Quotes of the Day:
“We live in a world in which speed is prized above almost all else, and acting faster than the other side has itself become the primary goal. But most often people are merely in a hurry, acting and reacting frantically to events, all of which makes them prone to error and wasting time in the long run. In order to separate yourself from the pack, to harness a speed that has devastating force, you must be organized and strategic. First, you prepare yourself before any action, scanning your enemy for weaknesses. Then you find a way to get your opponents to underestimate you, to lower their guard. When you strike unexpectedly, they will freeze up. When you hit again, it is from the side and out of nowhere. It is the unanticipated blow that makes the biggest impact.”
- Robert Greene, The 33 Strategies Of War
"One school of thought regards this as part of the reason for the decline and fall of Rome: lead poisoning gradually took its toll, impairing the thought and judgment of many Romans, especially at the top. The theory is much disputed; perhaps it contains no truth. But as a metaphor it is irresistible. We have built networks for the delivery of information—the internet, and especially social media. These networks, too, are a marvel. But they also carry a kind of poison with them. The mind fed from those sources learns to subsist happily on quick reactions, easy certainties, one-liners, and rage. It craves confirmation and resents contradiction. Attention spans collapse; imbecility propagates, then seems normal, then is celebrated. The capacity for rational discourse between people who disagree gradually rots. I have a good deal more confidence in the lead-pipe theory of the internet, and its effect on our culture, than in the lead-pipe theory of the fall of Rome."
- Ward Farnsworth
“When men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe... that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas-- that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out. That at any rate is the theory of our Constitution. It is an experiment. As all life is an experiment. Every year if not every day we wager our salvation upon some prophecy based upon imperfect knowledge. ”
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
1. Statement by National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan on Iranian Threats and Provocations Against American Citizens
2. White House worried Iran is plotting assassination attempts against Trump administration officials
3. Paratrooper charged in Syria shootout acquitted of all charges
4. Taliban graduated 200 Special Forces completing three-month training
5. The Continuing Storm
6. Analysis | Kazakhstan called for assistance. Why did Russia dispatch troops so quickly?
7. America’s Asia Strategy Has Reached a Dead End
8. Myanmar's Suu Kyi faces six years in jail after new sentences -source
9. (Reserve) Army Officer Relieved of Command, Facing Discharge over Racist Social Media Posts
10. Opinion | Steve Bannon Is Onto Something
11. Impact of North Korea’s latest missile test on Iran nuke threat
12. Is the Crisis in Kazakhstan the Rebirth of the Soviet Union?
13. All is not well in the transatlantic relationship
14. Spiking the Problem: Developing a Resilient Posture in the Indo-Pacific with Passive Defenses
15. Rise of rightwing extremism in US military sparks fears over democracy
16. January 6, the Afghanistan Withdrawal and the Future of U.S. Counterterrorism
17. US pairs skater Timothy LeDuc calls human rights abuses in China 'horrifying'
18. How Fake Spies Ruin Real Intelligence
19. Higher ed's role in civic learning and democracy’s future (opinion)
1. Statement by National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan on Iranian Threats and Provocations Against American Citizens
Statement by National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan on Iranian Threats and Provocations Against American Citizens
JANUARY 09, 2022
•
Yesterday, Iran purported to impose sanctions on 51 Americans. They do so as Iran’s proxy militias continue to attack American troops in the Middle East, and as Iranian officials threaten to carry out terror operations inside the United States and elsewhere around the world. Make no mistake: the United States of America will protect and defend its citizens. This includes those serving the United States now and those who formerly served. As Americans, we have our disagreements on politics. We have our disagreements on Iran policy. But we are united in our resolve against threats and provocations. We are united in the defense of our people. We will work with our allies and partners to deter and respond to any attacks carried out by Iran. Should Iran attack any of our nationals, including any of the 51 people named yesterday, it will face severe consequences.
2. White House worried Iran is plotting assassination attempts against Trump administration officials
Excerpts:
Coates said that she isn’t aware of any such contact between the Biden team and former Trump administration officials such as herself and credited Sullivan for issuing the “very welcome” statement on Sunday. “They’ve been pretty busy,” she acknowledged. “There’s been a lot going on ... I’m very glad he’s focused on it.”
Sullivan urged Iranian officials not to mistake intra-American disagreements about the wisdom of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal as a sign that violence against the Trump team would be tolerated
“As Americans, we have our disagreements on politics,” he said. “We have our disagreements on Iran policy. But we are united in our resolve against threats and provocations. We are united in the defense of our people.”
White House worried Iran is plotting assassination attempts against Trump administration officials
Iran’s imposition of “sanctions” on dozens of Americans amounts to an assassination threat against members of former President Donald Trump’s administration, according to a senior U.S. official who threatened “severe consequences” for any harm done to them.
“Make no mistake: the United States of America will protect and defend its citizens,” White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said Sunday. “This includes those serving the United States now and those who formerly served.”
Iranian officials have made explicit their interest in killing one of the people involved in the U.S. strike that killed Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Gen. Qassem Soleimani. The regime observed the second anniversary of his death last week, which occasioned a flurry of truculent rhetoric and the unveiling of economic sanctions by Iran that U.S. observers take as a proxy for a threat of violence.
“Wherever it is needed, we will provide for the basis of revenge against the Americans from within their houses and by people by their side without us being present,” IRGC Quds Force Commander Sardar Esmail Qaani said in remarks published by Iranian media. “If wise people in America are found who deal with those who committed the atrocity of assassinating Commander Soleimani, this action will be much less burdensome for America than if the offspring of the Resistance Front, who know no bounds, to themselves go and take this revenge.”
That statement sharpens the point of the economic sanctions that Tehran unveiled this weekend, according to observers.
“In essence, a government official in the world's foremost state sponsor of terrorism invited Americans to partake in domestic terrorism against one another,” said Foundation for Defense of Democracies senior fellow Behnam Ben Taleblu, who translated the Iranian general’s remarks. “The Islamic Republic has tried to use intimidation, harassment, the threat of violence, as well as actual violence, to include kidnapping, terror, and assassination, to silence critics abroad for four decades. In this regard, its latest ‘sanctions’ can be seen as another vector in its terror campaign.”
Sullivan promised to retaliate against any such operation. “We will work with our allies and partners to deter and respond to any attacks carried out by Iran,” he said. “Should Iran attack any of our nationals, including any of the 52 people named yesterday, it will face severe consequences.
Iranian officials threatened FDD in 2019, citing the influence of their experts within the Trump administration as evidence that the think tank had engaged in “economic terrorism” against the regime. Tehran has shown a significant interest, but limited capacity, to act within U.S. territory in recent years, as evidenced by the failed attempt to bomb a restaurant in Washington, D.C., in 2011 and the FBI’s exposure of a kidnapping plot against an Iranian-American journalist living in Brooklyn.
"So they are doing this kind of thing all the time,” said former White House deputy national security adviser Victoria Coates, who specialized in Middle East and North African affairs during her tenure at the NSC under Trump. “So far, they haven’t been successful, but they only have to be successful once.”
Coates is one of the individuals named on Iran’s new sanctions list, which she agreed is “a euphemism for something more concrete” than an economic punishment or refusal to grant a hypothetical visa request.
“It would be reassuring if either somebody from the White House or the FBI wanted to reach out and say, ‘There are no current threats against you of which we are aware; do you have any concerns?’” she said.
Coates said that she isn’t aware of any such contact between the Biden team and former Trump administration officials such as herself and credited Sullivan for issuing the “very welcome” statement on Sunday. “They’ve been pretty busy,” she acknowledged. “There’s been a lot going on ... I’m very glad he’s focused on it.”
Sullivan urged Iranian officials not to mistake intra-American disagreements about the wisdom of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal as a sign that violence against the Trump team would be tolerated.
“As Americans, we have our disagreements on politics,” he said. “We have our disagreements on Iran policy. But we are united in our resolve against threats and provocations. We are united in the defense of our people.”
3. Paratrooper charged in Syria shootout acquitted of all charges
Paratrooper charged in Syria shootout acquitted of all charges
Sgt. 1st Class Robert Nicoson, the paratrooper who was accused of leading a patrol into an unnecessary gunfight in Syria before ordering troops to delete videos of the incident, was acquitted of all charges Friday evening after a court-martial at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.
The soldier’s civilian defense attorney, Phillip Stackhouse, argued that the patrol had briefed leaders that it would go to the checkpoint and the alleged threats Nicoson made were intended to deter an attack. Accusations that Nicoson tried to cover up the incident ultimately lost traction, as well.
“He was fully acquitted of all of the allegations,” Stackhouse told Army Times.
Spokesman for the 82nd Airborne Division, Lt. Col. Brett Lea, confirmed the acquittal Saturday morning.
The jury was comprised of two lieutenant colonels and six command sergeants major, Stackhouse said. They found Nicoson not guilty of all seven allegations. A motion for a finding of not guilty was granted to an eighth allegation at the end of the evidence phase.
“The trial lasted for a week and over 20 witnesses were called to the stand to provide testimony to a combat experienced panel,” Stackhouse said in an email to Army Times. “After just over 2-hours of deliberations, the panel president delivered the verdict in open court.
“Sergeant First Class Nicoson, and his family, continue to be humbled and thankful to those that have supported him and stood by his side.”
The charges against Nicoson came after an Aug. 17, 2020 incident at a checkpoint in northeastern Syria manned by troops loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Nicoson’s patrol drove up to the checkpoint and a gunfight unfolded.
Originally, Nicoson was charged with dismounting his vehicle and threatening to kill the pro-regime fighters if they did not allow his unit, Blackhorse Troop, 1st Squadron, 73rd Cavalry Regiment, through. U.S. officials said at the time of the incident that the Americans had initially been cleared to move through the checkpoint.
After “receiving safe passage from pro-regime forces,” the Americans “came under small arms fire from individuals in the vicinity of the checkpoint” and returned fire in self-defense, Operation Inherent Resolve spokespeople said at the time.
A roughly 10-minute gunfight reportedly erupted, leading to the killing of one Syrian fighter and the wounding of two others. There were no U.S. casualties. A portion of the gunfight was caught on video, though it does not show how it began.
U.S. soldiers conduct convoy operations in northeastern Syria Sept. 27, 2020. (Sgt. 1st Class Curt Loter/Army)
After the shootout, the charge sheets claimed Nicoson ordered two soldiers to delete video recordings of the unit’s actions at the checkpoint in an attempt to cover up any potential wrongdoing.
Early on, there were questions about the allegations.
The accusations against Nicoson were first reported in April by Army Times. Nicoson was arraigned in August. But a July preliminary hearing report obtained by Army Times detailed how the hearing officer recommended two charges against Nicoson be dismissed — failure to obey an order and reckless endangerment.
“Although there is probable cause to support both of the specifications, the facts, as presented, leave room for doubt,” the hearing report reads. “The evidence is contradictory and seems colored by multiple conversations, rumors, and/or training conducted in the aftermath of the incidents.”
The Army CID investigation did not start until a couple months after the August 2020 incident, the preliminary hearing officer wrote in his report, adding that the “witnesses seem to have inherent bias and prejudice as a result of what they were told after the fact.”
But the commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, Maj. Gen. Christopher Donahue, still approved the full slate of charges, including the two that the preliminary hearing officer recommended dismissing.
In total, Nicoson was charged with two counts of failure to obey an order; two counts of reckless endangerment; one count of communicating threats; and three counts of obstructing justice.
The August 2020 clash occurred in a part of Syria where a tenuous U.S. military presence has guarded lucrative oil fields and chased lingering Islamic State fighters since the collapse of the extremist group’s territorial possessions. But altercations — like the one that followed Nicoson home, as well as more tame ones involving Russian forces — have highlighted the unpredictable nature of the mission there.
Nicoson’s charge sheets stated that the soldiers were supposed to stay two kilometers away from checkpoints like the one they ultimately encountered. But at trial, the soldier’s squadron commander explained that the guidance was not a “black and white order,” Stackhouse told Army Times.
The platoon leader, Stackhouse said, also briefed “going to” the pro-regime checkpoint to the troop commander. That platoon leader, who was not charged and who Stackhouse called “a solid officer,” was speaking with higher headquarters while Nicoson interacted with pro-regime forces.
Nicoson spoke to the pro-regime forces through a linguist and there was “some disagreement about what was actually said,” Stackhouse argued. Additionally, there were pro-regime fighters setting up offensive fighting positions during the interaction, prompting fear that the Americans were about to be attacked.
“We argued what(ever) was said was in self-defense of himself and his soldiers in an attempt to deter an attack. Self Defense was an instruction given to the panel,” Stackhouse said in an email to Army Times. “Obviously we do not know upon what theory the members returned a not guilty verdict.”
“Regarding the videos, there were issues argued about if it was said, what was actually said, and why something may have been said,” Stackhouse added. “Regardless, our position was that nothing occurred that was obstruction of justice.”
Kyle Rempfer is an editor and reporter who has covered combat operations, criminal cases, foreign military assistance and training accidents. Before entering journalism, Kyle served in U.S. Air Force Special Tactics and deployed in 2014 to Paktika Province, Afghanistan, and Baghdad, Iraq. Follow on Twitter @Kyle_Rempfer
4. Taliban graduated 200 Special Forces completing three-month training
Everyone wants special forces.
Note ideological training.
Excerpt:
The statement reads that the Forces are equipped with Night Vision scopes and Laser mounted weapons and are given rigorous physical, mental and ideological training.
Taliban graduated 200 Special Forces completing three-month training - The Khaama Press News Agency
Interior Ministry of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan in a statement on Saturday, January 8, 2022, said that a battalion of 200 Special Forces graduated after completing the three-month course in Kabul.
The statement reads that the Forces are equipped with Night Vision scopes and Laser mounted weapons and are given rigorous physical, mental and ideological training.
“The forces are have been trained by Afghan instructors with high Islamic morale and Afghan pride and they are accustomed to all kinds of climate conditions such as urban, desert, and mountainous terrain.” Reads the statement.
The statement further reads that the battalion will be able to thwart any attack or plan of the enemy.
It is worth mentioning that, the interior ministry has started training of this kind in all provinces of Afghanistan and the forces will soon be completed.
It comes at a time when the ministry is yet to provide its rank-and-file as a specific uniform.
Ministry of Defense has said that they have started working on making a hundred-thousand-member army.
5. The Continuing Storm
Excerpts:
The institutional, social, economic and political crises are in full view now and resemble much of the prior cycle. Presidents do not make history, but they do preside over it, the best managing the system to go where it must. If history follows the past, which it does not do in detail, the 2022 elections will further make the system unworkable while the crisis intensifies. As the last cycle reached back to Roosevelt, the 2024 election will likely reach back to Reagan, at least in spirit. The spirit won’t work, and I would guess that 2028 will bring to power the heir to Jackson, Hayes, Roosevelt and Reagan, none of whom knew how to solve the problem, but will preside over the problem resolving itself, both institutionally and socio-economically.
The hard times aren’t over yet. Isolated expertise continues to rule, and our animosity for those different from us politically, socially and racially will not give up.
So far my forecast for this decade has worked out, but there is ample opportunity for me to be proved wrong. I rather hope I am wrong, but I can’t deny a counter wish for being right.
The Continuing Storm
It has been about two years since “The Storm Before the Calm: America’s Discord, the Crisis of the 2020s, and the Triumph Beyond” was published, and about three years since I submitted it to my editor at Penguin Random House. As 2022 begins, I’d like to summarize where I think we are.
Let’s begin with the American institutional crisis, which is intensifying. Historically, institutional crises in the U.S. are generated by wars – the American Revolution, the Civil War, World War II – in 80-year intervals, each creating different structures for managing the federal government. This time is different. 2025 will be 80 years since the end of World War II. But our institutions are already shifting, driven not by war but by COVID-19.
World War II was won by experts, and in its aftermath, experts were placed at the center of governance. The weakness of expertise is that experts are structurally narrow. They know their fields brilliantly but can’t know the whole. COVID-19 places medical experts at the center of things. But as I have argued, their expertise could address the medical problem (and I think they have done fairly well), but they are institutionally indifferent to the consequences of their solutions outside their field. Their institutional solutions created massive disruption, from developmental problems in children due to distance learning and no social interaction with each other to enormous economic and social problems. The supply chain crisis continues to threaten huge economic dislocation. The social tensions that have arisen have intensified political divisions in the United States and elsewhere, as well as individual frictions that can be seen clearly in air travel. The pandemic generated a range of problems beyond the medical sphere, and some of them had deep ramifications for the future.
I argued in my book that expertise is necessary, but that there was no systematic method of bringing other areas of expertise to bear, and in particular no institution that could oversee the multiple and sometimes contradictory areas of expertise. The office of the president is incapable of carrying out this function. George Washington created the Cabinet to support the president, but the Cabinet is almost moribund while any president is limited. What is needed is institutionalized common sense. Common sense can see beyond any single solution and measure the net result with a sense of the future of the commonwealth. An institutional shift will take place that controls expertise without dispensing with it.
We are seeing the institutional problem all around us, with the economy, society and polity. I think we can see a solution, but as with war, the fog of an institutional shift remains, and the crisis will deepen in multiple areas before a solution is forced on the system. We are getting there but are not there yet.
The social and political crisis is obvious. The country has split into two political camps that hold each other in utter contempt. Congress is almost evenly divided, and there is no clarity emerging politically, nor any common understanding on any issues, which means that the pressure on the decaying institutional system will intensify. Looking back at the late 1960s and 1970s, the last socio-economic shift, we see violent riots, frequently pivoting on race, and an economic system of intensifying inflation, presidents forced from office or impeached and so on. I would benchmark us at about 1975, with the violence declining a bit, the economy seeming to be out of control, and the political system incapable of functioning and trying to absorb defeat in Vietnam while coping with the Soviet Union and China. The major difference this time is the labor shortage, whereas in 1975 the problem was unemployment.
President Gerald Ford could not get control of the government or deal with the problems. It was not his fault, but the time was not right – the social and political system was not yet unsustainable. The idea was taking hold that the nation ought to reach back into the Roosevelt era and solve the problem that way. Thus, Jimmy Carter was elected, and he decided to cut taxes on the lower- and middle-income classes, at a time of inflation. It had an inevitable effect and delegitimized the Roosevelt era. Ronald Reagan was elected next, and without fully understanding what was happening, he presided over the opening of the new era.
The institutional, social, economic and political crises are in full view now and resemble much of the prior cycle. Presidents do not make history, but they do preside over it, the best managing the system to go where it must. If history follows the past, which it does not do in detail, the 2022 elections will further make the system unworkable while the crisis intensifies. As the last cycle reached back to Roosevelt, the 2024 election will likely reach back to Reagan, at least in spirit. The spirit won’t work, and I would guess that 2028 will bring to power the heir to Jackson, Hayes, Roosevelt and Reagan, none of whom knew how to solve the problem, but will preside over the problem resolving itself, both institutionally and socio-economically.
The hard times aren’t over yet. Isolated expertise continues to rule, and our animosity for those different from us politically, socially and racially will not give up.
So far my forecast for this decade has worked out, but there is ample opportunity for me to be proved wrong. I rather hope I am wrong, but I can’t deny a counter wish for being right.
In The Storm Before the Calm, George Friedman, master geopolitical forecaster and New York Times bestselling author of The Next 100 Years focuses on the United States, predicting how the 2020s will bring dramatic upheaval and reshaping of American government, foreign policy, economics, and culture. A Bloomberg Best Books of 2020. For more by George Friedman go to https://geopoliticalfutures.com/
6. Analysis | Kazakhstan called for assistance. Why did Russia dispatch troops so quickly?
The key point is in the subtitle and the conclusion here. It is all about protecting authoritarian regimes.
Conclusion:
This week may have “changed Kazakhstan forever,” but Russia’s intervention under CSTO auspices crystallizes an ongoing trend: Regional organizations, leaders and norms worldwide are bolstering autocracies and promoting illiberal norms and practices.
Analysis | Kazakhstan called for assistance. Why did Russia dispatch troops so quickly?
Preserving autocracies is a primary goal for regional organizations like the CSTO.
On Jan. 5, the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) agreed to send troops to help the Kazakh government quell mounting political unrest. What had started as protests against a rise in fuel prices in the western city of Zhanaozen rapidly turned into broad demonstrations against government corruption and lack of reforms across Kazakhstan’s major cities, including the largest city of Almaty. President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev blamed the protests on a “terrorist threat.”
The CSTO’s rotating chair, Armenian Prime Minister Pashinyan, granted Tokayev’s request for assistance within hours — following “all-night consultations” that included Russian President Vladimir Putin and Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko. Russian troops comprised the bulk of the 2,500 dispatched, reportedly tasked with securing Almaty airport, major energy facilities and the Russian-operated cosmodrome at Baikonur.
What is the CSTO?
What does this deployment mean — and what is the CSTO? Some analysts see the deployment of Russian troops as analogous to the Soviet Union’s intervention in the domestic affairs of Warsaw Pact countries. But this first intervention by the Eurasian security organization isn’t a callback to the Cold War. My research suggests it’s a sign of the rise of contemporary regional organizations designed to protect the survival of autocratic regimes.
The Collective Security Treaty Organization currently has six members — Russia, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. It has its origins as the Collective Security Treaty, signed in 1992 as a follow-up to the Commonwealth of Independent States, formed after the Soviet Union dissolved.
The CSTO has been building its capacity since the 2000s — in part as a reaction to the U.S. military presence in Central Asia. It enacted the legal framework for Russian military bases in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, allowed members to buy weapons at Russian domestic rates and pursued a common air defense system. Decision-making is greatly influenced by Russia, but countries have joined and then withdrawn (Uzbekistan joined in 2006 and then withdrew again in 2012). The organization features a rotating chairmanship and an interparliamentary assembly.
Western policymakers and analysts largely dismiss the CSTO as an unconvincing attempt to mimic Western organizations like NATO. U.S. and NATO policymakers refused to engage with the CSTO or treat it as a regional security organization, to avoid granting it legitimacy.
The CSTO has boosted its capacity
Regional scholars note the CSTO’s increasing capabilities. In 2009, for instance, the CSTO established a rapid response force. In December 2010, it adopted new rules on interventions, allowing the organization to deploy peacekeepers to deal with domestic unrest in member countries.
The CSTO’s record of nonintervention — even when members had urgently requested the dispatch of troops — helped support the prevailing view that the CSTO was mere legal fiction. For example, Kyrgyzstan’s acting premier appealed to Russia in 2010 to send forces under CSTO auspices to rein in clashing Kyrgyz and Uzbek ethnic mobs.
In autumn 2020, the organization rebuffed Armenia’s appeal for assistance in the renewed conflict with Azerbaijan over Nagorno Karabakh and surrounding territories. In both cases, CSTO officials cited legal reasons why its mandate prevented interventions, but Russia also seemed reluctant to be drawn into these regional conflicts.
Why Kazakhstan?
Given the history of CSTO inaction, why did Russia agree with such haste to support the CSTO’s intervention in Kazakhstan? For one, both Russia and Belarus fear large-scale protests could reverberate across the region (including in their own countries), especially if inspired or supported by foreign influences.
And Russian and CSTO forces have now effectively weighed into a domestic political clash. The political crisis in Kazakhstan is not merely one of bottom-up protests. It is also a high-level power struggle between current President Tokayev and former president Nursultan Nazarbayev.
Nazarbayev officially stepped down as president in 2019, but continued his influence as chairman of the country’s Security Council. His family and allies still control most of the country’s lucrative strategic and extractive industries. By intervening now, Russia is signaling to any wavering Kazakh security forces that power and authority firmly reside with Tokayev.
Reports now indicate that Nazarbayev’s main political ally (as well as twice former prime minister, and intelligence chief head), Karim Massimov, was arrested on charges of treason. A spokesman for Nazarbayev claimed the former president is in the capital, Nur-Sultan, despite rumors that he and his family members may have fled abroad.
How regional organizations reinforce autocracy
The evolving situation in Kazakhstan supports international relations scholarship about Russian (and Chinese-led) regional organizations in Central Asia. Many experts view the true role of these organizations as defending the autocratic regimes and practices of their members, rather than promoting integration.
The CSTO is an example of what international relations scholar Roy Allison’s calls “protective integration.” While ostensibly a military organization, the CSTO serves a larger role, protecting authoritarian governments by fostering a regional “culture of interaction, normative bonding, and collective political solidarity.”
And the CSTO is just one example of the increased role of international organizations in the rise of what political scientists Alexander Libman and Anastasia Obydenkova term “authoritarian regionalism,” a phenomenon Dan Nexon and I also explore in our book on the waning of the U.S.-led global liberal order. In the 1990s and early 2000s regional organizations seemed to promote democratic values and procedures. The trend now — especially in Eurasia — is for regional groups to defend autocracy in member nations by redistributing resources and providing legitimacy to politically embattled rulers.
What’s the endgame in Kazakhstan?
Protesters — and others critical of the regime — may view Russia’s actions as an unacceptable violation of Kazakhstan’s sovereignty, and question the validity of the “peacekeeping” concept as applied to CSTO troops. And they may predict that Tokayev lacks the legitimacy and capacity to quell social unrest without introducing real reforms to address pressing issues like rising prices, perceptions of elite corruption and Kazakhstan’s stark economic inequalities.
But Tokayev appears to be doubling down on repression — he dismissed international calls for a peaceful solution and negotiations with protesters as “idiocy” and warned on Friday that his security forces would “shoot to kill without warning.”
This week may have “changed Kazakhstan forever,” but Russia’s intervention under CSTO auspices crystallizes an ongoing trend: Regional organizations, leaders and norms worldwide are bolstering autocracies and promoting illiberal norms and practices.
7. America’s Asia Strategy Has Reached a Dead End
Quite a double entendre in the subtitle.
Yes, "its the economy stupid." But it is both/and and not either/or. We need the proper balance among the instructions of national power - not just military and economic. And it is not economic statecraft. It is simply starcraft.
However, our adversaries are using all their instruments of national power to support their political warfare strategies. We need a superior political warfare strategy that effectively integrates all elements of national power within balance and coherence among ends, ways, and means.
But from an economic perspective we will long be suffering from one of the worst strategic decisions made in the 21st Century - the. withdrawal from the Trans Pacific partnership (TPP).
Conclusion:
If the United States can prioritize economic statecraft oriented toward stability and peace, help Asian economies reduce inequality and adapt to climate change, and give up its effort to sustain a hegemony it no longer has, it will help Asia create a stability that is not only greater, but better and more just. It might even offset the loss of Washington’s once cooperative relationship with Beijing, which did more to keep Asia peaceful than many U.S. officials appreciate. In a world colored by Sino-U.S. rivalry, Asia needs a new source of stability. Fresh thinking about political economy may be just that.
America’s Asia Strategy Has Reached a Dead End
An expert's point of view on a current event.
Washington must finally prioritize economic statecraft and stop thinking with its missiles.
By Van Jackson, a senior lecturer in international relations at Victoria University of Wellington.
U.S. President Joe Biden delivers remarks during the annual U.S.-ASEAN Summit via video link from Washington on Oct. 26, 2021. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
In December 2021, the Biden administration’s Indo-Pacific coordinator, Kurt Campbell, detailed the shape of U.S. thinking about China and Asia during a conference on Indo-Pacific security. He hit all the familiar notes: the importance of alliances, weapons sales to counter China, the centrality of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), and the optimistic view that Sino-U.S. relations could be at once competitive and stable.
In any other era, such talk might have been comfort food for regional experts and policymakers. But absent from Campbell’s remarks at the conference, which was organized by Australia’s Lowy Institute, was any meaningful statement about political economy—the single aspect of statecraft most crucial to the Indo-Pacific region’s stability. It is in this arena of policy that China has done more to displace the United States than in any other, and it remains the glaring hole in Washington’s attempts to craft an Indo-Pacific policy. When pressed on this by his host, Campbell acknowledged that defense initiatives were not enough. But he could mention no concept, policy, or action to suggest economics was anything more than a throwaway gesture in a speech. Grand references to a forthcoming “economic framework” that would be “cutting-edge” lacked all specifics and stated no purpose other than wanting the United States to “design” the region’s standards.
To the extent Campbell’s remarks reflect Washington’s view of Asia, they are at once modestly reassuring and highly troubling. Reassuring because Campbell’s bland rhetorical restraint is a refreshing departure from the volatility and pugnaciousness of the Trump administration. Troubling, however, because the ideas powering U.S. President Joe Biden’s Asia policy are as bland as the rhetoric itself. U.S. policy toward the world’s most important region is no more than a mashup of the residual inertia from Trump’s military-first Asia policy with a revival of then-U.S. President Barack Obama’s well-intentioned but ill-fated “pivot to Asia,” which also had a heavily militarized agenda.
In December 2021, the Biden administration’s Indo-Pacific coordinator, Kurt Campbell, detailed the shape of U.S. thinking about China and Asia during a conference on Indo-Pacific security. He hit all the familiar notes: the importance of alliances, weapons sales to counter China, the centrality of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), and the optimistic view that Sino-U.S. relations could be at once competitive and stable.
In any other era, such talk might have been comfort food for regional experts and policymakers. But absent from Campbell’s remarks at the conference, which was organized by Australia’s Lowy Institute, was any meaningful statement about political economy—the single aspect of statecraft most crucial to the Indo-Pacific region’s stability. It is in this arena of policy that China has done more to displace the United States than in any other, and it remains the glaring hole in Washington’s attempts to craft an Indo-Pacific policy. When pressed on this by his host, Campbell acknowledged that defense initiatives were not enough. But he could mention no concept, policy, or action to suggest economics was anything more than a throwaway gesture in a speech. Grand references to a forthcoming “economic framework” that would be “cutting-edge” lacked all specifics and stated no purpose other than wanting the United States to “design” the region’s standards.
To the extent Campbell’s remarks reflect Washington’s view of Asia, they are at once modestly reassuring and highly troubling. Reassuring because Campbell’s bland rhetorical restraint is a refreshing departure from the volatility and pugnaciousness of the Trump administration. Troubling, however, because the ideas powering U.S. President Joe Biden’s Asia policy are as bland as the rhetoric itself. U.S. policy toward the world’s most important region is no more than a mashup of the residual inertia from Trump’s military-first Asia policy with a revival of then-U.S. President Barack Obama’s well-intentioned but ill-fated “pivot to Asia,” which also had a heavily militarized agenda.
Consequently, the United States is misallocating its attention and influence relative to what would actually benefit the region most. Economic policy, not defense policy, is the only way to address the interrelated problems of development, pandemic recovery, and adaptation to climate change—issues that plague policymakers throughout Asia and threaten to derail the region’s peace and prosperity.
Washington must also stop conflating economic strategy with stale tropes on free trade and coercive sanctions.
This is precisely the trouble with U.S. engagement in Asia to date: The United States has no economic strategy for the region—at least not since Obama’s ill-fated attempt to negotiate a new U.S.-Asia trade agreement, the Trans-Pacific Partnership. And it is unrealistic to expect any economic strategy beyond the free-trade pabulum so sharply at odds with U.S. domestic political constraints.
So what is the United States to do?
First, Washington must obviously prioritize economic statecraft and stop thinking with its missiles. It is clear from the way U.S. leaders talk about their country’s role in Asia that trade, aid, finance, and development are not as privileged in their minds as the Pentagon; economic equality outside U.S. borders does not even appear to register as a problem needing attention. If that does not change, the United States will continue to place itself on the wrong side of trends—including defense spending, naval expansion, nuclear modernization, and missile proliferation—that are turning the region into a powder keg, which serves no one except the defense industry.
Second, Washington needs an economic policy for Asia—one that tries to do actual good for the region instead of furthering only abstract U.S. interests. And there is much the United States can do to do right by Asia.
For instance, U.S. officials could use the United States’ privileged position in the global economy to negotiate various forms of debt relief on behalf of low- and middle-income countries in the region that have been hit particularly hard by the pandemic, such as the Philippines and Malaysia. (The United States did this for Iraq after the 2003 U.S. invasion.) Washington could also grant these countries preferential trade access, which would be a boon to Asia’s export-dependent economies.
The right kind of economic engagement would also focus on incentivizing the region’s U.S. partners to make progress on labor rights, fair treatment of workers, floor wages for companies that export to the United States, and anti-kleptocracy initiatives. Washington could also offer massive aid for the transition to green energy in developing Asian nations.
All this and more are in the realm of the possible and good. But accomplishing them requires recognizing that economic statecraft is the foundation for regional stability, durable peace, and more equitable development in low-income countries. Above all, Washington must stop conflating economic strategy with stale tropes on free trade and coercive sanctions.
The third thing the United States should do is recognize its own limits. The United States is not Asia’s economic hegemon, even though recently declassified documents suggest that U.S. officials still think it is. Since the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis, the region’s dense financial and trade architecture has largely moved on without the United States. And that’s okay. There’s nothing threatening about regional institutions that are exclusively Asian, especially if they help the region manage balance-of-payments issues and encourage capital controls to avoid future fiscal crises. Not every problem can be solved by U.S. power—especially when the United States no longer enjoys the position of primacy it did at the end of the Cold War. Insisting otherwise is a path to ruin.
If the United States can prioritize economic statecraft oriented toward stability and peace, help Asian economies reduce inequality and adapt to climate change, and give up its effort to sustain a hegemony it no longer has, it will help Asia create a stability that is not only greater, but better and more just. It might even offset the loss of Washington’s once cooperative relationship with Beijing, which did more to keep Asia peaceful than many U.S. officials appreciate. In a world colored by Sino-U.S. rivalry, Asia needs a new source of stability. Fresh thinking about political economy may be just that.
This essay is published in cooperation with the Asian Peace Programme at the National University of Singapore’s Asia Research Institute.
Van Jackson is a senior lecturer in international relations at Victoria University of Wellington, a distinguished fellow at the Asia-Pacific Foundation of Canada, and a defense and strategy fellow at Victoria University of Wellington's Centre for Strategic Studies. Twitter: @WonkVJ
8. Myanmar's Suu Kyi faces six years in jail after new sentences -source
Myanmar's Suu Kyi faces six years in jail after new sentences -source
- Summary
- Suu Kyi given four-year jail term on three more charges
- Charges include possession of unlicensed walkie-talkies
- All her charges could amount to over 100 years in prison
- Junta critics say cases designed to end her political career
- Verdict is politically motivated, Nobel Committee says
Jan 10 (Reuters) - A court in military-ruled Myanmar on Monday sentenced ousted leader Aung San Suu Kyi to four years in jail on charges including possession of unlicensed walkie-talkies, a source familiar with the proceedings said.
The latest sentencing in legal proceedings that rights groups have criticised as a farce and a "courtroom circus" means she faces a six-year jail term after two convictions last month.
She is on trial in nearly a dozen cases that carry combined maximum sentences of more than 100 years in prison. She denies all charges. read more
Nobel laureate Suu Kyi, 76, appeared calm when the verdict was read out on Monday in a court in the capital, Naypyitaw, said another source with knowledge of the court proceedings.
Suu Kyi was detained on the day of the Feb. 1 coup and days later, police said six illegally imported walkie-talkies were found during a search of her home.
The court handed her a two-year sentence for breaching an export-import law by possessing the handheld radios and one year for having a set of signal jammers. The two sentences will run concurrently, said the source.
She was also sentenced to two years on another charge of breaching a natural disaster management law related to coronavirus rules, the source said.
Myanmar has been in turmoil since the coup against Suu Kyi's democratically elected government led to widespread protests and signalled the end of 10 years of tentative political reforms that followed decades of strict military rule.
On Dec. 6, she received a four-year jail sentence for incitement and breaching coronavirus rules.
That sentence, which was later reduced to two years, was met by a chorus of international condemnation.
Rights group Amnesty International said on Twitter on Monday the new convictions were "the latest act in the farcical trial against the civilian leader".
Myanmar's National League for Democracy Party leader Aung San Suu Kyi arrives at a news conference at her home in Yangon November 5, 2015. REUTERS/Jorge Silva/File Photo
It called for her release along with thousands of others "unjustly detained" since the coup.
"The latest verdict against Aung San Suu Kyi is a politically motivated verdict. Aung San Suu Kyi continues to be the leading champion of democracy in Myanmar," Berit Reiss-Andersen, the chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, told Reuters.
"The Nobel Committee is deeply concerned about her situation," she added.
SECRETIVE TRIAL
Suu Kyi's supporters say the cases against her are baseless and designed to end her political career and leave the military free to wield power untrammelled by any challenge.
The junta says Suu Kyi is being given due process by an independent court led by a judge appointed by her own administration. A spokesman for the military council could not be immediately reached for comment.
Her trial has been closed to the media and Suu Kyi's lawyers have been barred from communicating with the media and public.
The military has not disclosed where Suu Kyi, who spent years under house arrest under a previous military government, is being detained.
"The Myanmar junta’s courtroom circus of secret proceedings on bogus charges is all about steadily piling up more convictions ... so that she will remain in prison indefinitely," Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director for Human Rights Watch, said in a statement.
Military ruler Min Aung Hlaing last month said Suu Kyi and ousted President Win Myint would remain in the same location during their trials and would not be sent to prison.
Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen did not seek to meet Suu Kyi during a visit to the country last week for talks with its military rulers. read more
Reporting by Reuters Staff Writing by Ed Davies Editing by Martin Petty, Robert Birsel, William Maclean
9. (Reserve) Army Officer Relieved of Command, Facing Discharge over Racist Social Media Posts
Army Officer Relieved of Command, Facing Discharge over Racist Social Media Posts
military.com · by Steve Beynon,Konstantin Toropin · January 7, 2022
A lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve was relieved of command in 2020 and is now facing removal from the force after he peddled racist opinions to his troops and peppered his social media accounts with a consistent flow of outlandish posts attacking public officials that his own lawyer described as racist, inflammatory and in poor taste.
Lt. Col. Michael Spillane, a medical officer with the 7207th Medical Support Group based out of Webster, New York, wrote a memo to soldiers under his command in June 2020, warning them of the "medical crisis created by China" and that "peaceful assemblies have turned into riots, looting, and shooting."
It was a memo full of typos and half truths laced with partisan wink and nod warnings about Democrats and minority-led protests amid a reckoning of racial justice, a highly atypical memo from an Army officer to his troops. Spillane's commander, Col. Jeffery Wood, later described the memo as offensive and inflammatory, in documents reviewed by Military.com.
"There is no reason to use such broad generalizations that can be taken as offensive," Wood wrote in a June 29, 2020, disciplinary statement for Spillane.
But it wasn't just Spillane's bizarre memo to his troops that led to a recent recommendation by a review board to remove him from service after a review of his conduct found him guilty of Article 133 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), Conduct Unbecoming an Officer and Gentleman. Troops are allowed to share political views, but regulations urge commentary to reflect "Army Values." The board also pointed to a waterfall of offensive memes posted to his Facebook account as justification to separate Spillane with a general discharge under honorable conditions. His discharge is awaiting final approval.
"Posting material on your personal social media that is clearly offensive is inconsistent with the Army Values and being a leader in the U.S. Army Reserve," Wood added into Spillane's record. "As we tell our newest soldiers, what you do in your civilian capacity reflects on your military position. You are in an especially sensitive position as a commander to affect your military position when you post or link offensive messages. Your soldiers are seeing these things and forming opinions about you."
While Spillane's lawyer, Sean Timmons, managing partner with Tully Rinckey's Houston office, agrees his client's posts are indeed offensive, the discharge status raises the stakes -- any status that isn't honorable can have dire consequences for a veteran. So-called "bad paper" discharges can exclude a veteran from benefits, mostly the GI Bill; hurt employment opportunities; and overall leave the veteran with a stigma that's difficult to shake off. Because of that, Timmons wants the Army to allow Spillane to leave with an honorable discharge.
In addition, Timmons argues that this is a First Amendment issue. Army regulations have vague guidance against posting obscene material on social media, and the UCMJ has rules against contempt toward public officials, including members of Congress. One Army legal official who spoke to Military.com on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about the case said troops are allowed to make political statements and engage in the democratic system, but the spirit of military law aims to forbid reckless and offensive slander toward elected officials.
Another post that Spillane shared was an altered Cream of Wheat box cover that replaced the product name with the phrase "Cream of Nothing" and swapped out the now-removed smiling, African American chef's face with that of President Barack Obama.
The chef caricature was removed from Cream of Wheat boxes in the fall of 2020 after the maker of the hot cereal noted that many found the logo offensive. The image dates back to the turn of the last century and was originally a smiling Black man called Rastus -- a pejorative term for Black men and a frequent character in minstrel shows. More recently, the image was intended to depict Chicago chef Frank L. White – though, in announcing the image's removal from its branding, the company said that it understood that he still reminded many of the original racist logo.
"The posts were objectively sexist, bigoted and offensive," Timmons told Military.com. "The question is what jurisdiction does the military have over a reservist in his private capacity on his private Facebook, posting his private political opinions? Our legal research is there is no jurisdiction."
A spokesperson with the Army Reserve did not respond to a request for comment.
Multiple posts by Spillane appeared to be sympathetic to the Confederacy, the rebel group that waged a gruesome war against the U.S. mostly over the right to preserve slavery. One post shows an image of the Confederate flag, saying that "if this symbol represents racism in America, so do these" and lists logos for the Democratic Party, the BET media company, the NAACP and the Hispanic Scholarship Fund.
The post trashed efforts to support historically disadvantaged communities, peddling falsehoods from the far right that minorities get systemic advantages over white Americans, such as overabundant access to college scholarships through avenues like the Hispanic Scholarship Fund -- which grants mostly small scholarships to American citizens and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program recipients.
Another showed an image of Robert E. Lee with text, "Do not take a knee, take a stand! Support Saving out history and our nation," in an apparent reference to Colin Kaepernick, a former Black NFL quarterback who was a cultural lightning rod for rightwing pundits and lawmakers for kneeling during the national anthem at the start of football games, protesting racial inequality and police brutality.
Spillane also made numerous anti-Muslim posts. One saying, "77 years after Pearl Harbor, it still hurts. But, 19 years after 9/11, we are importing them in and they're writing our laws," an apparent reference freshman lawmakers Reps. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., and Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., both of whom are Muslim and have drawn the partisan and racially charged ire of rightwing media and some GOP lawmakers. Tlaib was born in Detroit, while Omar was born in Somalia and moved to the U.S. as a teenager after her family sought asylum from violence in the East African country.
Another post shows an image of white men in hard hats and a photo of a Muslim family, saying, "Men like this are forced to work until they're 70, because the government is bringing in more and more people like this."
It is unclear how many troops have faced consequences for conduct on social media, but Spillane may be one of the first soldiers to be booted from the force in the wake of the Pentagon's newly announced policies aimed at eliminating extremism in the ranks. The 21-page report announcing those policies, released Dec. 20, specifically noted that "military personnel are responsible for the content they publish on all personal and public Internet domains, including social media sites, blogs, websites, and applications."
When the policy was announced, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby noted that the newly prohibited behavior "wouldn't be something that the command or the department's going to be actively fishing for." The investigation on Spillane was initiated after soldiers in his unit reported his online conduct, and the Pentagon seemingly had no involvement in flagging his posts or the investigation, according to documents reviewed by Military.com.
A soldier, whose identity was withheld in documents obtained by Military.com, told investigators in the inquiry that led to Spillane's removal from command in 2020 that he circulated a memo to his troops dated June 24, 2020, telling them they can express themselves freely on social media when not on duty.
"We all have personal beliefs and feelings, that is one benefit living in a Free Country," Spillane wrote in the memo reviewed by Military.com. "As a member of the US Army Reserves we are Citizen Soldiers and unless we are are orders, we all have a right to express these views. However once you are on Orders regardless of beliefs, race, gender we all put on green and follow the rules and regulations set fourth by the Department of Defense."
Military.com is exactly reproducing those passages as written.
The soldier, whose statement to investigators suggested they are above Spillane in the chain of command, questioned him about his memo on June 30, 2020.
"LTC Spillane seemed to not grasp the idea that someone could take offense to his posts or that his position as a commander requires greater scrutiny and empathy," the soldier said. "Furthermore, he indicated to me that he plans to file an EO [equal opportunity] complaint as he believes that he is being discriminated against and stated that he finds the phrase 'Black Lives Matter' to be racist and he takes offense to seeing it on his soldiers' Facebook posts."
Some soldiers interviewed by investigators described Spillane as an effective commander who displayed no racist, sexist or otherwise offensive behavior in person, entirely different from his online persona.
"Everyone has their faults but as a commander, the expectations are higher of them," another soldier said to investigators. "LTC Spillane just needs a little guidance due to his awkward personality."
Others described him as a subpar leader. When one soldier was asked by investigators whether Spillane was effective, they simply replied, "No, not really."
Another soldier went on to paint a bleak picture of Spillane's leadership, saying he and someone identified as Cpt. Colon ordered them to drive 530 miles overnight or be counted as absent without leave, or AWOL, after the soldier requested to care for their dad who was going through prostate cancer treatment.
The soldier had to jump the chain of command, going to Spillane's superiors and a command sergeant major to get permission to stay with their sick dad.
"Honestly though, what type of leader orders their subordinates to drive 530 miles in one day, let alone overnight?"
Scrutiny of service member's social media content is not new. Early in 2021, the Pentagon said it was planning to examine posted content of personnel undergoing reviews for security clearances.
The training material released as part of that announcement noted that, while troops have First Amendment rights to speak freely and assemble peaceably, the military must still assess their character, honesty, discretion, judgment and trustworthiness when deciding whether they are reliable enough to have access to classified or sensitive information.
In 2019, a Marine lance corporal was booted from the service after his racist social media posts came to light. Lance Cpl. Mason Mead shared a photo of a swastika, a quote from a Nazi collaborator, and an image of himself in blackface. He also encouraged violence against women.
While Spillane is looking at the end of his career after offensive posts, the military and particularly the National Guard have been slow to crack down on the force.
-- Konstantin Toropin can be reached at konstantin.toropin@military.com. Follow him on Twitter @ktoropin.
military.com · by Steve Beynon,Konstantin Toropin · January 7, 2022
10. Opinion | Steve Bannon Is Onto Something
He is onto something? It is ironic how many of Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals Bannon and his ilk employ. We associate Alinsky's rules with communists and socialist (and leftist, progressive, liberals). But the fact is his rules are really for extremists who seek political power and they are equally useful to those on the extreme left and extreme right. And whether it is on the extreme left or extreme right the pursuit of political power leads to one outcome - authoritarianism - which is sought by either extreme of the political spectrum.
1. “Power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have.” Power is derived from 2 main sources – money and people. “Have-Nots” must build power from flesh and blood.
2. “Never go outside the expertise of your people.” It results in confusion, fear and retreat. Feeling secure adds to the backbone of anyone.
3. “Whenever possible, go outside the expertise of the enemy.” Look for ways to increase insecurity, anxiety and uncertainty.
4. “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.” If the rule is that every letter gets a reply, send 30,000 letters. You can kill them with this because no one can possibly obey all of their own rules.
5. “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.” There is no defense. It’s irrational. It’s infuriating. It also works as a key pressure point to force the enemy into concessions.
6. “A good tactic is one your people enjoy.” They’ll keep doing it without urging and come back to do more. They’re doing their thing, and will even suggest better ones.
7. “A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.” Don’t become old news.
8. “Keep the pressure on. Never let up.” Keep trying new things to keep the opposition off balance. As the opposition masters one approach, hit them from the flank with something new.
9. “The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.” Imagination and ego can dream up many more consequences than any activist.
10. “The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.” It is this unceasing pressure that results in the reactions from the opposition that are essential for the success of the campaign.
11. “If you push a negative hard enough, it will push through and become a positive.” Violence from the other side can win the public to your side because the public sympathizes with the underdog.
12. “The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.” Never let the enemy score points because you’re caught without a solution to the problem.
13. “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions.
https://www.openculture.com/2017/02/13-rules-for-radicals.html
As an aside, I recommend all unconventional warfare practitioners read and become well versed in Alinsky's rules.
Opinion | Steve Bannon Is Onto Something
Ezra Klein
Steve Bannon Is Onto Something
Jan. 9, 2022
An election worker in Port Orchard, Wash., on Nov. 3, 2020.Credit...Ian Allen for The New York Times
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In his 2020 book “Politics Is for Power,” Eitan Hersh, a political scientist at Tufts, sketched a day in the life of many political obsessives in sharp, if cruel, terms.
I refresh my Twitter feed to keep up on the latest political crisis, then toggle over to Facebook to read clickbait news stories, then over to YouTube to see a montage of juicy clips from the latest congressional hearing. I then complain to my family about all the things I don’t like that I have seen.
To Hersh, that’s not politics. It’s what he calls “political hobbyism.” And it’s close to a national pastime. “A third of Americans say they spend two hours or more each day on politics,” he writes. “Of these people, four out of five say that not one minute of that time is spent on any kind of real political work. It’s all TV news and podcasts and radio shows and social media and cheering and booing and complaining to friends and family.”
Real political work, for Hersh, is the intentional, strategic accumulation of power in service of a defined end. It is action in service of change, not information in service of outrage. This distinction is on my mind because, like so many others, I’ve spent the week revisiting the attempted coup of Jan. 6, marinating in my fury toward the Republicans who put fealty toward Donald Trump above loyalty toward country and the few but pivotal Senate Democrats who are proving, day after day, that they think the filibuster more important than the franchise. Let me tell you, the tweets and columns I drafted in my head were searing.
But fury is useful only as fuel. We need a Plan B for democracy. Plan A was to pass H.R. 1 and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. Neither bill, as of now, has a path to President Biden’s desk. I’ve found that you provoke a peculiar anger if you state this, as if admitting the problem were the cause of the problem. I fear denial has left many Democrats stuck on a national strategy with little hope of near-term success. In order to protect democracy, Democrats have to win more elections. And to do that, they need to make sure the country’s local electoral machinery isn’t corrupted by the Trumpist right.
“The people thinking strategically about how to win the 2022 election are the ones doing the most for democracy,” said Daniel Ziblatt, a political scientist at Harvard and one of the authors of “How Democracies Die.” “I’ve heard people saying bridges don’t save democracy — voting rights do. But for Democrats to be in a position to protect democracy, they need bigger majorities.”
There are people working on a Plan B. This week, I half-jokingly asked Ben Wikler, the chairman of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, what it felt like to be on the front lines of protecting American democracy. He replied, dead serious, by telling me what it was like. He spends his days obsessing over mayoral races in 20,000-person towns, because those mayors appoint the city clerks who decide whether to pull the drop boxes for mail-in ballots and small changes to electoral administration could be the difference between winning Senator Ron Johnson’s seat in 2022 (and having a chance at democracy reform) and losing the race and the Senate. Wikler is organizing volunteers to staff phone banks to recruit people who believe in democracy to serve as municipal poll workers, because Steve Bannon has made it his mission to recruit people who don’t believe in democracy to serve as municipal poll workers.
I’ll say this for the right: They pay attention to where the power lies in the American system, in ways the left sometimes doesn’t. Bannon calls this “the precinct strategy,” and it’s working. “Suddenly, people who had never before showed interest in party politics started calling the local G.O.P. headquarters or crowding into county conventions, eager to enlist as precinct officers,” ProPublica reports. “They showed up in states Trump won and in states he lost, in deep-red rural areas, in swing-voting suburbs and in populous cities.”
The difference between those organizing at the local level to shape democracy and those raging ineffectually about democratic backsliding — myself included — remind me of the old line about war: Amateurs talk strategy; professionals talk logistics. Right now, Trumpists are talking logistics.
“We do not have one federal election,” said Amanda Litman, a co-founder of Run for Something, which helps first-time candidates learn about the offices they can contest and helps them mount their campaigns. “We have 50 state elections and then thousands of county elections. And each of those ladder up to give us results. While Congress can write, in some ways, rules or boundaries for how elections are administered, state legislatures are making decisions about who can and can’t vote. Counties and towns are making decisions about how much money they’re spending, what technology they’re using, the rules around which candidates can participate.”
An NPR analysis found 15 Republicans running for secretary of state in 2022 who doubt the legitimacy of Biden’s win. In Georgia, Brad Raffensperger, the incumbent Republican secretary of state who stood fast against Trump’s pressure, faces two primary challengers who hold that Trump was 2020’s rightful winner. Trump has endorsed one of them, Representative Jody Hice. He’s also endorsed candidates for secretary of state in Arizona and Michigan who backed him in 2020 and stand ready to do so in 2024. As NPR dryly noted, “The duties of a state secretary of state vary, but in most cases, they are the state’s top voting official and have a role in carrying out election laws.”
Nor is it just secretaries of state. “Voter suppression is happening at every level of government here in Georgia,” Representative Nikema Williams, who chairs the Georgia Democratic Party, told me. “We have 159 counties, and so 159 different ways boards of elections are elected and elections are carried out. So we have 159 different leaders who control election administration in the state. We’ve seen those boards restrict access by changing the number of ballot boxes. Often, our Black members on these boards are being pushed out.”
America’s confounding political structure creates two mismatches that bedevil democracy’s would-be defenders. The first mismatch is geographic. Your country turns on elections held in Georgia and Wisconsin, and if you live in California or New York, you’re left feeling powerless.
But that’s somewhere between an illusion and a cop-out. A constant complaint among those working to win these offices is that progressives donate hundreds of millions to presidential campaigns and long-shot bids against top Republicans, even as local candidates across the country are starved for funds.
“Democratic major donors like to fund the flashy things,” Litman told me. “Presidential races, Senate races, super PACs, TV ads. Amy McGrath can raise $90 million to run against Mitch McConnell in a doomed race, but the number of City Council and school board candidates in Kentucky who can raise what they need is …” She trailed off in frustration.
The second mismatch is emotional. If you’re frightened that America is sliding into authoritarianism, you want to support candidates, run campaigns and donate to causes that directly focus on the crisis of democracy. But few local elections are run as referendums on Trump’s big lie. They’re about trash pickup and bond ordinances and traffic management and budgeting and disaster response.
Lina Hidalgo ran for county judge in Harris County, Texas, after the 2016 election. Trump’s campaign had appalled her, and she wanted to do something. “I learned about this position that had flown under the radar for a very long time,” she told me. “It was the type of seat that only ever changed who held it when the incumbent died or was convicted of a crime. But it controls the budget for the county. Harris County is nearly the size of Colorado in population, larger than 28 states. It’s the budget for the hospital system, roads, bridges, libraries, the jail. And part of that includes funding the electoral system.”
Hidalgo didn’t campaign as a firebrand progressive looking to defend Texas from Trump. She won it, she told me, by focusing on what mattered most to her neighbors: the constant flooding of the county, as violent storms kept overwhelming dilapidated infrastructure. “I said, ‘Do you want a community that floods year after year?’” She won, and after she won, she joined with her colleagues to spend $13 million more on election administration and to allow residents to vote at whichever polling place was convenient for them on Election Day, even if it wasn’t the location they’d been assigned.
Protecting democracy by supporting county supervisors or small-town mayors — particularly ones who fit the politics of more conservative communities — can feel like being diagnosed with heart failure and being told the best thing to do is to double-check your tax returns and those of all your neighbors.
“If you want to fight for the future of American democracy, you shouldn’t spend all day talking about the future of American democracy,” Wikler said. “These local races that determine the mechanics of American democracy are the ventilation shaft in the Republican death star. These races get zero national attention. They hardly get local attention. Turnout is often lower than 20 percent. That means people who actually engage have a superpower. You, as a single dedicated volunteer, might be able to call and knock on the doors of enough voters to win a local election.”
Or you can simply win one yourself. That’s what Gabriella Cázares-Kelly did. Cázares-Kelly, a member of the Tohono O’odham Nation, agreed to staff a voter registration booth at the community college where she worked, in Pima County, Ariz. She was stunned to hear the stories of her students. “We keep blaming students for not participating, but it’s really complicated to get registered to vote if you don’t have a license, the nearest D.M.V. is an hour and a half away and you don’t own a car,” she told me.
Cázares-Kelly learned that much of the authority over voter registration fell to an office neither she nor anyone around her knew much about: the County Recorder’s Office, which has authority over records ranging from deeds to voter registrations. It had powers she’d never considered. It could work with the postmaster’s office to put registration forms in tribal postal offices — or not. When it called a voter to verify a ballot and heard an answering machine message in Spanish, it could follow up in Spanish — or not.
“I started contacting the records office and making suggestions and asking questions,” Cázares-Kelly said. “I did that for a long time, and the previous recorder was not very happy about it. I called so often, the staff began to know me. I didn’t have an interest in running till I heard the previous recorder was going to retire, and then my immediate thought was, ‘What if a white supremacist runs?’”
So in 2020, Cázares-Kelly ran, and she won. Now she’s the county recorder for a jurisdiction with nearly a million people, and more than 600,000 registered voters, in a swing state. “One thing I was really struck by when I first started getting involved in politics is how much power there is in just showing up to things,” she said. “If you love libraries, libraries have board meetings. Go to the public meeting. See where they’re spending their money. We’re supposed to be participating. If you want to get involved, there’s always a way.”
11. Impact of North Korea’s latest missile test on Iran nuke threat
It seems as if Israel is the only one who connects the dots between north Korea and Iran (or at least looks for the dots).
Impact of North Korea’s latest missile test on Iran nuke threat
As much of analyzing North Korean actions is at best educated guesswork, due to the opaque nature of the regime and the country, the answer is: It depends.
If Pyongyang just successfully launched a hypersonic missile for the second time, it could be an immediate reason for the US and possibly Israel to worry about the technology ever finding its way to Iran.
A hypersonic missile is much faster and takes a different flight path than a regular ballistic missile, flying part of its journey lower to the ground where it is harder to detect by radar and IS ALSO considered more maneuverable.
Put simply, a hypersonic missile is much harder to shoot down.
A suspected missile is fired, in this image released by North Korea's Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) on March 22, 2020. (credit: KCNA/ REUTERS)
Russia has since 2019 been bragging that its hypersonic missiles give it an unstoppable method for potentially hitting the US.
So if North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is getting closer to a hypersonic missile that could hit America, it could change the entire dynamic between the countries.
Kim still has not proven that his missiles can reach the US.
Launching a missile from that far away requires an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), which has to enter outer space and reenter the Earth’s atmosphere without malfunctioning FIRST from extreme cold, then extreme heat and vibrations, and other challenges.
There are also questions about whether the missile is really hypersonic or something in between a regular ballistic missile and a hypersonic one.
A regular ballistic missile might lessen the threat as it would be easier to shoot down in the event of an attack by Pyongyang.
But a number of experts believe the North has resolved the ICBM reentry issues, or given the number of almost completely successful tests they have done, achieving an ICBM that can hit the US is inevitable.
With estimates that the North could have anywhere from dozens to more than 60 nuclear weapons, if Kim really wanted to hit the US, many experts say it would be unlikely that American missile defense could shoot down everything he could throw at them.
FOR ISRAEL, Iran getting the transfer of hypersonic missile technology would be a threat – not just because the Islamic Republic has advanced farther than ever before toward nuclear weapons, but because it would also elevate the conventional ballistic missile threat.
Until now, Israeli assumptions have been that the three-level missile defense of Iron Dome, David’s Sling and the Arrow would be sufficient to defend the home front from most threats from Hamas and Iran, although this is less true for Hezbollah.
If Tehran gets its hands on hypersonic missile technology, Jerusalem might face a much scarier reality.
Of course, it has not been proven that North Korea has developed hypersonic weapons. And after all of the nuclear and missile cooperation between Iran and Pyongyang, Kim has never crossed certain lines that could lead back to him disastrously, such as giving Iran a turnkey ready-to-go nuclear missile.
So Kim might not risk the consequences of transferring such new technology.
After all of this, there is an entirely different way to look at the North’s test, especially juxtaposed with the ongoing nuclear negotiations in Vienna between Iran and the world powers.
Kim could be signaling to the Islamic Republic that it does not need to negotiate or play ball with the West.
His strategy of pushing forward with developing a nuclear arsenal has not escaped Western sanctions or raised his country out of economic depression or solved its food shortages.
But he has effectively ended the threat of regime change or anyone using military force against his country other than in response to a North Korean attack.
Kim has shown that putting your head down and expanding nuclear weapons capabilities is a strategy that can throw the West back on its heels.
Of all of the many rounds of Iran nuclear negotiations over the last two decades (the 2015 JCPOA was only one round), this is the moment when Tehran is most able to walk away from the table and cross the nuclear threshold – possibly before the world could decide how to react.
So will Iran be “inspired” by Pyongyang and walk away? Will the West get more intimidated about Tehran taking the North’s path and decide to grant additional concessions?
Kim’s latest missile test raises many questions without providing any clear answers.
But whatever those answers, none of them are good news for the US or Israel.
12. Is the Crisis in Kazakhstan the Rebirth of the Soviet Union?
Excerpts:
Multiple negotiations between Russia and the West will occur in the coming days. Before the Kazakh crisis, Mr. Putin likely believed he could secure diplomatic concessions through this move, and he may well have read
Joe Biden and Europe correctly. Especially now given CSTO’s Kazakhstan deployment, however, America and NATO must not give an inch to Mr. Putin’s demands, particularly to his insistence that NATO commit not to enlarge further.
NATO must urgently develop a strategy for the non-NATO former Soviet states. It is insufficient to say we have no treaty obligation to defend them, which ignores strategic reality. Russia’s imperiling of their security will inevitably affect NATO. It is no surprise neutral Finland has unequivocally reaffirmed its sovereign right to decide on NATO membership, and Sweden is increasingly called on to do the same.
NATO firmness now can render Mr. Putin’s expansionist aims untenable. But if NATO confines itself to rhetoric about the “rules-based international order” and asking all sides to “exercise restraint,” historians may mark the Kazakh crisis as the point where the Soviet Union rose from its ashes.
Is the Crisis in Kazakhstan the Rebirth of the Soviet Union?
The West needs to be firm as Putin seeks to expand Moscow’s control over neighboring states.
The unspoken corollary to this theorizing is that the last thing America or Europe should do is take provocative action regarding Ukraine or other countries caught in the gray zone between the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s eastern borders and Russia’s western ones. Kazakhstan is a Kremlin problem where “America has no real leverage,” as Politico put this instant conventional wisdom. Predictably, the State Department’s first reaction to the Kazakh crisis was moral equivalency, calling “for restraint by both the authorities and protestors.”
Doubtless, Moscow finds it unhelpful to have a bordering autocracy thrown into turmoil, but the West is badly mistaken and potentially at risk not to see the opportunities presented to Mr. Putin. His strategy to re-establish Russian hegemony within the borders of the former U.S.S.R. has been both patient and agile, and Kazakhstan’s troubles afford him significant possibilities.
Under Nursultan Nazarbayev, Kazakhstan was autocratic and reliably pro-Russian on security issues. Following that pattern, his handpicked successor, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, wasted no time requesting peacekeeping troops from the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organization to suppress widespread anti-government demonstrations. This first CSTO deployment into a member country contravenes its charter, which refers only to defending against external aggression. The initial 2,500-man force is nearly all Russian, and Mr. Tokayev has given orders to “shoot to kill without warning.”
Other Russian operations, in Moldova and Nagorno-Karabakh (the territory central to the Azerbaijan-Armenia conflict), are also poorly disguised Russian expeditionary forces, helping Moscow sustain conflicts throughout the former Soviet Union. This prevents countries from reducing Kremlin influence, hampers potential Western investment because of increased political risk, and quite possibly facilitates the reintegration of the independent states into Russia’s empire.
Mr. Putin ostensibly responded to a request from Kazakhstan’s government. We may learn more, but the current public posture of “multilateral peacekeepers,” carefully presented to look like U.N. efforts, is hard to challenge on its face. No one doubts, however, that Mr. Putin could extract a similar request from Belarus dictator Alexander Lukashenko, especially given the extensive Minsk-Moscow military relationship.
Last year, with Russian troops massed near Ukraine’s border, Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky warned repeatedly against a potential coup in Kyiv orchestrated by Moscow and pro-Russian oligarchs. Mr. Zelensky’s assertions were greeted skeptically by U.S. officials, and the reality, as in Kazakhstan, remains murky. Whatever the status and prospects for such a coup, however, a new pro-Russian government in Ukraine could readily invite CSTO forces. In a pinch, even a “provisional” government’s request for outside intervention would provide a patina of legitimacy.
Belarus and Kazakhstan are prominent candidates for full reintegration into Russia. Moscow has already outright annexed Crimea from Ukraine and achieved de facto control of the Donbas. Two Georgian provinces declared independence, and Transnistria remains outside Moldova’s control. Mr. Putin has a paradigm. Across the former Soviet republics, people with nationalist sentiments of course oppose Russian interference, erosion of sovereignty, and military intervention or annexation. Their problem is their inability to resist without Western support. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania can give thanks they gained NATO membership before European and American feet began to get cold.
Multiple negotiations between Russia and the West will occur in the coming days. Before the Kazakh crisis, Mr. Putin likely believed he could secure diplomatic concessions through this move, and he may well have read Joe Biden and Europe correctly. Especially now given CSTO’s Kazakhstan deployment, however, America and NATO must not give an inch to Mr. Putin’s demands, particularly to his insistence that NATO commit not to enlarge further.
NATO must urgently develop a strategy for the non-NATO former Soviet states. It is insufficient to say we have no treaty obligation to defend them, which ignores strategic reality. Russia’s imperiling of their security will inevitably affect NATO. It is no surprise neutral Finland has unequivocally reaffirmed its sovereign right to decide on NATO membership, and Sweden is increasingly called on to do the same.
NATO firmness now can render Mr. Putin’s expansionist aims untenable. But if NATO confines itself to rhetoric about the “rules-based international order” and asking all sides to “exercise restraint,” historians may mark the Kazakh crisis as the point where the Soviet Union rose from its ashes.
Mr. Bolton is author of “The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir.” He served as the president’s national security adviser, 2018-19, and ambassador to the United Nations, 2005-06.
13. All is not well in the transatlantic relationship
Excerpts:
“America still acts as if it is the leader,” concluded a disdainful Social Democratic member of the European Parliament. “But the preconditions for transatlantic leadership have changed fundamentally. America is not as sovereign as it used to be. America needs its allies as much as the allies need the U.S.”
The upcoming 2022 U.S. Congressional election and Biden’s fading poll numbers also have Europeans worried. “There is panic [over] what will happen in the U.S.,” said a Washington-based veteran of transatlantic relations. “Europeans hear that the Republicans may win the House and Senate in 2022, and the White House in 2024.”
“The Biden administration is working in a very narrow window of opportunity,” noted a U.S. expert at a British think tank. “We may only have 10-11 months,” added the Social Democratic member of the European Parliament worriedly, “because after the midterm election, things may be different.”
Then the real question will be, observed a former high-ranking European Union official, “will Biden have any political capital to expend on things that are important for Europe?”
All is not well in the transatlantic relationship
Politico · by Bruce Stokes · January 10, 2022
The most difficult hurdle in US-EU relations may prove to be the deterioration of American democracy.
US President Joe Biden arrives for an EU-US Summit in 2021 | Kenzo Tribouillard/AFP via Getty Images
By
January 10, 2022 4:00 am
Bruce Stokes is a visiting fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States.
January 20 marks the end of the first year of Joe Biden’s presidency, an administration that promised to respect and rebuild the transatlantic alliance after years of neglect and disdain, that declared, “America is back.” But subsequent experience has not reassured all Europeans.
To get a better understanding of the expectations and hesitations regarding the Biden administration’s second year, I conducted interviews with over 50 European and American experts. And it appears that all is still not well in the transatlantic relationship.
Overall, significant achievements were indeed made in 2021 — resolving bilateral trade disputes, launching technological cooperation, coordinating relations with China. “This went about as positively as I hoped it would on the day of his inauguration,” said a former German ambassador to the United States.
“There were lofty expectations, especially among [American] Europhiles, that Europe would be more of a priority in overall Biden foreign policy,” remembered a foreign policy analyst at a Washington think tank. “There was this sense we would see a new day in the partnership.”
But 2021 was also a year marred by friction: Afghanistan, the AUKUS defense pact, the challenges posed by Russia and China, as well as political developments in the U.S. have all “fed a conclusion in Europe that the relationship with the U.S. will never go back to 2016,” said a former U.S. ambassador to NATO — whether former President Donald Trump returns or not. And now the challenge facing the Biden administration is to prove such concerns wrong.
“You have to know that you have no other friends than Europe,” warned a Polish foreign policy expert. “If you screw up talking with us, that undermines the U.S. system of alliances and that is not useful for the U.S.” And when it comes to the looming confrontation with Russia over Ukraine, Europeans worry the U.S. has not yet learned this lesson, and there is fear, especially among Poles, that a deal affecting their futures will be made over their heads.
Moreover, as observed by a former U.S. ambassador to the EU, AUKUS openly said to Europeans that “the China folks in the White House are driving the bus. And they don’t have an appreciation of the EU as a useful partner on things that matter to the U.S.”
As a result, quipped a Berlin-based analyst: “Anxiety, skepticism and bad juju around the pivot to Asia is prevalent everywhere in Europe. The fear is that it will lead to transatlantic decoupling.” And as Washington’s attention progressively shifts to Asia, more incidents sparking Europeans’ sense of abandonment or betrayal may be inevitable.
The first test of this could be Taiwan, which has opened a representative office in the Lithuanian capital Vilnius. Beijing has imposed economic sanctions on the Baltic nation and threatened to deny multinational firms exporting from Lithuania access to China’s market in retaliation. If Washington stands idly by while Beijing coerces individual EU member countries and corporations in this manner, much-vaunted transatlantic cooperation on China could prove to be a paper tiger.
More broadly, 2022 may prove a test of transatlantic solidarity over economic sanctions on both Russia and China. A Russian invasion of Ukraine would almost certainly precipitate American and European sanctions, including a shuttering of the Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline, and there is growing support on both sides for sanctions against China for its human rights abuses as well. But with the European economy struggling to recover from the COVID-19 downturn, and the EU’s relatively greater dependence on both the Chinese and Russian markets, Brussels and Washington may find it difficult to act together.
Despite all that, the most corrosive development in transatlantic relations in the coming year may yet prove to be the deterioration of American democracy itself and what that says about the reliability of the U.S. as an ally.
The Stockholm-based International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance has judged the U.S. a “backsliding democracy,” and, according to a Pew Research Center survey, a median of only 18 percent of the publics in nine European nations believes that American democracy is a good example for other countries to follow.
“No longer in Europe are they talking about who is the sick man in Europe,” noted a worried New York-based foreign policy expert, “it’s America that is the sick man.”
“America still acts as if it is the leader,” concluded a disdainful Social Democratic member of the European Parliament. “But the preconditions for transatlantic leadership have changed fundamentally. America is not as sovereign as it used to be. America needs its allies as much as the allies need the U.S.”
The upcoming 2022 U.S. Congressional election and Biden’s fading poll numbers also have Europeans worried. “There is panic [over] what will happen in the U.S.,” said a Washington-based veteran of transatlantic relations. “Europeans hear that the Republicans may win the House and Senate in 2022, and the White House in 2024.”
“The Biden administration is working in a very narrow window of opportunity,” noted a U.S. expert at a British think tank. “We may only have 10-11 months,” added the Social Democratic member of the European Parliament worriedly, “because after the midterm election, things may be different.”
Then the real question will be, observed a former high-ranking European Union official, “will Biden have any political capital to expend on things that are important for Europe?”
Politico · by Bruce Stokes · January 10, 2022
14. Spiking the Problem: Developing a Resilient Posture in the Indo-Pacific with Passive Defenses
I am skeptical that the Philippines and Australia will be willing to host troops (again and more).
Excerpts:
Access to new bases requires
finding a willing nation to host U.S. forces, accept more troops, or to permit them to use different locations in peacetime. Both Australia and the Philippines appear poised to provide additional peacetime access to U.S. forces. While this does
not guarantee permission to use a base during a crisis or war, it would
complicate China’s planning, increase the number of missiles that need to be fired, and decrease confidence that the People’s Liberation Army could
knock out the majority of American forces in the theater with a devasting first blow. Moreover, it would reassure allies and partners that United States remains committed to their defense. For these reasons, the United States has sought to distribute its military footprint across the Indo-Pacific region for nearly a decade. However, such efforts have largely failed.
Spiking the Problem: Developing a Resilient Posture in the Indo-Pacific with Passive Defenses - War on the Rocks
In the late 1960s, U.S. Air Force Gen. Glenn Kent found a unique but effective way to overcome persistent resistance from Defense Department colleagues to building base defenses in Europe. During heated budget battles, Air Force officers habitually prioritized new aircraft and missiles over purely defensive measures. Gen. William “Spike” Wallace Momyer, commander of U.S. Tactical Air Forces, had written on a piece of paper that his top priority was to build hardened aircraft shelters to protect American fighter aircraft based in Europe from Soviet attack. Kent then obtained the Air Force chief of staff’s concurrence, which was captured by his signature under the phrase “I’m with Spike.” Kent or a colonel attended every meeting as the Air Force built its budget and each time eliminating funding for the shelters was proposed, he pulled out that piece of paper and said, “I’m with Spike.” This level of senior leader guidance and continuous engagement was needed to ensure that short-range American airpower — a key U.S. advantage — could have been effectively employed to stop a Soviet invasion, thereby strengthening deterrence.
Today, America’s military posture, which is comprised of forces, bases, and agreements, is a critical issue that needs a senior champion. China has a formidable arsenal of conventionally armed long-range missiles that are significantly more accurate than the ones that the Soviet Union had during the Cold War and plans to fire them in a first strike to destroy U.S. forces on the land and at sea. The Defense Department should ensure that American forces in the Indo-Pacific can survive this blow and generate combat power while under attack, which requires taking steps to increase the resiliency of U.S. military posture.
But absent a crisis, the Defense Department finds it difficult to significantly change America’s global posture. After more than a decade of promising to improve the survivability of U.S. forces in the Indo-Pacific, the department has little to show for it. In part, ongoing wars in the Middle East have inhibited efforts to rebalance the American military footprint to the Pacific, as has the need to obtain the consent of nations that host American forces. Additionally, the services prefer to fund their priority weapons, and their reticence to spend money on supporting infrastructure is compounded when uncertainty about future base access is factored in. Finally, the Defense Department has yet to break with its past approach to power projection and to fully flesh out new operational concepts and ways of fighting. No posture is perfect and American operating concepts will continue to evolve over time, but that should not impede the progress that can be made today to improve the resiliency of U.S. bases and forces.
In the near term, one of the most consequential and affordable steps that the Department of Defense can take to shore up the conventional military balance in East Asia is to reduce the vulnerability of American forces to Chinese air and missile attacks by distributing them across more locations and putting in place a system of passive defenses on existing bases. Doing so would introduce uncertainty that China could cripple U.S. forces with a first strike and thereby strengthen deterrence.
The Military Problem
China has developed large stockpiles of long-range precision cruise and ballistic missiles to hold U.S. forces at risk in the Indo-Pacific. Fixed facilities — especially sprawling air bases, ports, and headquarters — are particularly vulnerable to enemy air and missile attacks. Ballistic missiles armed with submunitions could damage aircraft parked in the open and render runways inoperable, while cruise missiles could target maintenance facilities, heavy equipment, electric power, housing areas, headquarters, docked ships, and fuel storage. The People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force also fields medium and intermediate range anti-ship ballistic missiles that can hit U.S. aircraft carriers and other large surface warships at sea up to 3,000 kilometers away. Chinese forces have enough weapons to saturate and overwhelm existing U.S. air and missile defenses, such as the Patriot, Aegis, and Terminal High Altitude Area Defense systems. Beijing has also fielded advanced warheads, such as hypersonic gliders, to evade these defensive systems. The People’s Liberation Army plans to employ these weapons in a devasting first strike to ensure that the United States cannot meaningfully intervene in a conflict and stop Chinese aggression.
There is no silver bullet to counter this threat. The United States and China are engaged in a long-term military competition and each side will respond to steps taken by the other to gain an advantage. The Defense Department tends to focus on technological counters, such as the Pacific Deterrence Initiative’s request for a missile defense system for Guam. Although a layered and integrated air and missile defense system is a part of the solution, surface-to-air missile defenses are expensive and relatively easy to defeat, and the United States cannot afford to field enough defenses to match China’s offensive arsenal. This places existing active missiles defenses on the losing side of the cost-exchange ratio. Future technologies that have a lower cost per shot and larger magazine, such as solid-state lasers, may reverse that equation, but U.S. forces in the Indo-Pacific cannot afford to wait for these technologies to mature as the military balance swings further in China’s favor and the risk of war grows. The Defense Department needs to take multiple steps today to protect its Pacific bases and forces while simultaneously investing in future capabilities that could fundamentally transform this problem.
The Missed Opportunity in the Posture Review
The Biden administration’s 2021 global posture review was a missed opportunity to make significant progress in this area. Although the review mentioned a few improvements to the U.S. posture on Guam, the Northern Marianas, and Australia, it heralded no big changes in the wider Indo-Pacific theater and was light on specifics. Instead of being a sign of the soon-to-be-released national defense strategy and fulfilling the department’s promise to focus on China, the posture review appears to have been an effort by the Biden administration to repair relations with allies and partners that had been frayed by its predecessor and to reverse the Trump administration’s decision to withdraw U.S. forces from Germany. Although the posture review is also part and parcel of the larger shift from the Middle East to the Indo-Pacific that the Department of Defense has tried to make since the Obama administration, there were no further reductions in the Middle East or details about what America’s over-the-horizon presence in Afghanistan will look like.
The review, therefore, largely reverted to the pre-Trump status quo rather than making significant additional changes to America’s military posture. Nevertheless, given that the administration has identified China as the pacing challenge and senior officials have argued that the Defense Department urgently needs to take steps to counter China’s growing military power and deter aggression, this was a missed opportunity. The Biden administration should not make the same mistake with the forthcoming national defense strategy and the Fiscal Year 2023 budget. Going forward, senior officials should champion investments in posture in the Indo-Pacific that protect American bases and forces and enable them to operate in a more distributed fashion. Senior leadership is required because both the services and Congress loathe spending money on military construction overseas. Although the services recognize the importance of a resilient posture, they continually prioritize combat forces over supporting infrastructure and equipment. And even if they do try to make these investments, members of Congress often do not like appropriating military construction funds abroad where there are no constituents.
The Unexciting and Neglected Solution
Passive defenses minimize the damage of an attack by improving the ability of the target to withstand a strike, recover, and continue critical military operations. This may include dispersing forces across multiple locations, spreading forces and equipment out on a base, hardening, redundancy, camouflage, concealment, deception, early warning systems, and recovery capabilities, such as civil engineers, to rapidly repair the damage from an attack and restore operations. Decades of RAND research has demonstrated that passive defenses greatly improve the survivability of U.S. aircraft and are useful against a range of threats from swarms of drones to ballistic and cruise missiles and hypersonic weapons. Ideally, one wants a diverse portfolio of active and passive defensive measures, which reduces the probability that an attack succeeds. Yet the U.S. military is overfocused on active defenses, such as surface-to-air missiles, electronic warfare, and defensive combat air patrols, which seek to intercept and neutralize a threat before it reaches its target. Passive defenses offer an affordable and effective way to counter a range of threats to U.S. bases and forces, but they lack strong advocates in the services, Congress, and industry and thus tend to be overlooked in favor of active defenses.
Access to new bases requires finding a willing nation to host U.S. forces, accept more troops, or to permit them to use different locations in peacetime. Both Australia and the Philippines appear poised to provide additional peacetime access to U.S. forces. While this does not guarantee permission to use a base during a crisis or war, it would complicate China’s planning, increase the number of missiles that need to be fired, and decrease confidence that the People’s Liberation Army could knock out the majority of American forces in the theater with a devasting first blow. Moreover, it would reassure allies and partners that United States remains committed to their defense. For these reasons, the United States has sought to distribute its military footprint across the Indo-Pacific region for nearly a decade. However, such efforts have largely failed.
China’s recent assertive actions — including belligerent diplomacy, economic coercion, and attempts by Chinese military and paramilitary forces to harass and intimidate — have alarmed many of its neighbors, suddenly enhancing the desirability of U.S. forces. Prior agreements and discussions with allies — like the Philippines and Australia — that previously did not produce significant posture changes have nonetheless laid the groundwork for steps that could be taken today. The United States does not need new permanent bases, but instead occasional access to improved facilities that can support distributed U.S. military operations. The Philippines and Australia should be prioritized because the moment appears propitious. The Biden administration has improved relations with the Philippines and consequently Manila extended the agreement that permits U.S. forces on its soil. The Department of Defense needs to seize on this opportunity and upgrade the airbases identified in the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement. The actions of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte stalled the implementation of the basing agreement, which has been limited to building a few storage warehouses. Further upgrades to air bases should be made and kit emplaced to enable U.S. aircraft to operate from them. Additionally, the United States should seek permission to rotate ground forces to the Philippines for exercises and to preposition supporting equipment — not weapons systems — for Marine stand-in forces and Army multi-domain task forces.
Additionally, the Defense Department needs to capitalize on the success of the Australia-United Kingdom-United States agreement by improving infrastructure at Australian air and naval bases so that they can support American forces and create a rear logistics hub outside of the worst threat ring. Australia is a big continent and a relatively safe location for large-body American bomber, tanker, and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance aircraft to operate and for ships and submarines to rearm and be repaired. Because Royal Australian Air Force Base Darwin is saturated with Australian troops and American Marines, the Defense Department should upgrade airbases in northern Australia and on Cocos Island. Moreover, it should preposition stockpiles of critical munitions, such as air-to-air missiles, anti-ship missiles, lightweight torpedoes, and sonobuoys, along with the shore equipment needed to reload the missiles fired by naval ships and submarines.
In addition to improving the infrastructure at new bases, the Defense Department should take actions that make it difficult for adversaries to find and efficiently target U.S. forces on existing U.S. bases. This would include on-base dispersal of weapons platforms, munitions stockpiles, and critical logistics systems, such as fuel distribution. Additionally, the Defense Department should selectively harden key facilities, such as command posts, field expeditionary hardened shelters for fighter aircraft, and acquire additional post-attack recovery capabilities to repair airfields and ports. Implementing these resiliency measures on existing bases would require military construction funds and some new equipment, but it would not require new bases and is something that the Defense Department could undertake today that would greatly improve the survivability of its current posture.
Spiking the Problem
During the post-Cold War era of uncontested U.S. hegemony, the Defense Department’s overseas footprint shrank, and forces were concentrated on a relatively small number of large installations to improve the efficiency of operations and reduce costs. Bases are crowded and aircraft and ships are kept close to one another to ease maintenance and support functions, making them lucrative targets that a highly capable adversary, such as China, could easily exploit. It is long past time to make the People’s Liberation Army targeters’ job more difficult. The Defense Department needs to make resiliency a priority and to accept the inefficiencies that are necessary to project power while under attack from a capable adversary.
The situation in the Indo-Pacific is not hopeless and war is not inevitable, but the United States needs to take steps to enhance deterrence in the next five years before China believes that it can successfully invade Taiwan, while making long-term investments in future technologies that enable it to maintain its military-technological edge. The Defense Department cannot afford to continue to lose more ground. The solution, however, is decidedly unpopular because it does not involve a larger force or buying more ships and aircraft, which would limit the Defense Department’s ability to modernize and not be fielded quickly enough to mitigate the growing near-term risk. Pouring concrete overseas, making investments in logistics and supporting materials, and operating in a distributed manner is anathema to many in the Defense Department who are accustomed to efficient operations and prefer to spend money on tanks, ships, airplanes, and sophisticated missiles.
Base resiliency is one area in which the United States can make impactful investments today while also investing in the future technologies of tomorrow. The United States should improve the resiliency of its posture by embracing a multi-faceted system of passive defenses. This will only happen if senior defense officials or members of Congress make it a priority. This solution is not exciting, nor is it perfect, but it will not break the bank and it is an effective stopgap measure while modernization efforts mature. It is far past time for senior defense leaders to stand up and say, “I’m with Spike.”
Stacie Pettyjohn (@StaciePettyjohn) is a senior fellow and director of the defense program at the Center for a New American Security.
15. Rise of rightwing extremism in US military sparks fears over democracy
This Is troubling on three levels to me. First, there is a problem. Yes, there are groups that are undermining good order and discipline by radicalizing military members. Second, that the problem may be overblown or exaggerated for political reasons. Third, the "solutions" employed could make things worse and either radicalize others or undermine the trust and confidence in the chain of command. This is a very difficult problem.
Rise of rightwing extremism in US military sparks fears over democracy
Experts caution the defense department’s safeguards don’t go far enough and that ‘we’re behind the ball on what we know’
Fears are growing among experts, politicians, and former generals about the rise of rightwing extremism in the US military and the potential threat it could pose to American democracy.
Even as the US Department of Defense issues new policies to root out extremism in its ranks, some experts caution that the safeguards don’t go far enough, leaving the next election vulnerable to attack as well as fears about a broader violent “insurgency” by rightwing radicals.
“We’re behind the ball on what we know about domestic terrorists in the United States,” Paul Eaton, a retired US army major general and senior adviser to the non-profit VoteVets, said.
Eaton and two other retired army generals recently wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post last month warning of the threat of a coup in the 2024 election. The generals warned that it could succeed with the aid of rogue military elements. They contemplated the possibility of a breakdown of the chain of command, along partisan lines, in the aftermath of a contested election with “rogue units organizing among themselves to support the ‘rightful’ commander in chief”.
Eaton said in an interview that the American military and law enforcement have a history of underestimating the threat from the far right.
“It’s the Timothy McVeigh problem: what did we know about McVeigh and what were we doing about it?” said Eaton.
The 1995 Oklahoma City bombing killed 168 people and injured over 650 when one morning ex-army soldiers Timothy McVeigh and co-conspirator Terry Nichols parked a rental truck filled with homemade explosives outside a federal building and detonated it. It remains the deadliest act of domestic terrorism in US history. The two men harbored anti-government and racists beliefs.
“The McVeighs of the world are still there, we had about 4,500 of them crawling all over the nation’s capitol [during the 6 January attack],” said Eaton, who added that the increased power of the internet and rise of social media had boosted the threat massively since McVeigh’s attack.
‘The McVeighs of the world are still there, we had about 4,500 of them crawling all over the nation’s capitol.’ Photograph: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images
“The infection of extremism into our state and local police and our armed forces is a very serious concern that needs to be monitored,” said Eaton.
Eaton added: “There’s a recruiting effort going on locally, they’re going to school boards, like missionaries sent to the islands to convert people. The Proud Boys and Oath Keepers are definitely recruiting.””
In many ways the aftermath of the attack on the Capitol in Washington DC laid bare the vulnerability of US service members to extremism. The 727 defendants charged in the 6 January Capitol riot include 81 with ties to the military, while five were active duty service members. A 35-year-old woman, air force veteran Ashli Babbitt, was fatally shot while attempting to break the doors into the House chamber.
The appeal of extremism among active duty and veterans is a longstanding issue with a track record of violent incidents.
Last year army private Ethan Phelan Melzer confessed to prosecutors in the southern district of New York to plotting an attack on fellow soldiers in his unit. The federal indictment states that Melzer confessed to sharing sensitive information about his soon-to-deploy unit with members of a neo-Nazi group in order to facilitate an attack that would “result in the deaths of as many of his fellow service members as possible”.
In 2018 marine lance corporal Vasillios Pistolis was imprisoned after assaulting people at the 2017 Charlottesville “Unite The Right” rally. Pistolis was discovered to belong the neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen after bragging about violence in chats with other Atomwaffen members, which were eventually leaked.
The data suggest the problem is growing in the US as from 1990-2010 there was an average of six cases a year, but over the last decade “that number has more than tripled to nearly 21 subjects per year”.
Members of the Proud Boys protest against Covid vaccines in New York City in November. Photograph: Yuki Iwamura/AFP/Getty Images
The generals’ public call for elections safeguards in the military comes as the Pentagon issued new guidelines aimed at rooting out extremism in its ranks. The defense chief, Lloyd Austin, ordered a 60-day “stand down” early last year to come up with rules to stomp out extremism among the military’s various branches. The new rules adopted by the Pentagon last month specify that service members are prohibited from engaging in extremist activities and could face disciplinary action for even “liking” extremist content on social media.
The new guidance specifies that commanders must not be “indifferent” and hold service members who participate in extremist activity accountable. The Pentagon defines extremism as advocacy for violence to achieve goals that are “political, religious, discriminatory, or ideological in nature”. It includes efforts to overthrow the government and advocating widespread unlawful discrimination “based on race, color, national origin, religion, sex (including pregnancy), gender identity, or sexual orientation”.
Bu the Pentagon’s effort towards stomping out extremism in the military may not go far enough. An Associated Press investigation found the new guidelines fail to account for racism among the ranks, membership in groups such as the KKK, and longstanding racial disparities in military justice.
The new guidelines don’t prohibit membership in extremist groups like the KKK as long as they are not “actively participating”. The new rules attempt to police acts rather than associations or beliefs. Some former military figures say it’s absurd to allow service members to also be members of violent extremist groups.
“Seriously? You want to be in a foxhole with a guy whose a member of the KKK? Is that really what we want to do here?” said Eaton. “The idea of service members having to be in close proximity to card carrying members of the Proud Boys, as long as they don’t ‘march’, that just doesn’t get it.” he added.
Some experts also criticize the approach as ignoring the very real threat of white supremacists. “It reflects the institutional bias that permeates all of our government, that even calling out white supremacy is politically fraught,” said Mike German, a former FBI special agent and current Fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice.
German is concerned the classification has the potential for unintended consequences. “It opens the door to a strange political ‘both sides-ism’,” he said. “The consequence is that somebody expressing anti-racism can be seen as an extremist under that description.”
Experts see the far-right and other extremists as actively trying to recruit members of the military, including foreign agents seeking to promote disruption within the US.
“We’re in the early stages of an insurgency in the Untied States,” said Kristofer Goldsmith, an Iraq war veteran and researcher.
In a 200-page report published by Vietnam Veterans of America, Goldsmith found that between 2017 and 2019 foreign entities, such as Russian hackers, “coordinated online targeting of American service members, veterans, and their families” in an effort to disrupt American democracy.
“We found 10 different ways foreign entities were targeting veterans online,” said Goldsmith, including through ads, fake veteran accounts that sent friend request to other veterans in order to penetrate the “relatively small community of veteran advocates, and found large social media pages run by foreign admins that spread disinflation tailored to veterans in a effort to influence the election”.
Goldsmith sees anti-democratic, white supremacist and fascists movements targeting veterans for the same reason as foreign adversaries. “Veterans are an economically efficient target for campaigns, because if you get one, they often bring their immediate social circle with them,” said Goldsmith.
Goldsmith warns that the coming election is vulnerable to a rising insurgency. “We saw a violent insurrection, we did not experience a peaceful transfer of power. It was an attempted coup. Every failed coup is just practice for the next one,” said Goldsmith.
16. January 6, the Afghanistan Withdrawal and the Future of U.S. Counterterrorism
From one of the foremost scholars on terrorism.
Conclusion:
In raw numbers, 2021 was a surprisingly successful year for U.S. counterterrorism, with relatively few casualties (aside from Jan. 6, the only major, generally-recognized terrorism incident occurred in Atlanta, where a mix of misogynist and racist grievances inspired a shooting that targeted spas that employed Asian women). Though U.S. counterterrorism agencies were relatively successful in protecting the homeland from terrorism, they cannot engender complacency. The riot at the Capitol has arguably only emboldened the more violently-inclined elements of the far right. The underlying grievances which inspired the attack, most notably anger over an allegedly stolen election, have not dissipated and have generated new threats and fortuitously abortive plots. Looking beyond the homefront, the fallout from the Afghanistan withdrawal will likely be longer-term, with the Taliban likely to be unwilling or unable to prevent safe havens for the range of Salafi-jihadist terrorist organizations still intent on striking the United States and its partners. Meanwhile, escalating attacks by Iranian-backed Shi’a militias in Iraq—using drones and other stand-off weapons—target U.S. diplomatic and military facilities and personnel in that country.
In other words, the United States now sits at a precipice perhaps unprecedented in its postwar history. Is it possible to address all the threats simultaneously? If so, how? If not, where should it prioritize? And how can it prevent counterterrorism whiplash, overreacting to major events in ways that prevent the development of a coordinated, long-term strategy that transcends ideology? These questions will determine the success or failure of counterterrorism in 2022 and beyond. As the United States navigates these challenges, one lesson remains clear: Complacency over terrorist threats only creates new opportunities for these adversaries, who historically strike when national attention is preoccupied with other priorities.
January 6, the Afghanistan Withdrawal and the Future of U.S. Counterterrorism
Editor’s Note: Counterterrorism policy confronts new challenges as 2022 begins, and it must do so as a range of new threats and concerns dominate policy priorities. Bruce Hoffman and Jacob Ware, both colleagues at Georgetown as well as experts at the Council on Foreign Relations, describe how the terrorism landscape changed in 2021, becoming more diffuse, more complex and more dangerous.
Daniel Byman
***
Throughout its history, the United States has mostly had the luxury of focusing on one ideological terrorist threat at a time. Countering terrorism even under these circumstances was always challenging, but protecting the homeland from a mono-chromatic threat landscape was comparatively straightforward. Today, however, these threats are more diffuse, more variegated and more complex. Moreover, they exist at a time of profound exhaustion and disillusionment, with the formidable resources of the U.S. national security apparatus distracted and divided by a myriad of traditional and non-traditional threats. These threats range from peer competitors to rogue states and from conventional warfare to counter-proliferation, advancing climate change, a global pandemic and the daily onslaught of cyberattacks that blur distinctions between states and criminal syndicates.
Terrorist threats to the United States have come in waves. In the early 20th century, for instance, anarchists predominated. They assassinated a U.S. president and, in the most significant terrorist incident of that era, killed more than three-dozen people in a bombing on Wall Street in 1920. In the 1960s and 1970s, the far-left constituted the main terrorist threat to national security. More than 1,000 bombings struck New York City in 1972 alone. In the 1980s and 1990s, white supremacists and anti-government extremists commanded our attention, with the deadliest modern domestic terrorist attack in U.S. history occurring in Oklahoma City in 1995. And, until recently, jihadists were the main concern throughout the beginning of the 21st Century, with 9/11 being the biggest blow. The Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, among other incidents, changed all that as violent, far-right extremism has again risen in prominence.
In many respects, 2021 was a watershed both in domestic and international terrorism—a year that witnessed both the deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol and the chaotic end to America’s longest war. Rarely in U.S. history has counterterrorism suffered such a crippling double-blow in one year. Remarkably, these disasters were both largely self-inflicted. Donald Trump cajoled and implored his followers to descend on the Capitol while Congress met to certify the previous November’s presidential election. Joe Biden pulled all troops out of Afghanistan despite the protests of his intelligence and military chiefs. Both events seem poised to guide the United States into a darker, more uncertain counterterrorism future—not least by providing boosts to both domestic violent far-right extremists as well as to a staggering array of international jihadist organizations.
This widening of terrorism threats comes as resources are being re-programmed daily to address pressing threats that have elbowed aside the priority attached to counterterrorism that has kept the homeland safe from foreign threats for over two decades. The United States now faces a new type of counterterrorism dilemma: How can it address escalating and multiplying terrorism threats with fewer resources at a time of declining governmental and public interest?
The Domestic Threat and the Legacy of January 6
Over the past year, the far-right terrorist threat has continued to diversify (as we wrote about in Lawfare in Nov. 2020). A number of factions have grown in size and stature over the past 24 months, leaving a chaotic, unpredictable and increasingly violently-inclined extremist landscape. The danger posed by the various factions—and, indeed, by their ability to coalesce around common grievances—was exemplified on Jan. 6, when a dizzying array of extremists descended on Washington, D.C., to attempt to overthrow a legitimate democratic election.
Jan. 6 has provided an important boost to the movement—not least due to the Republican Party and associated media’s reluctance to concede wrongdoing. "Right from the start, it was zero threat,” Trump has said about a riot that killed a police officer. And the continuing refusal to accept the election results risks throwing the United States into an unprecedented, anti-democratic new era in which politicians can not only simply decide to reject results, but also dispatch their most loyal supporters to commit shocking acts of violence and desecration of our democratic institutions in defense of their baseless claims. As Elizabeth Neumann, a former senior Department of Homeland Security counterterrorism official, wrote the month after the attack, “It’s going to take decades to undo the damage.”
But violent far-right extremism is not the only domestic terror threat confronting those charged with the safety and security of Americans. Violence from self-proclaimed incels has escalated, with 2020 and 2021 underscoring the galvanizing effect of this male supremacist ideology on an expanding constituency both in the United States and abroad. Violent far-left extremists—motivated primarily by racially-charged police violence and inactivity against climate change—have also been emboldened. And Black nationalists, as well as the Black Hebrew Israelite religious movement, retain their violent edge. The emergence of the Not Fucking Around Coalition, an armed Black nationalist militia, is a particularly worrying development.
The pandemic provides a particularly challenging “X” factor. Radicalization experts have repeatedly raised concerns about the radicalizing potential of coronavirus shutdowns, which has led to unprecedented numbers of young people spending unprecedented amounts of time online. The constant uncertainty posed by new variants extends to the current domestic terrorism landscape. In an era in which extremism and terrorism are driven largely by social media and conspiracy theories, the coronavirus and the public health measures taken in response fuel an already highly combustible extremist fire.
The International Threat and the Afghanistan Withdrawal
Perhaps the greatest tragedy of the 20-year war on terror is that the United States has made little progress toward ensuring the long-term safety of the homeland from global Salafi-jihadist terrorism. In fact, we find ourselves back where we started: with the Taliban in charge in Afghanistan and again providing safe haven to their longstanding al-Qaeda allies. But we should not necessarily expect a replay of the pre-9/11 template, where one single safe haven and one particular organization posed the greatest threat to the United States. Today, the threat matrix of foreign terrorist groups is more complex—populated by both Shi’a and Sunni groups backed by state patrons who direct and sponsor their violence.
The Salafi-jihadist counterterrorism challenge in a post-Afghan War world is two-fold. First, the United States and its partners face an increasing number of theats. From the Sahel and sub-Saharan Africa, through Syria and Yemen, to Afghanistan, regional affiliates linked to the Islamic State and al-Qaeda have been infused with newfound purpose and momentum by the Taliban’s lightning re-conquest of Afghanistan. The United States and its allies simply do not have the resources—nor, indeed, will their publics have the patience—to address the multiplying hotspots that will continue to challenge local regimes and regional and international military coalitions. Local partners, where willing and capable, will be more essential than ever in the next phase of this lasting conflict. But the assistance, advice and support of stronger powers are diminishing as a result of a one-two punch of the drive to end these “forever wars” coupled with the ongoing re-prioritization of national security concerns.
Second, it is unclear if global terrorist adversaries will choose to return to the 9/11 model—dramatic, spectacular, highly-coordinated, international and sometimes very deadly external operations. Over the past decade, the world’s foremost Salafi-jihadist terrorist organizations reacted to counterterrorism pressure by adjusting their modus operandi. Rather than focus on coordinating complex international plots that involve deploying attackers across borders, they instead aimed to radicalize followers within their own countries to then attack soft targets as lone actors using any means necessary. That model proved successful. From Orlando and San Bernardino in the United States to a number of European capitals, local radicals attacked their homelands, pledging allegiance to a far-flung caliphate. The defeat of the physical caliphate in the Levant damaged the Islamic State’s ability to inspire attackers abroad—a blow that might now be reversed by the Taliban’s success in Afghanistan.
With the United States seemingly relaxing that pressure—or at least drawing down its deployment of ground troops in favor of so-called “over-the-horizon” counterterrorism—it remains to be seen whether Salafi-jihadist terrorism will successfully continue this “homegrown” strategy of radicalization and attack or if groups take advantage of their renewed freedom to engage in more complex international operational plotting. And, though Afghanistan poses plenty of concern, we do not yet know whether another hotspot will rise to the fore. Worrying signs in Africa suggest the next epicenter of Salafi-jihadist terrorism may emerge in a new theater.
Meanwhile, an additional threat is posed by the Iranian-backed terrorism network that winds its way from Pakistan to Yemen. The supply of funds and fighters to groups like Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen is plentiful, and Iran remains intent on striking U.S. targets in the region, partially in lingering retribution for the assassination of Quds Force leader Qassem Soleimaini in January 2020. But perhaps the most unpredictable scenario concerns the diminishing Syrian civil war. Shi’a foreign fighters from Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Pakistan, Afghanistan and elsewhere will increasingly return to their homelands—where they may have the same destabilizing effect that their Sunni counterparts had after the Afghan War of the 1980s and defeat of the Islamic State caliphate in 2019.
Picking Priorities
Counterterrorism no longer sits atop the ladder of U.S. national security priorities. A new force rises in the East, seemingly intent on challenging U.S. global hegemony. Middle powers like Iran and North Korea continue to harass and pester, both through nuclear advances and irregular forces. And, most importantly, invisible enemies such as pandemics and climate change claim lives, expose fundamental divides within our own societies and open windows through which misinformation and conspiracy theories can infiltrate our politics. What’s more, terrorism now presents itself in far more diffuse and chaotic ways—stretching national security agencies that want nothing more than to focus on something else. The result is a growing dilemma for counterterrorism policymakers: addressing multiplying threats despite dwindling resources.
In raw numbers, 2021 was a surprisingly successful year for U.S. counterterrorism, with relatively few casualties (aside from Jan. 6, the only major, generally-recognized terrorism incident occurred in Atlanta, where a mix of misogynist and racist grievances inspired a shooting that targeted spas that employed Asian women). Though U.S. counterterrorism agencies were relatively successful in protecting the homeland from terrorism, they cannot engender complacency. The riot at the Capitol has arguably only emboldened the more violently-inclined elements of the far right. The underlying grievances which inspired the attack, most notably anger over an allegedly stolen election, have not dissipated and have generated new threats and fortuitously abortive plots. Looking beyond the homefront, the fallout from the Afghanistan withdrawal will likely be longer-term, with the Taliban likely to be unwilling or unable to prevent safe havens for the range of Salafi-jihadist terrorist organizations still intent on striking the United States and its partners. Meanwhile, escalating attacks by Iranian-backed Shi’a militias in Iraq—using drones and other stand-off weapons—target U.S. diplomatic and military facilities and personnel in that country.
In other words, the United States now sits at a precipice perhaps unprecedented in its postwar history. Is it possible to address all the threats simultaneously? If so, how? If not, where should it prioritize? And how can it prevent counterterrorism whiplash, overreacting to major events in ways that prevent the development of a coordinated, long-term strategy that transcends ideology? These questions will determine the success or failure of counterterrorism in 2022 and beyond. As the United States navigates these challenges, one lesson remains clear: Complacency over terrorist threats only creates new opportunities for these adversaries, who historically strike when national attention is preoccupied with other priorities.
17. US pairs skater Timothy LeDuc calls human rights abuses in China 'horrifying'
Will he be a lone voice or will there be others? What will happen to him?
Excerpt:
"What I can say is we absolutely acknowledge the horrifying things that we've seen happening to the Uyghurs. I read somewhere the other day that it's the largest number of people held in internment and labor camps since World War II. I mean, these are horrifying human rights abuses that we're seeing happening. And it can feel very powerless when you read those things, because you think, 'What can I do?'"
US pairs skater Timothy LeDuc calls human rights abuses in China 'horrifying'
| USA TODAY
NASHVILLE, Tenn. — In the months and weeks leading up to the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, U.S. athletes have been repeatedly asked about human rights abuses in China and, for the most part, tiptoed around them.
Pairs skater Timothy LeDuc did not do that Sunday.
Hours after they were named to Team USA, LeDuc fielded a question about human rights abuses in China, whether athletes have a responsibility to use their platform to speak about them and whether they plan to do so. They called it "a really hard question to answer."
"There's no simple answer to this question," said LeDuc, who will become the first openly non-binary athlete to compete at an Olympic Winter Games.
"What I can say is we absolutely acknowledge the horrifying things that we've seen happening to the Uyghurs. I read somewhere the other day that it's the largest number of people held in internment and labor camps since World War II. I mean, these are horrifying human rights abuses that we're seeing happening. And it can feel very powerless when you read those things, because you think, 'What can I do?'"
LeDuc, whose pronouns are they/them, is set to make their first Olympic appearance alongside partner Ashley Cain-Gribble after they finished first at this week's U.S. Figure Skating Championships. Alexa Knierim and Brandon Frazier, who withdrew from competition after Frazier tested positive for COVID-19, will join them in Beijing.
The U.S. is one of several nations that have planned to diplomatically boycott the Games due to China's human rights abuses, including its treatment of Uyghurs, which the U.S. government has deemed a genocide.
After acknowledging those abuses Sunday, LeDuc said they are also striving to speak out about – and defend – human rights in the United States, as well.
"I think we're all probably people that believe human rights are for everyone. We all should have access to the same rights," LeDuc said. "So I see human rights being violated here, in my country. I see trans people fighting for human rights. I believe that healthcare is a human right, and I see access to healthcare being denied. I believe abortion is healthcare, and access to abortion is a human right. And I see those rights under attack, in this country, and that's something we have control over here.
"So often, state and local governments are the ones who are restricting those rights, and we all have a responsibility and the ability to vote in those elections, and elect people who are going to protect those human rights. So that's kind of how I think of it. I feel powerless sometimes, seeing the situation in China. I can use my voice here, yes. But what I can do here to defend human rights is be sure that I am vigilant and vote for the people in my local communities and state and local elections to defend human rights here as well."
Contact Tom Schad at tschad@usatoday.com or on Twitter @Tom_Schad.
18. How Fake Spies Ruin Real Intelligence
The impact of "spytainment."
Excerpts:
Findings from my 2012 and 2013 YouGov polls also resonated with my student survey about the real influence of fictional spies. I found that the more frequently American viewers watched spy-themed TV shows and movies, the more likely they were to support aggressive counterterrorism tactics. Frequent spy-TV watchers were more willing than infrequent viewers to support assassinating known terrorists (84 percent versus 70 percent) and transferring suspected terrorists to a country known for using torture (60 percent versus 45 percent), and were more likely to believe that waterboarding suspected terrorists was the right thing to do (38 percent versus 28 percent).
Spytainment-viewing habits were also highly correlated with opinions about the NSA. The more that people watched spy-themed television shows and movies, the more they liked the NSA, the more they approved of NSA’s telephone- and internet-collection programs, and the more they believed that the NSA was telling them the truth about its surveillance activities.
Whatever one thinks about these activities—whether they are effective or ineffective, morally right or morally wrong—the fact that fiction may be significantly influencing public attitudes about them is unsettling.
How Fake Spies Ruin Real Intelligence
Espionage-themed entertainment is influencing policy makers, from soldiers fighting on the front lines to justices sitting on the nation’s highest court.
For fans of spy movies and television shows, a visit to CIA headquarters will be disappointing. The visitor center looks nothing like the high-tech offices of Jason Bourne and Carrie Mathison. Instead, the entry to America’s best-known intelligence agency has more of a shabby post-office feel. There are teller windows with bulletproof glass, soda machines, and an old-fashioned black landline phone mounted on the back wall. Once cleared by security, visitors head back outside, where they can walk down a winding road or take the rambling shuttle bus to the old headquarters building. There, lobby security has no retina scanners or fancy fingerprint devices, just a few turnstiles and a friendly security guard who takes cellphones and hands out paper claim checks.
The only clue that this is not a typical government building is the burn bags: Because classified documents cannot just be thrown away, instead of trash cans, striped burn bags that look weirdly like Trader Joe’s holiday shopping bags are scattered around the building to make incineration easier.
Spies, Lies, And Algorithms - The History And Future Of American Intelligence
Amy B. Zegart
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The National Counterterrorism Center is another story. Created after 9/11 to fuse terrorism-threat reporting across the U.S., NCTC has an ultramodern operations center with giant wall monitors, an open floor plan, and computer stations tracking bad guys around the globe. It looks like it came straight out of Hollywood. Because it did. Government officials hired an engineer from Walt Disney Imagineering to design the agency’s offices, right down to the sleek consoles and lunchroom chairs.
In intelligence, art is imitating life and life is imitating art. The implications of this shift are far more serious than they appear. In the past two decades, the amount of spy-themed entertainment, or “spytainment,” has skyrocketed, while spy facts remain scarce and university professors teach courses on just about everything other than intelligence. The result: Spy-themed entertainment is standing in for adult education on the subject, and although the idea might seem far-fetched, fictional spies are actually shaping public opinion and real intelligence policy.
Most Americans don’t know much about the secret world of intelligence because they have never come into contact with it. Although many are concerned about the growing gulf between civilians and the all-volunteer military, far more Americans interact with soldiers than with intelligence officers. On a typical American street, military veterans live in two out of every 10 houses. But outside of the Washington, D.C., area, almost no one lives next door to an intelligence official—or, if they do, they don’t know it. Intelligence isn’t very present in Congress either. In 2020, just 18 of the 535 representatives and senators serving in Congress had ever worked in an intelligence agency.
In 2009, I started hunting for polling data about Americans’ knowledge of intelligence, as well as their attitudes toward intelligence issues. I didn’t find much, so I decided to gather my own small sample of rough data, surveying UCLA undergraduates enrolled in my U.S.-intelligence-history class. The results were illuminating. My students, even those who followed the news closely, knew almost nothing about intelligence agencies and how they worked. What’s more, the data seemed to show a disconcerting connection between students’ ideas about intelligence and their consumption of spy-themed television. Those who said they regularly watched the hit show 24, which depicted torture often and favorably, were statistically more likely than their peers to approve of harsh interrogation methods such as waterboarding, which simulates drowning and which many regard as torture.
Of course, the survey couldn’t prove that watching 24 caused these attitudes; my sample size was only about 100 and it was hardly representative. Maybe the show attracted viewers who had been more pro-waterboarding all along. In 2012 and 2013, I ran two national surveys through YouGov, a polling firm, gathering data from about 1,000 respondents per survey from a nationally representative pool.
The YouGov findings echoed my less-scientific student poll. I found that Americans’ knowledge of intelligence is generally poor. A majority of Americans did not know who the director of national intelligence was or how much of the information in a typical intelligence report came from secrets. Perhaps most interesting, I found that even in 2013, when the media was saturated with stories about secret NSA programs revealed by the former contractor Edward Snowden, most Americans still had no idea what the NSA actually did. Many (wrongly) thought that the agency interrogated detainees and ran operations to capture or kill suspected terrorists. One in four Americans thought that the NSA built spy satellites (it doesn’t). The NSA does make and break codes—but only half of Americans knew that. The biggest crisis in NSA history was unfolding against a backdrop of widespread public misperception and ignorance. (The NSA intercepts and analyzes foreign signals intelligence, including email, telephone calls, and encrypted data transmissions, and is also, as its website declares, “home to America’s codemakers and codebreakers.”)
Findings from my 2012 and 2013 YouGov polls also resonated with my student survey about the real influence of fictional spies. I found that the more frequently American viewers watched spy-themed TV shows and movies, the more likely they were to support aggressive counterterrorism tactics. Frequent spy-TV watchers were more willing than infrequent viewers to support assassinating known terrorists (84 percent versus 70 percent) and transferring suspected terrorists to a country known for using torture (60 percent versus 45 percent), and were more likely to believe that waterboarding suspected terrorists was the right thing to do (38 percent versus 28 percent).
Spytainment-viewing habits were also highly correlated with opinions about the NSA. The more that people watched spy-themed television shows and movies, the more they liked the NSA, the more they approved of NSA’s telephone- and internet-collection programs, and the more they believed that the NSA was telling them the truth about its surveillance activities.
Whatever one thinks about these activities—whether they are effective or ineffective, morally right or morally wrong—the fact that fiction may be significantly influencing public attitudes about them is unsettling.
There is good reason to believe that the relationship between spytainment and beliefs about intelligence could be causal. We know that entertainment has influenced popular culture and attitudes on plenty of other subjects. In the 1980s, law-school applications shot up when L.A. Law became a hit television show. Prosecutors have bemoaned the “CSI effect”—the way the popular television show has led jurors to expect fancy forensic evidence in court and to assume that the government’s case is weak without it. And the 1986 blockbuster Top Gun became a Navy-recruiting bonanza, boosting enlistments and applications to the Naval Academy. The film made the Navy so popular that recruiters even began setting up tables outside of movie theaters. If art can affect life in the legal profession, criminal investigations, and the military, imagining that the same thing could be happening in intelligence is not much of a stretch.
Evidence suggests that this is the case. Spytainment has ballooned in the past 20 years, becoming the predominant, and often only, way for Americans to understand the intelligence agencies that serve them.
Spy-themed entertainment is everywhere these days—in Robert Ludlum novels, Tom Clancy video games, the James Bond and Jason Bourne movie franchises, and hit television shows such as Homeland and 24.
To be sure, spies have been big business for a long time. Bond first appeared in Ian Fleming’s 1953 novel, Casino Royale, and has been around so long that seven different actors have played him on the big screen. Clancy’s CIA hero, Jack Ryan, first turned up in the 1984 novel The Hunt for Red October, and Bourne first forgot his shady CIA past back in 1980, when Ludlum published The Bourne Identity. In fact, America’s first-ever best-selling novel was a fictional account of a double agent during the Revolutionary War that was published in 1821 and aptly titled The Spy.
The difference today is the quantity and variety of spy-themed entertainment surrounding us. A hundred years ago, American readers first discovered the allure of spytainment. Now they can’t get away from it.
Spies today corner a larger share of television and movie audiences than before. In the 1995–96 television season, only two shows remotely related to intelligence—The X-Files and JAG—made Nielsen’s list of the 100 most-watched programs. In the 2005–06 season, there were 12 spy shows on the list. As households have switched from traditional TV to internet streaming services, spy-themed shows have followed them—Jack Ryan made his Amazon Prime debut in 2019. Today, Hollywood studios are releasing twice as many spy blockbusters as they did in the 1980s.
Real spies have always had a complicated relationship with fictional ones. On the one hand, intelligence agencies have been courting Hollywood for decades in the hopes of getting favorable portrayals. On the other hand, they decry the negative and unrealistic depictions that often result.
No one promoted an agency’s reputation in the entertainment industry more assiduously than former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. Presiding over the Bureau from 1924 until his death in 1972, Hoover was a one-man public-relations machine who cooperated only with producers and reporters who portrayed the Bureau in a positive light. By the 1930s, there were FBI-themed radio shows, comic strips, bubblegum cards, and especially movies, including the Warner Bros. film G-Men, starring the biggest tough guy in Hollywood, James Cagney. These films glorified FBI agents as intrepid heroes, guns in hand, who worked the streets to solve crimes and always got their man. Although Hoover was quick to say that he did not officially endorse G-Men, the Bureau was flooded with fan mail after the movie’s release.
Today, the FBI, CIA, and Defense Department all have public-affairs officers or entertainment-industry liaisons who work with Hollywood writers, directors, and producers behind the scenes to try to get them to favorably portray their organizations. In 2008, the FBI sponsored a special public-relations seminar called FBI 101 for the Writers Guild of America. The CIA has developed and pitched its own list of story lines for screenwriters to consider. The Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines have deployed to Los Angeles, setting up entertainment-liaison offices there.
Movie posters decorate the public-affairs conference room at Langley. In 2004, the CIA had the Alias actress Jennifer Garner appear in a recruitment video. For years, the CIA’s kid website featured a cartoon spy, Junior Officer Ava Shoephone, who wore bright-red lipstick and a trench coat, and spoke through a secret telephone embedded in her high-heeled shoe. The agency even named its venture-capital firm In-Q-Tel after Q, the gadgets master from the James Bond series.
At the same time, the CIA dislikes the sinister depictions of agency life that ride shotgun with all the Hollywood glamour. Perhaps no movie captures the risks that arise when Hollywood writes history like Zero Dark Thirty, the Academy Award–nominated film about the CIA’s 10-year hunt for Osama bin Laden. The film received significant assistance from the CIA and portrays the agency in a very flattering light. According to declassified documents, CIA officials met with the movie’s makers on repeated occasions, reviewed draft scripts, and provided access to a number of key people involved in the hunt for bin Laden. Yet when the film was released, it generated so much controversy about what was real and what wasn’t that the then-acting director of the CIA, Michael Morell, had to issue a memo to his workforce clarifying the facts.
“The film creates the strong impression that the enhanced interrogation techniques that were part of our former detention and interrogation program were the key to finding Bin Laden. That impression is false,” Morell wrote. This was a big deal. Both the efficacy and morality of harsh interrogation techniques have been the subjects of intense debate: Defenders argue that these methods produced some useful information that contributed to finding bin Laden, and critics emphasize the way that harsh interrogations produced false and misleading information that hindered progress and raised deep ethical concerns. Reality is nuanced. The movie was not. The result was deeply misleading.
Yet the film’s writer, Mark Boal, and its director, Kathryn Bigelow, marketed Zero Dark Thirty as a faithful reporting of the facts, calling it a “reported film” and a “docudrama.” The film’s opening frame declares that it is “based on first-hand accounts of actual events.” These are strong words. Bigelow kept using them, including when she went on the comedy show The Colbert Report. It was a surreal moment: a filmmaker masquerading as a journalist telling a comedian masquerading as a news anchor that her fictional film masquerading as a documentary was a “first draft of history.”
The proliferation of spytainment has generated two policy problems. The first is a public mindset that sees intelligence agencies as far more powerful, capable, and unaccountable than they actually are. In its most extreme form, the tendency to believe that intelligence agencies are omnipotent has fueled conspiracy theories that a “deep state” is out there, running rogue. The second problem is a policy-making elite that invokes fictional spies and unrealistic scenarios to formulate real intelligence policy. From the heartland to the Beltway, a little knowledge of intelligence turns out to be a dangerous thing.
Conspiracy theories may make for great entertainment, but they are also believed by more and more Americans. A 2006 Scripps poll found that 36 percent of Americans considered it “likely” or “somewhat likely” that U.S. government officials either carried out the 9/11 attacks or knowingly allowed them to occur. Ten years later, a YouGov/Economist survey found that 25 percent of Americans still believed it was “probably” or “definitely” true that the “U.S. government helped plan the attacks of 9/11.” There’s absolutely no evidence that this is true and overwhelming evidence that it’s not.
Scratch the surface of any conspiracy theory and you’ll find a prevailing belief that intelligence agencies are too high-tech, too powerful, too secretive, and reach too far to make mistakes. Bad events don’t just happen. They are intended and carefully planned. The government’s penchant for secrecy is used as further proof; conspiracy theorists argue that if government officials were telling the truth, they’d let us see the classified documents.
More recently, connective technologies have created an online ecosystem tailor-made for spreading false narratives at lightning speed and unprecedented scale. The internet has become a misinformation superhighway where conspiracy theories can be conjured up by anyone, posted on social media, spread by hashtag, amplified by bots, and picked up by mainstream media—all at the touch of a button. In this new arena, conspiracy theories are being peddled by everyone from radical bloggers to Kremlin cyberproxies.
The 2020 election revealed the powerful grip of conspiracy thinking and the very real dangers that it poses. The following year, Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chairman Marco Rubio, a Republican from Florida, was so concerned about myths and misperceptions that he gave a short tutorial about what intelligence actually is during the committee’s public intelligence-threat hearing. “There’s a lot of TV shows about intelligence, there’s a lot of movies,” warned Rubio. “The work of our intelligence agencies is depicted in all kinds of ways in the popular culture, in the media, in the darkest recesses of the internet.”
I do not mean to suggest that intelligence agencies and officials never overstep their legal authorities, keep information from Congress, or engage in objectionable activities. They have. And even programs deemed to be legal—such as CIA drone strikes targeting American citizens without judicial review—bring up unsettling issues related to ethics and policy. But the allure of conspiracy theories and deep-state thinking raises serious questions about how well intelligence agencies will be able to fulfill their mission in the future if large swaths of the public, and even the president, view them with such suspicion.
So long as citizens believe that intelligence agencies can track anyone, go anywhere, and do anything—whether for good or for ill—real intelligence weaknesses are less likely to get fixed and real excesses are more likely to go unchecked.
Fictional spies are influencing policy makers, too, from soldiers fighting on the front lines to justices sitting on the nation’s highest court.
In the fall of 2002, Lieutenant Colonel Diane Beaver, the staff judge advocate general at Guantanamo Bay, ran a series of brainstorming sessions to come up with interrogation techniques that could be used on terrorist detainees held there. She later admitted that Jack Bauer, the lead character on 24 “gave people lots of ideas.” On the show, Bauer, a federal counterterrorism agent played by Kiefer Sutherland, repeatedly used torture to elicit information that would save the United States from an imminent terrorist attack, using the mantra “Whatever it takes.” Beaver ultimately approved the use of dogs, sexual humiliation, waterboarding, and other controversial interrogation techniques. The dean of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, Army Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan, became so concerned that 24 was hurting cadet training by glamorizing the efficacy and morality of torture that he visited the show’s creative team in Los Angeles to request that they produce episodes where torture backfires. (In a truth-is-stranger-than-fiction moment, the show’s crew thought that General Finnegan, who came wearing his military uniform, was an actor.)
Other military educators became similarly concerned that soldiers in the field could not differentiate what they were seeing on television—in shows that included 24, Lost, The Wire, and Alias, where interrogators faced imminent threats and torture always worked—from how they were supposed to behave in the field. Military leaders and FBI interrogators have long argued that other tactics work better; academic studies, for example, have found that prolonged sleep deprivation makes respondents unable to provide accurate information even if they want to. Rising concerns about spytainment’s influence on the military eventually led to an unusual partnership among military educators, Hollywood producers and writers, and the nonprofit organization Human Rights First to create a military-training film aimed at educating junior soldiers about the differences between fictionalized interrogations and their real-life jobs.
The military is not suffering this problem alone. Members of Congress, presidential candidates, and even former CIA Director Leon Panetta have all debated serious issues of policy by contemplating Jack Bauer plotlines, particularly ones involving so-called ticking-time-bomb scenarios, in which a suspected terrorist in custody is thought to hold vital information about an imminent threat to large numbers of people. In reality, these ticking-time-bomb situations have never occurred, and national-security experts have long argued that they are unrealistic.
And yet both Jack Bauer and ticking time bombs have been real considerations in the creation of national-security policy. In 2005, the Senate Judiciary Committee delved into ticking time bombs during its confirmation hearing of Alberto Gonzales, the nominee for attorney general. In a 2006 Heritage Foundation panel discussion of 24, former Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff praised Jack Bauer and the show as “reflecting real life.” John Yoo, the George W. Bush–administration lawyer who wrote the memos justifying the use of waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques, wrote a book about his time in government that referenced Jack Bauer and considered the ticking-time-bomb scenario to be plausible. The late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia even suggested—twice, in public—that he would sometimes turn to TV operative Jack Bauer to resolve legal questions about interrogation methods.
One week, during the 2008 presidential campaign, Jack Bauer was a major topic of conversation on Washington’s most venerated Sunday news show, Meet the Press. The guest was not a Hollywood producer or actor, but former President Bill Clinton, who was asked to comment on public statements made by his wife, the presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, on interrogation policy. In 2009, several members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence pressed Panetta about what interrogation techniques he might use if confronted with a “ticking-time-bomb situation.” Panetta took the hypothetical seriously, telling the intelligence committee that he would seek “whatever additional authority” he needed to get information that would protect Americans from imminent harm. The press quickly dubbed the policy the “Jack Bauer exception” to President Barack Obama’s ban on the use of harsh interrogation techniques.
Spy fiction has also affected congressional policy making. Tom Clancy’s Red Storm Rising inspired Vice President Dan Quayle’s support for the development of anti-satellite weapons during his time in the Senate. Of Clancy’s stories, Quayle said, “They’re not just novels … They’re read as the real thing.” Quayle later recommended Clancy as a consultant for the White House Space Council.
Spytainment isn’t all fun and games. Mounting evidence suggests that fiction too often substitutes for fact, creating fertile ground for conspiracy theories to grow and influencing the formulation of real intelligence policy. Most Americans, including members of Congress, cabinet officials, and judges making policies that affect national security, don’t know much about the secret world of intelligence. The costs are hidden but significant.
In the 21st century, the tip of the spear isn’t a spear. It’s intelligence—the ability to find, acquire, and analyze information to give us decision advantage against adversaries in physical space, outer space, and cyberspace. But secret agencies in democratic societies cannot succeed without trust. And trust requires knowledge. As the former CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden once put it, “The American people have to trust us, and in order to trust us they have to know about us.”
19. Higher ed's role in civic learning and democracy’s future (opinion)
Conclusion:
Just as important, in the words of Eduardo Padrón, “we have to rid ourselves of the elitist assumption” that civic learning is a priority only for certain kinds of students and certain kinds of institutions. Democracy is on the line—and college students who have the most to gain from finding solutions to society’s festering problems should be first at the table in helping to shape that promised better future.
Higher ed's role in civic learning and democracy’s future (opinion) | Inside Higher Ed
Carol Geary Schneider writes of civic learning, the equity shortfall and colleges’ role in nurturing the habits of mind and heart and practical problem solving our troubled democracy so urgently needs.
By
Just after World War II, when the United States’ commitment to democracy, international community and the public good was at a peak, the six-volume 1947 Truman Commission report on higher education gave a huge boost to the community college movement and to integration, as well. Less famously, this major report on higher education’s future also seized the moment to define, “from among the principal goals for higher education, those which should come first in our time.”
The commission cited three overarching goals for higher education:
- Education for a fuller realization of democracy in every phrase of living;
- Education directly and explicitly for international understanding and cooperation; and
- Education for the application of creative imagination and trained intelligence to the solution of social problems.
When was the last time you heard anyone in 21st-century policy circles make such a clear and direct connection between what students should learn in higher education and the “fuller realization of democracy” in our world and time?
Today, analysts are sounding warning bells about deepening societal divisions, dysfunctional government, rising authoritarianism and the crippling disparities we need to transform. On Jan. 6 this year, President Biden declared that “at home and abroad, we’re engaged anew in a struggle between democracy and autocracy … We are in a battle for the soul of America.”
The stakes are high, as they have been in earlier eras of rupture and threat. And yet we hear no broad-based policy discussions about making civic inquiry and democracy engagement a top priority for college learners in general, much less for community college students.
The Biden administration wants to make “14 the new 12” via free tuition for community colleges. And some states have already made that move. But both at the federal level and in the states, those working to advance tuition-free community college—with targeted investments in increased completion—have been notably silent on the democracy knowledge and practical civic know-how that two years of learning beyond high school could build for this riven democracy. Instead, policy priorities remain resolutely focused on job skills and getting students quickly into the economy.
It is time to bring together America’s alarmed recognition that “democracy is fragile” with the nation’s ongoing efforts to expand successful participation in postsecondary education. What we need now is a new era of policy and public engagement with higher education’s distinctive role in nurturing the habits of mind and heart and practical problem solving that our troubled democracy so urgently needs.
Democracy faces monumental problems, both at home and in a global era of rising authoritarianism. Those challenges—health, poverty, hunger, housing, the inequitable education system, climate, social distrust and more—are daily realities for many students. Racial slurs and messages from virulent white supremacist groups are spreading across American communities, including college campuses. As the president of my alma mater recently wrote to alumnae, students who have come to college to learn are struggling with pain, anger and exhaustion.
The fractures that threaten U.S. democracy are real and compounding. College students from all backgrounds—at both two- and four-year institutions—need to hear that their education will help them bring their knowledge, skills, examined values and direct practical experience to the hard work of co-creating the better future to which all Americans aspire. And that they will begin that work as part of their college studies.
It is time to broaden and democratize our postsecondary learning horizons.
Today, many colleges and universities—but fewer community colleges—are raising core questions about students’ roles as citizens in their general education programs and, increasingly, in their majors. And in 2020, an important report from the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce supplied contemporary and comparative evidence that general education helps “tame” authoritarian inclinations and thus protects democracy. Meanwhile, two decades of research on the most common civic learning pedagogy—community-based projects completed as part of a “service learning” course—show that student participation in service learning: 1) correlates with increased completion, 2) enhances practical skills valued by employers and 3) builds students’ motivation to help solve public problems.
Policy and higher education leaders must become bold in making the case that democracy is the foundation of everything else we hold dear, and that college students’ democracy learning is mission-critical for all forms of higher learning—including two-year, four-year, career and technical, and short-term training, too.
And we need to match advocacy with positive action. Frameworks already exist for advancing civic inquiry, deliberative dialogues and collaborative problem solving on social questions “across the curriculum.” Diverse institutional designs for making civic inquiry part of all students’ college learning already exist, as we will describe below.
Our challenge now is to significantly accelerate a grassroots-led civic learning revival that is now gaining momentum, although largely outside public or policy notice. And we need to set equity goals and markers so that the civic learning movement becomes inclusive rather than, as it is today, often marked by deep disparities between who participates and who does not.
Making Civic Learning and Democracy Engagement Committed to Equity
Making democracy learning a shared priority for all postsecondary students, with special emphasis on those historically underserved, is the rallying cry and goal for a new coalition that leading organizations have recently announced. Titled Civic Learning and Democracy Engagement (CLDE), the coalition is calling for both American and global civic inquiry, guided practice in civil discourse, and collaborative work on real-world public problems to be part of each postsecondary student’s educational pathway, including their career preparation.
The Association of American Colleges and Universities, Complete College America, College Promise, and the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association organized the coalition, of which I am one of the leaders. The initiative has already received endorsements from over 60 partner organizations, including entire state systems, the Higher Learning Commission and a host of other student success and civic learning organizations. Together, these organizations have rallied around the overarching goal of making civic learning in college pervasive, inclusive, high-quality and “equity-committed.”
Yolanda Watson Spiva, executive director of Complete College America, has summed up the coalition’s equity priorities plainly: “We cannot be a stratified nation in which some college students prepare for civic leadership while others get the implicit message that democracy will not require either their time or their talent.” Her observation points to the growing strength of the civic learning movement on campus, momentum that the coalition seeks to accelerate. But it points, as well, to the movement’s most unfortunate weakness.
The growing strength? Hundreds of community colleges, colleges and universities already have created campus centers and programs for student civic learning, community-based projects, dialogues across difference and civic leadership development. National data suggest the impact of these efforts. The National Study of Student Engagement (NSSE) routinely asks students whether—and how frequently—they took at course that included a civic action project in the community. The study director, Alex McCormick, has noted that some 53 percent of students at four-year institutions report taking one or more such courses during their first year of college. The number rises to around 60 percent by senior year.
The core weakness? At most institutions, participation in civic and democracy learning remains optional rather than part of the degree-requirement fabric. And the students least likely to “do optional” are America’s low-income, first-generation students and students from historically underserved communities.
The result is deeply inequitable participation in college-level civic learning. The students whose profiles predict low civic participation enroll in high numbers in the nation’s community colleges. That prediction turns out to be all too accurate. The Center for Community College Student Engagement, or CCCSE, the two-year counterpart to NSSE, reported this year that, across their multiple years in community college, 77 percent of respondents never took even one course that involved a community service project. (The two organizations are CLDE’s research partners.)
Faced with such disparities, educators point out that community college students (and many four-year college students) often live very complex lives, balancing college study with work and family and frequently facing searing societal disparities as well. But this reality makes college students’ civic learning a design challenge, not an absolute impossibility. And, in this spirit, many leaders who care deeply both about civic engagement and about equity have already led the way in showing how students’ civic learning and engagement can become integral, not optional, to students’ degree progression—and not just at elite institutions but in broad-access ones, as well.
Under Eduardo Padrón, Miami Dade College, the nation’s largest community college, made social responsibility one of its requisite student learning outcomes over 15 years ago, and it has both fostered and assessed students’ learning gains on civic engagement ever since. Piedmont Virginia Community College is working today to braid civic projects into its majors so that students develop practice in connecting their career studies to public questions and to the ethical choices that practitioners make in every field. Kingsborough Community College, celebrated as a top community college with notable gains in completion, has made course-based civic learning a degree requirement. Other equity-committed institutions, like the University of Wisconsin at Parkside, have embraced both the workplace and the community as sites for college students’ projects on locally significant public questions.
The prize-winning Metro Student Success Program at San Francisco State University is a particularly strong example of what a strong blend of equity commitments, deep civic learning, career preparation and sequenced supports for quality learning can achieve in practice for equity, student success and democracy. The program serves mainly low-income and first-generation students from historically underserved groups, and it has made a sequenced program of guided student work on searing social issues central to its efforts to support student completion. It provides a panoply of supports and services to its students, but it also focuses intensively on students’ gains in essential learning outcomes—communication, critical thinking and so forth—and on students’ own strategic work on some of San Francisco’s most festering societal problems.
Moreover, students do this civic work in “academies” that are directly tied to their likely career directions: business, STEM, education, health, ethnic studies and liberal and creative arts. Graduates become, in Metro’s words, “professional workers for the social good.” The results are significant, with students’ gains in completion far outstripping those of a matched sample not in the program, and outstripping the university’s graduation rates over all.
Higher education must multiply the number of institutions where students from historically underserved backgrounds work simultaneously on getting their degrees, preparing for good jobs and discovering their own roles in democracy’s needed repair. That would prove to be a sound investment in both higher graduation rates and in democracy’s future.
As the Truman Commission knew, and as we must rediscover today, all college students can and should develop the “creative imagination and trained intelligence” that American democracy sorely needs to tackle its many urgent challenges, including systemic inequities themselves. It will take creativity and commitment, but with democracy’s future on the line, we can create educational pathways that involve all America’s college students with “complex lives” in tackling democracy’s tough challenges. We can do so not as an add-on to job preparation, but rather as an integral part of students’ professional and career development.
Just as important, in the words of Eduardo Padrón, “we have to rid ourselves of the elitist assumption” that civic learning is a priority only for certain kinds of students and certain kinds of institutions. Democracy is on the line—and college students who have the most to gain from finding solutions to society’s festering problems should be first at the table in helping to shape that promised better future.
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.
