Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

“Listen now. When people talk, listen completely. Don’t be thinking about what you’re going to say. Most people never listen. Nor do they observe.”

- Ernest Hemingway

“Imagine the people who believe such things and are not ashamed to ignore, totally, all the patient findings of thinking minds through the centuries since the Bible was written. And it is these ignorant people, the most uneducated, the most unimaginative, the most unthinking among us, who would make themselves the guides and leaders of us all’ who would force their feeble and childish beliefs on us; who would invade our schools and libraries and homes, I personally resent it bitterly.”

- Isaac Asimov

“Thus it has come about that our theoretical and critical literature, instead of giving plain, straightforward arguments in which the author at least always knows what he is saying and the reader what he is reading, is crammed with jargon, ending at obscure crossroads where the author loses its readers. Sometimes these books are even worse: they are just hollow shells. The author himself no longer knows just what he is thinking and soothes himself with obscure ideas which would not satisfy him if expressed in plain speech.”

- Major General Carl von Clausewitz

1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, AUGUST 6 (Putin's War)

2. China launches long-range airstrike drills around Taiwan on fourth day of military exercises

3. After China’s Military Spectacle, Options Narrow for Winning Over Taiwan

4. China’s Taiwan Saber-Rattling Is the New Normal

5. Why Superpower Crises Are a Good Thing

6. After raging at US and Japan over Pelosi's Taiwan visit, China faces dilemma

7. Russian men, dying in war, leave many families sad, angry and silent

8. A U.S. Return to Guadalcanal, in Another Tense Historical Moment

9. White House summons Chinese ambassador amid military exercises, diplomatic retaliation for Pelosi Taiwan visit

10. The Provocative Politics of Nancy Pelosi’s Trip to Taiwan

11. Making Sense of the Nepal Army’s Engagement With Big Powers

12. ‘There’s no path out of economic oblivion for Russia’: New report reveals how corporate exodus has already wiped out decades of post–Cold War growth

13. Tracking the Fourth Taiwan Strait Crisis

14. ‘Putin’s Chef’ Is Personally Touring Russian Prisons for Wagner Recruits to Fight in Ukraine, Reports Say

15. Can Russia Divide Europe?

16. U.S. SOCOM hosts change of responsibility and retirement ceremony for its top enlisted leader

17. ‘Absolute evil’: inside the Russian prison camp where dozens of Ukrainians burned to death

18. Russia’s co-opting of US political groups is serious business

19. Blinken commits U.S. to defending Philippines against armed attacks

20. Corruption is sending shock waves through China's chipmaking industry

21. Opinion | Even from prison I can see opposition to Putin’s war growing

22. ‘America’s Philosopher’ Review: The Key to John Locke

23. Ex-Time reporter: The day I knew journalism had died in America

24. Another Way to Help Taiwan—and America

25. As English Goes, So Goes the U.S.

1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, AUGUST 6 (Putin's War)

Maps/graphics: https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-august-6

RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, AUGUST 6

Aug 6, 2022 - Press ISW

understandingwar.org

Kateryna Stepanenko, Katherine Lawlor, Karolina Hird, George Barros, and Frederick W. Kagan

August 6, 9 pm ET

Click here to see ISW's interactive map of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This map is updated daily alongside the static maps present in this report.

Russian and Ukrainian forces traded accusations of dangerous shelling at the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) on August 6 continuing the exchange of accusations ISW reported on August 5.[1] ISW cannot independently determine which party is responsible for the incident. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky condemned the alleged Russian shelling as an "open, brazen crime” and “an act of terror.”[2] He called on the international community to designate Russia as a state sponsor of terrorism and to sanction Russia’s nuclear industry. [3] Both sides claimed that the shelling caused a fire at the hydrogen station at the plant. The Russian-appointed head of the Zaporizhia Oblast Occupation Administration, Evgeniy Balitskyi, claimed on August 5 that Ukrainian forces “decided to put the whole of Europe on the brink of a nuclear catastrophe” by shelling the plant.[4] The Ukrainian head of the Zaporizhia Oblast Military Administration, Oleksandr Starukh, claimed on August 6 that Russian forces are trying to “provoke” Ukrainians into shelling the NPP to make the West hesitant to provide weapons to Ukraine.[5]

A Russian opposition outlet reported that Russian forces are storing explosives and ammunition around the nuclear power plant. The Insider reported on August 5 that a source claimed Russian forces mined the turbine room of energy block 1 of the NPP around August 2.[6] A separate source claimed that about 500 Russian soldiers, as well as armored personnel carriers and anti-aircraft guns, were stationed within the plant and that Russian forces mined the area around the plant. The second source said that Russian forces “store mines and ammunition in the immediate vicinity of the energy blocks, under trestles, with some of the ammunition stored inside the energy block.” The second source was unsure “whether the energy block has been mined or is simply used for storing explosives.” The Insider reported that Russian forces established Grad rocket batteries near the village of Vodyane, approximately 4 km from the NPP reactors (and approximately 2 km from the spent fuel containment units at the plant). Ukrainian channels and officials had reported in mid-July that Russian forces were firing on Nikopol—the Ukrainian town just across the river from the NPP—from near the nuclear reactors at Zaporizhzhia NPP.[7] Ukraine’s Southern Military Command has subsequently reported that Russian forces have regularly shelled Nikopol with Grad rockets, damaging 47 houses on August 5 and 6.[8]

ISW previously assessed on August 3 that Russian forces are likely using the NPP to play on Western fears of a nuclear disaster in Ukraine in an effort to degrade Western will to provide military support to a Ukrainian counteroffensive, while also effectively using the plant as a nuclear shield to prevent Ukrainian strikes on Russian forces and equipment.[9]

Note: ISW does not receive any classified material from any source, uses only publicly available information, and draws extensively on Russian, Ukrainian, and Western reporting and social media as well as commercially available satellite imagery and other geospatial data as the basis for these reports. References to all sources used are provided in the endnotes of each update.

Key Takeaways

A Russian opposition outlet reported that Russian forces are storing explosives and mines in and around Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant and may have mined parts of the plant. Russian forces may also be firing rockets at Ukrainian positions from within or near the plant.
Russian forces conducted limited ground attacks northwest of Slovyansk and east and south of Bakhmut.
Russian forces conducted a series of ground attacks to attempt to break through Ukrainian defensive lines north, west, and south of Donetsk City.
Russian forces did not conduct offensive operations in southern Ukraine and continued to undertake defensive measures.
Ongoing Ukrainian partisan activity and civilian resistance are frustrating Russian occupation forces as Russian occupation authorities continue to prepare for the integration of occupied territories into the Russian Federation following their upcoming sham annexation referenda.
Russian state media advocated for labor camps, repressions, and shooting of Ukrainian partisans and civilians that refused to cooperate with Russian-appointed officials in occupied Ukrainian territories.

We do not report in detail on Russian war crimes because those activities are well-covered in Western media and do not directly affect the military operations we are assessing and forecasting. We will continue to evaluate and report on the effects of these criminal activities on the Ukrainian military and population and specifically on combat in Ukrainian urban areas. We utterly condemn these Russian violations of the laws of armed conflict, Geneva Conventions, and humanity even though we do not describe them in these reports.

Main Effort—Eastern Ukraine (comprised of one subordinate and two supporting efforts);
Subordinate Main Effort—Encirclement of Ukrainian Troops in the Cauldron between Izyum and Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts
Supporting Effort 1—Kharkiv City
Supporting Effort 2—Southern Axis
Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts
Activities in Russian-occupied Areas

Main Effort—Eastern Ukraine

Subordinate Main Effort—Southern Kharkiv, Donetsk, Luhansk Oblasts (Russian objective: Encircle Ukrainian forces in Eastern Ukraine and capture the entirety of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, the claimed territory of Russia’s proxies in Donbas)

Russian forces conducted a limited ground attack northwest of Slovyansk and otherwise shelled settlements along the Izyum-Slovyansk line on August 6. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian troops tried and failed to advance on the western outskirts of Bohorodychne, about 17km northwest of Slovyansk.[10] Russian forces continued artillery strikes on settlements along the Kharkiv-Donetsk Oblast border, including Mazanivka, Adamivka, Kurulka, Dibrovne, Dovhenke, Krasnopillya, and Dolyna.[11]

Russian forces did not conduct any confirmed ground attacks on Siversk and continued to shell Siversk and surrounding settlements on August 6.[12] Social media posted to Twitter on August 5 showed elements of the Russian 55th Motorized Rifle Brigade of the 41st Combined Arms Army of the Central Military district reportedly operating in the direction of Siversk.[13] This imagery seemingly confirms that elements of Russian Colonel General Aleksandr Lapin’s “Central Group” of forces are still operating in northeastern Donetsk Oblast near the Luhansk Oblast border, as ISW has previously reported.[14]

Russian force conducted a series of ground attacks east and south of Bakhmut on August 6. The Ukrainian General Staff stated that Russian troops attempted to gain more advantageous tactical positions around Stryapivka, Bakhmutske, Soledar, Yakovlivka, Volodymyrivka, and Pokrovske, settlements along the eastern arc of Bakhmut and all within 12km of the outskirts of Bakhmut.[15] Russian troops additionally continued localized ground attacks south of Bakhmut around Vidrozhennya, Vershyna, Kodema, and Zaitseve and otherwise shelled Bakhmut and surrounding settlements to support ongoing ground operations.[16] Geolocated footage posted by the Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) militia forces indicates that Russian forces have likely captured Travneve, a small settlement about 17km south of Bakhmut.[17]

Russian forces conducted a series of ground attacks in an attempt to break through Ukrainian lines of defense in the Avdiivka-Donetsk City area on August 6. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces unsuccessfully attempted to penetrate Ukrainian defenses north of Donetsk City in the Spartak-Avdiivka, Novoselivka Druha-Krasnohorivka, and Lozove-Nevelske directions.[18] Russian troops also attempted to push west of their positions near Oleksandrivka towards Maryinka, about 5km west of the Petrovskyi district of Donetsk City.[19] Ukrainian sources additionally refuted Russian claims that Russian forces have full control over Pisky, and geolocated footage of Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) soldiers in Pisky indicates that Russian troops likely only control the southeastern outskirts of Pisky.[20]

Russian forces conducted several limited ground attacks southwest of Donetsk City in the direction of the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast border on August 6. The Ukrainian General Staff stated that Russian forces unsuccessfully attempted to break through Ukrainian defenses around Krylivka, Pavlivka, Novomaiorske, and Prechystivka- all southwest of Donetsk City and within 30km of the Zaporizhia Oblast border.[21] Russian forces continued air and artillery strikes in the area between Donetsk City and the oblast border.[22]

Supporting Effort #1—Kharkiv City (Russian objective: Defend ground lines of communication (GLOCs) to Izyum and prevent Ukrainian forces from reaching the Russian border)

Russian forces did not conduct any confirmed ground attacks in northeastern Kharkiv Oblast and shelled Kharkiv City and surrounding settlements on August 6.[23]

Supporting Effort #2—Southern Axis (Russian objective: Defend Kherson and Zaporizhia Oblasts against Ukrainian counterattacks)

Russian forces did not conduct offensive operations in southern Ukraine and focused on defending their occupied positions with aviation and artillery. Ukrainian military officials reported that Russian forces continued to launch airstrikes near Andriivka, situated on the eastern Inhulets River’s bank near the Ukrainian bridgehead.[24] Russian forces also continued aerial reconnaissance near the bridgehead and maintained artillery fire along the contact line in Kherson Oblast.[25] The Ukrainian Southern Operational Command stated that Russian forces are rotating manpower and redistributing equipment in unspecified directions in Kherson Oblast but noted that the composition of Russian troops in the area has not changed as of August 5.[26] Russian forces launched rockets at Nikopol, Zaporizhia City, and Mykolaiv City from MLRS systems.[27] Social media footage also showed Russian forces transporting a Buk air defense system near Pryazovske, southeast of Melitopol, on an unspecified date.[28]

Ukrainian military officials confirmed several strikes at Russian strongholds and ammunition depots throughout Kherson Oblast. The Ukrainian Southern Operational Command stated that Ukrainian missile units destroyed two Russian control points belonging to the 76th Airborne Assault Division and the 49th Combined Arms Army in Chornobaivka (about 5km northwest of Kherson City), a command and observation post of an unspecified battalion tactical group (BTG) in Bruskinske along the T2207 highway, and an ammunition depot in Oleshky southeast of Kherson City.[29] Ukrainian local officials noted that Russian forces are continuing to accumulate large quantities of military equipment in Oleshky, likely in preparation to defend logistics routes to Kherson City and to establish defensive positions on the left bank of Dnipro River.[30] Social media users published footage of a large smoke cloud coming from Skadovsk (approximately 62km south of Kherson City), but Ukrainian officials have not confirmed any Ukrainian attack on that location as of the time of this publication.[31]

Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts (Russian objective: Expand combat power without conducting general mobilization)

Existing Russian military units and the Russian National Guard (Rosgvardia) are continuing to recruit volunteers to reinforce existing military units. Caucasus region-focused outlet Kavkaz Uzel reported that Russian forces distributed leaflets and established a day-long recruitment drive in Nazran, Republic of Ingushetia, to recruit volunteers for the existing 503rd Motorized Rifle Regiment of the 58th Combined Arms Army.[32] Russian forces reconstituted the 503rd Regiment in July 2021, after it had been dismantled in 2009 during the military reforms.[33] Rosgvardia also posted job listings for riflemen and drivers in the Republic of Ingushetia offering starting monthly salaries of 45,000 to 50,000 rubles (about $750 to $820) with a requirement to be ready to participate in the “special military operation” in Ukraine. The Republic of Dagestan also posted explosives expert positions with a requirement for “a desire to serve in the Russian Armed Forces.” Stavropol and Krasnoyarskiy Krai both listed on employment portals several military positions such as UAV operator with the requirement to travel for ”business trips.” Such recruitment drives indicate that Russian leaders are seeking to exploit different security services to generate more volunteers for the ”special military operation.” The drives also suggest that volunteer recruitment is not limited to newly forming volunteer units.

ISW identified additional Russian federal subjects (regions) that are recruiting personnel for volunteer battalions to participate in the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Local media outlets reported that Khanty-Mansi Okrug and Voronezh and Smolensk Oblasts are forming volunteer battalions and offering one-time enlistment payments ranging between 100,000 and 250,000 rubles (about $1,650 to $4,130).[34] Smolensk Oblast officials created the ”Feniks” volunteer battalion Telegram channel on July 27 and announced recruitment of men ages 18 to 60 in the region for a minimum six-month service period.[35] Khanty-Mansi Okrug announced the formation of two unnamed volunteer battalions also requiring a minimum contract time period of six months.[36] Voronezh Oblast promised recruits of an unspecified volunteer battalion monthly salaries of at least 256,000 rubles (about $4,200) if the servicemen serve in the combat zone.[37]

Activity in Russian-occupied Areas (Russian objective: consolidate administrative control of occupied areas; set conditions for potential annexation into the Russian Federation or some other future political arrangement of Moscow’s choosing)

Ongoing Ukrainian partisan activity and civilian resistance are frustrating Russian occupation forces and may lead to additional crackdowns on occupied civilians. Unknown people shot and killed the deputy head of the Russian administration in charge of the housing and utility sector in Nova Kakhovka, Kherson Oblast, Vitaly Gura, on August 5.[38] Gura died in the hospital on August 6. Russian milblogger Daniil Bezsonov claimed that Ukrainian partisans were responsible.[39] Ukrainian Advisor to the Kherson Military Administration Serhiy Khan warned that ”Gura’s fate will reach all collaborators” but did not directly attribute the attack to partisans.[40] Ukrainian Telegram channel MariupolNow reported that partisans took responsibility for an explosion at the Russian-controlled police station in Berdyansk, Zaporizhia Oblast on August 6.[41] The Ukrainian Resistance Center reported on August 4 that Russian occupation forces harassed the staff of a construction materials store in occupied Kherson, but that the staff refused to work for Russian occupation forces.[42] The Ukrainian Resistance Center also reported both attacks on August 6 and said “The Center for National Resistance notes that collaborationism is bad for your health.”[43]

Russian state media advocated for the introduction of labor camps, repression, and the shooting of Ukrainian partisans and civilians who refuse to cooperate with Russian-appointed officials in occupied Ukrainian territories. Kremlin-affiliated outlet Komsomolskaya Pravda host Sergey Mardan encouraged an unnamed occupation authority that he interviewed on his show to recreate gulags (the notorious Soviet prison/labor camp system), confiscate private property, and shoot local teachers and partisans for refusing to cooperate with Russian-appointed authorities.[44] The majority owner of Komsomolskaya Pravda, Sergey Rudnov, is the son of Oleg Rudnov, a childhood friend of Russian President Vladimir Putin.[45] The unnamed occupation official also acknowledged that Russian authorities have been facing severe challenges with partisan activity, specifically noting an occasion when partisans disabled the electronic control units of unspecified equipment. The interview confirms Ukrainian official reports of partisan activity and the refusal of Ukrainian specialists to cooperate with occupation authorities.

Meanwhile, Russian occupation forces continue to prepare for the integration of occupied territories into the Russian Federation following their sham annexation referenda. The Ukrainian Resistance Center reported on August 6 that Russian authorities seized the Suspline Kherson TV branch, likely to establish pro-Russian broadcasters in advance of the referenda, and renamed it the Tavriia channel.[46] The Tavriia (or Tauride) Gubernia was a historical province of the Russian Empire and is a possible administrative structure for parts of occupied Kherson and Zaporizhia oblasts that could fold them into a Russian republic that may also include Russian-occupied Crimea.[47] The Center reported that the majority of the TV channel staff refused to cooperate, so Russian forces appointed a ”cleaning lady” as channel director and imported propagandists from St Petersburg to open a ”media school” to teach all ”willing” people how to be journalists, cameramen, and editors for the occupation administration-run channel. Russian state-affiliated news outlet TASS reported that Russian occupation forces will begin issuing Russian license plates in Kherson Oblast with region code 184 and will require residents to have Russian passports to acquire legal license plates.[48] ISW previously reported that Russian occupation authorities are dramatically expanding their passportization of occupied Ukrainian territories by requiring Ukrainian civilians to acquire Russian passports to participate in basic life activities.[49] The Russian head of the Zaporizhia Occupation Administration, Yevheny Balitsky, stated on August 5 that the Zaporizhian rail lines will become “part of a big network of Russian railways,” demonstrating Russian plans for increasingly overt integration with the Russian Federation.[50]

[2] https://www.president dot gov dot ua/en/news/sho-bilshe-nashogo-zerna-bude-na-svitovomu-rinku-menshim-bud-76905

[3] https://tass dot ru/armiya-i-opk/15409285

[6] https://theins dot ru/en/news/253868

[7] https://24tv dot ua/nikopol-obstrili-artileriyi-zdiysnyuyut-teritoriyi-zaporizkoyi_n2099012; https://zona dot media/article/2022/08/05/nuclear; https://t.me/energoatom_ua/8174; ; https://www.ukrinform dot ua/rubric-ato/3529711-na-zaes-rosiani-vstanovluut-raketni-kompleksi-z-akih-obstriluut-nikopol.html;; https://lb dot ua/society/2022/07/15/523298_rosiyani_obstrilyuyut_nikopol_z.html; https://t.me/vilkul/1606

[20] https://www.ukrinform dot ua/rubric-ato/3544782-na-doneccini-selise-piski-perebuvae-pid-kontrolem-zsu-kirilenko.html ; https://zn dot ua/ukr/UKRAINE/selishche-piski-perebuvaje-pid-kontrolem-ukrajinskikh-vijskovikh-.html; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WY8sDvZdWEA&ab_channel=%D0%A2%D0%A1%D0%9...

[32] https://www dot kavkaz-uzel.eu/articles/379906/

[33] https://gazetaingush dot ru/obshchestvo/zhitelyam-ingushetii-obyasnili-prichinu-razmeshcheniya-voennogo-poligona-v-predgornoy

[34] https://www dot kommersant.ru/doc/5470457; https://t.me/iovf_phoenix_67/5; https://informugra dot ru/news/obyasnyaem_ru/dlya-uchastiya-v-spetsialnoy-voennoy-operatsii-formiruyutsya-imennye-podrazdeleniya-yugry-/

[36] https://informugra dot ru/news/obyasnyaem_ru/dlya-uchastiya-v-spetsialnoy-voennoy-operatsii-formiruyutsya-imennye-podrazdeleniya-yugry-/

[37] https://www dot kommersant.ru/doc/5470457

[38] https://sprotyv.mod.gov dot ua/2022/08/06/na-pivdni-odrazu-dva-gaulyajtera-perebuvayut-u-vazhkomu-stani/ ; https://ria dot ru/20220806/pokushenie-1807714966.html?utm_source=yxnews&utm_medium=desktop; https://t.me/rian_ru/173599; https://real-vin dot com/na-hersonshhine-ubit-gauljajter; https://news.liga dot net/politics/news/v-novoy-kahovke-podstelili-vidnogo-kollaboranta-on-v-bolnitse-v-tyajelom-sostoyanii; https://ru.slovoidilo dot ua/2022/08/06/novost/bezopasnost/xersonshhine-ubili-vysokopostavlennogo-kollaboranta-vitaliya-guru; https://focus dot ua/voennye-novosti/524630-v-hersonskoy-oblasti-sovershili-pokushenie-na-kollaboranta-guru-chto-izvestno-video; https://t.me/voenkorKotenok/39056

[42] https://sprotyv dot mod dot gov dot ua/2022/08/04/v-hersoni-okupanty-zahoplyuyut-biznes-ale-praczivnyky-vidmovlyayutsya-praczyuvaty-na-voroga/

[43] https://sprotyv dot mod dot gov dot ua/2022/08/06/na-pivdni-odrazu-dva-gaulyajtera-perebuvayut-u-vazhkomu-stani/

[44] https://sprotyv.mod.gov dot ua/2022/08/06/okupanty-pozhalilys-propagandystam-na-totalnyj-sabotazh-z-boku-misczevyh-u-melitopoli/; https://focus dot ua/voennye-novosti/524623-v-melitopole-okkupanty-hotyat-rasstrelivat-uchiteley-za-zarplaty-iz-ukrainy-video; https://t.me/ivan_fedorov_melitopol/358

[46] https://sprotyv dot mod dot gov dot ua/2022/08/06/okupanty-ne-zmogly-nabraty-personal-dlya-vidzhatogo-nymy-telekanalu-u-hersoni/

[48] https://t.me/stranaua/56461; https://tass dot com/russia/1490353;

understandingwar.org

2. China launches long-range airstrike drills around Taiwan on fourth day of military exercises

Four days of threatening exercises and China continues to play the victim card.

Excerpts:

US allies have also come forward to condemn China’s actions, including in a joint statement issued Friday by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong, and Japanese Foreign Minister Hayashi Yoshimasa following their meeting on the sidelines of the ASEAN Foreign Ministers’ Meeting in Cambodia.

The diplomats “condemned (China’s) launch of ballistic missiles,” including those the Japanese government said landed in its exclusive economic zone, for “raising tension and destabilizing the region,” and called on China “to immediately cease the military exercises,” according to the statement released by the US State Department.

China hit back on Saturday evening, with its embassy in Australia calling the US “the biggest saboteur and destabilizer of peace in the Taiwan Strait” and disputing the “legal basis” for Japan’s claims regarding the missile landings.

“China is the victim of political provocation from the US. The actions taken by the Chinese government to safeguard state sovereignty and territorial integrity and curb the separatist activities are legitimate and justified,” a statement from the embassy read.

China launches long-range airstrike drills around Taiwan on fourth day of military exercises | CNN

CNN · by Wayne Chang,Simone McCarthy · August 7, 2022

CNN —

Chinese forces took part in drills focused on land attacks and long-range airstrikes around Taiwan on Sunday, its military said, on what was expected to be the final day of extensive exercises rolled out in response to a visit to the island by US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

The Eastern Theater Command of the Chinese military said on Sunday around noon local time that it conducted live-fire drills in the waters and airspace around Taiwan “as planned.”

“The drills focused on joint fire land strikes and long-range air strike capabilities,” the command said in a statement posted to its official account on the social media platform Weibo, without specifying whether the drills have ended.

The exercises, planned to take place in six zones around the island, began Thursday and were scheduled to last until Sunday at noon local time in Beijing, Chinese state media reported.

KINMEN, TAIWAN - FEBRUARY 02: A view of the South China Sea between the city of Xiamen in China, in the far distance, and the islands of Kinmen in Taiwan, in the foreground, on February 02, 2021 as seen from the airspace above Kinmen, Taiwan. Kinmen, an island in the Taiwan strait that is part of Taiwan's territory, is so close to China that the deep-water port of Xiamen, one of China's biggest, lies less than three miles away across the water. It is one of the few areas of Taiwan that mainland Chinese tourists can visit without visas or permits, and has deep ties with the adjacent Fujian province of China; locals have seen a boost to their incomes from Chinese tourism in pre-pandemic times. Wartime anti-tank barricades litter the beach and also features the Zhaishan tunnel, which Taiwanese forces still reserve the right to use in wartime and for military exercises. (Photo by An Rong Xu/Getty Images)

An Rong Xu/Getty Images/FILE

Does Taiwan have its own airspace? China sets military drills close to island after Pelosi visit

Taiwan’s Defense Ministry on Sunday said it detected multiple Chinese aircraft, naval vessels and drones operating around the Taiwan Strait that morning, in what it called a “simulated attack against the main island of Taiwan and Taiwan’s naval vessels” – a slight dial-up of language from Saturday when it said that Chinese military drills around the island could be a “possible simulated attack.”

Taiwan’s military “closely monitored” the situation and deployed aircraft and vessels to “appropriately” react to Chinese military drills around the island, the Defense Ministry added. It also said drones “intruded” into outlying islands controlled by Taiwan.

The ministry did not immediately provide an exact number for the Chinese aircraft, vessels or drones that were detected on Sunday morning or say whether they crossed the sensitive median line in the Taiwan Strait that separates the island from the Chinese mainland.

China announced the drills – whose scale marks a significant escalation from past activities – within an hour of the arrival of Pelosi and a congressional delegation in Taiwan on Tuesday evening. The stop, which was expected but not announced beforehand, was part of a larger Asia tour.

Chinese officials had repeatedly warned Washington of unspecified repercussions in the lead-up to the expected trip. In addition to the drills, Beijing also launched a raft of diplomatic penalties, including canceling future phone calls between Chinese and US defense leaders and suspending bilateral climate talks.

The Chinese Communist Party views self-governing Taiwan as its territory, despite never having controlled it, and has long vowed to “reunify” the island with the Chinese mainland – by force if necessary.

The previous days’ drills had seen a number of air and maritime operations around the island, including the launch of 11 ballistic missiles on Thursday – some of which flew over the island of Taiwan and landed in Japan’s exclusive economic zone. That marked the first time China had sent missiles over the island.

On Saturday, 14 vessels and 20 planes operated by the Chinese military were detected around the strait, according to Taiwan’s Defense Ministry. Of the 20 aircraft, 14 crossed the median line, it added.

On Friday, 68 Chinese warplanes were reported in the Taiwan Strait, according to the ministry. Of those, 49 entered Taiwan’s air defense identification zone – a buffer of airspace commonly referred to as an ADIZ. That was just a few planes short of the record set last year when 56 Chinese warplanes entered the ADIZ on the same day.

Chinese military helicopters fly past Pingtan island, one of mainland China's closest point from Taiwan, in Fujian province on August 4, 2022, ahead of massive military drills off Taiwan following US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit to the self-ruled island. - China is due on August 4 to kick off its largest-ever military exercises encircling Taiwan, in a show of force straddling vital international shipping lanes following a visit to the self-ruled island by US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. (Photo by Hector RETAMAL / AFP) (Photo by HECTOR RETAMAL/AFP via Getty Images)

Hector Retamal/AFP/Getty Images

Taiwan says multiple Chinese aircraft and vessels spotted in possible simulated attack

Taiwan’s Premier Su Tseng-chang on Sunday reiterated Taiwan’s condemnation of the drills.

“Not only Taiwan but other countries in the region as well as freedom-loving countries like the US and so on have vehemently protested and condemned China’s arrogant military operations disrupting regional peace and stability,” he said during a press engagement.

“We call on the Chinese government to not flex its military muscles and disrupt regional peace.”

A US National Security Council spokesperson on Saturday called China’s recent military activities around Taiwan a “significant escalation in China’s efforts to change the status quo.”

“They are provocative, irresponsible, and raise the risk of miscalculation,” the spokesperson said. “They are also at odds with our long-standing goal of maintaining peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait, which is what the world expects.”

US allies have also come forward to condemn China’s actions, including in a joint statement issued Friday by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong, and Japanese Foreign Minister Hayashi Yoshimasa following their meeting on the sidelines of the ASEAN Foreign Ministers’ Meeting in Cambodia.

The diplomats “condemned (China’s) launch of ballistic missiles,” including those the Japanese government said landed in its exclusive economic zone, for “raising tension and destabilizing the region,” and called on China “to immediately cease the military exercises,” according to the statement released by the US State Department.

China hit back on Saturday evening, with its embassy in Australia calling the US “the biggest saboteur and destabilizer of peace in the Taiwan Strait” and disputing the “legal basis” for Japan’s claims regarding the missile landings.

“China is the victim of political provocation from the US. The actions taken by the Chinese government to safeguard state sovereignty and territorial integrity and curb the separatist activities are legitimate and justified,” a statement from the embassy read.

CNN’s Gladys Tsai and Arlette Saenz contributed to this report

CNN · by Wayne Chang,Simone McCarthy · August 7, 2022

3. After China’s Military Spectacle, Options Narrow for Winning Over Taiwan

I like that description: A military spectacle. I doubt there is much that can be done in the way of winning hearts and minds. I think China's actions harden Taiwanese will to resist.

And of course the big question is whether Xi has a timeline for action against Taiwan.

Excerpts:

One puzzle that hangs over Taiwan is whether Mr. Xi has a timetable in mind. He has suggested his vision of China’s “rejuvenation” into a prosperous, powerful and complete global power depends on unification with Taiwan. The rejuvenation, he has said, will be achieved by midcentury, so some see that time as the outer limit for his Taiwan ambitions.

“We now have a 27-year fuse that can either be slow-burn or fast-burn,” said Mr. Rudd, the former Australian prime minister who is now president of the Asia Society, citing that midcentury date. “The time to worry is the early 2030s, because you’re closer in the countdown zone to 2049, but you’re also in Xi Jinping’s political lifetime.”

In an agenda-setting speech on Taiwan policy in 2019, Mr. Xi reasserted that China hoped to unify with Taiwan peacefully, but would not rule out armed force.

He also called for exploring ways to update what a “one country, two systems” arrangement for Taiwan would look like, and the Chinese government assigned scholars to the project. Such plans, Mr. Xi said, “must fully consider the realities of Taiwan, and also be conducive to lasting order and stability in Taiwan after unification.”

After China’s Military Spectacle, Options Narrow for Winning Over Taiwan

The New York Times · by John Liu · August 7, 2022

The exercises were designed to deter Taiwan from moving further away from Beijing, but they also indicated how few policy carrots China has.

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People lined up near the Hsinchu Military Air Base in Taiwan on Friday.Credit...Lam Yik Fei for The New York Times

Aug. 7, 2022, 3:07 a.m. ET

China’s 72-hour spectacle of missiles, warships and jet fighters swarming Taiwan was designed to create a firewall — a blazing, made-for-television warning against what Beijing sees as increasingly stubborn defiance, backed by Washington, of its claims to the island.

“We’re maintaining a high state of alert, ready for battle at all times, able to fight at any time,” declared Zu Guanghong, a Chinese navy captain in a People’s Liberation Army video about the exercises, which ended on Sunday. “We have the determination and ability to mount a painful direct attack against any invaders who would wreck unification of the motherland, and would show no mercy.”

But even if China’s display of military might discourages other Western politicians from emulating Nancy Pelosi, who enraged Beijing by visiting Taiwan, it also narrows hopes for winning over the island through negotiations. Beijing’s shock and awe tactics may deepen skepticism in Taiwan that it can ever reach a peaceful and lasting settlement with the Chinese Communist Party, especially under Xi Jinping as its leader.

“Nothing is going to change after the military exercises, there’ll be one like this and then another,” said Li Wen-te, a 63-year-old retired fisherman in Liuqiu, an island off the southwestern coast of Taiwan, less than six miles from China’s drills.

“They’re as bullying as always,” he said, adding a Chinese saying, “digging deep in soft soil,” which means “give them an inch and they will take a mile.”

President Xi Jinping of China at an event on Taiwan in 2019.Credit...Pool photo by

Mr. Xi has now shown he is willing to bring out an intimidating military stick to try to beat back what Beijing regards as a dangerous alliance of Taiwanese opposition and American support. Chinese military drills across six zones around Taiwan, which on Sunday included joint air and sea exercises to hone long-range airstrike capabilities, allowed the military to practice blockading the island in the event of an invasion.

In the face of such pressures, the policy carrots that China has used to coax Taiwan toward unification may carry even less weight. During previous eras of better relations, China welcomed Taiwan’s investment, farm goods and entertainers.

The result may be deepening mutual distrust that some experts warn could, at an extreme, bring Beijing and Washington into all-out conflict.

“It’s not about to be a blow up tomorrow, but it elevates the overall probability of crisis, conflict or even war with the Americans over Taiwan,” said Kevin Rudd, the former Australian prime minister who previously worked as a diplomat in Beijing.

Understand the China-Taiwan Tensions

Card 1 of 5

What does China mean to Taiwan? China claims Taiwan, a self-governing island democracy of 23 million people, as its territory and has long vowed to take it back, by force if necessary. The island, to which Chiang Kai-shek’s Chinese forces retreated after the Communist Revolution of 1949, has never been part of the People’s Republic of China.

What does Xi Jinping want? China’s leader has made it clearer than any of his predecessors that he sees unifying Taiwan with China to be a primary goal of his rule — and a key to what he calls China’s “national rejuvenation.” Mr. Xi is also keen to project an image of strength ahead of his expected confirmation to an unprecedented third term this fall.

How is the U.S. involved? In an intentionally ambiguous diplomatic arrangement adopted in 1979, the United States maintains a “one China” policy that acknowledges, but does not endorse, Beijing’s claim over Taiwan. U.S. leaders have remained vague about how they would help Taiwan if China attacked, but President Biden has pledged to defend the island.

Why are tensions rising now? Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s recent trip to Taiwan has ignited regional tensions. She is the highest-level American official to visit the island since 1997. A chorus of official Chinese bodies portrayed her trip as part of an American effort to sabotage China’s efforts at unification with Taiwan.

How is China responding? A day after Ms. Pelosi’s trip, China began live-fire military drills near Taiwan, with missiles striking seas off the island, including five that landed in Japan’s exclusive economic zone waters. Amid growing international criticism, Beijing then sent warships and aircraft into waters and airspace near the island.

Taiwan has never been ruled by the Communist Party, but Beijing maintains that it is historically and legally part of Chinese territory. The Chinese Nationalist forces who fled to Taiwan in 1949 after losing the civil war also long asserted that the island was part of a greater China they had ruled.

But since Taiwan emerged as a democracy in the 1990s, growing numbers of its people see themselves as vastly different in values and culture from the People’s Republic of China. That political skepticism toward authoritarian China has persisted, and even deepened, as Taiwan’s economic ties to the mainland expanded.

Celebrating National Day in Taipei, Taiwan, last year.Credit...Lam Yik Fei for The New York Times

“The attractiveness of the carrots in China’s Taiwan policy — economic inducements — has now fallen to its lowest point since the end of the Cold War,” said Wu Jieh-min, a political scientist at Academia Sinica, Taiwan’s top research academy.

“The card it holds presently is to raise military threats toward Taiwan step by step, and to continue military preparations for the use of force,” he said, “until one day, a full-scale military offensive on Taiwan becomes a favorable option.”

Since the late 1970s, Deng Xiaoping and other Chinese leaders have tried to coax Taiwan into accepting unification under a “one country, two systems” framework that promised autonomy in laws, religion, economic policy and other areas as long as the island accepted Chinese sovereignty.

But in increasingly democratic Taiwan, few see themselves as proud, future Chinese citizens. Support for Beijing’s proposals sank even lower after 2020, when China imposed a crackdown on Hong Kong, eroding the freedoms that the former British colony was promised under its own version of the framework.

Mr. Xi has continued to promise Taiwan a “one country, two systems” deal, and he may return to offering Taiwan economic and political incentives, if he can influence the island’s presidential election in early 2024.

Taiwan’s current president, Tsai Ing-wen, must step down after her second term ends that year. And a potential successor from her Democratic Progressive Party, which rejects the “one China” principle and favors independence, may be more pugnacious toward Beijing.

In the years after that election, China’s leaders likely “want to show some substantive jumps forward on Taiwan, not necessarily unification, but some results there,” said Wang Hsin-hsien, a professor at the National Chengchi University in Taipei who studies Chinese politics. “Xi Jinping is the kind of man who repays enmity with vengeance and repays kindness, but when he takes vengeance it is repaid in double.”

Taiwan’s annual Han Kuang military exercises in New Taipei City last month.Credit...Lam Yik Fei for The New York Times

One puzzle that hangs over Taiwan is whether Mr. Xi has a timetable in mind. He has suggested his vision of China’s “rejuvenation” into a prosperous, powerful and complete global power depends on unification with Taiwan. The rejuvenation, he has said, will be achieved by midcentury, so some see that time as the outer limit for his Taiwan ambitions.

“We now have a 27-year fuse that can either be slow-burn or fast-burn,” said Mr. Rudd, the former Australian prime minister who is now president of the Asia Society, citing that midcentury date. “The time to worry is the early 2030s, because you’re closer in the countdown zone to 2049, but you’re also in Xi Jinping’s political lifetime.”

In an agenda-setting speech on Taiwan policy in 2019, Mr. Xi reasserted that China hoped to unify with Taiwan peacefully, but would not rule out armed force.

He also called for exploring ways to update what a “one country, two systems” arrangement for Taiwan would look like, and the Chinese government assigned scholars to the project. Such plans, Mr. Xi said, “must fully consider the realities of Taiwan, and also be conducive to lasting order and stability in Taiwan after unification.”

“I still believe that the military capacity is first and foremost calibrated at present as a deterrent,” said Willian Klein, a former U.S. diplomat posted in Beijing who now works for FGS Global, a consulting firm, referring to China’s buildup. “Their strategy is to narrow the possible universe of outcomes to the point that their preferred outcome becomes a reality.”

But the proposals that Chinese scholars have put forward on Taiwan highlight the gulf between what Beijing seems to have in mind, and what most Taiwanese could accept.

The Chinese studies propose sending Chinese officials to maintain control in Taiwan, especially if Beijing wins control by force; others say that China must impose a national security law on Taiwan — like the one it imposed on Hong Kong in 2020 — to punish opponents of Chinese rule.

Snorkeling on Saturday in Liuqiu, an island off the southwestern coast of Taiwan, less than six miles from China’s drills.Credit...Lam Yik Fei for The New York Times

“It must be recognized that governing Taiwan will be far more difficult than Hong Kong, whether in terms of geographic extent or the political conditions,” Zhou Yezhong, a prominent law professor at Wuhan University wrote in a recent “Outline for China’s Unification,” which he co-wrote with another academic.

Taiwanese society, they wrote, must be “re-Sinified” to embrace official Chinese values and to “fundamentally transform the political environment that has been long shaped by ‘Taiwanese independence’ ideas.”

China’s ambassador to France, Lu Shaye, said in a television interview last week that Taiwan’s people had been brainwashed by pro-independence ideas.

“I’m sure that as long as they are re-educated, the Taiwanese public will once again become patriots,” he said in the interview shared on his embassy’s website. “Not under threat, but through re-education.”

Polls of Taiwanese people show that very few have an appetite for unification on China’s terms. In the latest opinion survey from National Chengchi University, 1.3 percent of respondents favored unification as soon as possible, 5.1 percent wanted independence as soon as possible. The rest mostly wanted some version of the ambiguous status quo.

“I cherish our freedom of speech and don’t want to be unified by China,” said Huang Chiu-hong, 47, the owner of a shop that sells fried sticks of braided dough, a local snack, on Liuqiu, the Taiwanese island.

She said she tried to see the People’s Liberation Army in action out of curiosity, but glimpsed nothing at a pavilion overlooking the sea.

“It seems that some people are concerned,” she said. “For me, it’s just a small episode in the ordinary life of Taiwanese.”

The New York Times · by John Liu · August 7, 2022

4. China’s Taiwan Saber-Rattling Is the New Normal

Is this the new normal or is it the new normal when there are internal political challenges?

Excerpts:

“What they are designed to do is to test, in a very real-world situation, whether Beijing can actually blockade Taiwan,” said Craig Singleton, a senior China fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a former U.S. diplomat. “They have put into effect an operational plan, and this was an opportunity for them to test it. The PLA right now is figuring out how much gas and food are being consumed and how stable the communications systems are while everyone else is counting missiles.”

China is also in the middle of a major leadership shake-up that could see the tempo of the saber-rattling increase even further. The Chinese Communist Party’s 20th leadership congress, set to take place in November, will likely see Xi take an unprecedented third term as China’s leader and give him authority to select a new premier, state councilor, and foreign minister, which experts expect to be hard-liners on Taiwan. “It’s fair to assume that they’re going to go with people who are more aligned with Xi Jinping,” said a former U.S. official speaking on background on condition of anonymity. “That’s the ultimate thing: It’s about loyalty, not about their personal views.”

China’s stepped-up military exercises and the lack of well-defined guardrails have some experts worried. “You’re one miscalculation away from what could turn into quite a serious crisis if one of those missiles that overflew Taiwan hit something by mistake,” Singleton said.

China’s Taiwan Saber-Rattling Is the New Normal

Foreign Policy · by Jack Detsch, Anusha Rathi · August 5, 2022

Report

China has slashed military-to-military talks and climate dialogues after U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s controversial visit.

By Jack Detsch, Foreign Policy’s Pentagon and national security reporter, and Anusha Rathi, an intern at Foreign Policy.

NEW FOR SUBSCRIBERS: Click + to receive email alerts for new stories written by Jack Detsch Jack Detsch

Chinese military helicopters fly past Pingtan island.

Chinese military helicopters fly past Pingtan island, one of mainland China’s closest points from Taiwan, in Fujian province, China, on Aug. 4, ahead of massive military drills off Taiwan following U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to the self-ruled island. Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images

China’s decision to drastically curb diplomacy with the United States in the wake of the top U.S. lawmaker’s visit to Taiwan—including nixing crisis communications channels that the Biden administration had worked assiduously to prop up—is an increasing sign that the relationship is set to hit a new low, experts and former senior U.S. officials told Foreign Policy.

On Friday, as 49 Chinese aircraft crossed the median line of the Taiwan Strait—a new record for daily air incursions—less than 36 hours after U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi left Taiwan and just one day after unleashing a barrage of ballistic missiles that cut off the island from two sides, Chinese officials laid out eight responses that appeared to set a dismal new normal for the relationship. They include cutting off talks between military theater commands, working meetings between the ministries of defense, and maritime security talks. Also taken off the table were climate talks and illegal migrant repatriations.

Experts who spoke to Foreign Policy said the moves indicated that China was trying to set a new normal in the relationship that would not be defined by new guardrails, which Chinese officials have mostly scoffed at while slowly raising the military temperature over Taiwan.

“It’s just another stark reminder that this is a conflict that’s not out there in the future or some abstract thing that may or may not happen,” said Lyle Morris, a senior policy analyst at the Rand Corporation and a former U.S. Defense Department official who worked on crisis communication efforts with China. “The potential for a conflict is much higher than we all thought, at least the timeline.”

In talks with Chinese officials, including between U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping, the United States had increasingly pushed for more detailed lines of communication, including between U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and his rough counterpart, Gen. Wei Fenghe (officials have debated how closely matched the two officials are given Wei’s relatively low ranking in China’s order of succession), Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley, and top regional commanders.

Biden administration officials condemned the move to cut off channels of communication on Friday. “These lines of communication are important for helping to reduce miscalculation and misperception,” Biden administration national security spokesperson John Kirby said at a press briefing. By cutting off the climate dialogue specifically, Kirby said, China is “not just punishing themselves with this act. They’re punishing the world.” Kirby expressed confidence that senior military officials can still speak at high levels despite some of the channels being suspended.

China’s announcement on Friday is likely to throw a further damper on the possibility of talks. In recent diplomatic exchanges, Chinese officials have shot back that they are pushing for “crisis prevention” instead of guardrails, which means China wants the United States to do nothing in the Taiwan Strait that would upset Beijing in the first place, according to people familiar with China’s position. On Thursday, the frosty relationship was made clear as Biden administration officials called in China’s ambassador to the United States to issue a stern warning over China’s stepped-up exercises.

And although Pelosi’s visit wasn’t unprecedented, marking the second trip by a U.S. speaker in the last 25 years, China’s foreign ministry insisted it was a “gross interference in China’s internal affairs,” according to a ministerial spokesperson. U.S. officials repeatedly warned Pelosi that the timing of the visit, coinciding with the 95th anniversary of the founding of China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA), would likely be seen as provocative by Beijing.

China’s Friday announcement showed that the fallout from the new status quo in relations with the West is likely to be wide ranging. The latest move by China, which alone produces nearly 30 percent of the world’s carbon emissions, threatens to derail global climate cooperation at a time when agricultural and energy systems are on the brink of collapse and climate change impacts are intensifying globally. Just last week ,soaring temperatures pushed the country’s electricity usage to hit a record high and led to widespread blackouts.

“We’re not going back where we were before the visit, at least anytime soon,” said Zack Cooper, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a former National Security Council and Defense Department official. “There’s going to be a lot more military activities around Taiwan, probably more to the east and closer than we are used to seeing.”

But the live-fire tests that surrounded the island and vast air incursions over the median line is a sign to experts that China is now focused on trying to show that the Taiwan Strait is no longer contested. Although China lost two missiles during test firings near the island during the eight-month Taiwan Strait crisis between 1996 and 1997—sparking a major defense modernization push—Beijing has encountered no such problems this time. Pelosi’s aircraft was forced to take a three-hour detour to get to the island this week, and the missile firings have already disrupted shipping traffic in the region, showing the growing reach of China’s military—even as the Pentagon thinks it is still below the level of capability needed to invade the island.

“What they are designed to do is to test, in a very real-world situation, whether Beijing can actually blockade Taiwan,” said Craig Singleton, a senior China fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a former U.S. diplomat. “They have put into effect an operational plan, and this was an opportunity for them to test it. The PLA right now is figuring out how much gas and food are being consumed and how stable the communications systems are while everyone else is counting missiles.”

China is also in the middle of a major leadership shake-up that could see the tempo of the saber-rattling increase even further. The Chinese Communist Party’s 20th leadership congress, set to take place in November, will likely see Xi take an unprecedented third term as China’s leader and give him authority to select a new premier, state councilor, and foreign minister, which experts expect to be hard-liners on Taiwan. “It’s fair to assume that they’re going to go with people who are more aligned with Xi Jinping,” said a former U.S. official speaking on background on condition of anonymity. “That’s the ultimate thing: It’s about loyalty, not about their personal views.”

China’s stepped-up military exercises and the lack of well-defined guardrails have some experts worried. “You’re one miscalculation away from what could turn into quite a serious crisis if one of those missiles that overflew Taiwan hit something by mistake,” Singleton said.

Jack Detsch is Foreign Policy’s Pentagon and national security reporter. Twitter: @JackDetsch

Anusha Rathi is an intern at Foreign Policy. Twitter: @anusharathi_

5. Why Superpower Crises Are a Good Thing

Nietzsche adapted: That which does not end the world makes the international community stronger.

Excerpts:

Crises are terrifying, but they can also be clarifying. Diplomatic or military confrontations illuminate the intentions of an adversary. They vividly illustrate the stakes of geopolitical competition. Crises are also opportunities for constructive action: They can catalyze initiatives and investments that will help the United States triumph in the protracted rivalries ahead.

For proof, look backward to the early Cold War. The late 1940s saw near-incessant crises from Western Europe to East Asia. Fears of war were omnipresent amid repeated superpower disputes. Yet Washington and the nascent Western world ultimately came through these crises with a mix of firmness and flexibility and used them as stimulus for many of the legendary measures that ultimately won the Cold War. The great policies that positioned the United States for success in this twilight struggle—the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, the creation of NATO, and others—were not products of calm, deliberate planning. They were born of the urgency and creativity that flourish in a crisis.

To be sure, no one should welcome the perils that are now coming into view. Yet the United States and its friends can use moments of high tension to address their military weaknesses, strengthen vital coalitions, and rally domestic support for sharper competitive measures. The key to thriving in this era of great-power rivalry will be seizing the opportunities that crises present.

...

Political torpor is presently a problem. One reason Washington’s China policy often seems stuck in neutral is that many steps to make the United States more competitive, from reducing supply chain dependence on Beijing to spending the money necessary to ensure an adequate defense, carry near-term economic and political costs. That could change when spiking tensions remind Americans of what Truman argued in 1947: that the price of avoiding difficult measures may eventually be higher than the price of taking them.

A serious crisis in the Taiwan Strait or the East China Sea could dramatically shift the calculus of U.S. firms that have so far hesitated to reduce their operations in or exposure to China. It could loosen the government’s purse strings when it comes to diplomacy and defense. It could even cause U.S. leaders to discard political shibboleths—for example, the idea that joining major trade deals, such as the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, is political poison—that have hindered U.S. strategy.

Crises, former Cold War strategist George Kennan acknowledged, are nearly inevitable: When great powers compete, “There is no real security and there is no alternative to living dangerously.” Great-power crises are once again coming, whether Americans are ready or not. The question is whether Washington can navigate them safely—and use them to its advantage.

Why Superpower Crises Are a Good Thing

A new era of tensions will focus minds and break logjams, as Cold War history shows.

By Hal Brands, a professor of global affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

Foreign Policy · by Hal Brands · August 5, 2022

Welcome to an era of grave and persistent tension, one in which great-power crises will be frequent and intense. In Europe, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has destabilized the continent’s eastern half, triggered a proxy war with NATO, and created an ever-present risk of escalation. In Asia, U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan could touch off a serious crisis between the United States and China. Indeed, given the way the two countries’ interests are now colliding in hot spots throughout the Western Pacific, the question is not whether they will find themselves in some sort of perilous showdown but when, where, and under what circumstances.

These aren’t the only global flash points: Washington is currently laboring under the threat of renewed nuclear crises with Iran and North Korea. But showdowns with even the most roguish of rogue states aren’t as consequential as great-power military crises—incidents that have a meaningful prospect of war. So buckle up for a period when the world’s mightiest actors engage in high-stakes tests of strength.

Crises are terrifying, but they can also be clarifying. Diplomatic or military confrontations illuminate the intentions of an adversary. They vividly illustrate the stakes of geopolitical competition. Crises are also opportunities for constructive action: They can catalyze initiatives and investments that will help the United States triumph in the protracted rivalries ahead.

For proof, look backward to the early Cold War. The late 1940s saw near-incessant crises from Western Europe to East Asia. Fears of war were omnipresent amid repeated superpower disputes. Yet Washington and the nascent Western world ultimately came through these crises with a mix of firmness and flexibility and used them as stimulus for many of the legendary measures that ultimately won the Cold War. The great policies that positioned the United States for success in this twilight struggle—the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, the creation of NATO, and others—were not products of calm, deliberate planning. They were born of the urgency and creativity that flourish in a crisis.

To be sure, no one should welcome the perils that are now coming into view. Yet the United States and its friends can use moments of high tension to address their military weaknesses, strengthen vital coalitions, and rally domestic support for sharper competitive measures. The key to thriving in this era of great-power rivalry will be seizing the opportunities that crises present.

U.S. President Harry Truman addresses a joint session of Congress in 1947 to ask for aid for Greece and Turkey to stave off Soviet influence.

Then-U.S. President Harry Truman addresses a joint session of Congress in Washington on March 12, 1947, to ask for funding and military advisors for Greece and Turkey. Bettmann Archive/Gettty Images

Crises are the norm in great-power rivalries: They occur as participants probe for weakness, gauge one another’s resolve, and measure their relative strengths. Indeed, crises are particularly common near the outset of great-power rivalries, when red lines are yet to be fully established, zones of influence remain fluid, and the key patterns of competition are still being set.

The early Cold War was no exception. Diplomatic collisions and war scares occurred when the Soviet Union exerted pressure on Iran and Turkey in 1946. The first half of 1947 saw one crisis precipitated by communist subversion and coercion against Greece and Turkey and another caused by the economic near-collapse of Western Europe. Early 1948 brought more trouble: a Moscow-backed coup in Czechoslovakia and the onset of then-Soviet leader Joseph Stalin’s blockade of West Berlin. In Asia, the Chinese civil war was simultaneously roiling superpower relations. In 1950, the outbreak and escalation of the Korean War put the whole world on edge.

What made this period so geopolitically transformative was that Washington and its friends paired crisis management with crisis exploitation.

Amid these incidents, not even steely nerved statesmen were certain that the Cold War could be kept cold. In 1946, then-U.S. President Harry Truman chose to support Turkey against Soviet intimidation on grounds that “we might as well find out whether the Russians were bent on world conquest now as in five or 10 years.” During the Berlin blockade, Truman wrote of “a terrible feeling … that we are very close to war.” When China intervened in the Korean War in late 1950, many U.S. officials feared that global conflict was imminent.

Truman ultimately avoided such a cataclysm by blending prudence and strength. The United States refused to back down in areas it deemed crucial: Washington supported Turkey, Greece, and Iran against pressure from Moscow or its proxies. The United States stayed in West Berlin during the blockade and even fought a limited war to save South Korea from destruction. Yet Truman also gave ground in areas then thought to be of secondary importance, refusing to intervene in China’s civil war even though that abstention guaranteed a communist victory. And when it became clear that Truman had overreached in Korea—by turning a defensive war to preserve the South into an offensive war to liberate the North—Washington settled for a localized stalemate rather than precipitate a larger conflagration.

Through these measures, the United States avoided potentially disastrous retreats in the Cold War while also limiting the danger of a global hot war. What made this period so geopolitically transformative, though, was that Washington and its friends paired crisis management with crisis exploitation.

Marshall Plan stamps and posters to signal America's aid to Europe's post-war recovery.

Left: A European Recovery Plan emblem is stamped on relief packages sent abroad in 1948. Right: Two men stand in front of a poster supporting the Marshall Plan in 1947. Bettmann Archive/MPI/Getty Images

Consider the emergence of the Truman Doctrine in March 1947. That initiative entailed around $400 million in aid for Greece and Turkey, paired with Truman’s statement that the world was now split between “alternative ways of life” and that the United States must support “free peoples” in their struggle against totalitarian encroachment. At stake was more than the security of the Mediterranean rim, Truman explained. If Washington failed to prevent Moscow and its proxies from imposing their will on independent nations, it risked seeing a global resurgence of the sort of aggression and coercion that had brought on World War II.

The Truman Doctrine helped preserve critical noncommunist outposts at the intersection of Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. It made clear that Washington would invest heavily in international stability now rather than paying a great deal more once that stability had crumbled. It also began the process of winning congressional and public support for an open-ended competition with Moscow by compelling Truman to explain what was fundamentally at issue in that competition and ask for new investments to wage it effectively.

Yet the Truman Doctrine was not some carefully crafted, long-gestating initiative: It emerged from an unanticipated crisis caused by an intensifying communist insurgency in Greece, Soviet diplomatic intimidation of Turkey, and the collapse of a bankrupt Britain’s influence in the region. For Washington, the crisis clarified that fading British power would place new and sustained demands on the United States. It forced U.S. officials to devise, in just two weeks, an unprecedented package of peacetime economic and security assistance for Europe—and to marshal the arguments to push that package through a skeptical U.S. Congress. In other words, a fast-breaking emergency stimulated a historic burst of diplomatic creativity and political persuasion.

The Truman Doctrine was not some carefully crafted, long-gestating initiative: It emerged from an unanticipated crisis.

Even more innovative was the Marshall Plan, a record-breaking $12 billion injection of economic assistance meant to revive Western Europe and weld it into a community that could resist Soviet depredations. That policy, too, came together in a comparative snap of the fingers—just three weeks—after worsening economic distress in Europe and growing U.S.-Soviet tensions over how to manage occupied Germany made it clear that there was no time to waste. “The patient is sinking,” then-U.S. Secretary of State George Marshall declared, “while the doctors deliberate.” So the United States threw out its prior hesitance about long-term support for Europe and threw together the program that would spur the continent’s economic and political revitalization.

Yet the Marshall Plan also occasioned new tumults, including sometimes-violent upheavals by communist parties in Western Europe and the Soviet-backed takeover of Czechoslovakia in February 1948. In response, terrified Western European governments created a military alliance and urgently sought to tie the United States to that pact. This was the genesis of the North Atlantic Treaty, a revolutionary project that broke with 150 years of U.S. diplomatic non-entanglement—and never would have been possible without the psychological shock of the Czechoslovak coup and the Berlin blockade that quickly followed.

NATO existed mostly on paper in 1949 though, and it took one final crisis to produce the U.S. alliance structure we know today. The outbreak and intensification of the Korean War led the United States to dispatch additional troops to Europe, seek West Germany’s rearmament, create a unified NATO command structure, and conclude security pacts with Japan, the Philippines, Australia, and New Zealand. It unleashed a free-world rearmament program meant to provide conventional strength and lasting nuclear superiority vis-à-vis the Soviet bloc.

The crises of the early Cold War forced and allowed Washington to craft the policies, muster the coalitions, rally the domestic support, and build the strong positions that eventually helped it prevail over the Soviet Union.

arms race-senor-salme-illustration-site

The Art of the Arms Race

To avoid disaster, the United States must relearn crucial Cold War lessons.

china-decline-deena-so-oteh-illustration-hp

The Dangers of China’s Decline

As China’s economic miracle fades, its leaders may become more inclined to take risks.

The Russian and Chinese national flags are seen on the table as Russia's President Vladimir Putin and his China's President Xi Jinping stand during a signing ceremony at the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse in Beijing on Nov. 9, 2014.

Opposing China Means Defeating Russia

Moscow’s war isn’t a distraction. It’s part and parcel of the threat posed by Beijing.

A destroyed tank in Ukraine amid the ongoing Russian military assault on the country.

A destroyed tank is seen in Mariupol, Ukraine, on May 30, amid the ongoing Russian military assault on the country. AFP via Getty Images

No one knows precisely how the next few years will unfold. But a new era of rivalry is certainly here, and we should expect a new spate of crises as Washington’s competitions with Moscow and Beijing intensify.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping is itching to challenge the status quo in the Taiwan Strait and elsewhere in East Asia, where China’s aspirations collide with the United States’ interests and security commitments. Washington has been signaling its determination to prevent Beijing from coercing its neighbors or asserting control over Taiwan; China has been issuing ever-starker threats toward Taiwan, Japan, and the superpower that supports them. Even if Pelosi’s visit doesn’t lead to a grave security crisis in the Western Pacific, something will.

Meanwhile, don’t think that Russian President Vladimir Putin is about to quietly fade away. A Russia that somehow ekes out a victory in Ukraine may further assert itself in Eastern Europe and elsewhere. A Russia that is clearly losing in Ukraine may be prone to desperate gambles. In Europe and Asia alike, great-power thrusts and probes will be common; competitions in risk-taking will ratchet tensions higher.

Washington can certainly avoid provoking crises gratuitously, but it probably can’t avoid them altogether. The better news is that the United States can put crises to good strategic use.

The free world can make the most of the Ukraine crisis by ensuring that they aren’t caught short when the next crisis—or war—breaks out.

First, crises can reveal an adversary’s intentions. The crises of 1946 and 1947 showed that the Soviet Union was not content with the gains it had made during World War II but was seeking further expansion at the expense of the noncommunist world. We’re learning something similar in Ukraine today.

For years, Western observers debated whether Putin was an unrepentant aggressor or a normal statesman aggrieved by NATO’s expansion toward Russia. As Russian forces murder civilians and massacre prisoners of war and as Putin and his aides openly proclaim their desire to restore the Soviet Union, only the most credulous analysts can still believe that the issue is in doubt. The current crisis has been an utter cataclysm for Ukraine. But it has also forearmed the West by demonstrating what Putin is truly about.

Second, crises can expose weaknesses in the U.S. military posture and provide an opportunity to correct them. The United States and its allies should thank their lucky stars that they discovered the inadequacies of their arsenals and the debilities of their defense industrial bases during Ukraine’s war rather than their own. After only a few months of fighting, Western democracies are confronting painful trade-offs between their ability to support Ukraine and their ability to keep their own militaries well supplied.

This is a scary but informative preview of how rapidly a full-on great-power war, whether in Europe or the Western Pacific, would exhaust Western munitions stockpiles and destroy ships, planes, and other assets that the democracies cannot easily replace. If that problem is now impossible to ignore, the free world can make the most of the Ukraine crisis by surging production of key weapons systems and munitions, investing in greater resilience in their too-fragile defense industries, and otherwise ensuring that they aren’t caught short when the next crisis—or war—breaks out.

Third, crises can accelerate the formation of balancing coalitions. The Ukraine war not only led to an expanded NATO by breaking down Swedish and Finnish ambivalence toward the alliance, but it also nourished a nascent global coalition of democracies—including countries such as Japan, South Korea, and Australia—that are opposed to autocratic aggression in Europe and potentially elsewhere.

U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi poses with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen.

U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (left) poses with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen in Taipei, Taiwan, on Aug. 3. Chien Chih-Hung/Office of Taiwan’s President via Getty Images

Soldiers line the deck of a Taiwanese vessel.

Soldiers line the deck of a Taiwanese vessel during a preparedness drill in Keelung, Taiwan, on Jan. 7, amid escalating Chinese threats to the island. Ceng Shou Yi/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Similarly, a Taiwan Strait crisis could hasten the creation of bilateral and multilateral arrangements meant to hem in Beijing: deeper U.S. military planning on Taiwan contingencies with Japan and Australia, realistic discussions of the role that India or Vietnam might play in a war for dominance of the Western Pacific, the pre-packaging of economic and technological sanctions that Washington and other advanced democracies might use in case of Chinese aggression, and even the emergence of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue—which has so far downplayed security issues—as a more credible military coalition.

Of course, recklessness is unbecoming in a superpower, so a crisis that Washington is widely seen to provoke—which appears to be the case with Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan—could have the opposite effect. But in a dust-up triggered primarily by an adversary, the United States could make years’ worth of diplomatic progress with its friends.

Fourth, crises can cut through gridlock. The Marshall Plan and the North Atlantic Treaty would not have been possible in normal times. Since February, the United States has moved more weapons and money to Ukraine than nearly anyone would have previously thought possible—and it has done so at a speed that is remarkable to anyone familiar with the normally glacial pace of the U.S. government. The question now is whether Washington can use this or a future crisis to achieve something similar on the other side of the world.

Crises can cut through gridlock: Neither the Marshall Plan nor the founding of NATO would have been possible in normal times.

The United States could pursue a significantly expanded and expedited program of military sales and assistance for Taiwan, slashing the red tape that often hinders such programs—if Taiwan ruptures its own inertia by massively increasing its defense budget; adopting a strategy focused on asymmetric capabilities, such as missiles and drones; and building a capacity for resistance by the entire population. Crises may not radically change the world’s understanding of what is necessary—defense analysts have known what Taiwan needs for years—but they can radically reduce the friction that prevents good ideas from being enacted.

Finally, crises are opportunities to build political consensus and momentum. During the Cold War, early crises convinced the American public to support expenditures and policies that would have been unthinkable had tensions not been so high. Crises can jolt democratic systems out of their complacency because they reveal the looming danger more graphically than even the most eloquent speeches or sharply argued strategy documents ever can.

Political torpor is presently a problem. One reason Washington’s China policy often seems stuck in neutral is that many steps to make the United States more competitive, from reducing supply chain dependence on Beijing to spending the money necessary to ensure an adequate defense, carry near-term economic and political costs. That could change when spiking tensions remind Americans of what Truman argued in 1947: that the price of avoiding difficult measures may eventually be higher than the price of taking them.

A serious crisis in the Taiwan Strait or the East China Sea could dramatically shift the calculus of U.S. firms that have so far hesitated to reduce their operations in or exposure to China. It could loosen the government’s purse strings when it comes to diplomacy and defense. It could even cause U.S. leaders to discard political shibboleths—for example, the idea that joining major trade deals, such as the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, is political poison—that have hindered U.S. strategy.

Crises, former Cold War strategist George Kennan acknowledged, are nearly inevitable: When great powers compete, “There is no real security and there is no alternative to living dangerously.” Great-power crises are once again coming, whether Americans are ready or not. The question is whether Washington can navigate them safely—and use them to its advantage.

Foreign Policy · by Hal Brands · August 5, 2022

6. After raging at US and Japan over Pelosi's Taiwan visit, China faces dilemma

China showed restraint and consideration of other countries' security issues? Really?

But I think we must be aware of the impact of China's domestic issues.

Excerpts:

Lu Xiang, a specialist in U.S.-China relations at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said the response from Beijing showed restraint and consideration for the security interests of China's Asian neighbors.

"The Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea is an essential travel passage, hence the drills will be over shortly," Lu said, "I believe Beijing will try its best to minimize the impact experienced by other countries, including [the effect on] commercial flights."

Li Mingjiang, an associate professor at the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore, predicted Beijing would gradually tune things down because stability was its top priority ahead of a major leadership reshuffle this autumn.

"After venting its anger through military exercises, economic sanctions [and diplomatic battles], Beijing would need to climb down from escalating tensions, which is in line with China's overall interests.

"At a time when China is facing mounting domestic pressure over a long list of social and economic woes, Beijing has no other choice but to tread more carefully when dealing with external challenges in a bid to avoid disruptions to internal stability," Li said. (SCMP)

After raging at US and Japan over Pelosi's Taiwan visit, China faces dilemma

The Korea Times · August 7, 2022

In this photo released by the Taiwan Presidential Office, U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Taiwanese President President Tsai Ing-wen, center, pose for a photo during a meeting in Taipei, Aug. 32. U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, meeting top officials in Taiwan despite warnings from China, said that she and other congressional leaders in a visiting delegation are showing they will not abandon their commitment to the self-governing island. AP-YonhapChina's response to Nancy Pelosi's Taiwan visit ― including a display of military force and angry attacks on Japan and the United States ― has upped the ante diplomatically, but now faces a dilemma over whether to escalate things further or work to keep its other neighbors onside.

In the wake of the U.S. House Speaker's trip last week, Beijing has attempted an effective blockade of Taiwan with unprecedented live-fire drills, sanctioned Pelosi and her family and suspended lines of communication with Washington over issues such as maritime security and climate change.

China's Foreign Minister Wang Yi also staged two walkouts at a regional gathering of foreign ministers in Cambodia ― a rarely used diplomatic tactic ― to register Beijing's rage at being accused of a "gross overreaction".

But on Monday China will welcome Korea's Foreign Minister Park Jin for his first visit to China, days after President Yoon Suk-yeol declined to meet Pelosi when she visited his country.

Unlike Japan, South Korea has largely refrained from commenting on the Taiwan question and Pelosi's visit to the island, despite Yoon's pro-Washington stance.

Wang also held talks with New Zealand Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta in Cambodia.

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi speaks during a press conference on the sidelines of the East Asia Summit Foreign Ministers' Meeting in Phnom Penh, Aug. 5. AFP-Yonhap

Sourabh Gupta, a senior fellow at the Institute for China-America Studies in Washington, pointed to a dilemma for Beijing when it was trying to balance the need to step up military deterrence against Taiwan without scaring its Asian neighbors away.

"The strongest card that China has on the Taiwan question is the sentiment of its Asian peers. Nobody in Asia wants to see a non-peaceful solution to the Taiwan question, including one implemented by Beijing.

"But equally, almost nobody in Asia wants to see the geopolitics of the Asia-Pacific stranded in the Taiwan Strait, especially in this age of the Russia-Ukraine conflict," he said.

"Having made its bitter denunciations, China's wisest approach going forward would be to send emissaries to every major and minor Asian capital and restate its one-China principle and the U.S. violation of the spirit of its own one-China Policy. But I think Chinese diplomacy is too arrogant to choose this course of action."

Aside from his walkouts, Wang also cancelled planned talks with the Japanese Foreign Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi in Cambodia and, despite expectations that he would meet U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, a meeting never went ahead as both sides insisted it had not been on the agenda.

Beijing has also summoned ambassadors from the Group of 7 to protest against a joint statement that accused China of trying to unilaterally change the status quo in the Taiwan Strait by force.

Three Taiwanese Air Force Mirage 2000-5 fighter jets taxi on the runway before take off at an airbase in Hsinchu, Taiwan, Aug. 7. Following a visit of U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Pelosi to Taiwan, the Chinese military started to hold a series of live-fire drills in six maritime areas around Taiwan's main island from Aug. 4 to 7. EPA-Yonhap

While it was not the first time that Beijing has called in G7 envoys for a dressing-down over diplomatic disputes, observers believe it is rare for China to bring those tensions into the open with such a ferocity.

Koh King Kee, president of the Centre for New Inclusive Asia, a think tank in Malaysia, said Wang's cancellation of his first face-to-face meeting with his Japanese counterpart is unlikely "to result in self-isolation or diplomatic disadvantage to Beijing".

He added: "China will focus its response to Pelosi's Taiwan visit by punishing Taiwan and protesting against the U.S. It will not want to unnecessarily antagonize other U.S. allies over Pelosi's visit to avoid potential negative impact on trade relations with these countries."

While China feels it is necessary to take actions, such as sanctions against individuals, Beijing's main aim was to "deter politicians from U.S. allies from visiting Taiwan in order to gain personal political mileage," Koh said.

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations issued a joint statement on Thursday, urging all sides to de-escalate tension over Taiwan while warning of the risk of "miscalculation, serious confrontation, open conflicts and unpredictable consequences among major powers".

While Asean nations refused to take sides, they nonetheless reaffirmed their support for the one-China principle after Pelosi's Asia tour, which also included stops in Singapore and Malaysia.

Nick Bisley, a professor of international relations at La Trobe University in Australia, said China's comprehensive and "very significant" response to the Pelosi visit has "unsettled the region".

He said: "The question is just how far the U.S. and others are prepared to push China back and this is where the risk is greatest. If the U.S. feels that it really needs to be seen to be pushing China back then things could escalate rapidly and in very dangerous ways."

Lu Xiang, a specialist in U.S.-China relations at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said the response from Beijing showed restraint and consideration for the security interests of China's Asian neighbors.

"The Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea is an essential travel passage, hence the drills will be over shortly," Lu said, "I believe Beijing will try its best to minimize the impact experienced by other countries, including [the effect on] commercial flights."

Li Mingjiang, an associate professor at the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore, predicted Beijing would gradually tune things down because stability was its top priority ahead of a major leadership reshuffle this autumn.

"After venting its anger through military exercises, economic sanctions [and diplomatic battles], Beijing would need to climb down from escalating tensions, which is in line with China's overall interests.

"At a time when China is facing mounting domestic pressure over a long list of social and economic woes, Beijing has no other choice but to tread more carefully when dealing with external challenges in a bid to avoid disruptions to internal stability," Li said. (SCMP)

The Korea Times · August 7, 2022

7. Russian men, dying in war, leave many families sad, angry and silent

We are nowhere near seeing opposition to the war on a scale that will influence Russian decision making and certainly not Putin's.

Excerpts:

Not many grieving families publicly question the war effort. The silence serves to minimize public understanding of its impact on the home front. In the eastern Siberia city of Ulan-Ude, a recent survey by the independent news site Lyudi Baikala found that few residents knew that more than 250 people from the region had been killed, a count the site calculated using open sources.

Still, cracks have appeared. In Buryatia, a group of wives of Russian soldiers made a video in June to demand that the military bring their men home. Hundreds of soldiers from the region contacted an activist group there for information on how to break their contracts, according to Alexandra Garmazhapova, founder of the Free Buryatia Foundation. Casualties on a local memorial page on VKontakte rise daily.

On Monday, the deaths of local basketball players Dmitry Lagunov and Nikolay Bagrov were confirmed. A woman named Raisa Dugarova responded on the page. “Why does Buryatia have to bury its sons every day?” she asked. “Why are we doing this?”

The following day there was another entry, about the death of Zolto Chimitov, a corporal in his early 30s who had been born in the rural village of Tsakir. He became a boxing champion, later training to be a forester. He had three children.

“Oh god, please stop this war. How many of our guys can die?” a woman named Yevgenia Yakovleva wrote. “My soul is torn from pain. I don’t know how to accept this, survive and live with it.”

Russian men, dying in war, leave many families sad, angry and silent

The Washington Post · by Robyn Dixon · August 6, 2022

When Yevgeny Chubarin told his mother he was joining the Russian army to fight against Ukraine, she cried and begged him not to go. But his exhilaration shone through. By May 15, he had an AK-47 and was on his way. The 24-year-old stone-factory worker was killed the next day.

Stories like his are taboo in Russia, where the wrenching grief of many families is buried beneath the triumphant bombast of state media. The war is portrayed as an existential struggle for survival, against “Nazis” as well as NATO, and a virtual news blackout about the bloody toll underscores Kremlin anxiety about the durability of its manufactured support.

Yet some stories seep out. Vladimir Krot was a 59-year-old Soviet-trained pilot, a retired Afghan war veteran, who begged to serve in Ukraine. He kept asking despite repeated rejections and, in June, as casualties mounted, he finally was told “yes.” Krot died just days later, when his SU-25 jet went down during a training flight in southern Russia. He left behind a wife and 8-year-old daughter.

The number of war dead is a state secret. It is a crime to question the invasion or criticize the military. Independent journalists who speak to bereaved relatives or cover funerals have been arrested and told that showing such “tears and suffering” is bad for public morale. Authorities have ordered some online memorial pages to be shut down.

The Kremlin’s priority has been to prevent angry voices of mourning families and antiwar activists from coming together and gaining traction. Information about war dead could deter Russia’s increasingly urgent recruitment effort, scraping up prisoners with military experience and offering highly paid contracts for deployments.

Internal security agents visited Dmitry Shkrebets this summer after he accused Russian authorities of lying about how many sailors died when the Black Sea flagship Moskva was sunk by Ukrainian missiles on April 13. His son Yegor, one of the conscripts onboard, was listed as “missing.” The agents accused Shkrebets of making bomb threats and confiscated his laptop, as he detailed on VKontakte, Russia’s version of Facebook. On Tuesday, 111 days after Yegor’s death, the military finally gave his father a death certificate.

“It will never be easier,” Shkrebets wrote in a post. “There will never be true joy. We will never be the same again. We have become different, we have become more unhappy, but also stronger, tougher. We no longer fear even those who should be feared.”

But independent analyst Bobo Lo of the Lowy Institute, an Australian think tank, believes the Kremlin has largely contained the risk of unrest over the high casualty count. Because most people are so cautious about airing dissent, gauging the real level of support for the war is difficult. Pollster VCIOM, which is close to government authorities, reported in June that 72 percent of Russians back the fighting.

Politically, Russian President Vladimir Putin “has been able to defend this,” said Lo, a former deputy head of mission at the Australian Embassy in Moscow. “Partly through controlling the information narrative, but also because this is now seen as a war against the West.”

With many families afraid to speak out and no credible casualty count, independent media and rights groups keep their own tallies. Their numbers, based only on confirmed open-source death reports, are modest.

The independent Russian outlet Mediazona and BBC News Russian counted 5,185 war dead as of July 29, with the greatest losses in remote and impoverished areas such as the southern region of Dagestan and the Siberian region of Buryatia. The wealthy cities Moscow and St. Petersburg were barely touched, the two outlets concluded. Moscow with 12.5 million residents, lost just 11 servicemen, and St. Petersburg 35.

By contrast, the CIA and British intelligence MI6 estimate that at least 15,000 Russians have been killed since their country’s invasion of Ukraine in late February, losses equal to the decade-long Soviet war in Afghanistan. And that was “probably a conservative estimate,” MI6 chief Richard Moore told the Aspen Security Forum last month.

Chubarin’s death was an ominous reflection of the Russian military’s desperation. A former conscript from the Karelia region, he signed a three-month contract and was too excited to ask how much he would be paid. His mother, Nina Chubarina, thinks he wanted to prove himself as a man. She wonders if he was trying to win back his ex-wife.

“He knew it was dangerous,” she said in a recent interview. He left on May 11, sending cheerful messages and videos after he arrived in Belgorod in southern Russia. He got little training in his four days there, then made a rushed call home. He had been issued a machine gun and was headed to the war.

“That was it. That was the last time we spoke,” she said. The military told her he was found dead near Mariupol on May 16. “He was a very brave guy, was not afraid of anything. He was so cheerful and open and so kind.”

Chubarina, a dairy farmworker, does not question the war. She just rereads a poem her son sent her while a conscript in 2017, about growing up and leaving her behind: “Forgive me for all the pain that has fallen on your weary shoulders. Please accept my soldier’s bow. It is from the bottom of my heart.”

Sergei Dustin of Baltiysk refuses to be quiet. His daughter, Alexandra, married a marine named Maksim and became a widow at 19. He vented his rage on Facebook, saying Russians needed to ask why their sons were dying.

He described the war as a “massacre started by crazy old men who think they are great geopoliticians and super strategists, incapable, in fact, of anything but destruction, threats against the world, puffing out their cheeks and endless lies.”

Some responses called him a traitor. His son-in-law had left in the winter for “training exercises” and ended up in Ukraine. An old friend from Ukraine was fighting on the other side. Dustin hoped neither would die.

He refused to hear any details about how the young man died, and his daughter shut herself inside her grief. “It’s very hard for her to understand and acknowledge that her husband was taking part in an operation that, to put it mildly, was far from nice,” he said. “This whole story just brings sorrow and tragedy for everyone.”

Not many grieving families publicly question the war effort. The silence serves to minimize public understanding of its impact on the home front. In the eastern Siberia city of Ulan-Ude, a recent survey by the independent news site Lyudi Baikala found that few residents knew that more than 250 people from the region had been killed, a count the site calculated using open sources.

Still, cracks have appeared. In Buryatia, a group of wives of Russian soldiers made a video in June to demand that the military bring their men home. Hundreds of soldiers from the region contacted an activist group there for information on how to break their contracts, according to Alexandra Garmazhapova, founder of the Free Buryatia Foundation. Casualties on a local memorial page on VKontakte rise daily.

On Monday, the deaths of local basketball players Dmitry Lagunov and Nikolay Bagrov were confirmed. A woman named Raisa Dugarova responded on the page. “Why does Buryatia have to bury its sons every day?” she asked. “Why are we doing this?”

The following day there was another entry, about the death of Zolto Chimitov, a corporal in his early 30s who had been born in the rural village of Tsakir. He became a boxing champion, later training to be a forester. He had three children.

“Oh god, please stop this war. How many of our guys can die?” a woman named Yevgenia Yakovleva wrote. “My soul is torn from pain. I don’t know how to accept this, survive and live with it.”

The Washington Post · by Robyn Dixon · August 6, 2022

8. A U.S. Return to Guadalcanal, in Another Tense Historical Moment

A U.S. Return to Guadalcanal, in Another Tense Historical Moment

The New York Times · by Damien Cave · August 7, 2022

At a ceremony to mark the 80th anniversary of a crucial battle in the Pacific, two daughters of men who served there reflected on the lessons of war.

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Caroline Kennedy, U.S. ambassador to Australia and daughter of John F. Kennedy, presented medals on Sunday to Nelma Ane and John Koloni, the descendants of men who saved her father during World War II.Credit...Matthew Abbott for The New York Times

Aug. 7, 2022Updated 5:11 a.m. ET

Caroline Kennedy, the United States ambassador to Australia, and Wendy Sherman, the U.S. deputy secretary of state, stood together at dawn on Sunday on the island of Guadalcanal to honor the 80th anniversary of the World War II battle there that nearly led to the death of their fathers, and that redefined America’s role across Asia.

Then and now, there was violence, great-power competition and jittery concern about the future. Their visit occurred as China’s military finished 72 hours of drills around Taiwan simulating an invasion. And in their remarks at events with officials from Japan, Australia, New Zealand and Solomon Islands, both officials emphasized that the region — and the world — finds itself at another crossroads.

Ms. Kennedy, surrounded by local well-wishers, promised to “honor those who came before us and to work and do our best to leave a legacy for those who follow.”

Ms. Sherman was more pointed. “It is up to us to decide if we want to continue having societies where people are free to speak their minds,” she told a group gathered on a leafy ridge above Solomon Islands’ capital, Honiara. “If we want to have governments that are transparent and accountable to their people. If we want an international system that is fair and orderly, where everyone plays by the same rules and where disputes are solved peacefully.”

In many ways, the Guadalcanal visit was the bookend to a tense week that started with trips to Asia by Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken and the speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, whose brief time in Taiwan set off China’s military exercises. Across the region, history, diplomacy and a crisis intertwined, as they often do when great-power competition surges.

The U.S. combat ship Oakland by the harbor in Honiara, where a crowd gathered to watch the memorial service on Sunday.Credit...Matthew Abbott for The New York Times

As Hal Brands, a global affairs professor at Johns Hopkins University, recently wrote, the early years of the Cold War were also defined by “diplomatic collisions and war scares,” when Russia and the United States jockeyed for position in a still-unsettled world order.

Today’s superpowers are different, and the contested locations are too, with new proving grounds like Ukraine and Taiwan. But some spots on the map — including the Pacific islands — seem destined for repeat roles.

China has been working across the region to secure influence, resources and possibly military bases in what security analysts describe as an effort to disrupt the Australian and American presence in the island chains that played a pivotal role in World War II.

In Solomon Islands, one of the poorest of the Pacific island nations, the government has been especially accommodating. In 2019, Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare cut diplomatic ties with Taiwan, the self-governing island that China sees as a renegade province. A few months ago, he signed a security agreement with Beijing that could allow China’s navy to use some of the same islands where around 7,000 Americans died in World War II.

White House summons Chinese ambassador amid military exercises, diplomatic retaliation for Pelosi Taiwan visit

foxnews.com · by Tyler Olson | Fox News

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The White House summoned Chinese Ambassador Qin Gang Thursday night amid increased tensions in the wake of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said Friday.

The meeting came as China has suspended all planned discussions with the U.S. on key international issues as retaliation against the visit and is holding live-fire military exercises surrounding Taiwan.

"We felt it was important to bring the ambassador in, to make clear our positions about their provocative actions," Kirby told reporters. "And as I said in my readout we condemn the military actions."

National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said Friday that the White House summoned the Chinese ambassador Thursday night. ( (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta))

CHINA HALTS MILITARY, CLIMATE TALKS WITH US IN RETALIATION FOR PELOSI VISIT

Kirby added: "We also made clear to the ambassador that Beijing's actions are concern not only to us, but to Taiwan and to the rest of the world. And made clear that – we wanted to make sure that he knew how much the international community was also opposed to this."

The People's Republic of China has long claimed sovereignty over Taiwan and the Taiwan Strait, the relatively narrow strip of ocean between the island of Taiwan and the Chinese mainland. The Chinese military has frequently sent planes into the area, testing Taiwan's air defense zone.

The U.S. does not have official relations with Taiwan – also known as the Republic of China – and maintains a "One China" policy that recognizes the People's Republic of China as the legitimate successor nation.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan this week, in a trip that angered the Chinese Communist Party but earned support from bipartisan lawmakers in the U.S. (Getty Images)

PELOSI TAIWAN TRIP: IRAN, SYRIA JOIN LIST OF COUNTRIES CONDEMNING CONTROVERSIAL VISIT

But the U.S. also has robust trade relations with Taiwan, and American officials often laud the island's liberal democracy in comparison to the Chinese Communist Party's authoritarian government.

The visit to Taiwan by Pelosi, D-Calif., emphasized those points, and bipartisan American lawmakers backed her visit, despite discouragement from the White House.

"She has every right to go. And it’s been unseemly and counterproductive for President Biden and his aides to have publicly sought to deter her from doing so," Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said this week. "Beijing wants to dictate Taiwan’s future to its people and snuff out the island’s democracy. And they are building the military capacity to bring this about. That's what's provocative."

Chinese President Xi Jinping's Chinese Commuist Party angrily condemned a visit to Taiwan by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. (Ju Peng/Xinhua via Getty Images)

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Despite bluster on both sides, Kirby said Friday the White House aims to avoid a direct confrontation with China.

Kirby said the White House made clear to the Chinese ambassador that "nothing has changed about America's one China policy. And that we don't want to we don't want to see a crisis evolve out of this, nor is there any justification for that to happen."

Kirby also said it's important to keep many lines of communication open between the U.S. and China.

Fox News' Timothy H.J. Nerrozi and Anders Hagstrom contributed to this report.

Tyler Olson covers politics for Fox News Digital. You can contact him at tyler.olson@fox.com and follow him on Twitter at @TylerOlson1791.

foxnews.com · by Tyler Olson | Fox News

10. The Provocative Politics of Nancy Pelosi’s Trip to Taiwan

Unrequited love? No love from Taiwan but the PRC still loves it?

Excerpts:

What does independence mean in practice? I think a lot of people who don’t know about the issue would say, “What are you talking about? Taiwan is independent—they get weapons from the United States, they have a democratically elected government,” etc.

Taiwan and mainland China have been separated for seventy years but neither side has filed divorce papers. Independence is Taiwan saying to the world, “This is it. We’re filing for divorce.” The P.R.C. would like to get back together. They want a reconciliation. Some people would say it’s not “back together”; it would be getting together with the P.R.C. for the first time. At any rate, the P.R.C. government—and the vast majority of P.R.C. people, I think—would like Taiwan to return to the family home.

They have tolerated this separation for a long time, and I believe that they can tolerate it for a while longer. What they can’t tolerate is the divorce papers. If Taiwan were to take an action that permanently foreclosed any possibility of reconciliation, of bringing the mainland and the island of Taiwan under some kind of common flag, whether it’s the P.R.C. flag or something else, that would be unacceptable to the Chinese Communist Party leadership, and it would have to respond in the strongest possible way. The C.C.P. leadership has chosen that position, obviously—nature does not ordain that it has to act that way. That’s the policy it has created, and that is the corner into which the C.C.P. leadership has painted itself.

The Provocative Politics of Nancy Pelosi’s Trip to Taiwan

What is the House Speaker’s high-profile visit really about?

August 4, 2022

The New Yorker · by Isaac Chotiner · August 4, 2022

On Tuesday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi landed in Taiwan, becoming the first person of her rank to do so in almost thirty years. Her trip was not officially sanctioned by the Biden Administration, but the President did not publicly dissuade her from going. The Chinese government, which views the island as part of the People’s Republic of China, announced a series of military drills in response. The United States has a long-standing relationship with Taiwan, and is its main provider of military equipment, but it maintains an official distance from the island to avoid angering China and provoking armed conflict. These fears have grown over the past decade as Chinese leaders have espoused increasingly nationalist ideology, and harshly cracked down on protests against their rule in Hong Kong. (The U.S. approach to Taiwan is often described as “strategic ambiguity”; it agrees that the P.R.C. is the only governing authority of China, but maintains an informal relationship with Taiwan.)

I recently spoke by phone with Shelley Rigger, a professor of political science at Davidson College and the author of the books “Why Taiwan Matters” and “The Tiger Leading the Dragon: How Taiwan Propelled China’s Economic Rise.” During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed the problems that Pelosi’s visit could cause for Taiwan, the divisions among the Taiwanese on how to deal with an increasingly assertive China, and the lessons the different sides of the China-Taiwan conflict have drawn from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

What did you make of Pelosi’s decision to visit?

The core thing that I take away from Pelosi’s visit is that it was ultimately about U.S. domestic politics and P.R.C. domestic politics, and Taiwan was the pawn caught in the middle. Initially, Pelosi’s goal was almost certainly to do a little cheerleading for Taiwan, show that the U.S. cares about it, that we’re paying attention, and that it’s an important friend and partner—that kind of thing. But, once it became this test of wills between Pelosi and her team and Xi Jinping and his team, whether or not it was good for Taiwan fell away, and it strictly became something that people in the U.S. and China were talking about, saying we had to do this because we cannot back down. And I think that’s very unfortunate. It does not benefit Taiwan, probably does harm to Taiwan’s security, and it has insured that U.S.-China relations, which were already pretty bad, are worse than they were before. We may have a much more difficult time recovering than we thought three weeks ago.

Based on what you just said, it seems that Pelosi shouldn’t have scheduled the visit at all, or that American politicians should not try to show support for Taiwan in this way. After China gets upset, there are reasons American politicians do not want to just say, “O.K., you’re upset about it. We’re not going to do it.” The logical upshot is, well, don’t do it at all.

This is totally predictable. We know what is going to happen if we get into a shoving match with the P.R.C. Unless American politicians actually want to drive the most important diplomatic relationship in the contemporary world into the ground, they have to be strategic and thoughtful about the cost and benefit of a particular action.

I don’t oppose American officials’ or policymakers’ doing things that have actual benefits for Taiwan’s security. I don’t oppose arms sales. I would love it if, instead of going to Taiwan, Pelosi had spent some time trying to persuade her party that it’s a good idea to actually set aside its determination to oppose all trade agreements and make some kind of trade agreement with Taiwan, or even try to get the U.S. back into a regional trade agreement, like the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership. What Taiwan needs from the U.S. is concrete action that enhances its security and helps it maintain a strong economy that can continue to hold up the cost of Taiwan’s security and also sustain the standard of living in Taiwan so that people there are enthusiastic about defending their democracy.

The Pelosi visit to Taiwan was never a substantive thing. It was always a symbolic gesture; it was a show of support. From the first moment that they announced that it might happen, my question has been: What concrete benefit does Taiwan derive from this show of support that outweighs the predictable response from the P.R.C.? I have never heard anyone even try to articulate that. They used the slogan “We’re supporting Taiwan,” and then when the P.R.C. pushed back, it became “Well, now we have to go, because Beijing is pushing back.” To me, that is not strategic, it’s not rational, it’s not smart, and it’s not being driven by national-security expertise or thinking.

My understanding is that the Taiwanese government, and even the aspects of the opposition that are seen as pro-China, have welcomed Pelosi broadly and have not criticized the visit, but maybe that’s because they’re in a pretty tough place and they don’t want to piss off the Americans. What’s your reading of the response?

I don’t know whether the Taiwanese encouraged the visit. Maybe they did. I haven’t seen any evidence that they did. The evidence that I’ve seen suggests that the Pelosi team came up with this on their own. I had an e-mail exchange last night with a colleague who said that, when she was in the State Department, if a congressional delegation wanted to come to the country where you were posted, they were coming. That wasn’t an invitation, it wasn’t a request; it was, “We are coming.” Many countries feel that it is impossible to say no to a U.S. delegation.

And certainly, Taiwan would be the last country in the world that would want to offend the U.S. Speaker of the House. The House of Representatives approves arms sales to Taiwan. There’s Taiwan-related legislation pending in Congress right now. You can’t say no. So, whether they initiated or encouraged the visit or not, they talked about it as little as possible. And the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (D.P.P.) representative in the U.S. gave quotes to the South China Morning Post that seem to me to show some reservations about this visit.

When it really blew up, Taiwan had no ability to influence the outcome, and it became a show of strength by a particular American politician. We also know that the State Department, the Pentagon, and the White House had reservations about the trip. This was the legislative branch taking action outside the policy and preferences of the executive branch and with no concrete evidence, that I have seen, of encouragement from the host government.

And what about the response from the Kuomintang (K.M.T.), which is the largest opposition party and favors closer ties to China than the D.P.P. does?

They’re stuck in exactly the same position. The big push for the K.M.T. in the last few months has been to rebuild ties with the U.S., because, during the Ma Ying-jeou administration, from 2008 to 2016, the K.M.T. drifted away from the U.S. There was a growing sense in Washington that the K.M.T. just didn’t seem to care about this relationship. Earlier this summer, the K.M.T. sent a representative, their likely Presidential candidate who’s also the party chair, to Washington. They are also trying not to get crosswise with the U.S. government. Many members of the K.M.T. would be more likely to voice some criticism of [Pelosi’s] visit in normal times, but it’s difficult right now because nobody in Taiwan wants to worsen the situation by adding a Taiwan angle to the U.S.-China angle.

Has China’s current era of aggressive nationalism changed Taiwanese politics?

I think what has changed Taiwanese domestic politics or attitudes toward cross-Strait relations is to some extent the trends that you’re describing, but even more, the domestic development within the P.R.C. In the early two-thousands, I did focus groups with young people in Taiwan about various political topics, including mainland China. One of the things that came out of those really strongly was that they thought of the P.R.C. as kind of scary, but also a place with a lot of opportunity, where you could go and develop your career. I did that same research again, in 2015, with focus groups of young people in Taiwan, and the picture was much darker. What had really darkened the picture was not “Well, they’re in the South China Sea,” or any of that. It was, “Now when you go to China there’s all this surveillance. You have to do everything on your phone, from ordering food to buying a train ticket, and somebody has all that information.” The state knows everything about you, and there’s a general sense that you’re not free in the P.R.C., even compared with fifteen years ago. Admittedly, the P.R.C. was not a free country fifteen years ago, but, from the perspective of young Taiwanese people, it’s got much worse. There are a lot of Taiwanese who have been detained, arrested, and subjected to these forms of detention in which you’re not quite in the legal system, so you may wait many years for any kind of legal action. It’s just scary.

The rising reluctance to engage with the P.R.C., to go to the mainland, to imagine the mainland as an interesting place to try out for a while, is less about the kinds of things that we see and more about the kinds of things that the Taiwanese who do live in mainland China—and there are many of them—see in their everyday lives. That has definitely undermined even further the idea that there might be a possibility for some kind of arrangement that could pass for unification by Beijing’s standards. And Hong Kong further underscores the degree to which it’s just not easy to imagine living under that flag, under that system, without losing much of what makes life good in Taiwan.

And what about in terms of the K.M.T.? What would closer ties actually look like in practice now?

They don’t know, and that’s the problem. Their identity is “not the D.P.P.,” so they try to characterize the D.P.P. as pro-independence, even though the D.P.P. really is not pushing for independence. Mischaracterizing the D.P.P. is an important part of K.M.T.’s approach. In fairness, the D.P.P. does the same thing—it mischaracterizes the K.M.T. as pro-unification, which the K.M.T. is not, at least not as we understand it today. The policy might be characterized as somewhat more open to engagement with China, but it’s difficult to put flesh on. During the Ma administration, the idea was, “We are more secure if the P.R.C. feels like the relationship is stable.”

The Ma administration operationalized that theory through primarily economic engagement and agreements with the P.R.C. Direct flights became finalized, so people could fly from Shanghai to Taiwan without having to go through Hong Kong, and so on. Prior to 2008, money went from Taiwan to the mainland, but people and money rarely came from the mainland to Taiwan.

Another part of Ma’s strategy of trying to ease tension through engagement and interaction was to invite more people and investment from the mainland into Taiwan. As the Taiwan Strait became a two-way strait, people in Taiwan suddenly realized, “Wait a minute—this is not an abstraction. The mainland is coming to us.” People who had never seen someone from mainland China in their entire lives suddenly found their communities overrun by P.R.C. tourists. The number of P.R.C. people in Taiwan went from practically zero to four million in six years, and it was too much. These P.R.C. tourists had no ill intent, but there were so many of them, and suddenly something that had been an abstraction became an everyday reality. Starting in 2012, you see a series of protests, all of which have a similar vibe, which is, “We’re pushing too far. This is going too fast.” For the K.M.T., that approach has already been tried, and it’s been taken to its feasible maximum. It’s very difficult to replace it with something that has the same affect toward the P.R.C. but does not activate the same kind of anxiety in Taiwan. I do not think they have figured it out yet.

What does independence mean in practice? I think a lot of people who don’t know about the issue would say, “What are you talking about? Taiwan is independent—they get weapons from the United States, they have a democratically elected government,” etc.

Taiwan and mainland China have been separated for seventy years but neither side has filed divorce papers. Independence is Taiwan saying to the world, “This is it. We’re filing for divorce.” The P.R.C. would like to get back together. They want a reconciliation. Some people would say it’s not “back together”; it would be getting together with the P.R.C. for the first time. At any rate, the P.R.C. government—and the vast majority of P.R.C. people, I think—would like Taiwan to return to the family home.

They have tolerated this separation for a long time, and I believe that they can tolerate it for a while longer. What they can’t tolerate is the divorce papers. If Taiwan were to take an action that permanently foreclosed any possibility of reconciliation, of bringing the mainland and the island of Taiwan under some kind of common flag, whether it’s the P.R.C. flag or something else, that would be unacceptable to the Chinese Communist Party leadership, and it would have to respond in the strongest possible way. The C.C.P. leadership has chosen that position, obviously—nature does not ordain that it has to act that way. That’s the policy it has created, and that is the corner into which the C.C.P. leadership has painted itself.

Yes, I was going to say that words such as “have to” can make people think that you’re saying they have to for some moral reason.

They have to because they’ve told everyone for forty years that it’s what they’re going to do. And it would be a serious loss of legitimacy for the Communist Party to fail in something that they have made so foundational to their own claim to govern.

Do you have a sense of how the past six months in Ukraine have changed the way people in Taiwan, or the government of Taiwan, or maybe even the government in mainland China, thinks about this issue?

One thing it did was it brought home to citizens, and especially politicians—political leaders in Taiwan—that twentieth-century war is still here in the twenty-first century. This could happen. The idea that we can say, “Oh, come on, it’s 2022, that doesn’t happen”—no, it happened. And it would look at least as ugly in Taiwan as it’s looking in Ukraine, so that’s sobering. I think for the P.R.C. it is an opportunity to learn from someone else’s experience. What does and doesn’t work? Beijing did not expect the West to be as unified as it has been in the face of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Beijing has to think about why that happened and what that might mean for its own plans. The P.R.C. is also going to study the Ukraine war for military lessons. But I don’t think it changes their goals at all. It may affect their timeline by becoming something that they want to watch and study and learn from.

In Taiwan, it has increased people’s sense of urgency to make the necessary military changes that might allow Taiwan to resist. In some ways the successful resistance in Ukraine has been encouraging, and yet, the U.S. response included the decision not to intervene directly, which totally makes sense in terms of U.S. foreign policy. But there was a very sharp decrease in the percentage of Taiwanese who believed that the U.S. would intervene to help Taiwan after the U.S. did not intervene to help Ukraine.

It’s a pretty mixed bag, but none of this is the sort of thing that people in Taiwan think about all day long. We’re paying more attention to the Pelosi visit in the U.S. than my friends in Taiwan are. And that makes sense because I don’t think the Pelosi visit, all of this brouhaha, is about Taiwan at all. It’s about American politicians thinking that this is the moment to poke Beijing or to stand up to Beijing or to prove how macho they are relative to Beijing. And, if Taiwan gets caught in the middle, well . . .

The New Yorker · by Isaac Chotiner · August 4, 2022

11. Making Sense of the Nepal Army’s Engagement With Big Powers

Excerpts:

The thrust of the Nepal Army’s engagement with the defense forces of other countries is to enhance its readiness for U.N. missions but also to be better equipped for post-disaster situations and development projects.

After Nepal’s devastating earthquakes in 2015, the army was again among the first responders. But when faced with a major test, the army found that it did not have enough training or expertise to adequately carry out its post-disaster duties.

Later in the same year it applied to be a part of the U.S. State Partnership Program (SPP), which entails an exchange of personnel between an American state’s National Guard and a partner foreign country. Disaster-preparedness would be the centerpiece of this inter-country cooperation between U.S. and Nepali security personnel.

It was the then army chief, Rajendra Chhetri, who wrote to the United States on October 27, 2015, requesting Nepal’s inclusion in the SPP.

Why, the curious public asked, was the chief of the country’s defense forces writing to the Americans to be a part of what was a state-to-state program, instead of a high-level government representative?

But the army chief is unlikely to have acted on his own. Chhetri wrote in the letter that he was “authorized by the government of Nepal.” More plausibly, he had gotten the go-ahead for the letter from the then-K.P. Oli government. Whatever the case, his letter, which was leaked only recently, has sparked a new debate over the intent and rationale of the army’s external engagements.

The SPP letter-leak came hot on the heels of the Nepali parliament’s ratification of the MCC Nepal compact, a $500 million U.S. grant agreement with Nepal. Parliament passed the compact after much acrimony, as it too was believed to be a part of the IPS, a strategy to “encircle” China in the reading of many Nepalis. The Americans had put considerable pressure on Kathmandu to honor its commitment to the compact. If not, they warned, the hesitance would be interpreted as a sign of Nepal acting at China’s behest.

Making Sense of the Nepal Army’s Engagement With Big Powers

China, India, and the U.S. all want to influence Nepal through engagement with its army. What does the Nepal Army want?

thediplomat.com · by Biswas Baral · August 5, 2022

For the past 20 years the Nepal Army chief has been a regular presence at the annual Indo-Pacific Chiefs of Defense (CHODs) conference. Very few Nepalis were aware of the powwow, held under the aegis of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command. But it was a different story this year.

When the Chief of Army Staff Chief Parbhu Ram Sharma recently left for the conference, held this year in Sydney, Australia, the national parliament was in an uproar.

“If indeed the program in Australia is a part of the Indo-Pacific Strategy [IPS], it goes against the spirit of our constitution,” the ruling Maoist party lawmaker Amrita Thapa remarked.

“Our parliament has already ruled that Nepal will not be a part of the IPS,” thundered Anjana Bishankhe, another Maoist lawmaker. “Why has the government sent the army chief in a violation of that ruling?”

The parliament’s International Relations Committee later sought the government’s clarification over Sharma’s participation.

Things even remotely related to the IPS are closely scrutinized in Nepal these days. The national army, meanwhile, is increasingly seen in the country’s (sizable) left circles as an American accomplice in containing China.

Secondary Concerns

The prime constitutional duty of the Nepal Army is to maintain the country’s territorial integrity, sovereignty, and independence. But as the national defense force has grown in size – from 46,000-strong at the start of the Maoist insurgency in 1996 to a 95,000-personnel force today – the ambit of its secondary responsibilities has also grown.

The army in a way has had to justify its anomalous expansion. It protects the country’s national parks, leads post-disaster work (a sizable undertaking in a country prone to earthquakes and water-borne disasters), and, increasingly, is in charge of big infrastructure “national pride” projects.

That is on the domestic front. The Nepal Army’s presence has also steadily grown in United Nations peacekeeping missions: Nepal is currently the second-largest troop contributor (with 5,571 active personnel) to such missions, behind only Bangladesh (6,554).

The thrust of the Nepal Army’s engagement with the defense forces of other countries is to enhance its readiness for U.N. missions but also to be better equipped for post-disaster situations and development projects.

After Nepal’s devastating earthquakes in 2015, the army was again among the first responders. But when faced with a major test, the army found that it did not have enough training or expertise to adequately carry out its post-disaster duties.

Later in the same year it applied to be a part of the U.S. State Partnership Program (SPP), which entails an exchange of personnel between an American state’s National Guard and a partner foreign country. Disaster-preparedness would be the centerpiece of this inter-country cooperation between U.S. and Nepali security personnel.

It was the then army chief, Rajendra Chhetri, who wrote to the United States on October 27, 2015, requesting Nepal’s inclusion in the SPP.

Why, the curious public asked, was the chief of the country’s defense forces writing to the Americans to be a part of what was a state-to-state program, instead of a high-level government representative?

But the army chief is unlikely to have acted on his own. Chhetri wrote in the letter that he was “authorized by the government of Nepal.” More plausibly, he had gotten the go-ahead for the letter from the then-K.P. Oli government. Whatever the case, his letter, which was leaked only recently, has sparked a new debate over the intent and rationale of the army’s external engagements.

The SPP letter-leak came hot on the heels of the Nepali parliament’s ratification of the MCC Nepal compact, a $500 million U.S. grant agreement with Nepal. Parliament passed the compact after much acrimony, as it too was believed to be a part of the IPS, a strategy to “encircle” China in the reading of many Nepalis. The Americans had put considerable pressure on Kathmandu to honor its commitment to the compact. If not, they warned, the hesitance would be interpreted as a sign of Nepal acting at China’s behest.

Now, in wanting to be a part of the SPP – a continuation of the wishes of the previous Oli government – Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba was accused of joining the American military camp. The accusation came from Deuba’s own party plus the main opposition, as well as from popular commentators.

The SPP, according to another “leaked” document, which the U.S. embassy in Kathmandu later termed a “fake,” would allow for the stationing of American security personnel on Nepal soil. The new rumor found immediate traction, despite the stern denial from the U.S. embassy.

Deuba clarified that Nepal had no intention of joining the SPP, and the government later officially opted out of the program. To calm the waters, Deuba even put off his official U.S. visit.

Nepal’s Many Military Partnerships

Many observers say there was nothing wrong in Nepal wanting to join the SPP.

“Yes, the government of the day should have written to the U.S., not a sitting army chief,” said Binoj Basnyat, a former army official and a security analyst. “But the SPP was no more than a continuation of regular exchanges between the two countries’ armies.”

He says Nepal’s military diplomacy has always had three goals: maintaining traditional relations with different militaries, enhancing the army’s capacity, and increasing the quality of its presence in U.N. peacekeeping missions.

“How would the engagement between the Nepal Army and U.S. State Guards under the SPP have gone beyond these roles?” Basnyat asked.

Again, the Nepal Army is best known outside the country for its outsized presence in U.N. peacekeeping missions. Over 140,000 army personnel have served in 44 U.N. missions since 1958. It’s a lucrative assignment: an officer on peacekeeping duties earns, on average, around $1,500 a month — more than what most Nepalis make in a year.

Increasing its presence in leadership roles in the U.N. missions is one of the army’s main goals. For the same purpose, it conducts regular military exercises with the U.S., China, India, and a host of other countries.

Currently, there does not seem to be any clear preference of the Nepal Army between the armed forces of the U.S., India, and China, the three main geopolitical players in the country.

Given the age-old, multifarious ties between Nepal and India, underpinned by the open border and close people-to-people ties, the Nepal Army is naturally the closest to its Indian counterpart. The Nepal Army chief is the ceremonial head of the Indian Army and vice versa.

The two armies engage in regular military exercises under Operation Maitri. Nepali nationals serve in the Indian Army and many Nepal Army personnel get their staff college training in India. Even when other channels between the two countries have broken down — as happened during the 2015 border blockade – the army-to-army back channels have been used to diffuse bilateral tensions.

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Similarly, the Nepal Army’s engagements with China have also been growing. The first serious help the Chinese extended to the army was during the decade-long Maoist insurgency (1996-2006) when it offered arms to fight the insurgents. The Nepal Army and the People’s Liberation Army also engage in regular military exercises (although not since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic). China also gives the Nepal Army some monetary aid. Staff college training in China is gaining in popularity too.

During his 2020 Nepal trip, Chinese Defense Minister Wei Fenghe had hinted at the scope of military aid for Nepal Army, which would mostly concentrate on “construction and engineering equipment and logistics for Nepali peacekeepers.”

With the Americans, the Nepal Army learns the ropes of disaster preparedness, anti-insurgency, and mountain warfare. By providing the army latest arms and ammunition, they also helped in its modernization. The army officials are also a regular part of U.S. training and exchange programs.

Making Sense of It All

Deepak Prakash Bhatta, a Nepali parliamentarian and a member of the parliament’s foreign affairs committee, said defense cooperation has never been a goal of Nepal’s military diplomacy. The country’s focus is rather on “peace and security.”

“Big powers tend to emphasize the defense component,” he said. “It is in their interest to do so, not ours.”

A bottom-line of Nepal’s foreign policy, Bhatta adds, is that the country should never be a part of any military or security alliance – and the army has been mindful of this.

Suresh Raj Chalise, Nepal’s former ambassador to the U.S., said the militaries of Nepal and the U.S. have been cooperating since 1945 – even before the two countries established diplomatic ties in 1947.

“I would go so far as to argue that U.S.-Nepal ties are underpinned by the relations between their militaries,” he averred. So it is a mistake to suspect their recent engagements.

Former Army Chief Gaurav Shumsher Rana also rubbished claims of the army’s ulterior motives in dealing with any foreign power: “The Nepal Army has always been an instrument of the state. Never has it acted independently of the government in power, nor will it do so in the future.”

That does not mean there is a shortage of those who doubt the army’s intent.

Krishna Khanal, professor of political science at Tribhuvan University in Kathmandu, argued it is unclear what the army wants to achieve abroad.

“With an increase in its size, the scope of the army’s interests has also grown,” Khanal said. “I don’t think the army has political ambitions. But, yes, its foreign engagements have been rather murky.”

He believes the former army chief was well aware of both the costs and benefits of Nepal joining the SPP when he wrote to the United States in 2015. “Yet he chose not to make full disclosure to the government of the day, which is not a healthy development in a democracy.”

Ajaya Bhadra Khanal, a seasoned journalist and foreign policy commentator, argued that foreign powers will always try to influence the Nepal Army, the country’s most stable and strongest institution. “China wants to use the army to increase its influence on other state organs. India and the U.S., for their part, would like to stop that from happening,” he said.

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For instance, the Chinese want the army to be aligned with it in terms of weapons and training – and the Americans are angling for the same.

Even as the army has to maintain this difficult geopolitical balance, not just with China and the U.S. but also with India, getting lucrative U.N. peacekeeping postings will be one constant of all its external involvements. If in the process its personnel also get to visit different countries for various military trainings and exchanges, so much the better.

“Most of our able-bodied men and women are forever trying to escape to greener pastures overseas,” Professor Khanal remarked. “If everybody in the country is only looking after themselves, the army too may feel perfectly justified to pursue its own interests abroad.”

GUEST AUTHOR

Biswas Baral

Biswas Baral is a Kathmandu-based journalist who writes on Nepal's foreign policy. Follow him on Twitter @biswasktm.

thediplomat.com · by Biswas Baral · August 5, 2022

12. ‘There’s no path out of economic oblivion for Russia’: New report reveals how corporate exodus has already wiped out decades of post–Cold War growth

‘There’s no path out of economic oblivion for Russia’: New report reveals how corporate exodus has already wiped out decades of post–Cold War growth

BYYVONNE LAU

August 4, 2022 at 2:47 PM EDT

Fortune

The Western sanctions and widespread corporate exodus from Russia since Feb. 24 have ravaged the Russian economy—and its future prospects look even bleaker, according to a new report from Yale University researchers and economists led by Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, Yale School of Management professor and senior associate dean for leadership studies. It’s now become clear that the Kremlin’s “finances are in much, much more dire straits than conventionally understood” and that the large-scale “business retreats and sanctions are catastrophically crippling the Russian economy,” the researchers wrote.

Deterioration

As of Aug. 4, over 1,000 companies, including U.S. firms like Nike, IBM, and Bain consulting, have curtailed their operations in Russia. Though some businesses have stayed, the mass corporate exodus represents 40% of Russia’s GDP and reverses 30 years’ worth of foreign investment, says the Yale report.

The international retreat is morphing into a larger crisis for the country: a collapse in foreign imports and investments.

Russia has descended into a technological crisis as a result of its isolation from the global economy. It’s having trouble securing critical technology and parts. “The domestic economy is largely reliant on imports across industries…with few exceptions,” says the report. Western export controls have largely halted the flow of imported technology from smartphones to data servers and networking equipment, straining its tech industry. Russia’s biggest internet company, Yandex—the country’s version of Google—is running short of the semiconductor chips it needs for its servers.

At the same time, Russia’s “domestic production has come to a complete standstill—with no capacity to replace lost businesses, products, and talent,” the Yale report said. Russian producers and manufacturers are unable to fill the gaps left by the collapse of Western imports. Russia’s telecom sector for instance, now hopes to lean on China, India, and Israel to supply 5G equipment.

In the weeks following the Ukraine invasion, the Kremlin largely prevented a “full scale financial crisis” owing to quick and harsh measures, like restricting the movement of money out of the country and imposing a 20% emergency interest rate hike, Laura Solanko, senior adviser at the Bank of Finland Institute for Emerging Economies in Transition, an organization that researches emerging economies, told Fortune last month. The ruble even rebounded from a March low, when it was valued at less than one U.S. cent.

Yet Russia’s financial markets are the worst-performing in the world this year, the report noted. “Putin is resorting to patently unsustainable, dramatic fiscal and monetary intervention to smooth over these structural economic weaknesses,” which has led to a government budget deficit for the first time in years and drained the Kremlin’s foreign reserves even with its continued inflow of petrodollars, the researchers wrote. The Russian government is giving subsidies to businesses and individuals to mitigate any economic shocks caused by sanctions. This “inflated level” of fiscal and social stimulus, on top of military expenditures, is “simply unsustainable for the Kremlin,” the report said.

And the ruble’s recent dramatic turnaround doesn’t indicate a strong Russian economy, but marks something far worse: the clear collapse of foreign imports. Sergei Guriev, scientific director of the economics program at Sciences Po, in France, and a research fellow at London-based think tank the Centre for Economic Policy Research, previously told Fortune that it represents a “very bad” situation for the nation.

The EU is now phasing out Russian energy, which could hit the Kremlin’s oil and gas profits. Such a scenario would severely strain the Kremlin’s finances, since Western countries have frozen half of its $300 billion in foreign reserves.

Heading toward economic oblivion

Russia’s precarious economic position means that it faces even more dire, long-term challenges ahead.

Sanctions aren’t designed to cause an immediate financial crisis or economic collapse, but are long-term tools to weaken a nation’s economy while isolating it from global markets, the report said. And the sanctions are doing exactly that for Russia.

The country is losing its richest and most educated citizens as its economy crumbles. Most estimates say that at least 500,000 Russians have fled the country since Feb. 24, with the “vast majority being highly educated and highly skilled workers in competitive industries such as technology,” the report said. Many wealthy Russians who flee are taking their money with them. One estimate is that 20% of Russia’s ultra-high-net-worth individuals have left this year. In the first quarter of 2022, official capital outflows stood at $70 billion, according to Bank of Russia estimates—but this figure is likely to be a “gross underestimate” of the actual amount of money that has left the country, the Yale team wrote.

Russian citizens are also set to become poorer, despite Putin’s minimum wage and pension income hikes. A former Putin aide predicts that the number of Russians living in poverty will likely double—and perhaps even triple, as the war continues. Russia “hasn’t seen the worst yet,” Russian political scientist Ilya Matveev, told Fortune last month.

“There is no path out of economic oblivion as long as the allied countries remain unified in maintaining and increasing sanctions pressure against Russia,” the researchers wrote.

Fortune

13. Tracking the Fourth Taiwan Strait Crisis

Map graphic at the link.

https://chinapower.csis.org/tracking-the-fourth-taiwan-strait-crisis/?utm_source=pocket_mylist

Tracking the Fourth Taiwan Strait Crisis | ChinaPower Project

chinapower.csis.org · August 5, 2022

As U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi traveled to Taiwan on August 2-3, China responded with forceful and coercive military, economic, and diplomatic measures. Developments are still unfolding, but the large-scale and unprecedented military exercises taken by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) far exceed the operations China engaged in during the Third Taiwan Strait Crisis that took place in 1995-1996. Chinese escalation has precipitated the Fourth Taiwan Strait Crisis, leading to international calls for China to immediately halt its military activities. This page will track and analyze key Chinese activities as they develop.

Unprecedented PLA Military Exercises around Taiwan

The most significant step to date is a series of large military exercises and live-fire drills. On August 2, Chinese state media announced that the PLA would conduct military exercises from August 4-7 in six zones throughout the Taiwan Strait and around the island of Taiwan. State media detailed that the exercises would include:

A series of joint military operations around Taiwan;
Joint air and sea exercises in the sea and airspace of the northern, southwestern, and southeastern Taiwan Islands;
Long-range live ammunition firing in the Taiwan Strait; and
Test firing of conventional missiles in the waters east of Taiwan.

As a whole, these PLA exercises are much closer to the main island of Taiwan than prior ones, showcasing the PLA’s increased confidence in its capabilities to operate near Taiwan. The six exercise zones are within Taiwan’s Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) and encircle Taiwan from multiple directions. Several exercise zones are far from the Chinese mainland and beyond the Taiwan Strait, venturing into Japan’s and the Philippine’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ). Three of the exercise zones intrude into Taiwan’s territorial waters and lie dangerously close to Taiwan’s capital and key cities. It is also worth noting that these exercises were rolled out at once, while the exercises during the Third Taiwan Strait Crisis took place in multiple stages from July 1995 to March 1996.

Mapping China’s Military Exercises

Statements by Chinese military analysts have made clear that the PLA chose the location of each exercise zone for specific purposes. Below are details on the importance of each zone to PLA operations and to Taiwan’s security.

Zone 1: This zone is positioned off the coast of mainland China’s Pingtan Island at the narrowest part of the Taiwan Strait. PLA analysts have noted that operations by this narrow neck could enable China to close off the northern entrance to the Taiwan Strait. This zone was also chosen to intentionally breach and undermine the legitimacy of the “median line” running through the Taiwan Strait, where PLA forces typically operate to the west of the line.

Zone 2: Located north of Taiwan, this zone intrudes into Taiwan’s territorial waters and is 22.5 kilometers (km) away from the tip of the island and approximately 50 km from Taipei, Taiwan’s capital. It is near both the Port of Taipei and Keelung Harbor, a key port for both military and commercial activity. Both ports are critical to Taiwan’s economy and together handle approximately 20 percent of total cargo to the island. Zone 2 is also located near Taipei’s Taoyuan International Airport, the island’s busiest airport, as well as Taipei Songshan Airport, which serves as a military airbase and saw over six million passengers in 2019. This zone is located close to beaches and coastal areas to the northwest and west of Taipei that military planners believe to be suitable for a potential PLA amphibious landing on Taiwan.

Zone 3: Located 18.5 km northeast of Taiwan, this zone is near the only beaches on the east coast of Taiwan that may be suitable for a PLA amphibious invasion. The southeast corner of Zone 3 intrudes into Japan’s EEZ and is a short distance from the hotly contested Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands, which are administered by Japan and claimed by China and Taiwan. Zone 3 thus further positions the PLA to conduct operations against both Taiwan and Japan. Similar to Zone 2, this zone is close to Taipei and Keelung Harbor. Control of both zones could make it difficult for the United States or Japan to flow forces into Taipei from the northeast side and could enable the PLA to blockade Keelung Harbor. Operating from Zones 1, 2, and 3 could allow the PLA to move quickly to seize Taipei from three different directions and may be particularly important if the PLA seeks to engage in a decapitation attack against Taiwan’s leadership.

Zone 4: This zone rests approximately 130 km from Taiwan’s eastern shores in the Pacific Ocean. Because of the distance to China and relatively mountainous terrain on Taiwan’s east coast, the PLA has historically engaged in fewer operations and exercises in this region than on the western side of Taiwan. This zone directly faces two air force bases at Hualien and Taitung, which are among Taiwan’s most important military bases. Placing forces there would enable the PLA to launch attacks on Taiwan’s eastern shores and bases and help deny the United States and other countries from flowing forces into Taiwan from the east. This zone also overlaps with Japan’s EEZ. Sandwiched between this zone and Zone 3 is Japan’s Yonaguni Island, which hosts a military base, radar, and other equipment and serves as a critical outpost near Taiwan and the Senkaku Islands.

Zone 5: This zone is positioned southeast of the southern tip of Taiwan. It sits between Taiwan’s Orchid Island and the islands comprising the Philippine Province of Batanes and intrudes into the Philippine EEZ. This stretch of seas, known as the Bashi Channel, is a critical choke point separating waters within the First Island Chain from the Philippines Sea and the broader Pacific Ocean. The Bashi Channel is also home to several undersea cables, which could be severed to severely disrupt internet access and communications in the region.

Zone 6: This zone is located at the southwest corner of Taiwan and is the largest of the six. It is close to a region that has been a stronghold of the Democratic Progress Party (DPP), the party that President Tsai Ing-wen leads and Beijing views as pushing for Taiwan independence. The southwest corner of Taiwan’s ADIZ is where the PLA has engaged in the most air intrusions, but typically at a distance much farther from the main island of Taiwan than the exercise zone. This zone reaches into Taiwan’s territorial waters, near the large cities of Kaohsiung and Zuoying, which are both home to key military bases. Kaohsiung also boasts Taiwan’s most important commercial port—which handled nearly 59 percent of Taiwan’s total shipping throughput in 2021—and Taiwan’s second-busiest airport. Similar to the zones in northern Taiwan, this zone is close to beaches and coastal areas suitable for an amphibious invasion of Taiwan. Military operations from Zone 6 could target DPP supporters, significantly undermine Taiwan’s economy (as part of a blockade), and support a potential invasion of the island.

The Significance of China’s Exercises

These unprecedented exercises serve at least four main objectives. First, they are intended to impose political costs on Taipei and undermine morale and support for Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen among Taiwan’s public. Part of this involves making clear that Taiwan will bear the brunt of Chinese punishment for closer relations with the United States. Beijing hopes that this will drive a wedge between Taipei and Washington.

Second, these exercises are part of larger Chinese deterrence and signaling efforts toward the United States, Taiwan, U.S. regional allies, and the broader international community to demonstrate how capable and determined China is to exert control over Taiwan and enforce its One China Principle. The exercises involve direct costs for Japan, and to some extent the Philippines, because of PLA operations (and firing of missiles) within both countries’ claimed waters. PLA activities are also meant to broadly deter countries from supporting Taiwan by showcasing how much China is willing to escalate.

The PLA at 95 and the Current Crisis in the Taiwan Strait: A Conversation with Roderick Lee

Third, these exercises allow the PLA to rehearse how to conduct a variety of military operations that could form part of a PLA blockade or invasion of the island. This includes not only activities directed at Taiwan, but operations to prevent potential third country intervention in a China-Taiwan conflict.

Fourth, and longer term, Beijing aims to use the exercises to establish a new status quo in the Taiwan Strait. China is specifically seeking to erase the notion of the median line that divides the strait and aims to constrain PLA operations west of the line. China also seeks to establish a new normal in which the PLA no longer respects Taiwan’s claims to a separate airspace and territorial waters. These exercises are likely only the beginning of PLA operations close to and above Taiwan.

Authors:

Bonny Lin, Brian Hart, Matthew P. Funaiole, Samantha Lu, Hannah Price, Nicholas Kaufman

chinapower.csis.org · August 5, 2022

14. ‘Putin’s Chef’ Is Personally Touring Russian Prisons for Wagner Recruits to Fight in Ukraine, Reports Say

A sign of desperation?

Excerpts:

But this appears to be the first time that Yevgeny Prigozhin, commonly known as “Putin’s chef,” is said to have personally appealed to inmates.

“They are primarily interested in murderers and robbers, they treat the drug addicts warily, the same with the rapists. It’s better, he said, for it to not be common killers, but straight up calculating ones–you will like it with us, he said. In general, he gave the impression of a maniac,” one unnamed inmate was quoted telling Mediazona.

The inmate went on to note there seemed to be no coercion to join, though “very many” did sign up, he said, estimating that at least 200 inmates eagerly accepted the offer.

Inmates were reportedly offered a free pardon and a paycheck in return for their service, with the man identified as Prigozhin promising they had only a 15 percent chance of dying, a figure reportedly based on an “experimental” deployment of inmates earlier in July.

‘Putin’s Chef’ Is Personally Touring Russian Prisons for Wagner Recruits to Fight in Ukraine, Reports Say

‘WIN THIS DAMN WAR’

“In general, he gave the impression of a maniac,” one unnamed prisoner was quoted telling Mediazona.

Allison Quinn

News Editor

Updated Aug. 06, 2022 5:05PM ET / Published Aug. 06, 2022 4:41PM ET

The Daily Beast · August 6, 2022

AFP via Getty

A sanctioned Russian businessman and close Putin ally linked to the notorious Wagner Group has reportedly been personally touring Russian prisons and recruiting inmates to join the fight in Ukraine.

That’s according to new reporting out Saturday by the independent outlet Mediazona, which interviewed two inmates held in different facilities in different regions of Russia. Numerous reports have emerged in recent weeks about Wagner’s alleged new recruiting drive among inmates, with the private Russian military force ostensibly trying to shore up Russian forces that have been depleted by heavy losses in the nearly six month war.

But this appears to be the first time that Yevgeny Prigozhin, commonly known as “Putin’s chef,” is said to have personally appealed to inmates.

“They are primarily interested in murderers and robbers, they treat the drug addicts warily, the same with the rapists. It’s better, he said, for it to not be common killers, but straight up calculating ones–you will like it with us, he said. In general, he gave the impression of a maniac,” one unnamed inmate was quoted telling Mediazona.

The inmate went on to note there seemed to be no coercion to join, though “very many” did sign up, he said, estimating that at least 200 inmates eagerly accepted the offer.

Inmates were reportedly offered a free pardon and a paycheck in return for their service, with the man identified as Prigozhin promising they had only a 15 percent chance of dying, a figure reportedly based on an “experimental” deployment of inmates earlier in July.

During an alleged visit by Prigozhin to a penal colony in Rybinsk, in the Yaroslavl region, on Aug. 1, inmates were told that “World War III” was underway and they were being given the chance to fight for their homeland, according to the account told by an inmate to Mediazona.

“My guys go into African countries and in two days they leave nothing alive there, and now they are also destroying enemies in Ukraine. Your decision to serve in the [private military company] is a deal with the devil. If you leave here with me, you will either return a free man or you will die. You will be required to kill enemies and follow the orders of leadership. Those who retreat will be shot on the spot,” an inmate quoted Prigozhin as saying.

Russian billionaire and businessman, Concord catering company owner Yevgeny Prigozhin in 2016.

Mikhail Svetlov

An inmate at a penal colony in Plavsk, in the Tula region, told Mediazona inmates received a visit from Prigozhin on July 25 in which he allegedly said, “I have special authority from the president, I don’t give a fuck, I need to win this damn war at any cost.”

After the visits, during which Prigozhin was said to have been accompanied by other representatives of Wagner, inmates were reportedly blocked from using phones. And according to a friend of one of the inmates in Plavsk, the Wagner representatives said they’d be back for another visit in two or three months if they “run out” of inmates from the first wave of recruitment.

Several human rights groups have also reported on Wagner’s alleged recruiting drive, including Rus Sidyashaya, which said both inmates and their families have told of overtures from Wagner, and Gulagu.net, a human rights group that monitors conditions for prisoners in Russian penal colonies.

Vladimir Osechkin, the founder of the human rights group Gulagu.net, wrote on Facebook recently that a prisoner at a high-security facility had spoken of the Putin crony Prigozhin arriving by helicopter in late July and convincing about 150 inmates to join the war.

The man identified by inmates as Prigozhin reportedly tried to relate with them by noting he’d served prison time himself, according to Mediazona.

So far, according to the independent outlet Verstka, which has also closely covered the alleged Wagner recruiting drive, the mercenary group has recruited more than 1,000 inmates at 17 different penal colonies throughout Russia.

Long accused by Western officials and investigative journalists of financing Wagner, Prigozhin has denied having any links to the paramilitary force, a shadowy group that has left a long trail of war crimes allegations in its wake in Ukraine, Syria and the Central African Republic.

In a statement to Verstka on Wagner’s alleged recruiting drive for the war in Ukraine, the press service of Prigozhin’s company Concord Management reportedly sent back comment from the businessman in which he avoided answering directly if he was recruiting inmates but admitted that he’d “been in [penal] colonies in the 80s.”

The Daily Beast · August 6, 2022

15. Can Russia Divide Europe?

Excerpt:

By pursuing his aggression against Ukraine in February 2022, Putin has galvanized and united the European Union—much as he has done with NATO and the West in general—in ways that might have seemed implausible before the war. It has been decades since there has been such a display of European and transatlantic cohesion and resolve. But it is far from clear that this can be sustained, particularly as the war itself changes and becomes increasingly unpredictable. Although the conflict is almost certain to continue, its evolution will likely not be linear. And in moments of lull, European leaders will face new challenges in sustaining the pressure on Russia and will no longer be able to count on the unifying effect of an acute external threat.

Putin surely believes that resilience is only about pain endurance, and that liberal democracies—first and foremost western European ones—are simply too weak in leadership and do not have what it takes to wait him out. Europeans, by contrast, have shown that they believe that resilience is not just about resisting pain but about the ability to adapt, react, and bounce back from crisis. Europeans understand that their democratic systems and European institutions are slow and messy but strong.

Europe’s path through its serial crises over the past few decades—including the sovereign debt crisis, migration, Brexit, and the COVID-19 pandemic—show just that. The Ukraine war and the way it will test Europe’s defenses, economies, and energy systems, as well as the social fabric of its democratic order, may well be the hardest test of all. To pass it, Europeans will need to find their own determination and strength rather than relying on Putin to do the job.

Can Russia Divide Europe?

Why a False Peace Could Be Worse Than a Long War

By Nathalie Tocci

August 5, 2022

Foreign Affairs · by Nathalie Tocci · August 5, 2022

On July 26, the European Union announced a gas deal that was aimed at showing member states’ continued resolve on Russia: according to the agreement, EU states will reduce gas consumption by 15 percent between August and March, thus helping prevent a crisis in the winter by showing solidarity and limiting Russia’s ability to weaponize Europe’s energy supply. On the surface, it was a further demonstration of the unified front that the continent has mostly maintained since the outset of the war. In reality, however, the cuts are voluntary and many individual states have carveouts that call into question how meaningful the deal will be, especially when gas shortages will affect some much more than others.

Six months into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, there are signs that Europe is struggling to stay the course on an increasingly costly war. With rising inflation, an escalating energy crisis, and the growing threat of recession, European leaders have become increasingly vocal about the socioeconomic fallout of the conflict and its political and geopolitical ripple effects. Meanwhile, beneath the outward show of consensus, there are simmering tensions about how to handle the war. Germany, for example, has dragged its feet about promised weapons shipments to Ukraine. In Italy, where the coalition government of Prime Minister Mario Draghi has fallen, there is mounting political opposition to military support for Kyiv among the country’s populist parties. And although five packages of sanctions were approved at lightning speed, Europeans spent weeks bickering over a sixth one aimed at Russian oil, which was held up by the EU’s in-house autocrat, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.

Amid these challenges, a larger question looms about how long European unity on the war can be sustained and what might cause it to collapse. In fact, the greatest threat to the European coalition may not be the lack of progress in ending the heightened violence in Ukraine, as has been the case up to now, but a comparative lull in the conflict, which could allow Moscow to lure some EU states into pressing Kyiv to make concessions, particularly if the energy crisis continues to get worse. Paradoxically, by giving in to the illusion of peace, Europe and the West could end up prolonging the war at everyone’s expense.

Return of the Populists

During the early phase of the war, the European Union showed remarkable resolve. Never known for its speed, Brussels managed, in a matter of weeks, to approve the most far-reaching sanctions ever implemented. European governments quickly stepped up on defense, with Germany announcing a staggering 100 billion euros in additional military spending and the EU facilitating arms transfers to a third party for the first time. Europe also agreed to give temporary protection to millions of Ukrainian citizens, including the freedom to move and work across the EU. And in June, the European Council formally granted Ukraine and Moldova candidate status in the EU, as well as granting Georgia status as a prospective candidate, pending reforms. For much of the spring, the new dynamic seemed to bear out German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s claim that the Russian invasion was a Zeitenwende, a turning point, and that Europeans were ready to meet the challenge.

Since then, however, the momentum in Brussels has flagged. Although the EU states eventually agreed to an oil embargo on Russia, for example, it will occur with a time lag that may allow Russia to adapt. And despite the recent gas agreement on energy saving, a true gas embargo is nowhere in sight. In fact, rather than an EU gas embargo on Russia, it is Moscow that has turned off the gas in Europe. Six countries—Bulgaria, Denmark, Finland, Latvia, Poland, and the Netherlands—have been cut off completely from Russian supply. Furthermore, Gazprom, the Russian state-owned energy company, drastically reduced gas flows to the rest of Europe. Nordstream I, which is the largest pipeline bringing Russian gas to Europe and which is mostly owned by Gazprom, was temporarily closed in July for maintenance. It has since reopened, but gas exports are down to 20 percent of the agreed amounts, with further disruptions on the horizon. Rather than agreeing on new sanctions, the EU is scrambling to address gas storages in many countries and struggling to ration use. To diversify its supplies, it is seeking new energy partnerships with the United States, the Middle East, Africa, and the Caucasus. The International Monetary Fund estimates that in the event of a complete cutoff of Russian gas to Europe, the economies of some countries—including the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, and Italy—could contract by more than five percent. It will be a cold and costly winter.

The mounting economic pressures are already starting to have worrying consequences in European politics. In countries such as Italy and France, populist and right-wing nationalist parties are using the costs of war to rally public support. They argue that by sanctioning Russia and embracing the green agenda, European governments and EU institutions are fueling inflation, hollowing out industry, and destroying jobs. It is a message that has also been amplified in the mainstream media. Already in France’s presidential election in April, extreme right- and left-wing parties performed strongly—an outcome that was repeated in the parliamentary election in June. Far more dramatic was Draghi’s fall in Italy in July, after the three parties with closest ties to the Kremlin pulled back their support for the coalition government of which they were part.

These events may only be a foretaste of what is to come. Taking their cues from the Kremlin’s playbook, many populist parties have adopted rhetoric that belies their actual intentions. Rather than admitting that they want to throw Ukraine under the bus, populist party leaders like Italy’s Matteo Salvini say that they are for peace, compromise, and diplomacy. Populists took a temporary beating with the pandemic as their no-vax narrative left Europeans largely unimpressed. But the Ukraine war, coupled with the energy crisis, has given them a perfect opportunity to rise again. Over time, this dynamic could create a new surge in nationalist populism that could imperil not just European unity but the existence of the European Union as a whole. Whereas a nationalist Europe is possible, a nationalist EU is a contradiction in terms.

Continental Divides

Even more concerning for Europe is the return of old geopolitical cleavages. First is the growing divide between the continent’s east and west, with the states on Ukraine’s border, such as the Baltic countries and Poland, calling for justice through sanctions and robust military support for Ukraine, and states in western Europe, such as Italy, France, and Germany, leaning toward compromise with Russia. French President Emmanuel Macron’s controversial remarks in June about the importance of not humiliating Russia while Russian artillery was pummeling Ukraine is a case in point. As the energy and economic crises deepen, countries that are further away from the frontline are more likely to push for dialing back on the war. Eastern European leaders, although their countries are also suffering from the economic fallout, will probably remain firm in their conviction that peace is possible only when Ukraine has expelled Russian forces from its territory and Russian President Vladimir Putin has been held accountable for his aggression.

The second cleavage runs north-south, a divide that almost tore the eurozone apart during the sovereign debt crisis a decade ago. With the near-term possibility of recession, and perhaps even stagflation, the difference in the borrowing costs between northern and southern EU member States—notably between Germany and Italy—is rising. France, Spain, and Italy, which have less room for fiscal maneuver to face a recession, are calling for a new initiative from Brussels to top up Europe’s post-pandemic recovery fund and help cope with the economic costs of the war, including the expensive energy transition. This time, however, Germany, which has seen its energy prices triple and, because of its heavy reliance on Russian gas, is far more exposed to Russia’s energy blackmail than many other members, is less likely to support such a move. If anything, the German government seems likely to call on other EU members to help alleviate Germany’s energy crisis, rather than to provide its own financial resources to help other members’ economic woes. No wonder Germany strongly backed the EU gas-saving agreement in July.

Putin wagers that it is just a matter of time until Europe is pulled apart.

These divisions are precisely what Putin had hoped for. Convinced that Europe’s liberal democracies are weak and morally corrupt, the Russian leader has banked on the assumption that the West’s unity on Ukraine will crumble and could ultimately break in the coming months. By playing cat and mouse on gas, creating a world food crisis by blockading the export of Ukrainian grain through the Black Sea, and pursuing a scorched-earth strategy in Ukraine, Putin may wager that it is just a matter of time until the West, starting with Europe, is pulled apart by competing pressures. As Moscow sees it, liberal democracies have a low pain threshold: they are not capable of playing a long game if it comes at a high social or economic price.

Moscow is aware that sanctions are causing colossal damage to Russia. Putin has admitted this much in public. The Kremlin also knows that the damage will grow over time. For the time being, although the energy decoupling between Europe and Russia has led to the most acute energy crisis since the 1973 oil embargo, Russia has reveled in sky-high oil and gas prices. But as Europe weans itself from Russian fossil fuels—both by diversifying its energy sources and stepping up its transition to clean energy—it will eventually emerge stronger from this crisis. By contrast, despite Moscow’s new, much vaunted ties to Beijing, it will take years for China to replace Europe as a market for Russian hydrocarbons, and for a variety of reasons, China is highly unlikely to be as lucrative for Moscow as Europe has been. Furthermore, it is difficult to see China investing in Russia’s energy transition: Russia’s long-term economic future is bleak.

Putin must recognize this reality, but his calculus is probably that Europe will break first, given its fragile unity. Internal pressures on the continent will allow him to achieve his war aims in Ukraine, and perhaps, sooner or later, return to business as usual with Europe, or at least with some European countries. As the Kremlin sees it, Europe’s divisions and weaknesses will prevent a long-term scenario in which Russia bears the strategic, economic, and political costs of its invasion.

The Risk of Restraint

With every additional month of war, the risk of European disunity grows, and the first worrying signals have already surfaced. But much will depend on the course of the conflict itself. If Russia continues the campaign of atrocities and destruction that has characterized the past six months, European leaders can count on Putin to keep them unified. Notwithstanding the energy crisis and the economic pain caused by it, as well as the political and geopolitical tensions these will bring about, Europeans are unlikely to step away from a bleeding Ukraine. At the current level of violence and with Russia openly declaring its ambitions to seek and hold more Ukrainian territory, Europeans will not withhold weapons and economic support to Kyiv, let alone lift sanctions in return for a truce. As long as Russia proceeds with its brutal onslaught, Europeans may kick and scream, but they will stay the course.

But it will be far more difficult for Europe if Putin, out of necessity rather than choice, changes tactics in Ukraine. By fall, Russia may simply lack the military capability to maintain the unrelenting military offensive of the last six months. Already, some Western intelligence agencies believe that Russia is incurring a very high military price for its war, both in terms of equipment and casualties. The CIA and MI6 estimate that over 15,000 Russian soldiers have died since February 24. These losses are likely to grow even further as Ukrainian forces receive higher-grade Western weapons. This does not mean that the Kremlin’s goals have changed, however: the pursuit of an ideological project is not easily deterred, and a leader that compares himself to Peter the Great is unlikely to settle for a few territorial gains in the Donbas. As Russia’s military becomes increasingly stretched, the Kremlin will likely have to adapt its strategy, including allowing for a temporary reduction in hostilities—fewer Russian missile attacks on Ukrainian cities, say, or a broader reduction in artillery fire—to allow its forces to rebuild and regroup. Such a change would mean that the pace of war in the coming months could change according to the relative depletion and reconstitution of Russia’s military power.

The greatest risk that European leaders faces is thus a hidden one: if Russian operations in Ukraine subside and Moscow begins to hint at some kind of compromise or truce, Europeans might fall in a trap. Such a prospect, although it would present itself as an opportunity to be seized, would likely be an insidious threat: for Moscow, it would simply serve as a way to gain time to prepare for the next round of fighting, a few months down the line. And if some countries supported such a step, it could further divide Europe, even as it helped the Kremlin prolong the war.

It is precisely when violence subsides that the West should show its true resilience and redouble support for Kyiv, to ensure not just that Russia loses this war but that Ukraine actually wins it, by securing a territorially and therefore economically viable state, with security guarantees, and, ultimately, a course toward reconstruction and democratic consolidation in the EU. However, the temptation to seek accommodation with Russia would be strong, especially given that it would likely happen at a time of growing social, economic, political, and geopolitical pressures on the continent. If a reduction in violence in Ukraine coincides with a surging energy crisis in Europe, it could lead European leaders not just to argue and dither but to divide apart altogether.

More Pain, More Gain

By pursuing his aggression against Ukraine in February 2022, Putin has galvanized and united the European Union—much as he has done with NATO and the West in general—in ways that might have seemed implausible before the war. It has been decades since there has been such a display of European and transatlantic cohesion and resolve. But it is far from clear that this can be sustained, particularly as the war itself changes and becomes increasingly unpredictable. Although the conflict is almost certain to continue, its evolution will likely not be linear. And in moments of lull, European leaders will face new challenges in sustaining the pressure on Russia and will no longer be able to count on the unifying effect of an acute external threat.

Putin surely believes that resilience is only about pain endurance, and that liberal democracies—first and foremost western European ones—are simply too weak in leadership and do not have what it takes to wait him out. Europeans, by contrast, have shown that they believe that resilience is not just about resisting pain but about the ability to adapt, react, and bounce back from crisis. Europeans understand that their democratic systems and European institutions are slow and messy but strong.

Europe’s path through its serial crises over the past few decades—including the sovereign debt crisis, migration, Brexit, and the COVID-19 pandemic—show just that. The Ukraine war and the way it will test Europe’s defenses, economies, and energy systems, as well as the social fabric of its democratic order, may well be the hardest test of all. To pass it, Europeans will need to find their own determination and strength rather than relying on Putin to do the job.

Foreign Affairs · by Nathalie Tocci · August 5, 2022

16. U.S. SOCOM hosts change of responsibility and retirement ceremony for its top enlisted leader

Congratulations to CSM Shane Shorter from 1st Special Forces Group.

U.S. SOCOM hosts change of responsibility and retirement ceremony for its top enlisted leader

dvidshub.net

Photo By Michael Bottoms | After serving three years as the Command Senior Enlisted Leader of U.S. Special...... read more

Photo By Michael Bottoms | After serving three years as the Command Senior Enlisted Leader of U.S. Special Operations Command, Command Chief Master Sgt. Greg Smith hands the responsibility to Command Sgt. Major Shane Shorter during a change of responsibility ceremony held in the headquarters, August 4, 2022. Photo by Michael Bottoms. | View Image Page

MACDILL AFB, FL, UNITED STATES

08.05.2022

Story by Sgt. Maj. Jason Baker

U.S. Special Operations Command

By USSOCOM Public Affairs

MacDill Air Force Base, Florida. – U.S. Special Operations Command held a combined change of responsibility and retirement ceremony inside the headquarters’ Wargame Center, Aug. 3, 2022. Command Sgt. Maj. Shane Shorter assumed responsibility of USSOCOM from Command Chief Master Sgt. Gregory Smith, who held the position for more than three years.

Gen. Richard Clarke, commander of USSOCOM, was the host of the ceremonies. During his speech, Clarke spoke about Smith’s career spanning more than 32 years of service, with 26 of those years being in the special operations.

“I know for me personally, I absolutely hired the right guy into this command, because he made a difference,” said Clarke about selecting Smith as his command senior enlisted leader. “He is brilliant, anyone who knows Greg, knows he is brilliant. He really is the savant of SOCOM. He can tell you, ‘Back in 2010 when I was at the commander’s conference we did this’ and this is why this decision was made."

Clarke thanked Smith for his leadership, sage advice and commended him for his unique strategic intellect and knowledge. He then explained Smith’s true value to the command was his due to his focus on, what he termed ‘the three P’s,’ - partnership, people and professionalism.

“The other ‘P’ that I just want to hit with Greg is people. Gregg, values our people," said Clarke. "Greg and I have had the opportunity to go to Walter Reed many times to visit our wounded service members over the last three years and Greg values our people. He saw how important the ties, the families, the things that needed to be done, because he truly cares deeply about our people. And I got to witness that every day, not just in his personal interactions with the people but also with the systems that he tried to set up within this headquarters.”

Smith, who served as the USSOCOM command senior enlisted leader since July 2019 accepted his retirement award, orders and certificate prior to passing the USSOCOM Colors to Shorter. During his comments Smith thanked the many senior leaders who attended representing the U.S. joint force and the international SOF partners and allies.

“To the staff, the team, and the SOCOM enterprise, it has been an unbelievable honor to work for you,” said Smith. “To the men and women of USSOCOM, thank you. Thank you for allowing me to be a member of your team. I love you all, God bless this command and the United States of America.”

Clarke expressed his confidence in Shorter to take the reins of responsibility from Smith due to his previous experience and assignments mostly centered in the Indo-Pacific theater.

“The great news about this community is that we have amazing draft choices and when one person leaves there are so many others that can come in and take their place," said Clarke. “Shane with a just phenomenal career, much of it spent at our 1st (Special Forces) Group and out in Okinawa. Given where this command is and where the National Defense Strategy is (focused). Shane Shorter is the right guy to come in here at this point in time."

Shorter thanked Clarke for his confidence in him and thanked Smith for the thorough transition prior to replacing him as the CSEL for USSOCOM.

“I would like to take a moment to personally thank Gregg for his long service to the nation and his service and dedication to the SOF enterprise.” said Shorter. “I will finish with my last thanks, thanks to all of you, every single person that makes up the SOF enterprise. In my opinion, the best organization on the planet. Without each of you this organization would not be as strong. I am honored to serve with you, I am humbled for the opportunity in front of me and proud to be one of your teammates.”

Shorter, comes to the position after serving as the Commandant of the Joint Special Operations University. He previously served as command senior enlisted leader for U.S. Indo-Pacific Command at Camp Smith Hawaii and has served as a Special Forces NCO for 30 years.

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17. ‘Absolute evil’: inside the Russian prison camp where dozens of Ukrainians burned to death

‘Absolute evil’: inside the Russian prison camp where dozens of Ukrainians burned to death

Entrepreneur Anna Vorosheva accuses Moscow of murder after spending 100 days in the Olenivka detention centre

Russian-Ukraine war – latest updates

The Guardian · by Luke Harding · August 6, 2022

Screams from soldiers being tortured, overflowing cells, inhuman conditions, a regime of intimidation and murder. Inedible gruel, no communication with the outside world, and days marked off with a home-made calendar written on a box of tea.

This, according to a prisoner who was there, is what conditions are like inside Olenivka, the notorious detention centre outside Donetsk where dozens of Ukrainian soldiers burned to death in a horrific episode late last month while in Russian captivity.

Anna Vorosheva – a 45-year-old Ukrainian entrepreneur – gave a harrowing account to the Observer of her time inside the jail. She spent 100 days in Olenivka after being detained in mid-March at a checkpoint run by the pro-Russian Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) in eastern Ukraine.

She had been trying to deliver humanitarian supplies to Mariupol, her home city, which the Russian army had besieged. The separatists arrested her and drove her in a packed police van to the prison, where she was held until early July on charges of “terrorism”.

Now recovering in France, Vorosheva said she had no doubt Russia “cynically and deliberately” murdered Ukrainian prisoners of war. “We are talking about absolute evil,” she said.

The fighters were blown up on 29 July in a mysterious and devastating explosion. Moscow claims Ukraine killed them with a US-made precision-guided Himars rocket. Satellite images and independent analysis, however, suggest they were obliterated by a powerful bomb detonated from inside the building.

Russia says 53 prisoners were killed and 75 injured. Ukraine has been unable to confirm these figures and has called for an investigation. The victims were members of the Azov battalion. Until their surrender in May, they had defended Mariupol’s Azovstal steel plant, holding out underground.

A day before the blast, they were transferred to a separate area in the camp’s industrial zone, some distance from the grimy two-storey concrete block where Vorosheva shared a cell with other women prisoners. Video shown on Russian state TV revealed charred bodies and twisted metal bunk beds.

“Russia didn’t want them to stay alive. I’m sure some of those ‘killed’ in the explosion were already corpses. It was a convenient way of accounting for the fact they had been tortured to death,” she said.

Male prisoners were regularly removed from their cells, beaten, then locked up again. “We heard their cries,” she said. “They played loud music to cover the screams. Torture happened all the time. Investigators would joke about it and ask inmates, ‘What happened to your face?’ The soldier would reply, ‘I fell over’, and they would laugh.

“It was a demonstration of power. The prisoners understood that anything could happen to them, that they might easily be killed. A small number of the Azov guys were captured before the mass surrender in May.”

Vorosheva said there was constant traffic around Olenivka, known as correctional colony No 120. A former Soviet technical school, it was converted in the 1980s into a prison, and later abandoned. The DNR began using it earlier this year to house enemy civilians.

Captives arrived and departed every day at the camp, 20km south-west of occupied Donetsk, Vorosheva told the Observer. Around 2,500 people were held there, with the figure sometimes rising to 3,500-4,000, she estimated. There was no running water or electricity.

The atmosphere changed when around 2,000 Azov fighters were bussed in on the morning of 17 May, she said. Russian flags were raised and the DNR colours taken down. Guards were initially wary of the new prisoners. Later they talked openly about how they were going to brutalise and humiliate them, she said.

“We were frequently called Nazis and terrorists. One of the women in my cell was an Azovstal medic. She was pregnant. I asked if I could give her my food ration. I was told, ‘No, she’s a killer’. The only question they ever asked me was, ‘Do you know any Azov soldiers?’”

Conditions for the female inmates were grim. She said they were not tortured but received barely any food – 50g of bread for dinner and sometimes porridge. “It was fit for pigs,” she said. She suspected the prison governor siphoned off money allocated for meals. The toilets overflowed and the women were given no sanitary products. The cells were so overcrowded they slept in shifts. “It was tough. People were crying, worried about their kids and families.” Asked if the guards ever showed sympathy, she said an anonymous person once left them a bottle of shampoo.

According to Vorosheva, the camp’s staff were brainwashed by Russian propaganda and considered Ukrainians to be Nazis. Some were local villagers. “They blamed us for the fact that their lives were terrible. It was like an alcoholic who says he drinks vodka because his wife is no good.

“The philosophy is: ‘Everything is horrible for us, so everything should be horrible for you’. It’s all very communist.”

Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has called the explosion “a deliberate Russian war crime and a deliberate mass murder of Ukrainian prisoners of war”. Last week, his office and Ukraine’s defence ministry gave details of clues which they say point to the Kremlin’s guilt.

Friends and relatives of Azov battalion soldiers protest in Kyiv after the explosion in Olenivka jail that killed dozens of prisoners of war. Photograph: Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP/Getty Images

Citing satellite images and phone intercepts and intelligence, they said Russian mercenaries from the Wagner group carried out the killings in collaboration with Vladimir Putin’s FSB spy agency. They point to the fact a row of graves was dug in the colony a few days before the blast.

The operation was approved at the “highest level” in Moscow, they allege. “Russia is not a democracy. The dictator is personally responsible for everything, whether it’s MH17, Bucha or Olenivka,” one intelligence source said. “The question is: when will Putin acknowledge his atrocities.”

One version of events being examined by Kyiv is that the blast may have been the result of intra-service rivalries between Russia’s FSB and GRU military intelligence wings. The GRU negotiated Azovstal’s surrender with its Ukrainian army counterpart, sources suggest – a deal the FSB may have been keen to wreck.

The soldiers should have been protected by guarantees given by Russia to the UN and the International Committee of the Red Cross that the Azov detainees would be properly treated. Since the blast, the Russians have refused to give international representatives any access to the site.

Vorosheva said the Red Cross were allowed into the camp in May. She said the Russians took the visitors to a specially renovated room and did not allow them to talk independently to the prisoners. “It was a show,” she said. “We were asked to give our clothes’ size and told the Red Cross would hand out something. Nothing reached us.”

Other detainees confirmed Vorosheva’s version of events and said the Azov soldiers were treated worse than civilians. Dmitry Bodrov, a 32-year-old volunteer worker, told the Wall Street Journal the guards took anyone they suspected of misbehaviour to a special disciplinary section of the camp for beatings.

They emerged limping and moaning, he said. Some captives were forced to crawl back to their cells. Another prisoner, Stanislav Hlushkov, said an inmate who was regularly beaten was found dead in solitary confinement. Orderlies put a sheet over his head, loaded him into a mortuary van and told fellow inmates he had “committed suicide”.

Vorosheva was freed on 4 July. It was, she said, a “miracle”. “The guards read out the names of those who were going to be freed. Everyone listened in silence. My heart leaped when I heard my name. I packed my things but didn’t celebrate. There were cases where people were on the list, got out, then came back.”

She added: “The people who run the camp represent the worst aspects of the Soviet Union. They could only behave well if they thought nobody was looking.”

The Guardian · by Luke Harding · August 6, 2022

18. Russia’s co-opting of US political groups is serious business

The author invokes George Kennan.

In my opinion, we need to conduct a superior form of political warfare as part of strategic competition against all our adversaries, the revisionist, rogue, and revolutionary powers.

To do so we must recognize their strategies, understand them, expose them and attack them (with a superior form of political warfare and influence activities).

Excerpts:

George Kennan, the American diplomat who advocated for the policy of containment to limit Soviet expansion, warned that a more hostile Soviet Union required the United States to adapt. As Kennan explained in 1948, “The Kremlin’s conduct of political warfare has become the most refined and effective of any in history. We have been handicapped however by a popular attachment to the concept of a basic difference between peace and war … having been engaged by the full might of the Kremlin’s political warfare, we cannot afford to leave unmobilized our resources for covert political warfare.”

Russia’s co-opting of US political groups is serious business

BY MICHAEL RICHTER, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR - 08/06/22 7:00 AM ET

THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY CONTRIBUTORS ARE THEIR OWN AND NOT THE VIEW OF THE HILL

The Hill · by Rachel Scully · August 6, 2022

According to a federal indictment unsealed in Florida last week, Russian intelligence manipulated and co-opted multiple U.S. political groups as part of a “malign influence campaign” to “sow discord, spread pro-Russia propaganda, and interfere in elections in the United States.” As a former intelligence officer, I recognize the tactic, and it portends a potential increase in hostilities on which Moscow undoubtedly has doubled down because of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and U.S. support for Ukraine. In contrast to bots and far-away hackers, this is on-the-ground covert action at work.

This tactic is nothing new for Russia’s security services: They have been using it since the czarist era and it is often referred to as “social engineering” or Zubatovschina, in reference to Sergie Zubatov, a czarist spy chief who, for a time, successfully employed this technique as part of the czar’s efforts to undermine groups that sought revolution. Zubatov’s agents clandestinely infiltrated revolutionary groups, manipulated their discourse, and used funding to direct their activities. Now, according to this federal indictment, Russia is doing that on U.S. soil with U.S. political groups. The consequences, if left unchecked, could be significant.

Russia has turned to these techniques in times of trouble. By the time Zubatov unleashed his covert action campaign, the czarist empire had been reeling from a number of significant security incidents: In 1878, the governor general of St. Petersburg was shot and the head of the secret police was assassinated. In 1880, a bomb was detonated against a wall in the Winter Palace where the czar regularly dined. And in 1881, Alexander II, the so-called Czar Liberator, was assassinated. After the czar’s assassination, his successor, Czar Alexander III, employed a number of aggressive techniques before turning to Zubatovschina in the early 20th century.

Russian leadership almost certainly views the present moment as a time of trouble. Its plans for victory in Ukraine have been foiled by an unexpected and fearsome resistance, and it has become an international pariah struggling under a growing sanctions regime. And imagine the conclusions that Vladimir Putin must have drawn from the intelligence report he undoubtedly received with his morning coffee on Jan. 7, 2021: The U.S. is more susceptible to manipulation and exploitation than thought.

Zubatovschina did not save czarist Russia from revolution — and there is no reason it should diminish U.S. support for Ukraine. But it requires the U.S. national security apparatus to carefully consider the scope of hostilities now existing between Moscow and Washington, and bears an unfortunate resemblance to early Cold War hostilities.

George Kennan, the American diplomat who advocated for the policy of containment to limit Soviet expansion, warned that a more hostile Soviet Union required the United States to adapt. As Kennan explained in 1948, “The Kremlin’s conduct of political warfare has become the most refined and effective of any in history. We have been handicapped however by a popular attachment to the concept of a basic difference between peace and war … having been engaged by the full might of the Kremlin’s political warfare, we cannot afford to leave unmobilized our resources for covert political warfare.”

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Lt. Gen. James Doolittle, who received the Medal of Honor for leading the daring Doolittle raid against Japan in World War II, agreed with Kennan and concluded that the United States must engage in more aggressive covert action techniques to survive. Doolittle recognized that many Americans would be repulsed by his suggestion, but he considered it essential and concluded that “[h]itherto acceptable norms of human conflict do not apply. If the United States is to survive, long-standing American concepts of ‘fair-play’ must be reconsidered. We must develop effective espionage and counterespionage services and must learn to subvert, sabotage and destroy our enemies by more clever, more sophisticated and more effective methods than those used against us. It may become necessary that the American people be made acquainted with, understand and support this fundamentally repugnant philosophy.”

Cold War memories need not guide our every response, or induce us to act rashly, but they are instructive, and we would be naïve not to recognize the seriousness of Russian intelligence manipulating U.S. political groups with an on-the-ground covert action campaign inside the United States. Unfortunately, we all may need to reacquaint ourselves with Kennan’s and Doolittle’s fundamentally repugnant philosophy.

Michael Richter is a former intelligence officer with the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and now is a lawyer in private practice. The views expressed here are his own.

The Hill · by Rachel Scully · August 6, 2022

19. Blinken commits U.S. to defending Philippines against armed attacks

Blinken commits U.S. to defending Philippines against armed attacks

Reuters · by David Brunnstrom

Summary
Marcos invited to Washington despite legal issues
Blinken says ties with Philippines 'ironclad'
Marcos downplays impact of Pelosi's Taiwan visit
Philippines minister says can ill-afford Taiwan conflict

MANILA, Aug 6 (Reuters) - Secretary of State Antony Blinken assured the Philippines on Saturday that the United States would come to its defence if attacked in the South China Sea, seeking to allay concerns about the extent of the U.S. commitment to a mutual defence treaty.

In meetings in Manila dominated by discussion on simmering U.S.-China tensions over the Taiwan visit of U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Blinken said a 70-year-old defence pact with the Philippines was "ironclad".

"An armed attack on Philippine armed forces, public vessels and aircraft will invoke U.S. mutual defense commitments under that treaty," Blinken told a news conference.

"The Philippines is an irreplaceable friend, partner, and ally to the United States."

Blinken was the most senior U.S. official to meet new President Ferdinand Marcos Jr, the son of the late strongman who Washington helped to flee into exile in Hawaii during a 1986 "people power" uprising that ended his two-decade rule.

In opening remarks to Blinken, Marcos sought to downplay the diplomatic flare-up over Taiwan and said he believed Pelosi's trip "did not raise the intensity" of a situation that was already volatile.

"We have been at that level for a good while, but we have sort of got used to the idea," Marcos said.

The Philippines is a fulcrum of the geopolitical rivalry between the United States and China and Marcos faces a tricky challenge in balancing ties between the two major powers.

1/6

Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. and U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken pose for a photo at the Malacanang Palace in Manila, Philippines, August 6, 2022. Ezra Acayan/Pool via REUTERS

He will also face domestic pressure to stand up to China in the South China Sea, without angering its leadership.

U.S.-Philippines ties were shaken by predecessor Rodrigo Duterte's overtures towards China, his famous anti-U.S. rhetoric and threats to downgrade their military ties.

On Saturday, Philippines foreign secretary Enrique Manalo said President Joe Biden had invited Marcos to Washington, and both sides were working on a suitable date.

Marcos has not been to the United States in more than a decade, due largely to a contempt of court order for his refusal to cooperate with a Hawaii court, which in 1995 ordered the Marcos family to return $2 billion of missing state wealth to victims of abuses by the state under his father's rule.

Marcos Jr and mother, Imelda, also face a $353 million fine.

The U.S. embassy in Manila has said heads of state have diplomatic immunity.

Manalo said Washington was an important ally, but concerning nearby Taiwan he told Blinken the Philippines "looks at the big powers to help calm the waters".

"We can ill afford any further escalation of tensions," he said.Reporting by David Brunnstrom; Writing by Karen Lema; Editing by Martin Petty and Mike Harrison

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Reuters · by David Brunnstrom

20. Corruption is sending shock waves through China's chipmaking industry

Corruption is sending shock waves through China's chipmaking industry

The arrests of several top semiconductor fund executives could force the government to rethink how it invests in the sector.

By Zeyi Yangarchive page

August 5, 2022

Technology Review · by Zeyi Yangarchive page

China’s chipmaking industry descended into chaos last week, with at least four top executives associated with a state-owned semiconductor fund arrested on corruption charges. It’s an explosive turn of events that could force the country to fundamentally rethink how it invests in chip development, according to analysts and experts.

On July 30, China’s top anticorruption institution announced that Ding Wenwu, the chief executive of the China Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund, nicknamed the “Big Fund,” had been arrested for “suspected serious violations of the law.” Ding is not the only person in trouble. Two weeks ago, Lu Jun, a former executive at the Big Fund’s management institution, was also taken into custody, along with two other fund managers, according to the Chinese news outlet Caixin.

Established in 2014, the Big Fund was intended to use government money to build a supply chain of chips made in China, thus reducing reliance on the US and its allies. The fund epitomizes the way the Chinese government can throw its weight behind a strategic industry—in this case, semiconductors.

Eight years later, a total of $30 billion poured into the industry—with $20 billion more on the way—has yielded a complicated mix of successes and failures. The fact that the fund was driven by a political mission and not financial interests made it ripe for corruption, and analysts say the latest investigations may push China to manage semiconductor funding with more precision and professional knowledge.

The idea of the Big Fund was to pour money into industries not getting funding from traditional routes like venture capital. Instead of startups, its first $20 billion funding round, in 2014, went after publicly listed companies and their subsidiaries, often in semiconductor materials and manufacturing, according to Rui Ma, a tech analyst and host of the podcast Tech Buzz China. These companies find it harder to make money because any progress in chipmaking requires a long period of time and significant investment in research. Therefore they’re less attractive to venture capitalists, Ma says.

The Big Fund was arguably ahead of its time. In 2014, China’s central government decided it could use public funding to address the capacity gap in chip production while several local governments started experimenting with smaller funds. But it wasn’t until 2019, when the US cut off Huawei from accessing chips made with US technologies, that the situation became urgent. The semiconductor industry traditionally relies on global supplies, and Chinese tech companies are dependent on overseas suppliers like Taiwan’s TSMC, Korea’s Samsung, or the Netherlands’ ASML. All those countries are US allies.

The urgency has only intensified in recent months and years: the US is increasingly squeezing China’s ability to access advanced chip technologies, even asking ASML to stop exporting older lithography machines to China. That makes the Big Fund, and the associated self-sufficiency drive, ever more important.

A new $12 billion US chip plant sounds like a win for Trump. Not quite.

The US is trying to disentangle the global tech supply chain and cut Huawei off from its supply of advanced silicon chips, but the plan could backfire.

The Chinese government has yet to reveal the exact reason why Ding and other people are being investigated. But most media outlets and analysts have associated the case with a cluster of corruption investigations around Tsinghua Unigroup, a semiconductor company invested in by the Big Fund that failed spectacularly in recent years.

Founded in 1988, Tsinghua Unigroup is one of the oldest chipmakers in China. It made headlines in 2015 when its plan to acquire the American company Micron Technologies was blocked by the US government. Many of its ambitious acquisitions were backed by the Big Fund, which invested at least $2 billion in Unigroup and its subsidiaries to develop wafer manufacturing, flash memory chips, and 5G chips.

But the juggernaut eventually faced bankruptcy in 2021. In July 2022, three former or current executives of Unigroup, including its chairman of 13 years, were put under investigation over corruption allegations, although no public charges have been posted so far.

It remains unclear whether the failure of Unigroup directly triggered the anticorruption earthquake within Big Fund. However, the strategy that the latter has taken—throwing massive investments against the wall and seeing what sticks—can fail miserably. According to longtime observers, that strategy is also the perfect breeding ground for corruption.

“This is the least surprising corruption investigation I’ve heard of for a while,” says Matt Sheehan, a fellow at the US think tank the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Not because I know Ding Wenwu is personally corrupt, but when you have that amount of money sloshing around in an industry, it’d be way more surprising if there isn’t a major corruption scandal.”

A significant part of the problem was a lack of precision, says Sheehan. China knew it needed to invest in semiconductors but didn’t know what exact sub-industry or company to prioritize. The country has been forced to learn by trial and error, feeling its way through issues like the bankruptcy of Unigroup and the expanding technology blockade by the US. The next step should be more targeted investments into specific companies, Sheehan says.

That might mean a new boss for the Big Fund—someone who’s better versed in getting financial returns, says Paul Triolo, a senior VP at the business strategy firm Albright Stonebridge, which advises companies operating in China. Many of the Big Fund’s managers came from government backgrounds and may simply have lacked the relevant experience. Ding, who’s under investigation now, used to be a department director at China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.

“You need competent people to run this [Big Fund] that understand the industry, finance, and are not going to fund projects that don’t have a sound commercial basis,” Triolo says.

Ultimately, these investigations may end up being positive for China’s semiconductor industry because they highlight the limitation of politically driven funding and may push the Big Fund to be managed on a more market-based basis. Beijing’s appetite for experiments is waning as its worries about self-sufficiency intensify. “They can’t afford to squander $5 billion on fabs that aren’t going to be viable,” says Triolo.

Technology Review · by Zeyi Yangarchive page

21. Opinion | Even from prison I can see opposition to Putin’s war growing

But as we have read in other reports there is silence. Will there be opposition and resistance to Putin's war?

Opinion | Even from prison I can see opposition to Putin’s war growing

The Washington Post · by Vladimir Kara-Murza · August 5, 2022

PRETRIAL DETENTION CENTER NO. 5, Moscow — Every day is the same in prison, a monotonous routine from the moment we are woken up by the sounds of the Russian national anthem (the Soviet one, brought back by Vladimir Putin early in his rule) until the prison guard switches off our cell lights in the evening. The whole day ahead is known by the minute: the meals, the hour-long walk in a circle in the small prison courtyard, packages (on the days when they come in).

But the high point of the day comes closer to dinner, when the prison guard opens the porthole and hands us a stack of letters. Only someone who has been in prison can appreciate how important these can be. I receive dozens of letters every week from all over Russia; from places I’ve never been to, as far as Norilsk and Magadan. Most of the people who write to me don’t know me personally, but want to simply express their solidarity and support.

Most of this support concerns the reason that put me in prison — my opposition to Putin’s brutal war in Ukraine. In letter after letter (all of which, needless to say, are registered in the prison system with the names and contact details of their authors), my correspondents express their indignation and despair over the war. “Please know that you’re not alone,” one woman from the south of Russia wrote to me last week.

I am, of course, heartened by such sentiments, but certainly not surprised. From the start of Putin’s invasion I knew very well what his propaganda goes to great lengths to hide — and what some people in the West fail (or don’t want) to see: that there are many Russians who oppose this war. The Kremlin knows this. This is why since February it has shut down what remained of independent media, blocked more than 3,000 websites and instituted prison terms of up to 15 years for anyone who publicly opposes the war.

For the same reason, all of Moscow’s central squares — including Pushkin Square, the traditional site of dissident rallies in Soviet times, and Bolotnaya Square, which hosted the largest anti-Putin protests a decade ago — have been continuously occupied by riot police since February. While theaters, concert halls and sporting venues in Moscow have been fully open for months, the complete ban on public rallies remains in place, under the pretext of the coronavirus pandemic.

In such conditions, it is nothing short of remarkable that thousands of Russians — more than 16,400, by the latest count from human rights groups — have defied official bans and the threat of prosecution to stage antiwar demonstrations. But many more have expressed quiet opposition. Before my arrest in April, not a day would go by without people approaching me on the street or in a cafe to shake my hand and say “thank you.” Even more telling, stickers with the letter Z, the emblem of support for the war in Ukraine, are seen almost exclusively on official vehicles. (The police van in which I was driven on the day of my arrest had a large Z across the back window.) You would be hard-pressed to spot one on regular private cars on the streets of Moscow.

Growing opposition to the war among Russians received unexpected official confirmation thanks to a leaked poll conducted by the main government pollster. Publicly released polls invariably show overwhelming support both for Putin and for the war, but their reliability is about as high as the 99 percent official results for the Communist Party in Soviet “elections”; I continue to be amazed by Western analysts who take these polls seriously. A recent media exposé of the Russian polling industry revealed, among other things, that most people simply refuse to respond to pollsters’ questions for fear of repercussions — 2 in 3 before the start of the war, 5 in 6 now. “I don’t want to go to prison” is a popular reaction from respondents, according to a regional pollster. Unsurprisingly, the minority that does respond gives the expected “correct” answer.

But sometimes the Kremlin actually wants to know what Russian society thinks, and this is why it recently commissioned a survey about the war to the state-run Russian Public Opinion Research Center. The question was phrased carefully: Instead of a direct “yes” or “no,” the respondents were asked to select their “preferred option” between continuing the war and starting peace talks with Ukraine. The results were not meant for public consumption, but were leaked and published by the Bell, an independent online journal. According to government pollsters, the invasion of Ukraine split Russian society down the middle: The options of continuing the war and of starting peace talks received 44 percent each (a further 12 percent “declined to answer” — almost certainly belonging to the second half). Notably, a strong plurality both in Moscow and in St. Petersburg opted for peace talks, as did a large majority of all Russians below the age of 35.

The last finding is perhaps the most remarkable, as this is the generation that has grown up and formed during Putin’s two-decades-plus rule. Again, I am not surprised. In my extensive travels across Russia in recent years, I have met many young people who are tired of the archaism and autocracy of the Putin era. It is this generation — not Putin’s close circle that increasingly resembles Leonid Brezhnev’s aging Politburo — that will shape Russia’s destiny in the coming years.

Instead of generalizing and painting all Russians as enemies, as some shortsighted Westerners seem to be doing, it is important to find ways to start a dialogue with that part of Russian society that wants a different future for our country. If I can do this from prison as I pick up my daily stack of letters, it should certainly be possible for everyone else.

The Washington Post · by Vladimir Kara-Murza · August 5, 2022

22. ‘America’s Philosopher’ Review: The Key to John Locke

For all those with an interest in political philosophy.

I will order this.

Excertps:

Ms. Arcenas has done valuable work in documenting Americans’ affection for an empiricist philosopher. Her discussion of 20th-century scholarly debates over Locke’s significance, from Leo Strauss to J.G.A. Pocock, are accurate and well-expressed. Throughout the book, though, you sense that nobody can ever draw on Locke in a way that gains the author’s approval. Mid-20th-century liberals like Richard Hofstadter and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. formulated an “American political tradition” in which Locke played a founding role, but they were “mostly white men” writing “social, economic, and political conflict out of American history.” Conservatives of the same period insisted that Locke’s emphasis on private property was essential to the preservation of democracy, but “it seems not to have mattered that Locke was no democrat himself, nor that the Founding Fathers who kept his ideas alive were not particularly sympathetic to democracy either.” You wonder, in the end, why anybody should bother reading Locke at all.

In a short epilogue, Ms. Arcenas recalls staying in a rented apartment in Montana. The place had a Gadsden flag (“Don’t Tread on Me”) displayed on the front porch. Inside was a small library. At eye level, “sandwiched between volumes on the history of the pistol and the US Constitution, stood John Locke’s Two Treatises on Government.” Ms. Arcenas tells this story with a hint of derision and takes the image as one more sign that Locke is used as a “partisan pawn in debates over the political heritage of the United States and its commitment (or not) to minimal government and individual rights.”

I’m not sure. The trans-Atlantic liberal order Locke helped to bring about finds itself under assault from all sides by people determined to replace it with tyranny of one kind or another. A guy who keeps a copy of the “Two Treatises” next to the Constitution and a history of firearms may well understand the greatness of John Locke and the value of liberalism better than anybody.

‘America’s Philosopher’ Review: The Key to John Locke

The political thinker who mattered most to a revolutionary generation spoke in a language they had no difficulty understanding.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/americas-philosopher-book-review-the-key-to-john-locke-11659730787?mod=opinion_major_pos10&utm_source=pocket_mylist

By Barton SwaimFollow

Aug. 5, 2022 4:20 pm ET

One way to sum up postwar American politics is to say that conservatives try to stop liberals from breaking the liberals’ own rules. The “rules” in this formulation are those of liberalism in the broadest sense: constitutional principles, the rule of law, rights-based protections.

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America's Philosopher: John Locke in American Intellectual Life

By Claire Rydell Arcenas

University of Chicago

280 pages

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“Liberal” regimes aren’t supposed to impose a particular understanding of the Good on their citizens; they’re meant to ensure local and individual freedoms and enable citizens to figure out what the Good is for themselves. But some liberals—typically the highly educated and privileged sort—tend to forget they are liberals and try to define righteousness for everybody. They do this by reallocating citizens’ wealth according to their own ideals, regulating private economic behavior, dictating to local communities how they should govern themselves, imposing protean codes of correct speech and behavior on everybody else, and so on. Conservatives, in this admittedly biased way of putting it, are there to stop liberals from indulging these illiberal impulses; to remind them, in other words, that they are liberals, not potentates.

13 BOOKS WE READ THIS WEEK

A sweeping new history of the underground war against Hitler, the philosopher who shaped a young America, a Hollywood romance and more.

Not everyone considered themselves good liberals, of course. On the left, communists, socialists and other radicals of the 20th century rejected liberalism as an invention of capitalism and Cold War ideology. On the right, a confederation of Catholic intellectuals in the 1960s and ’70s sought to burst the bands of liberalism and establish a more overtly moral political order. More recently, the progressive left has largely given up on the idea that everyone, including people whose opinions and customs progressives find loathsome, deserves legal protections. Among conservatives, a group of “postliberal” intellectuals, resolutely traditionalist in religious outlook, have proposed scrapping liberalism altogether by regulating markets and expanding state power in ways that shore up “communitarian” values: i.e., by doing what the political left has been doing for 70 years but in a “conservative” way.

In debates over liberalism, the name of one political philosopher nearly always gets thrown around: John Locke (1632-1704). It was Locke who, in the “Two Treatises of Government,” formulated a conception of the state that derived its legitimacy from the consent of the people, protected private property, and ruled through representational government. Locke wrote his two-part book at a time of intense political volatility—perhaps around 1680, during the reign of the restored monarchy of Charles II, though the work was published in 1689, just after the Glorious Revolution. The “Two Treatises” was among the first great attempts to envision a form of government in which one conception of the Good would not be permitted to traduce all the others. Locke, it’s fair to say, was the archetypal liberal.

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The subject has particular relevance for Americans, who for many generations have been taught that the Founders were deeply influenced by Locke. Claire Rydell Arcenas gets to the question of Locke’s effect on the Founders in “America’s Philosopher: John Locke in American Intellectual Life,” but her book isn’t only about Locke’s influence; mainly it chronicles Americans’ remarkably consistent esteem for a 17th-century English philosopher who never set foot in the New World.

One thing is clear early on in Ms. Arcenas’s story: Americans really did read and admire Locke. But his popularity in the New World derived initially, in the early and mid-18th century, from the “Essay Concerning Human Understanding.” In that work—a much heftier one than the slim “Two Treatises,” running to 500 or 600 pages in modern editions—Locke denied the existence of “innate” ideas; the mind at birth, he held, was a blank slate, and all human knowledge was gained through experience and observation. “At Harvard,” Ms. Arcenas finds, “Locke’s Essay was read and taught by individual tutors decades before the faculty voted in 1743 to include it as part of the formal curriculum.”

The “Essay” found its way onto library bookshelves across colonial America. Newspapers quoted memorable lines from it. People argued over it in clubs and debating societies. Scarcely less popular in the American colonies were the “Letter Concerning Toleration,” in which Locke made the case for a circumscribed religious pluralism, and “Some Thoughts Concerning Education,” in which the lifelong bachelor offered advice on raising and educating children.

In “Some Thoughts Concerning Education,” to take one astonishing instance of the lengths to which Americans would go to heed Locke’s counsel, the philosopher suggested that a child should “have his Shooes made so, as to leak Water; and his Feet washed constantly every Day in cold Water.” Edmund Quincy, son of the Bostonian politician Josiah Quincy III, recalled in a biography of his father that his grandmother took Locke’s advice seriously. “Locke was the great authority at that time,” Edmund wrote of the 1770s; and so “Mrs. Quincy caused her son, when not more than three years old, to be taken from his warm bed, in winter as well as summer, and carried down to a cellar-kitchen, and there dipped three times in a tub of water cold from the pump. She also brought him up in utter indifference to wet feet,—usually the terror of anxious mammas.”

Why the craze for Locke in 18th-century America? Here Ms. Arcenas, a professor of history at the University of Montana, is unhelpful. “America’s Philosopher” appears to be a version of the author’s doctoral dissertation, and perhaps for that reason she offers complicated interpretations when simple ones would do. On the matter of Americans’ reverence for Locke, she begs the question. Locke was treated as an authority because he was recognized as a man of “clear reasoning and honesty” and because he had a reputation as an “educational and childrearing guru.” He was treated with reverence because he was revered.

But the reasons for Locke’s popularity in Revolutionary America aren’t hard to divine. One is that he was Protestant. His religious views may have been heterodox in some respects, but he openly avowed his Protestant faith, and there is no reason to believe—as modern scholars, projecting their own areligious attitudes onto Locke, have often done—that those avowals were insincere. Revolutionary-era Americans would have associated Locke with the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the ascendant Protestant king, William of Orange: The philosopher had been exiled by the quasi-Catholic monarch Charles II in 1683, and the preface of the “Two Treatises” claimed that the book vindicated William’s legitimacy. All this would have made Locke highly acceptable to the overwhelmingly Protestant reading audience of 18th-century America.

The other reason Americans loved their Locke is even more obvious: His ideas accorded with their own. The “Letter Concerning Toleration” envisions something like the kind of Protestant pluralism Americans would create for themselves in the Constitution. The “Two Treatises” posited a just republic based on consent and conceded the right of the people to overthrow a tyrannical government and form a more just one. And the “Essay Concerning Human Understanding” implied a fundamental equality between farmer and noble, shoemaker and statesman.

Why can’t Ms. Arcenas simply say that Americans liked Locke because they basically understood him? I guess because that would be too obvious, and who needs academic historians to state what’s clearly the case? Later in the book, when she takes up Americans’ response to Locke in the mid-19th century, she notes that Southern slaveowners didn’t so much care for him. Why? Because “his most famous thought experiments—the state of nature and social contract, articulated in the Second Treatise—emphasized the idea (catastrophic to their pro-slavery arguments) that men were born equal.” So slaveowners in the 1850s understood Locke, but Americans of the 1770s liked him mainly because he had a great reputation?

When Ms. Arcenas attends to one of the key questions of the book—did Locke influence the famous first lines of the Declaration of Independence?—she again feels the need to make the simple complicated. She does this by framing the question in an absurdly simplistic way: “We imagine Jefferson, in Philadelphia in 1776, quill poised, with Locke’s Second Treatise at hand, ready to compose the Declaration’s opening lines.” Who is “we”? Nobody I know.

Ms. Arcenas points out that Locke in the “Second Treatise” doesn’t use the line “life, liberty and property,” as is sometimes claimed. His words are “Lives, Liberties and Estates,” and he goes on to call all three “by the general Name, Property.” That’s a fair point. But it’s hardly a reason to think that Jefferson didn’t take the three-part noun phrase from Locke. We know—and Ms. Arcenas acknowledges—that Jefferson deeply admired Locke and had certainly read the “Two Treatises” closely.

“Did Locke, through Jefferson’s pen, give life to the United States?” she asks. “In a word, the answer is no.” But the answer, on her own evidence, and with all due caveats, is clearly yes.

Put the Declaration and its phrasing aside. And grant that the influence of philosophers on world events is always complicated, partial and difficult to trace. Still it’s plain, or plain to anyone not writing an academic monograph, that the main body of Locke’s philosophy—his rejection of divine-right monarchy, his ideas on consent and religious toleration, and his insistence that all human minds come into the world equally bereft—found expression in the War for Independence and all the consequent Founding documents.

Ms. Arcenas has done valuable work in documenting Americans’ affection for an empiricist philosopher. Her discussion of 20th-century scholarly debates over Locke’s significance, from Leo Strauss to J.G.A. Pocock, are accurate and well-expressed. Throughout the book, though, you sense that nobody can ever draw on Locke in a way that gains the author’s approval. Mid-20th-century liberals like Richard Hofstadter and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. formulated an “American political tradition” in which Locke played a founding role, but they were “mostly white men” writing “social, economic, and political conflict out of American history.” Conservatives of the same period insisted that Locke’s emphasis on private property was essential to the preservation of democracy, but “it seems not to have mattered that Locke was no democrat himself, nor that the Founding Fathers who kept his ideas alive were not particularly sympathetic to democracy either.” You wonder, in the end, why anybody should bother reading Locke at all.

In a short epilogue, Ms. Arcenas recalls staying in a rented apartment in Montana. The place had a Gadsden flag (“Don’t Tread on Me”) displayed on the front porch. Inside was a small library. At eye level, “sandwiched between volumes on the history of the pistol and the US Constitution, stood John Locke’s Two Treatises on Government.” Ms. Arcenas tells this story with a hint of derision and takes the image as one more sign that Locke is used as a “partisan pawn in debates over the political heritage of the United States and its commitment (or not) to minimal government and individual rights.”

I’m not sure. The trans-Atlantic liberal order Locke helped to bring about finds itself under assault from all sides by people determined to replace it with tyranny of one kind or another. A guy who keeps a copy of the “Two Treatises” next to the Constitution and a history of firearms may well understand the greatness of John Locke and the value of liberalism better than anybody.

Mr. Swaim is an editorial-page writer for the Journal.

Appeared in the August 6, 2022, print edition as 'The First Liberal and His Advice'.

23. Ex-Time reporter: The day I knew journalism had died in America

An interesting perspective and historical analysis from the author's personal experience.

Fourth estate: heal thyself?

Ex-Time reporter: The day I knew journalism had died in America

New York Post · by Kenneth R. Timmerman · August 6, 2022

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I have covered war, espionage and intrigue for major news organizations in the United States and around the world, including the New York Times, Newsweek, Time magazine, Reader’s Digest, CBS 60 Minutes, ABC News, Le Monde, L’Express, Le Point, and many others. That was when these organizations still tried to be “mainstream” and did not pull punches, self-censor and lie to protect their political allies.

Only when I was fired by Time in 1994 for investigating a story that threatened President Bill Clinton and many senior officials in his administration did I begin to understand that the mainstream media was dead.

The first war I went to cover was the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. As a Left-Bank expat living in Paris, I naturally sympathized with the Palestinians and planned to embed with a pro-Palestinian NGO in beseiged West Beirut. I wanted to write about the plight of innocent civilians whose lives had been shattered by war.

Timmerman (left) during one of his numerous visits to Iraq with an unidentified acquaintance. The journalist came to know many of the top arms dealers in the Middle East.

Provided by Kenneth R. Timmerman

I wanted to write about the “little” people, not about politics and politicians.

What I eventually learned went far beyond my wildest nightmares. The Palestinians rejected my credentials from their own diplomats in Europe, and threw me in an underground cell as a suspected Israeli spy.

The Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 was the first war Timmerman covered. As a progressive, he initially expected to sympathize with the plight of the Palestinians. Instead, the Palestinians threw him in jail and beat him.

Getty Images

There were 15 of us packed in the cell, which couldn’t have measured more than 16 by 10 feet. There were Lebanese Christians and Palestinians seeking to flee West Beirut, Kurds, Syrians and even a Somali. All of them smoked to hide the kerosene-fringed stench of the latrine bucket and their own clothes, and I smoked with them, but it just made the air thicker and more fetid. For 24 days and nights, we got pounded incessantly by Israeli fighter-jets, naval guns, tanks and artillery. The building had eight floors when I arrived, and was reduced to one and a half floors and pancakes by the time I was released.

One day two American reporters, guests of the PLO, took refuge in the underground shelter during an air raid. A cellmate, a French foreign legionnaire, started whistling the French national anthem and I joined him. Then we whistled the Star Spangled Banner and the two journalists, terrified, turned their backs on us and studiously ignored what they were hearing.

Timmerman’s reporting uncovered attempts by China to buy sensitive military equipment from US manufacturers with the benediction — or at least, a blind eye — from Clinton administration officials.

Later, I was taken upstairs for a “bastonnade,” a beating on the soles of the feet using three lengths of metal-shielded electric cable, twisted together and bound with tape. The pain was beyond anything I could imagine, and eventually I passed out.

I certainly learned more about the “little people” as a hostage than I ever could at a press briefing or from some senior official. Speaking directly to the bit players of world history — not the stars — became a habit I have kept to this day.

Before the first Gulf War I made many trips to Iraq, where I got to know virtually every Western arms dealer. (Hint: arms dealers love to talk). I also tracked down and interviewed the heads of Iraq’s ballistic missile, nuclear and chemical weapons programs, before anyone even knew their names.

During his time at Time magazine (former headquarters above), Timmerman said it became apparent that editors sought to serve the interests of the Democratic party, rather than uncover the truth.

I returned to the States after 18 years overseas to work for Congressional Democrat Tom Lantos as a specialist on weapons of mass destruction, and subsequently joined a new investigative team at Time magazine. Sources in the AFL-CIO Machinists Union tipped me off to strange doings at the B-1 bomber plant in Columbus, Ohio, midnight visits by Chinese intelligence officers, and frustrated US Customs agents. As I investigated, encouraged by Time editors, I uncovered and documented a massive effort by China to buy sensitive military production gear from US weapons plants, seemingly with the benediction — or at least, a blind eye — from Clinton administration officials.

Timmerman said he was shown a complaint from an assistant secretary under Clinton, which was faxed to the editor-in-chief of Time. The story was spiked and Timmerman got fired.

Eventually, along with other reporters, I put together a four-page story on the scheme that was scheduled to run in mid-July 1994. After a Friday lunchtime staff meeting, the Washington, DC, editor, came into my cubicle. “You’ve pissed off people in the administration with your questions,” he said.

“I thought it was my job to ask difficult questions of the administration,” I said.

He fired me on the spot and pulled the story, which ran a year later under the title “China Shops” in the conservative American Spectator magazine. Three years after I was fired, the exporter, McDonnell Douglas, was indicted for export violations, and Sen. Fred Thomson and Rep. Christopher Cox launched massive investigations into the Clinton sell-off of sensitive US technology to Communist China that led to the creation of the US-China Security Commission, which continues to investigate Chinese misdeeds today.

A source at the Commerce Department later showed me the complaint that his predecessor, an assistant secretary, had faxed to the editor-in-chief of Time magazine the day before I was fired. It was explicit, and called for them to pull the story.

Time’s editors showed in July 1994 that they believed their job was not to uncover the truth but to provide political cover to Democrats in Washington. It’s only gotten worse since then, but I believe this incident formally marks the end of the “mainstream media” as we once knew it. Like many other countries in Europe and elsewhere, we now have a politicized media in the United States. But unlike other countries, in all but a few cases our media refuses to acknowledge its ideological affiliation. So added to bias, you have hypocrisy.

Kenneth Timmerman is the author of 12 books of non-fiction and four novels, and was nominated for the Nobel Peace prize in 2006. The piece is adapted from his new memoir, “And the Rest is History: Tales of Hostages, Arms Dealers, Dirty Tricks, and Spies,” (Post Hill Press), which will be released on August 30.

New York Post · by Kenneth R. Timmerman · August 6, 2022

24. Another Way to Help Taiwan—and America

A trade deal?

Excerpts:

China’s pressure campaign underscores the urgency as it conducts live-fire exercises in six areas around Taiwan. This is an escalation compared to China’s exercises in 1995 and 1996 in a previous Taiwan Strait crisis. The disruption to air and ship traffic amounts to a temporary blockade. Beijing knows its military intimidation can change the risk calculus of business and deter foreign investment in Taiwan.

On Monday China barred shipments from more than 100 Taiwanese food exporters. Later in the week it banned Taiwanese citrus, as well as two kinds of fish. Bloomberg reports that Beijing has now blocked nearly a third of Taiwanese food items.

China is Taiwan’s largest trade partner, and Beijing is betting that Taiwanese businesses will push for conciliation with the Mainland if it increases the economic pain. A trade deal with the U.S. would reassure Taiwanese that the U.S. will stay engaged economically. And it would also reassure the rest of Asia, especially Japan and the Asean countries of Southeast Asia, that the U.S. is there to stay.

Another Way to Help Taiwan—and America

The U.S. can ease the pressure of China’s economic coercion with a bilateral trade deal.

By The Editorial BoardFollow

Aug. 5, 2022 6:25 pm ET

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-taiwan-trade-opportunity-china-u-s-nancy-pelosi-tsai-ing-wen-beijing-11659730039?mod=opinion_lead_pos3&utm_source=pocket_mylist

China is trying to show the world this week that it can isolate Taiwan, with a show of live-fire military exercises and trade restrictions. One non-military way the U.S. can respond is by expanding economic and free-trade ties with the island democracy.

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Beijing claims its escalations are a response to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan this week. After meeting with President Tsai Ing-wen, the House Speaker said she discussed “a trade agreement that might be possible and soon.” That’s good news, and the Democrats now running Washington could move with dispatch to help Taiwan withstand China’s economic coercion.

With $114.1 billion in two-way trade, Taiwan was America’s eighth largest merchandise trading partner last year, outpacing India, France and Italy. Taiwan was the 10th largest U.S. export market and the seventh largest source of imports. But there’s room to grow, and Taiwan made a goodwill overture with its recent removal of barriers to U.S. beef and pork. Taiwan’s agricultural imports from the U.S. in 2021 rose 18% to $3.94 billion.

Yet the White House has been slow to move on a Taiwan trade deal, as it also has been on trade in the entire Asia-Pacific region. In May the Biden Administration launched the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework as a way to deepen U.S. economic engagement. Taiwan’s chief trade negotiator said this spring that it hoped to become a “full member.” But the island was excluded from the framework.

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Taiwan’s consolation prize is a U.S.-Taiwan Initiative on 21st Century Trade launched in June. But this effort overlaps with the existing U.S.-Taiwan Economic Prosperity Partnership Dialogue. Neither the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework nor the U.S.-Taiwan trade initiative include negotiations on market access, which limits their economic impact.

Far better would be a bilateral free-trade deal. And if Mrs. Pelosi is serious about countering China’s attempt to isolate Taiwan, she could support renewal of the expired trade promotion authority that allows the White House to fast-track trade deals in Congress.

The Congressional Research Service has identified Taiwanese barriers to agriculture, digital services, biotech and medical devices as among the U.S. trade concerns. Trade promotion authority would facilitate negotiations over these issues and reassure Taiwan that Congress won’t rewrite a deal once it is signed by the Biden Administration.

China’s pressure campaign underscores the urgency as it conducts live-fire exercises in six areas around Taiwan. This is an escalation compared to China’s exercises in 1995 and 1996 in a previous Taiwan Strait crisis. The disruption to air and ship traffic amounts to a temporary blockade. Beijing knows its military intimidation can change the risk calculus of business and deter foreign investment in Taiwan.

On Monday China barred shipments from more than 100 Taiwanese food exporters. Later in the week it banned Taiwanese citrus, as well as two kinds of fish. Bloomberg reports that Beijing has now blocked nearly a third of Taiwanese food items.

China is Taiwan’s largest trade partner, and Beijing is betting that Taiwanese businesses will push for conciliation with the Mainland if it increases the economic pain. A trade deal with the U.S. would reassure Taiwanese that the U.S. will stay engaged economically. And it would also reassure the rest of Asia, especially Japan and the Asean countries of Southeast Asia, that the U.S. is there to stay.

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Journal Editorial Report: The Week’s Best and Worst from Jason Riley, Mary Anastasia O’Grady, and Kim Strassel. Image: Associated Press

Appeared in the August 6, 2022, print edition as 'Another Way to Help Taiwan'.

25. As English Goes, So Goes the U.S.

A conservative critique of the decline of English scholarship (and Western Civilization, Classics, and Great Books). And then there are two comments criticizing the critique.

As English Goes, So Goes the U.S. - Chronicles

chroniclesmagazine.org · by Mark Bauerlein · July 1, 2022

By undermining the Western canon in the 1990s, leftist academics paved the way for today’s ‘woke’ hurricane.

When I finished graduate school at UCLA in 1988, I believed that English sat at the top of the academic heap. The department claimed nearly 1,700 majors; the nonmajor survey courses I taught during the year after I filed my thesis had more than 400 students each; and professors and administrators across the quad were eager to know what this thing called “deconstruction” was. The department required of every major a yearlong survey course, from Beowulf to W. H. Auden, with a syllabus that proclaimed, “This is English, the full sweep!” Earlier, in 11th-grade English, I got the same thing for American literature, a grand patrimony from Hawthorne to Hemingway, implying the country’s own grandness. English was where you found the meaning of the past. Without a flagship English department, a university could not be a tier-one institution.

It wasn’t only a campus thing. One year before, a book by a renowned literary theorist at University of Virginia spent six months on The New York Times’ best-seller list—not Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind but E. D. Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy, wherein the famous list of terms in the appendix was heavy on literary subjects. In 1986, The New York Times Magazine profiled Yale English faculty and their guru, Jacques Derrida, giving them a certain amount of notoriety and celebrity. If you turned on the television, you might see literary scholars Stanley Fish and Catharine Stimpson battling William F. Buckley Jr. and Dinesh D’Souza over political correctness, as happened in a forum moderated by Michael Kinsley in August 1991. And in 1984, William Bennett’s National Endowment for the Humanities published To Reclaim a Legacy: A Report on the Humanities in Higher Education, which regretted the spread of ideology and theory in literary study—but it only proved how important English professors were.

How quaint it appears at this late date: conservatives and liberals arguing over literary tradition, debating a Shakespeare requirement and asking whether Zora Neale Hurston belongs next to Faulkner. When Jesse Jackson spoke in 1987 at Stanford in a warm-up for another presidential run (his 1984 Rainbow Coalition still had momentum then), students marched away decrying a general education requirement at the school, a mostly literary course: “Hey hey, ho ho, Western Culture’s got to go!”

We English majors loved hearing of these developments. I was an obedient liberal at the time who nonetheless favored Great Books and Western Civ. I didn’t want to see those courses go down, but the bare fact of public attention to literary studies was a reward in itself. Those of us just entering the field could easily believe that we worked at the center of American controversy. It was exhilarating. Even if we didn’t much care about politics, our archival digging in the library and the tortuous critical readings we did of Leaves of Grass and Macbeth would have an impact. People cared about our subject matter.

classic works of English literature

(photo by Randy Robertson /

Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0)

It didn’t last long, of course, only a few years, sometimes going by the name “Canon Wars” to depict the controversy over who should and who should not be included in the standard Western literary canon. It was all over and done by the mid-’90s, when the Culture Wars moved on to gays-in-the-military and the Contract with America, followed by Bill and Monica. English, too, began to slide. One year after the Jackson event, the Stanford faculty scrapped the Western Culture requirement.

Literature departments suffered a loss of market share; the number of bachelor’s degrees in English hovered around 50,000 at the same time that the graduating population was booming, climbing from 1.16 million in 1995-96 to 2.01 million in 2018-19. In the last few years, in fact, English has fallen to around 40,000 degrees per year, its share of majors dropping from 4.3 percent in 1995-96 to 3.7 percent in 2004 to a feeble 1.9 percent in 2018-19. Literature itself became less seminal within the departments. Professors preferred to speak of cultural studies, queer theory, and postcolonialism, not of Hamlet or Emma Bovary.

By 1998, when I’d made it to full professor at Emory University, the conservative defense of Western civilization and the great American novel was nonexistent in the faculty lounge. Just a year before, a book by UC Santa Cruz Professor John Ellis bore a simple and summary title: Literature Lost: Social Agendas and the Corruption of the Humanities.

The reigning theories of the ’90s abandoned literary language for the racy topics of sexuality, politics, and race. Everyone was a diversifier, adding gender theory, media studies, and other nontraditional subfields to their professional profiles, or at least declaring themselves as such at critical moments—for instance, during a department vote over changing course requirements for the major. While conservative critics Roger Kimball, D’Souza, Bennett, et al. wrote books that each outsold any 100 academic tomes put together, the professors went on steadily, unblinkingly with their dismantling project. The very idea of a core Western or American literary tradition was off the table.

For many years afterwards—having worked off-campus at the National Endowment for the Arts and, later, at First Things magazine (while still teaching at Emory)—I believed that the decline of literary studies was an all-academic affair. The language of theory was too recondite for anyone but insiders, and too many academics came off as goofs and misfits when out of their professional zones. Who else but eccentric PhDs would listen to Judith Butler go on about gender and sex in her turgid prose? Why would anyone take seriously an English professor declaiming the “truths” of imperialism and Cold War geopolitics? What do English professors know about such matters?

Others thought the same thing. When I started to frequent conservative circles in the early 2000s, I often heard it said that there was a silver lining to the politicization of the humanities. Thank goodness that the Marxists and multiculturalists had camped out in literature departments, the argument ran. At least nobody will pay attention to them. The enrollment declines were understood as healthy, a sign that sensible undergrads rightly avoided the tenured radicals. Settled in ivory tower units slipping in popularity, the professors would do less damage. Their blather about capitalism and patriarchy and whiteness would have a smaller captive audience, and people who really knew about such things (economists, social scientists, and biologists) would recognize the blather at first sight.

We got it wrong; I realize that now. Yes, literature professors left literature and dove into social/political matters they weren’t trained to understand, but to feign expertise in race and sex and politics was not the point. The positive labor of social-political analysis wasn’t the real goal, nor was keeping the English major strong. The real goal had already been accomplished, and right in front of us: the demolition of literary tradition, of a Western literary canon and an American literary canon. Still, the politically moderate, open-minded liberals on the faculty (I was one of them) didn’t want to admit it. Our more aggressive colleagues pushing “diversity” just wanted a more diverse syllabus, so they said, and we believed them, because disbelieving them would mean ascribing to them lesser motives, destructive ones, and that wouldn’t be collegial. It wouldn’t be liberal.

But once the multiculturalists got rid of the old canon, their promise of a richer, fuller curriculum of multiple cultures never materialized. After Stanford dropped the Western Culture course, it created a diversity replacement for it, expecting all the professors who denounced the old to teach the new. Well, they didn’t show up. Stanford had a hard time getting professors into those classrooms. The outcome proves the point. They didn’t want a new and improved humanities curriculum, adding Toni Morrison to Shakespeare, adding wives and mothers to kings and generals in history courses. No, the revolutionaries just wanted to take out the Western/American heritage. They didn’t aim to share space with traditionalists, no deference to “Can we all get along?” The tradition had to go, period. “Diversity” was a dodge, a tactic, a temporary step in the discreditation of the old.

It worked. When we look at English departments today, we see no organized, cumulative sequence of study that guarantees students will learn strands of women’s literature, African-American literature, and Native-American myths, along with classic American literature. Instead, we have a mishmash of courses straying into identity politics, media, and various agenda-driven critical theories, with some novels and poems serving as pretexts. No consistent threads, no coherence, save for the firm objection to anything that smacks of a restoration of the old.

To cast America First as an Alt-Right insurgence, first one had to dispel the other America, as preserved in Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau, Douglass, Whitman, Dickinson, Twain, Wharton, and so on. The old syllabus showed America had a lineage of American-ness, an exceptional descent, our own to identify and absorb.

This is one of the major successes of the left. Take a look at the reaction to a couple of the greatest speeches given by a U.S. politician in living memory. At Warsaw on Jul. 6, 2017, President Trump envisioned the Western past in ways that hearkened right back to the Canon Wars of the ’80s. He cited Copernicus, Chopin, Saint John Paul II, and Polish heroes of science, music, and religion. He spoke of “national characters” and “the will to defend our civilization” and the desire for God. “We write symphonies,” he said. “We celebrate our ancient heroes, embrace our timeless traditions and customs.” By “our,” he meant Europe and America, the West, and he declared at the end, “And our civilization will triumph.”

Three years later, on July 4th, he delivered a complementary speech at Mt. Rushmore, where he announced, “Seventeen seventy-six represented the culmination of thousands of years of Western civilization.” He proceeded to extol the four faces, Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt, who “exemplified the unbridled confidence of our national identity and culture.” Nods to Buffalo Bill, Wild Bill Hickok, and the Wright Brothers followed, then to Jesse Owens and George Patton, Walt Whitman and Mark Twain, Irving Berlin and Ella Fitzgerald, Bob Hope and Elvis Presley, among others—a canon of American expression and action, a fabulous lineage of American greatness.

And how did the media respond to these commemorations? An article in Foreign Policy bore the title, “Trump’s Mt. Rushmore Speech Is the Closest He’s Come to Fascism.” The New York Times called it “a divisive culture war message,” a “dark and divisive speech,” while the Associated Press accused him of “pushing racial division” and Vox called it “fearmongering.”

Reaction to the Warsaw speech had been the same. Peter Beinart in The Atlantic labelled it “racial and religious paranoia” while The Guardian cast it as “dark nativism,” Vox as an “alt-right manifesto,” and Slate as “white nationalist rhetoric.” The Washington Post called it a “white nationalist dog-whistle,” and the The Village Voice said it sounded like something you’d hear in a “Thirties Berlin rathskeller.”

To be sure, both speeches had their defenders, at National Review and elsewhere, though what could one say to the hysterical characterization of Trump’s words as the onset of fascism? I remember watching CNN right after the Warsaw event and hearing a guest casually refer to the speech as a flat case of white supremacy, as if it were an obvious fact, indisputable. In her world, this was received wisdom: Western Civ equals white supremacy, clearly and unexceptionally.

The blithe utterance of such a noxious charge on a network broadcasting in airports across the country goes to show that the Canon Wars of the late 1980s were not merely an academic squabble. In those former times, the only place you would hear such a radical equation was in a few hard left activist organizations or in obscure corners of the universities, but certainly not in mainstream news outlets.

Now, what was once a quirky and bilious academic indictment is conventional liberal opinion. In 1984, the phrase “Make America Great Again” wouldn’t have offended anybody in the public arena. It would only echo another campaign slogan from that time period: “Morning in America.” In 2016, however, MAGA evoked in academics, intellectuals, and journalists images of Nuremberg—or at least they pretended it did—and the pretense brought them attention and advancement.

It wouldn’t have worked if the universities hadn’t paved the way for it. We must recognize the full consequence of the fall of an American literary canon. To cast America First as an Alt-Right insurgence, first one had to dispel the other America, as preserved in Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau, Douglass, Whitman, Dickinson, Twain, Wharton, and so on. The old syllabus showed America had a lineage of American-ness, an exceptional descent, our own to identify and absorb. And by that acknowledgement, the nation was unified, its past stable and coherent—and good. The literary canon authorized it. However much they dreaded 11th-grade English, youths got a sense of their country through Hester Prynne and Huck Finn and Gatsby, Rip van Winkle and the Joads. These literary characters formed what every nation needs: a body of works with a national meaning. Take that away, keep the patrimony from the rising generation, and the nation forms less clearly in their hearts and minds. Young Americans are consequently less inclined to defend their country.

This was a terrible loss for conservatism and a key victory for the left. The reaction to Donald Trump indicates how important this academic skirmish of prior decades was to the other side. While the right focused on law and economics, the left in its strategic vision went after the cultural foundations, playing a long game that has resulted in the Woke hurricane now sweeping through institutions from Berkeley to Wall Street, the NFL and the Navy and the Salvation Army. Yes, there is a line to draw from Herman Melville and Robert Frost to strong borders and the First Amendment. Citizens who have no knowledge of the greatest users of the American language don’t have a deep conception of America itself. One can’t be loyal to a formless past.

Comments (2)

We are unable to defend our country/civilization because we are unwilling to identify our enemies in a straightforward manner. These ideologies are the product of a specific group. This group both supports and pushes these ideas, and has a long history of antagonism against Christianity and Western Thought. It is easily demonstrable by merely identifying the most prominent leaders and citing their supporters. But if this group is named my comment will be removed as it has on other sites that are “reputable” defenders of The West and Christianity. To defeat them, you must be willing to identify them. It is not currently happening.
JULY 28, 2022
ROBERT L TAYLOR
REPLY
This article is only partly accurate, in fact hardly accurate. . It fails to identify, to denounce the complicity of the “right” in the disaster that has befallen our country. That disaster begins I would argue with the pseudo conservative Reagan who may I remind you preferred the pseudo conservative Bennet to the great scholar ME Bradford. The “left” had nothing to do with that. The real damage to our universities was begun under the presidencies of Reagan and Bush. Roger Kimball and D’Souza conservatives? Hardly–the real conservative movement had been destroyed by Buckley and his ilk years ago. In place of people like Robert Taft we were presented with a group of small minded cold warriors who in the end did not give a hoot about the destruction of our universities or our culture so long as we could destroy the USSR. We did. That worked out well did it not? Reagan when he was gov. of California destroyed the rot at SF State university–surely he could have dome SOMETHING similar on a national level. However he was as interested in that as he was interested in reversing Roe V Wade. The same goes for his epigones Bush the elder and younger. Finally like most neo con articles pretending to be it gives the game away when it bemoans the “key victory for the left” What left? There is no left in this country. Once upon a time there was a left which organized steel workers, miners etc. Like them or hate them they were at least true to their proclaimed constituency. What passes for the “left” these days are minions of self absorbed gentry. The old left in so far as it paid attention would have appreciated Melville. The new “left” is simply the ideological afterbirth of a toxic “internationalism”. That is to say as someone once quipped your new “leftist” has more in common with his/her its Parisian counterpart that with the druggist down the road. President Trump understood that; Reagan Bush and the whole grotesque apparatus of the “left” and the “right” also understand that–but they are at best indifferent and at worst applaud.
JULY 28, 2022
ROBERT ALPERT
REPLY

chroniclesmagazine.org · by Mark Bauerlein · July 1, 2022

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Senior Fellow, Foundation for Defense of Democracies

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

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Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

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V/R

David Maxwell

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Phone: 202-573-8647

Personal Email: d avid.maxwell161@gmail.com

Web Site: www.fdd.org

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Subscribe to FDD’s new podcast, Foreign Podicy

FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.

If you do not read anything else in the 2017 National Security Strategy read this on page 14:

"A democracy is only as resilient as its people. An informed and engaged citizenry is the fundamental requirement for a free and resilient nation. For generations, our society has protected free press, free speech, and free thought. Today, actors such as Russia are using information tools in an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of democracies. Adversaries target media, political processes, financial networks, and personal data. The American public and private sectors must recognize this and work together to defend our way of life. No external threat can be allowed to shake our shared commitment to our values, undermine our system of government, or divide our Nation."

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RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, AUGUST 6

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