Quotes of the Day:
"What is the use of living, if it be not to strive for noble causes and to make this muddled world a better place for those who will live in it after we are gone? How else can we put ourselves in harmonious relation with the great verities and consolations of the infinite and the eternal? And I avow my faith that we are marching towards better days. Humanity will not be cast down. We are going on swinging bravely forward along the grand high road and already behind the distant mountains is the promise of the sun."
- Winston Churchill
"People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in the world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they can't find them, make them."
- George Bernard Shaw
"Most people are mirrors, reflecting the moods and emotions of the times; few are windows, bringing light to bear on the dark corners where troubles fester. The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows."
- Sydney J. Harris
1. America’s Missing Ambassadors
2. How to Avoid Nuclear War
3. China and the ‘G’ Word—Genocide
4. Solomon Islanders beat back Beijing, for now
5. Opinion | China is rising as a nuclear power. Its ambitions warrant global attention.
6. China ‘Clearly’ Developing Aviation and Maritime Capabilities to Counter U.S. in Indo-Pacific, Says Pentagon
7. I'm Helping to Start a New College Because Higher Ed Is Broken
8. KFF COVID-19 Vaccine Monitor: Media and Misinformation
9. They were children when the Afghanistan War began. As soldiers they carried the burden of ending it
10. Bomb threats evacuate Ivy League campuses after similar calls to Miami University, Ohio University
11. AUKUS shows Europe’s security no longer a US priority
12. ‘Desert warships’ spark new fears at the Pentagon
13. Adding India to the Five Eyes Would Cause a New Cold War, Pakistani Official Says
14. How Taiwan Underwrites the US Defense Industrial Complex
15. Pentagon: Allies’ ‘Views and Perspectives’ Being Considered in Nuclear Posture Review
16. 5 key updates in the Pentagon’s 2021 China Military Power Report
17. Fear, Honour, and AUKUS in the Indo-Pacific
18. Sanctions Reform Should Start with the Treasury Office Enforcing Them
19. Pentagon scaremongering in bid to justify US' aggressive nuclear policy
20. Pentagon intensifies effort to evacuate families of Defense Department service members from Afghanistan
21. Beijing’s Taiwan Invasion Timeline: Two Predictions
1. America’s Missing Ambassadors
And don't forget Korea.
America’s Missing Ambassadors
The Senate should move fast on Biden’s capable envoys to Japan and China.
WSJ · by The Editorial Board
U.S. Ambassador to Japan nominee Rahm Emanuel speaks before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., Oct. 20.
Photo: Patrick Semansky/Associated Press
How’s this for a self-imposed foreign-policy setback: America’s most important ally in the most important theater of world politics has been without a Senate-confirmed U.S. ambassador for more than two years. The Foreign Relations Committee finally approved former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s nomination to be U.S. ambassador to Japan last week, but he awaits a vote on the floor.
The last American ambassador to Japan, Bill Hagerty, was confirmed in July 2017, and the Trump Administration strengthened ties with Tokyo as competition with China intensified. Mr. Hagerty left the post in summer 2019 to run for U.S. Senate in Tennessee, and President Trump’s 2020 nominee to replace him didn’t get a Senate vote before the November election.
Mr. Emanuel, President Biden’s pick, is opposed by two progressive Democrats, Ed Markey and Jeff Merkley, who cited a police homicide that took place when Mr. Emanuel was mayor. GOP partisanship could also work against Mr. Emanuel.
But great-power politics hasn’t slowed down to accommodate the parochial interests of U.S. Senators. Japan’s significance to Asia’s security has surged since 2019 as China escalates its military threats against Taiwan. In the months since Mr. Biden’s election, Japanese officials have declared that an attack on Taiwan is a direct threat to Japan’s security. There’s anxiety in Tokyo about America’s resolve—and who can blame them if the U.S. can’t even send an ambassador to the country?
Japan’s new Prime Minister, Fumio Kishida, is eyeing a boost in defense spending. A prompt confirmation of Mr. Emanuel will accelerate cooperation and send a message to China about the strength of the U.S.-Japan alliance.
The Senate could also help by confirming the next U.S. ambassador to China—a position that has been vacant since October 2020. Mr. Biden has nominated Nicholas Burns, a seasoned foreign-policy establishment figure.
If confirmed by the Senate (he was also voted out of committee last week), Mr. Burns will play a different role than his recent predecessors, as he’d represent the U.S. to an increasingly hostile government in Beijing. America’s interests in East Asia are too critical for its ambassadors to be missing from key capitals.
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WSJ · by The Editorial Board
2. How to Avoid Nuclear War
Excerpts:
If and when norm-strengthening negotiations evolve into numerical accords, the fluidity of trilateral relations and opposition on Capitol Hill will preclude treaty making. If trilateral accords can somehow be reached, they would likely take the form of executive agreements and be term limited. The arguments in favor of formality and agreements of indefinite duration are not persuasive when treaties, like executive agreements, can be discarded after U.S. national elections. The reaffirmation of norms need not await the resolution of discussions about numbers. To the contrary: The reaffirmation of norms is needed if trilateral talks are to succeed over time. Even if agreements are not reachable or as inclusive as we would like, preliminary discussions with Moscow and Beijing could still have utility. At a minimum, it could prod useful assessments of different limitation parameters and on how best to proceed.
Those who didn’t recognize winning the nuclear peace will surely notice its loss. Strengthening deterrence provides no guarantee against catastrophic loss. To avoid nuclear war, diplomacy and arms control have to accompany deterrence. Sooner or later, national leaders will revive arms control because our lives depend on it. Reassurance and stabilization begin with lengthening and strengthening norms and can take many forms. Reinvention depends on diplomatic adeptness, creativity, and wisdom. It also depends on the state of relations between major powers. If their competition sharpens, and if national leaders are content to intensify that competition, then no proposals to reverse course will succeed.
When leaders decide to pursue course corrections or when leaders change, opportunities will arise. When conditions permit, they’ll need plans on how best to proceed. We face daunting challenges because policymakers have run out of simple solutions. We have much ground to cover since the era of grand treaty making ended with the Cold War. It’s time to plan once again for a future in which nuclear weapons aren’t used in warfare. We’ve succeeded in the past, and we can succeed again by harnessing deterrence with arms control.
How to Avoid Nuclear War - War on the Rocks
Arms control has become passé. Russian and U.S. leaders have cast aside treaties as inconvenient to their pursuit of freedom of action. Republican presidents produced great arms control achievements. At present, most Republican senators and aspirants for higher office denigrate arms control and treaty-making as a failed, unnecessary, and unwise pursuit. Arms control provided necessary guardrails in the past. Now, dangerous military practices are on the rise, especially in Ukraine and across the Taiwan Strait. U.S.-Chinese relations are trending toward crisis. Four nuclear-armed states in Asia — China, Pakistan, India, and North Korea — are increasing their nuclear arsenals. Every nuclear-armed competitor is relying increasingly on deterrence as the diplomacy of arms control is in the doldrums. If unaltered, these trend lines point toward tragedy.
Many have forgotten what is crucial to remember: Deterrence is dangerous by design and has a track record of failure in lesser cases. There have already been two border wars between nuclear-armed rivals — the Soviet Union and China in 1969 and India and Pakistan in 1999. India and China as well as India and Pakistan clash along disputed borders. As rivals sharpen deterrence, they move toward the next crisis. Deterrence has always needed diplomacy and arms control to avoid nuclear tragedy.
Deterrence resulted in five-digit-sized U.S. and Soviet nuclear arsenals. Diplomacy reduced superpower holdings by 85 percent. The dictates of deterrence led to almost 2,000 nuclear tests, including over 400 in the atmosphere. Diplomacy produced treaties limiting and then prohibiting nuclear testing. Deterrence generated dangerous military practices like maintaining nuclear weapon delivery vehicles on a high state of alert. Diplomacy produced guardrails, codes of conduct, and rules of the road.
When the Soviet Union dissolved, deterrence didn’t provide safeguards against “loose nukes” and “dirty” bombs. The diplomacy of arms control did. Diplomacy also produced treaties curbing nuclear proliferation as well as prohibiting chemical and biological weapons. No hard problem is ever solved in perpetuity by either diplomacy or deterrence. Outliers and norm breakers still exist. Without norms, however, there are no norm breakers. The diplomacy of arms control has kept their number small. Deterrence didn’t establish protective norms. The diplomacy of arms control did.
National leaders will again seek arms control in its varied forms for the same reasons as their predecessors. They will reach the conclusion that strengthening measures for deterrence increase nuclear dangers, and that diplomacy is required to reduce them. It might take a major crisis — or something worse — for U.S., Chinese, and Russian leaders to turn to diplomacy the way that John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev did after the Cuban missile crisis. The remarkable journey Ronald Reagan undertook with Mikhail Gorbachev began with Reagan’s realization after the annus horribilis of 1983 — a year of multiple shocks to U.S.-Soviet relations — that a paranoid Kremlin leadership believed that Armageddon was approaching. Eventually — and sooner is far better than later — nuclear-armed rivals will arrive at the same conclusions that Kennedy, Khrushchev, Reagan, Gorbachev, and other leaders before them: Nuclear war has to be avoided, and deterrence by itself is, at best, half the solution. Deterrence needs help that only diplomacy and arms control can provide.
A new construction project for nuclear arms control will borrow from the past, but it will take different shape than during the Cold War because the geometry of nuclear competition is far more complicated. The measures of reassurance leaders choose to pursue alongside deterrence will be adapted to suit domestic political purposes and geopolitical realities.
Whenever chastened or forward-looking leaders of nuclear-armed states turn to arms control, they will not have to start from scratch. Revival is possible because foundational elements for avoiding nuclear war remain in place. Deterrence is well funded and national vulnerability between nuclear-armed rivals remains inescapable. Key norms continue to constrain the options of deterrence strategists and national leaders. The norm of no battlefield use of nuclear weapons is now over seven decades old. The last tests of nuclear weapon designs of any military consequence by a pairing of nuclear-armed rivals occurred over two decades ago. Since every test of a nuclear weapon constitutes a declaration of military utility, the absence of testing matters greatly. These norms can be broken tomorrow or next year. But these two key norms have survived many days and many years. Because they are the hardest for any national leader to break, their extension is feasible.
Leaders who wish to avoid nuclear war can build on these foundational elements. A third critical norm, that of nonproliferation, is codified in a treaty that was indefinitely extended in 1995. This norm requires reinforcement because additional pairings of nuclear-armed rivals would multiply chances of catastrophe. Iran poses a serious challenge to this norm. Reaffirmation can be pursued either through diplomacy or, if diplomacy is vitiated, through military strikes. The follow-on proliferation consequences of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons are so great that this stark choice is unavoidable.
Those who denigrate arms control forget that, by the end of the Cold War, conditions for lasting nuclear peace were in hand — not because of strengthened deterrence, but because champions of deterrence adopted the practices of arms control. The United States and Russia were no longer enemies. Crucial norms were in place alongside the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which codified national vulnerability, thereby removing one incentive for increased nuclear force levels. Strategic forces were no longer threatening: Indeed, Boris Yeltsin agreed in the second Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty to the prohibition of land-based missiles carrying multiple warheads. Conditions for strategic, crisis, and arms race stability were therefore at hand. Deep cuts were envisioned. Dangerous military practices were absent. Major powers respected the territorial integrity and national sovereignty of others.
This was the inheritance that Vladimir Putin, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump found unnecessary and inconvenient. Putin initiated the demise of arms control by disregarding provisions of the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty. Bush withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, prompting, as forewarned, Putin’s withdrawal from the second Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty and its prohibition of land-based missiles carrying multiple warheads. As NATO expanded, Putin became more blatant in violating treaties, most notably the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. Bush announced plans to deploy missile defenses in new NATO countries and to include Georgia and Ukraine in the queue for future NAO membership. Then Putin’s army marched on Tbilisi, after which he carried out hybrid warfare in eastern Ukraine and annexed Crimea. Putin then shed crocodile tears when Trump withdrew from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces and Open Skies treaties.
Where do we go from here? During the Cold War, strategic arms control was built on treaties, and treaties were built on numbers. Treaties and numbers still matter greatly, but they are much harder to negotiate in a triangular, as opposed to a bilateral, context. Because of the complex geometry of nuclear competition and because of domestic politics in the United States, less formal constraints seem unavoidable. More states will have seats at the table, most importantly China. All this will take time. In the meantime, norms matter more than formalities. Norms are easier to extend than new strategic arms reduction treaties are to negotiate, and nuclear numbers are to reduce. A hard focus on extending and reaffirming crucial norms can, over time, establish conditions for far fewer numbers, with or without treaties.
If Beijing and Moscow choose to engage in dangerous military practices, arms control, whether by means of norm strengthening or numbers, will not succeed. In this event, the United States will also increasingly engage in dangerous military practices. The dynamics of this competition will invite crises, or worse. Perhaps then, the competitors will become more inclined toward measures of reassurance alongside deterrence.
In my book, Winning and Losing the Nuclear Peace: The Rise, Demise, and Revival of Arms Control, I propose that we embrace an ambitious goal of extending the three norms of no use, no testing, and no new proliferation to the 100th anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Imagine, if you can, a world in which nuclear weapons have not been used on battlefields for 100 years, and a world in which nuclear weapons have not been tested by major and regional powers for almost five decades. Imagine, too, that North Korea remains the last nuclear-armed state. Now imagine the perceived utility of nuclear weapons in 2045. How many potential mushroom clouds would be required for deterrence? How high would the barriers be against use and testing?
Aiming for a century of non-battlefield use, a half-century of not testing nuclear weapons, and another quarter-century of successful nonproliferation might seem too ambitious and even otherworldly. Perhaps, but in 1945 it seemed otherworldly to envision a world in which nuclear weapons would not be used in warfare for three-quarters of a century. When conversations began about limiting nuclear testing in the Eisenhower administration, it was similarly otherworldly to envision a world in which major and regional powers would not conduct tests for a quarter-century. Those who conceived of a global nonproliferation compact more than a half-century ago were rewarded with 62 signatories. Notably absent were China, France, West Germany, other U.S. allies, Brazil, Argentina, and leading non-aligned states. This treaty now has 189 adherents, one dropout, North Korea, and one severe test — Iran.
The hardest part of establishing these three bedrock norms is behind us. Further extensions are possible, even in a period of heightened competition, because they are the most difficult norms for national leaders to break. The national leader who authorizes the first use a nuclear weapon since 1945 will live in infamy for the rest of recorded history. The companion norm of no testing signifies recognition of the dangers associated with use. Experiments continue, and those who complain about troubling experiments block on-site inspections by opposing ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty.
Chinese officials have repeatedly said that they will not ratify the test ban treaty until the U.S. Senate consents to do so. India won’t ratify until China does, and Pakistan will wait for India to ratify. Republican senators most concerned by China’s nuclear build up can do something about it: They can consent to the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty while demanding that all four instruments of ratification be deposited together. A cascade of ratifications could begin with a super-majority vote in the U.S. Senate. Meanwhile, test moratoria continue because the major power willing to resume testing would set off a very different cascade, as all four nuclear-armed rivalries would follow suit.
The greatest nuclear dangers reside in the increase in dangerous military practices between the United States and China, Russia and the United States, India and China, and Pakistan and India. Air and naval operations in the Taiwan Strait and South China Sea increase the likelihood of crises, as do military operations in eastern Ukraine. But we’ve been here before, not just with the Soviet Union, but also with China. Despite severe crises and because of diplomacy, the norm of no battlefield use has held, at least so far. Norm strengthening is a matter of daily occurrence. Success happens one day at a time and one crisis at a time.
What, then, to do about treaties and numbers? President Joe Biden and Putin quickly agreed to extend verifiable limits in the 2010 Strategic Arms Reductions Treaty for another five years. Negotiating next steps will be challenging. U.S. and Russian negotiators are discussing many agenda items, with some preferences clearly beyond reach. The greatest threats to nuclear peace at present relate to ground, air, and naval forces operating in close proximity, as well as dangerous cyber and space practices. Consequently, Washington’s most challenging and urgent agenda items relate to codes of conduct rather than numerical arms control. This agenda belongs at the top of Washington’s conversations with Beijing as well as Moscow.
Another U.S.-Russian treaty mandating further reductions becomes harder to envision as China ramps up its force structure. Trump was right in calling for Beijing’s inclusion and an end to its free riding, but he proposed a trilateral warhead counting exercise rather than effective controls and reductions. Whatever appeal this proposal has in conceptual or visionary terms — or some downsized variant of this idea, such as counting tactical nuclear weapons — it would constitute a very lengthy digression from reducing nuclear dangers. Norm strengthening is needed well before counting is completed and reductions can begin.
Where can this most usefully be done? The 65-member Conference on Disarmament in Geneva is too unwieldy to succeed. Its last hurrahs in treaty making occurred during the Clinton administration. Ever since, its procedures have empowered blocking action. There is also scant reason to expect that the permanent five members of the U.N. Security Council can become an effective forum to advance important arms control agenda items. The geometry of nuclear competition suggests creation of a new forum to focus on norm building and codes of conduct in which all four pairs of nuclear-armed rivals are represented along with Britain and France, countries with great expertise and practical experience to offer. I would exclude Israel and North Korea from this forum because their addition poses more problems than potential benefits.
A seven-nation forum consisting of the United States, Russia, China, India, Pakistan, Britain, and France would be hard to steer, but the nuclear dangers we now face are interconnected and unwieldy. When the nature of a problem seems intractably complex, the wisest course might just be to expand the scope of the problem. Even as the four pairs compete, they have the most to lose if key norms are broken and the most to gain if they are extended. Existing bilateral conversations on nuclear risk reduction would, of course, continue, but there are no effective channels of communication and substantive exchanges between India and China and between India and Pakistan, where border clashes are becoming more intense. A non-hierarchical, seven-nation approach to norm building might just succeed. All seven have significant concerns about the intentions and capabilities of states with the most dynamic nuclear modernization programs. Each state has its own reasons to engage, as well as to be wary. If other states are willing to sit at the table, it becomes harder for anyone to hold out.
The ground rules for seven-nation talks seem most likely to avoid traps if the agreed focus of conversation is nuclear risk reduction and norm building. Sidebar conversations would be encouraged, as they could lay the groundwork for bilateral agreements. The tabling of bilateral issues would, however, be prohibited. The first order of business might be to affirm the canonical Reagan-Gorbachev pledge that a nuclear war cannot be won and must not be fought. Thematic discussions on dangerous military practices might suggest common concerns and remedies, whether bilateral or multilateral.
Again, this sounds wildly optimistic. The intensification of rivalries could well foreclose useful discussions — even if all seven states agree to attend. There are many pitfalls, requiring deft multilateral diplomacy. The U.S. State Department would need reinforcements. And yet, for all the manifold difficulties involved, there is sufficient connective tissue to try. Potential benefits include new opportunities to engage China and to open clogged channels of conversation.
Over time, if this forum proves its worth, topics could evolve from norm building to the consideration of guardrails, limits, and reductions for nuclear modernization programs. None of the states with the most dynamic modernization programs are willing to relax requirements unless others do. One approach worth considering is a multilateral build-down concept where all seven states would agree to reduce the size of their arsenals as they modernize them. A build-down approach has the advantage of becoming all encompassing, while avoiding a ratio-based, hierarchical, multilateral system that has been tried before for naval arms control and that has no practical chance of success.
Lengthening and strengthening norms have to be the first order of business when dangerous military practices are on the rise. Numerically based arms control cannot take an extended holiday, however, especially since Russia is adding new means of delivery to its strategic forces and Beijing is acting with dispatch to significantly increase its deployments of land-based missiles.
As if the agenda outlined here isn’t ambitious enough, a new negotiating forum to address trilateral nuclear arms control and reductions seems inescapable. The more China builds up, the harder it becomes to succeed at bilateral controls. There are, no doubt, mixed motives behind the speed of Beijing’s build up, which is reminiscent of the Kremlin’s actions in preparations for strategic arms limitation talks in the Johnson and Nixon administrations. Some deterrence strategists will view Beijing’s activities as early evidence of nuclear war-winning ambitions. Other explanations seem more likely, including the prosaic impulses of seeking to gain leverage in upcoming negotiations and to avoid disadvantage.
Beijing surely recognizes that it cannot “just say no” to strategic arms limitations indefinitely. Because Beijing is in a hurry, the Biden administration is obliged to speed up preparations for trilateral negotiations on numerical limitations that serve U.S. national security interests as well as the interests of friends and allies. As with the U.S.-Soviet strategic arms limitation talks, trilateral discussions are likely to encounter stalls and unexpected delays. We have time to do our homework on important matters of scope and limitation.
When the Johnson administration was first preparing for negotiations with the Kremlin, its plans included limitations on medium-range, intermediate-range, as well as ocean-spanning missiles. This approach is worth reconsidering, given Putin’s deployment of these missiles in violation of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, U.S. rejoinders, and China’s heavy investments in missiles of less-than-intercontinental-range. Then there is the highly contentious matter of including interceptors for national missile defenses.
Depending on what means of delivery are included and excluded, it might be possible to devise an effective arms control regime with equal aggregates of nuclear-capable delivery vehicles and missile defense interceptors. A firestorm of protests to equal aggregates with China as well as Russia can be expected, but depending on units of account, counting rules, and range limits, they might well serve the interests of the United States as well as U.S. friends and allies. Dozens of loopholes would need to be nailed shut, and Beijing would have to accept uncomfortable monitoring arrangements. Success will be very hard to achieve and will likely be followed by setbacks until leaders arrive on the scene who are willing to buck deterrence orthodoxy. When they do, the build-down concept of reducing while modernizing might also apply.
If and when norm-strengthening negotiations evolve into numerical accords, the fluidity of trilateral relations and opposition on Capitol Hill will preclude treaty making. If trilateral accords can somehow be reached, they would likely take the form of executive agreements and be term limited. The arguments in favor of formality and agreements of indefinite duration are not persuasive when treaties, like executive agreements, can be discarded after U.S. national elections. The reaffirmation of norms need not await the resolution of discussions about numbers. To the contrary: The reaffirmation of norms is needed if trilateral talks are to succeed over time. Even if agreements are not reachable or as inclusive as we would like, preliminary discussions with Moscow and Beijing could still have utility. At a minimum, it could prod useful assessments of different limitation parameters and on how best to proceed.
Those who didn’t recognize winning the nuclear peace will surely notice its loss. Strengthening deterrence provides no guarantee against catastrophic loss. To avoid nuclear war, diplomacy and arms control have to accompany deterrence. Sooner or later, national leaders will revive arms control because our lives depend on it. Reassurance and stabilization begin with lengthening and strengthening norms and can take many forms. Reinvention depends on diplomatic adeptness, creativity, and wisdom. It also depends on the state of relations between major powers. If their competition sharpens, and if national leaders are content to intensify that competition, then no proposals to reverse course will succeed.
When leaders decide to pursue course corrections or when leaders change, opportunities will arise. When conditions permit, they’ll need plans on how best to proceed. We face daunting challenges because policymakers have run out of simple solutions. We have much ground to cover since the era of grand treaty making ended with the Cold War. It’s time to plan once again for a future in which nuclear weapons aren’t used in warfare. We’ve succeeded in the past, and we can succeed again by harnessing deterrence with arms control.
3. China and the ‘G’ Word—Genocide
Excerpts:
The key legal text, the Genocide Convention, laid down five acts by which a perpetrator could intend “to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” Killing is one of those acts; enforced birth control, and the transfer of children, are also on the list. The other two are more nebulous: “causing serious bodily or mental harm” and “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”
Like Lemkin’s original definition, these phrases are open to interpretation. Legal precedent only gets you so far. As Sir Geoffrey observes to me, unlike in previous cases, “there is no suggestion of mass killing. It’s all the other limbs, which have never been the subject of a formal court determination, which we’re having to deal with.”
If China is declared guilty of genocide, that would strengthen the case for international sanctions; for multinationals to cut or reduce their ties with the country; and for organizations and individuals to find their own ways of expressing solidarity with the Uyghurs. They could, of course, do that anyway, and it is tempting to dismiss the genocide debate as needlessly complex, a terminological question that obscures a plain moral imperative.
Sir Geoffrey Nice, however, believes the legal nuances are no reason to abandon the term. “It suited the politicians and the lawyers at the time to hand out this definition. They shouldn’t then be allowed to take it away by saying, ‘Oh, no, it’s too difficult to use.’ You can’t give and take away at the same time.”
The Genocide Convention was the first ever treaty passed by the U.N. General Assembly: it represents, in some ways, the beginnings of the post-war international order. Over the next few years we may discover how much of that order remains.
China and the ‘G’ Word—Genocide - The American Conservative
Though it acts as a court, it has no official status. The governments asked to participate have either snubbed or (in the case of China) condemned it. Some witnesses, under threat of sanctions from Beijing, started dropping out before its proceedings had even begun. And yet, the Uyghur Tribunal, whose final hearings took place in London in September, is an institution nobody can afford to ignore. It offers the best hope yet of answering a pressing question: is China committing genocide against the Uyghurs, the 12 million Turkic Muslims in the northwestern region of Xinjiang?
A series of testimonies from the region, collected by organizations such as Human Rights Watch and publications including the Washington Post, the Independent, and the New Yorker, indicate that since late 2016, Xinjiang has been transformed into a nightmarish police state, where Uyghurs are spuriously arrested, detained, subject to forced labor, raped, tortured, separated from their spouses and children, and forced to confess to non-existent crimes. The scale is unclear, but satellite imagery suggests that at least 1 million, and perhaps three times that, have suffered imprisonment at some point. A leaked memo showed that in a single week in 2019, the authorities in southern Xinjiang seized over 16,000 citizens, with 5,500 more recorded as “temporarily unable to be detained.”
The repression is brutal in its ambitions: Chen Quanguo, Xinjiang’s governor, has proclaimed a “smashing, obliterating offensive,” pledging to “bury the corpses of terrorists and terror gangs in the vast sea of the People’s War”—an especially disturbing turn of phrase given that people are suspected of terrorism if they socialize too little or have the wrong kind of beard. It is a frighteningly high-tech kind of persecution. Surveillance cameras are programmed to recognize Uyghur faces, all cars have state-issued GPS trackers, phone data is exhaustively harvested, and QR codes are affixed to houses to provide instant information to the police. It is dehumanizing in the most fundamental ways. One Uyghur doctor, now in Istanbul, told ITV that as part of a government-run “population control plan,” she had taken part in more than 500 operations on Uyghur women including forced contraception, abortion, and sterilization. The question—one question, anyway—is whether all this meets the legal definition of genocide.
In the “Yes” camp are the U.S. State Department, during both the Trump and Biden administrations; the British, Canadian, Dutch, and Lithuanian parliaments, which have voted to declare a genocide; and—to some extent—four barristers from Essex Court Chambers in London, whose 105-page legal opinion concluded that there was a “very credible” case for using the term. The barristers pointed in particular to evidence of widespread sterilization, as well as the separation of children from parents. Was there, as international law requires, a “genocidal intent”? That is harder to prove, they reckoned, but leaked documents from central and regional governments, laying the groundwork for the repression, suggest that President Xi Jinping and Xinjiang governor Chen Quanguo could indeed be convicted of this “crime of crimes.”
The “No” camp includes the scholars William Schabas and Jeffrey Sachs, who have argued in Project Syndicate that, although there is evidence of “a gross violation of human rights,” the essential element of genocide—the intent to destroy a group—is far from proven. Others, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, are on the fence. Boris Johnson has said that the definition is a matter for the courts.
Indeed it is, but China is not a member of the International Criminal Court; and the U.N. cannot, in practice, summon the International Court of Justice to investigate, given China’s veto power on the Security Council. A national court, or a court appointed by several countries, could try the matter, but governments have avoided setting one up. That leaves only one option.
* * *
So it was that on June 4, a group of lawyers, academics, and Uyghurs-in-exile gathered at a conference center in the shadow of Westminster Abbey for the Uyghur Tribunal’s opening day. The tribunal was set up at the initiative of the World Uyghur Congress, with an unpaid and independent judicial panel chaired by Professor Sir Geoffrey Nice QC, a highly distinguished human rights lawyer and judge who led the prosecution of Serbia’s former president Slobodan Milošević. In his opening remarks, Sir Geoffrey said the tribunal had been started as a last resort: the organisers would have disbanded it if a government, or governments, had formed their own court. Instead, he said, it fell to him and his colleagues to hear evidence from experts on the region and from first-hand witnesses such as Qelbinur Sidik, who told of her experiences in Xinjiang’s camps.
After two four-day sessions in June and September, the tribunal is now working on its verdict, expected in December. It will have to answer two questions: first, what conclusions can be drawn from the evidence, the satellite imagery, leaked government documents, and copious first-hand testimonies? Second, a major theoretical issue: what is the threshold for genocide?
The word is one of the most potent neologisms of the 20th century, coined by the Jewish-Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin around 1944 and codified by the U.N.’s Genocide Convention in 1948. When I spoke to Sir Geoffrey Nice, he acknowledged the difficulty of pinning down a definition. “The public citizen has been given this word,” he says. “Can you imagine being as powerful after your death as Lemkin, in giving every educated person on the planet this new word? They didn’t have it before; now they’ve got it. What a phenomenal success. But, they don’t really know how”—he pauses—“they know how to use it, but they don’t really use it accurately, according to the law.”
Contrary to one fairly common misperception, genocide is not a matter of numbers. Although the Khmer Rouge murdered over a million Cambodians, the courts didn’t count this as genocide, because there was no intent to destroy a people. However, Khmer Rouge leaders were convicted of genocide for the numerically slighter killing of ethnic minorities, the Cham and Vietnamese, because there appeared an intent to destroy an identifiable group.
It also doesn’t mean total destruction. The Bosnian commander Radislav Krstic, convicted of genocide for his role in the 1992 Srebrenica massacre, appealed on the grounds that Srebrenica’s Muslims were only a fraction of the Bosnian Muslim population. The International Criminal Tribunal rejected his appeal, saying that his intent was effectively genocidal even if he only got the chance to carry it out in one place. As the tribunal noted, the Nazis didn’t make a plan to destroy the Jewish population outside Europe, but the Holocaust is still the supreme example of genocide.
Raphael Lemkin defined the crime as “a co-ordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups.” Since then, scholars and courts have mulled over what constitutes the “life” of a “group” and what is “essential” to it. Lemkin also wrote of “cultural genocide,” the devastation a group’s linguistic and historical identity. Advocates of a genocide conviction point out that the Uyghur language has been suppressed and, in at least one prefecture of Xinjiang, completely banned from the classroom. The Uyghurs’ religion has received similar treatment: one official in Kashgar, according to the New Yorker, boasted that “we destroyed nearly seventy percent of the mosques in the city.”
The key legal text, the Genocide Convention, laid down five acts by which a perpetrator could intend “to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” Killing is one of those acts; enforced birth control, and the transfer of children, are also on the list. The other two are more nebulous: “causing serious bodily or mental harm” and “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”
Like Lemkin’s original definition, these phrases are open to interpretation. Legal precedent only gets you so far. As Sir Geoffrey observes to me, unlike in previous cases, “there is no suggestion of mass killing. It’s all the other limbs, which have never been the subject of a formal court determination, which we’re having to deal with.”
If China is declared guilty of genocide, that would strengthen the case for international sanctions; for multinationals to cut or reduce their ties with the country; and for organizations and individuals to find their own ways of expressing solidarity with the Uyghurs. They could, of course, do that anyway, and it is tempting to dismiss the genocide debate as needlessly complex, a terminological question that obscures a plain moral imperative.
Sir Geoffrey Nice, however, believes the legal nuances are no reason to abandon the term. “It suited the politicians and the lawyers at the time to hand out this definition. They shouldn’t then be allowed to take it away by saying, ‘Oh, no, it’s too difficult to use.’ You can’t give and take away at the same time.”
The Genocide Convention was the first ever treaty passed by the U.N. General Assembly: it represents, in some ways, the beginnings of the post-war international order. Over the next few years we may discover how much of that order remains.
Dan Hitchens is former editor of the Catholic Herald.
4. Solomon Islanders beat back Beijing, for now
A good question in the conclusion:
Given the CCP’s doctrine of unrestricted warfare, it is only a matter of time before it comes back, hard, from multiple vectors, and tries to complete the takeover. Just a few days ago, the newly registered Solomon Islands Chinese Business Council met the Prime Minister.
The people of Malaita—and the many others in the Solomons trying to keep their country free—need support of all sorts. They need people to talk about them. They need other countries to ask the central government to explain what it’s doing. They need diplomatic support. They need training and education programs. And they really, really need development, investment and supply chains that aren’t run by Beijing.
They are on the front line, and they need supplies.
So, what are we going to do about it?
Solomon Islanders beat back Beijing, for now - The Sunday Guardian Live
But the CCP won’t stop. The next time ‘people power’ may not be enough to fight off Beijing. And once the PRC has fully eaten the Solomons, it will use it as a jumping off point for its next meal.
On 27 October, CCP interference in the internal politics of the Solomon Islands nearly triggered major violence. It was only thanks to the courage and wisdom of Solomon Islanders that Beijing failed.
The Solomon Islanders did it on their own. No one helped—none of those roaming the region cloaked in the flag of democracy and preaching “values” looked their way. Not the United States, not Australia, not New Zealand, not Taiwan, not India.
The Solomon Islanders saved their own democracy. For now.
But the CCP won’t stop. The next time “people power” may not be enough to fight off Beijing. And once the PRC has fully eaten the Solomons, it will use it as a jumping off point for its next meal.
BACKGROUND
In September 2019, the Solomon Islands, a country of around 700,000 people off the northeast coast of Australia, switched diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The central government made the decision without public consultation, and it was widely unpopular, particularly in the most populous province, Malaita.
The Premier of Malaita, Daniel Suidani, clearly stated his concern that if the central government grew closer to Beijing, the Solomons would become more like China—more authoritarian, more prone to destructive resource extraction, more religious oppression, less options and rights for citizens.
In the two years since the CCP moved in, he’s been proven right. Newly arrived Chinese, working for Chinese companies, have distorted the economy, contributing to unemployment, coercion and corruption.
Suidani, concerned about the effect on the people, society and environment, has tried to keep Chinese companies out of his province. The central government has punished him, in part by withholding viable development projects.
A petition to the central government from thousands of Malaitans outlined a range of other punishments visited on their province, including the central “government continually harasses the [local] government of Malaita through individuals, the media and even through the abuse of legal process”.
Respected senior leader Hon. Peter Kenilorea Jr., former Permanent Secretary, the Solomon Islands’ Ministry of Foreign Affairs and External Trade said: “We in the Pacific Islands say we are on the front line of climate change—we are also on the front line of the aggression from the Chinese Communist Party. The political warfare is on. The geopolitical front line is in our tiny nation of the Solomon Islands, and even within the provinces within the Solomons. We have one province [Malaita] that has been targeted and harassed—this is a real everyday occurrence.”
THE VOTE OF NO CONFIDENCE
The showdown came on 27 October. Local proxies of the pro-Chinese factions in the central government tried to table a vote of no confidence against Premier Suidani in the Malaita provincial legislature.
What happened next was described by Kenilorea: “Thousands of Malaita Province people took to the streets in Auki, the Administrative capital of the province, in a powerful show of solidarity in support for Premier Daniel Suidani. Villagers with very little money contributed towards purchase of fuel for transportation into Auki. The people called on their respective members of the provincial assembly to support Premier Suidani.”
“Their frustration over the inaction of their elected representatives to move towards showing support for Suidani reached a boil-over point. That their elected representatives still decided to go against the wishes of their respective electorates was an indication that promises of riches would have been made to these elected representatives to have made them so stubborn in the face of clear calls from their respective electorates to not move the motion and support Premier Suidani.”
“These elected representatives who filed the motion stayed together in a hotel surrounded by security detail. They were definitely funded to have such logistical details in place.”
“The police, fearing the real possibility of the breakout of violence, brokered a withdrawal of the motion with the mover. The motion of no confidence filed against Premier Suidani was withdrawn on the same day it was to be tabled. This was a wise and timely decision by the police and all the leaders concerned. This action averted certain violence erupting in Auki.”
“The withdrawal of the motion was seen as a crushing defeat to the sponsors of the motion against Suidani, which included, the national government and the CCP.”
“At the last parliament sitting Prime Minister Sogavare stated in parliament, with regards to the diplomatic switch, that only a minority of Malaitans supported Premier Suidani. He stated that the national government had made the decision to switch already. And that the people of Malaita should not hit their heads against a brick wall as they will hurt themselves.”
“Through their people power which resulted in the withdrawal of the motion of no confidence by the mover, the overwhelming majority of the people of Malaita have shown that they are with Premier Suidani on the matter relating to the switch. They are so supportive of Taiwan. They are so supportive of democracy.”
On that day, women of Malaita sat in front of the entrance to the legislature to block the entry of those wanting to table the motion. It was an act of civil disobedience in the protection of their legislature, of their democracy, from what they saw as an attack from outside.
Since then, Elijah Asilaua, the Member of the Provincial Assembly who was to table the vote of no confidence, apologized for his actions and asked forgiveness for working against the will of the people. Premier Suidani also apologized—to Asilaua for the actions of the crowd, and thanked him for withdrawing the motion.
They are trying to knit their province—their people—back together, with courage and wisdom. Like real leaders.
CRISIS AVERTED OR DELAYED?
The CCP doesn’t take “crushing defeats” well—especially ones that show the power of democracy in the face of coercion. The people of Malaita fought their own battle but, in the process, they fought for us all. They showed you can stand up for what’s right, and win. It’s Beijing’s worst nightmare.
Given the CCP’s doctrine of unrestricted warfare, it is only a matter of time before it comes back, hard, from multiple vectors, and tries to complete the takeover. Just a few days ago, the newly registered Solomon Islands Chinese Business Council met the Prime Minister.
The people of Malaita—and the many others in the Solomons trying to keep their country free—need support of all sorts. They need people to talk about them. They need other countries to ask the central government to explain what it’s doing. They need diplomatic support. They need training and education programs. And they really, really need development, investment and supply chains that aren’t run by Beijing.
They are on the front line, and they need supplies.
So, what are we going to do about it?
Cleo Paskal is a The Sunday Guardian Special Correspondent as well as Non-Resident Senior Fellow for the Indo-Pacific at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.
5. Opinion | China is rising as a nuclear power. Its ambitions warrant global attention.
Excerpts:
China’s quest for a stronger nuclear force could be intended to deter the United States from coercion if a conventional or nonnuclear conflict breaks out in the South China Sea — say, over Taiwan. China’s leaders also no doubt are taking note of the intensifying cooperation among the United States, Japan, Australia and India. President Xi Jinping seems determined to demonstrate China’s great power status, and that includes a great-power-sized nuclear arsenal.
During their antagonism during the Cold War, the United States and Soviet Union managed to negotiate limits and even elimination of fast-flying missiles and the nuclear warheads they carried. As China scales up its ambitions, it should be willing to join a renewed arms control process, with Russia also re-engaged. Great powers also have great responsibilities — first and foremost to avert the catastrophe of nuclear war.
Opinion | China is rising as a nuclear power. Its ambitions warrant global attention.
The Pentagon’s latest report to Congress on China’s military strength carries a significant and worrisome conclusion. Last year, it estimated China’s nuclear warhead stockpile was in the “low-200s” — where it had been for years — and might double by the end of the decade. The new report asserts China may possess up to 700 deliverable nuclear warheads by 2027 and “likely intends” to have at least 1,000 by 2030. What is going on?
After many years of relatively modest ambitions, China apparently intends to join the United States and Russia as a strategic nuclear power. It is building new intercontinental ballistic missile silo fields and missiles, has a nascent land-sea-air triad of nuclear forces, is investing in hypersonic glide vehicles and is pushing toward higher alert status. Tangible evidence of the expansion is the three missile silo fields that have come to light in recent months. If China eventually deploys missiles in all 300 new silos, plus a force of 100 road-mobile missiles, it would potentially be in the same ballpark as the United States (400 land-based missiles) and Russia (about 320), although the U.S. and Russian warhead stockpiles are larger. As in the past, it is important to watch closely China’s actual performance in strategic weapons; estimates can be wrong, and plans change.
For years, China hewed to a “minimum deterrent,” eschewing the launch-ready alert posture of Russia and the United States. But the Pentagon report says China is moving toward launch on warning — China calls it “early warning counterstrike” — during which the early warning of an incoming missile strike could trigger a retaliatory strike even before the incoming missile has detonated. Such a hair-trigger posture, broadly similar to Cold War practices of the United States and Russia, could multiply the risks of miscalculation. The Pentagon report confirms that Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Mark A. Milley and others reached out to China late last year to dispel a possible war scare in Beijing — highlighting the legitimate concern about the potential for “misunderstanding and miscalculation” that will only grow as China puts more forces on day-to-day alert. China’s 250 ballistic missile test launches in 2020 exceeded its launches in 2018 and 2019.
China’s quest for a stronger nuclear force could be intended to deter the United States from coercion if a conventional or nonnuclear conflict breaks out in the South China Sea — say, over Taiwan. China’s leaders also no doubt are taking note of the intensifying cooperation among the United States, Japan, Australia and India. President Xi Jinping seems determined to demonstrate China’s great power status, and that includes a great-power-sized nuclear arsenal.
During their antagonism during the Cold War, the United States and Soviet Union managed to negotiate limits and even elimination of fast-flying missiles and the nuclear warheads they carried. As China scales up its ambitions, it should be willing to join a renewed arms control process, with Russia also re-engaged. Great powers also have great responsibilities — first and foremost to avert the catastrophe of nuclear war.
6. China ‘Clearly’ Developing Aviation and Maritime Capabilities to Counter U.S. in Indo-Pacific, Says Pentagon
Excerpts:
“Again, you’ve heard the secretary talk about this many times – he holds the [People’s Republic of China] as our number one pacing challenge. And what we’re focused on – I mean I haven’t seen these images and they can speak to what their bombing runs look like. That’s for them to speak to,” Kirby said. “What I can tell you is we’re focused on developing the capabilities, the operational concepts, making sure we have the resources and the right strategies in place so we can deal with the PRC as the number one pacing challenge.”
The Pentagon last week unveiled its annual China military report, which found that the People’s Liberation Army Navy has the world’s largest maritime force on the globe with 355 ships and counting, and growing ambitions to operate more versatile platforms beyond the Indo-Pacific region.
Asked if the Defense Department is worried about how quickly China is developing new capabilities, Kirby said: “Yes, of course. And it’s all laid out in the China military report. We’ve been nothing but transparent and clear about our growing concerns over the kinds of capabilities that the Chinese military continues to develop.”
China ‘Clearly’ Developing Aviation and Maritime Capabilities to Counter U.S. in Indo-Pacific, Says Pentagon - USNI News
A screenshot of DF-26 launching in China.
China continues to pursue both aviation and maritime capabilities to counter the United States in the Indo-Pacific region, a Pentagon spokesman said Monday.
Asked about China’s range targets that are shaped like U.S. warships, Defense Department spokesman John Kirby pointed to the Pentagon’s recent assessment of China’s military power.
“They can speak to their exercises and what they’re training against. It’s been pretty fairly obvious and we just released the China military report a week ago that I think makes it very clear what our understanding of their intentions are and their capabilities are and how they’re developing those capabilities and to what ends,” Kirby told reporters today.
“And clearly they have invested a lot in particularly air and maritime capabilities that are designed largely to try to prevent the United States from having access to certain areas in the Indo-Pacific. What we’re focused on is that pacing challenge and making sure that we maintain the right capabilities and the right operational concepts to meet our security commitments in that part of the world.”
The comments come after USNI News reported on Sunday that China has built missile targets that are shaped like American warships, including an aircraft carrier and two Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, according to satellite imagery. The target range is located in the Taklamakan desert in the Ruoqiang region in central China.
While Kirby said he has not seen the satellite imagery photos, he noted that the Pentagon is worried about China’s “increasing intimidation” and “coercive behavior” throughout the Indo-Pacific region.
An Oct. 20, 2021 satellite image of a target in the shape of a U.S. aircraft carrier in the XXXX desert H I Sutton Illustration for USNI News Satellite image ©2021 Maxar Technologies Used with Permission
“Again, you’ve heard the secretary talk about this many times – he holds the [People’s Republic of China] as our number one pacing challenge. And what we’re focused on – I mean I haven’t seen these images and they can speak to what their bombing runs look like. That’s for them to speak to,” Kirby said. “What I can tell you is we’re focused on developing the capabilities, the operational concepts, making sure we have the resources and the right strategies in place so we can deal with the PRC as the number one pacing challenge.”
The Pentagon last week unveiled its annual China military report, which found that the People’s Liberation Army Navy has the world’s largest maritime force on the globe with 355 ships and counting, and growing ambitions to operate more versatile platforms beyond the Indo-Pacific region.
Asked if the Defense Department is worried about how quickly China is developing new capabilities, Kirby said: “Yes, of course. And it’s all laid out in the China military report. We’ve been nothing but transparent and clear about our growing concerns over the kinds of capabilities that the Chinese military continues to develop.”
Related
7. I'm Helping to Start a New College Because Higher Ed Is Broken
Excerpts:
In our minds, there can be no more urgent task for a society than to ensure the health of its system of higher education. The American system today is broken in ways that pose a profound threat to the future strength and stability of the U.S. It is time to start fixing it. But the opportunity to do so in the classic American way — by creating something new, actually building rather than “building back” — is an inspiring and exciting one.
To quote Haidt and Lukianoff: “A school that makes freedom of inquiry an essential part of its identity, selects students who show special promise as seekers of truth, orients and prepares those students for productive disagreement … would be inspiring to join, a joy to attend, and a blessing to society.”
I'm Helping to Start a New College Because Higher Ed Is Broken
Institutions dedicated to the search for truth have ossified into havens for liberal intolerance and administrative overreach.
November 8, 2021, 10:45 AM EST
If you enjoyed Netflix’s “The Chair” — a lighthearted depiction of a crisis-prone English Department at an imaginary Ivy League college — you are clearly not in higher education. Something is rotten in the state of academia and it’s no laughing matter.
Grade inflation. Spiraling costs. Corruption and racial discrimination in admissions. Junk content (“Grievance Studies”) published in risible journals. Above all, the erosion of academic freedom and the ascendancy of an illiberal “successor ideology” known to its critics as wokeism, which manifests itself as career-ending “cancelations” and speaker disinvitations, but less visibly generates a pervasive climate of anxiety and self-censorship.
Some say that universities are so rotten that the institution itself should simply be abandoned and replaced with an online alternative — a metaversity perhaps, to go with the metaverse. I disagree. I have long been skeptical that online courses and content can be anything other than supplementary to the traditional real-time, real-space college experience.
However, having taught at several, including Cambridge, Oxford, New York University and Harvard, I have also come to doubt that the existing universities can be swiftly cured of their current pathologies. That is why this week I am one of a group of people announcing the founding of a new university — indeed, a new kind of university: the University of Austin.
The founders of this university are a diverse group in terms of our backgrounds and our experiences (though doubtless not diverse enough for some). Our political views also differ. To quote our founding president, Pano Kanelos, “What unites us is a common dismay at the state of modern academia and a belief that it is time for something new.”
There is no need to imagine a mythical golden age. The original universities were religious institutions, as committed to orthodoxy and as hostile to heresy as today’s woke seminaries. In the wake of the Reformation and the Scientific Revolution, scholars gradually became less like clergymen; but until the 20th century their students were essentially gentlemen, who owed their admission as much to inherited status as to intellectual ability. Many of the great intellectual breakthroughs of the Enlightenment were achieved off campus.
Only from the 19th century did academia become truly secularized and professional, with the decline of religious requirements, the rise to pre-eminence of the natural sciences, the spread of the German system of academic promotion (from doctorate up in steps to full professorship), and the proliferation of scholarly journals based on peer-review. Yet the same German universities that led the world in so many fields around 1900 became enthusiastic helpmeets of the Nazis in ways that revealed the perils of an amoral scholarship decoupled from Christian ethics and too closely connected to the state.
Even the institutions with the most sustained records of excellence — Oxford and Cambridge — have had prolonged periods of torpor. F.M. Cornford could mock the inherent conservatism of Oxbridge politics in his “Microcosmographia Academica” in 1908. When Malcolm Bradbury wrote his satirical novel “The History Man” in 1975, universities everywhere were still predominantly white, male and middle class. The process whereby a college education became more widely available — to women, to the working class, to racial minorities — has been slow and remains incomplete. Meanwhile, there have been complaints about the adverse consequences of this process in American universities since Allan Bloom’s “Closing of the American Mind,” which was published back in 1987.
Nevertheless, much had been achieved by the later years of the 20th century. There was a general agreement that the central purpose of a university was the pursuit of truth — think only of Harvard’s stark Latin motto: Veritas — and that the crucial means to that end were freedom of conscience, thought, speech and publication. There was supposed to be no discrimination in admissions, examinations and academic appointments, other than on the basis of intellectual merit. That was crucial to enabling Jews and other minority groups to take full advantage of their intellectual potential. It was understood that professors were awarded tenure principally to preserve academic freedom so that they might “dare to think” — Immanuel Kant’s other great imperative, Sapere aude! — without fear of being fired.
The benefits of all this defy quantification. A huge proportion of the major scientific breakthroughs of the past century were made by men and women whose academic jobs gave them economic security and a supportive community in which to do their best work. Would the democracies have won the world wars and the Cold War without the contributions of their universities? It seems doubtful. Think only of Bletchley Park and the Manhattan Project. Sure, the Ivy League’s best and brightest also gave us the Vietnam War. But remember, too, that there were more university-based computers on the Arpanet — the original internet — than any other kind. No Stanford, no Silicon Valley.
Those of us who were fortunate to be undergraduates in the 1980s remember the exhilarating combination of intellectual freedom and ambition to which all this gave rise. Yet, in the past decade, exhilaration has been replaced by suffocation, to the point that I feel genuinely sorry for today’s undergraduates.
In Heterodox Academy’s 2020 Campus Expression Survey, 62% of sampled college students agreed that the climate on their campus prevented them from saying things they believed, up from 55% in 2019, while 41% were reluctant to discuss politics in a classroom, up from 32% in 2019. Some 60% of students said they were reluctant to speak up in class because they were concerned other students would criticize their views as being offensive.
Such anxieties are far from groundless. According to a nationwide survey of a thousand undergraduates by the Challey Institute for Global Innovation, 85% of self-described liberal students would report a professor to the university if the professor said something that they found offensive, while 76% would report another student.
In a study published in March entitled “Academic Freedom in Crisis: Punishment, Political Discrimination and Self-Censorship,” the Centre for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology showed that academic freedom is under attack not only in the U.S., but also in the U.K. and Canada. Three-quarters of conservative American and British academics in the social sciences and humanities said there is a hostile climate for their beliefs in their department. This compares to just 5% among left-wing faculty in the U.S.
Again, one can understand why. Younger academics are especially likely to support dismissal of a colleague who has made some heretical utterance, with 40% of American social sciences and humanities professors under the age of 40 supporting at least one of four hypothetical dismissal campaigns. Ph.D. students are even more intolerant than other young academics: 55% of American Ph.D. students under 40 supported at least one hypothetical dismissal campaign. “High-profile deplatformings and dismissals” get the attention, the authors of the report conclude, but “far more pervasive threats to academic freedom stem … from fears of a) cancellation — threats to one’s job or reputation — and b) political discrimination.”
These are not unfounded fears. The number of scholars targeted for their speech has risen dramatically since 2015, according to research by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. FIRE has logged 426 incidents since 2015. Just under three-quarters of them resulted in some kind of sanction — including an investigation alone or voluntary resignation — against the scholar. Such efforts to restrict free speech usually originate with “progressive” student groups, but often find support from left-leaning faculty members and are encouraged by college administrators, who tend (as Sam Abrams of Sarah Lawrence College demonstrated, and as his own subsequent experience confirmed) to be even further to the left than professors. There are also attacks on academic freedom from the right, which FIRE challenges. With a growing number of Republicans calling for bans on critical race theory, I fear the illiberalism is metastasizing.
Trigger warnings. Safe spaces. Preferred pronouns. Checked privileges. Microaggressions. Antiracism. All these terms are routinely deployed on campuses throughout the English-speaking world as part of a sustained campaign to impose ideological conformity in the name of diversity. As a result, it often feels as if there is less free speech and free thought in the American university today than in almost any other institution in the U.S.
To the historian’s eyes, there is something unpleasantly familiar about the patterns of behavior that have, in a matter of a few years, become normal on many campuses. The chanting of slogans. The brandishing of placards. The letters informing on colleagues and classmates. The denunciations of professors to the authorities. The lack of due process. The cancelations. The rehabilitations following abject confessions. The officiousness of unaccountable bureaucrats. Any student of the totalitarian regimes of the mid-20th century recognizes all this with astonishment. It turns out that it can happen in a free society, too, if institutions and individuals who claim to be liberal choose to behave in an entirely illiberal fashion.
How to explain this rapid descent of academia from a culture of free inquiry and debate into a kind of Totalitarianism Lite? In their book “The Coddling of the American Mind,” the social psychiatrist Jonathan Haidt and FIRE president Greg Lukianoff lay much of the blame on a culture of parenting and early education that encourages students to believe that “what doesn’t kill you makes you weaker,” that you should “always trust your feelings,” and that “life is a battle between good people and evil people.”
However, I believe the core problems are the pathological structures and perverse incentives of the modern university. It is not the case, as many Americans believe, that U.S. colleges have always been left-leaning and that today’s are no different from those of the 1960s. As Stanley Rothman, Robert Lichter and Neil Nevitte showed in a 2005 study, while 39% of the professoriate on average described themselves as left-wing in 1984, the proportion had risen to 72% by 1999, by which time being a conservative had become a measurable career handicap.
Mitchell Langbert’s analysis of tenure-track, Ph.D.-holding professors from 51 of the 66 top-ranked liberal arts colleges in 2017 found that those with known political affiliations were overwhelmingly Democratic. Nearly two-fifths of the colleges in Langbert’s sample were Republican-free. The mean Democratic-to-Republican ratio across the sample was 10.4:1, or 12.7:1 if the two military academies, West Point and Annapolis, were excluded. For history departments, the ratio was 17.4:1; for English 48.3:1. No ratio is calculable for anthropology, as the number of Republican professors was zero. In 2020, Langbert and Sean Stevens found an even bigger skew to the left when they considered political donations to parties by professors. The ratio of dollars contributed to Democratic versus Republican candidates and committees was 21:1.
Commentators who argue that the pendulum will magically swing back betray a lack of understanding about the academic hiring and promotion process. With political discrimination against conservatives now overt, most departments are likely to move further to the left over time as the last remaining conservatives retire.
Yet the leftward march of the professoriate is only one of the structural flaws that characterize today’s university. If you think the faculty are politically skewed, take a look at academic administrators. A shocking insight into the way some activist-administrators seek to bully students into ideological conformity was provided by Trent Colbert, a Yale Law School student who invited his fellow members of the Native American Law Students Association to “a Constitution Day bash” at the “NALSA Trap House,” a term that used to mean a crack den but now is just a mildly risque way of describing a party. Diversity director Yaseen Eldik’s thinly veiled threats to Colbert if he didn’t sign a groveling apology — “I worry about this leaning over your reputation as a person, not just here but when you leave” — were too much even for an editorial board member at the Washington Post. Democracy may die in darkness; academic freedom dies in wokeness.
Moreover, the sheer number of the administrators is a problem in itself. In 1970, U.S. colleges employed more professors than administrators. Between then and 2010, however, the number of full-time professors or “full-time equivalents” increased by slightly more than 50%, in line with student enrollments. The number of administrators and administrative staffers rose by 85% and 240%, respectively. The ever-growing army of coordinators for Title IX — the federal law prohibiting sex-based discrimination — is one manifestation of the bureaucratic bloat, which since the 1990s has helped propel tuition costs far ahead of inflation.
The third structural problem is weak leadership. Time and again — most recently at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where a lecture by the University of Chicago geophysicist Dorian Abbot was abruptly canceled because he had been critical of affirmative action — academic leaders have yielded to noisy mobs baying for disinvitations. There are notable exceptions, such as Robert Zimmer, who as president of the University of Chicago between 2006 and 2021 made a stand for academic freedom. But the number of other colleges to have adopted the Chicago statement, a pledge crafted by the school’s Committee on Freedom of Expression, remains just 55, out of nearly 2,500 institutions offering four-year undergraduate programs.
Finally, there is the problem of the donors — most but not all alumni — and trustees, many of whom have been astonishingly oblivious of the problems described above. In 2019, donors gave nearly $50 billion to colleges. Eight donors gave $100 million or more. People generally do not make that kind of money without being hard-nosed in their business dealings. Yet the capitalist class appears strangely unaware of the anticapitalist uses to which its money is often put. A phenomenon I find deeply puzzling is the lack of due diligence associated with much academic philanthropy, despite numerous cases when the intentions of benefactors have deliberately been subverted.
All this would be bad enough if it meant only that U.S. universities are no longer conducive to free inquiry and promotion based on merit, without which scientific advances are certain to be impeded and educational standards to fall. But academic illiberalism is not confined to college campuses. As students collect their degrees and enter the workforce, they inevitably carry some of what they have learned at college with them. Multiple manifestations of “woke” thinking and behavior at newspapers, publishing houses, technology companies and other corporations have confirmed Andrew Sullivan’s 2018 observation, “We all live on campus now.”
When a problem becomes this widespread, the traditional American solution is to create new institutions. As we have seen, universities are relatively long-lived compared to companies and even nations. But not all great universities are ancient. Of today’s top 25 universities, according to the global rankings compiled by the London Times Higher Education Supplement, four were founded in the 20th century. Fully 14 were 19th-century foundations; four date back to the 18th century. Only Oxford (which can trace its origins to 1096) and Cambridge (1209) are medieval in origin.
As might be inferred from the large number (10) of today’s leading institutions founded in the U.S. between 1855 and 1900, new universities tend to be established when wealthy elites grow impatient with the existing ones and see no way of reforming them. The puzzle is why, despite the resurgence of inequality in the U.S. since the 1990s and the more or less simultaneous decline in standards at the existing universities, so few new ones have been created. Only a handful have been set up this century: University of California Merced (2005), Ave Maria University (2003) and Soka University of America (2001). Just five U.S. colleges founded in the past 50 years make it into the Times’s top 25 “Young Universities”: University of Alabama at Birmingham (founded 1969), University of Texas at Dallas (1969), George Mason (1957), University of Texas at San Antonio (1969) and Florida International (1969). Each is (or originated as) part of a state university system.
In short, the beneficiaries of today’s gilded age seem altogether more tolerant of academic degeneration thn their 19th-century predecessors. For whatever reason, many prefer to give their money to established universities, no matter how antithetical those institutions’ values have become to their own. This makes no sense, even if the principal motivation is to buy Ivy League spots for their offspring. Why would you pay to have your children indoctrinated with ideas you despise?
So what should the university of the future look like? Clearly, there is no point in simply copying and pasting Harvard, Yale or Princeton and expecting a different outcome. Even if such an approach were affordable, it would be the wrong one.
To begin with, a new institution can’t compete with the established brands when it comes to undergraduate programs. Young Americans and their counterparts elsewhere go to college as much for the high-prestige credentials and the peer networks as for the education. That’s why a new university can’t start by offering bachelors’ degrees.
The University of Austin will therefore begin modestly, with a summer school offering “Forbidden Courses” — the kind of content and instruction no longer available at most established campuses, addressing the kind of provocative questions that often lead to cancelation or self-censorship.
The next step will be a one-year master’s program in Entrepreneurship and Leadership. The primary purpose of conventional business programs is to credential large cohorts of passive learners with a lowest-common-denominator curriculum. The University of Austin’s program will aim to teach students classical principles of the market economy and then embed them in a network of successful technologists, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and public-policy reformers. It will offer an introduction to the world of American technology similar to the introduction to the Chinese economy offered by the highly successful Schwarzman Scholars program, combining both academic pedagogy and practical experience. Later, there will be parallel programs in Politics and Applied History and in Education and Public Service.
Only after these initial programs have been set up will we start offering a four-year liberal arts degree. The first two years of study will consist of an intensive liberal arts curriculum, including the study of philosophy, literature, history, politics, economics, mathematics, the sciences and the fine arts. There will be Oxbridge-style instruction, with small tutorials and college-wide lectures, providing an in-depth and personalized learning experience with interdisciplinary breadth.
After two years of a comprehensive and rigorous liberal arts education, undergraduates will join one of four academic centers as junior fellows, pursuing disciplinary coursework, conducting hands-on research and gaining experience as interns. The initial centers will include one for entrepreneurship and leadership, one for politics and applied history, one for education and public service, and one for technology, engineering and mathematics.
To those who argue that we could more easily do all this with some kind of internet platform, I would say that online learning is no substitute for learning on a campus, for reasons rooted in evolutionary psychology. We simply learn much better in relatively small groups in real time and space, not least because a good deal of what students learn in a well-functioning university comes from their informal discussions in the absence of professors. This explains the persistence of the university over a millennium, despite successive revolutions in information technology.
To those who wonder how a new institution can avoid being captured by the illiberal-liberal establishment that now dominates higher education, I would answer that the governance structure of the institution will be designed to prevent that. The Chicago principles of freedom of expression will be enshrined in the founding charter. The founders will form a corporation or board of trustees that will be sovereign. Not only will the corporation appoint the president of the college; it will also have a final say over all appointments or promotions. There will be one unusual obligation on faculty members, besides the standard ones to teach and carry out research: to conduct the admissions process by means of an examination that they will set and grade. Admission will be based primarily on performance on the exam. That will avoid the corrupt rackets run by so many elite admissions offices today.
As for our choice of location in the Texas capital, I would say that proximity to a highly regarded public university — albeit one where even the idea of establishing an institute to study liberty is now controversial — will ensure that the University of Austin has to compete at the highest level from the outset.
My fellow founders and I have no illusions about the difficulty of the task ahead. We fully expect condemnation from the educational establishment and its media apologists. We shall regard all such attacks as vindication — the flak will be a sign that we are above the target.
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In our minds, there can be no more urgent task for a society than to ensure the health of its system of higher education. The American system today is broken in ways that pose a profound threat to the future strength and stability of the U.S. It is time to start fixing it. But the opportunity to do so in the classic American way — by creating something new, actually building rather than “building back” — is an inspiring and exciting one.
To quote Haidt and Lukianoff: “A school that makes freedom of inquiry an essential part of its identity, selects students who show special promise as seekers of truth, orients and prepares those students for productive disagreement … would be inspiring to join, a joy to attend, and a blessing to society.”
That is not the kind of institution satirized in “The Chair.” It is precisely the kind of institution we need today.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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8. KFF COVID-19 Vaccine Monitor: Media and Misinformation
KFF COVID-19 Vaccine Monitor: Media and Misinformation
Filling the need for trusted information on national health issues
The KFF COVID-19 Vaccine Monitor is an ongoing research project tracking the public’s attitudes and experiences with COVID-19 vaccinations. Using a combination of surveys and qualitative research, this project tracks the dynamic nature of public opinion as vaccine development and distribution unfold, including vaccine confidence and acceptance, information needs, trusted messengers and messages, as well as the public’s experiences with vaccination.
Key Findings
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Misinformation about health care topics is nothing new, but social media, the polarization of news sources, and the pace of scientific development on COVID-19 have all contributed to an environment that makes it easier than ever for ambiguous information, misinterpretation, and deliberate disinformation to spread.1 We find in the latest Vaccine Monitor that belief in pandemic-related misinformation is widespread, with 78% of adults saying they have heard at least one of eight different false statements about COVID-19 and that they believe it to be true or are unsure if it is true or false. One-third (32%) of all adults believe or are uncertain about at least four false statements. Belief in COVID-19 misinformation is correlated with both vaccination status and partisanship, with unvaccinated adults and Republicans much more likely to believe or be unsure about false statements compared to vaccinated adults and Democrats.
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With the public’s trust in news media declining over many years, we find that no news media source garners the trust of a majority of the public when it comes to COVID-19 information. While nearly half trust information about COVID-19 that they see on network and local television news, trust is lower for other news outlets and diverges in expected ways along partisan lines. Unvaccinated adults are far less likely than vaccinated adults to trust most of the news sources included in the survey for information on COVID-19, with the exception of conservative news sources.
- People’s trusted news sources are correlated with their belief in COVID-19 misinformation. The share who hold at least four misconceptions is small (between 11-16%) among those who say they trust COVID-19 information from network news, local TV news, CNN, MSNBC, and NPR. This share rises to nearly four in ten among those who trust COVID-19 information from One America News (37%) and Fox News (36%), and to nearly half (46%) among those who trust information from Newsmax. One thing this study cannot disentangle is whether this is because people are exposed to misinformation from those news sources, or whether the types of people who choose those news sources are the same ones who are pre-disposed to believe certain types of misinformation for other reasons.
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These findings suggest a challenge for reaching people with accurate information about COVID-19. While that challenge is particularly acute when it comes to reaching those who remain unvaccinated, the partisan divisions in misinformation and trusted news sources also have implications for those who are vaccinated, as we have reported a growing partisan divide in intention to get COVID-19 booster shots, even among the fully vaccinated.
Belief In COVID-19 Misinformation
Numerous studies have documented the prevalence of misinformation and disinformation about COVID-19, often fueled by social media2. The latest KFF COVID-19 Vaccine Monitor sheds light on how common it is for people to hear and believe certain “myths” about the disease and the vaccine, and how these beliefs correlate with individuals’ trusted media sources.
Belief or uncertainty about COVID-19 misinformation is widespread, with nearly eight in ten adults saying they have heard at least one of eight different pieces of misinformation and either believe them to be true or are not sure whether they are true or false. Most commonly, six in ten adults have heard that the government is exaggerating the number of COVID-19 deaths by counting deaths due to other factors as coronavirus deaths and either believe this to be true (38%) or aren’t sure if it’s true or false (22%).3 About four in ten have heard that pregnant women should not get the COVID-19 vaccine and think this is true (17%) or aren’t sure (22%). Among women ages 18-44, 18% believe this to be true and 29% are uncertain.
Among other common myths, one-third believe or are unsure whether deaths due to the COVID-19 vaccine are being intentionally hidden by the government (35%), and about three in ten each believe or are unsure whether COVID-19 vaccines have been shown to cause infertility (31%) or whether Ivermectin is a safe and effective treatment for COVID-19 (28%). In addition, between a fifth and a quarter of the public believe or are unsure whether the vaccines can give you COVID-19 (25%), contain a microchip (24%), or can change your DNA (21%).
Overall, about one in five adults (22%) do not believe any of the eight pieces of information tested in the survey, while nearly half (46%) believe or are unsure about between one and three false statements. One-third of adults (32%) say they have heard at least four of these statements and believe them to be true or are uncertain if they’re true or false. There are notable differences in misinformation belief by vaccination status and partisan identity and smaller differences by community type and education level.
Among adults who have not gotten a COVID-19 vaccine, nearly two-thirds (64%) believe or are uncertain about four or more false statements about the virus. Among vaccinated adults, most believe or are unsure about at least one false statement, but just 19% say this about four or more statements. Unvaccinated adults are at least 20 percentage points more likely than vaccinated adults to lack knowledge about each piece of misinformation tested, with the largest gap on the statement that “Deaths due to the COVID-19 vaccine are being intentionally hidden by the government” (61% of unvaccinated adults believe or are unsure if this is true compared to 25% of vaccinated adults).
Nearly half (46%) of Republicans compared to just 14% of Democrats believe or are unsure about four or more misstatements about COVID-19. Strikingly, 84% of Republicans believe or are unsure whether the government is exaggerating the number of COVID-19 deaths by including deaths due to other causes, compared to just one third of Democrats. In addition, there are large gaps between Republicans and Democrats in the shares who believe or are unsure whether pregnant women should not get the vaccine (52% vs. 28%), whether the vaccines have been shown to cause infertility (43% vs. 15%), and whether Ivermectin is a safe and effective treatment for COVID-19 (44% vs. 10%).
In addition to these differences by partisanship and vaccination status, believing or having doubts about four or more pieces of COVID-19 misinformation is also more prevalent among rural residents compared to those living in urban and suburban areas, among those without a college degree compared to college graduates, and among those ages 18-49 compared to those ages 50 and over.
Trusted News Media Sources For COVID-19 Information
Overall, there is no news source that garners trust from a majority of the public on the topic of COVID-19. At the top of the list, nearly half say they have “a great deal” or “a fair amount” of trust in COVID-19 information that they see or hear on their local TV news station (47%) and on network news like ABC, NBC, and CBS (45%). About a third put a similar level of trust in information they see on CNN (36%), MSNBC (33%), and NPR (32%) while three in ten say the same about Fox News (29%). A smaller share put at least a fair amount of trust in COVID-19 information from One America News and Newsmax (13% each).
Overall, far fewer people say they trust information about COVID-19 that they see on social media compared to traditional news platforms (13% say they trust information they see on YouTube, 9% on Facebook, 6% each on Twitter and TikTok, and 5% on Instagram). The group that is influenced by information they see on these platforms may be larger than the share that says they trust information they see there, as we previously found in January that 31% of adults got information about COVID-19 vaccines from social media over a two-week period, nearly as large as the share who got information from cable, network, and local TV news.
As has been well documented (in particular by the Pew Research Center), the U.S. media environment has become increasingly polarized in recent years, with Democrats and Republicans placing trust in completely different news sources. This is true when it comes to trust in COVID-19 information as well. Majorities of Democrats say they trust information about COVID-19 from network news (72%), local TV news (66%), CNN (65%), MSNBC (56%), and NPR (51%), while none of these sources is trusted by a majority of independents or Republicans. Republicans’ most trusted sources of COVID-19 information is Fox News (49%) followed by smaller shares who trust local TV news (34%), network news (25%), and Newsmax (22%).
Trusted news sources for COVID-19 information differ by vaccination status in addition to partisanship. Among mainstream news sources, vaccinated adults are at least twice as likely as unvaccinated adults to say they trust COVID-19 information from their local TV news station, network news, CNN, MSNBC, and NPR. Similar shares of vaccinated and unvaccinated adults say they trust COVID-19 information they see on Fox News (29% and 30%, respectively). The one news source that is trusted by a larger share of unvaccinated adults compared to vaccinated adults is Newsmax (17% vs. 11%), though the shares who trust Newsmax are relatively small for both groups.
Relationship Between Trusted News Sources and Belief In COVID-19 Misinformation
People’s trusted news sources are correlated with their belief in COVID-19 misinformation. Among those who say they trust COVID-19 information from CNN, MSNBC, network news, NPR, and local TV news, between three in ten and four in ten do not believe any of the eight pieces of misinformation tested in the survey, while small shares (between 11%-16%) believe or are unsure about at least four falsehoods.
Belief in misinformation is higher among those who say they trust COVID-19 information from conservative news sources, with nearly four in ten of those who trust Fox News (36%) and One America News (37%) and nearly half (46%) of those who trust Newsmax for such information saying they have heard at least four of the falsehoods tested in the survey and either believe them to be true or are unsure if they’re true or false. One thing this study cannot disentangle is whether this is because people are exposed to misinformation from those news sources, or whether the types of people who choose those news sources are the same ones who are pre-disposed to believe certain types of misinformation for other reasons.
The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation Headquarters: 185 Berry St., Suite 2000, San Francisco, CA 94107 | Phone 650-854-9400
Washington Offices and Barbara Jordan Conference Center: 1330 G Street, NW, Washington, DC 20005 | Phone 202-347-5270
www.kff.org | Email Alerts: kff.org/email | facebook.com/KaiserFamilyFoundation | twitter.com/kff
Filling the need for trusted information on national health issues, the Kaiser Family Foundation is a nonprofit organization based in San Francisco, California.
9. They were children when the Afghanistan War began. As soldiers they carried the burden of ending it
Excerpts:
As the interview neared its end, and the soldiers recounted their feelings about leaving Kabul once and for all, Rolando expressed bluntly how he felt now that it was over:
“I feel like I let down a 20-year generation of soldiers that have been fighting there. We kind of just handed over a country on a platter.”
Brantley and Buckly, on either side of him, looked at their feet.
Another soldier cut in. Sgt. Maj. Alex Licea, the public affairs sergeant major for the 18th Airborne Corps, who had been sitting quietly throughout the interview, spoke up: “You didn’t, by the way,” he said. “You didn’t.”
They were children when the Afghanistan War began. As soldiers they carried the burden of ending it
"I feel like I let down a 20-year generation of soldiers."
Spc. Robert Rolando was dropping off equipment at Abbey Gate — a main entrance on the east side of the Hamid Karzai International Airport (HKIA) in Kabul, Afghanistan — on Aug. 26 when he started talking with one of the Marines standing nearby.
He doesn’t have many Marine friends since the 24-year-old infantryman, assigned to 1st Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division, hasn’t spent much time around other military branches. Not to mention that his deployment to HKIA was his first.
But as he and the Marine started chatting, they traded things like patches and water bottles. Rolando gave him a chocolate bar he had. They shared phone numbers and planned to reconnect once they returned home. It was the first and last time they would meet.
Later that same day, Rolando and other soldiers heard a bomb go off where they had been hours earlier at Abbey Gate. A suicide bomber believed to be affiliated with ISIS-K had weaved through the crowd of civilians and detonated an explosive vest, killing 13 U.S. service members, including an Army special operations soldier, a Navy Corpsman, 11 Marines, and more than a hundred Afghan civilians.
Left to right: Spc. Dylan Brantley, 26; Spc. Robert Rolando, 24; Spc. John Paul Buckler, 23. (Photos via US Army)
The Marine that Rolando had befriended just hours earlier was among those slain in one of the deadliest attacks on U.S. troops as the 20-year-war drew to its end. Rolando had never lost a friend in combat before. Until that day, the chaos of war and the aftermath of a deadly attack — those had been abstracts. When Rolando returned to Abbey Gate that day, they became real.
“Later, we came back [to Abbey Gate] and he wasn’t there anymore,” Rolando said of the Marine. “A couple of the other guys were there, we were talking, and … I found out he was one of the ones who died in the explosion.”
Rolando and three other soldiers from 1st Brigade spoke to Task & Purpose in October about their experiences during their deployment to HKIA. Sitting in a circle inside a spare office at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, in an effort to find somewhere quiet, they spoke of the chaos in those final days. The soldiers recounted the seemingly impossible situations they found themselves in, the difficult decisions they had to make and the conversations they were forced to have. They recalled declining to take children into the airport despite pleas from desperate parents and having to turn away frantic civilians without passports, directing them to their local government leaders, all while watching that same government crumble before their very eyes.
Like Rolando, two other specialists who spoke with Task & Purpose were also in their early 20s and on their first deployment. They tried to prepare themselves by listening to other soldiers who had deployed before and offered advice on the flight to Afghanistan — “expect the worst,” they were told, “it’s war.”
U.S. Army Soldiers assigned to the 82nd Airborne Division, Pope Army Airfield, N.C., pack in a C-17 Globemaster III before departing Joint Base Charleston, S.C., August 14, 2021. The Pentagon recently activated the Immediate Response Force to help in the safe and secure movement of U.S. personnel and Afghan Special Immigration Visa civilians located in the Middle East. (U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Dawn M. Weber)
Hearing about war and experiencing it first hand are, of course, very different. And some things that happen in combat, like losing a friend for the very first time, are impossible to fully prepare for.
“I’ve been in the Army almost four years now and this is my first deployment, and I’d never lost somebody that I was close to,” Rolando told Task & Purpose. “I guess that was the closest — and it’s not the same of course, his friends and family feel a lot different — but the fact that I made a friend and then literally hours later, you find out they just got killed. It’s pretty horrible.”
‘I get why they did that. They were so scared to be in their own country.’
The situation the 1st Brigade soldiers were mentally preparing for on their flight to Afghanistan was nothing like the one they saw when they got there.
A battalion with the 82nd Airborne Division was rerouted to Kabul from their original destination of Kuwait on Aug. 14, joining a few thousand other troops who were ordered to Afghanistan as the capital quickly fell under Taliban control. One soldier who spoke with Task & Purpose, Spc. Dylan Brantley, a 26-year-old infantryman, said he arrived on Aug. 14. Spc. John Paul Buckler, a 23-year-old fire control specialist, recalled landing a day later and Rolando believes he got in on the 15th or 16th — as one can imagine, the days were running together.
Paratroopers assigned to the 82nd Airborne Division mobilize on Joint Base Charleston, S.C. August 14, 2021. The 82nd Abn. Div. rapidly deployed during an operation with the United States Central Command. (U.S. Army photo by Pfc. Vincent Levelev)
But they each said they expected that the environment would be hectic when they landed, with civilians potentially crowding the airstrip and the enemy waiting for them the moment they touched down.
“We were weapons hot coming off the plane,” Rolando said. But what they found on the airstrip was, well, nothing. It was quiet, calm almost. There was a group of Marines doing maintenance on a helicopter “as if nothing was wrong,” Rolando said. It was frankly a bit jarring, but also a welcome moment of peace.
As they recalled walking off the aircraft and onto Afghan soil for the first time, the three soldiers spoke casually, like they were recounting a routine day at Fort Bragg and not the beginning of what was going to be a historic end to two decades of war.
“It was nice,” Brantley said. “Everyone was so tensed up on the bird —”
“We were standing up and praying for each other, stuff like that,” Buckler matter-of-factly interjected.
“I’ve spent a lot of time in Colorado, and we landed and I’m looking around these beautiful, giant mountains,” Rolando added. “It was like Fort Carson, like this reminds me of home. It was beautiful.”
Two Paratroopers assigned to the 1st Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division conduct security while a C-130 Hercules takes off during a non-combatant evacuation operation in Kabul, Afghanistan, August 25. The Department of Defense is supporting the Department of State in evacuating U.S. civilian personnel, Special Immigrant Visa applicants, and other at-risk individuals from Afghanistan as quickly and safely as possible. (Master Sgt. Alex Burnett/U.S. Army)
That reprieve only lasted for so long. The soldiers quickly learned that the equipment they were accustomed to, like their MRAPs and M-ATVs — up-armored gun trucks — weren’t coming into Afghanistan. The focus was getting troops into Kabul, which left little room on the planes for heavy equipment. So the soldiers began looking for other vehicles around the airport they could use: they found demilitarized U.S. vehicles and trucks the Afghan military handed over, SUVs, a tow truck, and in one noteworthy instance, a Toyota pickup outfitted with a Russian anti-aircraft gun, as well as a Mercedes G-Wagon.
And then they jury-rigged whatever they could find to mount weapons to them, Rolando said. “It was definitely a lesson in readiness and versatility,” but it wasn’t necessarily a new challenge.
“We’re kind of in an environment where our trucks break down all the time,” he said. “And we’ve got to adapt and figure things out, and that’s here, locally.”
That first day was spent getting their equipment sorted, and their hodge-podge of acquired vehicles suitably armed and ready. They had only just finished when a sergeant told them that the airport was breached. Tens of thousands of Afghan civilians had pushed past security and climbed over concertina wire around the perimeter of the airport, and were rushing the airfield. The U.S. troops on the ground were vastly outnumbered. At one point, Brantley and three other soldiers turned a corner expecting to see a handful of Afghan civilians who had broken past the perimeter. What they saw, Brantley estimated, was a crowd of more than 25,000, and those numbers only grew.
FILE – In this Aug. 20, 2021, file image provided by the U.S. Marines, U.S. Marines with Special Purpose Marine Air-Ground Task Force – Crisis Response – Central Command, provide assistance during an evacuation at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan. (Lance Cpl. Nicholas Guevara/U.S. Marine Corps via AP, File)
From afar, the rest of the world watched as desperate Afghans flooded the airstrip, climbing onto Air Force C-17 Globemasters on the runway, in some cases clinging to the wheels as the planes took off before plummeting through the air minutes later. In at least one case, the Air Force later said a body was found in the wheel well of a plane after leaving Afghanistan.
For hours, troops at HKIA worked to push people back off the airfield, trying to assure them that they’d be safer off the airstrip. By the end of it, the soldiers felt defeated. They were exhausted, slathering sunscreen on when they could to avoid sunburn, chugging hot water from plastic bottles that had been sitting out in the sun. Rolando recalled seeing his platoon leader’s blonde head sticking up above a crowd of civilians as they moved closer to him, begging for his help. He was a “brand new second lieutenant,” who was a new addition to the company and “didn’t really know our guys,” Rolando said. The specialist pushed through the crowd and grabbed the lieutenant’s collar, pulling him back in order to regroup with the rest of their platoon.
“It was nerve-racking,” Rolando said. “These are people I’ve been talking to for 6 or 7 hours that are now coming to me, this far away from my face,” Rolando said, his hand outstretched several inches “pleading and begging and asking, ‘please put us on a plane, please get us out of here.’ And it was just everything we could do to say ‘please try to stay out of the sun, stay in the shade, stay safe, if you hear shooting move the other direction but don’t push past the barbed wire.’”
They’d only just gotten the crowds back when what felt like 30 seconds later, people were rushing the airfield again.
FILE – In this Aug. 21, 2021, file photo provided by the U.S. Marines, U.S. Marines with Special Purpose Marine Air-Ground Task Force – Crisis Response – Central Command, provide assistance at an evacuation control checkpoint during an evacuation at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan. (Staff Sgt. Victor Mancilla/U.S. Marine Corps via AP, File)
It wasn’t just the physical work that wore the soldiers down, it was the mental toll of attempting to comfort desperate people willing to do anything, and telling them to go back to the gates of the airport, closer to the armed Taliban fighters outside — the very people they were trying to escape, and the same enemy the U.S. military had fought for two decades. Rolando said he “felt horrible” every time he had to tell someone to get away from the airstrip and the planes — he understood they were grasping at hope.
“It was just hard,” Brantley added. “I get why they did that. They were so scared to be in their own country.”
Eventually, they were able to rest. Rolando said he got lucky; he and other soldiers were set up in a nice room with a television. They watched as the day’s events unfolded before them again, this time on the news.
“They reported, ‘60,000 people rushed the airstrip,’” Rolando recalled. “We were like no that didn’t happen — it was a lot more than that.”
A Paratrooper assigned to the 1st Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division conducts security as the Division continues to help facilitate the safe evacuation of U.S. citizens, Special Immigrant Visa applicants, and other at-risk Afghans out of Afghanistan as quickly and safely as possible from Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Aug 26, 2021.
‘Here I am looking at a kid that got cut with a machete, it’s just — it was a big wake-up call’
It wasn’t the last time those soldiers said they saw a break in reality between what they saw on the ground, and what they were hearing on the news. While U.S. officials assured the American public, and the world at large, that the Taliban were preparing “to provide safe passage of civilians to the airport,” soldiers at HKIA saw something else entirely.
In one instance, Rolando, who worked as a paramedic before joining the Army, said he was acting as a stand-in after the squad’s actual medic got heatstroke. A family handed him a two-year-old boy with a large cut on his arm, wrapped in a headscarf. Rolando asked the mother, who spoke English, what had happened. “The Taliban hit him with a machete,” Rolando recalled her saying.
“To hear that, and then see on the news at night that the Taliban are trying to be peaceful and make this transition good, but then here I am looking at a kid that got cut with a machete, it’s just — it was a big wake-up call,” Rolando said. He did his best to patch up the little boy — he didn’t have stitches, all he could do was clean the wound and bandage it. Afterward he pointed the family in the direction of a field hospital that had been set up nearby.
A man cries as he watches fellow Afghans get wounded after Taliban fighters use guns fire, whips, sticks and sharp objects to maintain crowd control over thousands of Afghans who continue to wait outside the Kabul Airport for a way out, on airport road in Kabul, Afghanistan, Tuesday, Aug. 17, 2021. At least half dozen were wounded, within the hour of violent escalation, including a woman and her child. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
While at times it felt there was little comfort they could provide to the people they were trying to help, the moments when they could meant everything. Rolando said when he handed the little boy back to his family after treating him the best he could, the crowd around them clapped. He was stunned that, as terrified as they were, they would do such a thing. And when he used the limited Pashto or Farsi that he picked up from translators or other civilians, he saw it “was huge” for the person he was speaking with. “They were so happy you were trying to communicate.”
The good moments stand out, of course, because they were few and far between. Every win was worth holding onto. Seeing people overwhelmed with joy and relief as they came into the airport because they knew they were safe meant everything, the soldiers said.
‘We sent all of them to Abbey gate’
On Aug. 26, the soldiers were spread out around HKIA. Spc. Buckler, the fire control specialist with 1st Brigade, had been working at Abbey Gate in the days leading up to the attack. It was “so hectic,” he said, but that Thursday, he and other soldiers were told they weren’t needed there.
Meanwhile, Spc. Brantley and his team were providing security at another gate when a group of civilians approached.
“They were trying to figure out what gates to use to get in, and we sent all of them to Abbey Gate,” Brantley said, his voice shaking. “Before the explosion.”
U.S. Soliders with the 82nd Airborne Division check evacuees during an evacuation at Hamid Karzai International Airport, Kabul, Afghanistan, Aug. 25. U.S. service members are assisting the Department of State with a non-combatant evacuation operation (NEO) in Afghanistan. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Staff Sgt. Victor Mancilla)
After the attack, Buckler said many of the soldiers he was with — the ones who had been told they weren’t needed at the gate — wished they’d been there, thinking maybe something could have been different if they had. Despite the security they knew existed at the gate — Rolando said he had previously spoken with the Marines about the protective measures they had in place, and said he knew they were doing “everything they could to stop something like that from happening” — there was still a sense of what if? It’s not uncommon for those who live through a deadly event to carry misplaced feelings of guilt, or even shame, often called survivor’s guilt.
In the aftermath of the attack, Rolando said their command team was “very, very good” about acknowledging the pain of what had just happened and encouraged soldiers to talk with the chaplain. But they still had a job to do, and going forward it appeared that the tragedy forged an even stronger bond, both between different services and between the U.S. forces and their international partners on the ground.
Capt. Cody Chellman, the public affairs officer for the 1st Brigade, said he didn’t think “anybody saw service [branches] after that.”
“It was a somber moment,” he said. “There wasn’t a Marine Corps, there wasn’t a Canadian force or an international force — it was just one team, brother and sister in arms.”
This handout image shows U.S. Marines and Norwegian coalition forces assist with security at an Evacuation Control Checkpoint ensuring evacuees are processed safely during an evacuation at Hamid Karzai International Airport, Kabul, Afghanistan, Aug. 20. U.S. service members are assisting the Department of State with a non-combatant evacuation operation (NEO) in Afghanistan. (Photo by Staff Sgt. Victor Mancilla / U.S. Marine Corps via Getty Images)
‘I feel like I let down a 20-year generation of soldiers’
As the Aug. 31 deadline for the withdrawal neared, U.S. troops began boarding C-17s and departing the country. It was an eerie thing, Rolando said, seeing the number of American service members on the ground grow smaller and smaller and smaller, all the while watching the place he’d help protect for nearly two weeks slowly empty out.
The day before the withdrawal deadline, Rolando’s time at HKIA came to an end. As he boarded a plane, Brantley — who would leave on the last flight out just hours later — stayed behind. He was needed to work on the trucks they’d commandeered earlier. It was weird seeing his teammates, and friends, remain as he prepared to leave, Rolando said.
“Watching those guys stay there definitely was weird. You almost felt like you had to say goodbye because you weren’t sure you were going to see them again. It was quiet. It was weird,” he said. “Especially after how intense that initial Monday was and how intense some of those quick reaction force missions were — it was very, very weird.”
Paratroopers assigned to the 1st Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division return home from recent deployment to Afghanistan on Fort Bragg, N.C. September 6, 2021. The 82nd Airborne Division aided in security and evacuation operations during the United States withdrawal from Afghanistan in August. (U.S. Army photo by Staff Sgt. Kulani Lakanaria)
Buckler agreed that it was unnerving. But ultimately, everyone did depart, marking an official end, not just to the withdrawal, but to the war — a war that, for some of them, lasted a matter of weeks. But somehow, it didn’t feel over, not really. For Rolando, it felt more like “an open-ended question” than anything else, he said.
Brantley felt relief boarding the plane to go home, but it was harder to process that knowing how many other people weren’t going to get that opportunity.
Since coming home, Rolando said he’s caught himself filtering things out of his experience when he tells loved ones about that deployment. His parents called when he returned and he said he instinctually wanted to protect them from what he’d seen and experienced. There’s no shortage of lingering feelings about the deployment, and unanswered questions about what happens next in Afghanistan, especially with those the U.S. were unable to evacuate in time. Efforts to save vulnerable Afghans trapped under Taliban rule are still ongoing, though in smaller volume and often behind the scenes with the help of private groups and organizations.
In this Aug. 30, 2021, photo provided by the U.S. Air Force, a soldier, assigned to the 82nd Airborne Division, boards a U.S. Air Force C-17 Globemaster III aircraft in support of the final noncombatant evacuation operation missions at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul Afghanistan. (Senior Airman Taylor Crul/U.S. Air Force via AP)
But it’s also clear that questions remain about what this means for them, for the men and women who were there, many of whom are arguably too young to have to shoulder what happened over those two weeks. Too young to have to calmly yet firmly tell a sobbing mother that no, they can’t take her infant son or daughter with them, and no, they can’t bring her into the gates just yet.
Too young to feel that the outcome of a 20-year-war, a war started while many of them were children themselves, was somehow up to them. A feeling that, while not particularly fair, keeps with a long, painful tradition upheld by those who came before them and who shoulder a similar burden from the same war.
As the interview neared its end, and the soldiers recounted their feelings about leaving Kabul once and for all, Rolando expressed bluntly how he felt now that it was over:
“I feel like I let down a 20-year generation of soldiers that have been fighting there. We kind of just handed over a country on a platter.”
Brantley and Buckly, on either side of him, looked at their feet.
Another soldier cut in. Sgt. Maj. Alex Licea, the public affairs sergeant major for the 18th Airborne Corps, who had been sitting quietly throughout the interview, spoke up: “You didn’t, by the way,” he said. “You didn’t.”
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10. Bomb threats evacuate Ivy League campuses after similar calls to Miami University, Ohio University
Bomb threats evacuate Ivy League campuses after similar calls to Miami University, Ohio University
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Yale University bomb threat forces several buildings to evacuate
Several buildings on Yale University’s campus in New Haven, Connecticut, were evacuated and closed due to a bomb threat. Credit: Gabriela Rassi
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Multiple Ivy League college campuses were evacuated on Sunday following reports of bomb threats, days after several Ohio universities received similar threats.
Cornell, Columbia, and Brown Universities all issued emergency alerts after receiving bomb threats Sunday afternoon. They each evacuated buildings and cautioned students to stay away from campus.
In Ithaca, New York, Cornell police cordoned off the center of campus on Sunday after receiving a call that bombs were placed in four buildings. In New York City, Columbia University police issued a campus-wide emergency alert after receiving bomb threats at university buildings at about 2:30 p.m.
James Brennan, a 25-year-old Cornell law student from the Town of Greece, said he was relaxing in his Ithaca apartment when the first alert came. He and other law students joined an online group chat, trying to sort out fiction — there were initial erroneous rumors of an active shooting incident — from fact, he said in a telephone interview Sunday.
Eventually, the campus alerts clarified the threat, Brennan said. He said the law school is not particularly active on a Sunday, but "does get a few people in there."
Cornell lifted the warning at about 7:30 p.m., stating on Twitter that "law enforcement has concluded search of the Ithaca campus; no credible threats were found. It is safe to resume all normal activities."
Columbia issued a statement following an investigation Sunday.
"Today's bomb threats were deemed not credible by the NYPD and the campus buildings have been cleared for reoccupancy," the university announced on Twitter. "We thank those individuals affected for their patience and cooperation in evacuating."
Brown University officials in Providence, Rhode Island, sent a text alert to students that said police were investigating “multiple buildings on campus involving a bomb threat.” Later in the day, Brown also decided the threats were not legitimate.
In New Haven, Connecticut, on Friday afternoon, a non-emergency communications line received a call alerting authorities to a bomb that referenced specific locations around the Yale campus, according to the Hartford Courant.
On Saturday, Ohio University received a similar threat. University police determined that it wasn't credible, and also said in a tweet that the source of the threat is "the same as several other false bomb threats recently made to other universities across the country."
Cleveland State University in Cleveland, Ohio, received a bomb threat on Thursday, according to Fox 8.
Contributing: The Associated Press; Gary Craig, Rochester Democrat and Chronicle
11. AUKUS shows Europe’s security no longer a US priority
I guess everything is zero zum. A new relationship, organization, pact here means a lessening of support somewhere else. Everybody wants their piece of the US security guarantees.
I would hope a European "wake-up call" would be because it understands the security environment and not because of US actions to secure its global interests.
AUKUS shows Europe’s security no longer a US priority
Security pact a wake-up call for Europeans to do more to safeguard their strategic interests including in the Indo-Pacific
The Australia-UK-US (AUKUS) security pact is a European – not just French – issue. While the canceled contract with Australia was not about European submarines, and the strategic partnership with Australia was not with the European Union, EU leaders and heads of European states did more than sympathize with the French.
EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Josep Borell stated that EU member states consider AUKUS as “affecting the European Union as a whole.” Michael Roth, the German Secretary of State for European affairs, called it a “wake-up call for everyone in the EU” and German Foreign Minister Heiko Mass said the manner in which it was established was “irritating and disappointing, not only for France.”
Why are Europeans worried? First, the way AUKUS was negotiated and announced led to a crisis of confidence across the Atlantic because it suggests that Europe is no longer the US priority.
For Europeans, the problem is less the loss of a contract than the way France was treated. If this is how the United States acts with France, which has the strongest military in the European Union and its second-largest economy, what would keep Washington from doing the same with any other European country?
Furthermore, if AUKUS confirms that the Indo-Pacific is now the priority for the United States, it implies Europe is no longer the strategic partner it once was. Not only did it sideline France – which is at the forefront of Europe’s growing Indo-Pacific engagement – but it also did so on the very day the European Union released its own Indo-Pacific strategy.
In addition, AUKUS directly impacts the security architecture in the Indo-Pacific, where the European Union has strategic interests and its own approach, as developed in its strategy for cooperation in the Indo-Pacific. AUKUS might complicate Europe’s deepening cooperation with Australia, and European countries could be tempted to limit engagement with the Indo-Pacific more generally.
One reason for the crisis might be the absence of political appointees in the Biden administration—no ambassadors in Europe, and Karen Donfried was only confirmed as assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs in late September.
Even Biden’s tour in Europe in June was remarkable in the way the communiqués of the G7, NATO, and EU-US summits all mentioned China, paving the way for more awareness in Europe over this challenge.
Furthermore, Ukraine (a European, though not an EU, state) claimed to be “surprised” when the United States decided to permit the completion of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.
The Russian pipe layer vessel Akademik Cherskiy is pictured in the waters of Kaliningrad, Russia last year as construction of the Nordstream 2 gas pipeline neared completion. Photo: AFP / Mikhail Golenkov / Sputnik
The withdrawal from Afghanistan was not a collective decision: The G7, EU, UN, and NATO’s secretary-general called on the Americans to extend the August 31 deadline to end evacuations, but the US response did not meet their expectations.
Finally, the lifting of the travel ban (expected in November) was not announced until September 20, despite high vaccination rates in Europe. Other countries with lower vaccination rates have not been subject to such a ban.
Last straw
AUKUS is the last straw. It is a wake-up call for Europeans, a clear sign that they must do more to safeguard their strategic interests. The US commitment to Article 5 remains iron-clad, but Europeans might wonder what the US stance would be if a crisis emerged in Europe’s neighborhood, especially one impacting Europe but not the United States.
If the United States were to leave Iraq, what would the Europeans do – considering that the American armed forces ensure force protection?
First, Europe does not have a shared strategic vision. To form one will require some collective imagination: as Carnegie Europe’s Judy Dempsey put it, “Strategic autonomy is meaningless” if Europe does not “collectively suppose strategically.”
The EU strategy for cooperation in the Indo-Pacific was a significant step in enhancing a shared vision, and it will inform the future strategic compass (to be released in March 2022 under the French EU presidency). The European Union should agree on the key challenges ahead, and new EU special envoy to the Indo-Pacific Gabriele Visentin will be essential to foster consensus.
EU High Representative Jossep Borell announces the new strategy outline on September 17, even as AUKUS announcement upstages him. Photo: Euronews
European states differ in their views of China, which the European Union has labeled a “systemic rival,” an “economic competitor” – but also a “negotiating partner.”
It will not be easy to adopt a new EU strategy on China, but the recent report from the European parliament is a first contribution. It calls for engaging Beijing on matters of global concern – climate, health, and nuclear disarmament – but also defending core European values and interests, including engaging China in a human rights dialogue.
The report says no comprehensive agreement on investment can be reached while China sanctions European members of parliament and institutions – Beijing’s sanctions themselves are a response to EU sanctions on individuals believed to be responsible for repression in Xinjiang. Meanwhile, the report suggests an EU investment agreement with Taiwan.
Second, Europe must demonstrate that it is ready to be the global actor the European Union wants to be. This comes with a price – both financial (increasing investments in defense spending or developing critical capabilities) and political.
The endorsement of the EU strategy on the Indo-Pacific by the heads of states in October is significant in this regard. Implementing the strategy, including its security component (increasing naval deployments and port calls, for instance) will demonstrate to regional actors and the United States that Europe is a key Indo-Pacific actor, offering a unique approach that it can implement.
Third, the European Union must engage in an open-eyed discussion with the United States on European security (not limited to European territory). Organizing focused dialogue on security and defense (with an agenda item on the Indo-Pacific) as promised during the EU-US summit last June would be a welcome initiative.
High-level consultations on the Indo-Pacific later this year, which were announced by Secretary of State Antony Blinken and High Representative Josep Borell, would also give the United States an opportunity to encourage Europeans to step up.
NATO will remain the cornerstone of European collective defense, but the United States has much to gain from a more credible, stronger European defense, as acknowledged by Biden in the joint communiqué with French President Emmanuel Macron.
Significantly, the communique states that the United States “recognizes the importance of a stronger and more capable European defense that contributes positively to transatlantic and global security and is complementary to NATO.”
Fourth, regaining trust with Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States is vital for further cooperation. How it happens will be critical. Opening avenues for cooperation in the Indo-Pacific, between the European Union and the Quad (as considered in the EU strategy) would be a positive step.
The fruitful meeting on October 29 paves the way for France and the United States to restore this trust. This positive dynamic is yet to be found with Australia and the United Kingdom.
AUKUS will have lasting effects on European security. It revealed how much the strategic environment had changed and how the European Union’s critical security partners intend to operate in it.
Europe must step up, not only to secure its own strategic interests but also to participate in renewing a more balanced and more effective transatlantic relationship, including in the Indo-Pacific.
Marie Jourdain (MJourdain@AtlanticCouncil.org) is a visiting fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Europe Center. She worked for the Ministry of Defense’s Directorate General for International Relations and Strategy in Paris.
12. ‘Desert warships’ spark new fears at the Pentagon
An aircraft carrier in the desert must be an easy target. But I still worry about what the Chinese are not showing us. What are we missing?
‘Desert warships’ spark new fears at the Pentagon
Maxar Technologies said the satellite pictures were from the northwestern province of Xinjiang
It appears to be a desert firing range like no other — located in Ruoqiang, in China’s northwestern desert region of Xinjiang, there are giant mock-up warships that are shaped like a US Ford-class aircraft carrier and Arleigh Burke-class destroyer.
And it has raised the alarm of US Pentagon officials, who fear that China is seriously gearing up for a shooting war over the Taiwan issue.
Satellite images captured by Colorado-based satellite imagery company Maxar Technologies show that China has built mock-ups of US ships on what appears to be a military firing range — suggesting they will be used for target practice, the UK’s Daily Mail reported.
It comes amid a massive military build-up by Beijing that has seen it develop new nukes, battleships, jet fighters, tanks and missiles while massively expanding its armed forces as it takes an increasingly bullish stance on the world stage.
Beijing and Washington are currently at loggerheads over Taiwan — an island China has vowed to “reunify” despite Biden saying he is willing to defend it — with tensions further growing in the South China Sea.
The independent US Naval Institute said on its website that the mock-ups of US ships were part of a new target range developed by the People’s Liberation Army.
Maxar identified the location as Ruoqiang, a Taklamakan Desert county in the northwestern Xinjiang region.
Targets include at least one stationary aircraft carrier, two stationary destroyers, and one aircraft carrier attached to a rail and designed for moving target practice.
It was not clear from the images how many details had been included, although USNI said it had identified features on the destroyer including funnels and weapons systems which reveal it is designed to mimic the Arleigh Burke-class.
China’s massive military upgrade has emphasized the development of land, sea and air-launched missiles to deny access and possibly sink opposing vessels, expressed most emphatically by the land-based DF-21D ballistic missile known as the “carrier killer.”
The Chinese military is using mock-ups of a U.S. aircraft carrier at a weapons-testing range in a remote western desert, new satellite imagery shows, indicating the PLA means business. Credit: Maxar via Twitter.
Recent months have also seen a substantial increase in Chinese military flights just southwest of Taiwan, the self-governing island republic claimed by Beijing as its own territory and which it threatens to annex by force.
The Chinese navy is the largest maritime force on Earth, boasting a total of 355 vessels, the US Defense Department revealed in a recent report.
China’s navy, known as the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN), has 355 ships and submarines, with an estimated 145 major surface combatants.
The navy is also readying its ability to carry out long-range precision strikes against land targets and enhance its anti-submarine warfare, further strengthening China’s global power projection capabilities, the report noted.
And this number is only expected to grow in the future, with the Defense Department anticipating the Chinese fleet to grow to 460 ships by 2030.
In addition to the world’s largest navy, China also possesses the world’s largest standing army and the third-largest air force. This is in addition to the country’s noted nuclear capabilities.
General Mark Milley, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, said: “We’re witnessing one of the largest shifts in global geo-strategic power the world has witnessed.
‘Today [China] has capabilities in space and cyber, land, sea, air, undersea, and they are clearly challenging us regionally.
‘So we have a case here of a country that is becoming extraordinarily powerful, that wants to revise the international order to their advantage.
‘That’s going to be a real challenge over the coming years. In the next 10, 20 years. That’s going to be really significant for the United States.”
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said at a daily briefing Monday that he had no information about the images, saying, “I’m not aware of the situation you mentioned.”
“The mockups of several probable US warships, along with other warships (mounted on rails and mobile), could simulate targets related to seeking/target acquisition testing,” according to the AllSource Analysis summary, which said there are no indications of weapon impact areas in the vicinity of the mockups.
“This, and the extensive detail of the mockups, including the placement of multiple sensors on and around the vessel targets, it is probable that this area is intended for multiple uses over time.“
Analysis of satellite images shows that the carrier target structure was first built between March and April of 2019. It underwent several rebuilds and was then substantially dismantled in December 2019.
The site came back to life in late September of this year and the structure was substantially complete by early October.
Sources: The Daily Mail, ABC News, USNI News, Jerusalem Post, US Department of Defense
13. Adding India to the Five Eyes Would Cause a New Cold War, Pakistani Official Says
An intelligence sharing agreement seems to really rattle some by giving the appearance that it is some kind of alliance organization.
Adding India to the Five Eyes Would Cause a New Cold War, Pakistani Official Says
Proposal in the U.S. Senate draws harsh words as Islamabad works up a new anti-terrorist effort.
Adding India to the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing club would hurt U.S.-Pakistan relations as Islamabad tries to coordinate a regional response to a growing Afghanistan terror threat, a senior Pakistani official said Friday.
“It’s a recipe for a new Cold War, a recipe for a new divide, and if you are going to have that, the lines will be drawn,” Sen. Mushahid Hussain Sayed, who leads the Senate Defence Committee, told reporters at a private event hosted by the Pakistani embassy.
Sayed was responding to a question about proposed legislation in the U.S. Senate that would order the Pentagon to look at adding India and several other Asia-Pacific countries to the decades-old intel-sharing agreement between Australia, Britain, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States.
He stopped short of saying that if India ultimately joined the Five Eyes group, Pakistan would place new limits on what it shares with the United States. But he said the move would hurt U.S.-Pakistan ties, which could affect coordination on Afghanistan policy.
The United States has asked Pakistan not to recognize the Taliban, Sayad said, and so Pakistan is taking its time and looking for a regional consensus on the issue of legitimizing the new government in Kabul, bringing in Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, China, Russia, Iran, and possibly others.
“Also, we are waiting to see what the [United States] does,” he said.
Sayed said U.S. officials should view the Taliban of today as different from the one that U.S. forces overthrew two decades ago.
“I feel they are chastened, more pragmatic. They know this is not the Afghanistan of the 1990s. They do not have a pan-Islamic perspective,” he said, meaning that the group no longer wants to export the harsh brand of Islam it has restored to power in Afghanistan.
He added that Islamabad was surprised by the Taliban’s swift victory, and denied reports that the Pakistan intelligence service, which reportedly has excellent ties to the group, knew about its rapid progress over the summer.
“We didn’t expect what was happening” in August, he said.
Soon after the Taliban takeover, Sayed said, Pakistan began trying to coordinate a regional response to ISIS-K and other terror groups. On Sept. 9, he said, Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency hosted “an unprecedented meeting” of the intelligence chiefs of neighboring countries plus Russia.
“We all agreed on a common counter-terror strategy in concert with the new administration in Kabul. So it’s a work in progress, but the [United States] should be on board,” he said.
He said ISIS-K militants threaten to cross the border into Pakistan, mount terror attacks, and retreat to Afghanistan.
“That’s our main concern. It’s a nightmare for us,” he said.
It is also a reversal of the way Al Qaeda once used hard-to-reach places in Pakistan as safe havens to launch cross-border attacks in Afghanistan.
14. How Taiwan Underwrites the US Defense Industrial Complex
Interesting analysis here. Are semiconductors a center of gravity or achilles heel?
How Taiwan Underwrites the US Defense Industrial Complex
Advanced semiconductors play an important role in the defense industry, and Taiwan supplies the lion’s share of those chips.
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Advanced semiconductors play an important role in the defense industry. This is increasingly so as the U.S. military posture relies on relatively few high-quality systems that are underwritten by advanced microelectronics. While supply chain visibility is low, especially in the defense sector, it’s clear that semiconductors increasingly provide significant value to complex weapons systems – and that Taiwan provides the steel in the spine for the U.S. defense industrial complex.
Semiconductors for commercial and military applications are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Electronic components in sophisticated military systems use many of the same logic and memory chips that appear in consumer electronics. For example, field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are frequently used in military systems due to their low-cost and high modularity. However, there are military-specific requirements that call for semiconductors with certain features. While commercial chip production is heavily driven by cost and timely, large-scale production, the defense sector’s demand for chips emphasizes performance. Namely, military-specific chips must be more durable and reliable, have a higher heat tolerance, and in some cases, be radiation tolerant.
As such, many military-specific chips contain compound semiconductors, which have superior electronic properties such as high electron mobility and direct band gap compared to silicon-only based semiconductors. Specifically, gallium arsenide (GaAs) and gallium nitride (GaN)-based chips appear most frequently in military-specific applications. Radio-frequency integrated circuits (RFICs) and monolithic microwave integrated circuits (MMICs) use GaAs and GaN technologies for a wide range of defense and aerospace uses. These include electromagnetic spectrum operations, signals intelligence, military communications, space capabilities, radars, jammers, and more.
Taiwan plays a central role in global compound semiconductor manufacturing. To illustrate, Taiwan’s WIN Semiconductors holds 9.1 percent of the total GaAs device market share, third in the world behind American firms Skyworks (30.6 percent) and Qorvo (28.6 percent). But in terms of pure-play GaAs foundry revenue, WIN Semiconductors holds by far the largest share at 79.2 percent. The next three firms are Tainan-based AWSC (8.6 percent), California-based GCS (4.2 percent), and Hsinchu-based Wavetek (3.4 percent). Together, the top three Taiwanese firms hold over 90 percent of the GaAs foundry market.
However, the United States has done well to keep critical defense-related compound semiconductor manufacturing onshore and, in many cases, in-house. Many U.S. defense primes, such as Raytheon and Northrop Grumman, and other contractors maintain their own foundries, most of which are certified as trusted suppliers to the U.S. government as part of the Department of Defense’s Trusted Foundry Program. An American stronghold over power and analog semiconductor devices is the primary reason why manufacturing in this case has been kept onshore. Drivers in the analog semiconductor market differ from those in digital semiconductors, which are characterized by longer life-cycles and lower capital equipment requirements. These defense-related semiconductors are largely untethered by advancements in the broader commercial market for state-of-the-art capabilities. However, as weapons systems require increasingly advanced chips, U.S. primes may have to lean on Taiwan for compound semiconductor manufacturing in the future.
Yet this reliance would only represent an even larger share of defense-related semiconductor dependencies on Taiwan. While compound semiconductor production has largely been kept onshore, advanced commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) chips will play an increasingly vital role in weapons systems. For example, a radar system that uses FPGAs for transmit/receive module processing would source from Taiwan, as TSMC is the world’s leading manufacturer of these chips. Other devices such as computer processing units (CPUs), graphics processing units (GPUs), and memory chips at advanced nodes are also mostly manufactured outside of the United States – most notably in Taiwan.
Reliance on Taiwan semiconductor production is due to the emergence of the fabless business model. As fierce competition among U.S. semiconductor firms rose in the 1980s, so did capital equipment costs for fabricating advanced chips. Fabs became more expensive as semiconductor devices got smaller, due to greater requirements for atomically-precise fabrication technology, more expensive manufacturing equipment, and increasingly complex designs. American semiconductor firms found it more efficient to separate design activity from chip manufacturing and even more so to focus on the former. Due to high margins from the fabless model and large capital expenditures associated with maintaining foundries on U.S. soil, many American firms began to outsource manufacturing overseas, most of which went to Taiwan.
Despite current private and public sector efforts in the U.S. to advance domestic semiconductor manufacturing capabilities, American dependencies on Taiwan are unlikely to reduce. That is because immense costs of maintaining and advancing state-of-the-art fabs continue today. TSMC’s forthcoming $12 billion Arizona fab costs roughly the same as the U.S. Navy’s Ford-class aircraft carrier. At the moment, the U.S. government and semiconductor industry are unwilling to compete on the same footing with Taiwanese investment. While the CHIPS Act, which passed the U.S. Senate and is awaiting markup in the House of Representatives, will allocate $52 billion for domestic semiconductor R&D and manufacturing, TSMC alone intends to spend $100 billion over the next three years in the same areas.
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Although the fabless model has surged U.S. tech companies like Nvidia and Apple to the top of the commercial market, it has had significant impacts on the defense sector’s supply chain security of semiconductors. Today, the largest U.S. manufacturer of GaAs semiconductors, Skyworks, while maintaining its own fabs, is to a degree reliant on Taiwan’s WIN Semiconductors for its foundry services. The largest producers of FPGAs are American firms Xilinx, Lattice, Intel, and Microchip Technologies, and they all depend on Taiwan in one form or another. While Xilinx invented the FPGA, most of its semiconductor wafers are manufactured by TSMC and UMC, with TSMC being the primary provider for advanced devices.
Taiwanese semiconductors provide critical functionality for advanced U.S. systems such as advanced fighters and ballistic missile defense systems. If requirements for compound chips surpass what Trusted Foundries can provide, Taiwan may soon be the largest provider of both compound and COTS semiconductors to the U.S. defense industrial establishment. Supply chain disruptions during a peacetime environment might not have short-term consequences; however, increased disruptions to production ahead of, and during, war would present a vulnerable chokepoint for American forces. Semiconductor supply chain disruptions in Taiwan would impact production, maintenance, repair, and overhaul at least two to five tiers upstream.
The reality is that the military demand in the semiconductor market is a drop in the bucket. Adhering to market demands, the commercial sector has outpaced national security focused requirements in innovation and cutting-edge technology. Gone are the days of ARPANET; the U.S. defense sector has little say in the direction of semiconductor trends and bases much of its systems on commercially available platforms. Continuing this path, adversaries that have similar access to such technologies could reverse engineer, out-innovate, and reduce American force impacts.
As the U.S. military grows increasingly dependent on American commercial technology firms, who in turn depend on Taiwanese chip manufacturing, a path forward could be to more closely coordinate and integrate U.S. and Taiwan defense and technology sectors. This could come in the form of a U.S.-Taiwan Senior Level Steering Group for Supply Chain Security and Defense Industrial Cooperation. As defense technologies trend toward more integrated, autonomous, and unmanned platforms, more advanced semiconductors will be increasingly central to weapons systems. The United States and Taiwan would do well to explore co-development and co-production of next generation defense platforms. If the two leading semiconductor powers nurture the development of future commercial applications, this could benefit the evolution of bleeding-edge military technologies.
15. Pentagon: Allies’ ‘Views and Perspectives’ Being Considered in Nuclear Posture Review
Pentagon: Allies’ ‘Views and Perspectives’ Being Considered in Nuclear Posture Review
The U.S. has consulted with allies regarding its ongoing Nuclear Posture Review and will continue to do so, the Pentagon said Nov. 8 after a media report indicated other nations have been pressing President Joe Biden not to change American policy on the use of nuclear weapons.
“Without getting into specific details, I mean, for understandable purposes, what I can tell you is that we are, as appropriate, consulting with allies and partners in the course of this review and certainly remain open to listening to and hearing out their perspectives,” Pentagon Press Secretary John F. Kirby told reporters during a briefing.
The Nuclear Posture Review, scheduled to be released in 2022, will likely set U.S. policy for its nuclear weapons arsenal and comes at a key moment. China has dramatically built up its array of intercontinental ballistic missile silos in recent months, while U.S. lawmakers continue to debate whether to modernize several aging legs of the nuclear triad or extend them.
Biden has said in the past that the U.S. should move to a policy of “sole purpose” whereby the sole purpose of American nuclear weapons is to deter nuclear use against the U.S. or its allies. Others, meanwhile, have pushed for a “no first use” policy, whereby the U.S. would pledge to never use nuclear weapons first in a conflict.
The Financial Times reported Oct. 29 that U.S. allies, including the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Japan, and Australia, were all lobbying Biden not to commit to a “no first use” policy, arguing that doing so would weaken deterrence against China and Russia.
Citing two anonymous sources, the Financial Times also indicated that the U.S. sent a “questionnaire” to allies “who provided an overwhelmingly negative response to any changes in nuclear policy.”
On Nov. 8, Reps. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.) and Michael McCaul (R-Texas), ranking members of the House Armed Services Committee and House Foreign Affairs Committee, respectively, announced they had sent a letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III, requesting a copy of that questionnaire, as well as “copies of each response received from U.S. allies, and any other cables or memos conveying ally views regarding a potential change in U.S. nuclear declaratory policy.”
That same day, Kirby declined to comment on the letter sent by Rogers and McCaul, saying he had not seen it. Yet while he did not directly confirm the Financial Times report, he did indicate that partner nations were welcome to provide their input on the nuclear posture review.
“I think across the review itself, the views and perspectives of our allies and partners are important and consultations with them and hearing them out and their perspectives has been and will continue to remain important as the review continues down the path,” said Kirby.
“I’m certainly not going to speculate one way or the other about policies inside that review and what that’s going to look like,” Kirby added. “But I would tell you just two things. It has been and remains an inclusive, comprehensive process that’s looking at the broad swath of our strategic deterrent capabilities here in the United States. And number two, any policy decision of that nature is going to ultimately be made by the President of the United States.”
16. 5 key updates in the Pentagon’s 2021 China Military Power Report
5 key updates in the Pentagon’s 2021 China Military Power Report
Senior Fellow
November 8, 2021
Last week, the Pentagon released its 2021 China Military Power Report, an annual review of military and security developments in China. The report includes a number of updates on last year’s version — here are five top items to take note of:
1. Nuclear advancements: Whereas the 2020 report surprised many by estimating that China’s stockpile of nuclear warheads was in the low 200s, the 2021 version states: “The accelerating pace of the PRC’s nuclear expansion may enable the PRC to have up to 700 deliverable nuclear warheads by 2027. The PRC likely intends to have at least 1,000 warheads by 2030.” In addition, China “is implementing a launch-on warning posture, called ‘early warning counterstrike.’” The report notes that “China has commenced building three solid-fueled ICBM silo fields, which will cumulatively contain hundreds of new ICBM silos.” These developments place China “on the cusp of a large silo-based ICBM force expansion comparable to those undertaken by other major powers.” Furthermore, “The PRC is also supporting this expansion by increasing its capacity to produce and separate plutonium by constructing fast breeder reactors and reprocessing facilities.” In sum, these changes suggest that Beijing is reshaping its nuclear posture, with significant implications for both nuclear and conventional escalation dynamics.
2. Missiles developments: Estimates of the number of China’s ballistic missiles are up across the board. Inter-continental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) are up to 150 from 100, and intermediate-range ballistic missiles (IRBMs) have been clarified as numbering 300, a change from the 200+ figure last year. However, launcher numbers remained the same for both. Perhaps most notably, estimates for medium-range ballistic missiles (MRBMs) are up considerably to 250 launchers and 600 missiles compared to 150 launchers and 150+ missiles last year. Short-range ballistic missiles (SRBMs) went from 600+ to 1,000. Finally, ground-launched cruise missiles (GLCMs) were clarified as numbering 300. Another development to watch was in hypersonics, with the report noting that China has begun to field “its first operational hypersonic weapons system, the DF-17 hypersonic glide vehicle (HGV) capable medium-range ballistic missile (MRBM).” Combined with recent revelations about China’s testing of a fractional orbital bombardment system, it is clear that Beijing is rapidly expanding its missile capabilities.
3. Overseas capabilities: For the first time, the 2020 report specifically identified places China might be considering for potential bases and logistical hubs. This year’s report highlights legal changes and military developments aimed at advancing China’s overseas influence. It notes that a revision to the National Defense Law “tasked the PLA with defending ‘overseas development interests.’” The report also highlights China’s expeditionary capability, noting the rapid development of “a limited capability to project ground power as an expeditionary force . . . [including] to speed up its transition from regional defense to trans-theater operations.” Platforms like ocean-going amphibious transport docks, the Liaoning and Shandong aircraft carriers, and the 2020-commissioned Renhai-class cruiser are key to building out China’s power projection capabilities. These capability changes reinforce our expectation that China will accelerate development of power-projection systems in coming years.
4. Cross-strait tensions: The 2021 report finds that China is expanding its forces and capabilities relevant to military operations against Taiwan. The total number of active-duty army personnel was the same in 2020 and 2021, but this year 4,000 more are reportedly stationed near the Taiwan Strait. China increased its landing ships and amphibious transport docks by 20, with 49 of 57 stationed near Taiwan. The report also notes that China has 15 more submarines (diesel attack, nuclear attack, and ballistic missile versions) than last year. Finally, China has increased its fighters by 100 overall. In addition, the report comments that Chinese leaders believe “advanced technologies, such as cloud computing and big data analytics, are changing the future of warfare faster than expected.” China is seeking to use these capabilities to alter the military balance across the Taiwan Strait and beyond.
5. China’s objectives: Last in this list, but certainly not least, is a reframing of China’s objectives. The 2021 report explicitly describes China’s goals as seeking to “match or surpass U.S. global influence and power, displace U.S. alliances and security partnerships in the Indo-Pacific region, and revise the international order to be more advantageous to Beijing’s authoritarian system and national interests.” The report goes on to emphasize that China’s leaders view the competition in ideological terms and warns that they “are increasingly willing to confront the United States and other countries in areas where interest[s] diverge.” Tensions between the United States and China continue to grow, and exchanges have been made more difficult by the COVID-19 pandemic. These factors are to blame for a steep decline in US-China military exchanges, which fell from 18 last year to four this year. Overall, the 2021 China Military Power Report paints a picture of a country that is growing more capable militarily while also adopting a more risk-acceptant posture.
17. Fear, Honour, and AUKUS in the Indo-Pacific
Good title. Thucydides remains relevant. The classics provide explanations for strategic calculations even today.
Conclusion:
In the same way that the mere presence of a submarine creates a profound effect on its operating environment, AUKUS achieves its most meaningful contribution to the Indo-Pacific without needing to deliver a single capability. The message of this strategic commitment of like-minded nations and their resolve is the true value of the partnership. Thucydides’ tryptic of fear, honour and interest provides thoughtful reflection into the motives of great powers and how the underlying themes of AUKUS generate a useful lens in which to view this behaviour. The fear of great power competition is contextualised in the strategic risk, latent power and resolve that AUKUS signifies. Pragmatic international relations and realism are now in favour over risk to reputation, honour and agency. Furthermore, the conflation of interests and values can no longer be conveniently viewed in isolation and the interdependence of nations, and the international system is now more transparent. The final insight into the shifting sands of great power competition in the Indo-Pacific is that Australia’s ambition for middle-power diplomacy has evolved to becoming a regional power with real agency.
Fear, Honour, and AUKUS in the Indo-Pacific
Great power competition in the Indo-Pacific has been an evolving determinant in Australian foreign policy over the past decade and many have argued that a choice needed to be made between the U.S. and China. To date, Australia has enjoyed the benefit of a hedging strategy that embraces the economic prosperity of a close trading relationship with China while maintaining a close security alliance with the U.S. This strategy has been tested recently and the tension between values and interests requires focused attention. If there was previously any doubt on where that pendulum would swing, it is now firmly answered in the announcement of AUKUS, an Australian, U.K. and U.S. security partnership. Initially the status of the commitment was ambiguous, was it another treaty, pact or renewed alliance? Terminology aside, what is resoundingly clear is that this trilateral security partnership is the most significant capability announcement in Australian defence policy history. A primary commitment under the AUKUS agreement is to deliver nuclear-powered submarines to Australia through the shared technology of the U.S. and U.K.
While the capabilities that AUKUS will provide represent a fundamental paradigm shift, the true meaning in this announcement is the long-term strategic commitment and pragmatic approach to offshore balancing in the Indo-Pacific.
This essay asserts that the real significance and true value of AUKUS is in the message its signatories send rather than the capability it will deliver. While the capabilities that AUKUS will provide represent a fundamental paradigm shift, the true meaning in this announcement is the long-term strategic commitment and pragmatic approach to offshore balancing in the Indo-Pacific. The rise of China and inevitable conflict stemming from an emerging power is commonly compared to Thucydides’ account of the rivalry between Athens and Sparta.[1] The principles and motives on which this is founded—fear, honour and interest—provide the framework to unpack the significance of AUKUS.
Fear: Strategic Competition and Great Power Rivalry
The AUKUS partnership directly addresses the growing fear of unchecked Chinese ambition and belligerence in the Indo-Pacific. Moreover, the significance of the U.S. and U.K. sponsoring a like-minded middle power with nuclear and other emerging technologies achieves a new threshold of offshore balancing not seen since the Cold War. In fact, one can draw similarities between the emergence of NATO, to the AUKUS announcement and the first in-person Quad Summit occurring in the same week. Certainly, the perception from Beijing is that the Cold War zero-sum mentality of creating specific alliances to isolate China from Asia is comparable to the containment strategies of Russia in Europe.[2] In this sense, the Western powers’ use of coalitions and defence arrangements to provide offshore balancing against a regional hegemon is a classical move in great power rivalry.[3] These events signal a shift in geostrategic priorities from the West, further amplified by the withdrawal from Afghanistan and the release of the European Union’s Indo-Pacific Strategy.
Although there are no absolutes in international relations and nothing is forever, AUKUS provides a defining moment in Australia’s commitment to great power competition in the region.
The significance of AUKUS has no immediate benefit to capability, but the underlying message and how the three nations delivered it provide meaningful insight into the purpose of the partnership and future implications. The capability that nuclear propulsion provides Australia will not be realised for almost two decades, and while the collaboration of emerging technologies such as AI, cyber security and quantum communications are significant, it is the strategic commitment that the partnership symbolises that provides the real insight. In fact, AUKUS offers a reduced capability in that Australia is now without a formal contract for submarines in the immediate future. The nature of sharing such technologies and commitment required by all parties is touted as a perpetually binding contract described by the Australian Prime Minister as a “forever partnership.”[4] The significance is heightened by the rarity of such privileged arrangements, with the last one occurring between the U.S. and U.K. in 1958.[5] Although there are no absolutes in international relations and nothing is forever, AUKUS provides a defining moment in Australia’s commitment to great power competition in the region.
The pragmatism and diplomacy shown by all three leaders of AUKUS demonstrates a marked turning point in contemporary international relations and highlights the level of strategic risk willing to be accepted to restore balance to the region.
Just as defining is the context and circumstances of the AUKUS announcement. AUKUS was a surprise both domestically and amongst other close allies, not to mention Australia reneging on a $90 billion contract with France for diesel-electric submarines.[6] The impact of the announcement and delivery of the underlying message was so important that France was not privy to the decision until the night before. This seemingly deliberate diplomatic calculation resulted in the recall of the French Ambassadors from America and Australia, illustrating just how much value France placed on the impact of the announcement by the AUKUS members. The diplomatic fallout of the cancelled French contract only serves to reinforce the importance of the message and emphasis on strategic realism, with the Australian Prime Minister responding that, although a difficult decision, he would not apologise for making decisions in the national security interest.[7] The pragmatism and diplomacy shown by all three leaders of AUKUS demonstrates a marked turning point in contemporary international relations and highlights the level of strategic risk willing to be accepted to restore balance to the region.
U.S. President Joe Biden unveils the AUKUS security initiative in the East Room of the White House in Washington, D.C., on September 15 2021, with Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson. (EPA)
Honour: The Clash of Cultures and National Pride
The management of alliances, diplomacy and statecraft is crucial to bridging the differences in cultures and ideologies, as well as aligning common interests and values. Although the current international system provides more opportunities to save face and resolve differences than in the Peloponnesian War, the concept of honour as a human condition is inextricably linked to the nature of war.[8] The Indo-Pacific provides an arena in which the contest of cultures is being played out and the Anglosphere sponsorship of nuclear technology in the region has raised the stakes. In contrast, the more immediate and tangible outcome of Australia’s privileged access to future technologies is less controversial. Instead, it is the nature of the nuclear agreement and strategic commitment that has hurt the national pride, agency and prestige of other cultures.
…the inherent and latent power of an AUKUS partnership is more valuable than the capability it may provide.
Even with seemingly close allies with shared values, the nature of AUKUS is conflicted. The “stab in the back” and emotive language from France highlights the fallout from the trilateral partnership.[9] France has considerable history, territory and maritime claims in the region. Australia recognises this influence and considers France a close partner with shared interests and defence agreements. France’s umbrage is less about a lost defence contract and more to do with the indignation of being treated as an outsider to a privileged partnership. The exclusivity of this partnership and the perceived insult to national pride are the causes of France’s emotive response, which is in stark contrast to the pragmatic approach of the members of AUKUS. It should also be noted that France has nuclear submarines that Australia could have considered, but the inherent and latent power of an AUKUS partnership is more valuable than the capability it may provide.
…the honour and agency at stake is not just a bipolar contest between China and the U.S., but a nonlinear system where real or perceived injustices may have a disproportionate effect across the region and the world.
There has also been a cautious response from countries within the Indo-Pacific who are understandably surprised by recent developments. Some nations that share the view that China’s rise and assertiveness is contrary to regional interests have expressed concerns about AUKUS, including Indonesia, whose Foreign Minister warns against “a continuing arms race and power projection in the region.”[10] In part, this is because of the lack of consultation and sense of exclusion. Even amongst the revered ANZUS alliance, New Zealand has made its views on nuclear power very clear and will not permit such Australian submarines in its territorial waters. Therefore, the honour and agency at stake is not just a bipolar contest between China and the U.S., but a nonlinear system where real or perceived injustices may have a disproportionate effect across the region and the world.
Interests: Free and Open Indo-Pacific
The key insight that AUKUS provides is the level of strategic commitment and risk that like-minded partners are willing to accept for a free and open Indo-Pacific. These interests form the basis of many historical forums and multilateral agreements, but have now manifested to a statement of intent that signals significant potential. The combination of AUKUS and the Quad Summit signify a new threshold of strategic commitment that aligns interests and values with a shared sense of purpose towards an emerging threat. These partnerships stand out from previous pivots to the Pacific and offset strategies by the manner and timing in which they have been announced. The escalation of China’s wolf warrior diplomacy and economic coercion has precipitated a multilateral response that signals the resolve of traditional allies to accept strategic risk to achieve a free and open Indo-Pacific.
The message of this strategic commitment of like-minded nations and their resolve is the true value of the partnership.
The nexus between these economic and security interests have always been a source of tension in the Indo-Pacific, with Australia historically able to hedge prosperity with the East and security with the West. However, the impact of a global pandemic on most nations’ domestic priorities, the implications of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and perceptions of an America First strategy have necessitated the containment of China’s offensive realism and ambitions in the Indo-Pacific.[11] In terms of capability, AUKUS provides some immediate effect to achieve this by sharing innovative technologies focused on countering anti-access/area-denial threats, regional deterrence, and maintaining freedom of navigation in the South China Sea. Furthermore, in the same week as the Quad Summit and AUKUS announcement the Australia-U.S. Ministerial Consultations released a joint statement confirming more U.S. presence and cooperation in Australia. In particular, enhancing U.S. Force Posture Initiatives that will see a “combined logistics, sustainment, and maintenance enterprise to support high-end warfighting and combined military operations in the region.”[12] The sequencing and stage management of all these events, not to mention the presence of a U.K. Carrier Group in the South China Sea, supports a clear assertion of a more pragmatic approach to Western interests in the Indo-Pacific.
Conclusion
In the same way that the mere presence of a submarine creates a profound effect on its operating environment, AUKUS achieves its most meaningful contribution to the Indo-Pacific without needing to deliver a single capability. The message of this strategic commitment of like-minded nations and their resolve is the true value of the partnership. Thucydides’ tryptic of fear, honour and interest provides thoughtful reflection into the motives of great powers and how the underlying themes of AUKUS generate a useful lens in which to view this behaviour. The fear of great power competition is contextualised in the strategic risk, latent power and resolve that AUKUS signifies. Pragmatic international relations and realism are now in favour over risk to reputation, honour and agency. Furthermore, the conflation of interests and values can no longer be conveniently viewed in isolation and the interdependence of nations, and the international system is now more transparent. The final insight into the shifting sands of great power competition in the Indo-Pacific is that Australia’s ambition for middle-power diplomacy has evolved to becoming a regional power with real agency.
Joe Wheatley is an Officer in the Australian Army. The views expressed are the author’s alone and do not reflect those of the Australian Government or the Defence Force.
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Header Image: PCU Virginia (SSN 774), Norfolk, Virginia, 2004. (US Navy).
[1] Richard Strassler, The Landmark Thucydides: Comprehensive Guide to the Peloponnesian War (New York: Touchstone Books, 1998), 16.
[3] John Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: WW Norton & Company, 2001, 141.
[5] Greg Sheridan, “Xi Jinping is the Real Creator of AUKUS and the Quad Unity,” The Australian Newspaper, 25 September, 2021, 16.
[7] Scott Morrison, “AUKUS Press Conference.”
[8] Colin Gray, The Future of Strategy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015), 100.
[9] Staunton, “AUKUS: France’s strategic outcry.”
[11] Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, 4.
18. Sanctions Reform Should Start with the Treasury Office Enforcing Them
They are of little use without a strong commitment to enforce them.
Conclusion:
The best way to strengthen and preserve U.S. interests and national security is an approach that revitalizes all U.S. agencies like OFAC that enforce U.S. sanctions — such as the Bureau of Industry and Security at the Commerce Department and the Office of Economic Sanctions Policy and Implementation at the Department of State — with the necessary human and technological resources to fulfill their missions. Doing so will put sanctions enforcement on a sound and solid foundation, which matters given policymakers’ frequent recourse to employ sanctions as a way to achieve U.S. interests and protect national security. Step 1, which calls for a structured policy framework, probably already exists and only requires minor tweaking or actually employing it. Multilateral coordination (step 2) and sanctions calibration (step 3) are sorely needed and easy to implement. Making sanctions easier to understand enhances compliance but duplicates past efforts at Treasury at improving outreach to the private sector. These first four steps mask the immense challenges facing the United States when it comes to using economic sanctions as an effective policy instrument. Economic sanctions first require investment and political support from both the executive and legislative branches of the U.S. government. Taking the path of least resistance will only undermine U.S. economic dominance and security for the Biden administration and future administrations.
Sanctions Reform Should Start with the Treasury Office Enforcing Them - War on the Rocks
In 2019, Hizballah called on its supporters to send donations. These calls came as U.S. economic sanctions impeded the group’s ability to access financial networks and forced it to cut salaries and other benefits to its employees. According to the U.S. Treasury, sanctions ultimately “degrad[ed] its malign influence” throughout the Middle East and weakened the influence of its sponsor Iran as well. America’s use of and dependence on economic sanctions as a national security tool has been buttressed by successes like these, and the earlier combination of U.S. and E.U. sanctions and cooperation widely credited with bringing Iran to the negotiating table over its nuclear program in 2015.
But the increasing reliance on economic sanctions placed significant pressures on the Treasury Department in fulfilling its mandate and raised the risk of losing a useful tool to overuse — so much so that, when Joe Biden came to power in January 2021, he promised that the United States would reevaluate its use of economic sanctions. Treasury just released the promised sanctions review, recommending five steps to modernize sanctions. The final recommendation, to shore up the offices charged with administering and enforcing economic sanctions, is the most crucial. Without first addressing Treasury and Office of Foreign Assets Control’s foundation — modernizing its sanctions technology, growing and maintaining its workforce and infrastructure — U.S. interests and security remain at risk, and any attempt to refine America’s use of economic sanctions will fail.
As the Oct. 18 report indicates, Treasury’s workload — and specifically that of the Office of Foreign Assets Control, or OFAC, charged with administering and enforcing U.S. economic sanctions — has only increased in the last four years as the United States has used its economic power to wield sanctions against not only Iran but also North Korea, Russia, and Syria. It also uses sanctions to combat drug kingpins and counter terrorism. OFAC sanctions designations have risen considerably, from 912 in 2000 to over 9,000 in 2020. U.S. sanctions regimes have also nearly tripled in number from 69 in 2000 to just under 180 in 2021. The Biden administration should prioritize the modernization of Treasury’s sanctions technology, grow its workforce dedicated to sanctions enforcement, and improve its monitoring and compliance infrastructure so that OFAC and Treasury can handle this workload and cope with the challenges of enforcing a growing portfolio of economic sanctions.
While only seven pages in length, the report represents — at least publicly — the new administration’s desired shift in the use of economic sanctions, departing from the Trump administration’s “maximum pressure campaigns” and “sanctions wall.” The four initial steps outlined in the report reflect changes in how the United States uses and applies economic sanctions to foreign policy and national security considerations. These steps impact the contours of economic sanctions. Step 1 urges the adoption of “a structured policy framework that links sanctions to a clear policy objective.” Step 2 advocates for multilateral coordination, when possible, while steps 3 and 4 recommend mitigating economic sanctions’ humanitarian impacts (as well as political and economic impacts) and making sure that U.S. economic sanctions are easily understood, enforceable, and adaptable.
Beyond Treasury’s issues of modernization, lack of human resources, and out of date infrastructure, the use of economic sanctions over the last several years has been complicated by several factors: their overuse, their humanitarian impacts, allies who want to see a more cautious and judicious use of economic sanctions, and the development of special-purpose vehicles by the European Union to avoid U.S. economic sanctions. U.S. and E.U. policymakers have rarely seen eye-to-eye on the use of economic sanctions, with the European Union preferring a more targeted approach that minimizes the humanitarian impacts on a target state’s civilians. In June 2021, the Biden administration and the European Union held a virtual summit whose purpose was to repair relations between Washington and Brussels after four years of difficult relations with the Trump administration. The joint communication that emerged from the summit highlighted the need not only for deeper cooperation in the implementation and enforcement of economic sanctions but also greater coordination between the United States and European Union in their administration.
The lack of harmonized sanctions regimes between the United States and the European Union is a historical problem. The United States’ decision during the 1990s to impose secondary sanctions, and extraterritorial applications of those sanctions, against Cuba and then Iran saw the European Union push back diplomatically against U.S. efforts to interfere with its trade interests, instituting a blocking mechanism that made it illegal for E.U. companies to comply with U.S. sanctions. Diplomatic efforts led the European Union to withdraw the blocking mechanism, but this mechanism returned during the Trump administration as the E.U. Commission sought to preserve the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action and keep Iran compliant with the nuclear agreement. The European Union also then debuted the Instrument in Support of Trade Exchanges, or INSTEX, a special-purpose vehicle that allows trade to take place without the need for money crossing borders.
Special-purpose vehicles are subsidiaries of firms utilized to keep risk off the parent company’s balance sheets. In the case of INSTEX, the special-purpose vehicle is backed by E.U. member states, rather than any single firm, and allows E.U. firms seeking to trade humanitarian goods with Iran to trade instead with European importers and exporters of Iranian goods, eliminating the need to exchange payments directly with Iranian firms. Payments for E.U. firms are settled within the European Union through INSTEX. A separate special-purpose vehicle in Iran settles transactions between Iranian importers and exporters for E.U. goods. While INSTEX has not handled significant volumes of trade, the creation of this unique mechanism showed it had the potential to undermine U.S. sanctions, as financial transactions occur domestically without crossing any borders. These alternative payment mechanisms — the result of the reality that the United States and Europe just cannot agree on what to do with sanctioned states — complicates OFAC’s mandate.
The sanctions review also recommended “calibrating sanctions to mitigate unintended economic, political, and humanitarian impact.” During the Trump administration, the “snapback” of economic sanctions against Iran and the “sanctions wall” that administration attempted to impose on Iran after the United States withdrew from the nuclear deal imposed significant barriers for humanitarian aid agencies and human rights groups. As Kolja Brockmann and I discuss in a recent Stockholm International Peace Research Institute publication, “overcompliance” — when firms cut all business and trade ties with Iranian counterparts in order to avoid any potential violation of U.S. secondary sanctions, even when some trade is still legal and permissible — has made it difficult for aid groups and other humanitarian relief agencies to purchase supplies and medicines for sanctioned targets like Iran, as banks and other companies cease operations with the country to avoid the risk of being sanctioned. Responding to criticism that aid was unable to reach places like Iran, which had been hit by earthquakes and floods during the Trump administration, Treasury instituted a procedure that aid organizations could utilize to avoid OFAC’s enforcement and penalties. The new procedure, however, created significant extra work for humanitarian groups and aid organizations, requiring anyone wishing to transfer humanitarian assistance to capture information on the identity of Iranian customers, account balances for those individuals and entities involved in the transaction, the business relationships of those individuals, written commitments from Iranian distributors that such aid would not go to sanctioned individuals or entities in Iran, and a litany of other documentation.
Figure 1. OFAC civil penalties since the Biden administration assumed office in January 2021. Dashed line indicates the mean penalty imposed as of October 2021. Chart generated by the author.
The complex, confusing, and often contradictory mechanism for sending aid worsened a dire humanitarian situation compounded by COVID-19. While it is unknown how many aid organizations and nongovernmental organizations utilized this humanitarian mechanism, the cumbersome nature of the policy not only created headaches for aid organizations but introduced additional layers of scrutiny for OFAC, which is already overworked and understaffed. The complexity and difficulty in keeping up with OFAC regulations and the United States’ use of economic sanctions also makes the Treasury’s recent report — especially step 4, which calls for “ensuring sanctions are easily understood, enforceable, and adaptable” — more critical. The amount of information required to send aid to sanctioned countries was itself a deterrent to providing aid and failed to mitigate the real or perceived risks foreign financial institutions felt in supporting humanitarian trade. As Bryan Early and I noted in a previous contribution to War on the Rocks, as well as in our research on OFAC’s enforcement of U.S. sanctions, E.U. firms, in particular, are sure to remember the staggering fines (nearly $1 billion in one case) the Obama administration imposed on Europe’s financial sector between 2009 and 2015 for violations of Iranian Transactions and Sanctions Regulations, among other U.S. sanctions regimes. These fines — the largest in OFAC’s history – served as a powerful deterrent against violating U.S. economic sanctions and U.S. foreign policy interests.
For Treasury and OFAC to realize the administration’s ambitious goals — to make sanctions clearly linked to a policy objective, multilateral, easily understood, and calibrated to prevent unintended humanitarian or political effects — OFAC should first address its resource deprivation. Exact numbers about OFAC’s budget and staff are hard to come by, and the agency has declined to release that data. Banks and other entities have sought OFAC expertise by poaching Treasury personnel, and OFAC lost at least 7 percent of its staff (14 out of 200 personnel) to the private sector between 2013 and 2014. Andrew Desiderio has also highlighted how OFAC became “depleted” at a critical time when the Trump administration indicated it was leaving the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action and reimposing sweeping sanctions against Iran. Russia and its meddling in the 2016 election spurred efforts by Congress to compel the Trump administration to take a harder line and impose further sanctions with H.R. 3364, The Russia, Iran and North Korea Sanctions Act. North Korea, too, required continual monitoring, especially as it was revealed recently that North Korea continues to make use of “correspondent banking” in the United States to facilitate its money laundering and proliferation finance activities.
Since Biden assumed office in 2021, there have been 14 civil enforcement actions against entities inside and outside the United States. While the first year of the Biden administration featured roughly the same number of enforcement actions as Trump’s first year in office, the average penalty issued during Trump’s first year was significantly higher, more than ten times higher than those enforcement actions issued this year. The lack of resources identified by Desiderio and others likely impacts OFAC’s ability to enforce economic sanctions effectively through the imposition of penalties. It takes time and staff power to hunt for violations, and more time and staff power to determine whether the violations were egregious and thus punishable with higher fines. This inability to impose stiffer penalties undermines Treasury and OFAC’s main deterrent in stopping domestic and foreign firms from undermining U.S. economic sanctions and foreign policy prerogatives.
Figure 2. Average penalty across voluntary disclosure of OFAC violations during the first term of the Trump administration in 2017. Chart generated by the author.
This decline in the average penalty goes to the heart of step 5 in the Treasury’s report and further underlines the need to modernize OFAC, grow its ranks, and improve its infrastructure. Figures 2 and 3, which show the average penalty for violations voluntarily disclosed, are further evidence of OFAC’s lack of resources. Historically (between 2003 and 2019), voluntary disclosures have accounted for 25 percent of OFAC’s total publicly released enforcement activity. Voluntary disclosures during the Biden administration are double the historical trend at 50 percent. Why is voluntary disclosure key? Voluntary disclosure refers to those instances cited in enforcement actions where entities self-report their violations and alert OFAC to having violated U.S. laws and regulations. Entities that engage in this behavior often get lower penalties on average and typically enjoy better outcomes. while those that fail to voluntarily disclose their violations run the risk of their sanctions violations being listed as egregious, which increases the penalty substantially.
In Figure 2, which shows the average penalty in the first term of the Trump administration by whether the penalty resulted from a voluntary or non-voluntary disclosure, the average penalty is 89 times higher for violations that had not been voluntarily disclosed. This suggests that, in 2017, OFAC found and punished a lot of violations that were not voluntarily disclosed — relying on its own resources or investigations, or those of other U.S. agencies, to discover entities, both foreign and domestic, violating U.S. sanctions.
Figure 3 shows the average penalty across voluntarily and non-voluntarily disclosed violations during the first year of the Biden administration. As the figure shows, OFAC now relies more heavily on voluntary disclosures. It may indicate an under-resourced OFAC as the average penalty for voluntarily disclosed violations is 27 percent higher than violations not voluntarily disclosed. One might attribute this shift to the late start of the Biden administration, but OFAC sanctions enforcement activity during these first ten months is comparable to the Trump administration’s. OFAC is handling roughly the same number of violations as it did in 2017, but most of the violations in 2021 are voluntarily disclosed and thus receive lower penalties.
Figure 3. Average penalty across voluntary disclosure of OFAC violations during the first term of the Biden administration as of Oct. 22, 2021. Chart generated by the author.
The lack of resources (i.e., a staff of approximately 200 personnel) means that OFAC relies on foreign and domestic companies to police themselves. In 2019, Andrea Gacki, speaking before the American Bar Association in Washington, D.C., discussed OFAC’s new compliance framework, which places greater emphasis on the presence and development of compliance programs, shifting the onus of sanctions enforcements onto entities themselves. While OFAC publicly states that these changes reflect efforts to signal its “compliance expectations,” the lack of resources likely played a significant role in the development and debut of this framework that shifted the responsibility and costs to the private sector, which likely contributes to their overcompliance and de-risking behaviors.
As the United States adds entities and individuals to its list of “specially designated nationals” and increases the number of countries and non-state actors targeted, the private sector faces significant pressure to modernize its compliance framework. While Treasury has made efforts to incentivize these investments, firms may find it cheaper to abandon sanctioned markets. Small and medium-sized firms may find sanctions compliance costly and challenging, making it more advantageous to scale back overseas trade.
If the Biden administration and the U.S. Treasury under Secretary Janet Yellen is serious about reforming the use of U.S. economic sanctions, step 5 in the Treasury report should take precedence over all the other steps outlined in the report. An OFAC that is properly funded by Congress and supported by the executive branch will permit the Biden administration to address steps 1-4 more adroitly. OFAC cannot rely on the deterrent effect of punishing foreign firms with heavy fines as financial institutions, particularly foreign ones, have become more mindful of compliance to avoid blistering penalties from the Obama era. As Bryan Early and I point out, those financial “whales” may have been fished to extinction. OFAC can no longer rely on easy targets to fulfill its mandate or to achieve deterrence and should now go after the smaller fish, which requires more personnel, time, and resources.
Second, the targeting of foreign firms, especially European ones, only complicates OFAC’s mandate and jeopardizes U.S. partnerships and the ability of the United States to realize short- and long-term foreign policy goals. The use (and sometimes abuse) of economic sanctions comes in part from the power and dominance of the U.S. dollar in the global financial system. But the United States’ (over)use of economic sanctions may paradoxically end up weakening the dollar: t led Europe to develop special-purpose vehicles like INSTEX, and though it is largely untested, Russia and China are likely to use it as a model in their efforts to distance their economies from the U.S. dollar. Firms once preoccupied with running afoul of U.S. authorities and facing millions of dollars in penalties can now take this risk off their ledgers and pass that risk to INSTEX, an attractive proposition for countries looking to avoid U.S. secondary and extraterritorial sanctions. The special-purpose vehicle — in theory — provides a shield to E.U. firms seeking to provide humanitarian aid. However, if it proves helpful and develops into a less cumbersome mechanism for the settlement of trade, other goods, such as oil, may soon be exchanged through it. If successful, U.S. economic and financial sanctions would be jeopardized and threats of being isolated from the U.S. banking system would have little effect. U.S. leverage would decline considerably.
Any reforms or adjustments to the United States’ use of economic sanctions to preserve this leverage are likely to fail without first mitigating Treasury’s resource deficit. It is unsurprising that step 5 is last on the list of changes policymakers at Treasury plan to pursue. Steps 1-4 are simpler to realize and can be done within the executive branch alone. A sizeable increase in Treasury’s annual appropriation to increase hiring and add significant resources to the budget not only requires congressional involvement but is likely to compete with the pandemic, the president’s infrastructure bill, and the Democrats’ focus on “Build Back Better,” as these initiatives garner significantly more attention from the public than sanctions enforcement.
The best way to strengthen and preserve U.S. interests and national security is an approach that revitalizes all U.S. agencies like OFAC that enforce U.S. sanctions — such as the Bureau of Industry and Security at the Commerce Department and the Office of Economic Sanctions Policy and Implementation at the Department of State — with the necessary human and technological resources to fulfill their missions. Doing so will put sanctions enforcement on a sound and solid foundation, which matters given policymakers’ frequent recourse to employ sanctions as a way to achieve U.S. interests and protect national security. Step 1, which calls for a structured policy framework, probably already exists and only requires minor tweaking or actually employing it. Multilateral coordination (step 2) and sanctions calibration (step 3) are sorely needed and easy to implement. Making sanctions easier to understand enhances compliance but duplicates past efforts at Treasury at improving outreach to the private sector. These first four steps mask the immense challenges facing the United States when it comes to using economic sanctions as an effective policy instrument. Economic sanctions first require investment and political support from both the executive and legislative branches of the U.S. government. Taking the path of least resistance will only undermine U.S. economic dominance and security for the Biden administration and future administrations.
Keith A. Preble is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of political science at Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy and is a graduate research associate with the Center for Policy Research’s Project on International Security, Commerce, and Economic Statecraft (PISCES).
19. Pentagon scaremongering in bid to justify US' aggressive nuclear policy
From a Chinese Communist Party mouthpiece. I think it would be interesting to compare the "talking points" in this article with those of pundits we hear around the world. Which came first, the pundits or the party's talking points?
Pentagon scaremongering in bid to justify US' aggressive nuclear policy: China Daily editorial
The Pentagon building is seen in Arlington, Virginia. [Photo/Agencies]
A report released last week by the US Department of Defense on China's military development, which alleges that China is increasing its nuclear weapons arsenal much more quickly than anticipated, narrowing the gap with the United States, is simply wild and biased speculation.
The claims have been denounced by China, as they are not based on facts and are aimed at misleading the international community and diverting attention from the US building up its nuclear strike capabilities. It is known to all that the US already boasts the largest and most advanced nuclear arsenal in the world, making it the biggest nuclear threat. Statistics from international think tanks indicate, as of early 2021, the US had 5,550 nuclear warheads.
But even that formidably destructive arsenal is not enough. With the world's sole superpower adopting an increasingly aggressive global strategy, it is investing trillions of dollars to upgrade its "nuclear triad" — its nuclear forces on land, in the sea and in the skies. It has not only developed low-yield nuclear weapons but also resumed research and development of land-based medium-range ballistic missiles and sought to deploy them in Europe and the Asia-Pacific.
Worse, the US has lowered its threshold for the use of nuclear weapons and unilaterally withdrawn from key international nuclear disarmament treaties including the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty.
And to serve its greater global strategic purposes, it has formed a new Anglo-Saxon military alliance with the United Kingdom and Australia solely with the aim of containing China.
In contrast, China sticks to a self-defensive nuclear strategy, with its nuclear forces always being kept at the minimum level required to safeguard national security. It remains committed to the nuclear weapons policy of no-first-use at any time and under any circumstances, and the country clearly and unconditionally pledges that it will never use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against nuclear-free countries and regions.
China's Ministry of National Defense has repeatedly asserted that the country's military development is solely for safeguarding national sovereignty, security and development interests. It is for crushing any ploy to undermine regional peace, stability and prosperity and does not target or pose a threat to any other country.
Even if the People's Liberation Army has heightened its combat preparedness and increased training and other activities in response to the US' strategic provocations over the Taiwan question and the South China Sea issue, China's defense policy is still defensive in nature.
The Pentagon's conspiratorial report, instead of hoodwinking people around the world, only lays bare its own strategic intentions. The Pentagon is just making excuses for the US to hike its own defense budget and implement an aggressive strategy targeting China. By revealing that the US believes there are advantages to be gained in provoking a competitive nuclear relationship with China, the Pentagon has made clear it is the US that is pushing nuclear escalation.
20. Pentagon intensifies effort to evacuate families of Defense Department service members from Afghanistan
Pentagon intensifies effort to evacuate families of Defense Department service members from Afghanistan
CNN · by Oren Liebermann, CNN
(CNN)The Pentagon has intensified its effort to evacuate the families of Defense Department service members and civilians from Afghanistan, creating a system to track the number of immediate family members who remain there more than two months after the US withdrawal.
In a memo, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Colin Kahl asked Defense service members and civilians to submit via email relevant information about their immediate family still in Afghanistan -- data that had previously been tracked by the services. Elevating the data collection to within the purview of the under secretary of defense will make it easier to pass this information on to the State Department, which leads the effort to evacuate American citizens, green card holders and others from the country.
"I think it's safe to say ... that we would expect dozens of service members would have concerns over family members," Pentagon press secretary John Kirby said at a news briefing Monday.
The memo, first reported by NBC News, was written last Thursday and refers specifically to immediate family members, defined as spouses or unmarried children under the age of 21.
The number of extended family members of US troops and Defense Department civilians remains unclear, a defense official told CNN, and it could be a much higher number than immediate family members. For extended family, the Pentagon says it will assist the State Department and the coordinator for Afghanistan relocation efforts "as they develop mechanisms that may facilitate the safe departures for such individuals from Afghanistan in the future."
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"Given the current situation in Afghanistan and the absence of an in-country US embassy presence, there are a number of challenges related to departures of Afghan nationals, including those of unique interest to DoD," Kahl wrote. "However, DoD, will continue to provide support in this relocation effort to the greatest possible extent."
The Pentagon's efforts to evacuate American citizens and allies from Afghanistan officially ended with the withdrawal of US forces from Kabul at the end of August. Since then, the State Department has led the evacuation effort and worked with US allies such as Qatar to continue them.
Last week, the State Department said it was in touch with 289 Americans who remain in Afghanistan. Of those, 81 are ready to leave the country, Deputy Secretary for Management Brian McKeon told House lawmakers.
The effort to evacuate the family members of US service members and Defense Department civilians from Afghanistan is part of a much broader relocation and resettlement effort that has seen the US bring approximately 77,000 Afghans into the country as part of Operation Allies Welcome.
The Biden administration has struggled with the sudden influx of evacuees with no clear timeline on how long they may stay at military bases. More than 50,000 remain at military facilities as they complete their visa processing.
On Monday, the Department of Homeland Security said the US is planning to waive fees for many of the Afghan evacuees to apply for work permits and legal permanent resident status. The waiver means that the evacuees, many of whom arrived in the United States with very little, will be exempt from paying costly application fees to get authorization to work or apply for lawful permanent residence.
CNN · by Oren Liebermann, CNN
21. Beijing’s Taiwan Invasion Timeline: Two Predictions
Excerpts:
Their American counterparts are also situating Chinese strategy in the context of major international events. Former national-security adviser Robert O’Brien told Nikkei Asia in an interview published November 2 that a Chinese attack on Taiwan could follow the U.S. political calendar and that the Chinese would be unwilling to act before the Beijing 2022 Olympics: “That window between the Olympics and the next presidential election could be a window that President Xi believes that he has an opportunity to create mischief when it comes to Taiwan.” According to Nikkei, O’Brien said that Beijing would be eager to act before the potential election of a China hawk like Donald Trump or Mike Pompeo.
Taken with Chen’s comments, that suggests a narrower window — between Taiwan’s 2024 presidential election in January and the U.S. election ten months later — that could be particularly perilous.
Beijing’s Taiwan Invasion Timeline: Two Predictions
An illustration of military aircraft behind the Chinese and Taiwanese national flags, April 9, 2021 (Dado Ruvic / Reuters)
In recent days, two government officials — one Taiwanese, the other American — have made noteworthy predictions about just when the People’s Republic could attack Taiwan.
Chen Ming-tong, the director of Taiwan’s national-security bureau, last week told his country’s parliament that Chinese officials had debated attacking the Pratas Islands but decided against doing so before 2024, according to Reuters. Chen didn’t reveal the source of his intelligence.
The islands, which are in the South China Sea, are frequently cited as a potential target if Beijing decides to begin an incremental assault on Taiwan. In a report on the islands last summer, Bloomberg noted that they are “uninhabited except for a garrison of Taiwanese marines and coast guard officers” and that Beijing’s air-defense identification zone incursions regularly follow a path between Taiwan and these outlying islands, some 250 miles apart. On this Taiwanese defense-ministry map indicating the most recent incursion, the Pratas are marked by the purple dot, while the Chinese aircraft routes are shown by the red and green arrows:
In addition to the distance from Taiwan, defending Pratas Island entails a number of other challenging factors, as Yoshiyuki Ogasawara, a professor at the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, described at The Diplomat:
Pratas Island (the other “islands” in the group are essentially rocks) has an airport, but no permanent inhabitants, only a number of civil officials of the Taiwanese Coast Guard and researchers. It is believed that around 500 soldiers of the ROC Marine Corps are also now stationed there. However, because the island is so small and flat, it is almost impossible to defend.
Clearly, the Pratas would make for an enticing target if Beijing were to attempt an attack short of invasion to test the international response. Seizing the island group would be a viable option if Chinese officials wanted to impose punishing “half-measures,” as Stanford University’s Oriana Skylar Mastro put it in her testimony to the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission earlier this year. That scenario could well be the prelude to a more intense assault.
If the assessment presented by Chen is reliable, Taiwan’s leaders can be confident that such a contingency is not in their immediate future, though it may still be on the horizon: “Our assessment is that this will not happen during President Tsai’s tenure,” he said, according to Reuters. “In the next one, two, three, years, within President Tsai’s tenure, it won’t happen.” That’s not a long time. Tsai’s tenure will end in May 2024, when a new Taiwanese leader is inaugurated.
It’s not clear how Chen reached this conclusion, or whether a Chinese decision not to attack the Pratas means that Beijing won’t take a different stab at escalating its pressure on Taiwan, perhaps via going after a different island or putting in place a blockade. However, his comments give us a sense for how Taiwanese officials are thinking through this challenge.
Their American counterparts are also situating Chinese strategy in the context of major international events. Former national-security adviser Robert O’Brien told Nikkei Asia in an interview published November 2 that a Chinese attack on Taiwan could follow the U.S. political calendar and that the Chinese would be unwilling to act before the Beijing 2022 Olympics: “That window between the Olympics and the next presidential election could be a window that President Xi believes that he has an opportunity to create mischief when it comes to Taiwan.” According to Nikkei, O’Brien said that Beijing would be eager to act before the potential election of a China hawk like Donald Trump or Mike Pompeo.
Taken with Chen’s comments, that suggests a narrower window — between Taiwan’s 2024 presidential election in January and the U.S. election ten months later — that could be particularly perilous.
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.
