Quotes of the Day:
“Each of us was put here in this time and this place to decide the future of humankind. Did you think you were put here for something less.”
- Chief Arvol Looking Horse
“Never fight unless you have to. Never fight alone. Never fight for long.”
- Fox Conner
"The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge."
- Bertrand Russell
1. Joint Statement of the Leaders of the Five Nuclear-Weapon States on Preventing Nuclear War and Avoiding Arms Races
2. Russian attack in Ukraine should bring full-time US presence on Kremlin’s doorstep, former top generals advise
3. The U.S. Is Naive About Russia. Ukraine Can’t Afford to Be.
4. Hong Kong Government Snuffs Out More Media
5. Finland insists has right to join Nato, defying Russia’s demands
6. China enters new role as Pacific Islands policeman
7. US shows an exit ramp to Russia
8. A David nation puts the global Goliath in its place
9. Analysis | Fears mount about Russian cyberattacks in Ukraine
10. Five major issues the military will face in 2022
11. 5 Places Where World War III Could Erupt in 2022
12. Opinion | The cybersecurity risk to our water supply is real. We need to prepare.
13. AUKUS deal sets off 'a very big alarm' in China
14. Solving Syria’s Crisis Starts with Sanctioning Iranian Oil
15. Judge grants relief to Navy SEALs who refused coronavirus vaccine, sued Biden administration
16. ‘Close the loopholes’: The Pentagon’s next front in its hunt for extremists
17. With Donald Trump lurking, is the U.S. sleepwalking toward calamity?
18. The Information Warfare Myth
19. How Extremism Went Mainstream
20. Static Inertia: The Legal Challenges to Making Progress on an Effective Military Information Strategy
21. The most important number for China policy
22. Taiwan people's support sought
23. The End of Cyber-Anarchy?
1. Joint Statement of the Leaders of the Five Nuclear-Weapon States on Preventing Nuclear War and Avoiding Arms Races
Joint Statement of the Leaders of the Five Nuclear-Weapon States on Preventing Nuclear War and Avoiding Arms Races
JANUARY 03, 2022
•
The People’s Republic of China, the French Republic, the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and the United States of America consider the avoidance of war between Nuclear-Weapon States and the reduction of strategic risks as our foremost responsibilities.
We affirm that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought. As nuclear use would have far-reaching consequences, we also affirm that nuclear weapons—for as long as they continue to exist—should serve defensive purposes, deter aggression, and prevent war. We believe strongly that the further spread of such weapons must be prevented.
We reaffirm the importance of addressing nuclear threats and emphasize the importance of preserving and complying with our bilateral and multilateral non-proliferation, disarmament, and arms control agreements and commitments. We remain committed to our Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) obligations, including our Article VI obligation “to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.”
We each intend to maintain and further strengthen our national measures to prevent unauthorized or unintended use of nuclear weapons. We reiterate the validity of our previous statements on de-targeting, reaffirming that none of our nuclear weapons are targeted at each other or at any other State.
We underline our desire to work with all states to create a security environment more conducive to progress on disarmament with the ultimate goal of a world without nuclear weapons with undiminished security for all. We intend to continue seeking bilateral and multilateral diplomatic approaches to avoid military confrontations, strengthen stability and predictability, increase mutual understanding and confidence, and prevent an arms race that would benefit none and endanger all. We are resolved to pursue constructive dialogue with mutual respect and acknowledgment of each other’s security interests and concerns.
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2. Russian attack in Ukraine should bring full-time US presence on Kremlin’s doorstep, former top generals advise
Russian attack in Ukraine should bring full-time US presence on Kremlin’s doorstep, former top generals advise
The Combined Resolve XVI training exercise is held at the U.S. Army’s Joint Multinational Readiness Center in Hohenfels, Germany, on Dec. 7, 2021. It included soldiers from Ukraine and several other countries. (Tommie Berry/U.S. Army)
STUTTGART, Germany — The U.S. should expedite delivery of sophisticated weapons to Ukraine and warn Moscow that any new invasion of Ukrainian territory will result in permanent American military bases near Russia’s borders, 24 former senior government officials and experts recommended in a recent open letter.
The statement, which was issued Thursday by the Atlantic Council think tank, calls for a permanent NATO presence in the Black Sea region and the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia if a Russian military buildup along the border with Ukraine turns into an incursion.
Basing permanent forces in the Baltics would conflict with commitments outlined in the NATO-Russia Founding Act, which calls on allies to refrain from basing nuclear weapons or large numbers of permanent forces in new member states.
But a new Russian attack on Ukraine should invalidate elements of that act, the experts said in the statement.
“In short, Moscow appears to be setting the stage for launching a major conventional assault on Ukraine, even though the United States and NATO have shown a willingness to sit down and discuss Kremlin concerns,” the statement said.
Among the 24 signatories are former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Gen. Philip Breedlove and retired Army Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, two of the key U.S. military leaders in Europe during the aftermath of Russia’s 2014 military intervention in Ukraine.
The statement comes ahead of a meeting Jan. 10 between Washington and Moscow on the crisis in Ukraine.
Soldiers with the Ukrainian armys 1st Battalion, 95th Separate Airmobile Brigade fire a ZU-23, a twin-barreled, 23 mm, anti-aircraft gun, during training at the Yavoriv Combat Training Center near Yavoriv, Ukraine, Aug. 31, 2017. A group of defense experts called on the U.S. to expedite the delivery of anti-armor and anti-aircraft missiles to Ukraine, bolstering its defenses against possible Russian aggression. (Eric McDonough/U.S. Army)
In the meantime, the Kremlin has issued various demands to the West, including a pledge that Ukraine will never join NATO. Moscow also wants the alliance to cease troop rotations into the Baltic states.
On Sunday, U.S. President Joe Biden told Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelenskyy in a telephone call that the United States and its allies will “respond decisively” if Russia further invades Ukraine, the White House said.
The call came shortly after Biden’s conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin about easing tensions on the border with Ukraine, where the Kremlin has reportedly massed about 100,000 troops.
Following Russia’s 2014 annexation of Ukrainian territory, the U.S. and other allies increased military support to the Baltic states and Poland. Those NATO missions thus far have been rotational, although some military experts say they should be made permanent.
Other retaliatory measures that should be taken, according to the statement, include a package of “major and painful sanctions.”
The outline of the sanctions should be communicated to Moscow now “so that the Kremlin has a clear understanding of the magnitude of the economic hit it will face,” the letter stated.
Washington also must persuade Germany to cancel the new Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline in the event of a Russian attack, according to the experts.
Construction of the pipeline was completed, but it has not begun supplying Russian natural gas to Germany because certification is still pending.
The most important step for the West, however, is getting more military hardware into Ukraine, according to the statement.
“For the Kremlin, a large invasion of Ukraine works only if Russian forces are able to seize and hold Ukrainian territory without sustaining significant and constant casualties,” it said. “Western countries should act now to equip Ukraine’s military and territorial defense units with additional capabilities that can impose such costs.”
John Vandiver
John covers U.S. military activities across Europe and Africa. Based in Stuttgart, Germany, he previously worked for newspapers in New Jersey, North Carolina and Maryland. He is a graduate of the University of Delaware.Stars and Stripes · by John Vandiver · January 3, 2022
3. The U.S. Is Naive About Russia. Ukraine Can’t Afford to Be.
Excerpts:
Seen from Kyiv, the Western attitude toward Russia also looks incredibly naive. Since the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008, Americans and Europeans have constantly been surprised by Russia, by Russian aggression, by Russian territorial ambitions, by Russian interference in our own political systems, by Russian attempts to destroy our alliances. But although Putin varies his tactics, his longer-term goals have been very clear for a very long time. He might use disinformation one year, gas-pipeline blackmail another, bribery or violence the next, but the endgame is always the same: reinforce his autocracy, undermine democracies—all democracies—and push Russian political influence as far as it will go. Break up NATO. Destroy the European Union. Remove American influence from Europe and everywhere else, forever.
Americans need to stop being surprised by this list of goals, and instead start writing a list of our own. We could start with this one: Help make Ukraine the successful, prosperous, Western-facing democracy that Putin so clearly fears. Don’t make decisions about Ukraine without Ukraine. And don’t do these things because it’s nice for the children at the ice-skating rink in Kyiv—do them because, in this case, Putin’s analysis is not paranoid: A successful, prosperous, Western-facing democratic Ukraine would indeed pose a dire ideological threat to Russia, as well as to Belarus and to other autocracies in the region and around the world. It would prove to the inhabitants of other autocracies that they can escape the influence of their greedy, brutal leaders. Losing Ukraine, by contrast, would reinforce dictators in Moscow, Minsk, and even Beijing.
Biden has said he wants to “prove that American democracy can still do big things and take on challenges that matter most.” Mostly, he means domestic challenges. But some challenges abroad will also affect American confidence and credibility well into the future. Helping Ukrainians defend Ukrainian democracy is one of them.
The U.S. Is Naive About Russia. Ukraine Can’t Afford to Be.
Putin is right about one thing: A free, prosperous, democratic neighbor is a threat to his autocratic regime.
Children twirled around a skating rink just outside the president’s office in central Kyiv last week, while tourists took pictures of themselves in front of onion-domed, snow-dusted churches nearby. The stores were full of people shopping for the New Year’s holiday and Orthodox Christmas, just as they always are at this time of year. The airports were crowded.
In other words, nothing unusual was happening in the Ukrainian capital—nothing except for the contingency plans being made for a possible Russian invasion. You can’t see them from the skating rink, but more than 100,000 Russian troops are gathered around Ukraine’s borders, along with weapons, armed vehicles, field hospitals, and Black Sea battleships. Quietly, newspaper editors are asking journalists to get their documents in order, just in case they suddenly need to travel to war zones. A Western diplomat told me that people she knows are “getting familiar with the concept of the ‘go bag,’” luggage that you have packed and ready in case of emergency. Gallows humor is everywhere. When, a few days ago, the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense called on women to register with the army, a plethora of jokes and memes made the rounds on people’s cellphones (this sort of thing: an image of a man lying in bed beside his wife and thinking, When will they get on with it and mobilize her?). People wonder out loud if the Russians will come before or after their planned winter vacations, and muse about whether they should change the dates accordingly.
A sense of unreality underlies all of these conversations. This moment is “strange—very, very strange,” Andriy Zagorodnyuk, a former Ukrainian defense minister, told me. For people in his country, the Russian threat is both dire and entirely unsurprising. Zagorodnyuk noted, as everybody in Kyiv does, that Russia already invaded Ukraine in early 2014. The Russians already occupy Crimea, which is Ukrainian territory. Fake “separatists,” supplied with Russian weapons, already control a small piece of eastern Ukraine, where they continue to fight the Ukrainian army, every day of every week. Some 14,000 people, including both soldiers and civilians, have already died in a conflict that continues only because the Russian government wants it to continue. Before I even broached the subject of whether Ukraine’s armed forces were ready for a new offensive, Andriy Yermak, President Volodymyr Zelensky’s chief of staff, reminded me: “We are in a state of constant military preparedness now for eight years.” Precisely because the Ukrainians are permanently under attack from Russia, it is usually the Ukrainians who shout loudest and call for international attention when the fighting escalates, or when the Russian army conducts massive military exercises along their borders, as it did last spring. But not this time.
This time, the alarm bells are ringing louder in Washington than in Kyiv. Secretary of State Antony Blinken began warning European allies about a possible new Russian invasion of Ukraine several weeks ago, and rumors of genuinely terrible things to come are flying around other Western capitals too. An invasion of Kyiv. An occupation of the country. The warnings seem to be based not just on the operational intelligence that many have seen—ominous photographs of military equipment and personnel accumulating around Ukraine’s borders—but on strategic intelligence, insights into the thinking of Kremlin insiders, which U.S. officials are allegedly showing their allies.
The alarm bells are also ringing because of the public behavior of Russian diplomats and officials, including President Vladimir Putin, who have spent the past couple of weeks accusing the United States and its allies of nonexistent aggression, such as imaginary plans to use chemical weapons against Russian-backed forces in eastern Ukraine. In fact, the sole aggressor in the region is Russia. Russian troops occupy not only parts of Ukraine but also parts of Georgia and Moldova; Russian “advisers”—latter-day Soviet commissars—now prop up a violent dictator in Belarus and may be about to annex that country too. Russian propaganda organs regularly issue violent threats. On New Year’s Eve, the Russian state news agency RIA Novosti tweeted a prediction: “Russia will destroy Ukraine within 10 minutes.”
Yet Russia insists on declaring that it fears NATO, a defensive alliance that mostly still exists, in 2022, because so many Europeans fear Russia. Putin has kept up this victim act for so many years that it has become banal; even many Russian experts now accept this performance as normal. But even if he believes it himself—even if he thinks that a handful of American soldiers rotating in and out of Poland pose some kind of physical threat to Moscow—that doesn’t mean the rest of the world has to accommodate his paranoia. It’s as if an American president repeatedly demanded that Canadian troops withdraw to the Arctic Circle on the grounds that their presence near Detroit constituted an unacceptable threat, and the rest of the world murmured agreement. In truth, the only logical explanation for this nonsensical posturing is that it is designed to justify a totally unprovoked invasion of Ukraine—or the Baltic states, or who knows where else—sometime in the future, and that’s why it has people worried.
In Kyiv, the novelty of this moment has produced, among the people I spoke with, two schools of thought. The skeptical school essentially thinks this whole situation might be a huge bluff: The Russians have deliberately set out to “scare the Americans,” perhaps even by leaking jazzed-up versions of Kremlin debates, in order to create pressure on Ukraine to change its constitution as the Russians would like, or to put Putin at the center of international attention, or to reestablish a Russian sphere of influence inside old Soviet borders. If this deliberately organized panic is a game, the skeptics say, the Russians have chalked up some wins. President Joe Biden has now twice held one-on-one conversations with Putin. A whole series of new Russian-American, Russian-NATO, and Russian-European security talks are scheduled for January. The tone of the diplomatic conversation around Ukraine has changed too. No longer are negotiators focused on the actual crisis in eastern Ukraine. Instead, the focus is on the Russian-American and Russian-NATO relationships.
So far, the U.S. has not yet given Putin anything else. Crucially, Biden and other senior administration officials have repeated several times an old Polish phrase, “nothing about us without us,” often used in the region. It means that decisions about Ukraine will not be made above the heads of Ukrainians. This is the only legitimate response to Putin’s threats, many of which are intended to achieve the opposite: get the U.S. to cut the Ukrainians out of the loop.
Members of a more pessimistic school of thought can also see that the saber-rattling has been carefully planned. But they fear that it reflects a genuine change: Perhaps Putin has finally decided to realize his long-standing dream of removing Ukraine from the map. Back in 2008, the Russian president told leaders gathered at a NATO summit that Ukraine is “not a state.” Last summer, he published a long essay arguing, among other things, that Russians and Ukrainians are “one people.” He then sent that essay to every soldier in the Russian army. Putin’s interest in invading, occupying, dividing, or otherwise destroying Ukraine—a country that has no nuclear weapons and could not invade Russia—is not strategic. It is emotional. The collapse of the Soviet Union was, in his words, “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.” An expanded Russian occupation of Ukrainian territory might, in his view, help right that wrong.
Putin’s interest is also ideological. Every year, Ukraine becomes more confident, more united, more European. Every year, Ukraine inches a little bit closer to democracy and prosperity. What if it gets there? The idea of a flourishing, democratic Ukraine right on Russia’s doorstep is, for Putin, personally intolerable. Just as Ukrainian independence once seemed to Stalin to be a dire threat to his Bolshevik regime, so too would a successful modern Ukraine pose too great a challenge to Putin’s autocratic, sclerotic, kleptocratic, and ever more brutal political system. What if Russians start envying their Ukrainian neighbors? What if they decide they want a system like that too?
What the pessimists in Kyiv fear is this scenario: If Putin believes that Ukraine must be destroyed sooner or later; if he believes that historical wrongs must be righted; even if he just wants to gain back some of the popularity he has lost to COVID, corruption, and a poor economy, then he might have reasons to think that this is a good moment to do it. The Russians can see that the U.S. is divided, that Europe is exhausted by the pandemic and in need of Russian gas, that nobody is interested in new military adventures. They can also see that pro-Russian political forces in Ukraine are slowly losing ground, that Ukraine continues to invest in its military, and that others are doing so too.
Despite one very notable setback in Kyiv’s relationship with Washington—President Donald Trump tried to use military aid as a tool to blackmail Zelensky, and got impeached for it—the U.S. has continued to give Ukraine training and military assistance, including $450 million of defensive weapons this year. None of this would enable Ukraine to attack Russia, but it might help Ukrainians defend themselves. The Russians know this, and they could be calculating accordingly. One Russian analyst, Vladimir Frolov, notes that the costs of an invasion are steadily rising—because of Ukrainian economic growth, national consolidation, and military investment—and suggests that the price could rise more in the future, which is why Moscow should act now.
The Ukrainians are also thinking about that price, because they want to make it even higher: This is a subject about which both schools of thought in Kyiv agree. They know their country doesn’t have much of a navy or an air force, and it doesn’t have the most advanced anti-aircraft defenses either. But Ukraine has taken steps toward the creation of a territorial-defense force, run by the professional military but open to civilian volunteers. Small groups of enthusiasts, including recent veterans of the eastern conflict, have already formed their own training units. According to a survey conducted last spring, about 30 percent of Ukrainians (and 46 percent of men) say that they are willing to join an armed battle if an invasion occurs. In an interview in the Polish press, the former Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko spelled it out clearly: Ukraine wants to ensure that “every city and every home becomes a fortress. And that thousands of coffins are sent back to Russia.”
The Ukrainian army itself is also prepared to split into smaller units, less easily targeted by advanced weapons. This might not stop a Russian bombing campaign, but that isn’t the point. The point is to make anyone considering a longer-term occupation think twice. As Zagorodnyuk noted, even the most fanatical Russian military planner must realize that once an invasion begins, events will spin out of control: “You don’t know how many people you are going to lose, how quickly you’re going to advance,” he said. “And you will certainly have trouble keeping control of anything you have invaded.”
But here is where a second gap emerges between Kyiv and Washington, as well as a second reason why this moment is so “very, very strange.” The Ukrainians, in the government and in the opposition, have no difficulty understanding that their conflict with Russia will involve violence, because it already does. Americans and Europeans, meanwhile, desperately want a solution involving nothing more than diplomacy and sanctions. On some level, Biden seems to understand that this might not be possible. He has publicly promised to reinforce Ukraine militarily in the event of an invasion, and also says he will move more arms and equipment into the eastern NATO states. Dmytro Kuleba, the Ukrainian foreign minister, told me that although he is grateful for this promise, it does raise a question: “If Washington sees the threat is imminent, then the best time to give us more military support to reinforce our armed forces is now, not after the invasion begins.”
In fact, the best time to give Ukraine more significant military support would have been eight years ago. Or five years ago. Or three years ago. If the U.S. had done so, then there would be a lesser threat, or no threat, of Russian invasion now, because Putin would calculate the risks differently. But Americans didn’t step in, because President Barack Obama never took Russia seriously, because Trump was on Putin’s side in the global contest between autocracy and democracy, and because Democrats and Republicans alike have had other things to think about since Biden took office.
As a nation, the U.S. has also started to forget the most important strategic lesson of the Cold War: Deterrence works. The idea that you invest in weapons in order to create peace has always sounded paradoxical, but decades of stability in Europe, thanks to both the creation of NATO in the 1950s and the expansion of NATO in the 1990s, prove this to be true. If you share a land mass with a bully, then make sure you are well armed enough to keep him at a safe distance.
Seen from Kyiv, the Western attitude toward Russia also looks incredibly naive. Since the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008, Americans and Europeans have constantly been surprised by Russia, by Russian aggression, by Russian territorial ambitions, by Russian interference in our own political systems, by Russian attempts to destroy our alliances. But although Putin varies his tactics, his longer-term goals have been very clear for a very long time. He might use disinformation one year, gas-pipeline blackmail another, bribery or violence the next, but the endgame is always the same: reinforce his autocracy, undermine democracies—all democracies—and push Russian political influence as far as it will go. Break up NATO. Destroy the European Union. Remove American influence from Europe and everywhere else, forever.
Americans need to stop being surprised by this list of goals, and instead start writing a list of our own. We could start with this one: Help make Ukraine the successful, prosperous, Western-facing democracy that Putin so clearly fears. Don’t make decisions about Ukraine without Ukraine. And don’t do these things because it’s nice for the children at the ice-skating rink in Kyiv—do them because, in this case, Putin’s analysis is not paranoid: A successful, prosperous, Western-facing democratic Ukraine would indeed pose a dire ideological threat to Russia, as well as to Belarus and to other autocracies in the region and around the world. It would prove to the inhabitants of other autocracies that they can escape the influence of their greedy, brutal leaders. Losing Ukraine, by contrast, would reinforce dictators in Moscow, Minsk, and even Beijing.
Biden has said he wants to “prove that American democracy can still do big things and take on challenges that matter most.” Mostly, he means domestic challenges. But some challenges abroad will also affect American confidence and credibility well into the future. Helping Ukrainians defend Ukrainian democracy is one of them.
4. Hong Kong Government Snuffs Out More Media
No mention of the South China Morning Post as some have been wondering about. I wonder what kind of pressure it is feeling from Beijing and how long it can last in Hong Kong?
I sent a note to John Power, a SCMP correspondent, but his email is no longer active so he must have left the paper. His last article was in November, I sent a follow-up email to his personal email address and I will see what he has to say about the SCMP in Hong Kong.
Hong Kong Government Snuffs Out More Media
As China deepens its crackdown on Hong Kong, concern is rising over the danger not only to freedom of expression but to the individuals who practice it in the wake of the closure of two independent news media, Stand News and Citizen News, under pressure from the Chinese Communist Party.
That follows a few weeks the removal of memorials at various Hong Kong universities of Tiananmen massacre statues, and reports that individual reporters and common citizens have been roughed up by police and others have been the targets of blistering comments in the Chinese press. Journalists have increasingly been the subject of attacks by the pro-Beijing papers Wen Wei Po and Ta Kung Pao along with activists and politicians.
Stand News was one thing, Citizen News another, and equally ominous. Police raided Stand News, arrested six reporters and editors (above) and confiscated the publication’s assets. Citizen News was intimidated out of existence, with chief writer Chris Yeung Kin-hing telling local media it was impossible to know where the red lines were drawn following the Stand News crackdown.
Both publications had a substantial history of being crosswise with government officials. Citizen News was co-founded in 2017 by former Ming Pao editor in chief Kevin Lau Chun-to, who in 2014 was attacked by two assailants who ambushed him in a triad-style attack and stabbed him in the back and legs in an apparent effort to cut tendons and cripple him for life without killing him.
It was widely speculated that the attack may have been because Ming Pao participated in an investigation by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists into the offshore assets of several of China's leaders, including relatives of Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping, former Premier Wen Jiabao and members of China’s National People’s Congress, although no official connection was ever made.
Co-founded with Lau by former Hong Kong Journalists Association head Daisy Li and 10 other journalists, Citizen News grew steadily in professionalism and influence to recruit staff from publications that increasingly were pulling back from aggressive journalism and was lauded for its responsible and aggressive reporting on issues.
“Sadly, we can no longer strive to turn our beliefs into reality without fear because of the sea change in the society over the past two years and the deteriorating media environment,” the publication said in a goodbye note published on Twitter. “We can’t work in a safe environment,” Chris Yeung said. “Reporters are also human and have their families and friends too. Journalists don’t want to be landed in this dilemma simply because of their work.”
The Chinese-language Stand News, a considerably more raucous nonprofit website, got its start in 2014, succeeding the most popular website in the territory, House News, which suddenly closed following a July 1 pro-democracy rally. Its founder, Tony Tsoi Tung-ho, “went missing” for a few days, often a euphemism for being collected up by gangland assailants believed to have been sent by the Chinese government. Tsoi reappeared to say he was “very scared” every time he crossed the border to the mainland. He later left Hong Kong for good, talking about “white terror,” a phrase usually used to describe political repression.
Stand News won its spurs with live streaming of on-the-ground coverage of 2019 protests that, according to critics, earned Hong Kong the stern gaze of Beijing and the implementation of the subsequent national security law that has strangled free expression in the city. It often demanded violent physical responses to what it considered government provocations.
Hong Kong’s security chief, John Lee, accused Stand News, whose employees were accused of sedition, of biased reporting although its supporters say it was a trusted source for reporting on topics that conventional Chinese language media have backed away from, especially following the decapitation and closure by National Security officials of the popular Apple Daily and the jailing and serial convictions of its owner and publisher Jimmy Lai, which continued last week with new charges. Lee denounced staff members as “rotten apples” and “evil elements” and accused them of exploiting their status as journalists to further political agendas.
The reaction from international journalism protection organizations and human rights NGOs was widespread and alarmed.
“Exactly six months after the dismantling of the Next Digital group and its flagship newspaper Apple Daily, Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam once again shows her determination to terminate press freedom in the territory by eliminating Stand News in a similar fashion," said Cédric Alviani, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) East Asia bureau head, who called for the release of all journalists and urged democracies “to act in line with their own values and obligations and defend what’s left of the free press in Hong Kong before China’s model of information control claims another victim.”
The Society of Publishers in Asia noted that both Stand News and Citizen News “have been recognized by their editorial peers for the journalistic quality of their work” and said it “regrets the closure of these media outlets, which follows the shut-down of Apple Daily, and notes with concern the rising pressures on independent local media following the introduction of the National Security Law in July 2020.”
The Hong Kong Journalists Association (HKJA) noted that Ronson Chan Ron-sing, the chairman of the HKJA and deputy assignment editor at Stand News, had been arrested as well, and expressed concern “that the police have repeatedly arrested senior members of the media and searched the offices of news organizations containing large quantities of journalistic materials within a year. HKJA urges the government to protect press freedom in accordance with the Basic Law.”
None of that cut any ice with the Hong Kong government, which released a statement on the Stand News arrests, saying that “The law enforcement actions taken by the police against Stand News are strictly according to the law and based on evidence.”
Freedom of speech and freedom of the press, the release said, “are protected under the Basic Law and the Hong Kong Bill of Rights. Article 4 of the Hong Kong National Security Law also stipulates that such rights and freedoms shall be protected in accordance with the law in safeguarding national security in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. However, freedom of speech and freedom of the press are not absolute. According to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, such freedoms can be restricted for reasons including protection of national security. We reiterate that no one is above the law.”
It went on to warn “the governments, media and organizations of the United States and western countries in respect of their attempt to twist facts and slandering remarks on the enforcement actions taken in accordance with the law. Such acts constitute gross interference in the affairs of Hong Kong, and reflect their double standards. In the past year, people's lives have resumed as normal, and the national security risk has subsided. These achievements are hard to come by. We will continue to guard against any acts endangering national security, and will bring any person or entity violating the law to justice regardless of background.”
The government release did not point out that the “national security risk” on Hong Kong streets was the product of outraged reaction to the Beijing government’s refusal to live up to the promises of universal suffrage and autonomy outlined in the Basic Law promulgated in 1997 by the Chinese and British governments. In December, 70 percent of Hong Kong’s voters stayed home from rigged legislative council elections that the government sought to pass off as an exercise in democracy.
The comment warning media may well have been directed at the Wall Street Journal, which editorialized on the Stand News crackdown under the headline: “No one is Safe in Hong Kong” and said “China’s shredding of Hong Kong’s autonomy is reaching new levels of nastiness. This week authorities forced the closure of the online publication Stand News and levied new charges against Apple Daily executives.”
That prompted a riposte from both Lee, the chief security officer, who charged the Journal had misled readers over Hong Kong’s situation and should support the Stand News arrests if it was “genuinely interested in press freedom,” and justice secretary Teresa Cheng Yeuk-wah, who accused critics of acting “out of ignorance or with ulterior motives” and who maintained that the press’s freedom to operate “has always been well respected in Hong Kong.”
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5. Finland insists has right to join Nato, defying Russia’s demands
This should further stir things up with Russia.
Excepts:
Leading politicians in all three Baltic countries believe that Finnish and Swedish membership of Nato is crucial for improving the security situation on Russia’s western border amid worries not just about Ukraine but also Belarus and its use of migrants to test Poland, Lithuania and Latvia.
Finland and Sweden joining Nato “could make entire northern Europe much more stable and safer,” said Marko Mihkelson, head of Estonia’s parliamentary foreign affairs committee.
Finland is one of the few European countries that did not significantly cut its military strength after the cold war as its 1,340km-long border with Russia, and memories of the bitterly fought 1939-40 winter war against the Soviet Union, ensured security matters retained a high priority.
Finland has also retained close diplomatic and commercial ties with Russia, and security experts say that Niinisto is perhaps the European leader most respected by his Russian counterpart Putin, with whom he has regular conversations.
Finland insists has right to join Nato, defying Russia’s demands
Russia’s sabre-rattling in Ukraine has reignited the debate in Finland as to whether the Nordic country should join Nato, defying demands from Moscow that seek to limit expansion of the military alliance in Europe.
Both president Sauli Niinisto and prime minister Sanna Marin used their new year addresses to underscore that Finland retained the option of seeking Nato membership at any time.
“Let it be stated once again: Finland’s room to manoeuvre and freedom of choice also include the possibility of military alignment and of applying for Nato membership, should we ourselves so decide,” Niinisto said.
Marin added in her separate speech that every country had the right to decide its own security policy, stressing: “We have shown that we have learnt from the past. We will not let go of our room for manoeuvre.”
As Russia amasses about 100,000 troops on Ukraine’s eastern frontier, Washington, Moscow and Nato member states are set to meet for talks in early January. US president Joe Biden is also due to speak to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky on Sunday. Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, has previously refused to rule out military action and has warned he has “all kinds” of options if his demands for “security guarantees” to limit Nato expansion are unmet.
Finland and neighbouring Sweden are both militarily non-aligned but have a growing co-operation with Nato as well as strong bilateral relationships with members of the alliance such as the US, Norway and UK.
There is no sense of Finland imminently about to apply for Nato membership, but Russia’s activity on the borders of Ukraine and its list of demands just before Christmas has fired up the internal debate in Helsinki to a level last seen after the Russian annexation of Crimea.
Niinisto also warned the west that it risked empowering Russia if it removed the threat of possible military action. Citing former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger on appeasing Nazi Germany, the Finnish president said: “Whenever avoidance of war has been the primary objective of a group of powers, the international system has been at the mercy of its most ruthless member.”
Petteri Orpo, leader of the main opposition National Coalition party, a longtime supporter of Nato membership, also said that now was the time to discuss whether Finland should apply and that he believed joining would improve both its security and that of the neighbouring region.
“Russia has recently suggested that the possible Nato membership of Finland and Sweden would force it to retaliate militarily. Such a speech is reprehensible and ultimately says more about Russia’s ultimate goals than Finland’s or Sweden’s. Finland does not pose a threat to Russia now or in any other way,” Orpo said on Thursday in a post on his party’s website.
Atte Harjanne, an active reservist and head of the parliamentary group of the Green party, a member of the ruling five-party government coalition, said the arguments for Finland joining had been “strengthened” and that the country should join immediately.
Leading politicians in all three Baltic countries believe that Finnish and Swedish membership of Nato is crucial for improving the security situation on Russia’s western border amid worries not just about Ukraine but also Belarus and its use of migrants to test Poland, Lithuania and Latvia.
Finland and Sweden joining Nato “could make entire northern Europe much more stable and safer,” said Marko Mihkelson, head of Estonia’s parliamentary foreign affairs committee.
Finland is one of the few European countries that did not significantly cut its military strength after the cold war as its 1,340km-long border with Russia, and memories of the bitterly fought 1939-40 winter war against the Soviet Union, ensured security matters retained a high priority.
Finland has also retained close diplomatic and commercial ties with Russia, and security experts say that Niinisto is perhaps the European leader most respected by his Russian counterpart Putin, with whom he has regular conversations.
6. China enters new role as Pacific Islands policeman
Excerpts:
2022 could be the year that the people of the Solomons are crushed by a PRC-trained police force, and that island lease—and much more—finally goes through.
Or, it could be the year that its corrupt leaders leave office and a new administration chooses a different path. The people of the Solomons—and many other countries around the world—are fighting hard for their future. They are doing their part. Is this the year we will do ours?
China enters new role as Pacific Islands policeman - The Sunday Guardian Live
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Published : January 1, 2022, 8:12 pm | Updated : January 1, 2022, 8:29 PM
China is winning, especially in the smaller countries. But as it refines its steps, and faces few counters, it will gain confidence and allies and move to bigger targets.
Alexandria, US: 2021 was a good year for China. And, unless something changes, 2022 is looking to be even better.
In the last year, headline after headline announced Chinese advances in comprehensive power projection. A few examples: China’s build up on (and possibly inside) the Indian border; the very public testing of its “game changing” new weapons; Beijing’s expansionist new border law; the PLA Navy sailing ships through Japanese waters—with the Russians; the election of their man on the Executive Committee of Interpol; the crushing of any semblance of independent media in Hong Kong; Nicaragua not just switching from Taiwan to the PRC, but giving the former Taiwanese embassy to China.
Actually, most of that was just in the past few months. The year as a whole was an even bigger win as countries around the world were caught up in Covid-response related paroxysm of social and economic disruptions.
As shopping, education, governance and more moved increasingly online, PRC hackers, trolls, blackmailers, thieves, drug dealers, money launderers, social media manipulators, etc., were waiting to inflict even more damage. Meanwhile, in spite of consumers wanting to move away from PRC products, exports boomed as powerful online retailers obfuscated country of origin labels, driving ever more business towards the PRC.
Yes, there are domestic problems in China. But, internationally, the wins for Beijing keep coming, and people around the world are worse off for it. It doesn’t have to be this way, but for 2022 to be different, we need to try some new approaches—including a bigger role for India.
To see what that could mean, let’s take a look at a situation in which China won, the people of the country lost, and how it could have gone differently—and still might.
HOW THE SOLOMON ISLANDS COULD HAVE BEEN A BEACON OF HOPE
Someone in the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs deserves a raise. Just look at the way they handled the Solomon Islands. It took only around two years for some smart PRC person/team to move it from a country that recognized Taiwan to one that not only recognizes China but—thanks in part to a deft outmaneuvering of Australia—was welcoming Chinese “police advisors” to help put down those in the country protesting the corrupt, pro-PRC Prime Minister Sogavare. Well played.
The way it was managed followed a predictable path—making the fact it wasn’t effectively countered even more troublesome.
These were the steps—steps that are being replicated in a range of other countries at this very moment. And these are the ways those steps could have been countered—benefitting the people of the Solomons and the security of the region.
Step One: Setting the groundwork. Even though Solomon Islands recognized Taiwan, the PRC maintained a consistent presence in the country, fronted by the business sector. It actively courted decision-makers, gathered intelligence and identified resistance.
During this phase, many in the country were concerned that the Prime Minister might unilaterally flip and quiet appeals were made to the United States and others. The United States was slow to act, exacerbated by the fact that it doesn’t even have an embassy in the country—a country where thousands of Americans died during the World War II battle of Guadalcanal fighting to liberate it. India also doesn’t have an embassy in the Solomons.
Washington was reliant on advice from Australia, which had led a peacekeeping mission in the country from 2003-2017. However, either Canberra was not aware of how close the country was to switching, or didn’t think it was an issue of concern. Either way, not good.
Additionally, at the end of the country’s civil war, the Townsville Peace Agreement (2000) was signed by the main parties, creating a path forward. However, in spite of the extended Australian presence in the country, key provisions related to political and socio-economic issues weren’t put into action. This left unaddressed fractures that could be—and were—utilized by malign forces to gain leverage.
Counter: During this phase, several actions could have made a difference including: the presence of diplomatic missions from the United States, India or others, that could give a more rounded assessment of the ground situation and offer more options to those looking to escape the PRC’s grasp; media investigations into corrupt practices, including those laundering their money via Australia; and a serious attempt to resolve some of the underlying political cleavages.
Step Two: Consolidation. Once the switch from Taiwan to China was announced in September 2019, Beijing moved quickly to try to embed itself before there could be any serious response. This included an attempt by a Chinese state owned company to lease an entire island with a deepwater port within days of the switch. The effort failed, largely because of local opposition.
But PRC efforts continued and were relentless, focused and well funded. Loyal politicians and business leaders were rewarded, and those standing in the way of PRC political or economic influence were targeted.
During this phase, there was brave and vocal concern about how PRC-linked corruption was distorting the politics and economics of the country, and could potentially lead to violence. Those local leaders found themselves largely ignored by regional diplomats, with one being told, “we don’t want to upset the apple cart”. Additionally, coverage about the negative effects of CCP influence in the country was largely discounted by regional academics and journalists, muting the urgency of the situation.
Counter: During this period, local leaders were trying to raise the alarm that there was a serious risk of destabilization. There were requests for relatively minor or run-of-the mill things that would have shown that those standing up for their communities in the face of PRC aggression weren’t being abandoned—small amounts of funding for a “festival of democracy” to raise awareness about what was at stake, an MRI machine, transparency in a World Bank project. All were ignored. Again, better diplomatic and media coverage could have been instrumental.
Also, unlike China, once Taiwan was derecognized, it largely pulled out (with the notable exceptions of shipments of Covid-related supplies and a humanitarian intervention to ensure a local leader received life-saving medical care). It didn’t stay in the country to keep relationships going—a short-sighted move given that, as a democracy, there was the possibility that an election could bring a new government more sympathetic to Taipei.
Step Three: Using Crisis to Advance More Quickly. Once the predicted violence broke out in the form of protests against the corrupt pro-PRC Prime Minister Sogavare, the PRC and its partners in the PMO did a clever thing. Sogavare called the Australians for “peacekeepers” to “restore order”. The Australians complied.
Sogavare had been on the ropes—with risk of defection from some of his MPs, and a looming vote of no confidence. The police had asked him to resign. With the arrival of the Australians, he could turn to those MPs and say “see, I’m backed by both the Chinese and the Australians—are you sure you want to go up against me?” They saved him.
At the time, one argument in Canberra for the intervention was that if the Australians didn’t go in, Sogavare would call in the Chinese. So, what happened? The Australians went in, justifying interventions (though by the time they arrived all the protests had ended anyway). And now that they are heading home—perhaps having realized they were snookered—the Chinese are sending in police trainers and equipment and no one can complain because the Australians were just there. Nicely done.
Counter: But it’s not over. There are still ways to help the people of the Solomons. They will tell you. In fact, they have. Apart from more and varied diplomatic outreach and corruption investigations, what they want is what they agreed to more than twenty years ago—a structure that is much more difficult for the PRC (or any outsiders) to subvert.
The government of the most populous province in the Solomons, Malaita, has asked the United National Security Council to send investigators to see if the terms of the Townsville Peace Agreement (TPA) have been met. Sogavare was Prime Minister when it was signed back in 2000, and so has no justification for standing in the way.
This is where India can come in. The answer is not more securitization of by Australia or China, it is a patient engagement with local leaders on how to implement an agreement that is already signed. Currently the media has inaccurately painted this as a China versus the US issue (had the US actually been involved, this may never have become an issue. This is a China expanding its sphere of influence issue). India coming in as an impartial mediator/observer makes it much more difficult to push that narrative, and opens up a new way forward.
It is unlikely Sogavare actually wants the issue resolved, but given the TPA is deposited with the UN, perhaps that is a venue through which India and partners can address the situation.
It’s worth trying because it’s not just the Solomons. All over the world China is trying to isolate and pick off countries one by one—Lithuania, Kiribati, Nicaragua. And in each of those countries, there are people trying to resist, trying to stay free. Currently, China is winning especially in the smaller countries. But as it refines its steps, and faces few counters, it will gain confidence and allies and move to bigger targets.
2022 could be the year that the people of the Solomons are crushed by a PRC-trained police force, and that island lease—and much more—finally goes through.
Or, it could be the year that its corrupt leaders leave office and a new administration chooses a different path. The people of the Solomons—and many other countries around the world—are fighting hard for their future. They are doing their part. Is this the year we will do ours?
Cleo Paskal is The Sunday Guardian Special Correspondent as well as Non-Resident Senior Fellow for the Indo-Pacific at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.
7. US shows an exit ramp to Russia
Excerpts:
Herein lies the great danger: With the challenging midterm elections due in November in the US, which Biden is almost certain to lose, he may visualize a political rebound by playing the Russia card, which enjoys bipartisan support. In strategic terms, the United States’ trans-Atlantic leadership also stands to gain.
The Kremlin leadership faces an existential dilemma. On the one hand, having waded into the midstream, turning back is difficult. On the other hand, the status quo may be seized by NATO to complete the unfinished business of training Russia to become a dancing bear.
However, what is being blithely overlooked is that in Kiev, there is also a savage power struggle brewing, as the recent attempt by President Volodymyr Zelensky to lock up his predecessor Petro Poroshenko in jail on sedition charges suggests.
The Pandora Papers have revealed that Zelensky founded a network of offshore companies and his former business partner and employer, a Ukrainian banking and media tycoon named Ihor Kolomoisky (who is also sanctioned by Washington), allegedly laundered US$5.5 billion through a tangle of shell companies.
In September in Kiev, someone tried to murder Serhiy Shefir, a friend and business partner who is believed to have created a network of offshore entities for Zelensky and others.
Meanwhile, the stink involving then-vice-president Biden’s son Hunter’s direct link to a corrupt Ukrainian company and its owner still pollutes the air. Forbes magazine recently wrote: “It’s consensus now that Hunter’s foreign relations have hurt American foreign policy in Ukraine.”
The internal and external political changes in Ukraine need to be taken seriously. They may turn out to be the “missing link” in the US narrative. Even if the Biden administration pretends not to notice, Moscow must be watching closely.
US shows an exit ramp to Russia
Biden presented Putin with two paths, one leading to diplomatic de-escalation and another towards serious costs and consequences
Getting off your high horse is never easy and it remains to be seen how deftly Moscow will navigate its path in the downstream of President Vladimir Putin’s 50-minute phone conversation last Thursday with his American counterpart Joe Biden.
Washington highlighted that the conversation took place after Putin’s “request” – meaning, the Kremlin is on the back foot.
The Russian readout claims that the forthcoming diplomatic engagements in Geneva in the second week of January between Russia and the US, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) successively will be about “providing Russia with legally binding security guarantees.” But the White House is noncommittal.
The Kremlin readout claims Biden emphasized that “Washington had no intention of deploying offensive strike weapons in Ukraine.” But the US statements failed to acknowledge that. Instead, in a background press call, a senior White House official was categorical that “there were certainly no declarations as to intentions.”
He firmly reiterated that any “further invasion of Ukraine” on Russia’s part will entail “costs [that] include economic costs, include adjustments and augmentations of NATO force posture in Allied countries, and include additional assistance to Ukraine.”
The Russian side underscored that Putin told Biden any “large-scale sanctions” would be “a grave error, de facto fraught with the danger of a complete breakdown in Russia-US relations.”
Russian state media highlighted this particular exchange. The White House readout concluded that “substantive progress in these dialogues [in Geneva] can occur only in an environment of de-escalation rather than escalation.”
On the core issue of a security guarantee, all that Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov would say was: “It seems to me that Washington understands Russia’s concerns, although Washington has its own concerns.”
Vladimir Putin faces some difficult choices. Photo: WikiCommons
Security guarantees?
On the contrary, the senior White House official never mentioned any security guarantees.
As far as the American side is concerned, apropos of issues related to NATO, “our position is very clear that these are decisions to be made by sovereign countries, obviously in consultation with the Alliance, and not for others to determine” – simply put, Russia has no locus standi on NATO expansion or Ukraine’s NATO membership.
In essence, Biden showed an exit ramp to Putin. The White House official disclosed that Biden “laid out [to Putin] two paths, two aspects of the US approach that will really depend on Russia’s actions.”
He said: “One is a path of diplomacy leading toward a de-escalation, and the other is a path that’s more focused on deterrence, including serious costs and consequences should Russia choose to proceed with a further invasion of Ukraine.”
Washington estimates that it is speaking to Moscow from a position of advantage. Putin’s conciliatory idiom in the most recent days probably reinforced an impression in the American mind that he’s looking for an exit strategy.
Meanwhile, Washington has succeeded brilliantly in rallying its European allies – especially the “European Quad counterparts” – and intends to keep up the “very careful and very intensive coordination and transparency among our partners and allies.”
Washington also set the stage for Biden’s phone conversation with a calibrated power projection. The US nuclear-powered aircraft carrier Harry S Truman and its escorts have been positioned in the Ionian Sea between Greece and Italy. On December 27, a US E-8 spy plane flew over eastern Ukraine to collect ground intelligence.
Two days later, the spy plane had a rerun. This is the first time ever that the US attempted such brazen intelligence gathering on Russian deployments. The mission was undertaken with the permission of the Ukrainian government.
From the copious output by US think-tankers in recent weeks, the US considers itself to be in a “win-win” situation. The Brookings Institute was plainly dismissive about Russia’s demands, which it considered too outlandish to merit consideration.
The think-tankers in Washington are poring over Russia’s options in binary terms – an outright invasion of Ukraine or a limited incursion plus deployment of Russian troops to Donbas.
Ukrainian troops conduct a drill with tanks while military activity continues in the Donbas region on April 18, 2021. Photo: AFP / Armed Forces of Ukraine / Anadolu Agency
Russia’s options
The latter option is given weight in a report compiled by the American Enterprise Institute and the Institute for the Study of War in Washington by a team of experts led by Frederick Kagan, the husband of Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland.
It anticipates: “Putin will very likely deploy Russian troops into Belarus this winter … Such a move could dramatically increase the challenge NATO faces defending the Baltic States from future Russian attack because it would put Russian mechanized units on both sides of the narrow Suwalki Corridor through which NATO supplies and reinforcements to the Baltic States must run … And it would put additional Russian troops on the Polish border, increasing the threat to NATO’s eastern flank.”
Having publicized on December 17 its demand for a written legally bound security guarantee, Moscow is now obliged to stick by it. The US assumption is that Putin is damned either way.
Indeed, if Putin backs down, it will be a massive loss of his public image as the “strongman,” which may even have implications for the 2024 presidential election in Russia.
Worse still, the West would be emboldened to retain the option to continue with the present “salami tactic” – integrate Ukraine into NATO incrementally while pushing military deployments right up to Russia’s borders.
Bringing Russia down a few notches in its global standing suits American interests worldwide when it is feeling the heat of Moscow’s contestation in global politics.
Curiously, the US does not take the “China factor” seriously. While there is no let-up in the United States’ confrontational policy toward China and a Cold War-style confrontation is crystallizing, Washington is confident that Beijing will not exacerbate the crisis by risking a military flashpoint through 2022 with the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of China due in the second half of the year.
The consensus among US experts is that Chinese stagecraft will be almost exclusively focused in the coming months on consolidating President Xi Jinping’s legitimacy and power base within the party and country to steer through the CPC Congress his re-election for a third term, a momentous event in Chinese political history since Mao Zedong.
While China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin have close relations, domestic issues will likely keep Beijing on the sidelines. Photo: WikiCommons
The challenges ahead
Herein lies the great danger: With the challenging midterm elections due in November in the US, which Biden is almost certain to lose, he may visualize a political rebound by playing the Russia card, which enjoys bipartisan support. In strategic terms, the United States’ trans-Atlantic leadership also stands to gain.
The Kremlin leadership faces an existential dilemma. On the one hand, having waded into the midstream, turning back is difficult. On the other hand, the status quo may be seized by NATO to complete the unfinished business of training Russia to become a dancing bear.
However, what is being blithely overlooked is that in Kiev, there is also a savage power struggle brewing, as the recent attempt by President Volodymyr Zelensky to lock up his predecessor Petro Poroshenko in jail on sedition charges suggests.
The Pandora Papers have revealed that Zelensky founded a network of offshore companies and his former business partner and employer, a Ukrainian banking and media tycoon named Ihor Kolomoisky (who is also sanctioned by Washington), allegedly laundered US$5.5 billion through a tangle of shell companies.
In September in Kiev, someone tried to murder Serhiy Shefir, a friend and business partner who is believed to have created a network of offshore entities for Zelensky and others.
Meanwhile, the stink involving then-vice-president Biden’s son Hunter’s direct link to a corrupt Ukrainian company and its owner still pollutes the air. Forbes magazine recently wrote: “It’s consensus now that Hunter’s foreign relations have hurt American foreign policy in Ukraine.”
The internal and external political changes in Ukraine need to be taken seriously. They may turn out to be the “missing link” in the US narrative. Even if the Biden administration pretends not to notice, Moscow must be watching closely.
M K Bhadrakumar is a former Indian diplomat.
8. A David nation puts the global Goliath in its place
Excerpts:
Lithuania, with a population smaller than the smallest second-tier Chinese city, has stood up to China by defying its threats and letting Taiwan open a representative office in Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital. This action was preceded by Lithuania’s withdrawal from the 17+1, which groups 17 countries of East and Central Europe with China to help promote Xi’s neo-imperial Belt and Road Initiative. And after its defense ministry found that Chinese mobile phones had built-in censorship capabilities, Lithuania advised consumers to ditch such devices.
...
The CCP’s campaign to bully Lithuania into submission was destined to fail because Beijing lacks real leverage over that nation: Lithuania’s exports to China accounted for just 1 percent of total exports, and the Lithuanian imports of Chinese products can be sourced from elsewhere. The CCP campaign was more about sending a warning to the rest of Europe not to follow Lithuania’s lead.
However, by showcasing its hectoring behavior and heavy-handed tactics, the CCP could impel some other nations to follow the Lithuanian example, thereby helping Taiwan to carve out more international space for itself. In other words, winning the geopolitical battle in Lithuania could be a turning point for Taiwan.
More broadly, by opening too many fronts simultaneously through its aggressive actions, the CCP has already dented China’s image, alienated the country’s partners and provoked an international backlash, thus leaving Beijing with only one lever of power — brute force. Simply put, the unbridled ambition, muscular revisionism, international bullying and hubris of the Xi-led CCP is turning it into China’s own worst enemy.
A David nation puts the global Goliath in its place
The Hill · by Brahma Chellaney, Opinion Contributor · January 3, 2022
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is intrinsically totalitarian, belligerent, arbitrary, expansionist and contemptuous of international law. And under Xi Jinping, the CCP has become more despotic, coercive and punitive. With its “tribute nation” approach to weak, vulnerable states, it seeks to influence their sovereign decisions.
But now a midget nation, with just 18,500 active military personnel, has set an example for bigger countries on how not to succumb to the efforts of the world’s largest, strongest and longest-surviving autocracy to impose its will through coercive pressure.
Lithuania, with a population smaller than the smallest second-tier Chinese city, has stood up to China by defying its threats and letting Taiwan open a representative office in Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital. This action was preceded by Lithuania’s withdrawal from the 17+1, which groups 17 countries of East and Central Europe with China to help promote Xi’s neo-imperial Belt and Road Initiative. And after its defense ministry found that Chinese mobile phones had built-in censorship capabilities, Lithuania advised consumers to ditch such devices.
With Lithuania now set to open its own representative office in Taipei, Taiwan’s capital, China has ratcheted up its punitive campaign against the Baltic nation of 2.8 million people that prides itself on its role in promoting human rights and democracy. The angry vitriol spewed by the Chinese state media has extended to mocking Lithuania’s puny size.
Yet, it is particularly galling for the CCP leadership that even translating threats into action and persisting with high-octane denunciations have not brought that minnow to heel.
China’s diplomatic sanctions have included withdrawing its ambassador from Vilnius and expelling the Lithuanian ambassador and then creating a situation that led Lithuania to shut its embassy in Beijing. China has also slapped informal trade sanctions on Lithuania, including imposing a customs block on its exports. And in a bid to disrupt production in Lithuania, China has been denying export permits for items needed by that country’s producers.
More importantly, the CCP’s weaponization of trade extends to banning multinational companies from using Lithuanian-produced parts and supplies or risk being shut out of the Chinese market. German companies with manufacturing facilities in Lithuania have the most to lose from this ban, with automotive supplier Continental under pressure to close operations there.
Lithuania, a member of the European Union and NATO, may have received little more than verbal support from Washington and Brussels thus far, yet it has refused to buckle under Chinese pressure.
Lithuania’s oversize place in Chinese diplomacy extends beyond its role as a transit corridor for freight trains from China to Europe. The CCP, as part of its strategy to annex Taiwan, is working to wipe out that island democracy’s international identity by bribing countries to break off diplomatic ties with Taipei.
China has already poached several of Taiwan’s diplomatic allies – including Burkina Faso, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Kiribati, Panama, the Solomon Islands and, most recently, Nicaragua – leaving only 13 nations and the Vatican still recognizing Taiwan as a sovereign nation. To squeeze Taiwan, Beijing has been vetoing its participation even in international forums where Taipei was earlier present, such as the World Health Organization’s decision-making World Health Assembly.
In this light, the CCP is enraged that Lithuania is moving in the other direction by allowing Taiwan to open a de facto embassy. And it worries that Lithuania could serve as a bellwether of sorts for Taiwan securing greater international cooperation.
The CCP is right to be concerned on that score. Some East and Central European nations, from the Czech Republic and Poland to Slovakia, are already seeking to deepen economic and cultural relations with Taiwan. No wonder Lithuania has been labeled by the CCP media as the “anti-China vanguard” in Europe.
If Taiwan gains greater presence on the international stage, it will be able to shore up its status as a de facto nation, making it more difficult for China to seize the self-governing island in the way it occupied Tibet and Xinjiang soon after coming under communist rule in 1949. The then-independent Tibet, for example, should have applied for United Nations membership shortly after that international body came into existence in 1945, but it never did.
Taiwan, a technological powerhouse with the world’s 22nd-largest economy by gross domestic product, has all the attributes of a robust independent state, and most Taiwanese want it to stay that way. In addition to bolstering its defenses with weapons like anti-ship and anti-aircraft missiles to deter a Chinese invasion, Taiwan needs to expand its global footprint to help safeguard its autonomous status.
Recognizing Taiwan’s imperative to win broader international support, major democracies – from the United States to Japan – are strengthening ties with Taipei, even as China steps up its campaign to isolate Taiwan. President Biden invited two Taiwanese officials to join the virtual “summit for democracy” that he recently hosted.
Against this background, Lithuania, setting a rare European example of fealty to democratic principles over other interests, has challenged China’s effort to turn Taiwan into an international pariah by permitting a representative office bearing the name "Taiwan" rather than “Chinese Taipei” (used by many nations and the International Olympic Committee) or “Taipei Economic and Cultural Office” (as in Canada and the U.S., for example). About 14 other nations host a “Taipei Representative Office.” But the “Taiwanese Representative Office” in Lithuania is the first such named office, which, according to the Chinese foreign ministry, supplants the one-China principle with “one China, one Taiwan in the world.”
The CCP’s campaign to bully Lithuania into submission was destined to fail because Beijing lacks real leverage over that nation: Lithuania’s exports to China accounted for just 1 percent of total exports, and the Lithuanian imports of Chinese products can be sourced from elsewhere. The CCP campaign was more about sending a warning to the rest of Europe not to follow Lithuania’s lead.
However, by showcasing its hectoring behavior and heavy-handed tactics, the CCP could impel some other nations to follow the Lithuanian example, thereby helping Taiwan to carve out more international space for itself. In other words, winning the geopolitical battle in Lithuania could be a turning point for Taiwan.
More broadly, by opening too many fronts simultaneously through its aggressive actions, the CCP has already dented China’s image, alienated the country’s partners and provoked an international backlash, thus leaving Beijing with only one lever of power — brute force. Simply put, the unbridled ambition, muscular revisionism, international bullying and hubris of the Xi-led CCP is turning it into China’s own worst enemy.
Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and the author of nine books, including the award-winning “Water: Asia’s New Battleground” (Georgetown University Press).
The Hill · by Brahma Chellaney, Opinion Contributor · January 3, 2022
9. Analysis | Fears mount about Russian cyberattacks in Ukraine
Excerpts:
Ukraine has been the target of Russia’s most brazen cyber operations in recent years. Such attacks would surely accompany any land invasion launched by the roughly 175,000 Russian troops currently massed on the Ukraine border.
A case in point: In the most significant known cyberattack against an electric grid to date, Kremlin hackers briefly shut off power for thousands of Ukrainian citizens in 2015. An attack of similar magnitude during a military conflict could sow chaos among the populace and dramatically reduce Ukraine’s ability to defend itself.
Analysis | Fears mount about Russian cyberattacks in Ukraine
By Joseph Marks
with research by Aaron Schaffer
Today at 7:23 a.m. EST
Welcome to The Cybersecurity 202! I give “Being the Ricardos” a B-minus overall, but the performances were great, especially J.K. Simmons as William Frawley. It sparked some real “Nick at Nite” memories.
Below: Senators want details about government cyber protections for the transportation sector, and a Russian extradited to the United States may have inside information about the Kremlin's 2016 election interference.
Fears are mounting about possible Russian cyberattacks of Ukraine
Fears are mounting about a possible Russian military invasion of Ukraine — and the cyberattacks that would undoubtedly come with it.
Ukraine has been the target of Russia’s most brazen cyber operations in recent years. Such attacks would surely accompany any land invasion launched by the roughly 175,000 Russian troops currently massed on the Ukraine border.
A case in point: In the most significant known cyberattack against an electric grid to date, Kremlin hackers briefly shut off power for thousands of Ukrainian citizens in 2015. An attack of similar magnitude during a military conflict could sow chaos among the populace and dramatically reduce Ukraine’s ability to defend itself.
Cybersecurity experts are already noting an uptick in Russian cyber intrusions into Ukrainian government and civilian computer networks that could lay the groundwork for a major cyberattack.
U.S. and United Kingdom officials are trying to forestall such attacks. They’ve sent cyberwarfare experts to Ukraine to help improve preparations and planning, the New York Times reports. But with Russia’s immense offensive cyber capabilities, it’s unlikely Ukraine could fully fend off an attack.
U.S. officials believe Russian President Vladimir Putin may also opt to launch cyberattacks that cripple Ukrainian infrastructure in place of a physical invasion, the Times reports.
The situation offers a harrowing example of the major role cyber capabilities are likely to play in any future military conflict — especially those involving the top tier of cyber-capable nations including Russia and China.
“We can certainly anticipate [Russian military action in Ukraine] will be accompanied by disinformation operations of all kinds and cyber incidents. ... It’s part of their toolbox,” Suzanne Spaulding, a top government cyber official during the Obama administration and director of the Defending Democratic Institutions project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told me.
“Going forward, all physical kinetic military action that would be occurring in Eastern Europe will be preceded by a cyber pulse,” Tom Kellermann, head of cybersecurity strategy at VMware predicted to the Hill.
Russia is no stranger to mixing cyberattacks with conventional military operations
Russia peppered Ukrainian computers with malware during 2014, according to the cybersecurity firm FireEye — probably aimed at stealing information to aid its invasion of Crimea that year.
- The nation’s 2008 invasion of Georgia was accompanied by “denial-of-service” cyberattacks, which rendered numerous Georgian government websites inoperable by flooding them with more Internet traffic than they could handle.
- Russia pummeled Estonia with a denial-of-service attack in 2007 that’s widely viewed as the first major case of nation-on-nation hacking.
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There’s also the 2017 NotPetya malware bug, which U.S. officials say was initially unleashed by the Russian military and aimed at crippling computers in Ukraine. It spread far more widely, wreaking havoc across dozens of nations in what the White House called at the time the “most destructive and costly cyberattack in history.”
The Biden administration is pushing to forestall a Ukraine invasion. Officials are prepping a raft of sanctions targeting Russia’s financial sector and preparing a range of export controls, as Paul Sonne, Ellen Nakashima and Michael Birnbaum report.
Biden told Putin during a phone call last week that the United States will “respond decisively” to an invasion, according to a statement by press secretary Jen Psaki.
The intense focus on the Ukraine conflict has distracted from other points of U.S.-Russia tension, including a Biden administration push for Putin to rein in Russia-based criminal ransomware attacks that pummeled U.S. schools, local governments and businesses last year.
There’s some evidence that effort may have yielded positive results. But rising tensions between the nation could thwart any progress.
The keys
A bipartisan group of senators wants to know how the Biden administration is defending the transportation sector against hacking
The lawmakers are asking for a trove of information from Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, including how the departments “detect, prevent, and respond to cyber threats” and the roles of each department’s subcomponents in protecting critical transportation infrastructure.
The letter also presses for an update to the transportation sector’s cybersecurity risk plan, which dates back to 2015 — that's practically ancient in the fast-paced world of cybersecurity. Ten senators signed on to the letter, which was led by Sens. Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.) and Roger Wicker (R-Miss.).
The letter cites numerous cyber threats to transportation infrastructure — most prominently a 2021 ransomware attack on Colonial Pipeline that threatened to cut off gas supplies to the southeastern United States.
A Russian hacker extradited to the United States reportedly has information on Russia’s 2016 election interference
Prosecutors last month extradited Vladislav Klyushin from Switzerland to the United States after he was charged with hacking and fraud in connection with a campaign against private companies that prosecutors said netted tens of millions of dollars worth of inside information. But Klyushin’s greater value could be inside information about Russia’s 2016 election operations, Bloomberg’s Henry Meyer, Irina Reznik and Hugo Miller report, citing people close to the Kremlin and Russia’s security services.
Russian intelligence has concluded that Klyushin “has access to documents relating to a Russian campaign to hack Democratic Party servers during the 2016 U.S. election,” Bloomberg reports. “His transfer to the U.S. represents a serious intelligence blow to the Kremlin, several of the people said, one that would deepen if Klyushin decides to seek leniency from U.S. prosecutors by providing information about Moscow’s inner workings,” Meyer, Reznik and Miller write.
The charges against Klyushin involve an elaborate insider trading scheme. He and associates allegedly hacked into companies that top firms use to file Securities and Exchange Commission reports and then bought and sold stocks based on the secret information.
“The U.S. government has not publicly connected Klyushin to Russian interference in the 2016 election. But one of Klyushin's co-defendants in the securities fraud case is Ivan Ermakov, who was one of a dozen GRU officers whom a federal grand jury indicted in 2018 for interfering in the 2016 election by hacking and leaking documents from the Democratic National Committee,” as CNN’s Sean Lyngaas reports.
Klyushin may also have access to information about other Russian intelligence operations, sources told Bloomberg.
The fight to end the filibuster could deliver election security reforms (if it works)
Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) set Jan. 17 as a deadline for changing Senate filibuster rules if Republicans continue to block voting rights legislation, John Wagner reports. The move is “Schumer’s strongest endorsement yet of trying to muscle through legislation that has been stymied because of Senate rules requiring a 60-vote threshold,” John writes.
One of the bills Senate Democrats want to pass is the Freedom to Vote Act, which primarily focuses on ballot access but is also chock-full of proposals sought by election security advocates. It would:
- Require states to conduct post-election audits
- Set up an advisory committee focused on election audits at the Commerce Department
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Formally add “election infrastructure” to the Department of Homeland Security’s list of “critical infrastructure” sectors
- Block states from using voting machines that aren’t manufactured or assembled in the United States and require them to have their software “developed and stored in the United States”
Reining in the filibuster is an uphill climb because all 50 Senate Democrats must be onboard — including moderates who’ve rejected changing the filibuster such as Sens. Joe Manchin III (D-W. V.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.). In a letter to lawmakers, Schumer emphasized that legislation proposed by Senate Democrats aims to counter “voter suppression and election nullification laws.”
Chat room
As we approach the anniversary of the Jan. 6 Capitol attacks, election security expert and Georgetown University professor Matt Blaze examines how disinformation trumped facts about election integrity that day.
Cyber insecurity
Global cyberspace
Securing the ballot
Daybook
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The Atlantic Council hosts an event on the next National Defense Strategy on Wednesday at 2 p.m.
Secure log off
Thanks for reading. See you tomorrow.
10. Five major issues the military will face in 2022
I often wonder what Kim Jong-un thinks when he reads forecasts like this. "Damn, I did not make another one. I am going to have to do something about this. I will show them." Yes I am being sarcastic but I will bet that the Propaganda and Agitation department are reading every one of these articles scouring them for any references to north Korea and Kim.
I also bet the four revisionist and rogue powers like what they read here as 2 of the 5 issues for the US military are internal and self-inflicted. I am sure they are asking how they can exploit such issues.
Five major issues the military will face in 2022
by Mike Brest, Defense Reporter | | January 02, 2022 07:00 AM
After an eventful 2021, things are unlikely to calm down in the new year. Here are a few issues that will be high priorities for the Department of Defense going forward.
China and Taiwan
The United States and China had a bumpy relationship in 2021 that shows no sign of smoothing out in the new year. The Chinese military took aggressive actions in their missile testing as well as in their posture toward Taiwan, the island nation that claims its independence from the mainland, which the Chinese Communist Party doesn't recognize.
The Chinese military conducted a hypersonic missile test that got the attention of the international community, and a DOD report released in November reveals that they have accelerated the pace of their nuclear expansion program to the point where they could “have up to 700 deliverable nuclear warheads” within roughly five years.
Gen. John Hyten, the former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who called the pace of China’s military development “stunning," acknowledged that the Chinese military has conducted "hundreds" of hypersonic tests in the last five years, while the U.S. has conducted only nine such tests.
The U.S. is still a “year or two” away from fielding their own hypersonic weapon, Gillian Bussey, director of DOD’s Joint Hypersonics Transition office, said in November.
Separately, the CIA created a new offshoot to focus exclusively on the threats emanating from China in October, which was announced a week after the Chinese military flew nearly 150 military flights into their airspace.
Understanding and catching up to the U.S.'s "pacing challenge," as Defense officials have characterized the foreign power, will be a subject to watch not just in 2022 but moving forward.
Over-the-horizon capabilities in Afghanistan
Relying on strikes without boots on the ground is a risky proposition, experts have said, though Defense officials have reaffirmed their confidence with the plan. Without having resources in a target area, it's harder for accurate and real-time intelligence to be gathered and utilized for a strike.
The military launched an errant drone strike that targeted a civilian aid worker, killing him and nine others, in Afghanistan during the final days before their withdrawal. While the Pentagon was quick to distance this strike from its over-the-horizon capabilities because there was intel of an imminent threat, it still demonstrates the risks associated with aerial strikes without support in the target location.
Defense officials have warned about the possibility of a resurgence in terror organizations in Afghanistan, with estimates saying ISIS-K, the affiliate in Afghanistan, could gain the capability to launch an attack in a foreign country within six months to a year while al Qaeda's timeline is roughly twice as long, though it remains an area of concern for the upcoming year.
Russia's military buildup along Ukrainian border
Russia has amassed a significant military presence on its border with Ukraine in recent months, stirring up both rhetoric and fears of a possible invasion reminiscent of Russia's incursion into Crimea less than a decade ago.
Presidents Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin have spoken multiple times about the rising tension and possible consequences, such as a Russian military invasion. The two most recently spoke Thursday, and Biden "made clear that the United States and its allies and partners will respond decisively if Russia further invades Ukraine," White House press secretary Jen Psaki said in a statement released after the call ended.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken said earlier this month he had seen "evidence that Russia made plans for significant aggressive moves against Ukraine," though other officials have noted that Putin's intent remains unclear.
The two sides are set to speak again in mid-January.
Additional discharges for service members who refuse COVID-19 vaccine
Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin mandated the coronavirus vaccine for all service members and DOD personnel in August, and an overwhelming majority of active-duty service members were vaccinated ahead of their deadlines, which have already passed.
More than 200 Marines have been discharged, the Army relieved six active-duty leaders, two battalion commanders included, and issued 2,767 general officer written reprimands, while the Air Force said 27 out of the roughly 5,000 active-duty airmen and guardians who refused the vaccine were discharged.
Even though each service has at least 95% of its active-duty members vaccinated, the group that hasn't been vaccinated numbers in the thousands, so the discharge numbers will continue to rise.
Those who are discharged over their refusal to get the coronavirus vaccination cannot be discharged under less than the general designation as a result of a provision that was included in the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act, which Biden recently signed into law.
Further claims of politicization of the military
Conservatives have accused DOD officials of promoting liberal viewpoints, arguing the new focal points are detrimental to the readiness and effectiveness of the military.
The controversies range from critical race theory, a concept that claims U.S. institutions were created with the implicit design to keep whites ahead of minorities, to the coronavirus vaccination mandate.
The crescendo of the conversation regarding critical race theory in the military came when Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, gave an impassioned answer as to why teaching cadets about the theory, and others, is valuable.
“I want to understand white rage, and I'm white," Milley told the House Armed Services Committee in June. “I personally find it offensive that we are accusing the United States military general officers are commissioned [and] noncommissioned officers of being ‘woke’ or something else because we're studying some theories that are out there. I've read Karl Marx, I've read Lenin — that doesn't make me a communist.”
The issue, while currently out of the spotlight, could reemerge in 2022.
11. 5 Places Where World War III Could Erupt in 2022
Kim Jong-un will be happy that he is mentioned in this forecast ad especially because he is put on the "WWIII level."
All four of the revisionist and rogue powers are represented.
5 Places Where World War III Could Erupt in 2022
Entering 2022, the world looks more dangerous than it has at any time since the late 1980s. Real conflicts of interest in Eastern Europe and the East China Sea have set the table for the first serious great-power conflict in decades. Crises in the Middle East, Northeast Asia, and the Himalayas continue to smolder.
Here are the five most dangerous flashpoints for the eruption of World War III, in descending order of peril:
5 Places World War III Could Erupt: Ukraine
Easily the most likely flashpoint for great power war in 2022 lies along the border between Russia and Ukraine.
Over the past six months, Russia has steadily built up forces along the frontier as Kyiv, Moscow, and Washington have traded barbs. Russia’s immediate concerns involve the Ukrainian acquisition and use of Turkish drones along its border regions, along with a general increase in Ukrainian military power. Moscow’s long-range problem is its inability to reverse the Western orientation that Kyiv has adopted since 2014.
Russia has publicly argued that it wants to resolve the issues of Ukraine and of Russia’s relationship with NATO on a permanent basis. The United States and NATO have not responded positively to these overtures, but have notably failed to guarantee Ukraine’s security. If Russia launches an invasion of Ukraine things could get ugly quickly. Despite improvements in Ukrainian forces, most analysts expect that Russia would win quick victories along the border, potentially gaining access to the Ukrainian heartland.
Direct Russian military action would put immense pressure on the United States to respond in some fashion. However, the US can support Kyiv in several ways without direct intervention. This includes economic sanctions against Russia, cyberattacks against Russian infrastructure, the transfer of weapons to Ukraine, and the sharing of real-time intelligence with Ukrainian forces. The use of any of these tools, especially if they show some success on the ground, could lead to a confrontation between Moscow and Washington.
5 Places World War III Could Erupt: Taiwan
Over the past year, long-simmering US concern over the Chinese threat to Taiwan has seemed to come to a boil.
Chinese military capabilities have grown rapidly over the past decade, and now constitute a major obstacle against US intervention. At the same time, China’s military remains untested, and an amphibious assault across the Taiwan Strait would constitute one of the most sophisticated military operations in history.
The potential for miscalculation is immense. The United States maintained a studied ambiguity towards Taiwan for the past forty years as it developed a strong economic relationship with the People’s Republic of China. This “strategic ambiguity” was designed to remove the incentive for Taiwan to declare independence while not giving China an excuse to invade. Some in Congress have now called for an end to this policy, and for more full-throated support of Taiwan’s international position.
A war could begin in several different ways. China could launch a “bolt from the blue” attack designed to catch US and Taiwanese forces unawares. Alternatively, tensions in other aspects of the US-China relationship might convince Beijing of the likelihood of a change in the US stance towards Taiwan, leading to a pre-emptive attack. Finally (and least likely) Taiwan might attempt to make its independence an accomplished fact, which most analysts believe would incur Chinese military intervention.
In any eventuality, escalation would be difficult for either side to manage, and a fight over access to Taiwan could quickly degenerate into a general war.
5 Places World War III Could Erupt: Iran
The US effort to increase military and economic coercion against Iran has failed. Iran has stepped up its nuclear efforts while improving the sophistication of its missile forces and increasing its covert activities across the region.
Negotiations have thus far failed to restore the status quo, as the United States has stumbled over its inability to commit and Tehran has taken a tough attitude. If negotiations fail to bring Iran into some kind of a deal, the threat of military action lurks in the background. While the Biden administration doesn’t seem excited about the prospect of war, US allies in Riyadh and Jerusalem could try to trigger a confrontation. Similarly, if Iran comes to believe an attack is inevitable, it could pre-empt with all the tools it has available. Iran lacks committed great power backing, but a conflict in the Middle East could open opportunities elsewhere for Russia and China.
5 Places World War III Could Erupt: North Korea
Japan, South Korea, and the United States have similarly been happy to let sleeping dogs lie, focusing on bigger international and domestic problems rather than trying to cut through the apparently intractable Korean situation.
To the extent that North Korea has made the headlines the news largely seems to be positive, with the US and Seoul coming to a mutual understanding on the prospects for a formal end to the Korean War.
And yet… the problem of North Korea remains unresolved. It is not a failed state but it faces enormous economic, social, and political problems. Historically, Pyongyang has used external belligerence to attract international attention and force a resolution of its concerns. While North Korea has not tested a nuclear weapon in several years, a resumption of testing, combined with additional tests of its missile arsenal, could erase much of the calm that has ensued over the past few years.
5 Places World War III Could Erupt: Himalayas
Tensions between China and India have mellowed over the past year, but we should not forget that the border between the two countries witnessed lethal confrontations over the past two years.
India and China have worked hard to reduce tensions along the border, but basic disagreements over territory and disposition remain. Both countries have continued to build up infrastructure in the region that could support rapid military mobilization.
Neither Beijing nor Delhi seem particularly interested in throwing down over control of remote mountain regions. But it is not difficult to envision renewed skirmishes that then draw in other problematic aspects of their relationship. Although China enjoys considerable military superiority, some trends appear to favor India. The burgeoning technological relationship between Delhi and Washington is a source of concern for Beijing, especially given the newfound willingness of the United States to engage in long-term technological agreements such as AUKUS. If China comes to understand renewed tension along the border as part of a general encirclement strategy rather than as a bilateral problem with India, it might become more willing to take serious risks to resolve the situation.
World War III in 2022?
The Covid pandemic has demanded much of the world’s attention over the past two years. This hasn’t stopped geopolitics in its tracks, but it certainly has redirected the priorities of global leaders. The pandemic isn’t over, but it is becoming part of the background noise of international politics, and great powers are recalibrating and reasserting their interests. We shouldn’t expect great power war in 2022, but we should always be aware of the potential for things to get out of hand. Most importantly, we should take care to consider that the conflicts above are interactive and interdependent. If war breaks out with Iran, it affects decision-making over the whole world.
12. Opinion | The cybersecurity risk to our water supply is real. We need to prepare.
This article reminds me of this excerpt from the book by the two PLA colonels, Unrestricted Warfare, in 1999:
Since the United States government began to seriously attack network crimes in 1990, not only have hacker activities not witnessed any decrease, but on the contrary, they have spread globally and have the great force of a forest fire. It is worth noting that following the "Information Warfare" ordinance of the American military, which placed enemy nation armies or world opponents on a par with non-approved users, inside personnel, terrorists, non-national organizations, and foreign intelligence organizations as the six sources of network threats, hackers with national or military backgrounds had already begun to reveal clues. [8] This not only greatly strengthened the battle formations of the hackers so that the actions of the disbanded and straggling hackers quickly escalated into national (network tyrant) actions, it also resulted in the increasing enlargement of the internet threat faced by all nations (including those nations with national or military hackers), and it becoming increasingly difficult to predict and guard against. The only thing which could be predicted was that the damage of this type of threat to the large network nation of the United States would certainly be greater than for other nations. Faced with theses prospects, even J. Saiteerdou [as printed 1049 3676 1422 6757], who is responsible for the investigation of computer crimes in the FBI of the United States, said with both self-confidence and worry: "Give me ten carefully chosen hackers, and within 90 days I would then be able to have this nation lay down its arms and surrender."
Opinion | The cybersecurity risk to our water supply is real. We need to prepare.
The Washington Post · by Mark Montgomery and Samantha F. Ravich Today at 1:36 p.m. EST · January 3, 2022
Mark Montgomery is senior director of the Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation (CCTI) at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and senior adviser to the Cyberspace Solarium Commission. Samantha F. Ravich chairs the CCTI and serves as a commissioner on the Cyberspace Solarium Commission.
It’s rare that four government agencies issue a joint advisory on a potential threat to the basic health and welfare of the entire U.S. population. But that’s what happened in October when the FBI, National Security Agency, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and Environmental Protection Agency warned that U.S. water and wastewater systems are being targeted by “known and unknown” malicious actors.
Their warning is not a theoretical one. In February, a hacker or hackers breached the water-treatment system in Oldsmar, Fla., and attempted to raise the level of sodium hydroxide, or lye, in the water more than 100-fold — from 100 parts per million to 11,100 parts per million. Sodium hydroxide, used to control water acidity, is poisonous at high levels.
Though an alert employee noticed his computer mouse cursor moving on its own, reset the sodium hydroxide levels and alerted his supervisor, the danger was real. As Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said at the time, water-system cybersecurity is “a matter of national security.”
Unfortunately, amid the press of other news, the Oldsmar story faded quickly, and neither the general public nor members of Congress seemed to pay much attention to the unusual four-agency advisory in October. The $1.2 billion infrastructure bill that ultimately passed Congress paid more attention to energy and transportation-sector cybersecurity than water protection. It’s not too late to wake up to the risk, though.
The United States has approximately 52,000 drinking water and 16,000 wastewater systems, many of which service small communities of fewer than 10,000 residents. These systems operate with limited budgets and even more limited cybersecurity personnel and expertise. The automation of technology that these water utilities implemented over the past two decades to both save money and increase efficiency has also exposed them to malicious cyber activity that could disrupt or manipulate services.
The Environmental Protection Agency is supposed to provide support and technical assistance to secure the nation’s water and wastewater sector against physical and cyberthreats as a sector risk management agency. For more than two decades, however, the EPA has not been resourced or organized to fulfill that mission.
More than a year and a half ago, in fact, the congressionally mandated Cyberspace Solarium Commission warned of “insufficient coordination between the EPA and other stakeholders in water utilities’ security,” echoing years of reporting by the Government Accountability Office.
The EPA cannot effectively assess and support the water sector because of a lack of will to confront this national security crisis. It certainly wasn’t a good sign when now-EPA Administrator Michael Regan made no mention of cybersecurity at his nomination hearing on Feb. 3, days before the Oldsmar hack. He was also not included in the White House Cybersecurity summit on Aug. 25, even though it included a panel on critical infrastructure cybersecurity in the energy, financial and water sectors.
Fortunately, this is a problem that can be addressed with government resources and closer collaboration with industry. The EPA’s Office of Water needs significantly more personnel, and the Agriculture Department’s Circuit Rider Program could use funding to provide cyber-specific technical support to rural water systems. Just $5 million a year would pay for up to 50 cyber circuit riders, who would travel around the country providing technical assistance to water utilities in rural areas. Their presence and know-how would be a boon for online security.
Meanwhile, Congress need not appropriate new money to EPA’s water-sector grant programs but, rather, direct that some existing grands focus exclusively on cybersecurity issues. EPA, in turn, should provide funds to the Water Information Sharing & Analysis Center and water associations that have been providing technical support and training to water utilities in the EPA’s absence.
Most dramatically, government needs to work with industry: Establish an oversight regime that develops water-sector cybersecurity standards and solicit input from water utilities and associations on prospective regulations.
In August, the American Water Works Association issued a paper outlining regulatory options for the sector. When industry is asking for federal oversight and standards, you know something is broken.
We need to get ready before the next Oldsmar, because make no mistake, another attack is coming. We just don’t know when or where.
The Washington Post · by Mark Montgomery and Samantha F. Ravich Today at 1:36 p.m. EST · January 3, 2022
13. AUKUS deal sets off 'a very big alarm' in China
AUKUS deal sets off 'a very big alarm' in China
- Australia has signed a security alliance with the US and the UK called AUKUS
- Pact will give Australia the technology to build nuclear-powered submarines
- China views the pact with suspicion and fears it aims to contain Beijing's navy
PUBLISHED: 18:44 EST, 3 January 2022 | UPDATED: 18:54 EST, 3 January 2022
The AUKUS pact has set off a 'very big alarm' in China, according to a senior Taiwanese politician.
The security alliance between Australia, the US and UK, announced in September, includes plans to give Australia technology to build eight nuclear-powered submarines before 2040.
Taiwanese MP Wang Ting-yu - who serves on his parliament's foreign affairs and national defence committee - has told The Australian that Beijing fears the allies aim to block China's navy in shallow seas and prevent it from projecting power into the blue waters of the Pacific.
HMAS Rankin submarine conducts helicopter transfers in Cockburn Sound, Western Australia last month as part of Rankin's training assessments to ensure the boat is ready to deploy
Chinese President Xi Jinping delivers a speech at the New Year gathering on December 31
He said the Chinese government believes the AUKUS pact is more of a threat than the Quad alliance between the US, Australia, Japan and India.
'We have information from inside China. They regard AUKUS more seriously than the Quad, especially the submarine [agreement],' Mr Wang told the newspaper.
'That's a very big alarm to Beijing. They're facing historical challenges, or historical co-operation, to choke them inside of their near seas.'
In November Defence Minister Peter Dutton signed a formal agreement alongside the US and UK to allow the countries to share information on the nuclear-powered vessels.
The agreement was signed in a ceremony alongside US Chargé d'Affaires Michael Goldman and UK High Commissioner Victoria Treadell.
China's foreign ministry said the AUKUS deal 'escalates regional tensions'.
'It stimulates [an] arms race, threatens regional peace and stability, and undermines international nuclear non-proliferation efforts,' Chinese foreign affairs spokesman Zhao Lijian said.
China's acting ambassador to Australia, Wang Xining, recently called Australia 'a naughty guy' over the AUKUS submarine deal, arguing it was helping the proliferation of nuclear weapons in south-east Asia.
He urged Australia to 'refrain from doing anything that's destructive to our relationship', after Mr Dutton had indicated Australia would support the US in any potential conflict over Taiwan.
Australia insists it has no plans to build or use nuclear weapons.
A new arms race is developing in the Pacific between the US and China, which could also drag in Russia - which borders the ocean - and the UK, after it signed a new defence pact with America and Australia. This graphic compares the relative sizes of each country's current nuclear arsenals
China is expanding its military as its economy balloons to rival that of the US, having lagged behind for decades.
In addition to building new nuclear missiles and silos, it has constructed new aircraft carriers, tanks, fighter jets, spy and attack drones, along with new rifles for its troops.
Beijing has used the new hardware to take a more aggressive stance in the Pacific: Imposing its rule on Hong Kong, menacing Taiwan, and laying claim to a number of uninhabited islands in the South China Sea which it has constructed military bases on top of.
It has also been pressing its claim to a number of other islands whose ownership is disputed, creating tensions with other regional powers such the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia and others. Similar disputes are underway in the East China Sea, around islands claimed by Japan.
China claims rights over the South China Sea in its entirety, which would hand Beijing control over hugely valuable international shipping lanes, fishing grounds which neighbouring countries rely on for food, and deposits of coal and oil which dot the seabed.
The US and its allies have been pushing back on these claims, and frequently conduct what they call 'freedom of navigation' operations through waters that China claims as its own in defiance of Beijing.
A recent and high-profile mission was led by the UK's newest aircraft carrier - HMS Queen Elizabeth - and its strike group, which included American destroyers. It provoked and angry response from the Communist Party (CCP).
China is using its new military hardware and economic might to throw its weight around in the Pacific, most notably in the South China Sea which has caused disputes with neighbours including Vietnam, the Philippines and Malaysia
With the end of the war in Afghanistan and the signing of the new AUKUS pact, attention has shifted away from the Middle East and towards the Pacific as the threat of direct conflict between the US and China looming large.
The flashpoint is likely to be Taiwan - and island off the Chinese coast that houses the remnants of the People's Republic of China, which once ruled the country and was deposed by the CCP when it came to power.
Historically, the US has recognised the ROC as the legitimate government of China and the two have a long-standing alliance. Taiwan views itself as an independent state, while Beijing considers it a breakaway province.
Tensions have mounted in recent years after a 2019 speech by Xi Jinping in which he committed himself to 'reunifying' Taiwan with the mainland, saying he is willing to use force if necessary.
The US has a policy of 'strategic ambiguity' towards Taiwan, refusing to say how far it would go in defence of the island - though Joe Biden recently suggested any attack would prompt a war. Officials later said he had misspoke.
With the signing of the AUKUS pact, Australia and Britain could also find themselves on the frontlines of the conflict - with Australia defence minister Peter Dutton admitting as much last week.
The Chinese.. are very clear of their intent with regard to Taiwan [and] the United States has been very clear of their intention toward Taiwan,' he said. 'Nobody wants to see conflict but that really is a question for the Chinese.'
Pictured: Defence Minister Peter Dutton signing the Exchange of Naval Nuclear Propulsion Information Agreement with US chargé d'affaires Michael Goldman (second right) and British High Commissioner Victoria Treadell (right) at Parliament House in Canberra in November
14. Solving Syria’s Crisis Starts with Sanctioning Iranian Oil
Excerpts:
Iran is sending fuel to Hezbollah because Lebanon is in the midst of a historic economic crisis that has led to a national energy shortage. The Biden administration says it wants to provide relief to Lebanon while showing Iran is not a true friend of the Lebanese people. Sanctioning Lebanese imports of Iranian fuel via Syria would cut off one source of supply, incentivize Lebanese imports from legitimate sources, and prevent Hezbollah from using the country's energy crisis for its political benefit.
Enforcing sanctions on Iranian crude and finished product into Syria would be an important first step to deny the regime its energy lifeline and, combined with other measures, incentivize it to make political concessions as part of UNSCR 2254, including the constitutional committee, release of detainees, and holding free and fair elections.
Rather than rehabilitating the Assad regime through willful negligence in its sanctions policy, the administration should escalate economic pressure on the Assad regime’s Iranian enablers to regain a measure of leverage at the negotiating table.
Solving Syria’s Crisis Starts with Sanctioning Iranian Oil
Rather than rehabilitating the Assad regime through willful negligence in its sanctions policy, the administration should escalate economic pressure on the Assad regime’s Iranian enablers to regain a measure of leverage at the negotiating table.
Iran has been openly providing the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria and the U.S.-designated Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah with millions of dollars worth of oil. The Biden administration has chosen to look the other way, even though Tehran’s shipments are a flagrant violation of both U.S. sanctions and the administration’s stated policy of securing a solution in line with United Nations Security Council Resolution 2254 (UNSCR 2254), which calls for a Syrian-led process that would create a permanent, peaceful, and political end to the conflict. To achieve this and push Assad away from Iran, Biden should impose Syria-related sanctions on the Iranian entities providing oil to Damascus.
In October, Secretary of State Antony Blinken reaffirmed the administration’s commitment to securing a political solution in Syria in line with UNSC 2254. He stated that the administration has not “lifted a single sanction on Syria or changed our position to oppose the reconstruction of Syria until there is irreversible progress toward a political solution, which we believe is necessary and vital.”
The problem with Blinken’s statement is that the administration claims to have one policy but is seemingly implementing another. Rather than putting Assad in the dilemma of choosing a political settlement under UNSCR 2254 or relying on Iran, Biden’s team is quietly greenlighting the Syrian dictator’s diplomatic rehabilitation without hard incentives.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Biden administration’s refusal to target senior Assad regime financiers with sanctions. From February through December 2020, the prior administration designated over 100 Syrian officials and their enablers, including senior financiers such as Samer Foz, Hussam Qaterji, Yasser Ibrahim, and Mohammed Masouti. That effort ground to a halt as soon as Biden took office. The approval of the regime’s participation in a regional energy agreement that will likely benefit the Syrian government is also an indicator.
If the Biden administration truly wants a political solution in Syria in line with UNSCR 2254, it must constrain Assad’s options, not expand them. To that end, the administration should fully utilize the Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act (Caesar Act) and other U.S. sanctions targeting the Syrian regime.
There is no better place to begin than by targeting Iran’s oil shipments to Hezbollah via Syrian ports. Caesar Act sanctions are mandatory, so the White House has a statutory obligation to impose them on all who knowingly provide significant material support to the government of Syria. In addition to being legally indefensible, ignoring Iranian oil shipments to Syria removes a powerful incentive for the economically crippled Assad regime to finally make significant concessions at the negotiating table.
The public evidentiary record is clear with respect to the application of sanctions to the vessels involved, the originator of the oil, and the organizations providing it. The National Iranian Tanker Company is carrying oil extracted and distributed by the National Iranian Oil Company on a wide scale. These entities should be designated for their conduct not just under Iran authorities, but under Syria or Syria-related sanctions as well. This would send a powerful message to the regime that continued reliance on Iranian energy would come at a cost.
Iran is sending fuel to Hezbollah because Lebanon is in the midst of a historic economic crisis that has led to a national energy shortage. The Biden administration says it wants to provide relief to Lebanon while showing Iran is not a true friend of the Lebanese people. Sanctioning Lebanese imports of Iranian fuel via Syria would cut off one source of supply, incentivize Lebanese imports from legitimate sources, and prevent Hezbollah from using the country's energy crisis for its political benefit.
Enforcing sanctions on Iranian crude and finished product into Syria would be an important first step to deny the regime its energy lifeline and, combined with other measures, incentivize it to make political concessions as part of UNSCR 2254, including the constitutional committee, release of detainees, and holding free and fair elections.
Rather than rehabilitating the Assad regime through willful negligence in its sanctions policy, the administration should escalate economic pressure on the Assad regime’s Iranian enablers to regain a measure of leverage at the negotiating table.
Andrew J. Tabler, former Senior Advisor at the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs and NSC Syria Director, is the Martin J. Gross Fellow in the Geduld Program on Arab Politics at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
Matthew Zweig, former Senior Advisor at the U.S. State Department’s Office of the Special Representative for Syria Engagement and Senior Professional Staff Member at the House Foreign Affairs Committee, is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a nonpartisan think tank focused on national security and foreign policy.
15. Judge grants relief to Navy SEALs who refused coronavirus vaccine, sued Biden administration
Excerpts:
“The Navy has not granted a religious exemption to any vaccine in recent memory,” O’Connor wrote. “It merely rubber stamps each denial.”
The injunction comes after nearly all of the more than 1 million active-duty U.S. service members received at least one coronavirus vaccination, and as the Defense Department has begun to end the military careers of those who do not. The Air Force and Marine Corps began administratively separating service members last month, while the Navy and Army were expected to begin doing so this month.
The Defense Department has seen numerous challenges since Austin mandated the vaccine in August, citing concerns about how the virus could affect the military’s readiness. The Pentagon has required other vaccinations for years, a point that senior defense officials have made repeatedly.
Judge grants relief to Navy SEALs who refused coronavirus vaccine, sued Biden administration
A federal judge granted a preliminary injunction on Monday blocking the Defense Department from taking action against a group of 35 Navy sailors who had refused to get a coronavirus vaccine, raising questions on how it might shape the Pentagon’s requirement that all U.S. troops get vaccinated.
U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor found that the pandemic “provides the government with no license to abrogate” the freedoms that any American has, and that the service members had a right to avoid getting a vaccination on religious grounds.
“This Court does not make light of COVID-19′s impact on the military. Collectively, our armed forces have lost over 80 lives to COVID-19 over the course of the pandemic,” O’Connor wrote Monday in a 26-page order.
But the judge added that the “loss of religious liberties outweighs any forthcoming harm to the Navy” and that “even the direst circumstances cannot justify the loss of constitutional rights.”
Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said Monday night that defense officials were aware of the injunction and reviewing it.
The troops — a group that included Navy SEALs and other members of Naval Special Warfare Command — filed suit against President Biden, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro and the Defense Department to challenge the Navy’s vaccination requirement in November. The troops cited Christian beliefs that they should not take a vaccine developed from aborted fetal cell lines and saw a modification of their bodies as an “affront to their Creator.” Many Christians have sought vaccination, with Pope Francis urging Catholics to do so on humanitarian grounds.
The suit was filed by First Liberty Institute, a nonprofit that specializes in defending religious liberty. Michael Berry, a lawyer for the institute, said in a phone interview that the ruling “sends a clear message to the Biden administration, to the Pentagon and to the Navy that our service members do not give up their religious freedom when they serve their country.”
Should the Biden administration appeal the decision, Berry said, “we will defend this as far as it needs to go.”
O’Connor noted that the Navy has a process by which service members can seek a religious accommodation to avoid vaccination but said that “by all accounts, it is theater.” Twenty-nine of the 35 troops represented in the lawsuit had seen their requests to avoid the vaccine denied, with many appealing, his ruling said.
“The Navy has not granted a religious exemption to any vaccine in recent memory,” O’Connor wrote. “It merely rubber stamps each denial.”
The injunction comes after nearly all of the more than 1 million active-duty U.S. service members received at least one coronavirus vaccination, and as the Defense Department has begun to end the military careers of those who do not. The Air Force and Marine Corps began administratively separating service members last month, while the Navy and Army were expected to begin doing so this month.
The Defense Department has seen numerous challenges since Austin mandated the vaccine in August, citing concerns about how the virus could affect the military’s readiness. The Pentagon has required other vaccinations for years, a point that senior defense officials have made repeatedly.
16. ‘Close the loopholes’: The Pentagon’s next front in its hunt for extremists
Excerpts:
The National Defense Authorization Act included a provision requiring Austin to submit a report “containing such recommendations as the Secretary considers appropriate with respect to the establishment of a separate punitive article in the UCMJ on violent extremism."
Urben said "what makes this particular campaign — combating extremism in the military — especially challenging is the sentiment that concerns about extremism in the military might be overblown, or that a handful of egregious offenders unfairly paint the entire institution in a negative light."
“It's hard to deter extremism or hold folks accountable on a consistent basis without having clear terminology, definitions, standards,” she added. “All of these efforts require sustained command-level emphasis over a long period of time to be effective.”
And that means not letting up when the issue is out of the headlines. “Measures have to be put in place to continually detect and deal with it on an ongoing basis,” Pitcavage said. “The military does seem to be moving in that direction, but the steps taken so far are just the first steps in what is going to be a considerable journey.”
‘Close the loopholes’: The Pentagon’s next front in its hunt for extremists
The military put stricter rules in place after Jan. 6. But will those efforts stick?
To address extremism in the ranks, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin ordered a forcewide stand down to remind the troops of prohibited behavior and established a working group to review the issue and recommend changes. | Olivier Douliery - Pool/Getty Images
01/04/2022 04:30 AM EST
One year after a few dozen military veterans took part in the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon has responded by tightening regulations to combat extremism in the ranks.
But the war has only just begun, according to Defense Department officials, lawmakers and experts on extremist movements.
Military leaders say they are still struggling to determine how many troops are engaging in extremist behavior and refine what activities should be barred. They have yet to develop recommended training for commanders and senior enlisted leaders to spot white supremacists, as well as anti-government or other radical elements hiding in their units. And proposed reforms to the military justice system to make extremism a crime are the focus of a new review mandated by Congress.
But perhaps most of all, the Pentagon needs to avoid the mistake it has made too many times before: losing focus on an enduring threat once the public and high-level attention fades. But there are serious doubts leaders have the staying power to make the new efforts stick.
“The past 40 years has basically been a history of some sort of crisis that illustrates extremism in the military and then there’s some sort of patchwork measures taken to try to deal with it,” said Mark Pitcavage, a leading authority on extremism at the Anti-Defamation League.
“And then it kind of subsides until the next crisis.”
Heidi Urben, a retired Army colonel and specialist on the military and politics at Georgetown University, agreed that the key is “to what extent the services will be able to sustain focus and command emphasis at all levels from this point out.”
She noted that the military branches, “particularly the Army, placed a lot of emphasis on countering extremism in the 1990s, and then that attention dissipated.”
In December, Austin issued a memorandum ordering “increased clarity” on what constitutes extremist behavior that could get troops kicked out of the military and how commanders should handle it.
He also approved revised guidelines that add new activities to the list of prohibited actions, including “liking” an extremist post on social media.
“The available data generally shows that cases of prohibited extremist activity among service members was rare,” the Pentagon working group concluded in reaching its consensus last month. “However, even a small number of cases can pose a significant problem, challenging safety and unit cohesion.”
‘To spot that sort of stuff’
The Defense Department is the first to acknowledge it has a lot more work to do.
Top of the list is developing more effective means to track how many troops are being punished or removed on a regular basis for engaging in extremist activities, either through the military justice system or criminal or administrative investigations by the military branches' internal watchdogs.
The working group pegged the number at roughly 100 in 2021, but also asserted it’s probably not a complete picture of a phenomenon that operates mostly in the shadows.
“While our ability to track those cases has improved since 2018 with the introduction of systems for flagging or coding cases that has that element,” a DoD official recently told reporters, “those systems have come online at different points over the last several years. So it makes it a bit challenging to compare data … one year to another.”
Cassie Miller, a researcher on extremism at the Southern Poverty Law Center, said the recent burst of extremist activity and movements nationally means the military desperately needs a better understanding of how much it has become a breeding ground, especially for those who leave the service.
“There hasn't been a priority [historically] on gathering that kind of data,” Miller said. “And so in a lot of cases, it simply does not exist.”
Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby told POLITICO that the recent decisions are seen as an initial salvo in a longer-term strategy to tackle the threat.
The Defense Department’s extremist working group has outlined a series of additional efforts to try to get a better picture.
For example, it enlisted the Institute for Defense Analyses, a government think tank, to complete a more detailed study of the extent of the extremism problem by June 2022. The study will include a review of “information-collection systems and data” and “behavioral pathways to extremist activity” such as how extremist groups recruit followers or encourage members to join the military to receive training.
A separate study by the Pentagon’s Applied Research Laboratory for Intelligence and Security will also evaluate new procedures for background investigations in order to flag potential extremists trying to join the military or entering the ranks of defense contractors with access to weapons and other sensitive equipment.
The working group’s report also recommended developing a plan to train DoD personnel and leaders on prohibited activity.
“Not everybody needs to be trained on that,” Pitcavage said. “But people in a number of positions, from recruiters to initial entry trainers and advanced trainers, company grade officers and senior enlisted personnel, there are key people that are in positions to spot that sort of stuff.”
Who is an extremist?
But Pitcavage also believes the Pentagon’s updated catalog of what is considered out of bounds “very, very narrowly” defines extremist behavior.
“They all have to be based on one or more of the extremist activities that are listed,” he said. “And all of those have to do with basically violence, criminal activities or breaking regulations.”
But that raises the question of whether a service member could be a member of a white supremacist group “as long as it doesn't specifically advocate the overthrow of the government or violence against people of other races or religions,” Pitcavage added.
The problem with that, in his view, is “most white supremacist groups don't advocate the overthrow of the government.”
Even one white supremacist in a military unit “can create all sorts of problems completely unrelated to overthrowing the government,” he warned. “They can pass on information to other extremists, including those who might belong to explicitly violent groups.”
“They’re going to have to expand the range of extremist activities that are covered,” he said.
Kirby disagreed with the claim that the new regulations are too broad. He said the rules include a “very detailed list of what we consider to be active participation in extremist activity,” including fundraising, attending rallies, or espousing racist or other violent ideologies such as “advocating widespread unlawful discrimination.”
Pitcavage would also like to see more focus on preventing troops from supporting extremist individuals, not just groups.
“Most white supremacists are not actual members of white supremacist groups,” he said. “In the days of the internet the need to join a formal group is simply far less than it used to be decades ago.”
“They are going to have to close the loopholes like that,” he added.
Kirby countered that the new rules barring “active participation” will make it “very difficult for you to provide support to individuals as well,” Kirby added. “We’re proud of the specificity.”
Pentagon pushback
Leading advocates in Congress for taking more aggressive action have lauded the Pentagon’s new guidelines.
But they also complain that the brass has resisted taking more aggressive steps to build a more sustained effort to keep extremist influences at bay over the long term.
Rep. Anthony Brown (D-Md.), an Army lawyer and member of the Armed Services Committee, led the effort after Jan. 6 to adopt legislation that would establish a dedicated office within the Pentagon for combating extremism.
But his bipartisan proposal, which passed the House, was stripped from the final defense policy bill after Pentagon opposition. He called that “a real missed opportunity to take a giant step forward.”
The measure would also have put Congress on the record that membership in an extremist group should be disqualifying for military service.
“We got a lot of pushback from the Pentagon on that issue,” Brown said in an interview, recounting military concerns about infringing on free speech. “They were fearful of constitutional challenges.”
Kirby maintained that there was an active debate about barring membership in such groups outright. “It was an active part of our deliberations,” he said. “There were genuine First Amendment rights we felt needed to be considered.”
But Brown dismissed that argument. “I am well aware of the deference that courts give to both the president and Congress when it comes to restricting constitutional freedoms in order to maintain good order and discipline in the military,” he said.
“I thought that was a missed opportunity to make that clear statement,” he added.
Brown also said the Pentagon opposed other mandates. For instance, “they thought the training requirements and data collection were overly burdensome, which is a joke,” he said.
‘There will have to be more’
Fellow Army veteran Rep. Jason Crow (D-Colo.), another member of the Armed Services Committee, believes far more action will be needed to ensure new measures take root.
“This was a first step and I think there will have to be more,” Crow said of the recent Pentagon reforms. “This is going to rely a lot on command commitment and commitment of the senior leadership pushing this down to the lower ranks in the military.
“I wanted to see this formalized, have some formal structures put into place that would help push that sustained long term change and cultural shift that we need and to make this a priority,” he added in an interview.
Potentially still ripe for revision is the Uniform Code of Military Justice to make extremist behavior a crime.
The National Defense Authorization Act included a provision requiring Austin to submit a report “containing such recommendations as the Secretary considers appropriate with respect to the establishment of a separate punitive article in the UCMJ on violent extremism."
Urben said "what makes this particular campaign — combating extremism in the military — especially challenging is the sentiment that concerns about extremism in the military might be overblown, or that a handful of egregious offenders unfairly paint the entire institution in a negative light."
“It's hard to deter extremism or hold folks accountable on a consistent basis without having clear terminology, definitions, standards,” she added. “All of these efforts require sustained command-level emphasis over a long period of time to be effective.”
And that means not letting up when the issue is out of the headlines. “Measures have to be put in place to continually detect and deal with it on an ongoing basis,” Pitcavage said. “The military does seem to be moving in that direction, but the steps taken so far are just the first steps in what is going to be a considerable journey.”
17. With Donald Trump lurking, is the U.S. sleepwalking toward calamity?
A very provocative OpEd from Canada.
Excerpt:
Which is why the most dangerous force in the world going into 2022 might not be in Beijing or Moscow, but in the United States. Its name is Trumpism.
With Donald Trump lurking, is the U.S. sleepwalking toward calamity?
THE EDITORIAL BOARD
PUBLISHED YESTERDAY
Protesters at the Michigan State Capitol call for a 'forensic audit' of the 2020 presidential election during a demonstration on Oct. 12, 2021.
JEFF KOWALSKY/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
In 2021, the world had no lack of bad actors.
As Christmas approached, Russian President Vladimir Putin had amassed an estimated 100,000 troops, 1,300 tanks and 1,800 pieces of artillery on the Ukraine border, and was demanding the West bend to his terms.
Through the fall, even as it was dismembering the last of “one country, two systems” in Hong Kong, Beijing ramped up its rhetoric about bringing Taiwan under its control. China carried out ominous military operations, sending so many fighter jets and bombers in Taiwan’s direction in October and November that the country had to scramble its defence forces each time.
The sabre-rattling further disturbed a world already made uneasy by a pandemic, supply-chain problems, and inflation. As the year ended, the prospect of China or Russia redrawing the map, by force of arms, hung over the planet.
However, the likelihood of either country doing that remains low. An invasion of Taiwan or the Ukraine would prompt strong retaliatory measures, especially from the United States.
Most likely, the posturing by Mr. Putin and his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, had two goals: to cement their leadership by appealing to their countries’ nationalism; and to test the resolve of the U.S. and its allies. Push, and see what happens.
Which is why the most dangerous force in the world going into 2022 might not be in Beijing or Moscow, but in the United States. Its name is Trumpism.
The past year offered something of a reprieve from Donald Trump. After his defeat in the 2020 election, and his retreat into private life after the Capitol Hill insurrection on Jan. 6, the world got a break from his constant presence. His late night tweetstorms ended after Twitter banned him. His appearances on Fox News were infrequent.
His lowered profile, and the return to a kind of adult normalcy in the form of President Joe Biden and his administration, has made a lot of people happily forget the degree to which Mr. Trump shattered norms and conventions, and sapped America’s alliances, during his four years in office.
He antagonized his NATO allies by threatening to pull out of the alliance, and seemed strangely intent on sheltering Mr. Putin from accusations that Moscow and its proxies interfered in the 2016 U.S. election. He was a naked self-dealer in office. He tried to turn the Department of Justice into his political servant. He forced the renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement on baseless grounds and imposed unjustified tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum.
Throughout it all he lied, attacked the media as part of a plot against him, called people silly names and did his utmost to diminish the office he held.
But his most dangerous move has been maintaining throughout the past year that he won the 2020 election, and was only removed from office by fraud. He has taken aim at the entire U.S. constitutional order, rejecting its limits and its legitimacy. His attempts to overturn the election led to the Capitol Hill riot, and millions of Americans still believe his ludicrous claims.
He’s been so effective at spreading the big lie that three retired U.S. generals wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post in December warning that, if Mr. Trump or someone he supports loses the 2024 election, insurrectionist forces within the U.S. military could stage a coup.
At the same time, Mr. Trump’s Republican allies have been replacing election officials in key states with loyalists who may refuse to accept any 2024 election outcome not in Mr. Trump’s favour. And on top of the usual gerrymandering, Republicans have also been passing state and local laws aimed at suppressing the other side’s vote, wherever possible.
If the Republicans come out of the 2022 midterm election with control of both the Senate and the House of Representatives – the former is possible, the latter almost certain – the result will be two years of gridlock and voter dissatisfaction. That would set Mr. Trump up nicely for the 2024 election; if he wins, the world will return to a more intense version of the instability that marked his first term.
And if he loses and throws the U.S. into an extended period of unrest, the resulting disarray could open the door for China and Russia to be even more aggressive.
The U.S. is sleepwalking towards calamity, one that could take the rest of the world with it.
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18. The Information Warfare Myth
Interesting thesis. I think we must understand the difference between influence and technologically based information warfare. While technologically based information operations can contribute to and support influence operations, such operations are not totally dependent on advanced technologically based information operations. But the autor will discount influence operations because they are hard to measure the effects of such operations and they often require time and patience to achieve results.
Excerpts:
U.S. military information warfare advocates have, for years now, tended toward the hyperbolic in predicting its significance. Information warfare is not insignificant, particularly cyber warfare, but it thus far has a dismal record at achieving foreign policy or military warfighting objectives. What, exactly, did the United States achieve through information warfare methods in Iraq and Afghanistan? Perhaps information warfare, particularly cyber and electronic warfare, will play a more decisive role against a technologically sophisticated adversary.
In some ways, however, even this thesis is being tested, as Ukraine is not a backward nation. Its information technology infrastructure was already heavily compromised to Russian actors. With its historical and cultural connections to Russia, it should have been an easy target for an information warfare campaign. Yet it has turned out to be the hardest of targets. Ukrainians have proven resilient to the point of defiance. And that should inspire the West and give pause to the Pentagon to not overinvest in information warfare at the expense of traditional hard-power capabilities.
All warfare methods must, ultimately, prove their efficacy. Information warfare’s durable effects seem stubbornly hard to measure. Perhaps they are mostly illusory. For now, information warfare is, and may always be, an enabling component to warfare and not a main effort.
The Information Warfare Myth
January 04, 2022
Russia’s troop buildup on the Ukrainian border may culminate in a full-scale invasion. Or it may be meant to coerce NATO to negotiate and concede to some of Vladimir Putin’s demands regarding Ukraine’s future. But one thing it surely demonstrates is that the efficacy of information warfare to achieve political and security objectives is greatly overstated. The U.S. military and national security community should take note.
One could be forgiven for concluding Vladimir Putin’s Russia is the world’s grand practitioner of information warfare. It’s a conclusion Putin ostensibly promotes, if, for no other reason, because it conjures an image of power that may be more illusion than reality.
The potential destructive effects of cyberattacks are serious, and it is no overreaction on the part of Western intelligence and military services to take that threat seriously. But even cyberattacks, at least as thus far practiced, seem far more bark than bite when evaluating what they achieve beyond imposing some costs on the target nation.
Western democracies should take heart at how Ukraine has stood firm against a ruthless and pervasive Russian information warfare campaign. In 2014, following the Maidan protests in Kyiv that ultimately ousted Ukraine's pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovich, Russia intensified a broad information warfare campaign against Ukraine. This campaign aimed to undermine Ukrainian popular support for the nation’s pro-European leadership. Or, if that did not work well, to at least sow discord and confusion to a point in which Ukrainians eventually would become apathetic about their government’s decision to defy Moscow.
Russia has been employing all the information warfare tools it can muster for nearly eight years, including cyberattacks, disinformation, and pro-Russian influence campaigns. Yet all evidence indicates the Kremlin has failed through information warfare alone to keep most of Ukraine in Russia’s political, economic, and cultural orbit. This contrasts with the parts of Ukraine Russia physically seized (the Crimea) or is engaging in a proxy war using local insurgents (the Donbas).
Contrary to the Russian narrative, Ukrainians were never as anti-Russian as Moscow claims. For example, in 2010, the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology recorded that 93 percent of Ukrainians surveyed in all regions had a favorable attitude toward Russia, with 22 percent of the population believing the two states should reunite. Yet in 2016, only 17 percent of Ukrainians reported having a favorable attitude toward Russia. More recent polling confirms Ukrainian public opinion remains at historic lows.
On the question of NATO accession, in 2010, shortly after Yanukovich was elected, in part to improve relations with Russia, only 28 percent of Ukrainians supported NATO accession. A June 2017 poll by the Democracy Initiatives Foundation showed Ukrainian support for joining NATO at 69 percent. Polling in 2021 showed that number remaining above 60 percent. Finally, Russian meddling in Ukraine’s information space has galvanized Ukrainian distrust of Russian media, prompting the ban of Russian social media sites and media outlets in the country.
Not only has Moscow’s information war against Ukraine proved to be remarkably anemic, but it may ultimately be counterproductive. Russia already has conducted cyberattacks against the Ukrainian financial industry and power grid, and Moscow will undoubtedly continue such attacks. It is doubtful, however, that more cyberattacks and a broader, more intense information warfare campaign (if that is even possible) can turn the tide and help Russia achieve lasting political objectives in Ukraine. Moscow has likely come to this realization, hence the threat of physical aggression.
U.S. military information warfare advocates have, for years now, tended toward the hyperbolic in predicting its significance. Information warfare is not insignificant, particularly cyber warfare, but it thus far has a dismal record at achieving foreign policy or military warfighting objectives. What, exactly, did the United States achieve through information warfare methods in Iraq and Afghanistan? Perhaps information warfare, particularly cyber and electronic warfare, will play a more decisive role against a technologically sophisticated adversary.
In some ways, however, even this thesis is being tested, as Ukraine is not a backward nation. Its information technology infrastructure was already heavily compromised to Russian actors. With its historical and cultural connections to Russia, it should have been an easy target for an information warfare campaign. Yet it has turned out to be the hardest of targets. Ukrainians have proven resilient to the point of defiance. And that should inspire the West and give pause to the Pentagon to not overinvest in information warfare at the expense of traditional hard-power capabilities.
All warfare methods must, ultimately, prove their efficacy. Information warfare’s durable effects seem stubbornly hard to measure. Perhaps they are mostly illusory. For now, information warfare is, and may always be, an enabling component to warfare and not a main effort.
Bill Bray is a retired Navy captain and the deputy editor-in-chief of the U.S. Naval Institute’s Proceedings magazine.
19. How Extremism Went Mainstream
Excerpts:
These represent substantial steps forward for a country that has spent decades focused on the security aspects of counterterrorism and combating extremism. But the Biden administration needs to treat this agenda with an even greater sense of urgency. At a minimum, the United States needs a well-resourced interagency task force to carry out the prevention efforts currently controlled exclusively by the security and intelligence sectors. The focus should be on building democratic resilience in the mainstream, not just mitigating the risk of violence from the fringe—with decision-making authority granted to experts in education, social work, and mental health. Washington should also provide significant funding for this kind of work to states and municipalities, making clear that such efforts are more than an afterthought to the security measures on which the United States spends untold billions of dollars.
In the absence of such steps, the risk of more political violence will continue to grow. In a November poll, troublingly low numbers of respondents said they would trust the official results of the 2024 presidential election if their preferred candidate loses: 82 percent of Democrats and only 33 percent of Republicans. If officials can’t find ways to push extremist ideas back to the fringes, the January 6 riot might someday look less like the last gasp of Trump-era extremism and more like a prelude to an era of violent division.
How Extremism Went Mainstream
Washington Needs a New Approach to Preventing Far-Right Violence
In the months before and after the 2020 U.S. presidential election, millions of Americans clicked their way through an online flood of disinformation, including the widely distributed falsehood that rampant voter fraud had allowed Joe Biden to steal what was rightfully Donald Trump’s victory. On January 6, 2021, the real-world consequences of this deception and delusion became clear, as thousands of pro-Trump rioters launched a violent assault on the U.S. Capitol, intent on stopping the certification of Biden’s victory.
The siege reflected two important trends that will continue to shape American politics in the coming years. The first is the mainstreaming of right-wing extremism. The majority of the rioters were hitherto ordinary Americans who had only recently embraced radical ideas. Their pathways to political violence did not involve a clearly defined ideology or an affiliation with particular groups but instead were shaped by a propaganda campaign that engulfed the full spectrum of right-wing politics: from Republican elected officials, prominent conservative commentators, and conservative-leaning major news outlets to newly minted social media influencers, minor radical organizations, and a burgeoning group of far-right niche media ventures.
Even before Trump’s rise, these forces had been gaining strength for years owing in part to the so-called war on terror. As I wrote last year in Foreign Affairs, the post-9/11 era was fertile ground for the far right, when law enforcement and intelligence services focused almost exclusively on the jihadist threat, and the fear of Muslim terrorists played into the hands of xenophobes, white supremacists, and Christian nationalists. Trump took advantage of those developments in his 2016 campaign, and by the time he took office, ideas that had long been relegated to the fringes of American society were rapidly becoming central to the country’s political ecosystem.
The mainstreaming of extremism has itself led to the second trend: a scrambling and recombination of extremist groups and ideas. Thanks not only to disinformation about the 2020 election but also to the polarization fed by the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests, those January 6 rioters who did belong to recognizable far right groups had become accustomed to having strange bedfellows—not just conspiracy theorists enamored of the pro-Trump QAnon movement but also “wellness” advocates opposed to vaccines, libertarians opposed to mask mandates, gun-rights proponents protesting perceived threats to the Second Amendment, and “accelerationists” seeking the violent collapse of political, economic, and social systems.
The post-9/11 era was fertile ground for the far right.
These changes have rendered violent extremist movements less coherent and more unpredictable than ever before. In the United States, such groups have generally been defined by relatively clear ideological leanings that aligned with specific intelligence and law enforcement strategies, training needs, and fields of expertise. But tactics such as monitoring, surveillance, and infiltration are harder to apply in an environment that is more spontaneous, fragmented, and characterized by rapid evolution and surprising coalitions. Simply put, the tools that authorities use to combat extremists become less useful when the line between the fringe and the center starts to blur.
The federal government urgently needs to adapt to this new reality. Extremism has gone mainstream; so must the interventions needed to address it.
STRANGE BEDFELLOWS
Violent movements change in both strategic and organic ways as they make inroads into the mainstream. On the one hand, transformation results from top-down efforts to repackage ideologies to broaden the appeal of ideas the mainstream might otherwise reject. But it’s also caused by the bottom-up fragmentation and reassembling of extreme ideas that happens as people radicalize in a vast and ever-expanding online ecosystem, a process that often involves no contact with particular organizations.
Strategic changes are typically rooted in efforts to reach and recruit broader audiences, but in the process, those changes often fundamentally alter fringe movements themselves. For example, the far right has historically defended traditional norms regarding families and has opposed policies such as same-sex marriage. But some far-right groups now claim that rights for women and LGBTQ people represent core Western values that they aim to protect against a supposed threat from Islam—especially by restricting immigration. Radical nativists have reframed their agenda to appeal to people who care about environmental issues by arguing that border closures or limits on migration will reduce pollution and preserve scarce resources.
Organic changes are more bottom-up in nature, driven by the patchwork essence of an online information ecosystem that easily moves a casual reader across disparate frameworks. Shifts in how extremist propaganda is produced and distributed—fewer manifestos, more memes—have allowed individuals to cleave off bits of ideology and reassemble them into new and unexpected forms. Thus a self-described “Bolshevik” white supremacist group calls for the liquidation of the capitalist class, far-right groups praise the Taliban and the Unabomber, QAnon spreads through yoga studios and alternative medicine communities, and antigovernment militias join forces with left-leaning antivaccine groups to protest restrictions and mandates related to the COVID-19 pandemic.
When it comes to dealing with extremism, other countries are far ahead of the United States.
As ordinary individuals encounter these ideas, whether through custom-tailored propaganda or through more grassroots efforts amplified by social media, they assemble them into their own personalized belief systems. This is a far cry from more traditional models of radicalization in which people gradually adopt an identifiable group’s ideological framework—such as fascism or neo-Nazism—that calls for violent solutions against a common enemy. These more coherent processes involve initiation rites, manifestos, leaders, and a chain of command that guide beliefs and actions. Those elements are largely absent from today’s patchwork, choose-your-own-adventure mode of radicalization.
When it comes to dealing with this kind of metastasizing extremism, a number of other countries are far ahead of the United States. They have recognized that the only way to address the mainstreaming of extremist ideas is to focus on the mainstream itself. Canada, Germany, New Zealand, and Norway have all adopted multisectoral approaches, drawing on resources and expertise from as many as a dozen federal agencies, including not only security and intelligence services but ministries of education, labor, health and human services, youth and families, social services, and culture and the arts. They have committed billions of dollars to efforts that build community trust, increase equity and social inclusion, combat racism, and improve media literacy and civic education so that citizens will be more likely to recognize and resist propaganda, disinformation, and conspiracy theories.
These approaches treat violent extremism less as a security issue than as a societal problem more akin to a public health threat. They integrate counter-extremism and violence prevention into community arts programs, soccer clubs, and interfaith dialogues. Educators, youth social workers, and other practitioners receive regular training—including through state-funded workshops, retreats, and seminars—to improve their knowledge of warning signs, learn about extremist culture, and develop pedagogical strategies. Public funding supports family counseling for people who have relationships with radicalized individuals, including their parents, siblings, teachers, and employers.
Data on the efficacy of such programs is hard to come by. But when my research lab began to test these models in the United States, my colleagues and I found clear evidence that they work. We created a guide to equip parents with tools to intervene in youth radicalization and then assessed what more than 750 parents and caregivers learned from reading it. We found that it took only seven minutes of reading for participants to significantly improve their knowledge and understanding of extremism and youth radicalization in ways that make it more likely they would act appropriately when dealing with a young person at risk. More than 80 percent of parents and caregivers reported that, after reading the guide, they felt “definitely” or “probably” prepared to talk with youth about online extremism and to intervene with youth they worried were in contact with extremist ideas. We have had similar success using video content (including animation) and training seminars conducted virtually.
A NEW APPROACH
In contrast to the holistic approaches pursued by some of its allies and partners, the United States houses its prevention efforts almost exclusively within the Department of Homeland Security. This is because in Washington, countering violent extremism has historically meant focusing more on the violence and less on the extremism. In the post-9/11 era, U.S. officials have essentially measured their success by determining how well they’ve barricaded the doors against violence from an already radicalized or radicalizing fringe. What’s been missing is a strategy to stop people from becoming radicalized in the first place.
There has been some change in the U.S. approach since the January 6 riot. For example, DHS has significantly retooled much of its prevention work, moving experts into regional offices where community-based specialists work more directly with school safety officers, religious leaders, and other practitioners and partners. Last June, the administration released the first-ever U.S. national strategy to counter domestic terrorism, which embraced a public health approach characterized by more interagency collaboration, community-centered prevention, and new investments in media literacy, critical thinking skills, and evidence-based programs to strengthen “user resilience to disinformation and misinformation online.” Notably, the new U.S. strategy directly spells out the need to confront long-term contributors to domestic terrorism, including racism, easy access to guns, mental illness, and the lack of civics classes in schools.
These represent substantial steps forward for a country that has spent decades focused on the security aspects of counterterrorism and combating extremism. But the Biden administration needs to treat this agenda with an even greater sense of urgency. At a minimum, the United States needs a well-resourced interagency task force to carry out the prevention efforts currently controlled exclusively by the security and intelligence sectors. The focus should be on building democratic resilience in the mainstream, not just mitigating the risk of violence from the fringe—with decision-making authority granted to experts in education, social work, and mental health. Washington should also provide significant funding for this kind of work to states and municipalities, making clear that such efforts are more than an afterthought to the security measures on which the United States spends untold billions of dollars.
In the absence of such steps, the risk of more political violence will continue to grow. In a November poll, troublingly low numbers of respondents said they would trust the official results of the 2024 presidential election if their preferred candidate loses: 82 percent of Democrats and only 33 percent of Republicans. If officials can’t find ways to push extremist ideas back to the fringes, the January 6 riot might someday look less like the last gasp of Trump-era extremism and more like a prelude to an era of violent division.
20. Static Inertia: The Legal Challenges to Making Progress on an Effective Military Information Strategy
I will say this again, some PSYOP officers lamented to me a few years ago that it is easier to get permission (authority) to put a Hellfire missile on the forehead of a terrorist than it is to get permission to put an idea between his ears.
Static Inertia: The Legal Challenges to Making Progress on an Effective Military Information Strategy - Modern War Institute
Editor’s note: This article is the first in the Army Cyber Institute’s (ACI) contribution to the series, “Compete and Win: Envisioning a Competitive Strategy for the Twenty-First Century.” The series endeavors to present expert commentary on diverse issues surrounding US competitive strategy and irregular warfare with peer and near-peer competitors in the physical, cyber, and information spaces. The series is part of the Competition in Cyber Project (C2P), a joint initiative by ACI and MWI. Special thanks to series editors Capt. Maggie Smith, PhD, C2P director, and Dr. Barnett S. Koven.
The United States military is constantly reorganizing and retooling itself to address information operations in gray-zone competition. Unfortunately, forward progress is hard to come by, and operations in the information environment remain an Achilles’ heel, which adversaries use against us to great effect. There is no shortage of ideas and proposals to address the information operations problem, but no solution has been able to overcome the static inertia and impel progress.
One of the major reasons for the static inertia is the constitutional and legal framework that our nation is built upon. Behind all the discussions is a nagging sense that the entire enterprise is just wrong—after all, the United States is a liberal democracy, we do not engage in state-sponsored propaganda, and there should be no Ministry of Truth in America. The whole prospect sounds utterly distasteful.
On the other hand, there are daily indications that our nation is getting crushed by adversary information operations. Our adversaries adeptly employ their militaries to engage in mis- and disinformation campaigns that results in real damage to the fabric of our nation. Very real strategic advantages are being lost at home and abroad as a result. From our adversaries’ perspectives, conducting information operations in America is like taking candy from a baby: our liberal democracy makes it easy. Further, our cyber and intelligence personnel can see the malign influence campaigns and can understand their impacts and the very real damage that is being done yet can do little to counter them. The result is what we see today. The military is caught in crosscutting pressures: On the one hand, there is an increasing cry to “do something” in response to adversary information operations that are having very real effects in eroding our competitive advantage. On the other, the calls to “do something” are caveated by an unstated but equally strong expectation that any response does not violate Americans’ civil rights, their civil liberties, or the United States’ constitutional order.
This tension creates two, interrelated challenges to crafting an effective strategy in the information environment. First, the prospect of military engagement to counter adversary information operations during competition raises very significant legal concerns that must be addressed—concerns foundational to our constitutional system. On the other hand, these legal concerns play a significant role in hindering the development of a coherent information strategy in competition. This article will attempt to bring these issues to light, so that the underlying and implicit concerns can be stated, which is a necessary first step to crafting an effective, comprehensive, whole-of-government strategy to respond to our adversaries’ malign influence campaigns. This article will discuss the underlying legal concerns and conclude with thoughts on the development of an integrated strategy.
Legal Concern #1: The First Amendment
The concerns surrounding the First Amendment are at the heart of the issue. Our basic democratic values include an appreciation for the “marketplace of ideas.” All ideas can be presented in American civil society, and these ideas will rise and fall based on their merit as demonstrated by how well they fare against counterarguments, contrary proposals, and critical examination by the listeners. The government is agnostic and does not take sides, and truth will prevail so long as freedom of speech allows for open competition of ideas without a government thumb on the scale.
However, this marketplace of ideas construct can and has been “hacked” by our adversaries. Russia, China, and Iran can participate in our marketplace of ideas as well, with one significant advantage. They can use their nation-state level of resources to great effect through microtargeting and psychological manipulation. In addition, adversaries take care to hide the source of the message, as an otherwise plausible message might be rejected outright if it were widely known to have originated from an Iranian government agency. This prospect raises a significant question: How can the US government respond to foreign adversary interventions into our marketplace of ideas without the US government also becoming a player in the very same marketplace (which is what the First Amendment sought to avoid in the first place)?
There are two legal aspects of First Amendment freedom of speech law that are at play in the current mis- and disinformation arena. First, while non-US speakers (individuals) and foreign nations do not generally have a protected right to freedom of speech within the United States, there is a right for US citizens to receive foreign speech. Going back to the marketplace of ideas concept, the Supreme Court has recognized that a US person has a constitutional right to seek out and consider speech originating from outside the United States (for example, the Supreme Court ruled that a US citizen had a right to request and receive materials labeled “communist political propaganda” by the postal authorities). Such activity is not protected to the same level as traditional speech, so reasonable government restrictions and limitations may be allowable, like requiring the disclosure of the foreign source of the speech in question. Unfortunately, legal cases on this doctrine are from the Cold War era, and how this right to receive speech might apply against US government restrictions on foreign speech in the internet era are still unclear.
Further confounding the situation is the great ease with which an American can “like,” “share,” or “retweet” foreign information. Once an American citizen forwards a Russian meme, however unwittingly, the speech is now protected speech because an American citizen has now adopted it and expressed it as his or her own. Such speech then receives the highest level of protection under the First Amendment. The ease of converting foreign disinformation into protected speech poses great challenges to government entities seeking to counter foreign malign influence and disinformation.
Finally, the entire situation is also complicated by the fact that social media companies are nongovernmental entities and not barred by the First Amendment from infringing on the freedom of speech. Lately, there are increasing discussions surrounding social media companies and their so-called censorship of speech. I used the term “so-called” because censorship is normally effected by governments, not private organizations. In fact, the First Amendment states that “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech” (a prohibition that was later extended to governmental entities at the state and local level). Nowhere does the Constitution prohibit Facebook or Twitter from abridging freedom of speech. Additionally, if the government seeks to compel social media companies to regulate speech, then the First Amendment may come into play if the social media companies were deemed to be acting as agents of the government. The government is thus limited to pointing out adversary disinformation that violates terms of service to the social media companies and trust that the companies do the right thing. The only “stick” that the government holds is the threat of repealing Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act—which may have many unintended consequences.
Legal Concern #2: The Role of the Military
The second concern relates to the role of the military, and potentially the intelligence community, in information operations. Our adversaries understand well the new paradigm of leveraging information operations as a critical means of gaining military advantages—with the Russian emphasis on information warfare during competition and the Chinese People’s Liberation Army actively embracing the “three warfares.” Russia and China clearly see the military value of stand-alone information engagement.
The US military, on the other hand, has historically avoided such activities. In fact, the Department of Defense links information operations to regular military activities, defining information operations as “the integrated employment, during military operations, of information-related capabilities in concert with other lines of operations [emphasis added].” The italicized phrases show the disconnect. In contrast to our adversaries, US military information operations are tied to an existing military operation and serve to help secure a military objective. Unlike their Russian or Chinese counterparts, US military information operations are not a stand-alone proposition, but are instead nested within other military operations.
The US military’s approach, while insufficient to respond to the current environment, is consistent with traditional understandings of roles and responsibilities within the federal government. The job of the military has been to fight and win our nation’s wars, not engage in propaganda campaigns, even in foreign contexts. Given the principle of civilian control of the military, the military is not going to jump wholesale into the field without affirmative orders to do so from its civilian overseers. In fact, Congress prohibits such activities within the United States: section 2241a of Title 10 prohibits DoD from expending funds “for publicity or propaganda purpose within the United States.” In the 1970s, the Church Committee highlighted the potential for abuse of power when the national security apparatus was deployed against Vietnam War protestors or civil rights activists, with many resulting reforms in the national security realm—further reinforcing hesitancy for military involvement. And during the Cold War, Voice of America was run by the US Information Agency, “an independent foreign affairs agency of the executive branch.”
However, the current information environment is unlike any that has existed in the past, as are our adversaries’ tactics in this environment. The speed, scale, and opacity of internet-enabled operations provide distinct advantages. As a result, adversary information operations create real risks to national security. With its extensive cyber capabilities and resources, the US military is currently in the best position to counter the adversary in the information arena. Congress seems to be favoring this approach, as noted by a recent Government Accountability Office report critical of recent DoD efforts, as well as several provisions in the annual National Defense Authorization Acts that seemingly nudge DoD further into the information environment.
To date, US Cyber Command’s response seems to be limited to a defensive engagement, such as the attack on the Russian Internet Research Agency, which prevented that organization from spreading disinformation during the 2018 elections. While a helpful first step, the tactic has been analogized to using terrestrial air-defense weapons such as missiles and antiaircraft guns to stop enemy air attacks instead of developing an aerial combat capacity. Yet, US Cyber Command’s cautious approach reflects deep concerns about freedom of speech and the proper role of the military in a constitutional republic. At present, there do not appear to be many guardrails in place to channel and direct US military information operations, which understandably results in a tentative response particularly because the risks are great if mistakes are made.
The Information Environment Needs the Same Attention as the Cyber Domain
Comparing this situation to the federal action to secure cyberspace demonstrates huge differences. In cyberspace, Congress has legislated several times on cyber matters, presidential directives have been issued to allocate responsibilities within the federal government to secure cyberspace and engage with our adversaries, and the Cyberspace Solarium Commission has made extensive recommendations, many of which have been now written into law. Information operations, on the other hand, have received much less attention. Some mentions of information operations are made in the directives, legislation, and reports addressing cyberspace operations, but they are tangential—due in large part to the fact that information operations are largely executed in and through cyberspace.
Due to the lack of guidance and the potential legal pitfalls, a tentative approach to countering adversary information operations is understandable. Many difficult and fundamental questions remain unresolved. Without clear answers to these foundational questions, it will be hard for an effective military information strategy to be formulated and executed. These include:
- Can or should the military engage in information operations targeted at an adversary’s population to achieve a strategic effect, such as undermining the populace’s trust in their leaders?
- Can or should the military engage in influence campaigns targeted at foreign populations of unaligned or neutral countries?
- What is the overall organization of the federal government for strategic competition against our adversaries? Where do information operations fit into the picture?
- What is the role of the federal government, if any, in responding to clearly false information spread by foreign adversaries among the US populace?
- How does the information aspect integrate into the government’s strategy in the current competition environment?
- How can we design an information strategy in competition that has the requisite speed and agility to be effective?
- Finally, how do we substantively and procedurally regulate activity in the information environment?
Without clear answers to these questions, not only the military but the entire federal government will struggle to respond and organize itself for effective action in the information environment.
There is no easy answer to the challenges posed in the modern information environment. And while there is widespread recognition that something needs to be done, the federal government has yet to do the work to outline how we will engage in the information environment to directly address the underlying legal and policy challenges outlined in this article. It may very well be that the military must be more directly involved in information operations, despite the reservations noted here. If so, it is incumbent on the US government’s political branches—Congress and the president—to clearly define the parameters for engagement in the information environment, legal and otherwise. Something like the Cyberspace Solarium Commission charged with addressing the information dimension may be advisable to develop such a grand strategy in this new environment. There must be a common understanding of the roles and responsibilities of all parties and the limits of what is allowed. Without clearly articulated guidance, we risk further erosion of strategic advantages due to weak, uncoordinated, and dilatory responses to continued and expanding malign influence campaigns.
Lt. Col. Mark Visger leads the Cyber Law and Policy Research Team at the Army Cyber Institute. He has previously served as a judge advocate and has law degrees from Washington and Lee School of Law and Columbia Law School.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, Department of Defense, US government, or any organization with which the author is affiliated.
Image credit: Staff Sgt. Joshua Magbanua, US Air Force
21. The most important number for China policy
Critical analysis.
Spoiler alert:
American spending on Chinese stocks and bonds reached $1.15 trillion by the end of 2020.
Conclusion:
Endless claims of “trade war” are merely lazy. The money that America has poured into the PRC makes clear the US was not serious about competing with China under President Trump. Under President Biden, we still aren’t even trying to show what those funds support. Yes, there have been valuable American policies. But they don’t stack up to $780 billion.
The most important number for China policy
January 3, 2022
By Derek Scissors
The Department of the Treasury has updated figures for US acquisition of foreign stocks and bonds organized by their true destination. This shows American spending on Chinese stocks and bonds reached $1.15 trillion by the end of 2020. At the end of 2016, the number was $368 billion. The $780 billion increase in investment in China under President Trump represents a miserable policy failure, a failure which has persisted under President Biden.
Among other things, the surge in what is termed portfolio investment mocks the idea of a “trade war.” From 2016 to 2019, prior to the pandemic, US imports of goods and services from China dropped all of $9 billion, or less than 2 percent. The latest data for 2021, with tariffs still in place, put imports on pace to be about $40 billion larger than 2016. These are afterthoughts compared to $780 billion in new investment.
Via REUTERS
Spending on Chinese stocks and bonds may have dropped in 2021, but this was due to action by the PRC, not the US. Beijing’s crackdown on private company stock listings likely discouraged some institutions. We won’t know for sure until late this year because Treasury refuses to publish accurate monthly or quarterly figures. Instead, it pretends the Cayman Islands and other offshore financial centers receive most US money, despite not having stock or bond markets.
There’s more we’re not allowed to know. For direct investment — not investing through stocks and bonds or taking a large stake — the Department of Commerce provides 15 sectors, with wholesale trade topping the list in 2020. There are many trade categories, from non-metallic mineral products to paints, coatings, and adhesives. For portfolio investment, there is no public information on the enterprises, technologies, and activities being supported.
It’s impossible to be sure where the huge sum of money ultimately goes. But the same is true for what we spend on Chinese imports. And it would be easy to report then publish information on the entities being initially invested in and their sectors of operation or distribution of assets. The latest US defense budget is $770 billion. What kind of policy can we have with no idea what that same amount of our money is up to in China?
There are legitimate arguments over whether and how to restrict American investment in the PRC. The Trump and Biden administrations began, belatedly and tentatively, to block funding of enterprises tied to the People’s Liberation Army. The number of firms sanctioned could reasonably be increased by a factor of five. In December, the Biden administration opened the door to banning investment on human rights grounds.
There is no room for debate about greater investment disclosure, at least for those genuinely concerned with the national interest. Opposing greater transparency contradicts a core principle of free markets. On top of harming policy-making, investing to help the People’s Liberation Army or increase repression is immoral. Trying to permanently hide what and where you’re investing in China is an anti-market and, possibly, an anti-American activity.
Endless claims of “trade war” are merely lazy. The money that America has poured into the PRC makes clear the US was not serious about competing with China under President Trump. Under President Biden, we still aren’t even trying to show what those funds support. Yes, there have been valuable American policies. But they don’t stack up to $780 billion.
22. Taiwan people's support sought
Chinese information and influence activities operation or propaganda.
Taiwan people's support sought
Photo taken on July 21, 2019 from Xiangshan Mountain shows the Taipei 101 skyscraper in Taipei. [Photo/Xinhua]
A senior official has called for Taiwan compatriots to draw a clear line with separatist forces, safeguard peace across the Taiwan Straits and contribute to national reunification.
Liu Jieyi, head of the Taiwan Affairs Office of the State Council, made the remarks in a New Year's message published in this year's first issue of Relations Across Taiwan Straits magazine on Sunday.
"We are better equipped, more confident and capable of accomplishing the great cause of national reunification and enabling people on both sides of the Straits to live a better life," he said.
The future of Taiwan and the well-being of its compatriots depend on the island's reunification with the motherland, Liu said.
After reunification, Taiwan will enjoy lasting peace, a more developed economy, greater prosperity, a more harmonious society and improved livelihood, as well as greater security and dignity in the world, he said.
"All Taiwan compatriots who support reunification will be their own masters," he said.
Liu said "Taiwan independence "is the biggest obstacle to reunification efforts and the well-being of Taiwan residents.
"Any attempt to seek 'independence' or interference by foreign forces will never succeed," he said.
Despite the impact of COVID-19 and obstructive tactics by the Democratic Progressive Party authorities in the past year, cross-Straits exchanges in various fields have continued to flourish, he noted.
The mainland cares about the health of Taiwan compatriots, he said. More than 177,000 of them have received COVID-19 vaccines on the mainland, and around 13.3 million doses of vaccines provided by Shanghai-based Fosun Pharma have been delivered to Taiwan, official data showed.
He called on Taiwan compatriots to seize the opportunities of the times, take an active part in cross-Straits exchanges and cooperation, adhere to the one-China principle and oppose "Taiwan independence".
Tang Yonghong, deputy director of the Taiwan Research Center of Xiamen University in Fujian province, said the DPP has taken advantage of the United States' strategy of "using Taiwan to contain the mainland", working with foreign forces to seek "independence" and curb the development of the mainland.
As island authorities have more aggressively undermined the core interests of the country, the mainland has taken countermeasures, including intensifying military exercises across the Straits and punishing separatists and their financial backers, he said.
Tensions rose across the Straits last year. The People's Liberation Army made about 950 flights near Taiwan in 2021, significantly higher than the 380 flights made in 2020, data unveiled by the island showed.
The actual number of planes dispatched was higher than the number stated by the DPP, Senior Colonel Tan Kefei, a spokesman for the Ministry of National Defense, said recently.
Last year, the Chinese military conducted numerous routine patrols around Taiwan with bombers, reconnaissance planes and fighter jets. The PLA also organized multiple military forces to conduct joint combat readiness patrols near the island, he said.
In November, the mainland unveiled a blacklist of secessionists, including three island officials, who support "Taiwan independence".
Measures to punish them were also revealed, including restrictions on enterprises related to them and their financial backers doing business on the mainland.
In December, China and Nicaragua resumed diplomatic relations after the Central American nation ended "diplomatic ties" with Taiwan. The move leaves just 14 countries that recognize Taiwan.
Tang, the expert, said the mainland's determination, will, capability, strategies and actions have not only dealt a severe blow to the arrogance of the secessionists, but also confirmed that "independence" is a dead end and reunification is the only way out for Taiwan.
Although it's expected that the US and Taiwan will make use of each other for their own purposes, which will further increase tensions, the mainland has maintained its ability to firmly steer cross-Straits relations, he said.
23. The End of Cyber-Anarchy?
Excerpts:
In cyberspace, one size does not fit all. There may be some norms related to coordination that can accommodate both authoritarian and democratic states. But others cannot, such as the “Internet freedom” agenda introduced by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2010. It proclaimed a free and open Internet. One can think of norms organized in a set of concentric circles with what Europeans call “variable geometry” of obligations. Groups of democracies can set a higher standard for themselves by agreeing on norms related to privacy, surveillance, and free expression and enforcing them through special trade agreements that would give preference to those that meet the higher standards, along the lines suggested by the cybersecurity expert Robert Knake. Such agreements could remain open to other states—so long as they are willing and able to meet the higher standards.
Diplomacy among democracies on these issues will not be easy, but it will be an important part of U.S. strategy. As James Miller and Robert Butler, two former senior Pentagon officials, have argued, “If U.S. allies and partners support cyber norms, they are likely to be more willing to support imposing costs on violators, thus substantially improving the credibility, severity (through multilateral cost imposition), and sustainability of U.S. threats to impose costs in response to violations.”
The Biden administration is wrestling with the fact that the domain of cyberspace has created important new opportunities and vulnerabilities in world politics. Reorganizing and reengineering at home must be at the heart of the resulting strategy, but it also needs a strong international component based on deterrence and diplomacy. The diplomatic component must include alliances among democracies, capacity building in developing countries, and improved international institutions. Such a strategy must also include developing norms with the long-term goal of protecting the old glass house of American democracy from the new stones of the Internet age.
The End of Cyber-Anarchy?
How to Build a New Digital Order
Foreign Affairs · by Do Morals Matter? Presidents and Foreign Policy From FDR to Trump · January 3, 2022
Ransomware attacks, election interference, corporate espionage, threats to the electric grid: based on the drumbeat of current headlines, there seems to be little hope of bringing a measure of order to the anarchy of cyberspace. The relentless bad news stories paint a picture of an ungoverned online world that is growing more dangerous by the day—with grim implications not just for cyberspace itself but also for economies, geopolitics, democratic societies, and basic questions of war and peace.
Given this distressing reality, any suggestion that it is possible to craft rules of the road in cyberspace tends to be met with skepticism: core attributes of cyberspace, the thinking goes, make it all but impossible to enforce any norms or even to know whether they are being violated in the first place. States that declare their support for cybernorms simultaneously conduct large-scale cyber-operations against their adversaries. In December 2015, for example, the UN General Assembly for the first time endorsed a set of 11 voluntary, nonbinding international cybernorms. Russia had helped craft these norms and later signed off on their publication. That same month, it conducted a cyberattack against Ukraine’s power grid, leaving roughly 225,000 people without electricity for several hours, and was also ramping up its efforts to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. For skeptics, this served as yet further evidence that establishing norms for responsible state behavior in cyberspace is a pipe dream.
Yet that skepticism reveals a misunderstanding about how norms work and are strengthened over time. Violations, if not addressed, can weaken norms, but they do not render them irrelevant. Norms create expectations about behavior that make it possible to hold other states accountable. Norms also help legitimize official actions and help states recruit allies when they decide to respond to a violation. And norms don’t appear suddenly or start working overnight. History shows that societies take time to learn how to respond to major disruptive technological changes and to put in place rules that make the world safer from new dangers. It took two decades after the United States dropped nuclear bombs on Japan for countries to reach agreement on the Limited Test Ban Treaty and the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
Although cybertechnology presents unique challenges, international norms to govern its use appear to be developing in the usual way: slowly but steadily, over the course of decades. As they take hold, such norms will be increasingly critical to reducing the risk that cybertechnology advances could pose to the international order, especially if Washington and its allies and partners reinforce those norms with other methods of deterrence. Although some analysts argue that deterrence does not work in cyberspace, that conclusion is simplistic: it works in different ways than in the nuclear domain. And alternative strategies have proved equally or more deficient. As targets continue to proliferate, the United States must pursue a strategy that combines deterrence and diplomacy to strengthen the guardrails in this new and dangerous world. The record of establishing norms in other areas offers a useful place to start—and should dispel the notion that this issue and this time are different.
A NEW FACT OF LIFE (AND WAR)
As cyberattacks become more costly, U.S. strategy to defend against them remains inadequate. A good strategy has to begin at home but simultaneously recognize the inseparability of cyberspace’s domestic and international aspects—the domain of cyberspace is inherently transnational. Furthermore, cybersecurity involves a blurring of public and private vulnerabilities. The Internet is a network of networks, most of which are privately owned. Unlike nuclear or conventional weapons, the government does not control them. Accordingly, companies make their own tradeoffs between investing in security and maximizing short-term profit. Yet inadequate corporate defense can have huge external costs for national security: witness the recent Russian cyberattack on SolarWinds software, which allowed access to computers across the U.S. government and the private sector. And unlike with military security, the Pentagon plays only a partial role.
In the realm of global military conflict, computer networks have become a fifth domain, in addition to the traditional four of land, sea, air, and space, and the U.S. military recognized this with the creation of U.S. Cyber Command in 2010. Among the special characteristics of the new cyber-domain are the erosion of distance (oceans no longer provide protection), the speed of interaction (much faster than rockets in space), the low cost (which reduces barriers to entry), and the difficulty of attribution (which promotes deniability and slows responses). Still, skeptics sometimes describe cyberattacks as more of a nuisance than a major strategic problem. They argue that the cyber-domain is ideal for espionage and other forms of covert action and disruption but that it remains far less important than the traditional domains of warfare; no one has died because of a cyberattack. That, however, is becoming an increasingly difficult position to take. The 2017 WannaCry ransomware attack damaged the British National Health Service by leaving computers encrypted and unusable, forcing thousands of patients’ appointments to be canceled, and hospitals and vaccine producers have been directly targeted by ransomware attacks and hackers during the COVID-19 pandemic.
What’s more, there remains much that even experts do not understand about how the use of cybertools could escalate to physical conflict. Consider, for example, the fact that the U.S. military depends heavily on civilian infrastructure and that cyber-penetrations could seriously degrade U.S. defensive capabilities in a crisis situation. And in economic terms, the scale and cost of cyber-incidents have been increasing. According to some estimates, the Russian-sponsored 2017 NotPetya attack on Ukraine, which wiped data from the computers of banks, power companies, gas stations, and government agencies, cost companies more than $10 billion in collateral damage. The number of targets is also expanding rapidly. With the rise of big data, artificial intelligence, advanced robotics, and the Internet of Things, experts estimate that the number of Internet connections will approach a trillion by 2030. The world has experienced cyberattacks since the 1980s, but the attack surface has expanded dramatically; it now includes everything from industrial control systems to automobiles to personal digital assistants.
Norms are not effective until they become common state practice, and that can take time.
It is clear that the threat is mounting. Less clear is how U.S. strategy can adapt to face it. Deterrence must be part of the approach, but cyber-deterrence will look different from the more traditional and familiar forms of nuclear deterrence that Washington has practiced for decades. A nuclear attack is a singular event, and the goal of nuclear deterrence is to prevent its occurrence. In contrast, cyberattacks are numerous and constant, and deterring them is more like deterring ordinary crime: the goal is to keep it within limits. Authorities deter crime not only by arresting and punishing people but also through the educational effect of laws and norms, by patrolling neighborhoods, and through community policing. Deterring crime does not require the threat of a mushroom cloud.
Still, punishment plays a large role in cyber-deterrence. The U.S. government has publicly stated that it will respond to cyberattacks with weapons of its choice and with force proportional to the harm inflicted on its interests. Despite a decade of warnings, thus far, a “cyber–Pearl Harbor” has not happened. Whether the United States treats a cyberattack as an armed attack depends on its consequences, but this makes it difficult to deter actions that are more ambiguous. Russia’s disruption of the 2016 U.S. presidential election fell into such a gray area. And although some recent Chinese and Russian cyberattacks appear to have been conducted primarily for the purposes of espionage, the Biden administration has complained that their scale and duration moved them beyond normal spying. This is why deterrence in cyberspace requires not just the threat of punishment but also denial by defense (building systems resilient enough and hard enough to break into that would-be attackers won’t bother to try) and entanglement (creating links to potential adversaries so that any attack they launch will likely harm their own interests, too). Each of these approaches has limits when used on its own. Entanglement has more of an effect when used against China, because of a high degree of economic interdependence, than it does against North Korea, with whom there is none. Denial by defense is effective in deterring nonstate actors and second-tier states but less likely to prevent attacks by more powerful and proficient actors. But the combination of a threat of punishment and an effective defense can influence these powers’ calculations of costs and benefits.
In addition to improving the defense of networks inside the United States, in recent years, Washington has adopted doctrines that U.S. Cyber Command has dubbed “defend forward” and “persistent engagement”—simply put, small-scale acts of cyberoffense, such as the disruption, diversion, or takedown of a network. Some press accounts credit these practices with reducing Russian interference in the 2018 and 2020 U.S. elections. But entering and disrupting an adversary’s network poses some danger of escalation and must be carefully managed.
SETTING SOME RULES
Despite its defensive and offensive capabilities, the United States remains highly vulnerable to cyberattacks and influence operations, owing to its free markets and open society. “I think it’s a good idea to at least think about the old saw about [how] people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw rocks,” remarked James Clapper, then the director of national intelligence, during 2015 congressional testimony on Washington’s responses to cyberattacks. Clapper was stressing, rightly, that although Americans may be the best at throwing stones, they live in the glassiest of houses. That reality gives the United States a particular interest in the development of norms that reduce incentives to throw stones in cyberspace.
Negotiating cyber-arms-control treaties would be extremely difficult, because they would not be verifiable. But diplomacy on cyberspace is hardly impossible. In fact, international cooperation on developing cybernorms has been going on for more than two decades. In 1998, Russia first proposed a UN treaty to ban electronic and information weapons. The United States rejected the idea, arguing that a treaty in this area would be unverifiable because whether a line of code is a weapon or not can depend on the intent of the user. Instead, the United States agreed that the UN secretary-general should appoint a group of 15 (later expanded to 25) government experts to develop a set of rules of the road; they first met in 2004.
Six such groups have convened since then, and they have issued four reports, creating a broad framework of norms that was later endorsed by the UN General Assembly. The groups’ work has strengthened the consensus that international law applies to the domain of cyberspace and is essential for maintaining peace and stability in it. In addition to grappling with complicated questions of international law, the report that was issued in 2015 introduced 11 voluntary, nonbinding norms, the most important ones being a mandate to provide states with assistance when requested and prohibitions against attacking civilian infrastructure, interfering with computer emergency response teams, which respond after big cyberattacks, and allowing one’s territory to be used for wrongful acts.
Monitoring networks at an air force facility in Colorado Springs, Colorado, July 2010
Rick Wilking / Reuters
The report was viewed as a breakthrough, but progress slowed in 2017 when the expert group failed to agree on international legal issues and did not produce a consensus report. At Russia’s suggestion, the UN supplemented the existing process by forming the Open-Ended Working Group, which is open to all states and involves consultations with nongovernmental actors: dozens of private companies, civil society organizations, academics, and technical experts. Early in 2021, this new group issued a broad, if somewhat anodyne, report that reaffirmed the 2015 norms, as well as the relevance of international law to cyberspace. Last June, the sixth expert group also completed its work and released a report that added important details to the 11 norms first introduced in 2015. China and Russia are still pressing for a treaty, but what is more likely to happen is the gradual evolution of these norms.
In addition to the UN process, there have been many other forums for discussion about cybernorms, including the Global Commission on the Stability of Cyberspace. Initiated in 2017 by a Dutch think tank, with strong support from the Dutch government, the GCSC (of which I was a member) was co-chaired by Estonia, India, and the United States and included former government officials, experts from civil society, and academics from 16 countries. The GCSC proposed eight norms to address gaps in the existing UN guidance. The most important were calls to protect the “public core” infrastructure of the Internet from attack and to prohibit interference with electoral systems. The GCSC also called on countries not to use cybertools to interfere with supply chains; not to introduce botnets into others’ machines in order to control them without the host’s knowledge; to create transparent processes that states can follow in judging whether to disclose flaws and vulnerabilities they discover in others’ coding; to encourage states to promptly patch cybersecurity vulnerabilities when discovered and not hoard them for possible use in the future; to improve “cyber hygiene,” including through law and regulations; and to discourage private vigilantism by making it illegal for private businesses to “hack back,” that is, to launch counterattacks against hackers.
These efforts are less flashy (and less expensive) than the development of sophisticated cyberdefense systems, but they will play a crucial role in curbing malign activity online. Many further norms can be imagined and proposed for cyberspace, but the important question now is not whether more norms are needed but how they will be implemented and whether and when they will alter state behavior.
THE NEW PRIVATEERS
Norms are not effective until they become common state practice, and that can take time. It took many decades for norms against slavery to develop in Europe and the United States in the nineteenth century. The key question is why states ever let norms constrain their behavior. There are at least four main reasons: coordination, prudence, reputational costs, and domestic pressures, including public opinion and economic changes.
Common expectations inscribed in laws, norms, and principles help states coordinate their efforts. For example, although some states (including the United States) have not ratified the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, all states treat a 12-mile limit as customary international law when it comes to disputes about territorial waters. The benefits of coordination—and the risks posed by its absence—have been evident in cyberspace on the few occasions when targets have been hacked through abuse of the Internet’s domain name system, which is sometimes called “the telephone book of the Internet” and is run by the nonprofit Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN. By corrupting the phone book, such attacks put the basic stability of the Internet at risk. Unless states refrain from interfering with the structure that makes it possible for private networks to connect, there is no Internet. And so, for the most part, states eschew these tactics.
Prudence results from the fear of creating unintended consequences in unpredictable systems and can develop into a norm of nonuse or limited use of certain weapons or a norm of limiting targets. Something like this happened with nuclear weapons when the superpowers came close to the brink of nuclear war in 1962, during the Cuban missile crisis. The Limited Test Ban Treaty followed a year later. A more distant but historical example of how prudence produced a norm against using certain tactics is the fate of privateering. In the eighteenth century, national navies routinely employed private individuals or private ships to augment their power at sea. But in the following century, states turned away from privateers because their extracurricular pillaging became too costly. As governments struggled to control privateers, attitudes changed, and new norms of prudence and restraint developed. One could imagine something similar occurring in the domain of cyberspace as governments discover that using proxies and private actors to carry out cyberattacks produces negative economic effects and increases the risk of escalation. A number of states have outlawed “hacking back.”
Negotiating cyber-arms-control treaties would be extremely difficult, because they would not be verifiable.
Concerns about damage to a country’s reputation and soft power can also produce voluntary restraint. Taboos develop over time and increase the costs of using or even possessing a weapon that can inflict massive damage. Take, for example, the Biological Weapons Convention, which came into force in 1975. Any country that wishes to develop biological weapons has to do so secretly and illegally and faces widespread international condemnation if evidence of its activities leaks, as the Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein discovered.
It is hard to imagine the emergence of a similar blanket taboo against the use of cyberweapons. For one thing, it is difficult to determine whether any particular line of code is a weapon or not. A more likely taboo is one that would prohibit the use of cyberweapons against particular targets, such as hospitals or health-care systems. Such prohibitions would have the benefit of piggybacking on the existing taboo against using conventional weapons on civilians. During the COVID-19 pandemic, public revulsion against ransomware attacks on hospitals has helped reinforce that taboo and suggested how it might apply to other areas in the realm of cyberspace. Something similar might evolve if hackers were to cause an increase in fatal accidents from the use of electric vehicles.
PEER PRESSURE
Some scholars have argued that norms have a natural life cycle. They often begin with “norm entrepreneurs”: individuals, organizations, social groups, and official commissions that enjoy an outsize influence on public opinion. After a certain gestation period, some norms reach a tipping point, when cascades of acceptance translate into a widespread belief and leaders find that they would pay a steep price for rejecting it.
Embryonic norms can arise from changing social attitudes, or they can be imported. Take, for example, the spread of concern for universal human rights after 1945. Western countries took the lead in promoting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, but many other states felt obliged to sign on because of public opinion and subsequently found themselves constrained by external pressure and by concern about their reputations. One might expect such constraints to be stronger in democracies than in authoritarian states. But the Helsinki process, a series of meetings between the Soviet Union and Western countries in the early 1970s, successfully included human rights in discussions about political and economic issues during the Cold War.
Economic change can also foster a demand for new norms that might promote efficiency and growth. Norms against privateering and slavery gathered support when these practices were economically in decline. A similar dynamic is at work today in the cyber-realm. Companies that find themselves disadvantaged by conflicting national laws relating to privacy and the location of data might press governments to develop common standards and norms. The cyber-insurance industry may put pressure on authorities to flesh out standards and norms, especially in regard to the technology embedded in the myriad household devices (thermostats, refrigerators, home alarm systems) that are now online: the so-called Internet of Things. As more and more devices become connected to the Internet, they will soon become targets for cyberattacks, and the impact on citizens’ daily lives will increase and foster demand for domestic and international norms. Public concern will only accelerate if hacking becomes more than a nuisance and begins to cost lives. If fatalities increase, the Silicon Valley norm of “build quickly and patch later” may gradually give way to norms and laws about liability that place more emphasis on security.
CYBER-RULES ARE MADE TO BE BROKEN
Even with international consensus that norms are needed, agreeing where to draw redlines and what to do when they’re crossed is another matter. And the question becomes, even if authoritarian states sign up for normative conventions, how likely are they to adhere to them? In 2015, Chinese President Xi Jinping and U.S. President Barack Obama agreed not to use cyber-espionage for commercial advantage, but private security companies reported that China adhered to this pledge for only a year or so before it returned to its old habit of hacking U.S. corporate and federal data, although that happened in the context of worsening economic relations marked by the rise of tariff wars. Does this mean the agreement failed? Rather than make it a yes or no question, critics argue that the focus (and any ensuing warning against such actions) should be on the amount of damage done, not the precise lines that were crossed or how the violations were carried out. An analogy is telling the hosts of a drunken party that if the noise gets too loud, you will call the police. The objective is not the impossible one of stopping the music but the more practical one of lowering the volume to a more tolerable level.
There are other times when the United States will need to draw principled lines and defend them. It should acknowledge that it will continue to carry out intrusions in cyberspace for purposes it deems legitimate. And it will need to state precisely the norms and limits that Washington will uphold—and call out countries that violate them. When China or Russia crosses a line, the United States will have to respond with targeted retaliation. This could involve public sanctions and also private actions, such as freezing the bank accounts of some oligarchs or releasing embarrassing information about them. U.S. Cyber Command’s practices of defend forward and persistent engagement can be useful here, although they would best be accompanied by a process of quiet communication.
Treaties regarding cyberspace may be unworkable, but it might be possible to set limits on certain types of behavior and negotiate rough rules of the road. During the Cold War, informal norms governed the treatment of each side’s spies; expulsion, rather than execution, became the norm. In 1972, the Soviet Union and the United States negotiated the Incidents at Sea Agreement to limit naval behavior that might lead to escalation. Today, China, Russia, and the United States might negotiate limits on their behavior regarding the extent and type of cyber-espionage they carry out, as Xi and Obama did in 2015. Or they might agree to set limits on their interventions in one another’s domestic political processes. Although such pledges would lack the precise language of formal treaties, the three countries could independently make unilateral statements about areas of self-restraint and establish a consultative process to contain conflict. Ideological differences would make a detailed agreement difficult, but even greater ideological differences did not prevent agreements that helped avoid escalation during the Cold War. Prudence can sometimes be more important than ideology.
Biden and Putin in Geneva, June 2021
Kevin Lamarque / Reuters
This seems to have been the approach explored by the Biden administration at a June summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Geneva, where cyberspace played a larger role on the agenda than nuclear weapons. According to press accounts, U.S. President Joe Biden handed Putin a list of 16 areas of critical infrastructure, including chemicals, communications, energy, financial services, health care, and information technology, that should be, in Biden’s words, “off limits to attack, period.” After the summit, Biden disclosed that he had asked Putin how he would feel if Russian pipelines were taken out by ransomware. “I pointed out to him that we have significant cyber-capability, and he knows it,” Biden remarked at a press conference. “He does not know exactly what it is, but it is significant. And if in fact they violate these basic norms, we will respond with cyber. He knows.” Thus far, however, it is unclear to what extent Biden’s words have been effective.
One problem with specifying what needed to be protected might be that it implied that other areas were fair game—and that ransomware attacks from criminals in Russia would continue no matter what. In the cyber-realm, nonstate actors serve as state proxies to varying degrees, and rules should require their identification and limitation. And because the rules of the road will never be perfect, they must be accompanied by a consultative process that establishes a framework for warning and negotiating. Such a process, together with strong deterrent threats, is unlikely to fully stop Chinese and Russian interference, but if it reduces its frequency or intensity, it could enhance the defense of U.S. democracy against such cyberattacks.
CHANGING BEHAVIOR
In cyberspace, one size does not fit all. There may be some norms related to coordination that can accommodate both authoritarian and democratic states. But others cannot, such as the “Internet freedom” agenda introduced by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2010. It proclaimed a free and open Internet. One can think of norms organized in a set of concentric circles with what Europeans call “variable geometry” of obligations. Groups of democracies can set a higher standard for themselves by agreeing on norms related to privacy, surveillance, and free expression and enforcing them through special trade agreements that would give preference to those that meet the higher standards, along the lines suggested by the cybersecurity expert Robert Knake. Such agreements could remain open to other states—so long as they are willing and able to meet the higher standards.
Diplomacy among democracies on these issues will not be easy, but it will be an important part of U.S. strategy. As James Miller and Robert Butler, two former senior Pentagon officials, have argued, “If U.S. allies and partners support cyber norms, they are likely to be more willing to support imposing costs on violators, thus substantially improving the credibility, severity (through multilateral cost imposition), and sustainability of U.S. threats to impose costs in response to violations.”
The Biden administration is wrestling with the fact that the domain of cyberspace has created important new opportunities and vulnerabilities in world politics. Reorganizing and reengineering at home must be at the heart of the resulting strategy, but it also needs a strong international component based on deterrence and diplomacy. The diplomatic component must include alliances among democracies, capacity building in developing countries, and improved international institutions. Such a strategy must also include developing norms with the long-term goal of protecting the old glass house of American democracy from the new stones of the Internet age.
Foreign Affairs · by Do Morals Matter? Presidents and Foreign Policy From FDR to Trump · January 3, 2022
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.
