significant numbers of conventional forces. Approximately 120,000 Russian soldiers are mobilized near Ukraine, with tens of thousands more ready to deploy into combat.12 It will be a challenge for Russian command and control to first move all of these forces into their attack positions with proper march discipline. It will also be difficult for Russia to maintain that discipline during the attack so that the massive amounts of vehicles and soldiers moving on a limited number of slippery and poor roads and often at night do not become one gargantuan traffic jam.
The coordination of airborne and amphibious assaults will prove another challenge. While airborne forces could be dropped along the Dnepr River to seize crucial bridges, how long would they be able to hold out while armored forces try to reach them over winter roads? The same applies for amphibious forces attempting to outflank Ukrainian defenses near Mariupol or to seize Odessa. Black Sea hydrography and coastal topography provide few good landing sites for amphibious forces, and once landed, they would be hard to sustain.13 Without proper coordination and rapid advance of armored forces, any airborne or amphibious assault as part of the invasion could become a “bridge or beach too far” for Russian forces. Figures 3a, 3b, and 3c highlight ships from the Russian navy’s Black Sea Fleet, including landing ships and corvettes that could be used in an amphibious assault into Ukraine.
Figure 3a: Sevastopol Bay, Crimea
Figure 3b: Close-Up of Russian Landing Ships in Sevastopol
Figure 3c: Close-Up of Russian Maritime Vessels in Sevastopol
The Russian military also has limited experience in coordinating a large number of aircraft that will support the ground attack. Russian air operations in Syria and Chechnya do not compare with the number of sorties that could be required in Ukraine across a front possibly several hundred miles wide. This will be the first time since World War II that Russia’s ground forces will face a modern mechanized opponent, and its air forces will face an opponent with a modern air force and air defense system. Consequently, Russian forces will likely face notable challenges in command, control, communications, and coordination.
Logistics: The initial attack will likely be well supported with artillery and air support, leading to several breakthroughs in Ukrainian defenses. However, once combat units expend their initial stores of ammunition, fuel, and food, the real test of Russian military strength will begin—including Russia’s ability to sustain the advance of a massive mechanized force over hundreds of miles of territory. Kiev and the Dnepr River crossings are at least 150 to 200 road miles from the Russian border, and its army will require at least several days of fighting to reach them. Before that, they will undoubtedly have to resupply, refuel, and replace combat losses of men and material at least once, which will require an operational pause.
In his article “Feeding the Bear,” Alex Vershinin argues that there are serious logistical challenges to a Russian invasion that is supposed to roll over the Baltic states in 96 hours and present the West with a fait accompli. Russia has built an excellent war machine for fighting near its frontier and striking deep with long-range fires. However, Russia may have trouble with a sustained ground offensive far beyond Russian railroads without a major logistical halt or a massive mobilization of reserves.14 As the operational depth in Ukraine is far greater than in the Baltics, a Russian invasion of Ukraine could be a longer affair than some anticipate due to the time and distance to bring up supplies. If the invasion is not concluded quickly due to a combination of weather, logistics, and Ukrainian resistance, how might this impact Russian morale?
Morale: There are two levels of morale on each side to consider: the morale of individual soldiers and the morale of each country and its people. At the individual level, will a Ukrainian soldier who believes he or she is fighting for their homeland have an advantage over a Russian soldier whose motivation for fighting may vary? For the Ukrainian nation as a whole, how strong is their sense of a unique national identity to resist what could be a long, destructive, and bloody struggle? The answers cannot be known until the war begins. However, should war come, one factor influencing morale will be time. The longer the Ukrainian army resists the Russians, the greater its confidence may grow as well as its institutional knowledge of how to fight this enemy. In addition, the longer the war continues, the greater may be the level of international support and the greater the chance of increased arms transfers to help turn the tide on the battlefield.
For Russia, the longer the war continues and the greater the casualties, the greater the chance of undermining Russian morale from the level of the basic soldier to Russian society writ large. Approximately one-third of Russian ground forces consist of one-year conscripts.15 These conscripts serve alongside professional soldiers, or kontraktniki, under a system of hazing known as the dedovshchina. This system is infamous for its abuses up to and including murder, which can erode unit cohesion. Additionally, heavy casualties will need quick replacements, and reservists brought to reinforce frontline units have received little recent training. As the number of professional soldiers decreases due to casualties, and reservists and conscripts increase on the front line, the chance of poor unit cohesion at the soldier level will rise. If casualties and even defeats mount, problems of cohesion at the front could be reflected in public unrest at home.
Every Kremlin ruler knows that one of the quickest ways to end a Russian dynasty or regime is to lose a war. While early Soviet assessments of the war in Afghanistan were hopeful, they eventually turned gloomy. At a Politburo meeting on October 17, 1985, for example, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev read letters from Soviet citizens expressing growing dissatisfaction with the war in Afghanistan—including “mothers’ grief over the dead and the crippled” and “heart-wrenching descriptions of funerals.”16 As the Soviet war in Afghanistan dragged on, the costs—including in blood and money—were too high and outweighed any geostrategic benefits. Over the course of the war, nearly 15,000 Soviet soldiers were killed, and another 35,000 were wounded.
Russian families are sure to resent their soldiers being used as cannon fodder, and the ubiquitous presence of cell phone cameras and videos in today’s world will expand soldiers’ complaints beyond their units. Therefore, the question for the Kremlin will be: the longer the war grinds on and society reacts to casualties and economic duress, how much are their initial objectives worth to them?
The U.S. and Western Response
A Ukraine that is willing to fight for itself is a Ukraine worth supporting. While the Ukraine of 2022 is not a perfect democracy, neither was Poland in 1939 when Britain and France decided that their principles and security interests made it necessary to draw the line against Nazi aggression along its borders. The key to thwarting Russian ambitions is to prevent Moscow from having a quick victory and to raise the economic, political, and military costs by imposing economic sanctions, ensuring political isolation from the West, and raising the prospect of a prolonged insurgency that grinds away the Russian military. In this war, Russia might have the watches, but the West and Ukraine may have the time.
Washington’s goal should be to deter Russian conventional operations in Ukraine by punishment—not denial. Deterrence by denial involves preventing an opponent from taking an action, such as seizing territory, by making it infeasible or unlikely to succeed. Absent a major U.S. and European military deployment to Ukraine, which President Biden has already ruled out since Ukraine is not a member of NATO, Ukrainian forces cannot prevent a rapid deployment of Russian forces into Ukraine. Deterrence by punishment, however, involves preventing an opponent from taking an action because the costs—such as nuclear weapons, economic sanctions, or an insurgency—are too high. Deterrence by punishment is possible if led by the United States. The United States and its European allies and partners should publicly and privately continue to communicate to Moscow that a conventional attack on Ukraine would initiate crippling sanctions from Western countries, deepen Russia’s political isolation from the West, and trigger a Western-backed insurgency against Russian forces in Ukraine. The United States would have to take the lead. The populations of several European countries, such as Germany and Austria, have noted that they would prefer to remain neutral in a war with Russia.17
If deterrence fails and Russian forces invade Ukraine, the United States and its allies and partners should conduct several immediate steps:
- Implement severe economic and financial sanctions against Russia, including cutting Russian banks off from the global electronic payment messaging system known as SWIFT.
- Enact a Twenty-First Century Lend-Lease Act to provide Ukraine with war materiel at no cost. Priority items would include air defense, anti-tank, and anti-ship systems; electronic warfare and cyber defense systems; small arms and artillery ammunition; vehicle and aircraft spare parts; petroleum, oil, and lubricants; rations; medical support; and other needs of a military involved in sustained combat. This aid could occur through overt means with the help of U.S. military forces, including special operations, or it could be a covert action authorized by the U.S. president and led by the Central Intelligence Agency.
- Provide intelligence to allow Ukraine to disrupt Russian lines of communication and supply, as well as warning of airborne and amphibious attacks and locations of all major units.
- Offer humanitarian support to help Ukraine deal with refugees and internally displaced persons. This assistance may also need to be extended to NATO allies on Ukraine’s borders for refugees fleeing westward.
- Provide economic support, including energy, to Ukraine and NATO allies due to the expected disruption of Russian gas flows to Europe.
- Conduct public diplomacy and media broadcasts to Ukraine and globally, including in Russia, to portray accurately what is happening.
- Apply diplomatic pressure on Belarus to deny Russia access to its territory to attack Ukraine. This is critically important because Russian use of Belarus’ rail and road networks would threaten a strategic turning movement of Ukraine’s northern flank.
- Coordinate with nongovernmental organizations and the International Criminal Court to document all war crimes inflicted on the Ukrainian people and to demand redress once the war is over. What happened to the Syrian people should not happen again.
The United States and NATO should be prepared to offer long-term support to Ukraine’s resistance no matter what form it ends up taking. There has already been public debate about unconventional warfare support to Ukraine should part or all of Ukraine be occupied.18 However, this option must be approached with a clear understanding of what is possible to achieve—and what might not be possible. Russia has historically proven adept at destroying armed resistance movements, and given enough time, it can do so again. Its methods against a Ukrainian resistance will be swift, direct, and brutal.19 Any sanctuary that the resistance uses, whether it is in rump Ukrainian or NATO territory, could be subject to Russian overt or covert attack. Therefore, it would require the protection of substantial conventional forces to deter Russian actions in NATO territory. Furthermore, whatever portion of Ukraine’s border Russia may occupy could quickly resemble the Iron Curtain of the twentieth century, featuring heavy fortifications. The Berlin Wall was a heavily-guarded concrete barrier, which included anti-vehicle trenches, mesh fencing, barbed wire, a bed of nails, and other defenses. It will be hard to establish supply lines for a resistance across such an obstacle from any sanctuary.
While the Russians have been adept at anti-resistance operations, they are not adept at extinguishing nationalism. Any support to occupied Ukraine should also include means to maintain Ukrainian’s national identity, history, and language among its citizens. While armed resistance would hearken to the 1980s support provided to the Afghan mujahedin, this type of support to preserve the Ukrainian nation would be more in keeping with the help provided to Polish Solidarity during its struggles for freedom.20
In addition, Ukraine could potentially prevent Russia from seizing and holding all or most of its territory with U.S. and other international aid. For example, Ukraine could keep most of its maneuver forces back far enough from initial Russian breakthroughs so that they are not encircled. As Russian forces advance west, Ukraine should gain intelligence to determine Russia’s main thrusts, conduct deep strikes against its supply lines to force them into an operational pause, and once they are stopped, envelop and counterattack them. Cities should hold out as long as possible. In the case of Kharkiv, railroads and bridges inside the city should be utterly destroyed prior to capitulation to further degrade Russian lines of communication. If the Russian military approaches the Dnepr River, its multiple dams could be opened and low-lying areas flooded. Airborne and amphibious assaults should be isolated immediately. Ukraine’s goal should be to prevent Russia from making any significant advances before the onset of the Rasputitsa, or thaw.
Once mechanized movement is ground to a halt by mud and supply problems, airborne and amphibious pockets can be eliminated, and Ukraine will have had enough time to mobilize and deploy its approximately 900,000-man reserve force. Hopefully, international aid will also begin arriving in the form of weapons systems to prevent Russia from achieving air superiority over Ukraine and allowing it to continue to strike deep into the Russian army’s rear to attrit reinforcements and supply lines. As weeks turn into months, international economic and financial sanctions should begin to take effect. The Kremlin would then be faced with a long war, on the battlefield and off it, with little end in sight.
A New Iron Curtain
The current situation bears an eerie resemblance to Soviet decisionmaking in 1979 to invade Afghanistan. In that case, a small coterie in the Politburo made the decision on their own based on faulty intelligence, poor perceptions of the international environment, overly optimistic scenarios of success, and little comprehension of the international political and economic costs they would face. A risk-versus-reward calculation of Russia achieving its political objectives should discourage it from an invasion. Its best option would be to continue to rattle sabers, pursue diplomatic negotiations, and aid pro-Russian insurgents in Eastern Ukraine—but to refrain from a conventional invasion. However, President Putin has made high-profile demands and threats that will be very hard to retreat from. Should miscalculation, emotion, and poor crisis management overcome rational calculations and lead to conventional war, the international landscape will likely witness a dramatic change.
In his famous Iron Curtain speech on March 5, 1946, British prime minister Winston Churchill spoke darkly that “a shadow has fallen upon the scenes” of Europe that pitted democratic states against authoritarian ones. “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic,” Churchill remarked, “an Iron Curtain has descended across the Continent.”21 A new Iron Curtain would be even more dangerous—spanning Europe, the Middle East, and Asia and incorporating a new axis of authoritarian regimes that includes Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea. This new dividing line would move along Russia’s borders with Finland and the Baltic states along NATO’s eastern flank; cut through Russian- and Iranian-supported countries in the Middle East and Central Asia, such as Syria and Kazakhstan; and snake along China’s borders with India through East Asia to the South China Sea. If Russia were to invade Ukraine, the United States and other European states would need to rush soldiers and materiel to NATO’s eastern flank—such as Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Poland—in case the Russians threatened to advance westward. Russia might also try to instigate a crisis in one or more of the Balkan states to split American and European attention and resources. In Asia, Taiwan would likely be on alert about possible Chinese movements to take the island.
Countries such as Russia and China admire strength and have little respect for weakness—including military weakness. Competition could increasingly become a struggle between rival political, economic, and military systems—between authoritarian, state-controlled systems and democratic ones. The illiberalism at the root of Chinese, Russian, Iranian, and North Korean systems is antithetical to Western Enlightenment values. They eschew freedom of the press, freedom of religion, free markets, and democracy. As Thomas Jefferson remarked, “Freedom of religion; freedom of press; and freedom of person. . . . These principles form the bright constellation, which has gone before us and guided our steps through an age of revolution and reformation.”22 They were critical in winning the Cold War against the Soviet Union, and they are just as important today.
“If the Western Democracies stand together in strict adherence to the principles of the United Nations charter, their influence for furthering these principles will be immense and no one is likely to molest them,” Churchill remarked in his Iron Curtain speech. “If however they become divided or falter in their duty and if these all-important years are allowed to slip away then indeed catastrophe may overwhelm us all.”23 Hopefully, reason will prevail in Moscow, and Russia will not invade Ukraine. If there is an invasion, however, the United States and its allies and partners need to be prepared to resist tyranny.
Philip G. Wasielewski recently retired after a 31-year career as a paramilitary operations officer in the Central Intelligence Agency. Seth G. Jones is senior vice president and director of the International Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C., and author most recently of Three Dangerous Men: Russia, China, Iran, and the Rise of Irregular Warfare (W.W. Norton, 2021).
The authors give special thanks to Joe Bermudez and Jennifer Jun for their assistance with satellite imagery analysis, as well as to Jared Thompson for his outstanding research assistance. The authors also thank Jeeah Lee and William Taylor for their exceptional editorial and graphic design support.
This brief is made possible by general support to CSIS. No direct sponsorship contributed to this brief.
CSIS Briefs are produced by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a private, tax-exempt institution focusing on international public policy issues. Its research is nonpartisan and nonproprietary. CSIS does not take specific policy positions. Accordingly, all views, positions, and conclusions expressed in this publication should be understood to be solely those of the author(s).
© 2022 by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. All rights reserved.
Please consult the PDF for references.
22. US senses opportunity in fraying Taliban-Pakistan ties
The subtitle seems like a fantasy or at least wishful thinking to me.
US senses opportunity in fraying Taliban-Pakistan ties
Washington is easing financial pressure on the Taliban to slow its pivot towards Russia, China, Iran and Pakistan
External interference in Afghanistan has reappeared much sooner than one would have expected after the Taliban takeover in August. In a familiar pattern, the rumor mill has become active.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova hit out Monday at rumors allegedly being planted by American sources insinuating that Moscow is supplying arms to the so-called National Resistance Front of Afghanistan in Panjshir province.
Zakharova said: “Anticipating possible subsequent fake news reports on this issue, we deem it necessary to state the following: Russia did not participate in any way whatsoever and is not going to participate in arming the Afghan conflicting parties … This scenario fundamentally contradicts Russia’s interests.”
Evidently, Moscow felt perturbed enough to scotch the rumors before they were rehashed as fake news. Zakharova underlined that exacerbating any intra-Afghan contradictions was “fraught with instigating a civil war based on ethnic strife” and will not contribute to stabilizing the situation in Afghanistan.
Interestingly, the Russian Foreign Ministry’s intervention came a few hours after a phone call from Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan to President Vladimir Putin earlier on Monday.
Although the Kremlin readout of Putin’s conversation did not refer to Afghanistan, according to a press release issued in Islamabad, Khan told Putin “that a peaceful and stable Afghanistan was pivotal for regional stability. Afghanistan was facing dire humanitarian and economic challenges and support of the international community to the people of Afghanistan at this critical juncture remained vitally important.”
The Pakistani statement also noted that Khan underscored the importance of the release of Afghanistan’s financial assets to address the dire needs of the Afghan people, and that both leaders agreed to enhance bilateral cooperation in different areas, including Afghanistan, and increase high-level exchanges.
Sirajuddin Haqqani’s FBI wanted poster. Photo: fbi.gov
Earlier this month, Iranian reports forewarned that the recent authorization by the US Department of Treasury for financial interaction with the Taliban and the Haqqani Network signified a new attempt by President Joe Biden’s administration to complicate the positive trajectory of the Taliban’s relations with Russia, China and other regional states.
Simply put, the new thinking in Washington is that by easing the pressure on the Taliban in a calibrated way, a dependency will develop on the part of the latter on American goodwill, which in turn would slow down or arrest Kabul’s pivot to Russia, China, Iran, Pakistan and others.
Whereas previously the US almost entirely depended on Western non-governmental organizations to keep an indirect presence in Afghanistan, there is a shift now toward leveraging the Taliban by using Washington’s considerable political and international instruments.
Basically, the tactic involves giving concessions to the Taliban in dollops in such a way that its dependency on Russia, China and other regional states (especially Iran and Pakistan) would diminish.
In effect, Washington is exploiting the reservations on the part of the neighboring states regarding the Taliban government by providing it limited aid in such a way that makes it even more difficult for them to decide on moving forward with the interim government in Kabul.
It is a chicken-and-egg situation that can change only if the regional states take a coordinated approach that recognizing the Taliban government is the most reasonable decision under the circumstances.
The point is, the withholding of recognition by the regional states is, in turn, impeding the process of state formation in Afghanistan and the transformation of the Taliban from an insurgent group to the ruling elite.
Meanwhile, all indications are that the US is preparing to fish in the troubled waters of the Taliban’s tensions with Islamabad.
A recent discussion at the Washington-based think tank US Institute of Peace (USIP), which is a federal institution established by the US Congress, anticipated the likelihood that the recent border incidents on the Durand Line could potentially lead to a rupture in relations between Kabul and Islamabad.
The Durand Line.
Taking part in the discussion, Richard Olson, a former US envoy to Islamabad, said there was an inevitability about the Taliban’s “break” with Islamabad over the question of the Durand Line “despite the Taliban’s historic reliance on Pakistan for support,” as the Taliban have a position consistent with the stance of all previous Afghan governments since 1947, asserting the right to free movement of Pashtuns across the colonial-era frontier and not recognizing the line as an international boundary.
Olson went on to say: “The issue may be further complicated by the fact that – apart from the issue of recognition – Pakistan demarcates the Durand Line differently from Afghanistan, and thus portions of the Pakistani fence may lie within what Afghanistan (and most of the international community, including the United States) would consider Afghan territory.”
Please note the subtle hint here that Washington is sympathetic toward the Taliban position. Olson added:
“But for Islamabad, the question of unrest in its own Pashtun territories looms much larger now than it did three decades ago … Kabul’s allowing of a de facto safe haven for the Pakistani Taliban is already a large irritant in the bilateral relationship.
“If Islamabad perceives that the Afghan Taliban has moved beyond asserting a traditional position on the Durand Line to actually supporting a revanchist movement to reclaim lost Pashtun lands, the relationship may well break. Already Islamabad is ascribing the TTP’s renewed strength to Indian machinations, so the regional implications of this conflict are potentially large.”
The town of Borki, on the Pakistan-Afghan border on the Durand Line, is the last village in Pakistan on the border with a large population. Photo: WikiCommons
To be sure, these are explosive remarks by a former American ambassador to Pakistan. Interestingly, another speaker in the USIP discussion speculated that if push comes to shove, “if the Taliban ramp up their challenge against the border, Pakistan might seek to influence the Taliban’s internal politics more aggressively.”
Clearly, Islamabad has a big challenge to cope with – without exacerbating tensions, it must remain firm and exert pressure on the Taliban to be reasonable and conciliatory. This is where Washington’s signaling to the Taliban becomes important.
The dismissive way the Taliban brushed aside the recent offer by Pakistan’s Khan to depute trained personnel to Afghanistan highlights that the ground beneath their feet is shifting. The Taliban would see political advantages in tapping into latent Pashtun ethnonationalism.
Equally, the Taliban do not feel beholden to Islamabad for their takeover in Kabul in August. The Taliban have diversified relationships and face no serious opposition threat internally, either.
Above all, the Taliban’s main challenge comes on the financial and economic front, and there Pakistan doesn’t have the capacity to be of any meaningful help.
Pakistani National Security Adviser Moeed Yusuf was to head for Kabul on Tuesday on an overnight trip. The two key items on his agenda will be the fencing of the Durand Line and, second, the elimination of safe havens for the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and other anti-Pakistan elements from Afghan territory.
M K Bhadrakumar is a former Indian diplomat.
23. Hidden gap between US, Japan defense views
Hidden gap between US, Japan defense views
Debate swirls over how Japan can both defend itself and complement the broader US military structure in Northeast Asia
The recent 2+2 meeting of Japanese and American defense and foreign ministers conveyed, as intended, a message of two allies marching in lockstep with each other.
The joint statement highlighted all the visible manifestations of this embrace – a five-year deal on Japanese host nation support for the American forces based in Japan; a shared approach to regional security in the Indo-Pacific; a tough stance toward China; increased combined training and joint operations planning; and cooperation on advanced weapons development.
As is always also true, gaps between the two allies were carefully played down. The Covid upsurge on US bases in Japan, however, could not be so easily papered over. It took rare angry outbursts from senior Japanese officials, from the Prime Minister on down, to get the Americans to pay sufficient attention to the dangerous outward spread from the bases, especially on Okinawa.
Less visible, and more significant, are the differences over the direction of Japanese defense spending. Senior American officials have embraced the target of Japan spending 2% of its GDP on defense, a goal borrowed from NATO but now enshrined in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party policy platform and celebrated by conservative Japanese politicians.
There are no illusions in Washington about the political obstacles to this level of spending – some 11 trillion yen a year or about US$100 billion – but the US clearly welcomes the new urgency in Tokyo to spend more.
The real challenge for the alliance is not how much Tokyo spends but what it buys with its money. Despite the assertion that Washington and Tokyo are on the same page, there are real differences between Japan’s priorities and choices and those of the US.
Offense versus defense
The debate in Japan on defense spending has focused on the choice between systems and forces that are meant for self-defense and those that allow Japan to carry out offensive strikes against targets in the territory of other countries.
In the view of more conservative Japanese experts, rather than build missile defense systems, money is better spent on longer-range ballistic and cruise missiles that can destroy launch sites in North Korea or even in China.
That camp also advocates pouring more money into domestic defense industry and developing home-grown weapons like a new next-generation fighter and long-range ballistic missiles. They want more aircraft carriers that can project power well beyond Japan’s shores.
Conservative defense policymakers in Japan claim that the acquisition of offensive strike weapons is necessary to strengthen the alliance with the US. But is that really true?
An artist’s impression of Japan’s sixth-generation F-X fighter. Photo: UK Defense Journal
This writer asked a group of American experts on security relations with Japan this question – if Japan could spend $100 billion a year on defense, what should be the priorities for Japan, from the viewpoint of the US?
The experts were from across the spectrum in the US – Van Jackson, a former Obama administration defense official now teaching in New Zealand; James Schoff, another former Obama defense official now leading a new program on alliance security relations at the Sasakawa Peace Foundation USA in Washington, DC; Bruce Klingner, a former senior intelligence official who is a senior researcher on Northeast Asia at the conservative Heritage Foundation; and Eric Heginbotham and Richard Samuels, respected scholars of Asian security at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
The American defense experts almost universally lean in the opposite direction – they favor defensive systems, strengthening the ability to survive a possible North Korean or Chinese attack and extending Japan’s ability to deny access to the Chinese naval and air forces.
Forward defense and access denial, as military planners put it, requires more spending on things like radar and other sensors to detect the enemy, and weapons to sink advancing Chinese ships or destroy attacking aircraft.
The porcupine strategy
Most of the experts welcome more spending, though they understand it would be a gradual buildup. But when it comes to priorities, they focus on how Japan can both defend itself and complement the broader US military structure in Northeast Asia.
“I still believe that Japan’s best strategy is to be the most gnarly porcupine possible,” says James Schoff, making an analogy to the animal which defends itself with a coat of sharp quills. Japan, the respected defense expert explains, needs to “be something that nobody wants to mess with aggressively (or even on the margins).” He would use added spending mainly to thicken defenses against missiles and put attacking air and naval forces at risk.
Schoff and others continue to give priority to missile defense and to the development of the high technology that is essential for what military experts call C4ISR – Command, Control, Communications, Computers (C4) and Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR).
This covers everything from extended range sensors and data processing to cyber defense. Electronic warfare and cyber warfare need more funding, the Americans agree, but they don’t give it a high priority.
The Americans remain skeptical about Japan’s decision to back off from placing Aegis missile defense systems on the land and moving them instead to more Aegis-equipped ships, a decision driven by political opposition at the proposed basing sites.
“On missile defense, I think Aegis onshore is a must,” says Schoff. With an eye on North Korea’s most recent test of maneuverable missiles designed to overwhelm missile defenses, he believes it is key to “take North Korean cheap missile shots for intimidation off the table.”
The Aegis Ashore Missile Defense Test Complex at the Pacific Missile Range Facility at Kauai, Hawaii, conducts a flight test. Photo: US Defense Department
While deterrence still depends on the US nuclear umbrella, “if Kim Jong Un ever lost his mind, Japan will want to destroy as many missiles as possible before the US wipes out North Korea,” concludes Schoff.
MIT’s Heginbotham and Samuels also place an emphasis on defensive systems, including expanding the use of ballistic and cruise missile defenses such as surface to air missiles.
They also give priority to strengthening the ability of Japan’s air and naval forces to survive an initial attack – what defense planners call “resilience.” Bases need to be hardened, building shelters for aircraft, improving runway repair capability, buying more aerial refueling tankers, increasing the ability to reload ships at sea, and adding more small surface ships and both cutting edge and more affordable combat aircraft.
Access denial measures
Along with these self-defense measures, the American planners emphasize the importance of what is called “access denial.” In practice, for Japan and the US, this means being able to prevent the Chinese navy and air forces from penetrating the waters around Japan and threatening the Senkakus and the Ryukyu islands, and thwarting potential Russian aggression in the north.
These systems could also play a role in deterring an attack across the Taiwan straits but none of the Americans I interviewed mentioned Taiwan specifically.
Rather than weapons to strike the territory of possible enemies, American defense experts focus on sinking or shooting down invading forces. Japan, they argue, should dominate the undersea battleground – continuing to build its formidable fleet of submarines, adding anti-sub warfare capabilities such as patrol aircraft, and developing unmanned underwater vehicles that can operate without human crews.
They favor spending significant funds on anti-ship missiles, such as the Japanese developed Type 12, including an extended range ground-launched version of this missile, as well as the air-launched Joint Strike Missile designed for the F-35 fighters.
Heritage’s Klingner also would give priority to the expansion of Japan’s new amphibious and rapid deployment ground forces – a version of the US Marines – along with the ability to move those forces by air and sea to the defense of the southwest islands.
He would put funds into more small aircraft carriers, equipped with the carrier-borne version of the F-35, as well as ships and helicopters to move those forces rapidly.
No to long-range strike
Beyond the extended range missiles to strike an invading Chinese fleet, American defense planners give a low priority, at most, to the kind of offensive strike weapons that some Japanese defense experts are now advocating.
Klinger does put extended-range cruise missiles – either the Type 12 or the American Tomahawk – on his procurement list, along with ground-launched ballistic and hypersonic missiles, but he places them below defensive and access denial needs.
“Long-range strike will be useful,” says Schoff, “but I think this can be sufficient at a minimal level. It will ideally never be needed, but it will be good to have some independent capability and be able to practice it with the US forces.”
File photo of a Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force Suzumani destroyer. Photo: AFP / Vitaliy Ankov / Sputnik
Others are more sharply opposed to any effort by Japan in this realm. Van Jackson believes such weapon systems are “unworkable” and “implausible” because long-range strikes would only be useful if combined with the ground or amphibious forces that can follow their use.
Despite this, most Americans believe Japan will head down this road. And they also anticipate that Japan will prefer to develop its own weapon systems – from advanced aircraft to missiles.
While American defense planners understand Japan’s desire for autonomy when it comes to building hardware, they prefer Japan spend its money on American weapons than build more expensive, and likely less effective, Japanese substitutes.
Behind the Japanese search for offensive strike capability and indigenous weapons, some of the American defense experts see evidence of Japanese fears of American retreat and preparations to defend Japan without depending on the US For Americans, Japan is a force multiplier to their own plans for East Asia, a complement rather than a substitute for American military power.
Japanese largely share that view, not least because Japan is not prepared to face a world without the American security guarantee. But buried not far below the surface in Japan – and exposed by the offensive strike debate – is the fear that someday down the line, the US will not be there.
“I don’t think Japan should be spending $100 billion on defense with the US alliance intact,” Jackson told me. “If there is an aim to hedge against alliance abandonment, then doubling the defense budget could make sense. But otherwise, it will not actually add to Tokyo’s security.”
24. The U.S. and China: How to get back from the brink
Excerpts:
And so: Biden should propose to Xi that they jointly take a significant step beyond their late-2021 virtual summit. Call it the U.S.-China “two-on-two.” The first move would be for both presidents to appoint two trustworthy former officials — think Obama and trade negotiator Charlene Barshefsky or Clinton and former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice on the U.S. side. A second step would be to dispatch them to a neutral country (Singapore, Iceland and Switzerland come to mind) to meet and game out roadmaps for de-escalation. Then, once this foursome has come up with several plausible scenarios, they would submit them to their current presidents as the basis for a special presidential summit.
By launching such an initiative, Biden would demonstrate American leadership and a commitment to diplomacy that, even as he pushes back against Beijing, would signal the importance he places on easing tensions. Unless both sides are willing to give a little to get a little, progress will remain elusive.
Given the high stakes and tensions of the moment, we need to employ all the “sticks” and “carrots” we can, with the dual aim of candidly expressing our concerns while at the same time seeking to repair some of the badly damaged bridges of the U.S.-China relationship. That repair work is critical: It’s necessary for a healthier global economy, the salvation of the planet and as a way to prevent miscalculations over Taiwan or the South China Sea from leading to war.
The alternatives are almost too frightening to contemplate.
The U.S. and China: How to get back from the brink
A longtime scholar of the U.S.-China relationship looks at what leverage the U.S. has left and how best to avoid a showdown between the world’s greatest powers.
The U.S. and China are hurtling toward trouble. The relationship is stressed in unprecedented ways, on several fronts: an increasingly vitriolic debate over Chinese actions in Hong Kong and Xinjiang, trade and tech wars, and even fears of an actual conflict over Taiwan or the South China Sea. The status quo is so unstable that unless fresh initiatives are undertaken, we may soon reach a point of no return.
What should the U.S. be doing? Given Beijing’s increasingly authoritarian form of statecraft, is cooperation still possible? And — how did we get to this impasse?
Let’s start with that last question.
How hopes were dashed
I am among those China specialists who watched the breakthroughs that marked the Deng Xiaoping era of “reform and opening” and allowed ourselves to dream of a China that would slowly morph from its revolutionary past to a more democratic future. Few of us foresaw that the Chinese Communist Party would reverse its reformist rudders as precipitously as it has under President Xi Jinping.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of that beguiling dream — born when Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger made their landmark visit to China, and which culminated with the normalization of relations between the U.S. and China in 1979. For decades, we enjoyed the comforting assumption that more exchange and trade would lead China toward a more open and tolerant society. As President Bill Clinton put it while trying to sell China’s admission into the World Trade Organization in 2000: “If you believe in a future of greater openness and freedom for the people of China, you ought to be for this agreement.” Other countries had a similar mindset. The German version was “Handel durch Wandel” or “change through trade.”
Filled with such hopes, nine U.S. presidents ramped up trade relations, academic exchanges, civil society collaboration, cross-border investment and even military-to-military cooperation. Interests converged well enough so that at a 2011 White House news conference, President Barack Obama could tell his Chinese counterpart Hu Jintao, “We welcome China’s rise. I absolutely believe that China’s peaceful rise is good for the world, and it’s good for America.”
You don’t hear American leaders saying anything like that today. China-naysaying is now a bipartisan activity in Washington, shared by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California and Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, and many in between. As for China, Xi is animated by visions of American decline and what the CCP calls “the east wind prevailing over the west wind.” Other Chinese leaders regularly deride the American political system for producing division, inequality and the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol — all, they say, clear signs of Western democracy’s inherent weakness and failure. Meanwhile, a recent white paper from China’s State Council Information Office touted China as “a model of socialist democracy that covers all aspects of the democratic process and all sectors of society. It is a true democracy that works.”
China’s new swagger
However one describes the current Chinese state, it is now fortified by a dynamic economy, an expansive Belt and Road Initiative (the largest-scale infrastructure project the world has ever known), a growing and much-modernized People’s Liberation Army, and a muscular form of xenophobia that is challenging U.S. interests and the world order.
Meanwhile, to ensure what he calls China’s “rejuvenation,” Xi is seeking to restore the supremacy of the CCP over everyday life, stifling the media, arresting dissenters, abolishing the 10-year term limit that governed past leadership successions, bullying neighbors with punitive trade policies and proclaiming that Taiwan will be reunified with the motherland “sooner rather than later,” even if force must be used.
As former National Security Council adviser for Asia, Evan Medeiros, recently observed in a speech at Harvard University: “We have been forced out of the era of engagement into a new era where the best we can hope is not even peaceful coexistence, such as we had with the Soviet Union, but competitive coexistence.”
ADVERTISEMENT
We’re finding that “coexistence” is as urgent today as any element of U.S. foreign policy. As Medeiros reminds us, “never before in U.S. history have so many of our interests been so connected with one of our principal security challenges.”
So we’re left with a paradox: Even as China irradiates our relations with antagonism, we still share a planet and a wide range of shared interests, including intricately linked supply chains that tie us together. We are locked in a standoff that Kurt Campbell, the current National Security Council coordinator for the Indo-Pacific, describes as “not a problem to be solved” but “a condition to be managed.”
Avoiding conflict: A roadmap
If there is a roadmap to a better future, it will involve an artful melding of carrots and sticks.
Let’s start with some basic assumptions.
First, every democratic country needs to acknowledge the challenges that a nationalistic and aggressive People’s Republic of China — supercharged by a dynamic economy and an advanced technological base — actually poses.
ADVERTISEMENT
Second: Americans must recognize that U.S. unilateralism will be an insufficient deterrent to China’s grand design, and that only new and collaborative confederations between allies, partners and friends that span our common interests — from trade and military security, to democracy and the environment — have a chance of deterring Xi’s global ambitions.
Third, the world must understand that the tailspin in U.S.-China relations will not be rescued by any 1972-style “big bang” diplomatic moment that transforms things overnight.
Fourth, everyone must understand that passivity or appeasement in the face of Beijing’s bullying behavior abroad and autocracy at home will only make things worse.
So, if China continues to act aggressively and unrepentantly in such hot spots as Xinjiang and Hong Kong, Taiwan and the South China Sea, among others — and to punish countries that question these actions — what effective new “sticks” can and should be deployed?
A first involves leveraging what we might call a “coalition of the China-wary.” It was such an alliance structure that deterred the USSR during the Cold War, and a variation on the theme offers the best hope of deterring China now. In fact, the U.S. has already begun catalyzing and nurturing such coalitions: The Quad (U.S./India/Japan/Australia), AUKUS (Australia/UK/U.S.), a more vigorous U.S.-Japan Security Alliance and an enhanced Five Eyes (an intelligence collaboration between the U.S., the U.K., Australia, New Zealand and Canada) are already up and running, and have helped put China on notice that its policies and actions have real consequences. This is particularly true when it comes to Taiwan. Japan and Australia have let Beijing know that aggression against Taipei will not only damage their bilateral relations, but that they may well come to Taiwan’s defense.
ADVERTISEMENT
There are other ways in which these alliances should leverage their collective power. More countries need to create an entities list such as the one Washington keeps, a system that requires U.S. firms to obtain special licenses to trade with Chinese companies deemed to endanger national security; the U.S. should draw up a slate of Chinese actions that would trigger further restrictions on foreign investments in China; and all allies in that China-wary group should collectively mandate more multinational freedom of navigation operations (FONOPS is the military acronym) in the Taiwan Strait and South China Sea.
Xi should also be forewarned that if he doesn’t trim his jib, there will be other consequences: an expanded boycott of the Beijing Winter Olympics; further restrictions from the U.S., Taiwan, Korea, the Netherlands and Japan on microchip technologies; and perhaps most important, a clearer expression from a broader group of nations that if China embargoes, blockades or orders a frontal attack on Taiwan, it can expect a confederation of countries to respond not just by limiting trade, but by collaborating in Taiwan’s defense and isolating China in global markets.
The message matters
That said, subtlety, even some new sensitivity, will be critical. This is where the “carrots” come in.
China has a well-honed historical narrative of national aggrievement that allows its leaders to argue — often with merit — that their country has been humiliated in the past and deserves to be more respected in the present. To conduct effective diplomacy with Xi’s China, the U.S. will need to better understand this history and the complex psychology that has allowed the CCP to see the democratic world as an interlocking web of unprovoked “hostile foreign forces.” Given that the CCP’s first impulse is to take umbrage and play the humiliation card whenever faulted by foreign governments, we need to have a deeper familiarity with the wellsprings of sentiment from which such responses flow.
Xi’s dilemma is that he wants to be internationally respected, even as he acts in ways that are undeserving of such respect. President Joe Biden’s dilemma involves navigating an increasingly aggressive Chinese posture in the increasingly hawkish anti-China atmosphere that now envelops Washington. But just as Biden must push back, he and other global leaders must also resist the temptation of inflammatory rhetoric. It does little good, for instance, to call Xi “a thug,” as candidate Biden did in 2020. Instead of ad hominem attacks, we must try — in the words of Mahatma Gandhi — to “hate the sin, but not the sinner.” As repellent as we may find some Chinese government behavior, we still need its cooperation to prevent conflict and solve world problems. After all, few complex global issues will be possible to manage without China’s buy-in.
ADVERTISEMENT
Elusive “common ground”
When it comes to those elusive “carrots,” the U.S. must identify and figure out how best to cultivate the bits of common ground that still remain between the U.S. and China. It’s a substantial list — one that offers hope: jointly preparing for the next global health crisis, cooperating on medical research — cancer in particular, confronting threats from North Korea and Iran, managing nuclear proliferation, agreeing (as the two sides have, at last, begun to do) on reciprocal arrangements for journalists to be based in each country and, perhaps most important, working together on climate change.
These are all critical — for the two nations and for the world. And every item on the list would benefit from some personal diplomacy.
Paging past presidents?
Which brings us to one more specific “carrot” — and potentially a very meaningful one for Beijing. Xi has always liked the idea of a so-called G-2, a gathering that recognizes the U.S. and China as unrivaled powers on the global stage. Meanwhile, he and his predecessors have always appreciated personal, high-level diplomacy, because it gives them greater standing at home.
And so: Biden should propose to Xi that they jointly take a significant step beyond their late-2021 virtual summit. Call it the U.S.-China “two-on-two.” The first move would be for both presidents to appoint two trustworthy former officials — think Obama and trade negotiator Charlene Barshefsky or Clinton and former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice on the U.S. side. A second step would be to dispatch them to a neutral country (Singapore, Iceland and Switzerland come to mind) to meet and game out roadmaps for de-escalation. Then, once this foursome has come up with several plausible scenarios, they would submit them to their current presidents as the basis for a special presidential summit.
By launching such an initiative, Biden would demonstrate American leadership and a commitment to diplomacy that, even as he pushes back against Beijing, would signal the importance he places on easing tensions. Unless both sides are willing to give a little to get a little, progress will remain elusive.
Given the high stakes and tensions of the moment, we need to employ all the “sticks” and “carrots” we can, with the dual aim of candidly expressing our concerns while at the same time seeking to repair some of the badly damaged bridges of the U.S.-China relationship. That repair work is critical: It’s necessary for a healthier global economy, the salvation of the planet and as a way to prevent miscalculations over Taiwan or the South China Sea from leading to war.
The alternatives are almost too frightening to contemplate.
25. China is owning the global battery race. That could be a problem for the U.S.
Excerpts:
Currently, most U.S. electric vehicle battery imports come from Japan and South Korea, but Jaffe said the U.S. might also import from China going forward. Meanwhile, further up the supply chain, the U.S. and other countries will likely remain dependent on Chinese companies; it will take years for new U.S. mines and chemical processing plants to get approved and come online.
One silver lining for the U.S.: The broader tech supply route isn’t a one-way street. In the most profound example, China imports more than $300 billion of semiconductors — a staggering figure — and the global industry relies on equipment from the U.S. and its allies. As EVs become increasingly high-tech, semiconductors have become a critical component. “All you hear in China is how the U.S. controls these core technologies like chips,” said An Feng, director of Innovation Center for Energy and Transportation, a U.S.- and China-based nonprofit. “They rely so heavily on each other.”
As electric car sales in China and the U.S. rise in the coming years, and raw material supplies tighten, it remains to be seen whether either side will leverage its advantage in future trade disputes. But the risks alone — and the urgent U.S. policy response — reflect the complexity of pursuing aggressive climate goals at a time of such high U.S.-China friction. When it comes to this critical piece of the clean energy puzzle, the U.S. will remain behind for years to come in a race that China started running a decade ago.
China is owning the global battery race. That could be a problem for the U.S.
Electric cars rely on lithium-ion batteries. China produces 76 percent while the U.S. makes only 8 percent.
If all goes according to President Joe Biden’s plans, in 2030 half the Americans buying new cars will choose an electric vehicle — a giant leap from just 2 percent in 2020. This lofty goal is a climate imperative — transportation is now the biggest source of U.S. carbon emissions — and it’s an economic imperative, too. The Biden administration sees it as a critical opportunity for American automakers to capitalize on the transition to clean energy.
But the U.S. is arriving late to the race. Over the past decade, China has deftly maneuvered to dominate the electric vehicle supply chain, particularly when it comes to these cars’ core component: lithium-ion batteries.
Hear more from Lili Pike about this story:
Ubiquitous in the modern economy from cellphones to laptops, lithium-ion batteries are now hot commodities on a larger scale. As countries strive to meet the 2015 Paris Agreement climate targets, the International Energy Agency projects skyrocketing global demand for electric-vehicle-sized lithium-ion batteries — a twentyfold jump in the next decade.
Chinese companies are poised to meet that surge in demand. In 2021, more than 3 million electric cars were sold in China — making it the largest market for the vehicles — and the country’s battery industry is growing exponentially to keep pace. Once a laggard, China’s share of global lithium-ion battery production capacity was 76 percent in 2020; the U.S. share? A mere 8 percent.
Meanwhile, global markets offer a stark picture of the competition: The price of lithium carbonate, one of the main raw materials used in batteries, jumped by nearly 500 percent last year, and a recent Bloomberg New Energy Finance report projects 2022 will see the first increase in lithium battery prices in a decade.
All this is playing out against a backdrop of historically high U.S.-China tensions. Billy Wu, a battery engineer and senior lecturer at Imperial College London, told Grid that U.S. policymakers are starting to realize when it comes to batteries, “if you have no native producers, then you will ultimately be at the whim of China.”
From the perspectives of the U.S.-China relationship, climate, the U.S. economy and the American car industry in particular, it all adds up to an urgent message: The U.S. needs to ramp up its own battery business — and do it fast.
How China passed everyone else in the battery race
You might call Zeng Yuqun the poster child for China’s lithium battery boom. Zeng may not be a global household name, but last summer he surpassed Alibaba founder Jack Ma to become the fourth-richest person in China. And a net worth of nearly $50 billion lands Zeng on the list of the top 30 richest people in the world. He is the founder of Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Ltd, better known as CATL — the world’s largest lithium-ion battery producer.
Contemporary Amperex Technology Co., Ltd. (CATL) The office building of Contemporary Amperex Technology Co., Ltd. is pictured on Aug. 8, 2018, in Ningde, China. (Photo by Zhu Difeng/VCG via Getty Images) (VCG/VCG via Getty Images)
Zeng’s company, CATL, along with several other Chinese battery manufacturers, has enjoyed a meteoric rise in recent years. While lithium-ion battery technology was invented by British, American and Japanese scientists in the 1970s and ‘80s and commercialized by Sony, China has leapfrogged other countries and become the world’s new battery production capital, part of its quest to be the global leader in electric vehicle manufacturing.
ADVERTISEMENT
China has poured money into the effort. Over the past decade, the Chinese government has provided more than $100 billion to the “new energy” vehicle industry (which includes electric and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles), according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The support has come mostly in the form of generous subsidies and tax rebates for buyers.
“In the traditional automobile industry, China lagged behind the U.S. and Europe for decades,” said Albert Qi Li, a China-based analyst for Benchmark Mineral Intelligence. “In the EV industry, however, every country is on the same starting line. China saw this opportunity and acted quickly.”
The Chinese government didn’t stop at funding for the cars themselves; as early as 2012, the government provided $214 million in electric vehicle research funding primarily for battery technologies, along with tax breaks for factory land, according to Tu Le, the founder of Sino Auto Insights, a consultancy firm.
At the same time, China blocked foreign competition. According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, starting in 2015, the government created a list of batteries that Chinese electric vehicle manufacturers could use if they wanted to be eligible for subsidies; the list excluded Korean and Japanese battery incumbents.
Taken together, the largesse of the state and sheer manufacturing prowess of Chinese battery companies have propelled the nation to the head of the field. In 2012, Chinese companies supplied lithium-ion batteries for just 10 percent of the electric vehicles sold worldwide; by 2019, the figure was roughly 50 percent.
ADVERTISEMENT
Chinese companies — often backed by the government — have also been strategic about securing mineral supplies for batteries. Lithium is mined predominantly in Australia and Chile, and Chinese companies have invested in these countries to gain access. CATL also received over $100 million in loans from state-owned banks to establish its lithium supply chain in China’s western Qinghai province, the New York Times recently reported. Similarly, cobalt, another important battery ingredient, is produced almost exclusively in the Democratic Republic of the Congo; a New York Times investigation found that 15 of that country’s 19 cobalt mines were owned or financed by Chinese companies, backed by billions from state-run banks.
Chinese dominance in the supply chain is even clearer at the refining stage: Bloomberg New Energy Finance research shows that Chinese companies are responsible for 80 percent of global battery raw material processing.
In short, China has built a wide-ranging lithium battery strategy over the past decade and executed that strategy to powerful effect. “The policies allowed them to build the foundations of an electric vehicle supply chain,” Li told Grid. “Now they are leveraging that position to become a global power.”
The U.S. plays catch-up
One of the primary reasons why the U.S. battery industry has fallen behind is that Americans aren’t buying enough electric vehicles. EVs remain more expensive than conventional cars, and Washington hasn’t offered customers subsidies at the same level as China. As a result, U.S. automakers haven’t seen as much demand for batteries.
That demand is expected to rise as more American drivers make the switch to electric cars and the Biden administration delivers on its own strategy for growing green technology. But at this critical moment, the U.S.-made battery supply is expected to fall short. Benchmark Mineral Intelligence estimates that, by the end of the decade, domestic factories will be able to provide batteries for only half the electric vehicles sold in the U.S.
ADVERTISEMENT
That shortage and China’s now-dominant position up and down the electric vehicle supply chain have set off alarm bells in Washington. In June, federal agencies released a comprehensive plan for lithium-ion battery development over the coming decade, urging the government to take decisive action to prop up U.S. production.
That plan — titled “National Blueprint for Lithium Batteries” — argued that government support for American battery manufacturers is critical not just for the green-tech sector, but for the future of the U.S. economy writ large. Among the report’s conclusions: “Capturing this market is imperative for the future viability of the U.S. auto industry, which historically has contributed 5.5% of the total U.S. gross domestic product.”
The authors went further, suggesting that the United States’ relatively weak position presents a geopolitical and military threat. With lithium refining and battery components so heavily controlled by Chinese companies, the U.S. electric vehicle supply could prove vulnerable to future trade spats; and as the U.S. military goes electric to lower its carbon footprint, ensuring a domestic battery supply chain becomes a national security priority.
“It does not help to make the batteries here,” said Sam Jaffe, a vice president at E Source, a utility research firm, “if someone can shut off our supply of lithium or nickel or cobalt. So having the upstream supply chain all the way from the mine to the refinery to the process chemical manufacturer to the battery factory is extremely critical.”
Facing all these challenges, the U.S. has begun to involve itself more directly in the industry — not unlike the Chinese approach. The first major government interventions have come via the bipartisan infrastructure legislation passed in Congress last fall. The infrastructure package allocated $6 billion in the form of Department of Energy loans and grants to the battery industry, including for materials refining, manufacturing and recycling projects. By funding the construction of a national electric vehicle charging network, the legislation could also help boost electric car demand, and battery production in turn.
ADVERTISEMENT
In addition, Biden’s Build Back Better package could provide an expanded tax credit to U.S. customers who buy EVs. The credit would start at $7,500 for most plug-in electric vehicles but increase to $12,000 for a car built domestically with union labor; another $500 would be tacked on for a car built with domestically produced battery cells.
“Even though it’s a relatively small number,” said Jaffe, “it’s enough to make the car manufacturers definitely want to buy batteries made in the U.S.”
This federal push to keep battery production domestic is part of a broader reckoning about China’s ascendance. And it’s a rare bipartisan effort. Policymakers on both sides of the aisle have embraced elements of the Chinese government’s economic strategy to compete with China’s increasingly advanced technologies. The shift was clear in the Senate’s passage of a bipartisan bill in June, which aims to provide billions of dollars in funding to help the U.S. stay competitive in critical technologies such as semiconductors.
“China is in a very different place than it was a decade ago,” Brian Deese, director of Biden Administration’s National Economic Council, told the New York Times in April. “We are in a different place vis-à-vis our international competitors. And my openness to more targeted efforts to try to build domestic industrial strength — the things that people in prior eras would demean or mock as industrial policy — has increased, because I think we are not operating on a level playing field.”
But despite the agreement on the need for industrial policy to counter China, U.S. politicians haven’t fully delivered on the rhetoric. The Build Back Better legislation is in jeopardy, hampering the Biden administration’s efforts to propel the U.S. electric vehicle and battery industries.
ADVERTISEMENT
What next in the U.S.-China battery race?
What are the U.S. chances in this high-stakes game of industrial catch-up? Venkat Srinivasan, who leads energy storage research at the Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory, sees hope for American companies. The lab is hosting a new public-private initiative to ramp up U.S. battery research and production, and recently, major U.S. auto companies have rolled out some big battery plans. Ford announced it will build three sprawling battery plants in Kentucky and Tennessee with Korean partner SK Innovation.
Srinivasan notes one factor likely to drive car companies to boost domestic production: Shipping hefty batteries is expensive. “So while imports are going to be part of the mix,” Srinivasan told Grid, “in the long term, much like manufacturing of cars, expect to see distributed manufacturing located close to where the markets are.”
Still, experts say it is unlikely the U.S. will scale its battery production fast enough to match lofty electric vehicle targets. Benchmark Mineral Intelligence forecasts that by 2025 the U.S. share of battery manufacturing will rise, but only slightly — from 8 to 9 percent.
Currently, most U.S. electric vehicle battery imports come from Japan and South Korea, but Jaffe said the U.S. might also import from China going forward. Meanwhile, further up the supply chain, the U.S. and other countries will likely remain dependent on Chinese companies; it will take years for new U.S. mines and chemical processing plants to get approved and come online.
One silver lining for the U.S.: The broader tech supply route isn’t a one-way street. In the most profound example, China imports more than $300 billion of semiconductors — a staggering figure — and the global industry relies on equipment from the U.S. and its allies. As EVs become increasingly high-tech, semiconductors have become a critical component. “All you hear in China is how the U.S. controls these core technologies like chips,” said An Feng, director of Innovation Center for Energy and Transportation, a U.S.- and China-based nonprofit. “They rely so heavily on each other.”
As electric car sales in China and the U.S. rise in the coming years, and raw material supplies tighten, it remains to be seen whether either side will leverage its advantage in future trade disputes. But the risks alone — and the urgent U.S. policy response — reflect the complexity of pursuing aggressive climate goals at a time of such high U.S.-China friction. When it comes to this critical piece of the clean energy puzzle, the U.S. will remain behind for years to come in a race that China started running a decade ago.
26. What Biden’s competition crusade tells us about globalisation
Excerpts:
“We’ve had an anti-worker policy in the name of low inflation,” says Blitz. The problem is that changing that approach — exactly what Biden, who has a bust of the workers’ rights activist César Chavez in his office, wants — may prove somewhat inflationary in the short to midterm. Stronger wage growth, which many economists and business leaders expect in 2022, may create more demand, raising prices.
Some of that inflation will abate as the Covid supply chain dislocations end. But for all sorts of reasons, from US-China decoupling to the shift to a low-carbon economy to the rise of decentralised technologies like 3D printing, we aren’t going back to the 1990s, when cheap goods were the zero-inflation offset for the rising cost of housing, as well as education and healthcare.
Nobody on either side of the political spectrum wants to declare war on rising wages. So we’re likely to see more focus on prices, and on what companies are doing to inflate them.
Corporate concentration and inflation may be correlated, particularly at times when demand wildly outstrips supply. It’s no accident that there are phenomenal profits being reported in some of the industries most vulnerable to chokepoints, including shipping and semiconductors.
But there’s an even bigger change going on here: the end of neoliberal globalisation. Its effects on corporations, workers and inflation have only just begun to be felt.
What Biden’s competition crusade tells us about globalisation
Joe Biden has, pretty much since the beginning of his administration, taken a stronger stand on competition policy than any US president in memory. He’s put antitrust advocates in place at the Federal Trade Commission, the Department of Justice and the White House. He issued an executive order tackling corporate concentration last July, containing 72 different provisions designed to curb the influence of giant companies.
Much of Biden’s fight has been about elevating the position of workers in the US economy and creating a more even playing field for small and midsized innovators. But the administration has also begun making a case for the connection between inflation, currently at a 40-year high, and corporate power.
In July 2021, the White House asked the Federal Maritime Commission to investigate price increases by large shipping companies. In December, it told the United States Department of Agriculture to look into whether big meatpackers were driving up food prices, creating a web portal for producers to report unfair trade practices and putting $1bn from the American Rescue Plan into helping smaller independent producers.
Most recently, Senator Elizabeth Warren grilled Federal Reserve chair, Jay Powell, on the role that companies are playing when it comes to inflation. “Market concentration has allowed giant corporations to hide behind claims of increased costs to fatten their profit margins,” she said, at his second term nomination hearing last week. Biden himself took aim at the meatpacking industry, saying, “These companies can use their position as middlemen to overcharge grocery stores and, ultimately, families.”
Supply chain disruptions, not only in food but many industries, are contributing to inflation. But direct causation between corporate concentration and inflation is harder to prove. There is some good research by academics including Steven Salop and Fiona Scott Morton that shows how consolidation can lead to disruption in times of stress, causing shortages and price spikes. This is exactly what we’ve seen in the past two years. But there are plenty of other counter trends, such as the deflationary impact of Big Tech platforms such as Amazon (although you may argue, as I have, that monopoly power and lower prices can exist in tandem).
I wonder if, when it points to the relationship between today’s price pressures and the influence of big corporations, the Biden administration is really looking at something more complicated than inflation dynamics — namely the way in which the past half century of globalisation is being disrupted.
As TS Lombard’s chief US economist, Steven Blitz, wrote in a note last week: “One can say current goods price inflation is the unfortunate consequence of high demand meeting constrained supply, but this argument shoves aside the underlying issue that has the Fed itching to tighten — revived middle-income wage growth keeping goods prices high and, in turn, overall inflation as well.”
As Blitz rightly points out, this group suffered in recent decades as a strong dollar teamed with technological investment made “possible, and profitable, offshore production of goods and services and reduced labour input for domestic production.” That has in turn resulted in government policies that support more domestic labour, greater union power and decoupling. More regionalisation, localisation and even vertical integration of supply chains in some companies is now happening.
“We’ve had an anti-worker policy in the name of low inflation,” says Blitz. The problem is that changing that approach — exactly what Biden, who has a bust of the workers’ rights activist César Chavez in his office, wants — may prove somewhat inflationary in the short to midterm. Stronger wage growth, which many economists and business leaders expect in 2022, may create more demand, raising prices.
Some of that inflation will abate as the Covid supply chain dislocations end. But for all sorts of reasons, from US-China decoupling to the shift to a low-carbon economy to the rise of decentralised technologies like 3D printing, we aren’t going back to the 1990s, when cheap goods were the zero-inflation offset for the rising cost of housing, as well as education and healthcare.
Nobody on either side of the political spectrum wants to declare war on rising wages. So we’re likely to see more focus on prices, and on what companies are doing to inflate them.
Corporate concentration and inflation may be correlated, particularly at times when demand wildly outstrips supply. It’s no accident that there are phenomenal profits being reported in some of the industries most vulnerable to chokepoints, including shipping and semiconductors.
But there’s an even bigger change going on here: the end of neoliberal globalisation. Its effects on corporations, workers and inflation have only just begun to be felt.
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.
