Quotes of the Day:
"There is nothing new in the story. It is as old as the Sibylline books. It falls into that long, dismal catalogue of the fruitlessness of experience and the confirmed unteachability of mankind. Want of foresight, unwillingness to act when action would be simple and effective, lack of clear thinking, confusion of counsel until the emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong—these are the features which constitute the endless repetition of history."
- Winston Churchill
“Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.”
- John Stuart Mill, Inaugural Address Delivered to the University of St Andrews, 2/1/1867
“The job facing American voters… in the days and years to come is to determine which hearts, minds and souls command those qualities best suited to unify a country rather than further divide it, to heal the wounds of a nation as opposed to aggravate its injuries, and to secure for the next generation a legacy of choices based on informed awareness rather than one of reactions based on unknowing fear.”
- Aberjhani, Illuminated Corners: Collected Essays and Articles Volume I.
1. In a provocative choice, China picks an athlete with a Uyghur name to help light the cauldron.
2. President Biden Announces 3 Key Nominees (including Ambassador to the Philippines)
3. Opinion | How China followed Nazi Germany’s Hollywood playbook
4. ISIS Loses Its Leader as Biden Navigates Global Crises
5. New World Order Or Hidden Power Struggle? Experts Assess The Future Of Chinese-Russian Relations
6. Michael Flynn Is Still at War
7. U.S. Carrier Group, Two Amphibious Ready Groups Drill in Philippine Sea with Japan
8. Despite Force Redesign, The Marine Corps Says It Still Needs Its Big Amphibious Warships. In Fact, It Needs Over 30.
9. The fight for UNCLOS is back with the Indo-Pacific in mind
10. Biden must learn from the JCPOA's mistakes | Opinion
11. What Will Stop the Islamic Republic of Iran
12. Americans can't get over hating the Russians, ever
13. A war with Russia would be unlike anything the US and NATO have ever experienced
14. Islamic State Leader Killed in US Raid. Where Does This Leave the Terrorist Group?
15. FDD | Turkey a Step Closer to Suspension From the Council of Europe
16. Did killing ISIS’s leader make the U.S. safer?
17. How China’s Growing Clout Led Hollywood to Look for a New Villain
18. G.O.P. Declares Jan. 6 Attack ‘Legitimate Political Discourse’
19. My secret life as a Mossad operative
20. China Can’t Carry the Russian Economy
21. Cyberattack on News Corp, Believed Linked to China, Targeted Emails of Journalists, Others
1. In a provocative choice, China picks an athlete with a Uyghur name to help light the cauldron.
The Chinese three warfares: No. 3 - Media or public opinion warfare.
In a provocative choice, China picks an athlete with a Uyghur name to help light the cauldron.
Feb. 4, 2022, 9:32 a.m. ET
Dinigeer Yilamujiang, left, and Zhao Jiawen, both Chinese Olympians, helped light the cauldron.Credit...Chang W. Lee/The New York Times
In a climactic moment to end the opening ceremony of the 2022 Winter Olympics, China chose two athletes — including one it said was of Uyghur heritage — to deliver the flame to the Olympic cauldron and officially start the Games.
The moment was tinged with layers of symbolism — a man and a woman working together, a nod to China’s Olympic history — but it was the choice of Dinigeer Yilamujiang, a cross-country skier who the Chinese said has Uyghur roots, that confronted head-on one of the biggest criticisms of the country’s role as host.
The Chinese Communist Party state has conducted a mass detention and re-education campaign targeting Uyghur Muslims in the western region of Xinjiang that the United States has declared as genocidal. It was among the reasons that several countries, including the United States, took part in a diplomatic boycott of the Games.
Lighting the Olympic cauldron is a central ritual for each opening ceremony, as hosts invent ever more spectacular ways to ignite the flame that stays alight during the sporting festival. The chief director of this year’s ceremony, Zhang Yimou, had promised a novel showstopper.
In the final act of the curtain-raising event, a group of six former Chinese athletes representing previous decades completed a relay that circled the stadium with torches, passing the flame on to the next. In the final handoff, it was delivered to Yilamujiang and Zhao Jiawen, a men’s Nordic combined athlete.
Walking together, they placed it in the center of a giant snowflake — another recurring symbol of the ceremony — that was raised in the center of the stadium.
2. President Biden Announces 3 Key Nominees (including Ambassador to the Philippines)
Our career foreign service officers have impressive credentials.
President Biden Announces 3 Key Nominees
FEBRUARY 04, 2022
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WASHINGTON – Today, President Joe Biden announced his intent to nominate the following leaders to serve as key leaders in his administration:
- Reuben Brigety, Nominee for Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to the Republic of South Africa
- MaryKay Carlson, Nominee for Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to the Republic of the Philippines
- Elizabeth Shortino, Nominee for United States Executive Director of the International Monetary Fund
Reuben Brigety, Nominee for Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to the Republic of South Africa
Reuben Brigety currently serves as an Adjunct Senior Fellow for African Peace and Security at the Council on Foreign Relations, and as a Member of the Board of Counselors of McLarty Associates in Washington, D.C. Brigety previously served as the Vice-Chancellor and President of the University of the South and the Mayor of Sewanee, Tennessee. During the Obama-Biden Administration, Brigety held several roles in the State Department, including Deputy Assistant Secretary for Population, Refugees and Migration, Deputy Assistant Secretary for African Affairs, U.S. Ambassador to the African Union and U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa. Earlier in his career, Brigety was the Special Assistant to the Assistant Administrator for Democracy, Conflict and Humanitarian Assistance at the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the Dean of the Elliott School of International Affairs at The George Washington University, the largest school of international affairs in the United States. He is a member of the American Academy of Diplomacy.
Brigety earned a B.S. from the U. S. Naval Academy, and an M.Phil in International Affairs, and a Ph.D. in International Affairs from the University of Cambridge in England. He is the author of numerous publications and speaks Spanish, French, and Amharic.
MaryKay Carlson, Nominee for Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to the Republic of the Philippines
MaryKay Loss Carlson, a career member of the Senior Foreign Service with the rank of Minister-Counselor, currently serves as the Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Previously, she worked as Deputy Chief of Mission in New Delhi, India for three years, including a ten-month stint as Chargé d’Affaires a.i. Prior to that, she held the position of Principal Deputy Executive Secretary on the staff of the Secretary of State in Washington, D.C. A Foreign Service officer since 1985, she has also served at U.S. diplomatic missions in China (twice), Ukraine, Hong Kong, Mozambique, Kenya, and the Dominican Republic. Her domestic assignments include Director of the Secretary’s Executive Secretariat Staff and Deputy Director of Korean Affairs. Carlson has received numerous performance awards, including six Superior Honor Awards.
A native of Little Rock, Arkansas, Carlson has a Bachelor’s Degree from Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee, and holds Master’s Degrees from Georgetown University and the National War College. She speaks Spanish and Chinese.
Elizabeth Shortino, Nominee for United States Executive Director of the International Monetary Fund
Elizabeth Shortino has more than 17 years of experience in public service, and has held positions at the Office of Management and Budget, the Department of Treasury, and the Office of the U.S. Executive Director at the International Monetary Fund. While at Treasury, Shortino served as Director of the Middle East North Africa Office and Director of the Office of International Monetary Policy. Since February 2021, Shortino has served as the Acting U.S. Executive Director at the International Monetary Fund.
Shortino holds a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science with a minor in Business Administration from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She also holds a Masters in International Relations from Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies with a specialization in Quantitative Methods and Economic Theory. Prior to joining government, Shortino worked as a management consultant for Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, LLC. Shortino lives in Arlington, Virginia with her husband and three children.
3. Opinion | How China followed Nazi Germany’s Hollywood playbook
Those who fail to study and learn from history or at least see the "rhymes" .....
Opinion | How China followed Nazi Germany’s Hollywood playbook
The Washington Post · by Sonny BunchContributing columnist Yesterday at 9:45 a.m. EST · February 4, 2022
Prior to World War II, Germany was one of the biggest markets for U.S. films. Universal execs were sure they had a hit on their hands in both American and German markets with their adaptation of “All Quiet on the Western Front,” Erich Maria Remarque’s classic antiwar novel. But the nascent Nazis, not yet fully in power in 1930, had other plans.
“Brownshirts in the audience yelled as the film appeared on-screen,” Schwartzel writes of opening night. “Joseph Goebbels, a failed novelist a few years away from becoming the most famous propagandist of the twentieth century, addressed the crowd. Hollywood had come to Germany to sully its reputation, Goebbels told the faithful.”
Universal scrubbed the film of anything that might offend Nazi sensibilities; after the studio resubmitted it, German authorities demanded the film be shown in the censored form around the world. And then they applied that ideal to all films: “In 1932 the German government, riding a wave of nationalist sentiment, introduced Article 15, a provision that gave Germany the right to cancel distribution agreements with any studio that produced a film it found offensive.”
While Schwartzel is understandably cautious about comparing the CCP to Nazism — though China’s ethnic cleansing of the Uyghurs and repression of Tibet should obviate some of that caution — the parallels between Chinese and German censorship efforts are obvious to anyone who has followed Hollywood’s travails in China.
As it is now with China, Hollywood was famously wary in its onscreen treatment of Nazis. As Chris Yogerst noted in his book “Hollywood Hates Hitler!,” part of that hesitance had to do with isolationist sentiment on the home front. Studio heads, many of them Jewish, feared that showing German aggression against Jews would incur the wrath of politicians and voters who hoped to keep the United States out of another war.
There were business reasons to avoid antagonizing Hitler, too. “Paramount claimed, ‘It is only logical for us to do business wherever profitable as an obligation to our shareholders,’ ” Schwartzel recounts. MGM made similar excuses. Money made it difficult to take a stand, as Thomas Doherty recounts in his history of the period, “Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-1939.”
And Goebbels understood the power of film. “We are convinced that the film is one of the most modern and far-reaching means for influencing the masses,” Doherty quotes Goebbels as saying. “A government can therefore not possibly leave the film world to itself.”
Mao Zedong agreed: “There is, in fact, no such thing as art for art’s sake,” Mao said. It’s why he banned Hollywood products during the Cultural Revolution and brought the Chinese film industry under state control. And it’s why, when Hollywood products began trickling back into the country during the 1990s, the Chinese used their burgeoning commercial muscle aggressively.
Martin Scorsese’s 1997 film, “Kundun,” based on the life of the Dalai Lama, was of particular concern to Chinese officials. When filming began, Chinese bureaucrats told Disney executives to kill the movie, lest they find themselves blackballed from China and lose out on the dreams of opening a theme park for the billion-plus who lived there. Chief Executive Michael Eisner strangled the film in the crib.
“They would release the movie, but as quietly as possible,” Schwartzel writes. “They would spend as little money as possible to market the film in a limited release. Once the dearth of marketing led to lousy returns in its opening weeks, Disney would have justification to tell Scorsese that it wasn’t worth expanding to theaters nationwide.”
Disney still found itself in hot water for years afterward. In a moral atrocity the likes of which are rarely seen even in Hollywood, Eisner begged forgiveness and bragged that few people had seen the film.
Over the next quarter-century that playbook would spread to every studio. Some self-censored, as when MGM realized it could not release the remake of “Red Dawn” until it had changed the Chinese villains to North Koreans. More frequently, China would simply be dropped as a potential villain. And occasionally, Chinese forces would be portrayed as heroic defenders, as in “Transformers: Age of Extinction.”
Fear of losing hundreds of millions in Chinese box office dollars would keep the studios in line. But given Beijing’s reluctance in recent years to allow American studios access to Chinese audiences, one has to wonder how much longer that fear will maintain its potency. War ultimately ended Germany’s pressure campaign; China might simply overplay its hand.
The Washington Post · by Sonny BunchContributing columnist Yesterday at 9:45 a.m. EST · February 4, 2022
4. ISIS Loses Its Leader as Biden Navigates Global Crises
Excerpts:
The renewed challenge from ISIS underscores the fact that covert cells still exist across an area of Syria and Iraq about the size of Indiana. There are also more than sixty thousand detainees, mainly women and children, in the Al Hol camp in northern Syria under control of the S.D.F., a militia with no legal authority to determine their fate. Two-thirds are children who U.S. officials fear are being radicalized. Many countries have refused to repatriate their nationals who joined ISIS. A key part of ISIS strategy has been to increase its ranks by breaking out prisoners and detainees. The ISIS threat—from both ruthless leaders and raw recruits—could linger for years.
“I tend to think of high-level leadership strikes or operations as being very necessary but certainly not sufficient for us to achieve our counterterrorism objectives,” Nick Rasmussen, the former head of the National Counterterrorism Center, told me. “The removal of a single leader does not in one moment radically alter the trajectory of a group or the nature of the threat environment, much less the course of ‘jihadism’ writ large.” In the wake of Abdullah’s death, ISIS will need to regroup. The line of succession is not clear. The movement reportedly has rival camps. But the long-term impact of the U.S. raid may be only “marginal to modest,” Cole Bunzel, a specialist on Islamist groups at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, told me. “The group is prepared for this scenario, and much of the group’s global network does not depend on the advice, input, or direction of the caliph.”
ISIS Loses Its Leader as Biden Navigates Global Crises
Hajji Abdullah is the latest jihadi leader eliminated in a U.S. raid, but the President still faces challenges in Russia, China, and Iran, as well as the pandemic.
The elusive leader of ISIS blew up himself, his wife, and their children during a risky predawn raid by helicopter-borne U.S. Special Operations Forces in northwest Syria on Thursday. The attack on the leader of what remains the world’s most dangerous terrorist movement, which was carried out after months of secret planning, led to the death of the third major jihadi leader in a confrontation with U.S. forces in the past decade or so. President Joe Biden said the operation that killed Hajji Abdullah, also known as Abu Ibrahim al-Qurayshi, was “testament to America’s reach and capability to take out terrorist threats no matter where they hide around the world.” President Barack Obama oversaw the operation that killed the Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden at his hideaway in Pakistan, in 2011. President Donald Trump approved plans that led to the death of the ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in Syria, in 2019. ISIS is estimated to have as many as twenty thousand jihadis in underground cells still proliferating across the globe, decades after the emergence of jihadism in the nineteen-seventies.
For Biden, the complex raid coincided with his efforts to broker an end to the escalating confrontation with Russia over Ukraine, an ambitious China, fraught negotiations on Iran’s nuclear deal, and a global pandemic. Administration officials said that Biden had been holding lengthy undisclosed briefings on the secret plan to kill or capture Abdullah. The timing is in some ways a political boon to Biden, despite claims by Administration officials that the raid was not meant to send a message to any other nation. Yet Biden’s deep engagement in the process and his order on Tuesday for the strike to begin indicated that—at seventy-nine—he can multitask international crises.
The raid was a coup in the now decades-long campaign to contain, curtail, or eliminate jihadi militants. Abdullah, who met Baghdadi during a stint in the U.S.-run Camp Bucca prison, in 2004, had overseen the spread of ISIS factions around the world. Despite the collapse of the Islamic State caliphate in 2019, ISIS cells still carried out attacks from West Africa to southeast Asia, including a major operation that killed Americans at Kabul airport during the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, last August. The ISIS leader had also been the driving force behind the most brutal ISIS tactics, including the enslavement and rape of thousands of Yazidi women and girls in Iraq. Kirby called him a “hands-on” leader. Yet Abdullah was so secretive that he never sent video messages or public propaganda to supporters. One of the few known photographs of him was released by the State Department. He relied on couriers to communicate instructions.
Abdullah was one of the last “legacy” leaders among the small corps of jihadis who can claim religious and military credentials, a senior Administration official told me. He was selected, after much internal bickering, “to put a defeated caliphate back together” following the death, also in a self-detonated bomb that killed family members, of Baghdadi, in 2019, Hassan Hassan, a co-author of “ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror,” told me. He said that Abdullah “failed, and died without making a single public statement to his followers,” and that ISIS is now “weak and under immense pressure.” The dispersed underground ISIS cells—still estimated to number more than ten thousand in Syria and Iraq—were waiting to hear from Abdullah after the ISIS jailbreak last month. “Instead, they heard about him,” Hassan said. “The news would devastate the group, and make it even harder for a new leader to fill the void.”
As the attack by U.S. forces played out over two hours, Biden, Vice-President Kamala Harris, and senior staff and military officials monitored it in real time from the White House Situation Room. Last December, U.S. intelligence, with help from a mosaic of local sources, had identified Abdullah’s hiding place—in a three-story residential building in northwest Syria—after years of searching for him. To avoid civilian casualties, the Administration opted to dispatch U.S. Special Operations Forces rather than employ missiles or drones to kill the ISIS leader. There was “tremendous tension, just given the number of children” in the multifamily dwelling, a senior Administration official told journalists. The raid came amid growing controversy over U.S. air strikes that have mistakenly killed civilians, both in Afghanistan, during the withdrawal last year, and in Syria, during the campaign against the ISIS caliphate in 2019. U.S. officials spent months planning the operation, at one point working off a tabletop model and doing multiple “physical rehearsals.” Biden described the preparations as “meticulous.”
After landing, U.S. forces used bullhorns to encourage everyone in the building to leave, Kirby said. Several children fled, but Abdullah soon set off the bomb that destroyed his quarters on the third floor. His unnamed deputy and his wife barricaded themselves on the second floor and both opened fire on U.S. forces, according to the Pentagon. They were both killed. After the Americans left, local responders in Syria reported thirteen deaths, including four women and six children. Kirby said that U.S. forces killed nine people—five combatants and four civilians—and that ten civilians, including eight children, were evacuated. Abdullah’s body was identified with fingerprints and later with DNA analysis. But his corpse was left in Syria.
Whatever the short-term victory, jihadism retains a strong ideological appeal among alienated, marginalized, and unemployed young Muslims. In the past, U.S. attacks by air, ground, or sea have only generated new activism, anger, and recruits. “Taking down terrorist leaders has various political and psychological effects negative to that terrorist movement and positive to those fighting terror—but the impact has been tactical, not strategic, in every case,” James F. Jeffrey, the former U.S. special envoy to the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS who now heads the Middle East program at the Wilson Center, said.
Assassinated leaders are inevitably replaced, experts note. “History has repeatedly shown that killing jihadi leaders—even the most prominent and important among them—won’t kill the movement,” Rita Katz, the executive director of the SITE Intelligence Group, told me. “To the contrary, both ISIS and al-Qaeda have endured major leadership killings over the last two decades, only to evolve and expand across the globe.” The deaths of bin Laden, in 2011, and the ISIS founder Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, in 2006—whom Katz described as “the two most charismatic and movement-inspiring figures of the global jihad”—didn’t blunt the movement. “Why should we expect the death of a faceless, voiceless figure like Abu Ibrahim to?” Katz said.
Abdullah had been hiding in Atmeh, a town near the Syrian border with Turkey, in a province that has been a stronghold for both Turkey-backed fighters and members of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, an Islamist rebel group originally affiliated with Al Qaeda. A group of men opened fire on one of the U.S. helicopters, a senior Administration official said. Two were killed. The raid followed the largest U.S. operation against ISIS in Syria since the demise of the caliphate, in 2019. American warplanes carried out air strikes in northeast Syria last week after ISIS launched a sophisticated attack on a prison in Hasakah, where more than three thousand members of ISIS were being held. It lasted for about a week. Hundreds of ISIS fighters were killed, according to the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, which also suffered dozens of losses.
The renewed challenge from ISIS underscores the fact that covert cells still exist across an area of Syria and Iraq about the size of Indiana. There are also more than sixty thousand detainees, mainly women and children, in the Al Hol camp in northern Syria under control of the S.D.F., a militia with no legal authority to determine their fate. Two-thirds are children who U.S. officials fear are being radicalized. Many countries have refused to repatriate their nationals who joined ISIS. A key part of ISIS strategy has been to increase its ranks by breaking out prisoners and detainees. The ISIS threat—from both ruthless leaders and raw recruits—could linger for years.
“I tend to think of high-level leadership strikes or operations as being very necessary but certainly not sufficient for us to achieve our counterterrorism objectives,” Nick Rasmussen, the former head of the National Counterterrorism Center, told me. “The removal of a single leader does not in one moment radically alter the trajectory of a group or the nature of the threat environment, much less the course of ‘jihadism’ writ large.” In the wake of Abdullah’s death, ISIS will need to regroup. The line of succession is not clear. The movement reportedly has rival camps. But the long-term impact of the U.S. raid may be only “marginal to modest,” Cole Bunzel, a specialist on Islamist groups at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, told me. “The group is prepared for this scenario, and much of the group’s global network does not depend on the advice, input, or direction of the caliph.”
5. New World Order Or Hidden Power Struggle? Experts Assess The Future Of Chinese-Russian Relations
Excerpts:
In the face of devastating sanctions threatened by the West after a potential new Russian invasion, Chinese economic and political support would signal a geopolitical shift that could upend American foreign policy and be felt from Europe to Asia.
But beyond the pomp of the Putin-Xi meeting, what lies under the surface of this fast-changing relationship?
RFE/RL asked seven leading experts about where things truly stand today and how they see this relationship progressing in the coming years. How might the dynamic change following the unrest in Kazakhstan and the threat of war in Ukraine? Could economic ties between the two countries forge a new type of partnership? And behind their shared rivalry with the United States, what obstacles could chill their relationship?
New World Order Or Hidden Power Struggle? Experts Assess The Future Of Chinese-Russian Relations
Amid the spectacle of the start of the Winter Olympics, Chinese President Xi Jinping offered solidarity to his counterpart, President Vladimir Putin, at a meeting in Beijing amid high tensions with the West.
The February 4 visit was their first in-person summit in two years after Xi stopped seeing foreign dignitaries because of the coronavirus pandemic, but it marks a new era in ties between Beijing and Moscow that continue to strengthen politically, economically, and militarily.
In a joint declaration, Putin and Xi heralded their relationship and sought to show a common front against rising Western pressure amid the Kremlin’s showdown with the West over Ukraine.
“The sides oppose further enlargement of NATO and call on the North Atlantic alliance to abandon its ideologized Cold War approaches,” the statement said.
A satellite image shows Russian armed forces near the Ukrainian border in Soloti, Russia, on December 5.
As the Kremlin demands that NATO withdraw from Eastern Europe while massing its forces along the Ukrainian border, Beijing has expressed support for Moscow’s grievances and even joined Russia in trying to block action on Ukraine at the UN Security Council.
In the face of devastating sanctions threatened by the West after a potential new Russian invasion, Chinese economic and political support would signal a geopolitical shift that could upend American foreign policy and be felt from Europe to Asia.
But beyond the pomp of the Putin-Xi meeting, what lies under the surface of this fast-changing relationship?
RFE/RL asked seven leading experts about where things truly stand today and how they see this relationship progressing in the coming years. How might the dynamic change following the unrest in Kazakhstan and the threat of war in Ukraine? Could economic ties between the two countries forge a new type of partnership? And behind their shared rivalry with the United States, what obstacles could chill their relationship?
Shifting In China's Favor
Alexander Gabuev, senior fellow, Moscow Carnegie Center
"Putin and Xi say that relations are the best they’ve been in history and they're not wrong.
'The relationship has been building and accelerated at a new pace recently. This isn’t an alliance and won’t become one given current trend lines, but the national interests of both countries are being served with this arrangement and things will continue to deepen.
Xi and Putin share a vodka toast over Russian pancakes as Xi visited the 2018 Eastern Economic Forum on Russky Island.
"Although, as things get deeper, they are also becoming more asymmetric in China’s favor, from trade to the economy to politics.
"A lot of these dynamics will depend on Ukraine. A military conflict there could trigger a new round of more severe Western sanctions against Russia and lead to two consequences for China.
"The first is that a large-scale security conflict with Russia will dominate the second half of U.S. President Joe Biden’s presidency and suck up lots of oxygen in decision-making rooms everywhere. That means less time they can spend on China, which is the main foreign policy goal of his administration.
"The second is that Russia will have to rely more on China to offset Western sanctions triggered by an invasion into Ukraine. Yes, the Russian economy is more sanctions proof than it was in 2014 and Moscow is worried about becoming too dependent on China, but the country will have to look to China for injections of cash and new projects if it wants its economy to grow.
"Trade already hit a record high in 2021, jumping 35 percent year-on-year to $147 billion. The Power of Siberia gas pipeline is up and running and there are already plans for a second pipeline.
"If something gets signed during this trip [by Putin to Beijing], it will be focused on the economy and trade."
A Deep Partnership With Limits
Jiayi Zhou, Stanford U.S.-Russia Forum fellow and Stockholm-based researcher
"Over the past two decades, the Russian and Chinese approach has been to stay relatively hands off when it comes to each other’s direct problems with the West. I still believe both sides are pragmatic and self-interested enough for this to remain the case, but the overall context has clearly changed.
"As it becomes more obvious how irreversible the downturn in relations with the United States and European Union has become, the China-Russia partnership has gone commensurately deeper: marked less by hedging strategies and a purely rhetorical alignment, and more by concrete, substance-based consultation and coordination.
Troops disembark from a Chinese military helicopter during joint war games held by Russia and China in the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region in August.
"Notably, their now upgraded 'comprehensive strategic partnership of coordination' is a singular category in Chinese foreign diplomacy applied only to Russia. Even if Putin and his circle are too realpolitik to be truly beholden to these kinds of labeling exercises, it does show the mutual respect and regard that both sides take seriously.
"A key dimension driving the deepened China-Russia partnership are also Xi and Putin themselves. This is not only in reference to their interpersonal relationship, but the very fact of their personalistic authoritarian rule, which has clearly become a matter of irresolvable, structural antagonism with Western countries.
"But there are limits to any Chinese-Russian 'axis.'
The many parallels currently being drawn between Ukraine and Taiwan aside, any open Chinese support for a Russian military invasion would place Beijing’s long-standing position on state sovereignty into serious question. I don’t see that happening yet and the deepened partnership is still likely to remain relatively hands off in the medium term."
Not So Great Economic Expectations
Vita Spivak, Moscow-based analyst at the consulting firm Control Risks
"Despite the strong geopolitical ties between the two countries and their leaders, China-Russia economic cooperation will stay practical.
"Putin’s current visit to Beijing is being compared to his May 2014 trip, where he signed a 30-year deal worth $400 billion to deliver gas to China with tensions high over Moscow’s annexation of Crimea and the outbreak of war in eastern Ukraine.
"But from an economic perspective, the China-Russia relationship in 2022 looks quite different from the one of 2014.
An official ceremony to launch Russian natural-gas supplies to China via the Power of Siberia pipeline in the Black Sea resort of Sochi on December 2, 2019.
"Moscow’s expectations from Beijing are much lower and more practical than they were in 2014. The Russian leadership is no longer under the impression that Chinese banks and companies will come to their rescue in case another round of Western sanctions is introduced against Russia.
"Russia is also seeking to avoid increasing its already considerable economic dependency on China, especially when it comes to strategic energy projects, such as those in the Russian Arctic. Therefore, Moscow is seeking to diversify the number of its investment partners at the expense of China.
"Over the last five to six years, Russia’s role as an energy provider to China has also grown considerably and it is now the second-largest supplier of crude oil to China and the third-largest provider of natural gas (pipeline and liquefied natural gas combined). Russian companies are also currently increasing their supplies of high-quality coal to China, which is important given the electricity shock China experienced last year.
"Moscow will continue to exploit its growing importance as an energy provider to Beijing, with new Chinese energy deals being a useful signal for Moscow to send to a Europe that is dependent on Russian gas. Moscow is also looking for ways to diversify its exports to China, which are still highly dependent on hydrocarbons.
"There is also talk from the Russian leadership about switching to China’s yuan in its financial system instead of using euros or dollars in order to protect against new sanctions. It looks like China’s leadership will not make an exception for Russia in its capital-control system -- and the Kremlin appears to be very aware of that.
'Back-To-Back' In Search Of A New World Order
Haiyun Ma, associate professor, Frostburg State University, Maryland
"Russia and China’s rivalries with the West are bringing the two countries closer than ever.
"Putin’s visit to China is primarily about shaping a new world order where Russian and Chinese core interests -- whether it be security concerns or territorial aspirations -- are respected and can be redefined through mutual support and increasingly coordinated actions in response to the West.
Directions for Chinese tourists on a street in Ulyanovsk, Russia.
"To strengthen their bargaining power and challenge the primacy of the United States, Europe, and Japan, the two countries are focused on the issues that they believe have been used against them in the current world order to curb and weaken them.
"For China, this is seen in assertive and ultranationalist policies in Xinjiang [Province], Hong Kong, the South China Sea, and the Taiwan Strait. For Russia, this is about NATO and the orientation of former Soviet countries, with Ukraine being the most notable example.
"The exact nature of this dynamic is unfolding in real time, but hints can be seen in the way Chinese officials have defined the relationship. Rhetoric from Beijing often says that China and Russia are supporting each other “back-to-back” defensively in the face of threats, not fighting shoulder to shoulder against the West.
"As they prepare for these challenges, Russia and China are minimizing any conflicting positions between them in regions with overlapping investments, interests, and influences such as in Central Asia and the South China Sea."
What Comes After Their Rivalry With The U.S.?
Artyom Lukin, China-Russia relations scholar at the Far Eastern Federal University in Vladivostok
"Both China and Russia share the same goal of doing away with America’s primacy in the global order. Until this grand objective is achieved, there are no reasons to worry about the health of Beijing and Moscow’s relationship.
"Looking ahead, the questions are what happens once China, with some Russian help, succeeds in dethroning the United States? If China becomes the world’s strongest superpower, how would it treat Russia?
An employee checks a gas valve at the Atamanskaya compressor station, part of Gazprom's Power of Siberia gas pipeline, outside the Far Eastern town of Svobodny in the Amur region of Russia.
"Russia’s economy is already one-tenth that of China’s and the gap continues to widen. Even more worrying than the GDP gap, Russia is getting increasingly behind China in many vital scientific and technological sectors. For example, Russia used to pride itself on its leadership in space, but now Moscow may become a junior partner in a Chinese-led project to set up a lunar base.
"If China, as it emerges as a new superpower, acquires imperial hubris and a sense of entitlement akin to the United States, then the China-Russia relationship might eventually get into trouble. Still, I hope the Chinese are smart enough not to repeat American mistakes."
China's Subtle Long Game With Russia
Jon Yuan Jiang, Chinese-Russian relations analyst at Australia’s Queensland University of Technology
"In Chinese diplomatic circles, there is an unspoken view that an economically weak but militarily aggressive Russia suits China the best.
"This is partly why China-Russia relations look promising in the short- to medium-term. Not only is Western pressure pushing both countries together, but Russia’s military operations also draw attention away from Beijing.
"Russia’s stagnating domestic economy and its sparsely populated Far East also leaves its lengthy border with China relatively secure, from a Chinese perspective. This offers China more strategic space and resources to deal with core issues elsewhere, such as its own declining population at home, global competition with the United States, and territorial claims over the South China Sea and Taiwan.
"There are definitely power struggles between China and Russia, but assertive military moves from Moscow also keep the relationship with Beijing from becoming too unbalanced.
"A good example of this is Russia’s recent intervention into Kazakhstan through the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO). The Russian move helped stabilize the situation in the country, which was also Beijing’s main concern. Despite China sometimes competing with Russia in Central Asia, Beijing deferred to the Kremlin’s military capabilities and let its interests take precedence."
Friction Can Stay Under The Surface For Only So Long
Theresa Fallon, director, Center for Russia Europe Asia Studies, Brussels
"The prospect of a joint Chinese-Russian front is a strategic planner’s nightmare, which is why it is in both Beijing’s and the Kremlin’s interest to highlight that they have the best relations in over 300 years.
"For now, the common goal to push back against the United States has kept a firm lid on their relationship, but underneath frictions are brewing.
Putin toasts Xi's birthday in Dushanbe on June 15, 2019.
"While Putin and Xi are eager to showcase their warm ties and how their countries are growing closer -- with Russia’s president even toasting the Chinese leader on his birthday in 2019 while wearing matching outfits -- the optics mask a deep distrust that isn’t going away.
"In June 2020, a retired Russian scientist was detained on charges of passing Russian submarine-detection technology secrets to China, and suspicion of Chinese espionage within Russia’s defense industry runs deep and has a storied history.
"Elsewhere, China and Russia’s populations have found themselves at odds, especially outside of each country’s political center.
"Chinese businesses and economic expansion are eyed with caution across Russia’s regions. Meanwhile, nationalistic outbursts, such as calls from Chinese Weibo users to reclaim parts of Russia’s Far East, feed into an unease and misunderstanding that still exists on both sides of the border that isn’t shown in either country’s state-media.
"Beijing maintains a longer view for the future, adopting a tactical strategy where it’s better to have Russia on its side and has shown that it’s willing to adapt and bide its time in the short- and medium-term.
"China still does not recognize Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea from Ukraine but did elect to reorient its flagship foreign policy project, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), to better integrate with Russia and focus less on Ukraine. Showing a sensitivity to strategy but an unwillingness to compromise on its interests.
"Moscow’s actions in Ukraine may be seen by Beijing as a useful distraction but, at the same time, the Kremlin’s actions must unnerve China, since Putin’s moves could disrupt the BRI.
"An estimated 85 percent of Chinese rail traffic to Europe transits through Belarus, which could be squeezed by renewed hostilities in the region. Ukraine, meanwhile, was once envisioned as one of the anchors of the BRI and Beijing still has its sights on the country, with China being its largest trading partner.
"China knows it needs to work with Russia, but that doesn’t mean that Beijing has forgotten about the long-term frictions that lay ahead in its relationship with Moscow. Putin would be smart to also keep an eye on these future tensions, regardless of the red carpet welcome he’s currently receiving in China."
6. Michael Flynn Is Still at War
A long read. An "expose" on Michael Flynn going back to his JSOC days.
Michael Flynn Is Still at War
Michael Flynn speaking at the ReAwaken America gathering in Phoenix in January.Credit...Mark Peterson for The New York Times
The general tried to persuade Donald Trump to use the military to overturn the 2020 election. A year later, he and his followers are fighting the same battle by other means.
Michael Flynn speaking at the ReAwaken America gathering in Phoenix in January.Credit...Mark Peterson for The New York Times
By
- Feb. 4, 2022Updated 6:41 a.m. ET
On Nov. 25, 2020, President Donald J. Trump announced via Twitter that he was granting a full pardon to Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, his former national security adviser. Flynn pleaded guilty in 2017 to lying to federal investigators about his contacts with Russia’s ambassador to the United States during the presidential transition, though he had later tried to withdraw the plea. A CNN report that evening reflected the conventional view in Washington that the pardon, arriving 18 days after the presidential election was called for Joe Biden, was a near-final chapter of the Trump presidency, “a sign Trump understands his time in office is coming to a close.”
At the time Trump announced the pardon, Flynn was encamped at the historic Tomotley estate in South Carolina, a more-than-700-acre former plantation dating back to the 17th century, where enslaved people harvested rice until much of the property was destroyed by federal troops at the close of the Civil War. Tomotley now belonged to L. Lin Wood, the Trump-supporting defamation lawyer who sued Georgia election officials over the state’s 2020 election results showing a Biden victory and predicted that the state’s Republican governor and secretary of state “will soon be going to jail.” (One of his suits was later dismissed; another is pending.) Though the next day would be Thanksgiving, Flynn had not brought his family with him. He had flown to South Carolina on the private jet of the former Overstock chief executive Patrick Byrne and set up camp at Tomotley, where he threw himself into the project of reversing the results of the election Trump had just lost.
The president and his loyalists, together and independently, had been working toward this end in various ways since Election Day. Byrne told me that he and Flynn’s attorney, Sidney Powell, met with Trump’s legal adviser Rudy Giuliani in Arlington, Va., shortly after the election to offer their assistance. Through Powell, Flynn soon became part of the group as well. Byrne said he had rented several rooms at the Trump Hotel for a few months — paying a full rack rate of about $800,000 — which he, Flynn, Powell and others would move in and out of. Byrne considered the hotel “the safest place in D.C. for a command bunker.” But Flynn suggested that they also establish a separate working area far from the Beltway. Powell contacted Wood, who agreed to host them at his secluded estate. As the group began to assemble in mid-November, Wood told me that he was surprised and “honored” to discover that Flynn, whom he had never met, was among his guests.
Powell had brought along two law associates. The other guests were there to gather and organize election information alongside her and Flynn. Among these was Seth Keshel, a 36-year-old former Army military intelligence captain who told me he got Flynn’s attention three weeks earlier by sending what he believed were suspicious election data to Flynn’s LinkedIn page. Another, Jim Penrose, was a cybersecurity specialist who had worked for the National Security Agency. A third, Doug Logan, was an associate of Byrne and the chief executive of a Florida-based software-security firm called Cyber Ninjas. (Powell, Penrose and Logan did not respond to requests for comment.) Wood and Byrne said the group had brought computers, printers and whiteboards. “It looked like Election Central,” Wood recalled.
Flynn and the other men slept and ate at an adjacent property, Cotton Hall, but otherwise toiled in the main residence at Tomotley. In a podcast interview, Keshel recalled that when he woke up in the mornings, usually around 5:45 a.m., Flynn typically had “been up for several hours,” juggling “a few different cellphones at any given time.” Keshel told me that while he spent his three weeks at Tomotley assembling data for Powell’s legal filings, Flynn came and went without notice and did not always volunteer what he was working on. “General Flynn is very adept at need-to-know,” he said.
Two days after Thanksgiving, Flynn spoke by phone with the Worldview Weekend Broadcast Network, a right-wing religious media outlet. Claiming that the 2020 election involved “probably the greatest fraud that our country has ever experienced in our history,” he asserted that China was “not going to allow 2020 to happen, and so now what we have is this theft with mail-in ballots.” A legitimate counting of the ballots would have resulted in a Trump landslide, he insisted. “I’m right in the middle of it right now,” Flynn said, “and I will tell you that, first of all, the president has clear paths to victory.”
While Powell was pursuing legal options for reversing the election results, Flynn was beginning to envision a military role. “It’s not unprecedented,” Flynn, describing the nascent plan, insisted to the Newsmax host Greg Kelly on Dec. 17. “I mean, these people out there talking about martial law, like it’s something that we’ve never done. Martial law has been instituted 64 times, Greg,” he said, then added, “I’m not calling for that.”
But by that point, Flynn was in fact calling for sending in the military to the contested states. Byrne told me that by Dec. 16, he had lined up a series of options for the president to consider, including using uniformed officials to confiscate voting machines and ballots in six states. Flynn suggested to Byrne that the National Guard and U.S. marshals in combination would be the most suited to the job.
On the evening of Dec. 18, Flynn, Byrne, Powell and a legal associate took an S.U.V. limousine to the White House. The group found their way into the Oval Office with the help of several eager-to-please White House staff members, including Garrett Ziegler, an aide to the Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro. (Navarro had released his own extensive, and swiftly debunked, report on election fraud the day before and was in the midst of lobbying Republican members of Congress to overturn the 2020 results.) Byrne, Flynn and Powell then made their case directly to the president about the options he had at his disposal, including Flynn’s suggested use of the National Guard and U.S. marshals. According to Byrne, Powell handed Trump a packet that included previous executive orders issued by President Barack Obama and by Trump that the group believed established a precedent for a new executive order, one that would use supposed foreign interference in the election as a justification for deploying the military. In this operation, Byrne added, Flynn could serve as Trump’s “field marshal.”
White House lawyers present at the meeting vehemently denounced the plan. According to Byrne, Flynn calmly replied: “May I ask what it is you think happened on Nov. 3? Do you think there was anything strange about the election?” According to another account of the meeting published by Axios, Flynn became livid. “You’re quitting!” he yelled at Eric Herschmann, a senior adviser to Trump. “You’re a quitter! You’re not fighting!” (Byrne denies that Flynn said this.)
Trump was amenable to the idea of civilian authorities’ seizing voting machines; in November, he reportedly proposed the idea of the Justice Department’s doing so to his attorney general, William Barr, though Barr rejected it. But either by his own judgment or on the advice of others, he seemed to draw the line at using the military. Byrne told me that Giuliani recently explained to him that he had counseled the president to reject such a plan because “we would all end up in prison.” (A lawyer for Giuliani did not respond to a request for comment.) After Flynn and Powell’s proposal was rejected, Phil Waldron, a retired Army colonel who served with Flynn and was now working with Powell’s legal team, later offered his own revised draft executive order, in which the Department of Homeland Security would be ordered to seize the machines. But Ken Cuccinelli, the department’s acting deputy secretary, resisted. (Waldron had presented his own martial-law plan to both Flynn and Trump’s legal team; it is unclear whether the plan that Flynn’s group presented originated with him or Waldron.)
A merchandise booth at the ReAwaken America event in Phoenix.Credit...Mark Peterson for The New York Times
Flynn, meanwhile, continued to agitate for military intervention. Through an intermediary, he contacted Ezra Cohen, the Defense Department acting under secretary for intelligence, who served under Flynn both at the Defense Intelligence Agency, where Flynn had been director, and on the National Security Council. Cohen (identified in other reports as Ezra Cohen-Watnick) was traveling in the Middle East at the time; the intermediary told him that Flynn wanted him to return to Washington right away.
The call, Cohen told me, was out of the blue. Although it has been reported that he and Flynn were close, he insisted that this was not true: They overlapped at the D.I.A., but Cohen said they met for the first time in the spring of 2016, well after Flynn left the agency, when Cohen wanted to solicit career advice from a veteran intelligence officer. Months later, Flynn recruited him to serve on the N.S.C., but Cohen said they had spoken only briefly a couple of times since Flynn’s departure from the White House.
Cohen said he demurred, but Flynn called him a second time, shortly before Christmas, catching Cohen on his cellphone as he was driving home from a Whole Foods in Maryland. He explained that he needed Cohen to direct the military to seize ballots and voting machines and rerun the election.
Cohen said he was too stupefied to ask his former boss how he thought Cohen had the authority to do such a thing. “Sir, the election is over,” he said, according to the ABC News reporter Jonathan Karl’s book “Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show.” “It’s time to move on.” Cohen told me that Flynn yelled so loudly that Cohen’s wife could clearly hear it from the passenger seat. “You’re a quitter!” Flynn berated him, as he had berated Herschmann. “This is not over! Don’t be a quitter!”
With Flynn’s fleeting window of direct access to the president closed, he and Powell urged Representative Devin Nunes, a Trump ally, to pursue a particularly hallucinatory rumor that the election results had been manipulated by an Italian defense contractor. But a Nunes staff member found the lead to be meritless, according to someone with knowledge of the discussions. Flynn’s attempts to reach the director of national intelligence, John Ratcliffe, were blocked by the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, according to a government official who was privy to these efforts.
It was a stunning near miss for American democracy. But after more than a month of furious machinations, Flynn seemed to have at last exhausted his options. He would later lament to a right-wing podcaster, a fellow retired general and conspiracy theorist named Paul Vallely, that “in the final days of the administration, there was a lot of decisions that could have been made.” Flynn had been boxed out, he claimed, by “a team that wanted to kind of, ‘Let’s get past this; let’s get rid of this guy Trump.’”
A day after the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, the conservative Washington Examiner published an article suggesting that the intelligence community had delayed the publication of a report outlining China’s attempts to influence the 2020 election (though the Office of the Director of National Intelligence categorically dismissed the claim that China played any role in altering the vote totals). Flynn texted a link to the article to an associate with a bitter accompanying note: “Ratcliffe should be ashamed of himself as well as Trump for not demanding this report be made public over a month ago.”
On a Friday evening this January, Flynn took the stage at Dream City Church in Phoenix, the latest stop of the ReAwaken America conference: a right-wing road show that combines elements of a tent revival, a trade fair and a sci-fi convention. Flynn, the featured speaker, was wearing a palm-tree-print blazer over a T-shirt and jeans. He began by leading a round of stretching exercises. “You’re the tough crowd, because you’re the ones who hung in there all day,” Flynn said to the audience of perhaps a thousand.
The crowd had thinned considerably from a peak of 3,500. Those who remained had listened for nine hours to a procession of speakers, including Eric Trump; Mike Lindell, the MyPillow chief executive; the young conservative activist Charlie Kirk from Turning Point USA; and, just before Flynn, a New Jersey gym owner who was banned from American Airlines after refusing to wear a mask on a flight. After hours of apocalyptic pronouncements — coronavirus vaccines described by one speaker as “poison death shots,” the Biden administration by another as “worshipers of Satan” — his musings about the 2020 election seemed bland by comparison.
Flynn insisted that the election was rigged against Trump and that the failure to remedy it constituted “a moment of crisis” for America. He labeled the election system “totally broken,” Democrats “socialists” and establishment Republicans “RINOs” (Republicans in Name Only). But, Flynn said, “people at the county level have the ability to change this country.” Elected county commissioners could write more restrictive voting laws. Elected sheriffs could enforce those laws.
“Not everybody can be a Washington, D.C., superstar,” Flynn reminded the crowd. “Not everybody can be a Joan of Arc.”
Flynn did not explicitly compare himself to the canonized martyr of the Hundred Years’ War. He did not have to. At this gathering and across the right-wing ecosystem, the story of Flynn’s victimization by a diabolical “deep state” and the news media is practically a matter of scripture. “Look at what they did to the general,” Eric Trump told the crowd earlier that afternoon, with Flynn standing onstage beside him. Warning the audience that “they want to take you down criminally,” Trump then pointed to the human evidence standing to his left: “They did it to him.”
‘If you think of the classic case studies in how radicalization occurs, it all happened with Mike Flynn.’
One year since Trump’s departure from office, his Make America Great Again movement has reconstituted itself as a kind of shape-shifting but increasingly robust parallel political universe, one that holds significant sway over the Republican Party but is also beyond its control. It includes MAGA-centric media outlets like One America News, Right Side Broadcasting and Real America’s Voice; well-attended events like the ReAwaken America Tour, which has also touched down in California, Texas, Oklahoma, Colorado, Michigan and Florida; its own personalities and merchandise; and above all, its shared catechism — central to which is the false claim that Trump was the legitimate victor in 2020.
In this world, Flynn is probably the single greatest draw besides Trump himself. The ReAwaken America Tour organizer, Clay Clark, a 41-year-old Tulsa-based entrepreneur and anti-vaccine activist, has featured him in eight engagements across the United States over the past year. “I view it as an honor to pay him to speak at our events,” Clark told me, adding that a nondisclosure agreement prohibited him from revealing Flynn’s fee. At the Phoenix event, two nonprofit organizations Flynn helps lead, America’s Future and the America Project, had separate booths. America’s Future offered $99 annual memberships as well as T-shirts and other merchandise.
All of this is bewildering to some of those who knew Flynn in his former life, as a celebrated intelligence officer in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and watched his spectacular fall from grace with bafflement and regret. It is as if Flynn has managed to burrow his way from a Beltway graveyard into a subterranean afterlife, where he has been welcomed by a Trumpian demimonde that deified him at first sight.
Flynn possesses unique credibility among the ex-president’s followers, with his own compelling story line: that of a distinguished intelligence official who, he claims, experienced firsthand the nefariousness of the deep state. He is a MAGA martyr of such stature that the faithful have been willing to overlook some complicating elements of history. There is the fact that Trump fired Flynn from his post as national security adviser for the same lie that led to his indictment by the Justice Department, and the fact that Flynn, after pleading guilty, spent 2018 cooperating with the Justice Department investigation of other Trumpworld figures. In the right’s transfigured portrayal of Flynn, “America’s general” was at most guilty of being a conservative who dared to accuse Obama of being soft on Islamic extremists, who dared to chant “lock her up” about the Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton — and who dared to ally himself with Donald Trump at a moment when doing so, for a retired military figure of his stature, was still deeply taboo. That an American three-star general had faced such persecution — that, as Eric Trump said, “they did it to him” — meant, by extension, that no conservative patriot was safe.
In the year since Flynn sought to enlist the military in overturning the election, he has continued to fight the same battle by other means. He has been a key figure in spreading the gospel of the stolen election. Speaking at a rally in Washington on Jan. 5 of last year, the night before the Trump faithful stormed the Capitol, he declared that “everybody in this country knows who won” on Election Day and claimed without evidence that more dead people had voted in the election in some states than were buried on famous Civil War battlefields.
In November, the House of Representatives’ Jan. 6 committee issued a subpoena to Flynn ordering him to testify, noting his reported presence at the Dec. 18 Oval Office meeting. In his speech the night before the Capitol riot, Flynn pledged: “Tomorrow, we the people are going to be here, and we want you to know that we will not stand for a lie.” The same day, Flynn was photographed with the longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone at the Willard Hotel, where several of the president’s loyalists had assembled. Flynn was also seen that evening down the street from the Willard at the Trump International Hotel, where other Trump advisers and family members had gathered and where Byrne had paid for Flynn’s lodging.
Flynn has sued to block the subpoena; his attorney, David Warrington, said in a statement, “General Flynn did not organize or speak at any of the events on Jan. 6, and like most Americans, he watched the events at the Capitol unfold on television.”
But the committee’s interest has both reflected and fueled a suspicion that Flynn is something more than a MAGA circuit rider. In addition to his role in the Dec. 18 meeting, Flynn is set apart by the 33 years he spent in the military establishment and the intelligence community, and by his persistent connections to that world. His brother Lt. Gen. Charles A. Flynn was an Army deputy chief of staff when rioters overtook the Capitol and took part in a phone call that day about whether to bring in the National Guard to assist the overwhelmed Capitol Police force. (Charles Flynn later denied to reporters that his brother’s views influenced the military’s response to Jan. 6.) Flynn’s suggestion at a conference last May that a Myanmar-style military coup “should happen” in the United States led Representative Elaine Luria, a moderate Democrat from Virginia and former Navy commander, to argue that Flynn should be tried for sedition under the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
Flynn has denied calling for a coup. He did not respond to a detailed request for comment for this article. In Phoenix, he described his motive for his ongoing activities as the patriotic urge to “stand here and fight for this country” and alluded to the scandal and financial ruin that followed for his family. “What we experienced was unbelievable,” he said.
His war against the federal government is all the more dangerous because it’s personal. “If you think of the classic case studies in how radicalization occurs, it all happened with Mike Flynn,” a fellow military veteran who later did business with Flynn observed. “You’re vilified. Your family’s ostracized. You don’t see any hope economically. This is how to make an extremist.”
Long before his descent into election conspiracism, Flynn was known for his unorthodox information-gathering methods. Those who worked with him at the Joint Special Operations Command, where he arrived in 2004, and his later posting in Afghanistan, where he was the top intelligence officer for the coalition commander, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, recalled his approach as obsessive, omnivorous, high-velocity.
“He was incredibly rapid,” one of his colleagues in Afghanistan recalled. “He’d take in intelligence from unusual sources, from the grass roots” — coalition soldiers in far-flung units — “and from open-source, not relying on signals. And he ran things in a very horizontal fashion. When you sent in a report, his first instinct was, ‘Who needs to see this?’ And he’d put 30 people on the email chain. It was interesting to see someone function not according to the usual rules.”
Former colleagues recall Flynn reviewing reports at his desk late into the night, a half-eaten plate of tater tots beside him. His tenacity seemed to be exactly what the U.S. military effort needed. By 2004, it was clear to everyone on the ground in Iraq that one year after the invasion, U.S. troops remained at pains to understand who the enemy was, much less to defeat it. Flynn’s team closed the information gap in a hurry.
But Flynn’s intelligence-gathering operation was invariably chaotic, embodied by the general himself — who, the former Afghanistan colleague said, “would contradict himself three or four times over a 10-minute period.” His determination to get actionable intelligence into the right hands also led him to defy protocol on occasion, as when a colleague saw Flynn sharing classified information on his computer with a Dutch officer in 2009. Around the same time, according to a Washington Post account, Flynn also shared sensitive intelligence with Pakistani officials, for which he was reprimanded by the Pentagon’s top intelligence official at the time, James Clapper.
Flynn’s discernment as an intelligence analyst also left something to be desired, recalled one former military intelligence officer who worked with him: “During the interrogations at Abu Ghraib, you just couldn’t explain to him that ‘Look, a lot of these guys that were taken off the battlefield just don’t know anything. And they’re all not interconnected.’ And he’d be like, ‘There’s got to be some connection that we’re not making.’ And we’d be like, ‘No, it’s just not there.’” Still, Flynn’s teams provided intelligence on the whereabouts and capabilities of Iraqi and Afghan militants of such value to America’s war-fighting efforts in both countries that his problematic tendencies were largely overlooked at the time.
Flynn onstage with Eric Trump in Phoenix.Credit...Mark Peterson for The New York Times
In his book, “The Field of Fight,” Flynn describes how, after the Sept. 11 attacks, he came to believe that radical Islam was an organized global project to destroy the West, akin to the Soviet Union’s designs on the developing world during the Cold War (which Flynn experienced firsthand as a young Army lieutenant participating in the U.S. invasion of Communist-controlled Grenada in 1983). By family tradition, Flynn, the working-class son of an Army sergeant from Rhode Island, was a registered Democrat. But he also regarded the left as useful idiots in the radical Islamists’ plans, if not outright accomplices. While in Afghanistan, he disdainfully opined to a colleague that Obama wanted to “remake American society.”
His misgivings about the president became personal in June 2010, when Obama fired McChrystal, Flynn’s mentor, after a Rolling Stone article quoted McChrystal’s team mocking members of the Obama administration. Six years later, Flynn would say in “The Field of Fight” that McChrystal’s “maltreatment is still hard for me to digest.”
Still, Flynn’s service under McChrystal had garnered significant admiration in Washington, and Clapper, who by this point was serving as the director of national intelligence, brought Flynn to work at the O.D.N.I. in 2011. A year later, Flynn became the new director of the D.I.A. On paper, bringing in the top intelligence officer in Iraq and Afghanistan made perfect sense. On the other hand, Flynn’s experience as the supervisor of a small operation would not readily scale to an organization of 17,000 employees within a top-heavy and doctrinaire intelligence bureaucracy.
One former senior intelligence official recalled trying to warn Flynn that running a large agency required different management techniques from those to which he was accustomed. Flynn, undeterred, wasted little time upending the D.I.A. He shuffled the responsibilities of the agency’s senior executives and made significant structural changes to the Defense Clandestine Service in defiance of the instruction of his Pentagon superiors. He often ignored his civilian chain of command, according to one of his subordinates.
Woven into the mythology of Flynn’s martyrdom is that his dire warnings about the growing threat of Islamic extremism were what ultimately cost him his job at the D.I.A. In “The Field of Fight,” he claimed to have been given his walking papers in February 2014 “after telling a congressional committee that we were not as safe as we had been a few years back.” In fact, the only evidence I could find of Flynn saying anything along these lines was his remarks to an audience at the Aspen Institute fully five months after being asked for his resignation by James Clapper and Michael Vickers, the under secretary of defense for intelligence, not Obama. “President Obama wouldn’t have known Flynn if he’d fallen over him,” Clapper told me. “We told Susan Rice” — Obama’s national security adviser — “what we’d done after the fact.” Their reasons for ending Flynn’s tenure, he added, included insubordination and erosion of morale at the agency. Clapper termed Flynn’s fired-for-telling-the-truth narrative “baloney.”
Flynn was permitted to retire with the full benefits accorded a three-star general. His retirement ceremony on Aug. 7, 2014 was well attended. He bought a three-bedroom house in the Old Town neighborhood of Alexandria, Va., and set up a consulting shop, Flynn Intel Group, in an office overlooking the Potomac River. And he began venturing into politics. Six months after his retirement, he went on “Fox News Sunday” to criticize the Obama administration’s terrorist-fighting “passivity.” A string of further appearances on the network followed. Flynn also began consulting with Republican presidential contenders, including Carly Fiorina and Scott Walker.
But in the private sector, too, Flynn was reckless. His admirers were horrified to see him form a partnership with Bijan Kian, an Iranian American businessman who would later be indicted on charges of acting as an unregistered agent of the Turkish government (the case has not been resolved). Kian epitomized, in the words of a former colleague, “these guys in the D.C. swamp who prey on generals fresh out of the military with no understanding of how the business world works.”
Even more concerning was Flynn’s acceptance of more than $45,000 for a speaking appearance in Moscow, at the 10th anniversary gala of Russia’s state-run RT channel in December 2015, where he was photographed sitting next to President Vladimir Putin. Friends and at least one intelligence official advised Flynn against attending the party to celebrate a Russian propaganda organization that was at the time openly spreading misinformation about and within the United States and other NATO countries. Flynn assured them that he knew what he was doing.
Trump did not find Flynn’s views on Russia disqualifying in the least. By the time the candidate had wrapped up the Republican nomination, Flynn was his senior foreign-policy adviser — and, briefly, the only nonpolitician under consideration to be Trump’s running mate, according to a former Trump campaign adviser. Like most of those in Trump’s orbit, Flynn did not seem to be staking his career on a victory in November. Beginning in the final weeks of the campaign, Flynn’s consulting firm accepted over a half-million dollars from a Dutch group with ties to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey. On Election Day in 2016, The Hill published an op-ed by Flynn (in which he failed to disclose his consulting relationship) titled “Our Ally Turkey Is in Crisis and Needs Our Support.”
Even for those conservatives who reject the most garish Trump-centric conspiracy theories, there is a tendency to view Flynn as a pawn in a chess match between Trump and federal officials who had reason to wonder if the new president sought help from the Russian government during his campaign. This is true to an extent, but Flynn had placed himself on the chessboard. He lied about discussing the Obama administration’s sanctions on Russia with that country’s ambassador to the United States, Sergey Kislyak, during the presidential transition — first to incoming Vice President Mike Pence, then to White House officials, then to the media and finally to two F.B.I. agents. One former senior intelligence official who reviewed the transcript of Flynn’s conversation with Kislyak told me that he was struck by the “plain stupidity” of Flynn’s lies — knowing that Trump’s campaign was already drawing scrutiny for its contacts with Russia and knowing as well that any phone conversation with a Russian diplomat was likely to be recorded by U.S. intelligence agencies.
When Flynn resigned in February 2017, Trump did not pretend to be heartbroken by the loss. As one of Trump’s senior advisers told me, Flynn “had no chemistry with Trump and didn’t come across as a guy who had it together.” But according to another adviser, the firing of Flynn constituted an early show of weakness in the eyes of the president’s son-in-law and consigliere, Jared Kushner, who confided to this individual in 2020 that throwing Flynn to the wolves was “the biggest mistake we ever made.” (Kushner could not be reached for comment.)
The following December, Flynn struck a plea deal with the special counsel, Robert Mueller. Over the course of a year, Flynn sat for about 20 interviews and acknowledged, in private and later in court, that he had willfully not told the truth about the nature of his conversations with Kislyak. Though the summaries of these interviews suggest Flynn was far from expansive and at times evasive, Mueller’s team was clearly hopeful that Flynn’s experience would encourage others in Trump’s circle to come forward. The prosecutors indicated that they would not object to Flynn’s receiving no jail time.
The crowd at the ReAwaken America event in Phoenix.Credit...Mark Peterson for The New York Times
Still, Flynn was racking up immense legal fees and could not find work. In the spring of 2019, he decided to fire his attorneys and replace them with the Dallas-based lawyer Sidney Powell, his future partner in the crusade to overturn the 2020 election. Powell withdrew Flynn’s guilty plea and claimed that the prosecutors were withholding what she called a crucial report that, as it turned out, did not exist. In May 2020, Attorney General William Barr intervened and moved that the case against Flynn be dismissed. A federal judge was still weighing whether to accept Barr’s recommendation when Trump rendered the matter moot by issuing his pardon on Nov. 25.
Less than a month after receiving his pardon, Flynn was face to face with the man who had given it to him, presenting what Byrne called the “beautiful operational plan” for deploying the military to six contested states. When both the White House and Ezra Cohen declined to enact this plan, Flynn continued to hype fraud conspiracy theories — and intended to do the same in a speech at Trump’s rally on the morning of Jan. 6, until he was informed at the last minute that his and Byrne’s slots had been canceled.
Byrne wrote that “Flynn and I sunk into our seats in despair” in the V.I.P. section throughout the program. They had hoped the president would make an evidentiary case for there having been an election-fraud conspiracy, but he had done nothing of the sort. According to Byrne’s account in his self-published book “The Deep Rig,” the two men repeatedly said to each other: “He does not get that it is not about him. He put on a [expletive] pep rally.” They returned to their hotel, hurriedly packed their bags and did not follow the throng to the Capitol, Byrne wrote.
Like several other Trump allies, Flynn refused to testify as scheduled before the Jan. 6 Committee in December and sued to block its subpoena of his phone records. Flynn’s defiance of the committee fuels suspicions in some corners that Flynn has something to hide — though his reticence would also be in keeping with someone who insists an election was stolen by the same deep-state operatives who engineered his dismissal from the White House five years ago. “They did a masterful job of getting rid of me early on, because they knew exactly what I was going to do,” Flynn told Paul Vallely on a podcast in November.
In September, I was attending a rally near the Capitol in support of those facing charges in the Jan. 6 riot when a short, muscular man with a shaved head approached me. He wore a T-shirt with Flynn’s face on it. Noticing my press badge, he held his iPhone up to my face and demanded to know: “Why aren’t you guys reporting on the 12th Amendment that’s going to potentially be triggered after Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin nullify their electors?”
I tried to explain that I was not writing about the election, but the man continued to talk. The next morning, I learned that a video of the encounter had been posted on the man’s Telegram account. His name was Ivan Raiklin, and he was a former Green Beret and lawyer.
Raiklin has often emphasized his dealings with Flynn. When he briefly tried to run for the U.S. Senate in Virginia in 2018, Raiklin was endorsed by Flynn’s son Michael Flynn Jr., and he sat in the federal courtroom next to Sidney Powell during the elder Flynn’s hearing that December; Flynn has been photographed with Raiklin elsewhere and once described him on Twitter as “a true American patriot.” Beyond that, Flynn has never confirmed their relationship, and Flynn’s brother Joe Flynn, in a brief statement on behalf of their family, said, “We do not have any association with Ivan Raiklin.”
‘He kept referring back to Mike Flynn as this linchpin and cog.’
Raiklin is one of a cohort of military-intelligence and law-enforcement veterans who have found or at least claimed places in Flynn’s general orbit since the 2020 election and are engaged in ongoing efforts to relitigate its results. Others include Seth Keshel and Jim Penrose from the group that gathered at Lin Wood’s estate that November; Phil Waldron; Thomas Speciale, the leader of the group Vets for Trump, who worked at the D.I.A. during Flynn’s directorship and has provided security for Flynn; and Robert Patrick Lewis and the former Michigan police officer Geoffrey Flohr of the First Amendment Praetorian, a right-wing paramilitary outfit that has provided security for Flynn and others more than once at Flynn’s behest.
Several of these men were present at the Capitol on Jan. 6, though in what capacity, and to what end, is still unclear. Flohr can be seen in video footage on the grounds near the west side of the Capitol talking on his cellphone just before the attack, though it is not known if he entered the building. Speciale was also on the west side of the building that afternoon, though he maintains that he never entered. Raiklin, too, was at the Capitol but insists he did not go inside the building.
What is less ambiguous is the role that some of these figures have played in the effort to reverse 2020’s outcome by other means. Since the election, Trump’s claims of thwarted victory have given rise to a wave of state-level organizing aimed at using legislatures and other levers of power to audit the 2020 election results, on the theory that they will void enough Electoral College votes to force a rerun of the election. Although the handful of state and local audits that activists and Republican lawmakers have managed to set in motion — most significantly in Arizona — have in no cases changed the election results, it remains an area of fervent activity, in which Flynn’s name is regularly invoked.
In November in New Hampshire, I attended an “election-security seminar,” presented by an organization called the New Hampshire Voter Integrity Group. The conference room was standing room only. The speakers included a state representative, a Republican candidate for Congress and Seth Keshel, who argued that their foremost mission should be “the remediation of the 2020 election.”
The final speaker was Ivan Raiklin. In his hypercaffeinated cadence, Raiklin devoted his talk to enumerating the supposed conspirators whose ongoing presence helped explain “why we haven’t remedied 2020 yet.” Those forces, he said, included the F.B.I., the Bushes, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., former Vice President Mike Pence and former Vice President Dick Cheney. This was the deep state that Trump was up against, Raiklin said.
And, he added, “who’s the first person of any stature whatsoever who has any credibility, other than within his family and the Trump Organization, that comes in and bats for him? This is important. This is the most important thing. Say it louder: General Flynn.” Flynn and Trump’s independence was a threat to the deep state, Raiklin insisted, which led to Flynn’s indictment and Trump’s defeat. “The reason why a million people showed up on Jan. 6,” he said, was that “they know bits and pieces of the story. And they knew that something had to be called out publicly. ”
The same month as the New Hampshire event, the Jan. 6 committee heard testimony from a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania named Everett Stern, who has said he was approached last April by two associates of Raiklin at a Republican gathering in Berks County. Stern, who owns a private intelligence firm, told me that the associates wanted to enlist his help in persuading high-ranking Republican officials in Pennsylvania to support an audit in that state. When Stern asked whom they were working with, one of them replied, “General Flynn.”
Later, Stern said, Raiklin communicated directly with him through text messages to find out more about his professional and personal life. After this vetting, Stern says that he was tasked with finding unflattering information about a particular Republican congressman so he could be “pushed” toward supporting an audit. Stern says he was also set up to meet personally with Flynn in Dallas in mid-June. By this time, however, Stern had reported his communications to the F.B.I. and was afraid of his legal exposure. He canceled at the last minute.
Michael Flynn before the crowd in Phoenix.Credit...Mark Peterson for The New York Times
Joe Flynn told me: “We do not have anything to do with what Everett Stern is alleging,” adding, “He’s nuts.” Raiklin, too, denied to me that he helped recruit Stern to pressure elected officials into supporting a 2020 election audit. But I heard a similar story from J.D. Maddox, a former C.I.A. branch chief who ran unsuccessfully for the Virginia House of Delegates last year. Maddox, who has not previously spoken publicly about his experience, told me that he was at a candidate meet-and-greet in Arlington last May when he bumped into Raiklin. Raiklin again brought up the need for election audits — and suggested tactics far beyond lobbying legislators. “If the Democrats don’t give us that,” Maddox recalled him saying, “then violence is the next step.”
Raiklin proceeded into what Maddox described as “a wild, contortionist explanation of how they would reverse Biden’s election,” involving a succession of state audits. First Arizona, then Georgia, then Wisconsin and then other state legislatures would nullify the 2020 election results, he envisioned, until Biden’s victory margin would evaporate. Maddox told Raiklin he was skeptical. “But he said he was certain it was going to happen,” Maddox told me. “And he kept referring back to Mike Flynn as this linchpin and cog.”
“General Flynn is central to all this,” Raiklin had similarly claimed in New Hampshire when I spoke with him briefly after his talk. He refused to elaborate, so what that meant, exactly, was hard to say. In the feverish activity that now attends the 2020 election on the right, it can be difficult to distinguish conspiring from conspiracism — not least in Flynn’s own statements. In an interview in late January with the right-wing conspiracy website Infowars, Flynn accused George Soros, Bill Gates and others of creating the coronavirus so they could “steal an election” and “rule the world.” In another interview, he floated the rumor that “they” may be “putting the vaccine in salad dressing.”
But the Capitol riot demonstrated how quickly such conspiracism could be converted into action. The belief that the 2020 election was stolen holds sway in the Republican Party as much now as it did then: According to a YouGov poll in December, 71 percent of all Republicans believe that Biden was not elected legitimately. The stolen-election myth has fused with a host of other right-wing preoccupations — the coronavirus vaccines, critical race theory, border security — into a single crisis narrative, of which Flynn is both purveyor and protagonist: The deep state intends to break America as it tried to break Flynn and the man he had the audacity to serve, Donald Trump.
At the ReAwaken America event in Phoenix, I visited a booth hawking art by a man named Michael Marrone. In addition to the usual hagiographic portraits of Trump in Revolutionary War garb, Marrone had several of Flynn and other hallowed figures in the original effort to overturn the election, like Lin Wood and Sidney Powell. One featured the general seated next to Powell, both in colonial attire, signing the Declaration of Independence. In another, Flynn stood jut-jawed and eagle-eyed, wielding a musket. A third, featuring him beside Trump on a battlefield, bore Flynn’s autograph, next to the QAnon slogan WWG1WGA (“where we go one, we go all”).
In real life, the bonds among this band had started to fray. Wood and Flynn endorsed different Republican candidates for governor of Georgia, a state that has become central to the right-wing efforts to overturn the 2020 results and assert partisan control over future elections. Their estrangement deepened and eventually became public when Wood posted text messages and snippets of a phone conversation on the social media app Telegram. In one of them, Flynn expressed his belief that Trump had “quit” on America.
When I spoke with Wood in December, he told me that he had begun to reappraise the general. For so long Flynn’s partner in conspiracism, he had lately begun to wonder if Flynn himself might not be what he seemed. He told me about attending a Bikers for Trump rally in South Carolina last May, where Flynn led the crowd in the Pledge of Allegiance, only to fall silent momentarily during the line “and to the Republic for which it stands.” At the time, “I tried to defend him,” Wood said. “Now I don’t know. Who forgets the Pledge of Allegiance? Draw your own conclusions. It’s troublesome.”
It occurred to me that this, one way or another, was probably Flynn’s life for the foreseeable future: The prospect of a normal retirement long gone, he now belonged to a MAGA storybook world of heroes and villains and nothing in between. That world “is filled with strong personalities, which is a complication in any movement,” said J.D. Rucker, a conservative podcaster who is acquainted with and admires Flynn. “When you’re fighting for a cause, you’re also fighting for a spotlight within that cause. The left is less susceptible to this — whether because they have a more collectivist view or because they’re not as capitalistic, I don’t know.”
“It’s a challenge to call out a grifter,” Rucker mused, “because usually they have a very passionate, cultlike following. And sometimes we get this situation where we have these multiple grifters going after each other. It’s entertaining, but it’s also dangerous for everybody involved.”
Robert Draper is a contributing writer for the magazine. He is the author of several books, most recently “To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America Into Iraq,” which was excerpted in the magazine.
7. U.S. Carrier Group, Two Amphibious Ready Groups Drill in Philippine Sea with Japan
U.S. Carrier Group, Two Amphibious Ready Groups Drill in Philippine Sea with Japan - USNI News
Aviation Boatswain’s Mate (Handling) 1st Class Ruselle Kane, a native of San Francisco, assigned to Wasp-class amphibious assault ship USS Essex (LHD 2), signals to an MH-60S Sea Hawk helicopter attached to Helicopter Sea Combat Squadron (HSC) 21 during a vertical replenishment (VERTREP) in support of Noble Fusion, Feb. 4, 2022 in the Philippine Sea. U.S. Navy Photo
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia – A U.S. Navy carrier strike group and two amphibious ready groups are drilling in the Philippine Sea with the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force.
Exercise Noble Fusion began on Thursday in the Philippine Sea with the JMSDF and elements of the U.S. Marine Corps and U.S. Air Force, the 3rd Marine Expeditionary Brigade said in a news release.
Taking place in the Luzon and Miyako Straits, Noble Fusion is a joint and combined naval expeditionary exercise that includes the Abraham Lincoln Carrier Strike Group, the America Amphibious Ready Group with the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit embarked and the Essex Amphibious Ready Group with the 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit embarked.
“Integrating the elements of the dual-MEU/ARG team with the power of the carrier strike group, joint elements and our Japanese counterparts in a distributed operation demonstrates our ability to command and control lethal forces in contested areas, create strategic advantage and integrated deterrence,” Col. Michael Brennan, an operations officer for Combined Task Force (CTF) 79, said in the release.
“Our sea-denial operations with naval expeditionary integration and littoral allies prepares us to counter potential adversarial aggressive actions in the First Island Chain.”
The 3rd MEB and Combined Task Force 76 are spearheading the drills.
“During the exercise, 3rd MEB became the Combined Task Force (CTF) 79. Together, CTF-76 and CTF-79 commanded and controlled the integrated naval expeditionary forces of the 11th and 31st Marine Expeditionary Units and Amphibious Squadrons 1 and 11, embarked aboard the USS Essex and USS America, respectively,” 3rd MEB said in the release. “Taking operational control of two MEUs while underway exemplifies the ability to conduct distributed command and control at sea.”
This is the first instance since 2018 that two MEU/ARGs are drilling in the Indo-Pacific, according to the Marine Corps.
The exercise started with the Lincoln CSG and the Essex ARG with the 11th MEU performing an amphibious operation to demonstrate terrain seizure and flying various aircraft.
“AV-8B Harriers and MV-22B Ospreys of the 11th MEU flew from Essex and rehearsed integrated air operations with a Navy E-2D Advanced Hawkeye flying from USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN 72) all within the Luzon Strait,” the 3rd MEB said in the release. “Simultaneously, 11th MEU Marines and Sailors aboard the Essex conducted operational checks on the Stalker unmanned aerial system and loaded Polaris MRZR light tactical all-terrain vehicle with other equipment into MV-22 Ospreys.”
An EA-18G Growler, assigned to the “Wizards” of Electronic Attack Squadron (VAQ) 133, launches from the flight deck of the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN 72) in the Philippine Sea on Feb. 4, 2022. U.S. Navy Photo
On Friday, the America ARG with the 31ST MEU performed “two live fire air-to-ground strikes along with one simulated strike” in a first island chain training range with F-35B Lightning II Joint Strike Fighters.
Air Force F-15C Eagles from Kadena Air Base’s 18th Wing and Marine Corps F-35Bs from Marine Corps Air Station Iwakuni, Japan, worked with a Task Force 72 P-8 Poseidon to perform a maritime strike, as Japanese destroyer JS Kongo (DDG-173) and American destroyer USS Dewey (DDG-105) helped with command and control, according to the release.
“In order to support the aircraft at distance, and increase time on station, the USAF 18th Wing supported with KC-135 Stratotanker aircraft and MAG-12 provided KC-130J Hercules aircraft for air-to-air refueling. In the evening, FA-18E Super Hornets and an E-2D Advanced Hawkeye flew from Lincoln to conduct simulated strikes against live surface targets in the First Island Chain,” the 3rd MEB said in the release.
The America ARG includes USS America (LHA-6), landing platform dock USS Green Bay (LPD-20) and landing ship dock USS Ashland (LSD-48) with elements of the 31st MEU embarked. The Essex ARG includes USS Essex (LHD-2), landing ship dock USS Pearl Harbor (LSD-52) and landing platform dock USS Portland (LPD-27) with the 11th MEU embarked. The Lincoln CSG includes USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN-72) with embarked Carrier Air Wing (CVW) 9; cruiser USS Mobile Bay (CG-53); and destroyers USS Gridley (DDG-101), USS Spruance (DDG-111), USS Fitzgerald (DDG-62) and USS Sampson (DDG-102). Sampson is currently detached and operating near Tonga in support of humanitarian and disaster relief operations.
In other regional developments, 20 ships from the Russian Navy’s Pacific Fleet departed on Tuesday from their home ports for the Sea of Japan and the Sea of Okhotsk to carry out their part in a fleet-wide Russian Navy exercise, according to a Russian Ministry of Defence news release. Among the ships are destroyers RFS Marshal Shaposhnikov (543) and RFS Admiral Panteleyev (548), corvettes RFS Sovershennyy (333), RFS Gromkiy (335), RFS Gremyashchiy (337) and RFS Hero of the Russian Federation Aldar Tsydenzhapov (339); and missile range instrumentation ship RFS Marshal Krylov (331).
On the same day, 10 other ships from the Russian Pacific Fleet headed to the waters of the Avacha Bay off the coast of Kamchatka to perform training and combat exercises. The exercise will involve joint tactical maneuvering, ship groups destructing targets, anti-submarine warfare, air defense at-sea operations and gun and anti-aircraft missile firings at various targets. Ships involved are corvettes RFS Smerch (423), RFS Kholmsk (369), RFS Ust-Ilimsk (362) and RFS MPK-107 (332), along with minesweepers and support ships.
Landing Helicopter Dock HMAS Adelaide departed Fleet Base East in Sydney on Monday. Royal Australian Navy Photo
Over in Australia, the Australian Department of Defence announced on Wednesday that frigate HMAS Arunta (FFH151) had departed Fleet Base East, Sydney, on Jan. 28 for a three-month regional presence deployment. The frigate will undertake a number of navy-to-navy activities with Australia’s regional partners and participate in various maritime exercises, though it did not provide specifics.
Meanwhile, Royal New Zealand Navy replenishment ship HMNZS Aotearoa (A11) departed Lyttelton on Friday and is heading south to support Antarctic environmental and scientific programs. This is Aotearoa’s first trip to Antarctica and the first time in more than 50 years that a Royal New Zealand Navy ship will perform an Antarctic resupply of McMurdo Station and Scott Base, according to a RNZN news release. Aotearoa just returned from a deployment to Tonga, where it conducted relief operations following the eruption of Tonga’s Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai underwater volcano last month.
New Zealand offshore patrol vessel HMNZS Wellington (P55) and multi-role support vessel HMNZS Canterbury (L421) are still on station in Tonga and international naval vessels continue to perform relief operations, with the Royal Australian Navy landing helicopter dock HMAS Adelaide (L01) launching its embarked Australian Army CH-47F helicopters to conduct aerial reconnaissance on Thursday at the request of the Tongan government. Adelaide had sailed to Tonga with three helicopters embarked on it.
[#OpTongaAssist] Mobilisés pour apporter une aide d’urgence aux îles Tonga, les patrouilleurs La Glorieuse et Arago ont achevé hier la livraison de près de 50 t de fret humanitaire, 10000 litres d’eau potable et 2000 rations, conformément au protocole sanitaire sur place. pic.twitter.com/VCnkyGjSRF
French Navy patrol vessel FNS Arago (P675) and offshore patrol vessel FNS La Glorieuse (P686) arrived in Tonga on Thursday, delivering 50 tons of humanitarian aid supplies, 10,000 liters of water and 2000 ration packs.
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8. Despite Force Redesign, The Marine Corps Says It Still Needs Its Big Amphibious Warships. In Fact, It Needs Over 30.
A lot of jobs in Virginia and Maine.
Despite Force Redesign, The Marine Corps Says It Still Needs Its Big Amphibious Warships. In Fact, It Needs Over 30.
Forbes · by Loren Thompson · February 4, 2022
The U.S. Marine Corps is in the midst of a major force redesign aimed at making it more relevant to the rising military challenge posed by China in the Pacific.
The new approach, which was first signaled by Commandant David H. Berger in his June 2019 planning guidance, envisions shifting to a more mobile, island-hopping posture within range of Chinese weapons as a way of keeping Beijing off balance in a war.
Using a new class of light amphibious warships, Marine units would move unpredictably from island to island off the Chinese coast, applying sophisticated reconnaissance and munitions to attack hostile targets (including shipping).
The basic idea is to integrate Marine wartime operations more closely with those of the Navy in a region where maritime maneuvers are likely to dominate efforts to deter and/or defeat adversary plans.
... [+]Wikipedia
The commandant’s planning guidance is a logical response to the changing emphasis of national defense strategy, which now focuses primarily on great-power rivals rather than the terrorists who drew Marine units into extended operations on land after 9/11.
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Stressing China allows the Marine Corps to return to the tactical setting where it is most comfortable, i.e., attacking from the sea.
However, something has been lost in translation as the commandant’s guidance is gradually transformed into programs.
General Berger never intended that the Corps would give up its large amphibious warships as it shifted to expeditionary advanced-base operations in the Western Pacific littoral.
Those warships, of which there are currently 31 in the active fleet, are essential to forming the amphibious ready groups that enable a fast response when crises occur around the world.
The Marine Corps generally plans to have three such readiness groups forward deployed at any given time, each consisting of three vessels—an amphibious assault warship hosting aircraft and landing craft, and two “transport docks” carrying similar equipment in lesser quantities.
There is nothing light about these warships, all of which are built by Huntington Ingalls Industries (a contributor to my think tank).
With a displacement of 45,000 tons, the assault ships are as big as a conventionally powered aircraft carrier—although less than half the size of the U.S. Navy’s nuclear-powered carriers—and the latest transport docks displace 25,000 tons.
The amphibious assault ships carry nearly 1,700 Marines in addition to the sailors who crew them, while the transport docks carry 400-700 Marines, depending on type.
Collectively, the three vessels in an amphibious ready group thus host around 3,000 Marines, comprising the most capable and self-sufficient amphibious warfighting forces in the world.
But here’s the thing: the ships can’t remain at sea indefinitely.
In order to sustain three ready groups forward with a total of nine vessels, the Marines actually need three times that many in order to cover training, transit and maintenance times.
And then there is an additional complement of ships to take into account those vessels that are in long-term overhaul and thus unavailable for service.
Even without an attrition reserve, the Marine Corps figures the absolute minimum it must have to sustain its global deterrent posture is 31 large “amphibs.”
Bear in mind, that only provides for one ready group near Europe, one near the Persian Gulf, and one near China; the Navy has traditionally maintained more than 31 vessels in the active fleet.
You can make a case for coming down to only the 31 vessels in the fleet today because the latest generation of amphibious warships is far more capable than what came before.
What you can’t rationalize is the planning number floated by the Biden administration in June of last year.
That envisioned a range of 8-9 amphibious assault ships, and 16-19 transport docks—in other words, a range of 24-28 large amphibs total.
The high end of that range is inadequate; the low end is grossly inadequate.
An amphibious fleet confined to such numbers would necessarily have big gaps in its global coverage, and be less likely to respond to fast-breaking crises in a timely fashion.
As the deputy commandant of the Marine Corps diplomatically described it recently, the 24-28 range is resource-driven rather than requirements-driven, meaning the number was derived from budget considerations rather than warfighting needs.
The Biden estimates also included 24-35 light amphibious warships, but those are not suitable substitutes for the large amphibious warships and no such vessels are currently in the fleet or under construction.
As it stands, the Marines have recently been breaking up their forward-deployed readiness groups because there are so many demands on their capabilities in places like the Persian Gulf.
Fortunately, each vessel is fairly self-sufficient when dealing with low-end contingencies, and the Marines have pre-positioned supplemental warfighting materiel in some regions.
But when you cut through all the details, what you find is that the Biden administration’s numbers would not permit the Marine Corps to sustain its current global posture.
There are two ways to fix this problem, one of them good and one of them bad.
The good way is to continue replacing aged Whidbey Island-class transport docks with a new generation of far more capable San Antonio-class transports.
The dozen or so Whidbey Island vessels average 30 years of age, are in poor material condition, and don’t begin to approach the capabilities of the more modern San-Antonio class, which has been further refined for the task of replacing the older ships.
Congress last year gave the Navy authority to acquire these vessels and larger amphibious assault vessels in a multi-year, multi-vessel arrangement that would save hundreds of millions of dollars.
The bad way of keeping the amphib fleet at an adequate number would be to extend the service life of the decrepit Whidbey Island class, although there have been rumors of a plan to look into that option.
An amphibious force that is populated entirely by modern amphibious assault ships and variants of the San-Antonio class would be up to the task to policing the world in the years ahead.
A force of less than 31 vessels, or one that got to 31 by keeping maritime relics in service, couldn’t do the job.
The Pentagon is currently completing a detailed study of how many amphibious warships the Marines will actually need through mid-century.
When that study reaches its inevitable conclusion—31 large warships or more—the Marine Corps needs to stop being so diplomatic and communicate to Congress the dangers of reducing the capabilities of the amphibious fleet at a time when much of the world seems to be aflame with conflict.
Forbes · by Loren Thompson · February 4, 2022
9. The fight for UNCLOS is back with the Indo-Pacific in mind
Should we or shouldn't we? What do naval and intentional law experts say?
The fight for UNCLOS is back with the Indo-Pacific in mind - Breaking Defense
The treaty faces steep odds for formal ratification, but some lawmakers are latching onto the military's focus on the Indo-Pacific as a pretext.
Rep. Joe Courtney, D-Conn., speaks at the United States Submarine Force Library and Museum. Courtney has been one of several lawmakers in recent years publicly advocating the United States ratify the United Nations Conventions on the Law of the Sea. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Tristan B. Lotz/Released)
WASHINGTON: A group of Democratic congressmen is renewing a legislative fight to push the United States to ratify the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, an international agreement the country has long resisted despite helping to craft it.
An amendment for a “sense of Congress” asserting that it’s in the country’s best interest to formally ratify the treaty, also dubbed UNCLOS, was included and passed by the House on Thursday night in the America COMPETES Act, a bill aimed at boosting American manufacturers’ ability to compete with China. The lower chamber advanced the bill mostly along party lines.
The renewed push comes at a time when the Pentagon, and in particular the Navy, are focusing on countering China by asserting power in the Indo-Pacific.
“In order to equip the United States to fully and credibly assert the rule of law in the maritime domain, particularly in the Indo-Pacific region, it’s time for our nation to finally join 168 countries around the world and ratify UNCLOS,” Rep. Joe Courtney, D-Conn., one of the amendment’s sponsors, said in a written statement following the House vote.
The amendment was also sponsored by Democratic Reps. Ami Bera, M.D., Rick Larsen, Wash., Elaine Luria, Va., Ed Case, Hawaii, and Dereck Kilmer, Wash. Courtney, among other lawmakers, have intermittently made pushes to have the agreement ratified for the past decade, but those efforts ultimately failed to simultaneously gain the necessary support by the sitting president and 67 senators.
UNCLOS is a 1982 treaty that formalizes well-known rules of navigation, governs the use of undersea resources and provides mechanisms for resolving disputes between countries. Despite its large number of signatories and the fact the United States participated in the original negotiations formulating the agreement, the US has never acceded to — or formally ratified — the treaty.
Proponents chiefly argue that ratifying the agreement would give the US more leverage in pressuring other nations to do the same. The US Navy and Coast Guard both already largely follow the rules of navigation the treaty lays out as a matter of service policy.
Proponents also argue that military leadership almost uniformly expresses support for ratification when asked about their positions during confirmation hearings for senior billets. Adm. Christopher Grady, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was the latest four-star officer to do as much.
Those who oppose accession say the treaty would forfeit a level of sovereign power on the United States’ part and that the protections UNCLOS offers for utilizing natural resources in the deep seabed could be worked out through direct negotiations with foreign nations. They also take issue with royalties the United States would end up paying to use resources for which the country already has access.
“We simply are not persuaded that decisions by the International Seabed Authority and international tribunals empowered by this treaty will be more favorable to U.S. interests than bilateral negotiations, voluntary arbitration, and other traditional means of resolving maritime issues,” Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, said after becoming a key vote to prevent ratification in 2012.
Opponents also disagree with the premise that the signing the treaty will assist in managing the behaviors of nations such as China.
“[T]he inability to force Chinese compliance despite a dispute tribunal ruling against Chinese claims in the South China Sea only serves to illustrate that international organizations lack the ability and authority to prevent such aggressive acts,” researchers for the Heritage Foundation wrote in a 2018 commentary. “Between friendly and democratic nations, the convention adds nothing. When a great and autocratic power like China is involved, the convention achieves nothing.”
The amendment passed by the House is a “sense of Congress,” a declarative resolution lawmakers use to spotlight issues, but one that has no effect on whether the status quo changes.
To ratify UNCLOS, the treaty would have to gain support from President Joe Biden, a favorable vote out of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and then 67 votes from the full Senate — a mountainous task given the 50-50 party split in the upper chamber and the large number of higher-profile, more controversial issues dominating Washington.
Still though, the military’s publicly stated focus on China and the Indo-Pacific writ large now appears to be underpinning the renewed charge for the United States to finally affirm the treaty.
“[T]he ratification of the UNCLOS remains a top priority of the United States Navy and the United States Coast Guard, the importance of which was most recently underscored by the strategic challenges the United States faces in the Asia-Pacific, the Arctic, and the Black Sea regions,” according to the amendment.
The House and Senate will now have to resolve their differences between the House’s bill and the Senate’s version, a process that could result in the UNCLOS language being stripped out or altered. But should it pass, given how sporadically UNCLOS is debated in Congress and the non-binding status that a “sense of Congress” has, it’s unclear what effect the amendment will have long term.
10. Biden must learn from the JCPOA's mistakes | Opinion
Excerpts:
Returning to an even worse version of the 2015 deal legitimizes all of Iran's nuclear advances, permits it to retain and expand its nuclear and missile capabilities and enables it to build a deadly conventional military. This "JCPOA minus" will leave Tehran less than six months from nuclear breakout with this time limit dropping sharply in a few years. The JCPOA, at least temporarily, kept breakout time to one year. Fueling all this will be tens of billions of dollars in sanctions relief that will fortify Iran's economy, strengthen the regime and expand support for its terrorist proxies.
If the Biden administration does return to the 2015 agreement, it will need a "day after" package that imposes clear and painful costs on Tehran if it doesn't move quickly to negotiations on a longer and stronger deal. That package should address the imminently expiring UN snapback that is essential for negotiating leverage. There will also be no new deal of any length or strength without serious pressure and a credible threat of military force.
Playing for time is not a strategy when time benefits your enemy. And, as Chairman Menendez made clear in his remarks on the Senate floor, hope is not a strategy either.
Biden must learn from the JCPOA's mistakes | Opinion
ON 2/4/22 AT 7:00 AM EST
Newsweek · by Jacob Nagel and Mark Dubowitz · February 4, 2022
The parties to the Vienna talks on Iran's nuclear program have returned to their capitals and are expected to reconvene soon for a final round. There are signs that the next round could see an announced return to an even more flawed version of the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).
Congress is not sitting on its hands. On Tuesday, Senator Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, took to the Senate floor to condemn the 2015 deal and the Biden administration's rush to return to it. He argued that the deal allows the clerical regime to continue building its nuclear capacity: "This is exactly why I was so concerned over the JCPOA framework of leaving the vast majority of Iran's nuclear program intact."
Chairman Menendez is correct. The 2015 JCPOA not only kept much of Iran's nuclear program intact; it permitted the program to expand. The deal offered Tehran a pathway to nuclear weapons as enrichment restrictions sunset, and allowed it to build industrial-size enrichment capabilities with near-zero nuclear breakout time and an easier clandestine sneak-out option. It gave Iran the immediate right to work on R&D for advanced centrifuges, which are more powerful and therefore easier to hide because fewer are needed to produce weapons-grade uranium. The Islamic Republic also had more latitude to develop ballistic missiles, as well as access to heavy weaponry, as the UN conventional arms and missiles embargoes were scheduled to lapse in five to eight years. All of this in return for the lifting of sanctions to allow tens of billions to flow into the coffers of the mullahs.
Now, six years later, the conventional arms embargo is already gone; the missile embargo will sunset next year; key restrictions on the installation of advanced centrifuges begin disappearing in 2024; and most enrichment restrictions, including the ban on weapons-grade uranium enrichment, will be gone by 2031. In the meantime, Tehran has massively expanded its nuclear capabilities. Much of that escalation occurred after the election of Joe Biden and the abandonment of his predecessor's maximum pressure campaign.
What's equally concerning is that the 2015 agreement has no mechanism to force the Iranians to renegotiate and reach the "longer and stronger" deal that the Biden administration now acknowledges must come before Tehran is a turn of the screw away from developing nuclear weapons. In 2025, the snapback mechanism that gives the U.S. or other parties to the deal the unilateral right to restore UN sanctions on Iran will expire. Gone will be any multilateral leverage, as China and Russia are unlikely to agree to reimpose sanctions.
Iran's chief nuclear negotiator Ali Bagheri Kani speaks to the press in front of the Palais Coburg, venue of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) meeting that aims at reviving the Iran nuclear deal, in Vienna on December 27, 2021. ALEX HALADA / AFP/Getty Images
Washington cannot be satisfied with an agreement based solely on "compliance for compliance." It must be made explicit, whether in the agreement or outside it, what will happen if Tehran does not agree to a new deal that permanently blocks all pathways to nuclear weapons ("longer"). U.S. negotiators have to addresses the deal's many flaws relating to inspections, military weaponization, missile development, support for terrorism and other malign Iranian activities ("stronger").
The U.S. team also cannot prematurely close the International Atomic Energy Agency's open investigations into undisclosed nuclear materials and activities. Iran has blocked the agency's weapons inspectors in at least four sites. The U.S. should be satisfied with nothing less than a full resolution of all outstanding questions related to the military dimensions of the Iranian nuclear weapons program. There can be no "unprecedented verification and monitoring regime," of the kind Obama administration promised back in 2015, without addressing this critical element of the Iranian program.
While American diplomats have been offering proposals in Vienna, the clerical regime has responded with increased attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq and against U.S. allies. Iranian-backed Houthi terrorists—who the Biden administration removed from the U.S. foreign terrorist organization list in February to appease Tehran—have replied to this unilateral American concession by attacking the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia with missiles and drones. One attack on the UAE used long-range missiles traveling more than 1,000 km and carrying around 500 kilograms of conventional warheads. It was the first such attack in decades of this range and potency. And it's a clear violation of the Missile Technology Control Regime, an agreement between three dozen countries to control the proliferation of missiles. While Tehran is not a part of this agreement, its flagrant violation cannot go unanswered. Returning to the JCPOA without a clear way forward on how to constrain Iran's deadly missile program—the delivery vehicle for a nuclear weapon—would pose a direct threat to American allies and, when Iran finishes an intercontinental ballistic missile, to the American homeland.
Returning to an even worse version of the 2015 deal legitimizes all of Iran's nuclear advances, permits it to retain and expand its nuclear and missile capabilities and enables it to build a deadly conventional military. This "JCPOA minus" will leave Tehran less than six months from nuclear breakout with this time limit dropping sharply in a few years. The JCPOA, at least temporarily, kept breakout time to one year. Fueling all this will be tens of billions of dollars in sanctions relief that will fortify Iran's economy, strengthen the regime and expand support for its terrorist proxies.
If the Biden administration does return to the 2015 agreement, it will need a "day after" package that imposes clear and painful costs on Tehran if it doesn't move quickly to negotiations on a longer and stronger deal. That package should address the imminently expiring UN snapback that is essential for negotiating leverage. There will also be no new deal of any length or strength without serious pressure and a credible threat of military force.
Playing for time is not a strategy when time benefits your enemy. And, as Chairman Menendez made clear in his remarks on the Senate floor, hope is not a strategy either.
Brig. Gen. (res.) Professor Jacob Nagel is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a visiting professor at the Technion Aerospace faculty. He previously served as acting national security adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and as head of the National Security Council. Mark Dubowitz is FDD's chief executive. An expert on Iran's nuclear program and sanctions, he was sanctioned by Iran in 2019.
The views expressed in this article are the writers' own.
Newsweek · by Jacob Nagel and Mark Dubowitz · February 4, 2022
11. What Will Stop the Islamic Republic of Iran
Excerpts:
The beginning of the end might start with an Israeli air raid.
Barring that eventuality, with all of its uncertainties, it seems highly likely that the Islamic Republic will be with us in 2030. Since 1989, when a Tehran soccer riot went anti-regime and the Revolutionary Guards decided to create a mobile force to suppress urban malcontents, the theocracy has feared and prepared for the unexpected spark. Khamenei, who is the most accomplished Middle Eastern dictator since World War II, isn’t today easily surprised by his enemies. We can only hope that his equanimity and plans founder on the unexpected and unforgiving.
What Will Stop the Islamic Republic of Iran | Sapir Journal
VOLUME FOUR WINTER 2022
REUEL MARC GERECHT
Can the Islamic Republic of Iran — the radical theocratic regime, that is, as opposed to the nation it tyrannizes — fall by the year 2030? That would be a moonshot for the Jewish people, though it would take a bold gambler to answer yes. Let’s think through the possibilities.
The supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, is 82 and has battled cancer. It’s possible to imagine scenarios after his death where contending factions divide the ruling clergy and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, leading to regime collapse. It’s also possible to imagine outside powers convulsing the theocracy — foreigners have often changed the course of Iranian history — leading to massive demonstrations and a successful insurrection. The two could even intertwine. Neither seems very likely, however, although the second scenario is more conceivable.
Khamenei may well be weakening the ruling elite by demanding too much personal loyalty from those who want to be in his inner circle. When diehard, accomplished revolutionaries such as former president Hassan Rouhani or former speaker of parliament Ali Larijani are treated shabbily and cast out, it becomes clear that Khamenei doesn’t practice what he preaches about a big revolutionary tent encompassing diverse opinions. His decision to select (not elect) the current president, Ibrahim Raisi — Khamenei’s “mini-me,” ruthless but without the supreme leader’s curiosity and intellectual depth — was surely dictated in part by Khamenei’s desire to close ranks in preparation for his passing. The senior political clerics once angry about the velayat-e faqih (rule of the jurisconsult), Ruhollah Khomeini’s innovation that allows one cleric to rule above others, probably don’t have much influence: Khamenei has been purging the clergy since succeeding Khomeini in 1989. Ditto the Islamic Revolutionary Guards. Those who wield real power today are the supreme leader’s men. They will most likely back the dispensation that Khamenei leaves them, including his selected successor.
A crucial point that optimistic outsiders need to appreciate: Future Western sanctions are unlikely to crack the regime. Donald Trump gave it his best shot. His unilateral measures, even more punishing than the Euro-American sanctions unleashed during the first term of Barack Obama’s presidency, damaged the Iranian economy, depleting the regime’s hard-currency reserve and further debasing the rial. The nationwide demonstrations that struck the country in 2019, in which protests sparked by a reduction in fuel subsidies accelerated into deadly clashes with security forces, were what many advocates of sanctions policy had longed to see: regime-threatening internal unrest. Even better, the protestors blamed the theocracy, not Trump and America, for their problems. But the regime hit back hard. Security forces remained loyal, killing their own countrymen with gusto. Hundreds died within days. Thousands were arrested and tortured.
And Khamenei became noticeably cockier and more dismissive of dissent. The supreme leader had been confused and hesitant, even a bit remorseful, after he crushed the pro-democracy Green Movement back in 2009. Protestors had hit the streets, millions strong, after an obviously rigged presidential election. This time, however, the Revolutionary Guards applied the lessons learned a decade ago: They and their underlings (the well-organized, decently paid, and reliably vicious street thugs in the Basij) killed quickly. The most intense nationwide protests against theocracy since the Islamic Revolution collapsed.
Regardless of what happens with Joe Biden’s efforts to revive the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), Barack Obama’s nuclear deal, the president isn’t likely to embrace sanctions the way his predecessor did. They are too provocative and require increasing intestinal fortitude as the Iranian regime draws ever closer to having sufficient highly enriched uranium for a bomb. Barring an incredibly stupid terrorist action (and Khamenei is capable of letting hubris get the better of him), it’s inconceivable that Biden, who has been more intense and probably more sincere in his “forever wars” rhetoric than Trump ever was, would commence another conflict to stop the clerical regime’s nuclear ambitions. Fear of the Iranian bomb is much more likely to cause the White House to fold and to promise significant sanctions relief in exchange for measures that don’t even meet the fading requirements of Obama’s accord.
Fear of the Iranian bomb is much more likely to cause the White House to fold and to promise significant sanctions relief in exchange for measures that don’t even meet the fading requirements of Obama’s accord.
A new, massive influx of cash to Tehran certainly won’t solve the myriad problems that gnaw at the theocracy’s base and legitimacy. It won’t lessen the corruption and étatisme that chew up money and crush initiative. It will give relief to some Iranians, but more important, a fillip of pride to Khamenei and his men. They believe they defeated Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign (they did), and that additional money from the United States will be proof they have pushed Trump’s successor into an extortionate arrangement in which Tehran gets billions in hard currency in exchange for the export of enriched uranium — which can be easily created by the ever-more-efficient centrifuges that the JCPOA allowed and that Biden won’t stop.
If we continue down this path, by 2030, the clerical regime’s position in the Middle East and at home will be only more secure. American retrenchment, which started under Obama and gained speed under Trump and Biden, won’t reverse in the next administration, barring some terrorist event or war that forces America back into the region.
If Republicans win the White House and Congress in 2024, it’s possible that new waves of sanctions could buffet the Islamic Republic. By then, however, the clerical regime will probably have had four years to recover its economic footing and intensify its ties, open and covert, to the outside world, especially with China. The theocracy may even have tested an atomic weapon. No Republican administration is going to get into a sanctions war with China over a nonnuclear — and definitely not a nuclear — Islamic Republic. China can keep Iran’s oil-based economy breathing by itself, if it chooses. And the clerical regime now has considerable experience living under sanctions. Tehran advanced the nuclear program significantly under Trump, even as the economy contracted and the country reeled from COVID-19.
The year 2030 will come quickly, probably too fast for economic hardship to generate sufficient societal pressure to once again push young Iranians onto the streets for another round with machine-gun-wielding security forces. There is no regime-change strategy that works — unless the security forces crack.
If we rule out the remote possibility of American preventive strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites, we are left with only one thing that hasn’t been tried: Israeli military strikes against the atomic program.
But the primary venue for putting real, bloody pressure on the Guards has been out of bounds under both Republicans and Democrats. Washington has stubbornly refused to implement a containment policy, which would entail, at minimum, a much more muscular deployment of U.S. forces to the Middle East, especially in Iraq, Syria, and the Persian Gulf. Containment is regime change: the methodical, patient application of pressure until internal contradictions sap the enemy’s will and capacity. By its nature, it risks war by putting down redlines all over the map.
On the ground, Iran’s position in Iraq is by no means secure. But Iraqi nationalism and democracy, which have troubled the Islamic Republic’s attempt to gain predominance among the Shia, would surely block any American attempt to increase the deployment of U.S. soldiers and their use. (The White House and Congress would abort the idea even earlier.) In Syria, the United States is still blocking a strategically important highway from northern Iraq. That’s something, particularly for the Israelis, who would have much more trouble finding and destroying Iranian military equipment (especially medium-range missiles) and personnel if that road were wide open. But this action has no reverberations on Iran’s internal politics, since it doesn’t really challenge the axis that dominates the Levant: the clerical regime, the Assad Alawite mafia, and Vladimir Putin. Serious American containment would reactivate the Sunni rebellion against Assad. For many reasons, some of them sensible — it could flood Europe with more refugees — Washington, no matter the party in power, isn’t likely to go there.
In the Persian Gulf, the United States will hold for the time being, possibly setting the stage for confrontation between the United States and Iran before 2030. Washington may no longer guarantee the unharassed movement of energy supplies through the Gulf; after Trump’s failure to retaliate against Tehran for attacks in 2019 on shipping and Saudi oil facilities, which temporarily knocked off-line much of the country’s refining capacity, it’s no longer certain what America will do to protect shipping and Saudi oil. But Washington is unlikely in the next decade to abandon its air and naval bases in the region, which at least check any overt, conventional Iranian aggression, such as a military incursion in Bahrain. As with the Khobar Towers bombing in 1996, as long as the United States is in the region complicating Tehran’s ambitions, Iran could lash out, possibly crossing an American redline.
For the clerical regime to collapse by 2030, something unexpected has to shock the Islamist system, something that might cause a chain reaction that the theocracy can’t handle. If we rule out the remote possibility of American preventive strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites, we are left with only one thing that hasn’t been tried: Israeli military strikes against the atomic program.
Discussions about cyber warfare and possible CIA or Mossad covert action, as intriguing as they might be, don’t belong in this conversation. They just don’t have the capability: Langley would take years, probably after awful mistakes, to develop a competent, big-project, covert-action team. Regardless, such action wouldn’t have the required impact. Without Israeli military action, the status quo likely holds. Tehran wins.
The military option is, as it’s always been, a wild card. We have no idea whether an Israeli raid would succeed in destroying the clerical regime’s nuclear sites, especially the buried-beneath-a-mountain cascades at Fordow. The odds against success are likely steep, which may be one of many reasons why the Israelis, despite a lot of harsh, menacing rhetoric, haven’t yet chosen to raid. But such a military operation would unavoidably upset the region’s pomegranate cart, probably leading to Iranian reprisals, including another surge of Iranian-sponsored terrorism.
Escalation is key. If the Iranian regime just absorbed the hit, didn’t retaliate, cried foul at the United Nations, and tried to rally anti-Israeli Europeans, then this tactic would probably flop.
On the other hand, depending on the Iranian response, they could easily find themselves in a war with both Israel and the United States. The Revolutionary Guards could get badly mauled. If any attack were made against a U.S.-flagged vessel in the Gulf, the U.S. Navy might well obliterate Iranian naval bases on the Gulf and in the Indian Ocean. If Iran successfully activated the Lebanese Hezbollah and it let loose thousands of missiles, Israel would be obliged to commence a massive air campaign, possibly even another invasion. American sanctions would intensify. The Europeans might even be obliged to join, depending on how egregious Iranian reprisals were. (Europeans also might try to sanction Israel, though Continental unanimity on that issue is unlikely.) With the West, Japan, and South Korea on alert, the Iranians would have a vastly harder time importing dual-use items to rebuild what the Israelis had destroyed — unless the Chinese decided to aid Iranian ambitions.
Internally, after an Israeli attack, the theocracy would certainly try to rally around the flag. In the short term, that could work. In a year or two, however, the cost of the conflict would come home, especially if Israel were successful in destroying the nuclear sites and killing key personnel. The loss of face would become undeniable: Regime propaganda regularly depicts Israel as too small and weak to stop Iran’s advance. And — perhaps — distaste for the theocracy, which is widespread and deep throughout society, could explode and convulse the country. If Khamenei were to die during this stressful time, the succession might become much more complicated. Indecision at the top would feed anger below. Countrywide demonstrations of sufficient size could overwhelm the security forces, which aren’t numerous, given the size of the country and the population.
The beginning of the end might start with an Israeli air raid.
Barring that eventuality, with all of its uncertainties, it seems highly likely that the Islamic Republic will be with us in 2030. Since 1989, when a Tehran soccer riot went anti-regime and the Revolutionary Guards decided to create a mobile force to suppress urban malcontents, the theocracy has feared and prepared for the unexpected spark. Khamenei, who is the most accomplished Middle Eastern dictator since World War II, isn’t today easily surprised by his enemies. We can only hope that his equanimity and plans founder on the unexpected and unforgiving.
12. Americans can't get over hating the Russians, ever
More Russian propaganda from Pravda. Who is John Stanton? I found a lot of John Stanton's. One is or was a buzzfeed reporter. I was thinking of emailing him. John Stanton can be reached at jstantonarchangel@gmail.com.
Americans can't get over hating the Russians, ever
04.02.2022 13:58
Americans hate Russians so much they want Vietnam 2.0 in Ukraine ASAP
"There is a sense of open, almost joyful viciousness in all this pro-war, anti-Russian sentiment on opinion pages and television broadcasts. It is certainly racist and demeaning in tone. Such is the first step in convincing the public that the "transgressor” is equivalent to a retrovirus.” John Stanton, Dissident Voice, 2015
Vietnam 2.0 is in the making in Ukraine. The US civil-military establishment, Republicans and Democrats alike, want a shooting war with Russia, even though it was the US that caused the carnage in Ukraine, not the Russians. Yet, that inconvenient reality has been nullified by the US propaganda campaign which, of course, the Russians have responded to with their own.” John Stanton, Counterpunch, 2015
Preparing for War with Russia Since 1992
As President Joe Biden announced the transfer of 2000 US troops to Poland and Germany on February 3, 2022, and the movement of an additional 1000 troops from Western Europe to Romania, I shook my head and looked to the sky thinking, "the United States and its elites really want a war with Russia, both economic and military. US generals want to use tanks, missiles, and aircraft against a near-peer competitor. They can't beat sandal wearing insurgents in Afghanistan, so they want to mix it up with the A-Team, i. e., Russia.”
Americans can't get over hating the Russians, ever. Here's President Harry Truman's comment on the Russians and Germans during WWII:
"If we see that Germany is winning, we ought to help Russia and if Russia is winning, we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible, although I don't want to see Hitler victorious under any circumstances.”
The announcement by the US administration that US troops would not be sent into Ukraine does not square with the fact that since post-February 2014 (US sponsored coup overthrew elected pro-Russian government), the US has been providing Foreign Internal Defense (FIDO) to the Ukrainian military, a fighting force riddled with neo-Nazis like the Azov Brigade. The US military and defense contractors have been busy supplying Ukraine with the tools, and training, of war making since 1992. For example, the Joint Contact Team Program-Ukraine (JCTP), the International Military Education and Training (IMET), the Foreign Military Sales/Foreign Military Financing, AeroVironment, Inc. (drones), Harris, Inc, (multiband radios). John Stanton, Pravda.Ru 2015
Clark Gets the Last Laugh?
General Wes Clark (USA, Ret.) visited Ukraine in 2014 and gave the following recommendations to Washington, DC, military, and political leaders in as I wrote in April 2014:
"General Clark and a former strategy advisor to Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger named Dr. Phillip Karber, indicated in a report that the two participated in 35 meetings with senior officials, military commanders and various politicians; with Karber visiting front line formations on the Northern, Eastern and Southern Fronts. The two aging Cold War Warriors recommend immediate shipments of American Body Armor, Night Vision Devices, Communications Equipment, Aviation Fuel and "to maximize their defense potential” Clark and Karber recommend the acquisition of Mig-29's, T-72 tanks, Man-Portable Air Defenses, and Anti-Tank weapons.” John Stanton, Dissident Voice, 2014
The Washington Post and The New York Times and the major networks, NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, FOX, et al, are salivating at the prospect of a Russian invasion of Eastern Ukraine, specifically the Donbass, home to separatist republics in Luhansk and Donetsk. As I wrote in April 2014:
"There is a sense of open, almost joyful viciousness in all this pro-war, anti-Russian sentiment on opinion pages and television broadcasts. It is certainly racist and demeaning in tone. Such is the first step in convincing the public that the "transgressor” is equivalent to a retrovirus.” John Stanton, Dissident Voice, 2014
NATO: Causing Trouble since 1949
Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barak Obama, Donald Trump and now Joe Biden have pushed NATO expansion right up to Russia's border. For example, Estonia and Latvia are NATO members. Estonia is 120 miles from St. Petersburg. NATO is purely a military alliance led by the USA. Its members serve simply military bases (some probably with tactical nuclear weapons) for US military forces and its many military contractors.
Is there any wonder that the President of Russia Vladimir Putin should be concerned? Are NAZI's in the USA and NATO pushing the expansion of NATO, the racial hatred of Russians, and seeking a hot war? It is revolting.
And then there is the bashing of the Winter Olympics in China. Here is station KDRO in Colorado reporting on the "authoritarian” nature of the Olympics hosted by China.
"The attendance of Russian President Vladimir Putin, Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Egypt's President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi and others, will send out an image not just of China's increasing distance from the West, but of an emerging bloc of Beijing-friendly authoritarian leaders.”
Just who has been selling weapons to Al-Sisi's dictatorship in Egypt? The USA.
Who has supported Saudi Arabia's war in Yemen? The USA.
Who talks about double standards?!
Attack Scenario, just a Guess: If Russia's Hand is Forced by USA-NATO
Russian military forces fought in Ukraine during World War II against NAZI Germany. For example, the Battle of Kiev and The Battle of the Dnieper. There is a historical record for Russian military planners to refer to. The Battle of Grozny in Chechnya will weigh heavily on Russian military planners as the decide which communities to take control of.
Let us take the Dnieper River as a demarcation point for a Russian advance into Ukraine. Specifically, the eastern banks of the river, not the western ones. Then let us divide that Ukrainian territory that is immediately east of that river into North, Central and South.
There is a lot of talk in the mainstream media about the Russians taking the city of Kharkiv (second largest in Ukraine at 1.5 million) in the North. The Russians are unlikely to expend the manpower and ammunition stocks necessary for a siege of that city. Again, the Battle of Grozny will still be fresh in the minds of the Russian military, plus the fate of cities in Syria that were leveled by artillery and airpower just to get at a few hundred ISIS fighters.
Bypassing Kharkiv and heading West to Poltava might be part of Russian military planning. The city has two rail lines that connect north to Kiev and to Kharkov. The population is roughly 280,000. Two large airfields sit just outside the city.
North
If the Russians advance from the North, they will likely use military resources from Belograd (tank battalion), Kursk (MIG aircraft, Iskander short range missiles) Bryansk (mechanized forces) and Smolensk (recon units), Voronezh (special forces, MIGs). Attacking forces would likely be led by autonomous Battalion Tactical Groups (BTGs) for a ground push to Poltava, if that's in the cards.
The pattern of attack may be the use, initially, of drones, electronic/cyber warfare, missile fires/airpower and then the BTG advances. Such an attack from the north to the south aiming for Poltava and bypassing Kharkiv and leaving Kiev on the western banks of the Dnieper River alone would split the two largest cities in Ukraine apart.
Of course, there are dozens and dozens of smaller communities in the path that could provide headaches to the advancing forces, but it is apparent that much of the success for a Russian assault into North, Central and Southern Ukraine, just shy of the Dnieper River, depends on the support of the civilians in communities that are overrun, bypassed, or even laid siege. Good military planning suggests that Russians have partisans, sympathetic Ukrainians, or native Russians will have infiltrated areas where the Russian forces are aiming.
Central
Russian military forces are already in Donetsk and Luhansk, just as US military advisors/defense contractors are in the trenches outside those cities training Ukrainian forces in antitank warfare, unconventional warfare.
A Russian offensive could start from any one of these locations or all of them: Millerova (MIGS), Shatky (mechanized troops), Gukovo (infantry), Kamensky (infantry). It is difficult to figure. Russian forces might eliminate the Ukrainian defenses outside the Donbass and drive north toward Pavlohrad bypassing Dnipro. Forces from Poltava in the north could drive south and hook up with those in Poltava. Zaporizhzia, a city split between the eastern and western side of the Dnieper, could be an enticing target for its airfield and its proximity to Western Ukraine. According to Wikipedia, ""Zaporizhzhia is known for its island of Khortytsia and Dnieper Hydroelectric Station. It is also an important industrial center producing steel, aluminum, aircraft engines, automobiles, transformers for substations, and other heavy industry goods.” Roughly 56 percent of the city's 700,000 plus population are Russian speakers, so avoiding a Grozny scenario would depend a lot on Russian support within the city.
South
Melitopol is a transport hub with a rail system and a key highway system: the European E58 which runs from Vienna to Rostov-on-Don and the E105 that stretches from St. Petersburg to Yalta. Out of a population of approximately 150,000, 62,000 are Russian, according to the Results of the Intercultural Cities Index. Whether they would help support a Russian takeover of the area is up for question, but control of the highways and rail lines in Melitopol would be helpful perhaps as a Russian military jump off point to targets further in any direction.
Maripol and Kherson have to be in the planning for a takeover. Maripol sits on the Sea of Azov and the key M-14 highway runs through the city along the Ukraine's southern coast. Kherson, a key Ukrainian port sits on the mouth of the Black Sea. Taking it would provide Russia with another naval base. Kerhson has a population of about 285,000 with roughly 45 percent of them Russian speakers.
Mykolaiv, with a population of approximately 450,000 must be of particular interest to Russian military planners for its location right on the eastern side of the Dnieper, its airfield, and the fact that it is a key shipbuilding center. Again, Grozny comes to mind and so overtaking Ukrainian forces would be difficult without Russian partisans and sympathetic Ukrainians in the city.
Russian attack forces will probably come from Armyansk (Crimea, infantry, BTGs), Dzahnskoy (, Crimea, attack and transport helicopters), Tanganrog (airlift/AWACS, A-100s, A-50s). Russian warships and submarines are capable of firing cruise missiles at any of the targets in this attack scenario. It is unclear if Russia will chance an amphibious operations against Ukraine.
The Russians, with their T-90s and upgraded T-72s (tanks) will face US trained antitank platoons armed with deadly tank killer Javelin missiles (not wire guided). They'll likely face Predator drones of some type armed with Hellfire missiles. The Ukrainians are dug-in all around Donetsk and Luhansk and on the border with Crimea. Minefields are a part of the Ukrainian defense mix of infantry, drones, and weaponry like the M141 bunker buster missile. News reports claim that the Ukrainians have been supplied with Stinger missiles, as well. Ukraine fields a tank called the T-64BV, an upgrade from older models. Ukraine will receive intelligence information from the USA.
No one knows if Russia's Kaliningrad, sandwiched between Poland and Lithuania, will play any role in an attack on eastern Ukraine or if Transnistria, a separatist enclave in Moldova will play some supportive role for Russia. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) that includes China, India, Pakistan, Uzbekistan and other nations may or may not support a Russian move into eastern Ukraine.
Thanks to Google Earth, Wikipedia, and News Reports for information.
Topics
13. A war with Russia would be unlike anything the US and NATO have ever experienced
More from the former marine Intelligence Officer, UN Arms Control inspector, and convicted felon writing for Russia's RT.
From 2012: Even after he was convicted on five felony counts and two misdemeanors last year, Ritter remained, as he always has, self-righteous and inclined toward seeing conspiracies.
A war with Russia would be unlike anything the US and NATO have ever experienced
In a recent press conference held on the occasion of a visit to Moscow by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke about continued NATO expansion, and the potential consequences if Ukraine was to join the trans-Atlantic alliance.
“Their [NATO’s] main task is to contain the development of Russia,” Putin said. “Ukraine is simply a tool to achieve this goal. They could draw us into some kind of armed conflict and force their allies in Europe to impose the very tough sanctions that are being talked about in the United States today,” he noted. “Or they could draw Ukraine into NATO, set up strike weapons systems there and encourage some people to resolve the issue of Donbass or Crimea by force, and still draw us into an armed conflict.”
Putin continued, “Let us imagine that Ukraine is a NATO member and is stuffed with weapons and there are state-of-the-art missile systems just like in Poland and Romania. Who will stop it from unleashing operations in Crimea, let alone Donbass? Let us imagine that Ukraine is a NATO member and ventures such a combat operation. Do we have to fight with the NATO bloc? Has anyone thought anything about it? It seems not.”
But these words were dismissed by White House spokesperson Jen Psaki, who likened them to a fox “screaming from the top of the hen house that he's scared of the chickens,” adding that any Russian expression of fear over Ukraine “should not be reported as a statement of fact.”
Psaki’s comments, however, are divorced from the reality of the situation. The principal goal of the government of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is what he terms the “de-occupation” of Crimea. While this goal has, in the past, been couched in terms of diplomacy – “[t]he synergy of our efforts must force Russia to negotiate the return of our peninsula,” Zelensky told the Crimea Platform, a Ukrainian forum focused on regaining control over Crimea – the reality is his strategy for return is a purely military one, in which Russia has been identified as a “military adversary”, and the accomplishment of which can only be achieved through NATO membership.
How Zelensky plans on accomplishing this goal using military means has not been spelled out. As an ostensibly defensive alliance, the odds are that NATO would not initiate any offensive military action to forcibly seize the Crimean Peninsula from Russia. Indeed, the terms of Ukraine’s membership, if granted, would need to include some language regarding the limits of NATO’s Article 5 – which relates to collective defense – when addressing the Crimea situation, or else a state of war would de facto exist upon Ukrainian accession.
The most likely scenario would involve Ukraine being rapidly brought under the ‘umbrella’ of NATO protection, with ‘battlegroups’ like those deployed into eastern Europe being formed on Ukrainian soil as a ‘trip-wire’ force, and modern air defenses combined with forward-deployed NATO aircraft put in place to secure Ukrainian airspace.
Once this umbrella has been established, Ukraine would feel emboldened to begin a hybrid conflict against what it terms the Russian occupation of Crimea, employing unconventional warfare capability it has acquired since 2015 at the hands of the CIA to initiate an insurgency designed specifically to “kill Russians.”
The idea that Russia would sit idly by while a guerilla war in Crimea was being implemented from Ukraine is ludicrous; if confronted with such a scenario, Russia would more than likely use its own unconventional capabilities in retaliation. Ukraine, of course, would cry foul, and NATO would be confronted with its mandatory obligation for collective defense under Article 5. In short, NATO would be at war with Russia.
This is not idle speculation. When explaining his recent decision to deploy some 3,000 US troops to Europe in response to the ongoing Ukrainian crisis, US President Joe Biden declared, “As long as he’s [Putin] acting aggressively, we are going to make sure we reassure our NATO allies in Eastern Europe that we’re there and Article 5 is a sacred obligation.”
Biden’s comments echo those made during his initial visit to NATO Headquarters, on June 15 last year. At that time, Biden sat down with NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg and emphasized America’s commitment to Article 5 of the NATO charter. “Article 5 we take as a sacred obligation,” Biden said. “I want NATO to know America is there.”
Biden’s view of NATO and Ukraine is drawn from his experience as vice president under Barack Obama. In 2015, then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Bob Work told reporters, “As President Obama has said, Ukraine should … be able to choose its own future. And we reject any talk of a sphere of influence. And speaking in Estonia this past September, the president made it clear that our commitment to our NATO allies in the face of Russian aggression is unwavering. As he said it, in this alliance there are no old members and there are no new members. There are no junior partners and there are no senior partners. There are just allies, pure and simple. And we will defend the territorial integrity of every single ally.”
Just what would this defense entail? As someone who once trained to fight the Soviet Army, I can attest that a war with Russia would be unlike anything the US military has experienced – ever. The US military is neither organized, trained, nor equipped to fight its Russian counterparts. Nor does it possess doctrine capable of supporting large-scale combined arms conflict. If the US was to be drawn into a conventional ground war with Russia, it would find itself facing defeat on a scale unprecedented in American military history. In short, it would be a rout.
Don’t take my word for it. In 2016, then-Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster, when speaking about the results of a study – the Russia New Generation Warfare – he had initiated in 2015 to examine lessons learned from the fighting in eastern Ukraine, told an audience at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington that the Russians have superior artillery firepower, better combat vehicles, and have learned sophisticated use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for tactical effect. “Should US forces find themselves in a land war with Russia,” McMaster said, “they would be in for a rude, cold awakening.”
In short, they would get their asses kicked.
America’s 20-year Middle Eastern misadventure in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria produced a military that was no longer capable of defeating a peer-level opponent on the battlefield. This reality was highlighted in a study conducted by the US Army’s 173rd Airborne Brigade, the central American component of NATO’s Rapid Deployment Force, in 2017. The study found that US military forces in Europe were underequipped, undermanned, and inadequately organized to confront military aggression from Russia. The lack of viable air defense and electronic warfare capability, when combined with an over-reliance on satellite communications and GPS navigation systems, would result in the piecemeal destruction of the US Army in rapid order should they face off against a Russian military that was organized, trained, and equipped to specifically defeat a US/NATO threat.
The issue isn’t just qualitative, but also quantitative – even if the US military could stand toe-to-toe with a Russian adversary (which it can’t), it simply lacks the size to survive in any sustained battle or campaign. The low-intensity conflict that the US military waged in Iraq and Afghanistan has created an organizational ethos built around the idea that every American life is precious, and that all efforts will be made to evacuate the wounded so that they can receive life-saving medical attention in as short a timeframe as possible. This concept may have been viable where the US was in control of the environment in which fights were conducted. It is, however, pure fiction in large-scale combined arms warfare. There won’t be medical evacuation helicopters flying to the rescue – even if they launched, they would be shot down. There won’t be field ambulances – even if they arrived on the scene, they would be destroyed in short order. There won’t be field hospitals – even if they were established, they would be captured by Russian mobile forces.
What there will be is death and destruction, and lots of it. One of the events which triggered McMaster’s study of Russian warfare was the destruction of a Ukrainian combined arms brigade by Russian artillery in early 2015. This, of course, would be the fate of any similar US combat formation. The superiority Russia enjoys in artillery fires is overwhelming, both in terms of the numbers of artillery systems fielded and the lethality of the munitions employed.
While the US Air Force may be able to mount a fight in the airspace above any battlefield, there will be nothing like the total air supremacy enjoyed by the American military in its operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. The airspace will be contested by a very capable Russian air force, and Russian ground troops will be operating under an air defense umbrella the likes of which neither the US nor NATO has ever faced. There will be no close air support cavalry coming to the rescue of beleaguered American troops. The forces on the ground will be on their own.
This feeling of isolation will be furthered by the reality that, because of Russia’s overwhelming superiority in electronic warfare capability, the US forces on the ground will be deaf, dumb, and blind to what is happening around them, unable to communicate, receive intelligence, and even operate as radios, electronic systems, and weapons cease to function.
Any war with Russia would find American forces slaughtered in large numbers. Back in the 1980s, we routinely trained to accept losses of 30-40 percent and continue the fight, because that was the reality of modern combat against a Soviet threat. Back then, we were able to effectively match the Soviets in terms of force size, structure, and capability – in short, we could give as good, or better, than we got.
That wouldn’t be the case in any European war against Russia. The US will lose most of its forces before they are able to close with any Russian adversary, due to deep artillery fires. Even when they close with the enemy, the advantage the US enjoyed against Iraqi and Taliban insurgents and ISIS terrorists is a thing of the past. Our tactics are no longer up to par – when there is close combat, it will be extraordinarily violent, and the US will, more times than not, come out on the losing side.
But even if the US manages to win the odd tactical engagement against peer-level infantry, it simply has no counter to the overwhelming number of tanks and armored fighting vehicles Russia will bring to bear. Even if the anti-tank weapons in the possession of US ground troops were effective against modern Russian tanks (and experience suggests they are probably not), American troops will simply be overwhelmed by the mass of combat strength the Russians will confront them with.
In the 1980s, I had the opportunity to participate in a Soviet-style attack carried out by specially trained US Army troops – the ‘OPFOR’ – at the National Training Center in Fort Irwin, California, where two Soviet-style Mechanized Infantry Regiments squared off against a US Army Mechanized Brigade. The fight began at around two in the morning. By 5:30am it was over, with the US Brigade destroyed, and the Soviets having seized their objectives. There’s something about 170 armored vehicles bearing down on your position that makes defeat all but inevitable.
This is what a war with Russia would look like. It would not be limited to Ukraine, but extend to battlefields in the Baltic states, Poland, Romania, and elsewhere. It would involve Russian strikes against NATO airfields, depots, and ports throughout the depth of Europe.
This is what will happen if the US and NATO seek to attach the “sacred obligation” of Article 5 of the NATO Charter to Ukraine. It is, in short, a suicide pact.
14. Islamic State Leader Killed in US Raid. Where Does This Leave the Terrorist Group?
Islamic State Leader Killed in US Raid. Where Does This Leave the Terrorist Group?
Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi was killed as he exploded a bomb at his compound in the country’s northwestern Idlib province. The blast also caused the death of members of his family, including children, U.S. officials said.
This isn’t the first time that American forces have targeted the head of terrorist organizations, nor the first time they have been successful. The Conversation asked Amira Jadoon, a terrorism expert at the U.S. Military Academy, and Haroro J. Ingram and Andrew Mines, research fellows at the George Washington University’s Program on Extremism, to explain how this raid fits the U.S.‘s counterterrorism strategy, and where it leaves the Islamic State.
1. Who was Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi?
He was born in 1976 in Mosul, northern Iraq. But very little was known about al-Qurayshi until September 2020, when it emerged that he had been detained and interrogated by U.S. forces in Iraq in early 2008.
Al-Qurayshi claimed that he joined the group in 2007, having finished a master’s degree in Quranic studies from Mosul University.
Soon after joining, al-Qurayshi became the group’s Shariah adviser, a major religious figure, in Mosul and later the deputy “wali,” or shadow governor, of the city before his capture in early 2008.
The interrogation reports show that al-Qurayshi revealed the names of at least 20 alleged members of the Islamic State of Iraq, as the group was known at the time. His betrayal came at a time when group members were being killed or captured in large numbers by U.S. and coalition forces.
Recent Islamic State attacks on Hasakah prison in northeast Syria and elsewhere across Iraq have hinted that the group is more advanced in rebuilding its capabilities across traditional heartlands than perhaps expected. But the death of al-Qurayshi just two years after that of his predecessor raises uncertainty over who will succeed him.
The fact that the Islamic State group couldn’t protect its top leader shows the continued pressure the group faces from U.S. and allied forces.
It may be that al-Qurayshi was himself betrayed, ultimately contributing to the circumstances that led to the U.S. raid. If so, it could indicate a split within the group between al-Qurayshi and those who wanted him gone.
Now, the Islamic State is likely to appoint al-Qurayshi’s successor based on the deliberation of its shura council, its senior leadership panel, as it has done previously.
If it happens as it has in the past, al-Qurayshi’s successor could be appointed in the next few days or weeks. He’ll be given an alias to conceal his identity. Group members and leaders of Islamic State global affiliates will be asked to pledge allegiance to him, but he may not make a public appearance for months or years – if ever.
But terrorism experts don’t agree on how effective killing top leaders is. Some have argued that taking out a terrorist leader constrains the operational capacity of groups and disrupts their organizational routines, making it harder for them to carry out attacks.
The Islamic State group has survived multiple deaths within its leadership precisely because of its bureaucratic approach to succession, and because it still enjoys pockets of strong local support.
In the short term, the death of al-Qurayshi may cause the Islamic State group to lie low. But this will not indicate the demise of the organization. The loss of al-Qurayshi could also trigger retaliation attacks as a signal of resolve among members and to stay relevant in the global jihadist landscape.
Back in early 2019, the U.S. and allied forces successfully beat back the Islamic State group from its height in 2014-16, when it controlled larges parts of Iraq and Syria.
This shift highlights how the Islamic State has maintained its relevance: If it experiences decline in its strongholds of Iraq and Syria, affiliates elsewhere are able to keep the vision of the global caliphate alive.
The recent terrorist attacks in Syria and Iraq suggest that the Islamic State’s resurgence strategy is much further along than many observers may have expected.
The death of al-Qurayshi is unlikely to affect the operations of Islamic State group’s affiliates in any meaningful way. Many have strategies that draw heavily on local resources and alliances with other groups. While the latest U.S. raid may result in temporary uncertainty for the broader movement, history suggests the Islamic State movement will be able to push forward with regional attacks and reestablish the support of affiliates around the world.
15. FDD | Turkey a Step Closer to Suspension From the Council of Europe
Conclusion:
The Biden administration, which has chosen to remain silent on this landmark case since October, should use this opportunity to reach out to its European allies and urge them not to break ranks. For Washington, this is a unique opportunity to declare its commitment not only to solidarity with Kavala but also to Europe’s post-World War II human rights regime. If Erdogan succeeds in dividing the Council of Europe, it will constitute a significant step toward dismantling Europe’s liberal democratic order.
FDD | Turkey a Step Closer to Suspension From the Council of Europe
fdd.org · by Aykan Erdemir Turkey Program Senior Director · February 4, 2022
The Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe adopted an interim resolution on Wednesday officially launching infringement proceedings against Turkey for Ankara’s refusal to release Turkish philanthropist Osman Kavala despite a binding 2019 ruling by the European Court of Human Rights. With this landmark decision by Europe’s top human rights body, Turkey comes a step closer to losing not only its voting rights but also its 72-year membership in the council.
Kavala, one of Turkey’s leading philanthropists and human rights activists, has been in solitary confinement in a maximum security prison on the outskirts of Istanbul for over four years on fabricated charges. Last December, in another interim resolution, the Committee of Ministers warned Ankara of its intention to refer the case to the European Court of Human Rights, a threat on which it followed through with the official start of Turkey’s infringement proceedings on Wednesday. That warning came following an Istanbul court’s extension of Kavala’s imprisonment in November, in defiance of the council’s September threats to launch the infringement procedure.
The Council of Europe was established in 1949 to defend fundamental rights and freedoms and to prevent a repeat of the atrocities committed during World War II. While Turkey, at the time a staunch Western ally, joined the council right from the start, the international organization expanded to 47 member states following the end of the Cold War.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Islamist-ultranationalist ruling bloc sees the values of the council and the binding rulings of its human rights court as threats to its illiberal vision for, and authoritarian rule in, Turkey. The council’s infringement proceedings are the set of actions — including the suspension of voting rights or membership — the organization takes against members that fail to abide by the binding rulings of its human rights court.
The Council of Europe first introduced infringement proceedings as a policy tool in 2010. Since then, the council has used it only once, in 2017, when it initiated proceedings against Azerbaijan after Baku refused to release opposition politician Ilgar Mammadov following a 2014 judgment from the European Court of Human Rights. The Mammadov case shows the efficacy of punitive action by the Council of Europe. In 2020, the Supreme Court of Azerbaijan overturned Mammadov’s conviction and awarded him compensation for damages resulting from his unlawful arrest and imprisonment, bringing the infringement procedure to an end.
So far, Erdogan has remained defiant. The Turkish president responded to the Committee of Ministers’ resolution by saying that Turkey will not respect the Council of Europe if it does not respect Turkish courts. Turkey’s Foreign Ministry joined Erdogan, calling the committee’s decision “prejudiced and politically motivated” and even claiming it “damages the credibility of the European human rights system.”
In declaring the European Union’s support for the Council of Europe’s resolution, Peter Stano, the EU spokesperson for foreign affairs and security policy, stated that Ankara’s attitude “sets a worrying precedent and further increases the EU’s concerns regarding [the] Turkish judiciary’s adherence to international and European standards.” European unity is essential for the infringement proceedings to move forward, since the Committee of Ministers requires a two-thirds majority to take further steps. During the December vote, which was not public, only 32 to 35 member states reportedly voted against Turkey. According to Al-Monitor, Ankara has been working hard to get as many council members as possible “to vote on the side of Turkey or at least abstain from pushing forward the infringement process.”
The Biden administration, which has chosen to remain silent on this landmark case since October, should use this opportunity to reach out to its European allies and urge them not to break ranks. For Washington, this is a unique opportunity to declare its commitment not only to solidarity with Kavala but also to Europe’s post-World War II human rights regime. If Erdogan succeeds in dividing the Council of Europe, it will constitute a significant step toward dismantling Europe’s liberal democratic order.
Aykan Erdemir is a former member of the Turkish parliament and senior director of the Turkey Program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD). For more analysis from Aykan and the Turkey Program, please subscribe HERE. Follow Aykan on Twitter @aykan_erdemir. Follow FDD on Twitter @FDD. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
fdd.org · by Aykan Erdemir Turkey Program Senior Director · February 4, 2022
16. Did killing ISIS’s leader make the U.S. safer?
Interview with Robert Grenier, former CIA head of counterterrorism.
Excerpts:
G: So, in theory, the reason we’re fighting ISIS at all is that we’re afraid they could attack the U.S. or American interests. But it sounds like you’re saying that strikes like the one Thursday actually make these attacks more likely?
RG: The short answer to that is yes. ISIS, unprovoked, is not particularly interested in attacking the U.S. It would be more likely to attack the Russians, because of their active support of Bashar al-Assad, all things being equal. They are not like al-Qaeda. For al-Qaeda, it was a matter of doctrine to attack the West in order to induce them to leave the Middle East. That is not the ISIS approach. Absent our engagement in the areas where they are active, and which they aspire to control, ISIS would not be inclined to attack us in the homeland. If anything, we are giving them a greater motivation to attack us in the homeland now.
Now, I don’t pose that there’s a suggestion that we ought not to be engaged in those areas. It would not be in our interest to see ISIS become, in the future, what it was in 2014 or ’15.
Did killing ISIS’s leader make the U.S. safer?
The man who led counterterror operations for the CIA speaks to Grid’s global security reporter about the U.S. raid and its aftermath.
Global Security Reporter
In the early morning hours of Feb. 3, U.S. Special Forces in northwest Syria launched a highly risky operation to capture or kill ISIS leader Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi. According to the official U.S. accounts of the raid, Qurayshi blew himself up rather than risk capture. At least 13 people were killed at the scene, according to first responders, including women and children.
Qurayshi was an enigmatic figure, about whom relatively little is known. Under his predecessor, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who also blew himself up during a raid in 2019, ISIS could for a time claim a self-declared “caliphate” the size of Great Britain. Today, the group has been driven underground, though it’s still capable of launching large-scale operations, as shown by a weeklong battle for control of a prison in northeast Syria last month.
The raid also comes in a period of heightened public scrutiny of the civilian toll of U.S. counterterrorism, following a botched drone strike that killed 10 civilians in Kabul, Afghanistan, last August and a string of revelations from an investigation into U.S. airstrikes by the New York Times.
To help make sense of what we know about this raid so far, and what it means for the future of ISIS and the United States’ counterterrorism strategy, we spoke with Robert Grenier, former CIA head of counterterrorism and a Grid contributor. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Grid: Listening to the descriptions of the raid that came out Thursday, are there any big questions you still have about how this was carried out or anything that doesn’t add up for you?
Robert Grenier: I think it’s all pretty straightforward. The thing that struck me is that this is a textbook example of how you should do targeted terrorism raids, as opposed to that drone strike that took place in Kabul last year as the evacuation took place. That was a textbook example of how not to do it.
The big reason why that horrible mistake was made was because, frankly, the U.S. was in a panic for fear that ISIS would strike again, and I’m sure we were terribly concerned that we might miss an opportunity to forestall another attack, and they would then be blamed for it. But there wasn’t nearly enough time to actually work up that target.
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In this instance, they apparently had months to work up the target. When I say work up the target, I mean that I’m sure that they would have been maintaining some level of drone surveillance over a lengthy period of time. They would know the pattern of movement, who was on the first floor, the second floor, the third floor.
And by conducting the raid using commandos rather than an airstrike, they were able to evacuate civilians to the maximum extent possible and avoid some of the collateral casualties that would otherwise most likely have resulted.
G: There were still civilian casualties though, including, reportedly, a number of children. Is that just inevitable in this type of operation?
RG: It tends to be. It’s true that initial reports from the battlefield are always wrong, but it appears that the majority of the civilian casualties took place as a result of the bomb that went off on the third floor, and Qurayshi was willing to sacrifice both himself and his family rather than risk capture.
G: In the last couple of years, particularly since President Joe Biden came in, we’ve seen a lot fewer counterterrorism strikes around the world, both drone strikes and these kinds of Special Forces raids. What does this one tell you about the Biden administration’s approach to fighting terrorism?
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RG: I think that this is an example of counterterrorism as narrowly and properly defined. This was a classic terrorist leader and a classic decapitation strike, as opposed — to use a starkly different example — to the pattern of drone strikes that we saw in Afghanistan and Pakistan at the height of the U.S. presence there. That was using drones and other counterterrorism methods against an insurgent foe, rather than a terrorist foe. Now, with the U.S. military presence removed from Afghanistan, we’re seeing the U.S. revert to classic counterterror as opposed to counterinsurgency.
G: Qurayshi wasn’t as well known internationally as his predecessor, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. How influential a figure was he actually? How big a deal is it that he’s been “taken off the battlefield,” as Biden put it?
RG: Not as significant as one might otherwise expect. And that’s almost by design. ISIS are very much ruled by their ideas, their ideology, the inspiration that they’re able to provide, as opposed to charismatic leadership. Clearly this fellow didn’t set himself up as a charismatic leader. He may not have been capable of it, since he was very much isolated for obvious operational reasons.
That said, the ability of U.S. forces to track this fellow down and to take him out is obviously a bit of an object lesson for others and will make them even more cautious than they otherwise are. But this is not going to cause ISIS to go away by any means.
G: What about globally? Was Qurayshi the operational leader of the ISIS groups in, say, Afghanistan or in North Africa? How much coordination is there between ISIS in Syria and in other countries?
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RG: One of the things that I’ve seen, which kind of makes me scratch my head a little bit, in some of the reaction is people making the link between what the U.S. has done in Syria and concerns about Afghanistan and the ISIS presence there. That’s kind of a non sequitur.
I don’t think that there is a great deal, if any, operational control. I think that this is a matter of adherence to a similar doctrine and a desire by these groups to brand themselves in a particular way.
G: So how much of a threat is ISIS today?
RG: ISIS still clearly remains a threat, whether we’re in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria or Africa, but they are a sort of diminishing threat. One of the things I like to say in terrorism, as in other aspects of life, is that nothing succeeds like success. And clearly, lately, they’ve not been successful.
That said, they remain a threat and something that ought not to be ignored. I think it’s wise for us to keep troops in northeastern Syria and to remain engaged in this, because there is still the possibility they could stage a breakout in Iraq, Syria or elsewhere.
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It’s easy to think of these things as being distant, remote, nothing that really affects Americans. But that could change. I think of the attacks in Paris that took place back in November of 2015. I’ll never forget the reaction of then-French President [François] Hollande. He called it an “act of war.” And I remember thinking that was one of the more ridiculous comments by a national leader in quite some time, because the reason that ISIS launched these attacks in Paris was not because it was part of their doctrine. It was somewhat against their doctrine. It was because they wanted to discourage the French from continuing their airstrikes in Iraq. So, yes, this was an act of war, and it was in response to French acts of war.
So, now, we shouldn’t rule out the possibility for analogous attacks in the future. If the next leader of ISIS were to decide to launch a campaign to discourage the Americans from maintaining the rather small presence that we currently have in northeastern Syria, he might want to attack us a lot closer to home.
G: So, in theory, the reason we’re fighting ISIS at all is that we’re afraid they could attack the U.S. or American interests. But it sounds like you’re saying that strikes like the one Thursday actually make these attacks more likely?
RG: The short answer to that is yes. ISIS, unprovoked, is not particularly interested in attacking the U.S. It would be more likely to attack the Russians, because of their active support of Bashar al-Assad, all things being equal. They are not like al-Qaeda. For al-Qaeda, it was a matter of doctrine to attack the West in order to induce them to leave the Middle East. That is not the ISIS approach. Absent our engagement in the areas where they are active, and which they aspire to control, ISIS would not be inclined to attack us in the homeland. If anything, we are giving them a greater motivation to attack us in the homeland now.
Now, I don’t pose that there’s a suggestion that we ought not to be engaged in those areas. It would not be in our interest to see ISIS become, in the future, what it was in 2014 or ’15.
17. How China’s Growing Clout Led Hollywood to Look for a New Villain
This is excerpt is from the comments section following this fascinating article and were flagged by a friend when he sent this article to me.
“How about this for a plotline to replace the Red Dawn story: The Chinese are becoming territorially expansionist; they have destroyed the reform movement by force and imprisonment in Hong Kong; they are threatening to invade Taiwan, they are creating military islands for the purposes of threatening our allies in the Pacific; they are stealing our intellectual property with impunity; they have hacked into the private personal files of virtually every government employee which would make those Americans vulnerable to blackmail and manipulation; and the president of the United States has become a Chinese dupe and will do nothing to thwart this Chinese aggression because the Chinese have information on him that could lead to his impeachment.”
But I always remember this quote from the original version of Red Dawn (their words not mine):
[Col. Tanner explains the global situation]
Matt Eckert: What about Europe?
Col. Andrew Tanner: I guess they figured twice in one century was enough. They're sitting this one out. All except England, and they won't last very long.
Eckert: Well, who is on our side?
Tanner: Six hundred million screamin' Chinamen.
Darryl Bates: Well, last I heard, there were a billion screamin' Chinamen.
Tanner: There were. [throws whiskey into fire, and it violently ignites for a moment, possibly signifying a Soviet nuclear strike on China]
How China’s Growing Clout Led Hollywood to Look for a New Villain
When MGM started work on a reboot of ‘Red Dawn,’ China was the obvious aggressor. By the time the movie was shot, that decision represented political suicide.
WSJ · by Erich Schwartzel
The premise of “Red Dawn” helped it connect with teenage audiences. MGM hoped to tap into that resonance when it asked screenwriters how they would handle a remake. One thing was clear: You couldn’t redo “Red Dawn” with Russia as the invading enemy.
In the original ‘Red Dawn,’ released in 1984, plucky American youths played by Patrick Swayze, C. Thomas Howell and Charlie Sheen battled Soviet invaders.
Photo: MGM/Everett Collection
“Who’s the villain?” Jeremy Passmore, one of the writers of the new version, asked MGM executives.
There was an obvious answer: China.
In most respects, the “Red Dawn” remake that eventually emerged was hardly memorable—it grossed $45 million in a year when “The Avengers” and “The Dark Knight Rises” each made 10 times as much. Yet its journey from a concept in the MGM C-suite to finished film would be referenced in the years to come as a turning point in Hollywood’s relationship with its most important foreign market: China. Today, stars like John Cena apologize in Mandarin for angering Communist Party officials, “Simpsons” episodes are scrubbed from streaming services for Tiananmen Square jokes and companies like Walt Disney Co. strike deals with state-backed entities to maintain access to the country’s 1.4 billion consumers.
“Red Dawn” would become a case study observed by every producer in Hollywood who needed this market to make a profit. And soon, it wouldn’t be just Hollywood taking the lesson of the movie to heart. Every industry that wants to do business with China, from cars to fashion to smartphones, now knows you don’t get far there by angering the regime. That risk is on prominent display this month as global companies trumpet involvement in the Beijing Winter Olympics, yet face domestic criticism for doing business in a country increasingly viewed as a foe to the U.S.
MGM had to reckon with a changing world order, as well. The studio was planning to release the new “Red Dawn” in the wake of a 2008 recession that shook faith in the American economy, a time of high unemployment and a trillion-dollar deficit. China, on the other hand, had just hosted the world at the Summer Olympics in Beijing. Chinese manufacturers were building factories in the U.S., a development that was once unthinkable to most Americans. A 2010 Pew Research poll found about 47% of American respondents said they thought China’s growing economy was bad for the U.S.; nearly 80% said the country’s modernizing military was a threat. The views represented a shift away from America’s long-held assumption that it was and would always be the world’s unimpeachable superpower.
Mr. Passmore got to work imagining a Chinese assault that turned a new group of teenagers into suburban vigilantes. It was a chance for “Red Dawn” to perform a function that many movies, from “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” to “Rosemary’s Baby,” had before: to reflect subconscious anxieties back to audiences as popular entertainment. It could have been, against the B-movie odds, an era-defining statement about the shaky viability of the American empire. Instead it became a movie of its time for a different reason—one that proved the power of China’s booming box office.
Fakeistan
Another writer MGM recruited to take a stab at his own script for the “Red Dawn” reboot, Carl Ellsworth, accepted the gig on one condition: “I don’t want to do Fakeistan invading the U.S.,” he says he told MGM executives.
Red Army meets Golden Arches in a scene from the 1984 ‘Red Dawn.’
Photo: MGM/Everett Collection
Mr. Ellsworth had a friend with connections at the Pentagon, so he went to Washington for inspiration. After turning over his cellphone to prevent foreign surveillance of the meeting, Mr. Ellsworth outlined his new “Red Dawn”: China attacks Taiwan, forcing a U.S. response. China dumps U.S. debt unannounced, sending the U.S. economy into a tailspin. Chinese paratroopers land on suburban lawns and Chinese generals take over city squares.
Mr. Ellsworth says he felt insecure describing this Hollywood fantasy of Chinese war games to real-world military personnel. But his schlocky scenario was met with the silence of recognition.
“No one ever said, ‘That’s ridiculous. That would never happen,’ ” he said.
The “Red Dawn” scripts written by the two men came in to MGM, each imagining a Chinese invasion of the U.S. Mr. Passmore went back to work at his temp job in quality-control testing for Deluxe Entertainment, a video-technology company, until one day the movie’s producers got back in touch.
“You’re coming in tomorrow,” he recalls being told. “And we’re meeting with Tom Cruise at noon.”
At this time, Mr. Cruise wasn’t only the marquee star of “Risky Business” and “Mission: Impossible.” He was also the head of United Artists, a storied studio that became a subsidiary under MGM in a deal that turned the A-list action star into another Hollywood executive giving notes on a script—or in this case, two scripts that needed to be sutured into one.
As head of United Artists, the studio making the ‘Red Dawn’ reboot, Tom Cruise offered notes as the script took shape. Neither he nor anyone else involved in the production foresaw the problems that would ensue from casting China as the bad guy.
Photo: Yanshan Zhang/Getty Images
Cruise, along with Passmore and a small cadre of MGM executives, spent a week going through the script page by page, examining each moment from the different versions to arrive at a final product.
Every detail was debated except for one: No one, recalled Mr. Passmore, asked whether casting China as the invader was a bad idea.
‘Tempers here will probably explode’
When photos from the “Red Dawn” set spread through state media outlets throughout China, the country’s state-run newspapers got to work trashing a movie that the nation’s citizens would likely never see.
“Tempers here will probably explode like kernels of movie house popcorn” when the movie comes out, China Daily wrote in an April 2010 editorial, calling it a “ticking time bomb.”
MGM executives quietly told crew members they could take their names off the “Red Dawn” credits if they feared retaliation. The studio knew well what could happen when an American company drew China’s ire. In the 1990s, the studio had released the Richard Gere drama “Red Corner,” about a U.S. businessman trapped in the country’s Kafkaesque legal system. The movie got MGM temporarily banned from China.
But criticism from China was only one issue facing MGM executives at the time. The studio had been paying about $300 million in annual interest on an outstanding $3.7 billion loan during the development of “Red Dawn,” and filed for bankruptcy protection before shooting wrapped. To raise money, MGM started selling off some newly completed productions.
Rival studios came in to determine whether they wanted to buy “Red Dawn.” But something had changed in the two-plus years between the moment Mr. Passmore was told to cast China as the villain and when the movie was ready for release. Work on the script had started in the summer of 2008, and filming wrapped in late 2009—days before “Avatar” would gross more than $200 million in Chinese theaters and awaken Hollywood to the nation’s economic potential. The trend line was clear: box office was rising in China just as it was stagnating in America.
By the time editing finished in mid-2010, no Hollywood executive would touch a movie that turned their most important new customer into the villain. If MGM itself released the movie, even just in the U.S., China could retaliate by refusing to show the studio’s more lucrative James Bond movies in its market.
For the producers of “Red Dawn,” that meant the only solution was a drastic one: changing the enemy in the film.
It wouldn’t be China invading the U.S. in this “Red Dawn” remake, MGM executives decided, but North Korea.
North Korea was a real-world antagonist of the U.S., they reasoned. And most important, Hollywood didn’t sell tickets in North Korea.
New kids, same tactics: Isabel Lucas and Chris Hemsworth battle North Korean invaders in the 2012 ‘Red Dawn.’
Photo: Open Road Films/Everett Collection
A current MGM spokesperson did not respond to request for comment. A spokeswoman for Gary Barber, MGM’s chief executive from late 2010 to 2018, declined to comment.
‘All these subnightmares’
The crisis soon moved from MGM’s executive suite to the computer monitors of employees working in a two-story concrete building on a residential street in the San Fernando Valley, next door to a Physicians Diagnostic Reference Library.
There, the team at Custom Film Effects specialized in “hidden effects” jobs: removing an errant boom mic from the frame, smoothing out the back acne of a shirtless action star, erasing an actress’s underwear to make her appear to be fully nude.
The demands of the “Red Dawn” job immediately took over the office.
This wouldn’t be a copy-paste operation of swapping in one nation’s flag for another. Throughout the movie, Chinese banners and propaganda posters were seemingly everywhere. Even the epaulets on the soldiers’ uniforms had to be changed, since they were Chinese military insignia and not North Korean ones.
“The flags are one nightmare unto themselves, and then there are all these subnightmares,” said Jamie Baxter, the lead CFE illustrator.
To Mr. Baxter, the whole North Korean mess felt like a waste of money.
Wouldn’t the effort be better spent on making the movie a better story? Whatever, he thought. At the time, he was already putting in extra hours to make money for his new wife and stepson.
I’m a cog, he thought to himself. A cog charging overtime.
The whole thing took Mr. Baxter and a small team of colleagues two months. When the revised movie was turned over to MGM, CFE was paid $1 million and didn’t take a credit.
‘North Korea? It doesn’t make any sense’
Changing the “Red Dawn” villains required more than just cosmetic swaps. New dialogue would need to explain that it was North Korea invading.
Street-fighting men: Josh Hutcherson and Connor Cruise (Tom Cruise’s son), run for cover in the 2012 ‘Red Dawn.’
Photo: Open Road Films/Everett Collection
“This is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard in my life,” Mr. Ellsworth says he told executives when they informed him of the plan.
Hollywood was losing its nerve, he thought. “Red Dawn” wasn’t Truffaut or even Spielberg, but this was one country censoring another country’s art. What had happened to freedom of expression? Was anyone going to speak up here? Would he?
Then Mr. Ellsworth started to weigh his own financial concerns. The movie’s release in theaters would mean a cash payment for him, followed by residuals from DVD sales and cable-TV deals. He’d live off those checks for a while, supporting his wife and two children. And it was in his best interest to be an agreeable writer, not a difficult one. Moral outrage over the decision wasn’t going to do him any good. So he went in to help salvage the movie.
Sitting in the producers’ offices off Sunset Blvd., Messrs. Passmore and Ellsworth shoehorned as much logic as they could into this new version of “Red Dawn.” The opening sequence explaining China’s assault went away, replaced by generic news reports of geopolitical buzzwords: Markets! Depression! Cyberattacks!
The writers added dialogue alluding to a plot involving more countries than just North Korea, a detail they thought made it somewhat more believable. The actors recorded these new lines, one of which sounds like the writers channeling their own frustration into the characters.
“North Korea? It doesn’t make any sense,” one character asks.
Audiences agreed. The revamped “Red Dawn” was purchased by FilmDistrict, a small company with no business in China, and came out in November 2012. When the movie made about $45 million at the U.S. box office, it wasn’t a total bomb, but certainly didn’t do well enough to recoup the film’s budget. Still, the outcome meant that MGM would avoid retaliation that kept its bigger, more expensive movies out of Chinese theaters.
When “Red Dawn” hit theaters, critics cited the villain switch in their pans of the movie. But the public response to MGM’s decision was surprisingly muted. Among the few constituents to criticize MGM’s decision at the time were Michigan militia members who loved the original 1984 film. They called the changes a “cop-out.”
It was a bigger story in China, where state-run publications bragged about MGM’s panicked edits. One state-run outlet reminded readers that the edits came “without a single word from Chinese authorities.” The reminder it gave Hollywood would prove more consequential.
In the years since, no other movie since “Red Dawn” has been put into production by a Hollywood studio and cast China as the villain.
Adapted from “Red Carpet: Hollywood, China, and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy” by Erich Schwartzel, to be published on Feb. 8 by Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2022 by Erich Schwartzel.
WSJ · by Erich Schwartzel
18. G.O.P. Declares Jan. 6 Attack ‘Legitimate Political Discourse’
I am sorry. I just cannot accept what happened on January 6th as "legitimate political discourse."
The sad irony is they just "legitimized" all the other "political discourse" they despise, namely that from the BLM and ANTIFA movements included some violent protests but none of which were an attack on our Constitution.
I am not making a partisan comment by sending this out. I am a moderate who leans conservative who has never been a member of a political party. But a view such as the one espoused below is antithetical to our oath to support and defend the Constitution.
G.O.P. Declares Jan. 6 Attack ‘Legitimate Political Discourse’
The Republican National Committee voted to censure Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for participating in the inquiry into the deadly riot at the Capitol.
Representative Liz Cheney has said Republican leaders “have made themselves willing hostages” to former President Donald J. Trump.Credit...Al Drago for The New York Times
Feb. 4, 2022, 1:10 p.m. ET
WASHINGTON — The Republican Party on Friday officially declared the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and events that led to it “legitimate political discourse,” formally rebuking two lawmakers in the party who have been most outspoken in condemning the deadly riot and the role of Donald J. Trump in spreading the election lies that fueled it.
The Republican National Committee’s overwhelming voice vote to censure Representatives Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois at its winter meeting in Salt Lake City culminated more than a year of vacillation, which started with party leaders condemning the Capitol attack and Mr. Trump’s conduct, then shifted to downplaying and denying it.
On Friday, the party went further in a resolution slamming Ms. Cheney and Mr. Kinzinger for taking part in the House investigation of the assault, saying they were participating in “persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse.”
It was an extraordinary statement about the deadliest attack on the Capitol in 200 years, in which a mob of Mr. Trump’s supporters stormed the complex, brutalizing police officers and sending lawmakers into hiding. Nine people died in connection with the attack and more than 150 officers were injured. The party passed the resolution without discussion and almost without dissent.
The censure marked the latest and most forceful effort by the Republican Party to minimize what happened and the broader attempt by Mr. Trump and his allies to invalidate the results of the 2020 election. In approving it and opting to punish two of its own, Republicans seemed to embrace a position that many of them have only hinted at: that the assault and the actions that preceded it were acceptable.
It came days after Mr. Trump suggested that, if re-elected in 2024, he would consider pardons for those convicted in the Jan. 6 attack and for the first time described his goal as aiming to “overturn” the election results.
For Republicans in Washington, the party’s actions threatened new division as their leaders try to focus attention on what they call the failings of the Biden administration.
Senator Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah, wrote on Twitter, “Shame falls on a party that would censure persons of conscience, who seek truth in the face of vitriol. Honor attaches to Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for seeking truth even when doing so comes at great personal cost.” He did not mention that the party chairwoman who presided over the meeting and orchestrated the censure resolution, Ronna McDaniel, is his niece.
The party’s far-right flank has been agitating to boot Ms. Cheney and Mr. Kinzinger out of the House Republican Conference for months, a push that Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the minority leader, has tried to brush aside. And their formal censure is sure to stir up those efforts again.
The Republican Party declared the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and events that led to it as “legitimate political discourse.”Credit...Jason Andrew for The New York Times
“We need to move on from that whole discussion and, frankly, move forward and get the House back in 2022,” said Representative Mike Garcia, a California Republican facing a difficult re-election campaign in a newly configured district.
Most House Republicans tried to ignore the actions of the party on Friday, refusing to answer questions or saying they had not read the censure resolution. Representative Dan Crenshaw, Republican of Texas, called it “dumb stuff,” while Representative Mark Green, Republican of Tennessee, lamented the distraction from “this abysmal administration’s record.”
Democrats, however, were incensed, especially at the censure resolution’s description of the Capitol attack as “ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse,” and the ongoing legal investigations of Mr. Trump in New York and Georgia “Democrat abuse of prosecutorial power.”
“The Republican Party is so off the deep end now that they are describing an attempted coup and a deadly insurrection as political expression,” said Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland and a member of the special House committee investigating the Capitol attack. “It is a scandal that historians will be aghast at, to think that a major political party would be denouncing Liz Cheney for standing up for the Constitution and not saying anything about Donald Trump’s involvement in the insurrection.”
Representative Adam Schiff, Democrat of California and who is also on the committee, said, “their party has degenerated into a cult to the former president, unwilling to acknowledge the truth, and I think they condemn themselves with their resolution.”
In his own defense, Mr. Kinzinger said, “I have no regrets about my decision to uphold my oath of office and defend the Constitution. I will continue to focus my efforts on standing for truth and working to fight the political matrix that’s led us to where we find ourselves today.”
The resolution speaks repeatedly of party unity as the goal of censuring the lawmakers. saying the party’s ability to focus on the Biden administration was being “sabotaged” by the “actions and words” of Ms. Cheney and Mr. Kinzinger which indicate “they support Democrat efforts to destroy President Trump more than they support winning back a Republican majority in 2022.”
More practically, the moves of the party in Salt Lake City will make it easier for the Republican apparatus to abandon Ms. Cheney and throw its weight and money behind her main primary challenger, Harriet Hageman.
The censure resolution declares that the party “shall immediately cease any and all support of” both lawmakers “as members of the Republican Party for their behavior which has been destructive to the institution of the U.S. House of Representatives, the Republican Party and our republic, and is inconsistent with the position of the Conference.”
Mr. Kinzinger has already announced he won’t seek re-election, as have several other House Republicans who voted to impeach Mr. Trump for inciting the attack on the Capitol. Ms. Cheney, however, has vowed to stand for re-election.
Representative Adam Kinzinger has already announced he won’t seek re-election, as have several other House Republicans who voted to impeach Mr. Trump.Credit...Stefani Reynolds for The New York Times
Earlier this week, the Wyoming delegation to the Republican National Committee submitted a so-called “Rule 11” letter, formalizing party support for Ms. Hageman. The existence of the letter was reported by The Washington Post.
The letter allows the Republican National Committee to send resources to the Wyoming branch of the party to spend on Ms. Hageman’s behalf — essentially designating her as the party’s presumptive nominee. The designations are common in Republican politics, but typically are used to support incumbents who may be facing token primary challengers. Florida’s delegation, for instance, filed a similar letter months ago that allowed the national committee to funnel resources to support the re-election campaigns for Gov. Ron DeSantis and Senator Marco Rubio.
Ms. Cheney, who faces an uphill battle in her re-election bid against a Republican Party aligned with Mr. Trump, said party leaders “have made themselves willing hostages” to Mr. Trump.
“I do not recognize those in my party who have abandoned the Constitution to embrace Donald Trump,” she said. “History will be their judge. I will never stop fighting for our constitutional republic. No matter what.”
Ms. Cheney’s spokesman, Jeremy Adler, condemned the Wyoming G.O.P. leadership and its chairman, Frank Eathorne, for directing resources to Ms. Hageman. Mr. Eathorne did not respond to messages Friday; other members of the Wyoming delegation declined to comment.
“Frank Eathorne and the Republican National Committee are trying to assert their will and take away the voice of the people of Wyoming before a single vote has even been cast,” Mr. Adler said.
Ms. Cheney has a commanding financial advantage over Ms. Hageman, according to federal campaign finance reports released earlier this week. Ms. Cheney entered 2022 with nearly $5 million in campaign cash, while Ms. Hageman reported just $380,000.
The censure resolution was watered down from an initial version that called directly for the House Republican Conference to “expel” Ms. Cheney and Mr. Kinzinger “without delay.” That demand was dropped. However, the language condemning the attack on “legitimate political discourse” was then added.
William J. Palatucci, a Republican National Committee member from New Jersey, said those changes were made “behind closed doors.” The final language was officially circulated to committee members early Friday morning. He called it “cancel culture at its worst.”
“The national committee attacking Liz Cheney is distracting and counterproductive,” he said. “We should be spending our time shooting at Democrats, not Republicans.”
19. My secret life as a Mossad operative
Another fascinating story. I cannot of course vouch for its veracity.
My secret life as a Mossad operative
This is an adaptation of Looking Forward, a weekly email from our editor-in-chief sent on Friday afternoons. Sign up here to get the Forward’s free newsletters delivered to your inbox. Download and print our free magazine of stories to savor over Shabbat and Sunday.
The husband nearly fell off his recliner a couple of weeks ago to show me something startling on his smartphone. It was a screenshot of a British passport, issued in 2005 for a woman born on Sept. 9, 1976. Her name jumped out in block letters: ANN RUDOREN.
A long-lost cousin, you wonder? Nope. We have no cousins with the last name Rudoren. Nobody does. There are, according to our very extensive (read: Google) research, no other people on earth with this seven-letter surname other than myself, my husband and our 14-year-old twins.
That’s because we made it up — and not until early 2006, by the way, after this here passport was issued — as part of our effort to build an egalitarian foundation for our family and avoid the patriarchal explanations to inevitable questions from our future children about why they had a different last name from me or my parents.
So what in the world was going on?
The passport had been flagged to us by Rabbi Melanie Levav, a friend who also created a new last name with her spouse (more on that later), and thus was intrigued when she spotted ours while watching the 2019 spy flick “The Operative” by Israeli writer and director Yuval Adler.
The film’s central character is a woman who goes undercover as an English tutor in Iran as part of a Mossad scheme to sell the regime faulty technologies. She ends up having a steamy affair with her key Iranian contact, the operation unravels, and she somehow manages to disappear from Mossad view by reclaiming her birth name (only removing the E from ANNE).
I had to track down Adler to ask: Was this woman named after — perhaps even based on — me?
Yes — and not really. Adler, who has a PhD in philosophy from Columbia, is best known for his 2013 film “Bethlehem,” a pre-“Fauda” tale about the complex relationship between an Israeli intelligence office and his teenage Palestinian informant that won a prize at the Venice Film Festival.
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When we spoke, he explained that he had screened “Bethlehem” for some parents at the Tel Aviv preschool his kids attended, among them Karl Vick — then the Middle East correspondent for TIME Magazine — and Stacy Sullivan of . Karl and Stacy are friends of mine, and when they made Adler a list of influencers to share the film with, Jodi Rudoren — then Jerusalem bureau chief of The New York Times — was high on the list.
“OK, but I don’t know who she is,” Adler recalled thinking. “But that’s a cool name,” he thought to himself. “It was a name I never heard before.”
Of course it was — we’d made it up. And he held onto it for six years?
“Names are important, actually — in stupid scripts they have stupid names,” Adler explained. “It’s like a look for the character, it’s part of how you look, like your hair.”
“Ann Rudoren,” fictional Mossad spy in Yuval Adler’s “The Operative.”
So Adler said he’s always collecting names, “sticky notes in your brain.” When he reads a nonfiction book, he’ll scour the index for “cool names.” Sometimes he looks at IMDb, the Internet Movie Database, which lists everyone involved in every production, and will find “some gaffer” on a little-known 1950s film to name a character after.
The undercover name of the woman in “The Operative,” Rachel Currin, came from someone Adler studied art with back at Columbia — Rachel Feinstein, who is married to the painter John Currin.
“I like these associations,” Adler said. “Currin sounds — you can’t mistake this name for a Jew; I wanted that, so Currin is cool. Rudoren is this other name that doesn’t sound like anything.”
Courtesy of Getty
Director Yuval Adler speaks at the “The Operative” press conference during the 69th Berlinale International Film Festival in 2019.
Maybe not to Adler. To us, the Fantastic 4 Rudorens — as our family text-group is titled — it sounds like equality and progress, like the ability to change the rules or shift the boundaries when they don’t work for you, like innovation and individuality, like home.
As I wrote when we first made the legal — and byline — change 16 years ago, none of the typical marital-name options felt comfortable to us.
Taking Gary’s last name — Ruderman — did not fit with my feminism. But keeping my original name — Wilgoren — also seemed fraught, as I knew my future kids’ doctors and teachers would nevertheless call me Mrs. Ruderman, and those (curious! evolved!) kids would ask why we had a different name, and the only answer would come back to patriarchy. Hyphenation seemed unrealistic — six syllables and way too much for the back of a sports jersey — so we combined: R-U-D from Gary’s side and O-R-E-N from mine. Pronounced roo-DOR-en, if you’re wondering.
We’re hardly alone in this adventure. Antonio Villaraigosa, the former Mayor of Los Angeles, is one famous example — he was Villar and she was Raigosa (they’re now divorced and he’s remarried but stuck with the combined name).
You might have seen the byline of one of our interns, Rudy Malcom, and thought it was a typo, missing the second “L,” but in fact, it’s another portmanteau — his parents, James Maloney and Debra Comer, kept their original names but gave Rudy and his twin brother the combo.
And then there are the Levavs: Melanie and her wife, Hope, and their two children, who we got to know because their sabbatical in Jerusalem overlapped with our time there. As they wrote in this 2001 journal exploring feminist rethinking of Jewish relationships, the former Melanie Kohler and Hope Berger felt strongly about presenting themselves to the community as “a new family unit” but worried hyphenation would “be too cumbersome.”
They decided to make up an entirely new name, and knew they wanted it to be Hebrew. They played with options based on translations of their original surnames, meaning, sound and gematria — the ancient practice of assigning numerical values to Hebrew letters.
“We thought of concepts that were important to us and we kept coming back to lev,” the Hebrew word for heart, they wrote. In gematria, “lev” has a value of 32 — which is also the number of letters in the traditional Jewish phrase consecrating marriage.
“Levav” adds a single Hebrew letter, worth two in gematria — “one for each of us,” they wrote — and can turn the noun “heart” into an active verb. They used a quote on their wedding invitations that starts with a form of the verb, “Levavtini:” You have captured my heart.
Our story is a little less poetic. We did talk about transliterating Ruderman and Wilgoren into Hebrew and then doing anagrams with those letters in search of a meaningful word we might then translate back into English. But mostly we just tried out different combinations of our syllables — and ran them through Google.
There were zero people named Rudoren, or at least none with any internet presence, back then. The only thing that came up called RUDOREN was a small island off the coast of Finland, which we fully plan to eventually claim as our ancestral homeland.
According to the ancestry website , ours is the world’s 8,968,613th most popular surname, held by “approximately four people” (and, the site does not add, one fictional Mossad operative). It is “most prevalent” in the United States (correct), and occurs in “highest density” in Israel (OK, it’s a bit out of date).
“The meaning of this surname is not listed,” the site says. Well, it’s kind of a lot to explain.
Download the printable PDF here.
20. China Can’t Carry the Russian Economy
China Can’t Carry the Russian Economy
Putin’s courting of Beijing has paid more diplomatic than economic dividends.
Russian President Vladimir Putin looks on during the opening ceremony of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics in Beijing on Feb. 4. Matthew Stockman/Getty Images
As Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin declare there are “no limits” to Russia-China ties, Beijing has made it increasingly clear it supports Moscow’s position on Ukraine. According to China’s foreign ministry, Russia’s “reasonable security concerns should be taken seriously and resolved.” For its part, Moscow has directly connected its standoff with the West to its relations with China, with Russian ambassador to the U.K. Andrey Kelin claiming on Jan. 30 that pressure from the United States and NATO is “pushing us to be closer” to Beijing.
Russia’s relationship with China is in the spotlight this week as Putin attends the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Winter Olympics on Feb. 4, the very Games the United States and a cluster of other Western countries will boycott diplomatically. It is these same Games that many (including U.S. officials) have speculated will serve to delay a potential Russian invasion of Ukraine, with the thinking that Putin would not want to upstage and steal the thunder from his increasingly close partner, Xi. So what does Putin plan to do in Ukraine once the Olympics end on Feb. 20, and what role could China play in such plans?
In answering such a question, it is necessary to acknowledge some concrete realities amid the escalatory rhetoric that has been taking place by both Moscow and the West in recent weeks. Although the United States has continued to warn that a Russian invasion of Ukraine could be imminent, this depends on Moscow’s willingness to risk the consequences. The military and political consequences are significant yet hard to quantify, but the economic consequences would be straightforward and dramatic. U.S. President Joe Biden has clarified that any offensive actions in Ukrainian territory would be considered as an invasion. This is where the China factor becomes very important.
As Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin declare there are “no limits” to Russia-China ties, Beijing has made it increasingly clear it supports Moscow’s position on Ukraine. According to China’s foreign ministry, Russia’s “reasonable security concerns should be taken seriously and resolved.” For its part, Moscow has directly connected its standoff with the West to its relations with China, with Russian ambassador to the U.K. Andrey Kelin claiming on Jan. 30 that pressure from the United States and NATO is “pushing us to be closer” to Beijing.
Russia’s relationship with China is in the spotlight this week as Putin attends the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Winter Olympics on Feb. 4, the very Games the United States and a cluster of other Western countries will boycott diplomatically. It is these same Games that many (including U.S. officials) have speculated will serve to delay a potential Russian invasion of Ukraine, with the thinking that Putin would not want to upstage and steal the thunder from his increasingly close partner, Xi. So what does Putin plan to do in Ukraine once the Olympics end on Feb. 20, and what role could China play in such plans?
In answering such a question, it is necessary to acknowledge some concrete realities amid the escalatory rhetoric that has been taking place by both Moscow and the West in recent weeks. Although the United States has continued to warn that a Russian invasion of Ukraine could be imminent, this depends on Moscow’s willingness to risk the consequences. The military and political consequences are significant yet hard to quantify, but the economic consequences would be straightforward and dramatic. U.S. President Joe Biden has clarified that any offensive actions in Ukrainian territory would be considered as an invasion. This is where the China factor becomes very important.
The biggest question is whether China can truly serve as an economic substitute for the West, dampening some of the cost of an invasion. After all, the United States and European Union have made clear that Russia would face major Western sanctions if it invades Ukraine, along with the inevitable reduction of trade flows and perhaps even the cancellation of major projects like the Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline. As such, it is crucial to look at the structural nature of Russia’s economic relationships with both the West and with China, both in terms of trade flows and the infrastructure that underpins them.
Russia’s economic ties with China have certainly grown in recent years. Bilateral trade hit a record annual high of more than $146 billion in 2021—up from less than $16 billion in 2003 and nearly $110 billion in 2020—with Russia serving as a major source of China’s oil, coal, natural gas, and agricultural imports. At the same time, Russia has increased imported goods, such as electronics and machinery, from China. Russia has become an important part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a signature part being the Power of Siberia pipeline, which has granted China direct access to Russian natural gas—though Western sanctions have reduced the importance of Eurasian rail routes, which the BRI was originally built around.
To be sure, Russian-Chinese trade is far higher than Russia’s overall trade with the United States, which was around $34 billion for the same time period. However, Russia’s trade with the EU totaled nearly $220 billion in 2021, roughly 1.5 times the size of Russian-Chinese trade. Russia serves as a major energy exporter to the EU, accounting for 26 percent of the European bloc’s oil imports and 40 percent of its natural gas imports. Although many have pointed to the EU’s energy dependence as a major source of leverage and a geopolitical tool for the Kremlin, the reality is that this dependence goes both ways, with energy revenues accounting for nearly 40 percent of Russia’s budget revenues. And while Russia’s energy exports to China have been increasing, the overall volumes are much lower in absolute terms than to the EU.
Of course, Russia could decide to increase its energy exports to China at the expense of its supplies to the EU. But that would be a costly project for Moscow. It would mean building expanded infrastructure from its distant Siberian deposits to China to match the extensive oil and gas pipeline network Russia has had in place with Europe for decades—an investment that would cost tens of billions of dollars. Another is the price premium for energy exports that Russia would forego, as Europe currently pays much higher prices for Russian natural gas via spot markets than China does via its 30-year contract with Gazprom, signed in 2014 just before the original conflict in Ukraine broke out.
This would certainly be painful for the EU too. Despite efforts to decarbonize and diversify from Russian supplies of fossil fuel gas, abrupt energy transitions have proven to have significant consequences, such as shortages and blackouts. This may explain why Germany—Russia’s largest gas importer in Europe—is much more cautious about Ukraine than the United States and United Kingdom are and also why Russia is predicted to maintain its role as the dominant natural gas provider to the EU until at least 2040.
The United States could also go well beyond the energy sector as with the “mother of all sanctions” package that the U.S. Senate has threatened. However, this too could go both ways, as cutting off Russia from the SWIFT payment system, the global bank transfer system dominated by the power of the dollar, could heighten concerns about SWIFT’s reliability and motivate other powers to create alternatives.
Nevertheless, Putin has to take the threat of Western sanctions and potential for serious economic disruption with the EU seriously. China is in no position to replace the European Union entirely as a partner yet. Thus, if Putin does decide to take military action against Ukraine, he would be doing so with a tremendous risk to the Russian economy. By extension, he would be threatening his own domestic popularity and political position, which has been underpinned by oil- and natural gas-fueled economic growth since he took office.
Given that domestic political consolidation is the first and most important geopolitical imperative for Russia, this therefore serves as an important constraining factor when it comes to Putin’s decision-making on Ukraine. Putin would have to weigh not only the military consequences of an invasion but also the possible economic and political ripple effects that would come as a result.
At the same time, the West has to consider the extent of its economic and political isolation from Russia, which could drive Moscow into an even closer relationship with China. This could violate a key geopolitical imperative for the United States, which is to prevent the emergence of a hegemon (or alliance of hegemons) in Eurasia that could challenge the United States’ global position.
Yet even in the best-case scenario—where war in Ukraine is averted and some kind of diplomatic understanding is reached—the prolonged standoff between Moscow and the West as well as its associated risks could transform the scale and depth of Russia’s ties with China in the long term. Putin’s visit to Beijing and the subsequent conclusion of the Olympics could well prove to be a symbolic turning point, not of an imminent war but of a deeper geopolitical shift.
Eugene Chausovsky is a nonresident fellow at the Newlines Institute. Chausovsky previously served as senior Eurasia analyst at the geopolitical analysis firm Stratfor for more than 10 years. His work focuses on political, economic, and security issues pertaining to Russia, Eurasia, and the Middle East.
21. Cyberattack on News Corp, Believed Linked to China, Targeted Emails of Journalists, Others
Cyberattack on News Corp, Believed Linked to China, Targeted Emails of Journalists, Others
The attack, discovered on Jan. 20, affected units including The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post and the U.K. news operation
By Alexandra Bruell
Sadie Gurman
and Dustin Volz
Updated Feb. 4, 2022 10:19 pm ET
WSJ · by Alexandra Bruell, Sadie Gurman and Dustin Volz
News Corp said it notified law enforcement and hired cybersecurity firm Mandiant Inc. to support an investigation. A representative of the Federal Bureau of Investigation said late Friday that it was aware of the incident.
“Mandiant assesses that those behind this activity have a China nexus, and we believe they are likely involved in espionage activities to collect intelligence to benefit China’s interests,” said David Wong, vice president of incident response at Mandiant.
News Corp disclosed the hack in a securities filing Friday, saying its preliminary analysis indicates that data was taken.
A spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington said that China is a staunch defender of cybersecurity and “firmly opposes and combats cyberattacks and cyber theft in all forms.” The spokesman, Liu Pengyu, said that identifying the source of cyberattacks is technically complex.
“We hope that there can be a professional, responsible and evidence-based approach to identifying cyber-related incidents, rather than making allegations based on speculations,” Mr. Liu said.
In the staff memo News Corp said it believes the threat activity is contained. The company has been offering guidance to affected employees.
“We are committed to protecting our journalists and sources. We will not be deterred from our purpose—to provide uniquely trusted journalism and analysis. We will continue to publish the important stories of our time,” said Almar Latour, chief executive of Dow Jones and publisher of The Wall Street Journal.
The company’s investigation indicates that systems housing financial and customer data, including subscriber information, weren’t affected, according to the securities filing and a person familiar with the matter.
The investigation detected that the intrusion appeared to date to at least February 2020, according to people briefed on the matter, and scores of employees were impacted. The hackers were able to access reporters’ emails and Google Docs, including drafts of articles, the people said. News Corp was still trying to determine the full extent of emails and documents that were accessed, the people said.
While the hackers accessed the Google system used by News Corp employees, there was no indication that they breached the system through a compromise at Google, said people briefed on the matter. Google’s own systems weren’t affected by the incident, a Google spokeswoman said.
Reporters who were affected by the hack and were briefed on it expressed concerns to company officials about protecting their sources’ identities. By Friday afternoon, many Journal reporters affected had been notified by company officials of specific documents that were believed to have been accessed.
The attackers appeared to be interested in a range of topics, including issues of importance to Beijing such as Taiwan and China’s Uyghur ethnic group, according to other people briefed on the matter and a review of some of the document target lists. Other areas of interest included draft Journal articles and notes about U.S. military troop activity, U.S. technology regulation related to China, and articles about President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and senior White House officials.
The hackers also searched using keywords for emails related to traditional intelligence areas, including defense, one person familiar with the ongoing investigation said. Those searches in some cases appeared to be prompted by contemporary news developments. “They would come back periodically,” this person said.
U.S. authorities have accused China-based hackers for years of targeting a range of American businesses and government institutions. FBI Director Christopher Wray said this week that Beijing is running a “massive, sophisticated hacking program that is bigger than those of every other major nation combined.” The FBI has more than 2,000 active investigations related to allegations of Chinese-government-directed theft of U.S. information or technology, Mr. Wray said.
China has repeatedly denied allegations that it has carried out cyberattacks.
In 2013, Chinese hackers trying to monitor news coverage of China hacked into the Journal’s network, apparently aiming to spy on reporters covering China and other issues, the Journal reported. The New York Times had experienced a similar attack. At the time, a Chinese embassy spokesman condemned allegations of Chinese cyberspying and said Beijing prohibits cyberattacks.
In February 2020, China revoked the press credentials of three Journal reporters based in Beijing. China’s Foreign Ministry said the move was punishment for an opinion piece published by the Journal. The three journalists work for the Journal’s news operation, which operates with a strict separation from the opinion staff.
The following month, the Trump administration announced a personnel cap in the U.S. on four state-run Chinese media outlets. Later that March, China expelled from the country American journalists from multiple news organizations, including the Journal.
In November 2021, each country agreed to ease visa restrictions for the other’s reporters. The Journal was among a handful of U.S. outlets set to receive new press credentials for some staff.
—Robert McMillan and Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg
WSJ · by Alexandra Bruell, Sadie Gurman and Dustin Volz
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.
