Quotes of the Day:

"Man has but little heeded the advice of the wise men. He has been - fatefully, if not willingly - less virtuous, less constant, less rational, less peaceful than he knows how to be, than he is fully capable of being. He has been led astray from the ways of peace and brotherhood by his addiction to concepts and attitudes of narrow nationalism, racial and religious bigotry, greed and lust for power."

- Ralph Bunche

“If we are to survive, we must have ideas, vision, and courage. These things are rarely produced by committees. Everything that matters in our intellectual and moral life begins with an individual confronting his own mind and conscience in a room by himself.”

- Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

"Life is not just about peaks and valleys, about wins and losses. Life is about the journey. You hear that all the time. You’ve got to absorb that. You’ve got to know that. The journey has to become the destination because there is no true destination. There is no endpoint. There is no goal. All rivers run to the sea and yet the sea is not full. Life goes on; accept what life gives you. The sun rises the morning after you win the championship or lose in the first round."

- Paul Assaiante, Run to the Roar

1. Israel says its war can both destroy Hamas and rescue hostages. Their families are less certain

2. Deadly explosion off Nigeria points to threat posed by aging oil ships around the world

3. How to End the US Marine Corps’ Intellectual Civil War

4. Israel's Strategic Challenge

5. China touts its plan for global security, with Russia by its side

6. As Violence Surges, Nations Seek U.S. Defense Pacts. Some Americans Are Wary.

7. Early stages of Israeli ground assault in Gaza shrouded in secrecy

8. Retired general ‘can only hope’ Iran, proxies don’t escalate Middle East conflict (General Robert Abrams)

9. Scoop: Saudi defense minister to visit White House amid fears of regional war

10. US to build new nuclear gravity bomb

11. Old video shows US Army arriving in Romania, not Marines landing in Israel

12. Russia's Shoigu accuses West of seeking to expand Ukraine war to Asia-Pacific

13. Fierce clashes in Gaza as Israeli forces expand ground offensive

14. Exclusive: US military bulk buys Japanese seafood to counter China ban

15. More ‘Buy America’ provisions threaten our industrial base and national security

16. Difficulties, Constraints and the Cost of Removing Hamas from Power

17. What America Wants From China

18. No, Xi Jinping Is Not About to Attack Taiwan

19. The Other Group of Viruses That Could Cause the Next Pandemic

20. A World at War

21. As the Israel-Hamas war rages, the U.S. wants to offer Israel advice — and get advised

22. America’s Three-Front War

1. Israel says its war can both destroy Hamas and rescue hostages. Their families are less certain

The age old challenge: hostage rescue versus hostage recovery.

Israel says its war can both destroy Hamas and rescue hostages. Their families are less certain

BY JULIA FRANKEL

Updated 10:32 PM EDT, October 28, 2023

AP · October 28, 2023

JERUSALEM (AP) — The Israeli military has sought to assure the public it can achieve the two goals of its war on Hamas simultaneously — toppling the strip’s militant rulers and rescuing some 230 hostages abducted from Israel.

But as the army ramps up airstrikes and ground incursions on the blockaded enclave, laying waste to entire neighborhoods in preparation for a broader invasion, the anguished families of hostages are growing increasingly worried those aims will collide — with devastating consequences.

Annihilating Hamas would seem to require a ground operation of unprecedented intensity fraught with the risk of harming Israeli hostages. Saving hostages stuck inside Gaza would appear to require engagement with Hamas, the group that forever traumatized the country when it sent fighters into southern Israel to brutally kill over 1,400 people and take dozens captive on Oct. 7, sparking this latest war between the bitter enemies. Over 7,700 Palestinians have been killed in the Israeli offensive, according to the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry.

Israel’s government has not described what a rescue mission could look like. In a televised address late Saturday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu acknowledged the agony of hostages’ families and promised their release was an “integral” part of Israel’s war effort, on par with its goal of destroying Hamas.

Hamas political leaders are in negotiations with mediators Egypt and Qatar to secure the freedom of at least some trapped Israeli civilians. Four hostages have have been released so far.

Anxiety over Hamas’ hostages reached a fever pitch Saturday, as Israel intensified its air campaign and sent troops into Gaza with heavy firepower. Crowds protested outside Israel’s Defense Ministry in Tel Aviv, demanding that Netanyahu and other officials address the fate of their loved ones.

It worked. Netanyahu met with the families Saturday and vowed to “exercise and exhaust every possibility to bring them home.” Defense Minister Yoav Gallant promised to meet them Sunday for what his office described as the first official meeting with them.

“We are not waiting any longer,” said protester Malki Shem-Tov, whose 21-year-old son, Omer, is being held captive in Gaza. “We want all of them back with us today. We want you, the Cabinet, the government, to imagine that these are your children.”

The plight of the hostages has captured the nation’s attention for the past three weeks. Israeli media are filled with stories about the hostages and interviews with their families.

But all of the military’s options carry enormous risks. A military invasion raises the prospect of intractable warfare in densely populated cities and subterranean tunnels that could suck young soldiers into a monthslong quagmire.

With the hostages believed to be hidden in Hamas’ sprawling tunnel network, heavy fighting raises the prospect of unmitigated chaos for soldiers and hostages alike.

Late on Friday as the Israeli military struck Gaza by air, land and sea with a ferocity never seen before, families of hostages were on edge, acutely aware of the dangers facing their loved ones.

“It was a long and sleepless night,” said Liat Bell Sommer, a spokesperson for the families who she said suffered from “absolute uncertainty regarding the fate of the hostages held there, who were also subject to the heavy bombings.”

The bombardment seemed to send a message to Hamas — if the group thought it could avoid a devastating ground invasion because of the captives in Gaza, it was wrong.

Balancing the families’ interests with the military goal of destroying Hamas has presented a dilemma for Netanyahu, who is already under fire for his government’s failure to prevent the worst attack in Israeli history and to swiftly come to people’s aid that day.

Amos Yadlin, a retired general and former head of Israel’s military intelligence, said the government’s challenge was to satisfy the immense public pressure both to return the hostages safely and wipe out Hamas. He insisted the two goals could be reconciled if the government finds the “right strategy.”

“Both should be handled simultaneously and should support each other,” Yadlin said, without elaborating.

But many experts believe the best strategy to save hostages remains diplomacy.

Hamas on Saturday offered Israel an exchange — the release of all hostages in Gaza for all Palestinian prisoners held by Israel. The plight of the prisoners is deeply emotional for Palestinians, who widely see the prisoners as freedom fighters.

Israel has a long history of agreeing to lopsided prisoner swaps. In 2011, it freed over 1,000 prisoners in exchange for Gilad Schalit, a soldier who was kidnapped and dragged across the border into Gaza. Many of those prisoners, including Hamas’ top leader in Gaza, Yehia Sinwar, had been convicted in the killings of Israelis.

“If the enemy wants to end this case at once, we are ready for that,” said Abu Obeida, the spokesman for Hamas’ armed wing.

Israeli military spokesperson Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari was evasive. He said Hamas was engaged in the “cynical exploitation” of the anxieties gripping the Israeli public.

But families who saw four women released to Israel last week following complex hostage diplomacy said they weren’t convinced that the Israeli government had their best interests in mind.

“They feel like they’re left behind and no one is really caring about them,” said Miki Haimovitz, a former lawmaker who spoke on behalf of the hostages’ families at Saturday’s protest. “No one is explaining what’s going on.”

AP · October 28, 2023

2. Deadly explosion off Nigeria points to threat posed by aging oil ships around the world

This is s security issue I have never followed. Global implications.

Deadly explosion off Nigeria points to threat posed by aging oil ships around the world

BY HELEN WIEFFERING AND GRACE EKPU

Updated 12:01 AM EDT, October 30, 2023

AP · by HELEN WIEFFERING · October 30, 2023

OKITIPUPA, Nigeria (AP) — It was the dead of night when the ship caught fire, Patrick Aganyebi remembers, but the flames made it seem as bright as day.

The explosion that night woke him and knocked him to the floor. He tucked his phone and his ID card in his pockets, strapped on a life jacket and made his way to the upper deck. As the flames barreled toward him, he prepared to jump nearly 100 feet (30 meters) into the sea.

Patrick Aganyebi, a maintenance operator aboard the Trinity Spirit oil ship, holds up his ID card in his home in Igbokoda, Nigeria, on Tuesday, Sept. 6, 2022. (AP Photo/Sunday Alamba)

Five workers were killed and two others presumed dead in the blast on the Trinity Spirit, a rusting converted oil tanker anchored 15 miles (24 km) off the coast of Nigeria that pulled crude oil from the ocean floor. It was by the grace of God, Aganyebi said, that he and two fellow crewmen escaped, rescued by a pair of fishermen as the burning vessel sank along with 40,000 barrels of oil.

This story was supported by funding from the Walton Family Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

The Trinity Spirit’s explosion in February of last year stands among the deadliest tragedies on an oil ship or platform in recent years. The Associated Press’ review of court documents, ship databases, and interviews with crew members reveals that the 46-year-old ship was in a state of near-total disrepair, and the systems meant to ensure its safe and lawful operation — annual inspections, a flag registry, insurance — had gradually fallen away.

The Trinity Spirit fits a pattern of old tankers put to work storing and extracting oil even while on the brink of mechanical breakdowns. At least eight have been shut down after a fire, a major safety hazard, or the death of a worker in the last decade, according to an AP review. More than 30 are older than the Trinity Spirit and still storing oil around the world.

Jan-Erik Vinnem, who has spent his career studying the risks of offshore oil production, said he’s sometimes shocked when he sees pictures of oil ships in Africa.

“I call them ‘floating bombs,’” he said.

Pius Orofin, a deck operator aboard the Trinity Spirit oil ship, speaks during an interview at his home in Okitipupa, Nigeria, on Tuesday, Sept. 6, 2022. (AP Photo/Sunday Alamba)

Patrick Aganyebi, a maintenance operator aboard the Trinity Spirit oil ship, sits for a portrait in his home in Igbokoda, Nigeria, on Tuesday, Sept. 6, 2022. (AP Photo/Sunday Alamba)

AGING HULLS

The Trinity Spirit was part of a class of vessels that extracts oil offshore and stores it at sea. They are known as floating production storage and offloading units — FPSOs — or as FSOs, floating storage and offloading units, when used only for storage. Since the 1970s, they’ve become increasingly popular for developing oil in deep waters and in places where no pipelines exist. According to the environmental group SkyTruth, there are some 240 in operation today.

FPSOs are unlike most ships for one key reason: They stay in place. Once attached to the ocean floor, they can linger at the same oil field for years or even decades. They may be surveyed by in-country regulators or hired inspectors, but they operate outside the normal flow of shipping traffic and the added safety and legal inspections that take place in port.

An explosion aboard the Trinity Spirit off the coast of Nigeria last year that killed five workers and left two others unaccounted for stands among the deadliest tragedies on an oil ship or platform in recent years. The Trinity Spirit fits a pattern of old tankers put to work storing and extracting oil even while on the brink of mechanical breakdowns. (Oct. 30) (AP video Grace Ekpu)

“If a vessel is sitting in a country’s domestic waters and is not going around trading … then you’re not going to have that same level of oversight,” said Meghan Mathieson, strategy director at the Canadian-based Clear Seas Centre for Responsible Marine Shipping.

More than half the current fleet of FPSOs are recycled oil tankers, according to Oslo-based Rystad Energy, which keeps data on the ships. Senior analyst Edvard Christoffersen said that without a major repair, most oil ships have hulls built to last about 25 years. But some FPSOs are used far longer, sometimes to dangerous effect.

In the same month that the Trinity Spirit caught fire, inspectors found problems with an aging FPSO moored off the coast of Malaysia. The Bunga Kertas was built as an oil tanker in the 1980s, and press coverage of its conversion to an FPSO in 2004 said the vessel had an intended service life of 10 more years.

But it was 18 years later when a safety issue on the Bunga Kertas led to a pause in operations. The ship’s hull had “ integrity issues,” according to stakeholder Jadestone Energy. Four months later a diver was killed while repairing the damage. Petronas, the operator at the time, did not respond to a request for comment.

Until this fall, another aging ship floating off the coast of Yemen seemed dangerously close to spilling a massive amount of oil. The FSO Safer was built in the same year as the Trinity Spirit, and became a floating hazard over years of neglect amid the country’s civil war. Seawater had leaked into the ship’s engine room by 2020.

“It could break up at any time – or explode,” the United Nations said in a statement this spring.

The ship held more than a million barrels of oil — risking a spill that could have decimated fisheries in the Red Sea, threatened desalination plants and washed oil on the shores of countries around the Horn of Africa, according to the U.N. After years of alarm and negotiations, the oil was transferred onto another tanker this August, but the rusting Safer remains off Yemen’s coast, awaiting funds to be scrapped.

Age isn’t the only measure of a ship’s health: Climate, storms and wave patterns can add stress to ship components or increase the pace of corrosion, just as careful maintenance can extend a ship’s life.

FILE - Technical vessels are seen by the decrepit Safer tanker on Monday, June 12, 2023, off the coast of Yemen. (AP Photo/Osamah Abdulrahman, File)

FILE - This 2019 photo provided by I.R. Consilium shows internal decay of the FSO Safer and the lack of a functioning cathodic protection system, moored off Ras Issa port, Yemen. (I.R. Consilium via AP)

FILE - Technical vessels are seen by the decrepit Safer tanker on Monday, June 12, 2023, off the coast of Yemen. (AP Photo/Osamah Abdulrahman, File)

But the fleet’s growing age is well known in the industry. The average hull age of FPSOs has increased from 22 to nearly 28 years since 2010, according to Rystad Energy. The American Bureau of Shipping — one of several companies known as classification societies that certify vessels’ safety — launched a working group in 2021 to address the challenges of older FPSOs, noting that 55 ships were approaching the end of their intended lives.

“A lot of these things are foreseeable,” said Ian Ralby, a maritime security expert who helped sound the alarm about the Safer.

“If they are not well maintained and not watched carefully,” Ralby said, “they can sink, they can spill, and they can, as the Trinity Spirit showed, blow up.”

DANGEROUS TO ABANDON

There has been little to no public explanation of what led to the Trinity Spirit’s explosion, though multiple Nigerian agencies had responsibility for overseeing the ship. The Trinity Spirit had been on the same oil field for more than two decades. According to Aganyebi, after the ship arrived in Nigeria, it was never brought to shore for major upgrades or repairs.

Warning signs began years before it caught fire. In 2015, the American Bureau of Shipping canceled its classification and ceased inspections of the ship. There’s no record the Trinity Spirit had insurance after that point, according to Lloyd’s List Intelligence. In the next several years, the ship lost its privilege to fly the flag of Liberia, becoming a stateless vessel.

By 2019, Nigeria’s petroleum regulator had revoked the Trinity Spirit’s license to pump oil. Nigeria’s head of maritime safety, quoted in local press coverage, said his agency had directed the ship to stop operating five years before the blast. Yet the Trinity Spirit was never forced to leave.

Up till the moment of the explosion, there was oil on board. As recently as 2021, according to satellite imagery and ship transponder data, oil was loaded onto a tanker that later docked at a Shell refinery in the Netherlands.

Adeyemi Adeyiga, a spokesperson for Nigeria’s Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission, which regulates the country’s oil resources, said the sale was legal because the oil was produced before the license was revoked. And a spokesperson for Shell said the company conducts robust reviews of its supply chain and complies with all laws and regulations.

Pius Orofin, a deck operator aboard the Trinity Spirit oil ship, left, and Patrick Aganyebi, a maintenance operator, sit for an interview in Okitipupa, Nigeria, on Monday, Sept. 5, 2022. (AP Photo/Sunday Alamba)

Though the federal government investigated the Trinity Spirit’s explosion, more than a year later no findings have been released. For months, it seemed the only scrutiny would fall on the surviving men.

Not long after their escape, and still in the throes of recovery, Aganyebi and a fellow crewman were arrested on accusations of “Murder, Arson, and Malicious Damage,” according to their charging documents. Police were acting on a complaint from Shebah Exploration and Production Company Limited — the Trinity Spirit’s longtime operator.

An attorney in Lagos took on the case pro bono.

“They committed no offense, they did nothing wrong. They were staffers of the company,” Benson Enikuomehin said. In an interview, he accused Shebah of drumming up criminal charges to distract from the company’s missteps. Anything that took place on the Trinity Spirit should be considered illegal after the license to the oil field was revoked, he said.

Yinka Agidee, an attorney specializing in Nigeria’s oil and gas sector who was not involved in the case, said the Trinity Spirit represented an “accident waiting to happen,” and showed that local authorities failed to enforce their own orders.

“I’m not sure if it’s a question of people closing their eyes or deliberately not doing what they’re supposed to have done,” she said. “But that has resulted in an accident and there has been a loss of life. So we need some explanation.”

Interviews and an exploration of documents provide a lack of clarity about who was responsible for the Trinity Spirit in the final years of its decline. Though Shebah hired Aganyebi and the rest of the Trinity Spirit’s crew, CEO Ikemefuna Okafor said in an email to the AP that the company wasn’t responsible for the ship’s neglect. The company reported the surviving crew to police, he said, because it had evidence of illegal storage of oil on the ship.

According to Okafor, liquidators seized ownership of the Trinity Spirit in 2018 due to Shebah’s outsized debt. Yet in a deposition given one year before the explosion, the company’s former president, Ambrosie Orjiako, described how Shebah continued to run operations.

This combination of photos provided by Pius Orofin, a deck operator aboard the Trinity Spirit oil ship, shows rusted areas of the ship moored 15 miles off the coast of Nigeria, in November 2021. (Pius Orofin via AP)

Sustaining fuel purchases, food supplies, and “skeletal manpower” wasn’t easy, Orijako said, because “there’s no revenue coming in.” But he managed to fund the minimal operations with family resources, he said, because the FPSO “would be dangerous to abandon.”

Adeyiga, the spokesperson for Nigeria’s Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission, said it was still finalizing its investigation into the ship’s explosion and would continue working to prevent similar tragedies from happening.

The Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency did not respond to repeated requests for comment, but issued notice in December that all FPSOs and FSOs in Nigeria’s waters must have a flag, be certified by a classification society, and maintain official plans for ship maintenance and emergency response.

SAVE OUR SOULS

The deck of the Trinity Spirit was an expanse of rust. Orange rust coated the floor, crept over pipes and trailed from crevices in the walls, according to cell phone photos taken four months before the explosion. Equipment failures plagued the ship’s interior: The engine room flooded twice, Aganyebi said, and the main generator plant was damaged and never repaired.

Shebah had started running operations on the ship in 2004, taking over from Houston-based ConocoPhillips. But the site’s wells had passed peak oil production several years earlier, according to the energy research firm Wood Mackenzie. Within a few years Shebah’s venture showed signs of financial stress.

Oil and gas operators tend to operate on the edge of financial wealth or financial ruin, said David Hammond, founder of the nonprofit Human Rights at Sea.

“These things go from boom to bust,” he said. “The workers are the last people to be looked after.”

Aganyebi worked in the engine room of the Trinity Spirit. Within a year of joining the crew in 2014, he said, Shebah stopped reliably paying his wages. Lawrence Yorgolo, who operated the crane on the ship, and Pius Orofin, a deck operator — the only other survivors of last year’s fire — alleged the same in interviews with the AP. The men said they stayed on board the ship because they had few other options and hoped they would someday be paid.

The staff sent repeated letters asking for the money they were owed, the men told AP. One of their last attempts was dated July 2019, with a subject line of “SAVE OUR SOUL (SOS).” They wrote they had worked 15 months without salary and endured, with “pains and hardship,” the “harsh condition and occupational hazards” of life on board the Trinity Spirit.

Shebah by that time owed millions of dollars. A trio of banks had sued the company over its alleged failure to make payments on a $150 million loan, and in 2016 a judge ruled that Shebah must repay nearly the full amount. A government-run entity, the Asset Management Corporation of Nigeria, moved to take over the company and the assets of its president. The ship’s staffing dwindled from nearly 40 people to 10.

For those who remained, there were times on the ship when there was nothing to eat, the survivors told AP. Yorgolo recalled how the crew went hungry one year on Christmas. On a separate occasion — the worst of them, he said — the engine room flooded and the staff worked for three days without food. The radio operator sent a message pleading with oil operators nearby to come to their aid.

This satellite image from Planet Labs shows an oil spill drifting from the wreckage of the Trinity Spirit ship, lower right to upper left, with clouds at right, on April 16, 2022, following an explosion aboard the ship in February 2022. (Planet Labs via AP)

“Our management was furious,” Yorgolo said.

When the radio operator next went to shore, according to Aganyebi, Yorgolo and Orofin, Shebah didn’t allow him back on the ship. He was the designated person to fire a flare or call for help in an emergency. Had the radio operator been on board the night of the explosion, Aganyebi said, “maybe those people that have died — they wouldn’t have died.”

The AP’s attempts to reach the former radio operator were unsuccessful.

When it broke in two and began to sink, the Trinity Spirit had at least 40,000 barrels of oil on board, according to Nigeria’s environmental department, which responded to examine the spill. It was capable, like most FPSOs, of storing more than a million barrels.

The agency said oil wasn’t leaking from the submerged tanks nor had it washed up on shore, but letters still arrived from community members in nearby Ondo and Delta states complaining about the spill. Oil sheens were visible fanning out from the vessel in satellite imagery for days.

Five bodies were recovered, and two were never found.

SINKING SHIP

Patrick Aganyebi, a maintenance operator aboard the Trinity Spirit oil ship, walks through his neighborhood in Igbokoda, Nigeria, on Tuesday, Sept. 6, 2022. (AP Photo/Sunday Alamba)

Among the more than 30 ships identified by the AP as older than the Trinity Spirit is the Al-Zaafarana, floating off the coast of Egypt. At 54 years, it is one of the oldest FPSOs still in service. Close behind it are FPSOs in Malaysia and Brazil, each at least half a century old.

Along Nigeria’s coast, about 200 miles (320 km) south of where the Trinity Spirit caught fire, the FPSO Mystras is still in service at 47 years old, although industry reports have noted structural issues on the ship. The classification society DNV severed ties with the Mystras three years ago, ending its regular inspections. According to Rystad Energy, it was originally designed to operate only through 2014.

The Mystras’ owner, NNPC Limited, did not respond to AP’s requests for comment.

Further inland, the Trinity Spirit’s surviving crew members have been left to eke out a living as they wait for the wages they say were never paid. Aganyebi’s vision is poor from the glare of the explosion; Orofin’s hearing is damaged from the noise. He has a long scar on his leg. Both men spent 19 days in jail.

Yorgolo, who was the only survivor not charged with a crime, fell on his back when he jumped from the burning vessel and was unconscious when fishermen pulled him into their boat. He believes he wasn’t named as a suspect only because he spent months in the hospital suffering from an injured spine.

The charges were dropped in October last year after the Ondo State Ministry of Justice reviewed the case. In conversations with AP, the men vehemently denied setting the vessel on fire or illegally storing oil. They blamed the explosion on their employer, Shebah, and the years without maintenance on the ship.

For Aganyebi, it was clear the company had abandoned the Trinity Spirit long ago.

“No medical personnel, no safety officer, no radio man in that gigantic vessel,” he said.

Off the coast of Nigeria, the ship is still visible — split in two pieces and half submerged. As recently as September, in satellite imagery, oil appeared to be leaking from the site of the wreck. It’s unclear when authorities will remove the hazard or salvage the remaining oil, as slowly, the ship sinks further into the sea.

___

Wieffering reported from Washington, D.C. Associated Press reporters Michael Biesecker in Washington, Sarah El Deeb in Beirut and Chinedu Asadu in Abuja, Nigeria, contributed to this report.

___

Follow the reporters: @helenwieffering and @GraceEkpu

Contact AP’s global investigative team at Investigative@ap.org or https://www.ap.org/tips/

AP · by HELEN WIEFFERING · October 30, 2023

3. How to End the US Marine Corps’ Intellectual Civil War

Excerpts:

The new Commandant of the Marine Corps has a way out of ending this intellectual civil war among marines. He could sponsor a new series of games run by an independent organization, such as the National Defense University using a red team that is familiar with Chinese doctrine and tactics and an unbiased analysis team.

If the game results indicate FD 2030 appears to be an operable concept, the Marine Corps can continue to march in the current direction, and we critics will be silenced. If not, the commandant can call a time-out and reevaluate the organization’s strategic direction. I am confident that the second case would prevail.

Such a move would go a long way toward restoring faith in the Marine Corps senior leadership among the retired community as well as active duty dissidents who are quietly waging an insurgency in the ranks.

How to End the US Marine Corps’ Intellectual Civil War

FD 2030 earned praise from the administration and Congress for its innovative approach but sparked an unprecedented internal strife when senior retired Marines expressed dissent.

Photo of Gary Anderson

GARY ANDERSON

OCTOBER 27, 20234 MINUTES READ

thedefensepost.com · by Gary Anderson · October 27, 2023

When the former Commandant of the Marine Corps introduced his new strategic approach, dubbed Force Design (FD) 2030, many in the administration and Congress applauded it as a forward-thinking, innovation-based approach based on emerging technologies.

They were subsequently puzzled when many senior retired marines, including virtually all the living former commandants, expressed dismay.

The resulting intellectual civil war has been unprecedented in the history of the corps.

Battle of Poitiers: Not All Innovation Is Good

Those who think FD 2030 is a disaster waiting to happen point out that not all innovation is necessarily good.

During the 1356 Battle of Poitiers, French knights were ordered to dismount and attack the army of the English Black Prince on foot. The rationale for this was that the English had defeated a similar French force 10 years earlier with an army made up overwhelmingly of infantry. It was a disastrous French innovation.

The French king failed to realize that the English victory at Crécy a decade earlier came about due to the range and killing power of English longbows, not the fact that they were fighting as infantry.

The flower of French chivalry was again slaughtered, and the king was captured. It would take decades and one more disastrous battle (Agincourt in 1415) before the French developed a combined arms approach to negate the longbow.

Focus on China

FD 2030 is designed to help gain naval superiority in the South China Sea in a potential war with China. The concept calls for the Marine Corps to acquire anti-ship missiles and other equipment to deny Chinese naval superiority in the region.

To accomplish this new mission, the former commandant divested the Marine Corps of all its tanks, much of its cannon artillery, its heavy engineer capability, and a significant portion of its manned aviation. In addition, several infantry battalions were discarded along with a reduction in strength of the remaining battalions.

Politicians love it for two reasons. First, it focuses on China, which is the primary threat of the moment identified by the National Command Authority. Second, it is the first time a service has voluntarily divested itself of capabilities without a guarantee of a return on investment.

The Chinese flag is raised during a military parade at the Zhurihe training base in China’s northern Inner Mongolia region in 2017. Photo: AFPFD 2030 Criticism

We retired marine critics of FD 2030 do not like it for several reasons; the most important of them is that we don’t believe it will work. We see it as a maritime Maginot Line.

Second, the lost capabilities were critical to what has made the Marine Corps the nation’s global 911 force because they could respond to any type of crisis ranging from a local natural disaster to a major regional conflict.

Finally, it is redundant with capabilities that exist within other services. Even if the theory behind the concept proved useful, it could be done just as well with a joint task force made up of capabilities that reside in other services. It is wasteful duplication.

More disturbing is the feeling of many retired and some active marines that the results of the war games that “validated” FD 2030 were manipulated to get the right results. My sources include several participants who believe the original analysis was edited to make the outcome more favorable to the concept than was the case. Since the final report is classified, no one can prove that assertion.

Investigation

Billions of dollars in capabilities were discarded to buy the new equipment that FD 2030 requires. If the games were manipulated, an investigation is in order.

Quite frankly, both the Defense Department Inspector General and the Congressional Research Office have been asleep at the switch. They both have the capability to look at the classified report and determine what happened. I am loath to use the word fraud, but I firmly believe that waste and abuse are afoot here.

The former commandant made it clear that FD2030 was not a subject of internal debate. Active-duty marines who argue against it in blogs do so using pseudonyms out of fear of official retaliation, and debate at the Marine Corps University has been stifled.

Commandant of the Marine Corps General Eric M. Smith. Photo: US Marine CorpsEnding Internal Strife

The new Commandant of the Marine Corps has a way out of ending this intellectual civil war among marines. He could sponsor a new series of games run by an independent organization, such as the National Defense University using a red team that is familiar with Chinese doctrine and tactics and an unbiased analysis team.

If the game results indicate FD 2030 appears to be an operable concept, the Marine Corps can continue to march in the current direction, and we critics will be silenced. If not, the commandant can call a time-out and reevaluate the organization’s strategic direction. I am confident that the second case would prevail.

Such a move would go a long way toward restoring faith in the Marine Corps senior leadership among the retired community as well as active duty dissidents who are quietly waging an insurgency in the ranks.

Gary Anderson served as the Chief of Plans (G-5) of the Marine Corps Expeditionary Force responsible for the Indo-Pacific area.

He lectures on Alternative Analysis at the George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs.

The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of The Defense Post.

The Defense Post aims to publish a wide range of high-quality opinion and analysis from a diverse array of people – do you want to send us yours? Click here to submit an op-ed.

thedefensepost.com · by Gary Anderson · October 27, 2023

4. Israel's Strategic Challenge

Excerpts:

Whatever the Israeli government decides, executing twin north-south strategies will require U.S. assistance, even beyond what is being currently discussed, not just in terms of resupply of materiel but particularly political cover and deterrent messaging against Iran as well as Hizballah.

...

In Gaza, the collapse of deterrence against Hamas means that Israel can no longer tolerate the presence of Hamas and hope merely to achieve quiet through episodic airstrikes and economic incentives. As Israel’s security cabinet declared the day after Hamas’ attack, Israel’s goal is now “to achieve the destruction of the military and governing capabilities of Hamas and Islamic Jihad in a way that will preclude their ability and willingness to threaten and attack the citizens of Israel for many years.”

This is an ambitious objective. The goal of eliminating the group’s “governing capabilities” suggests rooting Hamas out of the Gaza Strip and a refusal to continue accepting the group’s presence on Israel’s border. After Oct. 7, Israel’s security demands nothing less.

...

Regardless of what strategy Israel pursues, its success in the southern and northern theaters is going to require U.S. military, political, and strategic assistance.

Much of that has already been forthcoming. Biden has just asked Congress to appropriate $14.3 billion in assistance for Israel and, in his speeches and visit, demonstrated staunch support for Israel’s military campaign against Hamas. The challenge for the United States, though, might be sustaining this level of assistance as the conflict goes on. Both the dysfunctional U.S. political system and strained U.S. defense industry might struggle to provide sufficient aid to both Israel and Ukraine.

More important than materiel resupply, however, will be political support from the United States. The already-present accusations of Israeli war crimes will only grow louder as the tempo of Israeli operations grows. Indeed, with this conflict likely to be far more destructive than any Israel has fought in recent history, those calls are likely to grow deafening. The Oct. 17 explosion at the al Ahli hospital in Gaza City, blamed by Hamas on an Israeli airstrike but caused, according to Israeli and U.S. intelligence, by a misfired militant rocket, is a case in point. Israel’s quick publication of intelligence pointing to Palestine Islamic Jihad and Biden’s public confirmation that it was “the other team” is a model for how similar incidents should be handled.

Israel's Strategic Challenge - War on the Rocks

warontherocks.com · by Blaise Misztal · October 30, 2023

For nearly two decades, Israel has eschewed making strategic choices in dealing with the terrorist groups that surround it, relying instead on deterrence to minimize their threat while tolerating their presence. That approach failed on Oct. 7. Currently, Israel appears to be prioritizing the operational objective of clearing Hamas from Gaza. But it cannot afford to avoid grappling with the question of what that failure of deterrence means for its future security.

The most pressing strategic question for Israel, however, is not the one that has seized the attention of Western capitals — who will govern Gaza after Hamas. Instead, determining how to reestablish deterrence against other Iranian-backed groups, principally Hizballah in the north, is the more urgent challenge. Delaying operations or pursuing more minimal goals in the south while tackling the northern threat, by preemption if necessary, could do more to restore Israeli security than a massive ground offensive against Hamas. It would also buy time to develop viable options for the future governance of Gaza.

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Whatever the Israeli government decides, executing twin north-south strategies will require U.S. assistance, even beyond what is being currently discussed, not just in terms of resupply of materiel but particularly political cover and deterrent messaging against Iran as well as Hizballah.

Strategic Non-Strategy

Israel’s “mowing the lawn” approach to counter-terrorism suggests a lack of overarching strategy. As a group of retired U.S. military commanders wrote in a Jewish Institute for National Security of America study of the 2021 Israel-Hamas conflict, “the most telling feature of the Gaza conflict was the strategy mismatch between Israel’s purely military and operational objectives to degrade Hamas’ military capabilities – assisted by impressive advances in identifying and precisely striking targets – and Hamas’ information-based strategic objectives.”

Despite this, Israel did not so much lack a strategy for dealing with terrorist groups like Hamas, as it strategically chose a non-strategy: tolerating the group’s presence and relying on deterrence to control escalation. In Israel’s estimation, there was no viable strategy for achieving victory against the terrorist adversaries dug in to its south (Hamas and Palestine Islamic Jihad) and north (Hizballah) due to a combination of factors.

First, the multiplicity of threats facing Israel. Doing anything more than “mowing the lawn” in Gaza, for example, would require diverting capabilities and resources that might open Israel up to a more devastating attack from the north. Second, the lack of good strategic options. If the basis of counter-insurgency is to “clear, hold, build,” the Israeli government has seen any attempt to “hold” and “build” in currently terrorist-occupied territories as a worse strategic outcome than merely focusing on repeated cycles of “clear.” Israel failed at regime change in Lebanon in 1982, it preferred to unilaterally withdraw from Gaza in 2005 rather than keep occupying it, and its 2006 Lebanon war suffered from operational shortcomings and strategic indecision — there has been little appetite in Israel to repeat any of these scenarios. Nor have there been other actors who might replace Hamas in Gaza, as the United States has relied on, for example, the Syrian Democratic Forces to do after clearing Islamic State from Raqqa.

Thus, the Israeli government had chosen, rather than a strategy for dealing with these persistent threats, an approach that sought merely to deter them for as long as possible.

Deterrence Lost

Before the Oct. 7 attack, Israeli deterrence had been built on three legs.

The first, and most obvious, was denial. The Israel Defense Forces relied on the combination of its operational and intelligence superiority to degrade and destroy Hamas’ capabilities, infrastructure, and leadership, believing that this application of force at regular intervals was enough to force Hamas to reassess the value of attacking, at least until it rebuilt the capabilities Israel had just demolished.

The second element of Israeli deterrence was its belief in the transitive property of denial. That is, by mowing one terrorist lawn, Israel’s defense leaders believed it was sending deterrent messages to other terrorist organizations. Senior Israelis described to me the logic of recent operations against Palestine Islamic Jihad in (in August 2022 and May 2023) as not only degrading its capabilities but also, through the overwhelming operational effectiveness and shock of military operations, shoring up deterrence against Hamas and Hizballah.

The third piece of Israel’s approach to deterrence was the assumption bought into by senior Israel Defense Forces leadership that its terrorist adversaries were also political entities interested in maintaining the support of their populations and, therefore, susceptible to the use of economic carrots and sticks with which to induce quietude. After the 2021 conflict, for example, Israel began allowing Gazans to enter Israel to work to give Hamas a stake in maintaining peace. Israeli intelligence officials have also made the case that Hizballah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, might be reticent to jeopardize his position as the strongest political actor in Lebanon by entering into large-scale military hostilities with Israel.

For a decade and a half this Israeli approach to deterrence worked. With the massive air, ground, and naval incursion Hamas launched on Oct. 7, it collapsed. Hamas’ capabilities, it turned out, were significantly advanced, not degraded. Recent Israeli operations against Palestine Islamic Jihad had done nothing to stanch Hamas’ desire for conflict. And, most importantly, its savage slaughter of innocent Israelis and willingness to sacrifice the lives of Gazans to slake its bloodlust put any claims about it being a political organization to the lie.

But if Israel’s theory of deterrence did not hold against Hamas, it can have no confidence it will hold against Hizballah either. Thus, Israel should now articulate a new strategic approach to guide its response not just to the threat from Gaza but to the potentially more dangerous threat from Hizballah or even Iran.

Who Holds Gaza?

In Gaza, the collapse of deterrence against Hamas means that Israel can no longer tolerate the presence of Hamas and hope merely to achieve quiet through episodic airstrikes and economic incentives. As Israel’s security cabinet declared the day after Hamas’ attack, Israel’s goal is now “to achieve the destruction of the military and governing capabilities of Hamas and Islamic Jihad in a way that will preclude their ability and willingness to threaten and attack the citizens of Israel for many years.”

This is an ambitious objective. The goal of eliminating the group’s “governing capabilities” suggests rooting Hamas out of the Gaza Strip and a refusal to continue accepting the group’s presence on Israel’s border. After Oct. 7, Israel’s security demands nothing less.

Given Israel’s significant intelligence and precision-strike capabilities — allowing it decapitate Hamas leadership and destroy critical Hamas infrastructure, even underground — airpower would suffice to destroy the majority of Hamas’ military capabilities. But Hamas’ presence in and control of Gaza would probably survive an air war. Israel’s determination to eliminate them has led it to mobilize 360,000 reservists and forces are massing around Gaza in preparation for a ground offensive.

This will almost certainly be a long, grinding, and bloody process. As the Israeli government learned in 2014, and the United States learned in Fallujah in 2004 and then again in Mosul and Raqqa in 2016–2017, clearing an entrenched unconventional force from a dense urban environment is a dangerous task. Unless they can be rescued beforehand, commencing such an operation will almost certainly mean forsaking the chance to negotiate for the return of the over 200 hostages that Hamas has taken. “We will continue the operation,” former Israeli national security advisor Maj. Gen. (ret.) Yaakov Amidror said, “as if they are not there.”

Pursuing this objective, however, raises a vary salient question: After Hamas is cleared from Gaza and removed as a governing power, who holds it afterwards? The lack of a good answer to this question had prevented an expansive ground campaign for more than a decade. Merely clearing Gaza and retreating cannot guarantee that Hamas will not reconstitute itself, or another terrorist group emerge, and retake the territory as the Taliban did in Afghanistan — occupying Gaza could risk creating conditions in which extremism seethes and spreads as it does in Syria’s al Hol refugee camp. Turning to Gaza’s principal benefactors in the past — Qatar, Turkey, and the U.N. Relief and Works Agency — is not viable either given their support or abetting of Hamas.

The Israeli government did not have a satisfactory answer to the question of who, if not Hamas, runs Gaza before Oct. 7. Arriving at a viable solution now, at a moment’s notice, in the fog of war, seems unlikely. That in itself might be a good reason for Israel to proceed deliberately with any ground offensive. Certainly, that is how it increasingly appears to be seen in Washington, where President Joe Biden’s Oct. 19 speech warned Israel against recreating America’s post-9/11 mistakes. But it is not a concern that appears to resonate among Israeli leaders.

There is, however, another more compelling reason for which Israel might consider delaying or slowing its operations to clear Hamas: the operational limitations that a Gaza offensive might impose on the strategic choices available to Israel in the north.

The North Is Coming

The death and destruction that Hamas dealt is nothing compared to the devastating potential of Hizballah’s 150,000+ rocket arsenal. Israel estimates that Hizballah could sustain a rate of fire of at least 6,000–8,000 rockets per day. That would significantly exceed the 3,000 rockets that Hamas was able to launch on Oct. 7 — already the single largest volume of incoming fire Israel has ever faced. And, after honing its combined-arms capabilities in Syria, Hizballah fighters could stage cross-border attacks more effective than even Hamas’s on Oct. 7. As a Jewish Institute for National Security of North America study of a potential northern war found, the difficulty of intercepting this amount of rocket fire (even for Israel’s highly effective layered air-defense system), Hizballah’s possession of some several hundred precision-guided munitions, and Israel’s lack of strategic depth make it likely that Hizballah would be able to inflict potentially catastrophic damage.

This makes avoiding a northern war — or at least a Hizballah first strike — of paramount strategic importance to Israel, even as it copes with the Hamas threat. Unfortunately, Hizballah escalations prior to the Oct. 7 offensive, recent statements by Hizballah’s leader, and reported Hizballah and Iranian involvement in providing funding and training for Hamas’ attack, if not planning and operational support, all clearly suggest that Israeli deterrence has also eroded on its northern border.

Already, the preludes to a broader northern conflict have begun. Since Oct. 7, there has been daily contact across the Israel-Lebanon border. In response, Israel has conducted repeated airstrikes against targets in Lebanon and evacuated 28 communities that lie within 2 kilometers of the border. Whether these numerous daily engagements are a Hizballah attempt to distract Israel from the southern theater, a probing of Israeli defenses, or just a bid at relevancy while Hamas claims center stage is still unclear. But it all suggests that the deterrence that kept the north quiet for 17 years can no longer be counted on.

Aligning Strategies and Risks

While prosecuting an intense Gaza offensive, therefore, Israel will also have to develop and implement a new strategy to prevent Hizballah from widening the conflict. But how Israel fights in the south will affect the capabilities it has available, and therefore the strategy it can implement, in the north. Pursuing a maximalist ground campaign in Gaza, at least while the northern threat still looms and as the West Bank heats up, might prove risky for Israel.

Whether it is part of an intentional and coordinated strategy by Iran’s proxy network or mere coincidence, their increasing attacks against Israel on multiple fronts over the past year is part of what enabled the devastating effectiveness of the Oct. 7 attacks. The lack of Israeli response to Hizballah escalations had contributed to slipping deterrence, but it was growing unrest and violence in the West Bank that drew Israeli forces normally assigned to the southern command away from Gaza.

Already, the same dynamic is unfolding again. As isolated clashes turn to larger protests in the West Bank, Israeli security forces are increasing their presence. The ongoing exchanges along the northern border also demand heavier deployments. With the mobilization of 360,000 reservists, the Israeli military might have the manpower to fight on all three fronts simultaneously, but it might not have the air and air-defense assets to be as effective as it would need to be to eliminate Hamas and defend against a Hizballah onslaught at the same time. Israel’s operational plans for a northern war depend on wave after wave of sorties to eliminate as quickly as possible many of Hizballah’s munitions stockpiles and launch sites. Deploying those assets to the north at a time when ground forces are engaged in Gaza could deprive those units of much-needed air support. Or vice versa. Similarly, a northern war would require re-locating and re-directing at least some of Israel’s air defense batteries away from the south to deal with the large volume of fire from Hizballah. This could then leave southern communities exposed to rockets from Gaza.

These are not risks that Israel should be willing to take following the Oct. 7 attack. Even with incredibly strong backing from the United States, including clear deterrent messaging to Hizballah in the form of two aircraft carriers in the Eastern Mediterranean, Israel will not and cannot trust the security of its northern border to its U.S. partner alone. Iranian proxies are already trying to gauge and erode the power of the U.S. deterrent by attacking U.S. bases in the region — a lack of U.S. response might be interpreted to mean that the United States would be similarly reluctant to act against Hizballah.

Regardless of the strength of the U.S. deterrent right now, Israel cannot count on it in the long term. If only U.S. carriers are keeping Hizballah at bay, then their inevitable departure would prompt renewed attacks on Israel and the deployment of yet another carrier group — an untenable cycle. Instead, the United States should want Israel to have the strength to deter further attacks on its own.

Israel’s ability to defend itself by itself, and defend U.S. regional interests in the process, is one of its chief strategic assets as a U.S. partner. Preserving and, in the aftermath of Oct. 7, rebuilding that capability should be a core objective for Jerusalem and Washington alike. That means Israel, not the United States, taking the lead in confronting the Hizballah threat. And it should likely mean a more proactive Israeli strategy than the current tit-for-tat response to Hizballah attacks.

At the core of Israel’s now-shaken standing as the Middle East’s most capable military is its ability not just to respond to attacks but to take the initiative, as it has with repeated strikes in Syria or covert action in Iran. Restoring its ability to surprise, not just defeat, its adversaries will be critical to reestablishing Israel’s security, undoing the perception of political weakness or complacence that has built up recently, and rebuilding its deterrence. Short of that, Iran will gladly send further legions of Palestinians, Lebanese, or other proxies to kill and die for its cause. And the Iranian regime would shed what nuclear restraint it still exhibits should its leaders ever stop fearing what Israelis might do should they ever develop a nuclear bomb.

While ensuring Hamas can never again attack Israel is the rightful concern of Israel’s political leaders, all of these factors — the operational and strategic challenges of a Gaza ground offensive, a lack of deterrence against Hizballah, the risks of stretching its resources too thin across multiple theaters, and the need to rebuild its credibility — suggest that Israel should consider delaying its ground offensive in the south, or implementing it in phases, allowing it to adopt a strategy of preemption in the north. A preemptive strike, as reportedly supported by Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, would allow Israel to neutralize, or at least reduce, the risk of a Hizballah first strike while reestablishing the credibility of its deterrent threat against Iran and its other proxies who have been signaling their willingness to enter the conflict.

U.S. Assistance

Regardless of what strategy Israel pursues, its success in the southern and northern theaters is going to require U.S. military, political, and strategic assistance.

Much of that has already been forthcoming. Biden has just asked Congress to appropriate $14.3 billion in assistance for Israel and, in his speeches and visit, demonstrated staunch support for Israel’s military campaign against Hamas. The challenge for the United States, though, might be sustaining this level of assistance as the conflict goes on. Both the dysfunctional U.S. political system and strained U.S. defense industry might struggle to provide sufficient aid to both Israel and Ukraine.

More important than materiel resupply, however, will be political support from the United States. The already-present accusations of Israeli war crimes will only grow louder as the tempo of Israeli operations grows. Indeed, with this conflict likely to be far more destructive than any Israel has fought in recent history, those calls are likely to grow deafening. The Oct. 17 explosion at the al Ahli hospital in Gaza City, blamed by Hamas on an Israeli airstrike but caused, according to Israeli and U.S. intelligence, by a misfired militant rocket, is a case in point. Israel’s quick publication of intelligence pointing to Palestine Islamic Jihad and Biden’s public confirmation that it was “the other team” is a model for how similar incidents should be handled.

Beyond blaming Israel for individual incidents, political pressure to reach a ceasefire is likely to grow more intense well before Israel’s operations achieve their intended objectives, and particularly if they expand into Lebanon or other theaters. Defending Israel’s right to defend itself, as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield did recently, will be crucial to maintaining the political space Israel needs to conduct and conclude its operations. But it will require the United States buying into and helping execute Israel’s strategy — in both the north, if Israel opens a front there, and in the south. That does not mean, however, that the United States should fight Israel’s battles for it. Instead, it should take steps, and avoid taking others, in order to make it as feasible as possible for Israel to set and achieve viable strategic objectives.

In the north, that means reducing U.S. insistence on preventing Israeli escalation. The U.S. objective should be to strengthen Israel’s ability to defend itself, not restrain or undermine it. If the deployment of two U.S. carriers becomes as much a “bear hug” meant to constrain Israeli action as a deterrent against Hizballah, it could weaken Israel’s deterrent posture and set the expectation for continued U.S. presence, proving detrimental to both U.S. and Israeli interests in the long term. Instead, U.S. capabilities in the Eastern Mediterranean should be used to facilitate an Israeli strategy for reestablishing security in the north, deterring Hizballah until that strategy is ready and assisting any Israeli operations that follow. Where U.S. presence and strength are needed, however, is in the Persian Gulf in order to stop already ongoing Iranian-backed attacks in the region as well as deter Iran from trying to broaden the conflict if Israel does strike Lebanon. In addition to the A-10, F-35, F-15, and F-16 aircraft the administration has already announced it is deploying to the Middle East, it should consider moving a carrier strike group into the Gulf and strategic bombers and specialized munitions, such as the Massive Ordnance Penetrator, either to the region or to Diego Garcia.

Where the United States should engage Israel is on its southern strategy. Israel will need U.S. assistance in solving its strategic dilemma in Gaza — neither Washington nor Jerusalem should wait until the day after to tackle that challenge. While the Israel Defense Forces have been planning for a potential northern war and will be ready to execute a strategy of denial once the political decision is made, they will have a far tougher time articulating a coherent strategic objective while under fire in Gaza. The United States can and should help Israel to find a viable political solution that will enable the Israel Defense Forces to withdraw after their ground offensive, reconstruction to begin, and governance to resume, all while credibly keeping Hamas from reconstituting. This will likely require calling on responsible U.S. Arab partners to provide not just funding but perhaps even some sort of governing coalition and security presence. The success of such efforts will be directly proportional to two factors: Israel’s military fortunes and U.S. political engagement.

Despite the Oct. 7 attack’s deliberate setback to Israeli-Saudi normalization, the strategic logic of that process still holds and can extend to settling the future of Gaza. The centripetal forces that were driving Riyadh toward Jerusalem and Washington were the belief that they could better guarantee the security and prosperity of Saudis than Iran, Russia, or China. If Israel regains its reputation for unrivaled regional military strength by demonstrating its ability and will to defeat its enemies, if the United States extends its current deterrent posture to include defending its Gulf Arab partners against possible Iranian escalation, then those partners might be willing to invest the political and financial capital to secure a better future for Gaza. They might even come to see that championing a Hamas-free Gaza positions them to compete with Iran in the Muslim world. To be sure, support from other international partners and organizations will also be needed, but with buy-in from key Arab states, it will be easier to convince other international donors to back a new vision for Gaza.

Providing military, political, and strategic assistance to Israel can help to ensure that as Israeli leaders formulate strategies to address the southern threat from Hamas and the northern risk from Hizballah, they adopt an approach that reduces the risks to this close U.S. partner and rebuilds a viable stability in the region.

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Blaise Misztal is the Vice President for Policy at JINSA.

Image: Israel Defense Forces

Commentary

warontherocks.com · by Blaise Misztal · October 30, 2023

5. China touts its plan for global security, with Russia by its side

Excerpts:

“Our world is overshadowed by the dark cloud of cold war mentality and we must avoid falling into bloc confrontation,” Zhang told his audience, using language typically employed by Beijing to criticize Washington and its allies.

“If a country only cares about its own interest it will perceive everyone else as a rival, if it is obsessed with suppressing others with different opinions it will surely cause conflicts and wars in the world,” he said.

Zhang, who ranks higher than defense minister, also said countries should instead focus on “common security” and respecting each other’s paths of development – key tenants stressed in Xi’s security initiative, which the leader announced last year.

The general also said Beijing would “show no mercy” against any moves for Taiwan independence, referring to the self-governing island China’s ruling Communist Party claims as its own.

China would continue to “deepen strategic coordination” with Russia’s military, and it was willing, Zhang added, to develop China-US military relations.

...

The forum was attended by a delegation from the US defense department led by Xanthi Carras, China country director in the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense.

China touts its plan for global security, with Russia by its side | CNN

By Simone McCarthy, Steven Jiang and Wayne Chang, CNN

 5 minute read 

Updated 6:02 AM EDT, Mon October 30, 2023

CNN · by Simone McCarthy, Steven Jiang, Wayne Chang · October 30, 2023

CNN —

China is hosting defense officials from across the world for its flagship military diplomacy conference this week – a key opportunity for Beijing to promote its alternative vision for global security that has also underscored its increasing alignment with Moscow against the United States.

More than 30 defense ministers and military chiefs, as well as lower-level representatives from dozens more countries and organizations, including the US, gathered for the three-day Xiangshan Forum in the Chinese capital.

Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu was given prominent billing as the first visiting official to address the forum Monday, where he and China’s keynote speaker both took aim at what they see as a failed US-led security system.

Noticeably missing from the line-up was China’s own defense minister.

Beijing last week announced it had removed defense minister Li Shangfu from his position, without naming a replacement or providing an explanation for the sudden demotion – the latest in a series of high-level shakeups under Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

The Xiangshan Forum – billed as an opportunity for countries to resolve differences regarding defense and security issues – also comes amid heightened concerns about the potential for the Israel-Hamas war to spiral in a wider regional conflict and as Russia continues its onslaught on Ukraine.

Beijing has tried to project itself as a potential peacemaker in both conflicts, as it aims to cast itself as a player in global security amid heightened tensions with Washington.

That bid has drawn skepticism from governments in its own region and the West, given its aggression in the South China Sea and intimidation of Taiwan, as well as its backing of Russia despite its unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.

Both conflicts, however, were only briefly mentioned in a keynote address from top Communist Party military official Gen. Zhang Youxia, who repeated China’s calls for a “political resolution” for the “Ukraine crisis” and the “Israel-Palestine conflict.”

This pool photograph distributed by Russian state owned agency Sputnik shows Russia's President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping heading to a group photo session during the third Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on October 18, 2023. (Photo by Grigory SYSOYEV / POOL / AFP) (Photo by GRIGORY SYSOYEV/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)

Grigory Sysoyev/Pool/AFP/Getty Images

Putin touts solidarity with China in Xi’s pitch for new world order as crisis grips Middle East

Zhang, who is vice chairman of Central Military Commission – a powerful body headed by Chinese leader Xi Jinping who ultimately commands China’s armed forces – instead focused his address on hailing Xi’s “Global Security Initiative” as a solution to global conflict – while making veiled jabs against the United States, which he did not directly name.

“Our world is overshadowed by the dark cloud of cold war mentality and we must avoid falling into bloc confrontation,” Zhang told his audience, using language typically employed by Beijing to criticize Washington and its allies.

“If a country only cares about its own interest it will perceive everyone else as a rival, if it is obsessed with suppressing others with different opinions it will surely cause conflicts and wars in the world,” he said.

Zhang, who ranks higher than defense minister, also said countries should instead focus on “common security” and respecting each other’s paths of development – key tenants stressed in Xi’s security initiative, which the leader announced last year.

The general also said Beijing would “show no mercy” against any moves for Taiwan independence, referring to the self-governing island China’s ruling Communist Party claims as its own.

China would continue to “deepen strategic coordination” with Russia’s military, and it was willing, Zhang added, to develop China-US military relations.

Increasing alignment with Russia

His speech was followed by a pointed address by Russia’s Shoigu - a key architect of Moscow’s faltering invasion of Ukraine that still rages 20 months on in what is Europe’s fiercest fighting since World War Two.

During his speech Shoigu accused NATO of “covering its real intention” to increase its presence in the Asia-Pacific and of promoting an arms race in the region, echoing China’s typical talking points.

“To maintain its geopolitical and strategic dominance, the US is deliberately undermining the basis of international security and strategic stability, including arms control, and undermining the legitimate rights and interests of Russia for its own security,” Shoigu said.

Security coordination between China and Russia has tightened in recent years amid rising tensions between each with the US and its allies. Beijing has repeatedly said it will not provide lethal aid to Russia’s war effort, but has continued to participate in joint military drills and other security coordination, while providing a key lifeline for the Russian economy since its invasion of Ukraine last year.

China's Defence Minister Li Shangfu addresses a speech during the Moscow Conference on International Security in Kubinka, in the outskirts of Moscow, on August 15, 2023. Russian defence minister said on August 15, 2023, that Ukraine's military resources were "almost exhausted", despite support from the West. (Photo by Alexander NEMENOV / AFP) (Photo by ALEXANDER NEMENOV/AFP via Getty Images)

Alexander Nemenov/AFP/Getty Images/File

China removes Defense Minister Li Shangfu after two-month disappearance

The Russian defense minister’s appearance followed a visit from Russian President Vladimir Putin in Beijing earlier this month, where he took the place of prominence next to Xi at the leader’s Belt and Road Forum.

The security forum also comes as the US and China are attempting to navigate their contentious relationship that includes frictions over Taiwan and Beijing’s aggression in the South China Sea. A potential meeting between Xi and US President Joe Biden in the United States next month is seen by both sides as an important opportunity to stabilize ties.

Beijing severed high-level military dialogue with Washington last August in retaliation for a visit from then-US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to Taiwan.

Its officials have declined American outreach for high level meetings, in what was widely seen as a protest against sanctions Washington placed on former defense minister Li in 2018, prior to his time as defense minister, for weapons purchases from Russia.

Chinese defense ministry spokesperson Wu Qian said at a regular press conference last week that Chinese officials would “have exchanges” with the US delegation.

“China attaches great importance to the development of military relations between China and the United States,” Wu said at the time, adding he hoped for a “favorable atmosphere for the healthy and stable development” of their military relations, according to state media.

The forum was attended by a delegation from the US defense department led by Xanthi Carras, China country director in the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense.

CNN · by Simone McCarthy, Steven Jiang, Wayne Chang · October 30, 2023

6. As Violence Surges, Nations Seek U.S. Defense Pacts. Some Americans Are Wary.

The answer to these issues for allies is alliances - rather than only depend on the US all alliance partners have to step up and contribute to collective defense.

We have to give credit to Trump to try to force allies to contribute more to the defense.

We have to give credit to Bidne for revitalizing alliances and developing new collective security agreements.

But we need the best of both. We need strong relationships among friends, partners, and allies. But we also need those friends, partners, and allies to be strong;  e.g., to be their very best in terms of their own national security and contribution to collective security.

As Violence Surges, Nations Seek U.S. Defense Pacts. Some Americans Are Wary.

Many countries, including Ukraine and Israel, want greater U.S. protection against Russia, China, Iran and North Korea. But some Americans resist further military commitments.

By Edward Wong

Reporting from Washington and from Jerusalem and Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, while traveling with the U.S. secretary of state

nytimes.com · by Edward Wong · October 26, 2023

President Biden has reinforced the case to Americans for military aid to Ukraine and Israel.Credit...Erin Schaff/The New York Times

From around the world, they come to the halls of power in Washington seeking one thing: a commitment from the American government to protect their countries in a time of rising geopolitical crises.

In recent months, leaders and diplomats from a growing number of nations have signed security pacts with the United States, upgraded military ties and weapons purchases or have begun negotiating potential new defense treaties and arrangements.

The countries include Ukraine, at war with Russia; Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, eager to stave off Iran; and Japan, South Korea, Australia and the Philippines, anxious about China and North Korea’s military ambitions. Frightened by Russia’s aggression, Finland joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in April, while Sweden is on the brink of membership.

The Biden administration is surging munitions to Israel for airstrikes in Gaza and has sent two aircraft carrier groups to the eastern Mediterranean. Israel and the United States have a series of agreements on military aid.

The push around the world for the United States to be all things to all partners in terms of defense is stronger than at any time since the end of the Cold War. But many Americans are resisting having their nation play that role, at least partly because of the political impact of the disastrous U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

And critics say the devastating attacks by Hamas on Oct. 7 that killed about 1,400 Israelis underscore the fact that defense agreements do not create a real foundation for peace and deterrence.

That opposition to the United States being what President Biden and other U.S. officials call “the indispensable nation” — they mean the security guarantor around the world — has some roots in traditional liberal antiwar values, but it is also tied to surprising ideological shifts of recent years. Many Republican voters, once proponents of a Cold War and antiterrorism global military footprint, now support isolationist and pro-Russia politicians, notably former President Donald J. Trump.

Some Republican lawmakers are now trying to halt aid to Ukraine, and progressive Democrats have denounced the ongoing Israeli airstrikes that have killed thousands of Palestinians. All of that sets up a potential battle over a new White House request for $105 billion of military aid that would go mostly to Ukraine and Israel.

Democratic senators have also raised doubts about the Biden administration’s efforts to negotiate a defense treaty with autocratic Saudi Arabia that would resemble the agreements the United States has with Japan and South Korea, decades-long democratic allies.

Despite the signs of American opposition, countries across Europe, the Middle East and Asia still consider the United States the most — and perhaps the only — viable guarantor of their security. And U.S. officials say the alliances remain a pillar of what they call the “rules-based international order.”

Mr. Biden has reinforced that notion, most recently in a speech on Oct. 19 in which he made the case for military aid to Ukraine and Israel.

“American leadership is what holds the world together,” he said. “American alliances are what keep us, America, safe. American values are what make us a partner that other nations want to work with. To put all that at risk if we walk away from Ukraine, if we turn our backs on Israel, it’s just not worth it.”

But some lawmakers and analysts say other countries, including wealthy European nations fearful of Russia, need to take greater responsibility for their defenses.

“U.S. allies and partners are concerned about U.S. overstretch,” said Stephen Wertheim, a historian of American foreign policy and senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “But paradoxically, if they have put enough chips to date in the U.S. basket” of military ties, he added, “they want to seek closer relationships and more formal commitments from the United States.”

“From the perspective of the U.S.,” he said, “although there is great recognition in Washington that the unipolar moment is over, there’s still a reliance on U.S. security umbrellas along the lines of, ‘We know how to provide for peace and stability.’ There’s a presumption that the U.S. security umbrella is the solution.”

Defense agreements between the United States and other nations come in all shapes and sizes. The strongest, which usually need approval by two-thirds of the Senate, guarantee mutual defense if one country is attacked. Article 5 of the NATO charter is a prominent example.

Some agreements, such as the new one with Bahrain, are a step down, requiring only that the countries consult with each other in the event of hostilities. Israel is not one of the 52 treaty allies of the United States, but some Israeli officials have discussed whether to push for a formal pact.

After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the United States and its partners became more concerned about nonstate adversaries like Al Qaeda, and they focused their energies on the so-called global war on terror. But in recent years, as Russia and China have acted with greater military aggression, and as Iran and North Korea have advanced their nuclear and missile programs, many countries have sought to upgrade their ties with the United States.

The strategies in this era of so-called great-power competition hark back to the alliance and bloc building that took place during the Cold War.

Security umbrellas can sometimes deter adversaries from attacking. President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has refrained from strikes on any NATO nation even though those countries support Ukraine’s military. But the pacts can also appear flimsy: China’s naval and coast guard vessels act aggressively toward the ships of countries that are U.S. treaty allies — even ramming two Philippine military vessels on Sunday.

The most controversial move by Mr. Biden to forge a new mutual defense treaty involves Saudi Arabia. The kingdom is by far the biggest buyer of American weapons, and the U.S. military helps train its forces. But Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman wants much more. He has pressed the Biden administration for a Senate-ratified defense treaty that would commit the United States to protecting Saudi Arabia if it is attacked.

The treaty is Prince Mohammed’s biggest demand as a condition for normalizing ties with Israel, though the Saudis are in wait-and-see mode on the normalization talks as the Israel-Hamas war unfolds.

The prince has made an implicit threat that Saudi Arabia could move its main security relationship, including arms purchases, to another country, likely China, if it does not get a treaty with the United States. But some analysts say he is bluffing: The Saudi military is built around American weapons, and China’s military currently cannot project force in the Middle East and prefers to avoid becoming entangled in conflicts there. Without a treaty, the United States maintains more leverage over Saudi Arabia, they say, even as the kingdom grows its diplomatic and economic ties to China.

“The idea that a U.S. security guarantee will somehow peel Saudi Arabia away from China is naïve in the extreme,” Emma Ashford, a senior fellow on U.S. foreign policy at the Stimson Center, wrote this month. “Indeed, the most likely scenario for this deal is that the U.S. will take responsibility for Saudi security while China remains the kingdom’s most important economic partner. This seems like a poor trade.”

Since the Hamas attacks, other analysts have said that efforts by the Trump and Biden administrations to sell advanced weapons to Arab autocrats in exchange for those leaders normalizing ties with Israel in the Abraham Accords did nothing to expand options for peace in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In fact, they say those efforts helped increase tensions among Palestinians, who believe their aspirations for nationhood are being buried.

“The Biden doctrine presumed that the Palestinians could be shunted aside and offered some crumbs to keep them quiet,” Matt Duss, an advocate of progressive foreign policy, wrote in Foreign Policy. “No attempt would be made to address a key source of violence: the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, now more than half a century old.”

Mr. Biden faces resistance from his own party on a U.S.-Saudi defense treaty. On Oct. 4, a group of Democratic senators sent a letter to the president asking whether U.S. interests would be undermined by such a treaty, given Prince Mohammed’s dismal record on human rights, including his war in Yemen.

Defending Ukraine is also an increasingly thorny issue for Mr. Biden, but here it is Republicans who are balking. Republican lawmakers cut funding for Ukraine from stopgap government spending legislation passed last month. Now Mr. Biden is fighting to get Ukraine funding approved by Congress.

And Ukraine wants more. President Volodymyr Zelensky has pushed for his country to enter NATO. Barring that, he has said the United States and Europe must come up with a new “security architecture” to address Russia’s persistent threat.

The Reagan-era Republican Party might have jumped at a chance to support Ukraine, but Mr. Trump admires Mr. Putin and is pulling Republicans into the pro-Russia camp.

If Mr. Trump were to become president again, he would not only likely cut off aid to Ukraine, but he also might withdraw the United States from NATO and scrap the alliances with Japan and South Korea.

The traditional American security role in the world would end, an epochal change that would bring relief to some — but distress to others.

“A Trump victory would be a systemic shock for Europe,” said Constanze Stelzenmüller, director of the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution. “Policymakers and politicians are frantically debating hedging strategies, but there is no credible full replacement for the U.S. security umbrella.”

Our Coverage of the Israel-Hamas War

• A Delayed Invasion: Almost immediately after Israel was attacked on Oct. 7, it began preparing for a ground invasion of Gaza. More than two weeks later, the invasion has yet to happen. Here is why.
• In Besieged Gaza: Israel imposed a siege on Gaza on Oct. 9 — cutting off water, food, electricity and fuel. Survival in the enclave now means not only escaping death from intense airstrikes, but also finding enough to eat and drink.
• Urban Combat: As the Israeli Army gathers at the Gaza border for a threatened invasion, experts are warning that the country’s troops could face some of the fiercest street-to-street combat since World War II.
• A Political Conundrum: Israel has set itself a stiff challenge in aiming to vanquish Hamas. But a bigger question awaits after the war ends: Who will govern Gaza?
• Hostages: Hamas and other Palestinian groups are believed to be holding more than 200 hostages. An American mother and daughter and two elderly Israeli women have been released.

The Conflict’s Global Reach

• Fury in the Middle East: Amid widespread protests in the region, the carnage in Gaza has unified the Arab world and brought a new outpouring of support for the Palestinian quest for a state.
• Climate Change: The war between Israel and Hamas in the middle of an energy-rich region could imperil action against global warming.
• A Threat for Global Growth: As the conflict roils the markets, worries are growing about how much the turmoil could cost the global economy.
• Culture: Multiple events highlighting Palestinian culture, society and politics, including at the Frankfurt Book Fair, have been called off or put on hold since the war began.

nytimes.com · by Edward Wong · October 26, 2023

7. Early stages of Israeli ground assault in Gaza shrouded in secrecy

Well I should hope so.

Early stages of Israeli ground assault in Gaza shrouded in secrecy

By Shira Rubin, William Booth and Ilan Ben Zion

October 29, 2023 at 4:39 p.m. EDT

The Washington Post · by Shira Rubin · October 29, 2023

TEL AVIV — Israel has now launched what it is calling the second phase of its assault to destroy Hamas in Gaza, a conflict Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described as his country’s “second war for independence.” Israeli troops are inside the Gaza perimeter — probing, destroying tunnels and learning in close-quarter combat about the Palestinian fighters who shocked the world when they attacked Israel on Oct. 7.

The early movements, even near-term objectives, of the Israeli military’s ground assault remained shrouded on Sunday, not so much by the fog of war, but by a smokescreen of secrecy.

The United Nations said the ground operations were accompanied by the “most intense Israeli airstrikes and artillery shelling” since the start of the war more than three weeks ago. But Israel’s military and civilian authorities, watched over by military censors, are issuing sentences — not pages — of information about what exactly is happening.

The Israel Defense Forces on Sunday released short black-and-white, ghostly video clips showing tanks, armored bulldozers and troops on foot inside Gaza.

The numbers of soldiers, their units, how much artillery, how far they have penetrated into Gaza and where have not been revealed.

Still, a general outline is emerging.

Israeli tanks and military bulldozers have entered the territory. Israeli forces are spending the night. They are fully in. These are not the “targeted” raids that the IDF carried out last week, which it said were executed by small, elite units who crossed back into Israel at the end of their mission. This is the beginning of what Israeli leaders are warning could be a very long war, which would see Hamas, the militant group that controls Gaza, destroyed, and a new entity installed to govern the enclave.

But instead of a massive D-Day style assault, military analysts in Israel say it appears that the IDF is moving slowly, cautiously into the strip, not mile by mile, but 100 yards at a time, searching for and destroying Hamas booby traps and tunnels around the perimeter and preparing corridors for the quick deployment of tanks and troops to the periphery of Gaza City.

Gaza is only 25 miles long and six miles wide. At present, Israeli troops are mostly operating at the very edges of the narrow enclave, in farm fields and emptied villages, and around the Erez Crossing in northern Gaza, said Michael Milshtein, head of the Palestinian Studies Forum at Tel Aviv University and former senior member at Israel Defense Intelligence.

But what happens when Israeli forces enter Gaza City and the densely packed refugee camps that surround it? Several analysts, including Milshtein, reached for the same shorthand to describe the intense and bloody urban combat that might come.

“Fallujah,” they imagined, referring to the 2004 American-led, block-by-block assault in the Iraq War that left 95 U.S. soldiers and more than a thousand Iraqis dead.

On Sunday evening, the Israeli military reported that their troops came upon Hamas fighters exiting the shaft of a tunnel inside Gaza near the Erez Crossing in the north.

“Following the identification, the soldiers confronted the terrorists, killing and injuring them,” the IDF spokesman said.

The word Israeli military analysts kept using to describe the Israeli strategy was “gradualism.”

IDF spokesman Daniel Hagari said on Sunday that more and more Israeli troops were now continuously, and gradually, joining forces already fighting on the ground, “progressing along phases, according to plan.”

Hagari was referring to the three-phase plan outlined by Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on Oct. 20, in a meeting of the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee.

It includes, first, airstrikes and other “maneuvers” intended to kill militant leaders and obliterate Hamas infrastructure; followed by “lower intensity” operations “with the objective of eliminating ‘pockets of resistance,’” and, finally, the “removal of Israel’s responsibility for life in the Gaza Strip, and the establishment of a new security reality for the citizens of Israel,” according to a statement issued by his office.

On Friday night, internet and cellular service were cut, plunging Gaza into digital darkness. (Spotty service returned on Sunday.) Netanyahu, in a televised statement Saturday night, described the escalation as “the second phase of the war.”

The war will be “long and difficult,” Netanyahu warned. Israeli officials would not say whether the expanded campaign represents the start of the anticipated major ground incursion.

The prime minister said Israel’s objectives are clear, “to eradicate the military and governing capabilities of Hamas and return the hostages home,” referring to the 239 Israelis believed to be held in captivity in the enclave.

Yoel Guzansky, a former official in Israel’s National Security Council and now a senior fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies, said that Israel’s slower, more gradual approach might undermine predictions that it would go in, aggressively and quickly, as it did in the four previous wars it has waged against Hamas.

Guzansky said that the troops being sent in — probably composed of elite infantry units and combat engineers, whose numbers remain undetermined — have been deployed to the northern and eastern border areas.

They are seeking, he said, two tactical objectives: to identify and clear booby traps, improvised explosive devices, and any other natural or man-made obstacles for the entrance of larger numbers, and, more conceptually, give Israel a chance to learn about the enemy that it had for so many years discounted.

“If you enter a little bit, you can provoke the fighters, draw them out of hiding, and you can deny them all kinds of capabilities, and prepare for the big show later on,” he said.

But the IDF, he said, is also aware that the way Palestinian fighters engage with the IDF will provide clues as to “the ‘new Hamas’ — how it’s fighting, where it’s hiding, what capabilities, weapons, tactics it has.”

The former Israeli prime minister, Naftali Bennett, on Saturday night tweeted what he called “The Gaza Siege Plan.” It is not clear whether the Israeli military shares Bennett’s vision.

Bennett said the IDF should “suffocate Hamas operatives in their tunnels,” while Israel occupies a “security strip” inside Gaza until Hamas forces surrender and release all hostages.

The former prime minister said the IDF should “not act in the way that Hamas expects us to act.”

He also said that publicizing the siege plan “scares and stresses Hamas leaders and will be a catalyst to bring about results.”

Bennett imagined a “new security strip” two kilometers (1.2 miles) wide along the entire border, “a permanent strip.”

He advocated “massive firepower and ground forces, and engineering. Imagine bulldozers simply leveling the area.”

Bennett said Israel should cut the Gaza Strip in half, controlling the northern sector and letting civilians flee south, until “Hamas disarms unilaterally and releases all the hostages.”

Bennett imagined this could take months to years.

Kobi Michael, a senior researcher at Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies, said the offensive is now beginning to clear routes for operation in the Gaza Strip.

“Each night the raids are deeper and deeper, and we are cleaning all the routes from the border to Gaza City,” he said.

“All the cleaned areas are paved for the massive land incursion, which is the third phase of the operation. This is the gradualism of this war,” he said. “Everything is being done because Israel doesn’t want to cause a very big collateral damage and to save as much as possible the life of innocent civilians.”

Kobi did not envision Israeli troops at this point entering the Hamas tunnels.

“We are not going to fight in the tunnels, 30, 40 meters under the ground. But we have, I assume, some creative means and manners that will enable us to destroy these tunnels on the heads of Hamas terrorists that are hiding inside,” he said.

Ben Milch, 31, from Raanana in central Israel, served as a combat engineer in the Israeli military during the 2014 war in the Gaza Strip. He and his unit were involved in destroying Hamas tunnels.

“We know that they are slowly moving in with ground forces little by little. I would imagine that part of that is — from the engineering perspective — to clear tunnels to reduce the capability of Hamas popping up within Israel and behind our soldiers and setting up ambushes on us.”

Tunnels actually played a minimal role in the Hamas-led assault inside Israel, when militants stormed into Israeli communities in the south mostly by land but also by sea and air, with fighters paragliding over the perimeter.

But the network of underground passages could be vital for Hamas going forward, according to Yair Golan, the IDF’s former deputy chief of staff. Israel believes that Hamas leaders seek refuge in the tunnels, store weapons there, and are also probably using them to hold the hostages taken from Israel, Golan said.

“We can’t say exactly what the fighting will look like,” he said. “But the last two nights have been Israel’s declaration of intention to Hamas — to say, ‘pay attention, Israel will continue to apply pressure unless you begin to cooperate with us.’”

Booth and Ben Zion reported from Jerusalem.

The Washington Post · by Shira Rubin · October 29, 2023

8. Retired general ‘can only hope’ Iran, proxies don’t escalate Middle East conflict

Retired general ‘can only hope’ Iran, proxies don’t escalate Middle East conflict

BY MIRANDA NAZZARO - 10/29/23 10:26 AM ET

https://thehill.com/policy/international/4281941-retired-general-can-only-hope-iran-proxies-dont-escalate-middle-east-conflict/

Retired U.S. Gen. Robert Abrams said “we can only hope” Iranian proxies and Iran-backed groups do not take the war between Israel and militant group Hamas to a “much higher level.”

Asked on ABC News’s “This Week,” if the U.S. should be doing more about a potential escalation of the conflict, Abrams said, “We can only hope that Iran and its proxies don’t take this to a much higher level.”

Abrams’s comments echo those of U.S. and world leaders who have expressed concerns over an escalation of conflict in the Middle East following militant group Hamas’s bloody massacre of Israel over three weeks ago that left over 1,400 Israelis dead in their homes, at a bus stop and at a music festival.

Hamas has been backed by Iran in the past, though it is not immediately clear the exact role Iran or its proxies played in the Oct. 7 attack.

Attacks on American forces have increased since Hamas’s surprise incursion on Oct. 7, fueling worries that Iran and its proxies could seek to widen the conflict and destabilize the region.

Last week, U.S. fighter jets struck two facilities in eastern Syria used by Iran and its proxies following attacks against U.S. troopers in the region.

Defense officials told reporters President Biden ordered U.S. military forces to carry out “self-defense airstrikes” on a weapons storage facility and an ammunition storage area used by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. 

Defense Sectary Lloyd Austin said last week the strikes by F-16 fighter jets are in response to a series of ongoing and mostly unsuccessful attacks against U.S. personnel in Iraq and Syria by “Iranian-backed militia groups,” that began earlier this month. 

Abrams said the U.S. should “continue to escalate that sort of portion of this protection of protection of our troops.”

“Because as the national security adviser [Jake Sullivan] just said, the military, the U.S military will take all the actions necessary to defend their troops,” Abrams said, in reference to Sullivan’s earlier comments on “This Week,” where he vowed continued U.S. response to any attacks on U.S. troops by Iranian-backed groups or Iran’s proxies.

Israel has responded to Hamas with a bombardment of Gaza that ramped up over the weekend ahead of an expected ground incursion by Israeli forces. Over 8,000 Palestinians have died so far in the conflict, the Gaza Health Ministry reported on Sunday.

The U.S. has offered its “unwavering support,” of Israel, while U.S. officials have noted Israel’s reasonability to keep Palestinian civilians’ lives in mind while defending itself against Hamas.

9. Scoop: Saudi defense minister to visit White House amid fears of regional war

My friend from Georgetown. He had to drop out of graduate school to become the Saudi Ambassador to the US.

Oct 28, 2023 -World

Scoop: Saudi defense minister to visit White House amid fears of regional war

• Barak Ravid

https://www.axios.com/2023/10/28/saudi-mbs-kbs-biden-hamas-israel-gaza-war?utm_campaign=dfn-ebb&utm_medium=email&utm_source=sailthru&SToverlay=2002c2d9-c344-4bbb-8610-e5794efcfa7dSaudi Defence Minister Khalid bin Salman. Photo: Handout/Royal Court of Saudi Arabia /Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

Saudi Defense Minister Khalid bin Salman (KBS) is expected to visit Washington on Monday for talks with senior Biden administration officials, three sources with knowledge of the trip told Axios.

What it matters: The visit has long been scheduled, the sources said, but it will take place just days after Israel expanded its ground operation in Gaza — an offensive Riyadh condemned on Saturday. It also comes as the U.S. and Saudi Arabia express concerns that the fighting between Israel and Hamas could widen into a regional war.

• KBS, the brother of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) and the former ambassador to the U.S., is the highest-ranking Saudi official to visit Washington since the Biden administration assumed office.

Driving the news: KBS is expected to meet with White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, Secretary of State Tony Blinken and several senators, the sources said.

• The White House declined to comment. The Saudi Embassy in Washington didn't immediately reply to questions about the visit.
• President Biden on Tuesday spoke to MBS about the U.S. diplomatic and military efforts to deter state and non-state actors in the region from joining the war, the White House said.
• Biden stressed the U.S. "fully supports the defense of U.S. partners facing terrorist threats, whether from state or non-state actors," according to the White House.

What they're saying: The Saudi Foreign Ministry earlier Saturday issued another statement critical of Israel. It condemned and denounced the Israeli ground operation in Gaza.

• "Any ground operation by Israel would threaten the lives of Palestinian civilians and result in inhumane dangers," the statement said.

The big picture: Before the Israel-Hamas war began, Biden sought to ease tensions in the Middle East by pushing for a mega-deal with Saudi Arabia that included a historic peace agreement between the kingdom and Israel.

• The deal was expected to also include a Palestinian component.

• Biden this week said he had "no proof" but his "instinct" tells him Hamas may have attacked Israel when it did to disrupt the progress being made on an Israel-Saudi deal.
• "We need to work toward greater integration [in the region] for Israel — while insisting that the aspirations of the Palestinian people will be part of this future as well," Biden said.

What to watch: MBS and Biden in their call this week "affirmed the importance of working towards a sustainable peace between Israelis and Palestinians as soon as the crisis subsides," per the White House.

• The Saudi royal court said MBS told Biden of the need to "restore the peace track to ensure that the Palestinian people obtain their legitimate rights and in order to achieve fair and comprehensive peace."

Go deeper: Where countries stand on the Israel-Hamas war

10. US to build new nuclear gravity bomb

Back to basics? Simplicity works? Keep it simple, st....KISS

Precision guidance not necessary when close is good enough?

US to build new nuclear gravity bomb

Defense News · by Stephen Losey · October 27, 2023

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Defense Department on Friday announced the government is moving forward with developing a new version of the B61 nuclear gravity bomb.

The bomb, designated B61-13, would have a yield similar to the B61-7 and replace some of those older gravity bombs, the Pentagon said in its announcement. The B61-7′s yield is higher than the B61-12, the most recent bomb being added to the military’s arsenal.

The Pentagon said the decision to build this weapon was made to reflect the changing security environment in line with the 2022 Nuclear Posture Review. That study said the military needed to modernize its nuclear forces to properly deter its two main nuclear-armed competitors, China and Russia.

The B61-13 will use the same modern safety, security and accuracy features now incorporated into the B61-12, the Pentagon said in a fact sheet accompanying the release. It would also give the president more options to strike “harder and large-area military targets,” the Pentagon said, while the department works to retire legacy bombs such as the B61-7 and B83-1.

Hans Kristensen, a nuclear weapons expert at the Federation of American Scientists who was briefed by the Pentagon on the bomb earlier this week, told Defense News the weapon will incorporate the same warheads from the 1980s- and 1990s-era B61-7s, transplanted into the same style casing and tail kit as the B61-12.

Kristensen said the creation of this bomb is likely intended to be a compromise to break a yearslong disagreement between Democrats and Republicans over the fate of the massive, 4-decade-old B83-1 bomb.

Former President Barack Obama sought to get rid of the 1.2-megaton B83-1 — the last megaton bomb left in the country’s nuclear arsenal and one that would explode with 80 times the force of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. But his successor, former President Donald Trump, reversed that decision.

President Joe Biden since revived efforts to get rid of the B83. But key Republican lawmakers have objected, saying the B83-1 is needed to strike hard and deeply buried targets.

The maximum yield of the B61-7 — and by extension the new variant — is 360 kilotons, Kristensen said, while the B61-12 has a maximum yield of 50 kilotons.

“This is a sweetener to the hardliners in Congress to basically say: ‘OK guys, you want something with a high yield,” Kristensen said. “ ‘Here’s a small number of them … but you also get one with a tail kit that will be more accurate.’ ”

House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Ala., and Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi, the ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said in a statement they welcome the creation of a new B61 variant, but that it “is only a modest step in the right direction.”

“The B61-13 is not a long-term solution, but it will provide our commanders, particularly in [the Pacific and European regions], with more flexibility against these target sets,” Rogers and Wicker said. “As the Strategic Posture Commission recently noted, China and Russia are in a full-on arms race, and the U.S. is running in place. Dramatic transformation of our deterrent posture — not incremental or piecemeal changes — is required to address this threat.”

The Pentagon said the creation of this bomb will not lead to an overall increase in the size of the military’s stockpile. The United States plans to lower the number of B61-12s it will produce by as many B61-13s it builds.

Kristensen said defense officials indicated very few B61-13s are expected to be produced, on the order of a few dozen. He doubted their creation, alongside the retirement of B61-7s, would lead to much, if any, decline in the number of gravity bombs in the United States’ arsenal, which he said is somewhere between 400 and 500.

If the B61-13 is approved and funded by lawmakers, the Energy Department’s National Nuclear Security Administration will produce it.

The Pentagon said in its announcement that modern aircraft would be able to deliver this bomb.

In a follow-up statement, a Pentagon spokesperson said that will include the B-21 Raider stealth bomber the Air Force now has in development with Northrop Grumman. But the U.S. now does not plan to deploy it on the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the Pentagon said.

But whether the creation of the B61-13 will ultimately be a positive development is “the million-dollar question,” Kristensen said.

“If you work for the administration and you don’t want to waste money on maintaining the [B]83, then it’s a good position,” Kristensen said. “If you work outside and you look at what’s going on, you might want to say that it’s unfortunate we have to field nuclear weapons as sort of nuclear horse trading in Congress.”

“It’s probably not a new phenomenon,” he added. “But we understand the administration has decided that this is what it needs to sort of sweet talk the defense hawks into getting rid of the [B]83.”

About Stephen Losey

Stephen Losey is the air warfare reporter for Defense News. He previously covered leadership and personnel issues at Air Force Times, and the Pentagon, special operations and air warfare at Military.com. He has traveled to the Middle East to cover U.S. Air Force operations.

11. Old video shows US Army arriving in Romania, not Marines landing in Israel

Be vigilant. We must be effective fighting in the information domain.

Old video shows US Army arriving in Romania, not Marines landing in Israel

BY KARENA PHAN

Published 2:00 PM EDT, October 27, 2023

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AP · October 27, 2023

FILE - A Romanian policeman watches as U.S. military personnel attend a transfer of authority ceremony from the 101st Airborne Division to the 10th Mountain Division in Bucharest, Romania, Wednesday, April 5, 2023. In October 2023, social media users are sharing an old clip of U.S. soldiers in Romania, falsely claiming it shows Marines landing in Israel. (AP Photo/Andreea Alexandru)

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CLAIM: A video shows U.S. Marines arriving in Israel amid the latest Israel-Hamas war.

AP’S ASSESSMENT: False. The video is from 2022 and shows soldiers from the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division arriving in Romania.

THE FACTS: As Israel plans to launch a ground war in Gaza, social media users are sharing an old and unrelated clip to suggest that U.S. troops will be involved.

The video shows soldiers dressed in fatigues getting off of a plane at night, carrying their belongings and walking across the tarmac.

One post with the video on X, formerly known as Twitter, has more than 9,000 likes with text that reads: “HAPPENING NOW: Thousands of U.S. Marines Just Landed in Israel WW3 HIGH ALERT”

However, the video doesn’t show Marines nor Israel, and it isn’t recent.

The original can be found on the Defence Department’s media distribution website, which says it shows U.S. Army soldiers arriving in Romania in June last year. “101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) Soldiers arrive in Mihail Kogainiceani, Romania, June 28, 2022,” reads the video’s description.

The site says the unit was there “to reinforce NATO’s eastern flank” and conduct multinational exercises with allies across Europe.

Hours after the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas on Israel, the U.S. did begin moving warships and aircrafts to the region.

The Pentagon said last week it sent the USS Bataan amphibious ready group, which consists of three ships carrying thousands of Marines from the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit. The ships carry helicopters and assault craft that can insert Marines into hostile territory or provide medical care or other assistance.

This week, the Pentagon sent military advisors, including Marine Corps Lt. Gen. James Glynn, to Israel to aid in its war planning.

The U.S. Army declined a request for comment and a U.S. Marine spokesperson declined to comment further about deployments in the region.

___

This is part of AP’s effort to address widely shared misinformation, including work with outside companies and organizations to add factual context to misleading content that is circulating online. Learn more about fact-checking at AP.

AP · October 27, 2023

12. Russia's Shoigu accuses West of seeking to expand Ukraine war to Asia-Pacific

To what end? Why would we want to expand Putin's Ukraine war to the Asia-Pacific? 

Russia's Shoigu accuses West of seeking to expand Ukraine war to Asia-Pacific

Reuters

October 30, 20233:00 AM EDTUpdated 4 hours ago

Reuters

BEIJING, Oct 30 (Reuters) - Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu said the West wants to expand the conflict in the Ukraine to the Asia-Pacific region, Russian state media reported, citing comments made at a Beijing defence forum on Monday.

Speaking at the Xiangshan Forum, China's biggest military diplomacy event, Shoigu said NATO is covering up a build-up of forces in the Asia-Pacific region with an "ostentatious desire for dialogue", Russia's TASS news agency reported.

Shoigu said NATO countries were promoting an arms race in the region, increasing their military presence and the frequency and scale of military drills there.

U.S. forces will use information exchanges with Tokyo and Seoul on missile launches to deter Russia and China, Shoigu said. He also accused Washington of trying to use climate change and natural disasters as an excuse for "humanitarian interventions".

Shoigu said the emergence of new security blocs such as the Quad and AUKUS undermined the role of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and nuclear non-proliferation efforts in the region.

At the same time, he said, Russia's move to revoke its ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty did not mean the end of the agreement, and Russia was not lowering its threshold for the use of nuclear weapons.

"We are only seeking to restore parity with the United States, who have not ratified this treaty," Russia's RIA news agency quoted Shoigu as saying. "We are not talking about its destruction."

Shoigu said that Moscow was ready for talks on the post-conflict settlement of the Ukraine crisis on further 'co-existence' with the West, but that Western countries needed to stop seeking Russia's strategic defeat.

Making clear the conditions for such talks were not in place yet, Shoigu said: "It is also important to ensure equal relations between all the nuclear powers and permanent United Nations Security Council members who carry special responsibility for upholding peace and global stability."

Reporting by Lidia Kelly in Sydney; Writing by Liz Lee and Laurie Chen in Beijing and Olzhas Auyezov in Almaty; Editing by Christopher Cushing and Gerry Doyle

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13. Fierce clashes in Gaza as Israeli forces expand ground offensive

Fierce clashes in Gaza as Israeli forces expand ground offensive

By Nidal Al-Mughrabi and Henriette Chacar

October 30, 20236:45 AM EDTUpdated 34 min ago

Reuters · by Nidal Al-Mughrabi

• Summary
• Companies
• LATEST DEVELOPMENTS
• UN humanitarian office says 117,000 people sheltering in north Gaza hospitals
• Armed groups continue firing rockets at Israel, it says
• Israel says ground forces are fighting Hamas directly in Gaza

GAZA/JERUSALEM, Oct 30 (Reuters) - Fierce air and artillery strikes rang out in Gaza early on Monday as Israeli troops backed by tanks pressed into the Palestinian enclave with a ground assault that prompted more international calls for civilians to be protected.

Israel's military said it had struck more than 600 militant targets over the past few days as it expanded ground operations in the Gaza Strip, where Palestinian civilians are in dire need of fuel, food and clean water as the war enters its fourth week.

"IDF troops killed dozens of terrorists who barricaded themselves in buildings and tunnels, and attempted to attack the troops," a military statement said.

Israel began a major push into Gaza on Friday and reiterated calls for civilians to move from the north of the tiny coastal enclave to the south as it tries to root out Hamas militants it says are hiding in a labyrinth of tunnels under Gaza City.

In what appeared to be an effort to cut off the city, Israeli forces carried out dozens of air strikes on its eastern side, residents said, with some reporting the roar of tanks rolling in amid heavy exchanges of fire.

To the west, where Israel on Sunday showed tanks on the Mediterranean coast, the north-south coast road was hit several times, residents said. Internet and phone connections remained largely cut off in the north, making communication difficult.

Many Palestinians have remained in Gaza City, afraid to lose their homes and concerned by news of Israeli air strikes further south.

Medical officials in Al-Shifa and Al-Quds hospitals said air strikes had hit near their buildings. The U.N. humanitarian office OCHR said 117,000 civilians are sheltering alongside thousands of patients and doctors in hospitals in the north.

Israel has accused Hamas of locating command centres and other military infrastructure in Gaza hospitals, which the group denies.

Air strikes could also be heard in the southern towns of Rafah near Gaza's border crossing with Egypt, the only one not blocked by Israel, as well as east of Khan Younis, where Palestinian media said Hamas clashed with Israeli troops.

Phone and internet cuts which blacked out Gaza on Friday had eased and OCHR said on Monday services were "largely restored" although telecoms providers have said some areas on the north were still down.

CLASHES IN WEST BANK

Israel has said 1,400 people were killed when Hamas-led militants stormed through the south of the country on Oct. 7 and took 229 hostage. Hamas has released four so far and said 50 have been killed in retaliatory strikes.

Medical authorities in Hamas-run Gaza, which has a population of 2.3 million people, said on Sunday 8,005 people - including 3,324 minors - had been killed.

OCHR said rescuers were struggling to reach people.

"As of 29 October, about 1,800 people, including at least 940 children, have been reported missing and may be trapped or dead under the rubble, awaiting rescue or recovery," it said.

It also said that armed groups continued firing rockets at Israel indiscriminately, with no fatalities reported.

[1/13]Smoke rises over Gaza, as seen from Israel's border with Gaza, in southern Israel October 30, 2023. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein Acquire Licensing Rights

The Israeli defence ministry issued video footage of what it said were manoeuvres inside Gaza showing soldiers stationed inside buildings, tanks on a main road, and air strikes on what it said were buildings occupied by Hamas.

Reuters was not able to independently verify the exact timing or location of the video and Israel's military said it would not reveal where it was filmed.

"We are moving from the ground, spotting the terrorists and attacking from the air. There is also direct engagement between ground forces and terrorists. The fighting is taking place inside the Gaza Strip," military spokesperson Daniel Hagari said.

Islamist groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad said their members were also fighting Israeli forces in the Israeli-occupied West Bank city of Jenin, where scores of Palestinians have been killed and hundreds arrested since Oct. 7.

Israel said on Monday it had arrested 700 Hamas militants in the West Bank, where it says its forces often come under fire while trying to detain them.

The Palestinian health ministry said four people were killed during a raid in Jenin early on Monday. Israel said several fighters were killed in an air strike there.

AIRPORT UNREST IN RUSSIA

The conflict has spurred large demonstrations worldwide in support of the Palestinians, and antisemitic and Islamophobic harassment and attacks are increasing.

Russian authorities said they had taken over an airport in the predominantly Muslim Dagestan region and arrested 60 people after hundreds of anti-Israel protesters stormed the facility on Sunday when a plane from Israel arrived.

Twenty people were wounded at the airport before security forces contained the unrest, local authorities said. The passengers on the plane were safe, security forces told Reuters.

Israel's widening ground attacks on Gaza have spurred international calls for a "humanitarian pause" to allow aid in.

Qatar-mediated negotiations between Israel and Hamas continued on Sunday, a source briefed on the talks told Reuters, and included discussions about the possible release of hostages.

Hamas wants a five-day pause in Israel's operations to allow aid and fuel into Gaza in return for the release of all civilian hostages held by the militants, said the source, speaking on condition of anonymity.

More than half the hostages held by Hamas have foreign passports from 25 countries, the Israeli government says.

OCHA said 33 trucks carrying water, food and medical supplies had entered Gaza on Sunday, the biggest delivery so far, but that much bigger daily deliveries were required to meet urgent needs and prevent civil unrest. People stormed aid stores on Sunday in search of food.

U.S. President Joe Biden has warned Iran, which backs Hamas and other militant groups in the region, not to stir up the conflict. Iran said on Monday that Washington should stop blaming it for the violence.

There are fears that the war will spill over into the region, including in Lebanon, where the Israeli army and Iranian-backed Hezbollah group have been exchanging fire.

On Monday, Syrian state TV said Israeli air strikes targeted two army posts in Daraa, leading to "some material losses".

Reporting by Nidal al-Mughrabi, Yomna Ehab, James Mackenzie, Henriette Chacar, Dan Williams, Emma Farge and Jonathan Landay; Writing by David Lawder, Stephen Coates and Philippa Fletcher; Editing by Clarence Fernandez and Miral Fahmy

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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Nidal Al-Mughrabi

Thomson Reuters

A senior correspondent with nearly 25 years’ experience covering the Palestinian-Israeli conflict including several wars and the signing of the first historic peace accord between the two sides.

Reuters · by Nidal Al-Mughrabi

14. Exclusive: US military bulk buys Japanese seafood to counter China ban

In future years will we see VA medical claims of cancer related to eating this fish? Will we be seeing Camp Lejeune like commercials calling on people to make claims for eating Japanese fish? (I am only being half sarcastic as I know the science says the fish are not contaminated). And we should expect questions from Congressman at oversight hearings demanding to know for certain our servicemembers are not being harmed.  

Exclusive: US military bulk buys Japanese seafood to counter China ban

By John Geddie and Yukiko Toyoda

October 30, 20235:50 AM EDTUpdated 2 hours ago

Reuters · by John Geddie

TOKYO, Oct 30 (Reuters) - The United States has started bulk buying Japanese seafood to supply its military there in response to China's ban on such products imposed after Tokyo released treated water from its crippled Fukushima nuclear plant into the sea.

Unveiling the initiative in a Reuters interview on Monday, U.S. ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel said Washington should also look more broadly into how it could help offset China's ban that he said was part of its "economic wars".

China, which had been the biggest buyer of Japanese seafood, says its ban is due to food safety fears.

The U.N.'s nuclear watchdog vouched for the safety of the water release that began in August from the plant wrecked by a 2011 tsunami. G7 trade ministers on Sunday called for the immediate repeal of bans on Japanese food.

"It's going to be a long-term contract between the U.S. armed forces and the fisheries and co-ops here in Japan," Emanuel said.

"The best way we have proven in all the instances to kind of wear out China's economic coercion is come to the aid and assistance of the targeted country or industry," he said.

Asked about Emanuel's comments at a press conference on Monday, China's foreign ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said: "the responsibility of diplomats is to promote friendship between countries rather than smearing other countries and stirring up trouble".

The first purchase of seafood by the U.S. under the scheme involves just shy of a metric ton of scallops, a tiny fraction of more than 100,000 tons of scallops that Japan exported to mainland China last year.

Emanuel said the purchases - which will feed soldiers in messes and aboard vessels as well as being sold in shops and restaurants on military bases - will increase over time to all types of seafood. The U.S. military had not previously bought local seafood in Japan, he said.

The U.S. could also look at its overall fish imports from Japan and China, he said. The U.S. is also in talks with Japanese authorities to help direct locally-caught scallops to U.S.-registered processors.

'NOT A CHINA HAWK'

Emanuel, who was former U.S. President Barack Obama's White House chief of staff, has in recent months made a series of blunt statements on China, taking aim at various issues including its economic policies, opaque decision-making and treatment of foreign firms.

That has come as top U.S. officials, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken, have visited Beijing in an effort to draw a line under strained ties.

Asked if he considered himself hawkish on China, Emanuel rejected the term and said he was a "realist".

"I don't consider it hawkish but just consider it realist and honest. Maybe the honesty is painful, but it's honest," he said.

"I'm all for stability, understanding. That doesn't mean you're not honest. They're not contradictory. One of the ways you establish stability, is that you're able to be honest with each other."

He said China faced major economic challenges exacerbated by a leadership intent on turning their backs on international systems.

"The kind of loser in this is the youth of China. You now have a situation where 30% of the Chinese youth, one out of three, are unemployed. You have major cities with unfinished housing ... you have major municipalities not able to pay city workers. Why? Because China made a political decision to turn their back on a system in which they were benefiting."

The most recent official youth unemployment data from China, published in July before Beijing said it was suspending publication of the numbers, showed it jumping to a record high of 21.3%.

Emanuel said he was also keeping an eye on how China's leadership responds to the recent death of former Premier Li Keqiang, a reformist who was sidelined by President Xi Jinping.

"What's ... interesting to me, that I think is telltale, is how they will be treating his funeral and how they'll be treating comments about him," he said.

"I do think that there's kind of a section of China that sees what kind of policies he was pursuing as kind of the best of China. But that's up for China to decide."

Editing by Robert Birsel

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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15. More ‘Buy America’ provisions threaten our industrial base and national security

More ‘Buy America’ provisions threaten our industrial base and national security

BY JERRY MCGINN, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR - 10/27/23 3:00 PM ET

https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/4279599-more-buy-america-provisions-threaten-our-industrial-base-and-national-security/?utm

“Buy America” is a hardy perennial in debates over defense manufacturing in the United States. 

Given the industrial capacity and supply chain security challenges demonstrated by the Ukraine war and the COVID-19 pandemic, some members of Congress argue that a central part of the solution is to strengthen laws to buy from American companies. To that end, there are draft provisions in the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act currently under consideration, including one requiring 75 percent domestic content of defense systems by 2029. 

At the same time, however, the administration continues to emphasize the importance of working closely with allies and partners in preparing for and responding to international crises. This inherent tension is not new but has sharpened in recent years. While increasing domestic manufacturing is a critical priority, four specific realities demonstrate why additional Buy America provisions are counterproductive, unnecessary and ultimately harmful to our industrial base and our national security.

First, a buy-America-only approach is not reflective of how we fight. From last century’s world wars to recent operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, we always fight in coalition. To do that, we share intelligence and conduct operations with close allies and partners. We also develop standards for weapons systems through alliances such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. We have seen these common standards in action in Ukraine with international collaborative efforts to procure and increase the production of 155mm artillery shells. Those efforts would not have been possible without these standards.

Second, as the recent production awards to U.S., Canadian, Polish and Indian firms for the artillery shells illustrate, defense systems are the product of a global defense market. While U.S. companies comprise the preponderance of prime contractors for Department of Defense systems, there are significant capabilities provided by companies headquartered in partner countries.

For example, the world’s largest defense program, the F-35 Lightning II, has over 1,900 companies around the globe contributing to the production of this world-class fighter aircraft that 17 countries are purchasing. Moreover, the final assembly, checkout and sustainment for the F-35 is conducted at facilities in Texas and in Italy and Japan.

Non-U.S. organizations also produce many of the major systems for U.S. warfighters. From the venerable Bradley Fighting Vehicle to the Navy’s future frigate program and the finalists for the Army’s Optionally Manned Fighting Vehicle, allied-domiciled companies are playing primary or leading roles in developing these systems in the United States for use by American forces.

These programs underscore the third reality, namely that the direct contributions of U.S. subsidiaries of allied-headquartered companies significantly benefit our domestic industrial base. Hundreds of robust U.S. subsidiaries provide thousands of American jobs, producing products and providing services. United Kingdom-domiciled firms, for example, directly support 77,000 U.S. jobs in states across the country, per my inquiry from the U.K. embassy.

In addition, the international sales of defense systems produced in the United States comprise a significant portion of the revenues for U.S. defense companies, up to 25 percent in some of our largest primes. Aerospace and defense exports in 2022 totaled almost $105 billion and had a positive trade balance of $77.3 billion.

Additional provisions to buy American, however, will undermine the central rationale for this security cooperation that results in greater interoperability and closer interactions between DoD and allied militaries. Why should allies and partners continue to purchase American systems when their companies are excluded from the U.S. marketplace?

The final and most detrimental aspect of additional provisions is that they divert focus away from what the 2022 National Defense Strategy calls the “pacing” national security challenge, China. As COVID-19, Ukraine and the current crisis in the Middle East have demonstrated, the United States and our allies have significant industrial base capacity challenges and supply chain vulnerabilities, particularly with respect to China.

As Undersecretary of Defense Bill LaPlante has articulated in numerous venues, we are spending 3 percent of GDP on defense today as opposed to more than 6 percent in the 1980s. We definitely need to increase domestic industrial capacity, but we are not going to double defense spending so why risk the international industrial collaboration that is critical to our collective strategic competition with China by adding more buy America provisions?

Some in favor of additional provisions argue that existing exemptions will protect our closest allies, but the chilling effect of more requirements will almost certainly undermine those poorly understood exemptions. More broadly, who knows what capabilities will be the rare earth elements and 155mm shells of the future, and who will be best positioned to provide them?

There is more than enough work to go around. Instead of sticking it to our allies and partners, let’s focus on collaborative strategies to build the overall global industrial capacity we need to collectively address today’s profound national security challenges.

Jerry McGinn, Ph.D. is the executive director of the Greg and Camille Baroni Center for Government Contracting in George Mason University’s School of Business and a former senior DoD acquisition official.

16. Difficulties, Constraints and the Cost of Removing Hamas from Power

What comes next or how does this end?

Excerpts:

If Israel is able to remove Hamas from power, that creates another serious dilemma: who will replace it?

Israel certainly does not want to go back to ruling the Gaza Strip. And the Palestinian Authority, which currently barely holds on to its territory in the West Bank, can’t regain control of the Gaza Strip. Arab states are another option. But while several call for a cease fire, no Arab state, including the only one that has a border with the Gaza Strip, Egypt, wants to take on the demanding task of running the Gaza Strip. The U.N. certainly can’t do this job.

The danger then is that winning the war against Hamas will create a worse problem — the Gaza Strip could sink into anarchy, where different groups fight each other while confronting Israel as well.

Should Israel be in a position maintaining control of Gaza after a military victory, it could be faced with a serious humanitarian crisis, due to the poor state of Gaza’s infrastructure, which will only get worse due to the war. Israel does not want to be responsible for causing nor solving this huge problem, but this will happen if Israel gets too enmeshed in the administration of the Gaza Strip.

Hamas senior official Khaled Mashal said the terror group is “well aware of the consequences” of its Oct. 7 attack. Israel will have to deftly manage those consequences in the weeks ahead.

Difficulties, Constraints and the Cost of Removing Hamas from Power - Defense Opinion

PUBLISHED OCTOBER 29, 2023

@ 5:26 PM

defenseopinion.com · by Ehud Eilam · October 29, 2023

Israel is stepping up its ground attack in the Gaza Strip, but destroying a powerful movement like Hamas is a tall order due to several difficulties and constraints. Furthermore, achieving this goal might ultimately be counterproductive for Israel.

The delicate balance is that Israel must hit Hamas hard but aim to end the operation as soon as possible, while also determining if her war goals are the right ones. From an operational standpoint, Israeli ground units will have to overcome major challenges.

First, the fight will take place in urban combat in a highly dense area, with a vast network of tunnels under it that serve for hiding and as a springboard for strikes. Second, the IDF will confront anti-tank missiles, improvised explosive devices and mines, which will delay the advance and cause casualties. Third, the IDF will use massive firepower to protect its troops by suppressing hostile fire. But at the same time Israel also must do its best to minimize civilian casualties, a difficult task during an intense fight.

Israel currently has international support from the U.S. and other allies to strike Hamas, as long as the civilian population in Gaza does not pay a significant price, especially in loss of life. But if civilian casualties mount, then Israel would be in a tough spot and might see its support diminish.

Geopolitical considerations in the balance

Israel must also weigh geopolitical considerations as it faces an aggressive Iran and its proxy in Lebanon, Hezbollah.

The war is unlikely to include a direct Iranian military involvement, but as the fight in Gaza continues against Iran-funded Hamas, it might further devolve relations between Israel and Iran, which are already in a low point. The danger is that a prolonged conflict could increase the probability of a direct confrontation between Israel and Iran, who both must tread carefully or find themselves in their first shooting war.

Hezbollah, Iran’s most powerful Arab partner, has up to 150,000 rockets and missiles that can reach most of Israel. Iran and Hezbollah have solid reasons to steer clear of all out confrontation with Israel. For example, Iran would rather keep Hezbollah intact so it can deter Israel from bombing Iran’s nuclear sites.

Hezbollah does not want to risk a destructive war with Israel, which is why Hezbollah has restrained its actions against Israel for almost 20 years, since their last war in 2006. While Israel and Hezbollah have had minor clashes since Hamas crossed the border in its terrorist attack on Oct. 7, there is precedent for Hezbollah sitting out the conflict. Hezbollah has stayed out of all the fights that occurred between Israel and Hamas since 2008.

But if the confrontation between Israel and Hamas intensifies, it will increase the odds of more and bigger skirmishes between Israel and Hezbollah, which might escalate into a full-scale war. Israel can fight two fronts simultaneously in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon, but it would rather avoid that predicament for the strain on resources and personnel it would create.

The Biden administration is playing a major deterrent role by sending two carrier strike groups to the east Mediterranean, to dissuade Iran and Hezbollah from joining the fight and by providing missile defense, as the U.S. Navy has already done near Yemen.

After Hamas, what comes next?

If Israel is able to remove Hamas from power, that creates another serious dilemma: who will replace it?

Israel certainly does not want to go back to ruling the Gaza Strip. And the Palestinian Authority, which currently barely holds on to its territory in the West Bank, can’t regain control of the Gaza Strip. Arab states are another option. But while several call for a cease fire, no Arab state, including the only one that has a border with the Gaza Strip, Egypt, wants to take on the demanding task of running the Gaza Strip. The U.N. certainly can’t do this job.

The danger then is that winning the war against Hamas will create a worse problem — the Gaza Strip could sink into anarchy, where different groups fight each other while confronting Israel as well.

Should Israel be in a position maintaining control of Gaza after a military victory, it could be faced with a serious humanitarian crisis, due to the poor state of Gaza’s infrastructure, which will only get worse due to the war. Israel does not want to be responsible for causing nor solving this huge problem, but this will happen if Israel gets too enmeshed in the administration of the Gaza Strip.

Hamas senior official Khaled Mashal said the terror group is “well aware of the consequences” of its Oct. 7 attack. Israel will have to deftly manage those consequences in the weeks ahead.

defenseopinion.com · by Ehud Eilam · October 29, 2023

17. What America Wants From China

Excerpts:

Washington can afford magnanimity. It enjoys a sizable lead over China in national competitiveness. And as the political scientist Stephen Walt has argued, China has no viable path to achieving hegemony. The United States is a source of attraction for other countries when it looks to the future with optimism, manages its own affairs, and acts on its responsibilities as a global leader. These are factors within its power to control, not China’s.

Despite their respective ambivalence about certain features of the current international system, and the intensifying rivalry between them, the United States and China both want to avoid war and maintain stability. They both derive wealth and security from the existing system. And as the world’s two strongest countries, they are better able to contribute to collective problem-solving with existing institutions than they would be without them.

China’s ambitions will pose a sharp challenge to the United States well into the future. The best way for Washington to contend with this challenge is to keep China entangled in the international system while nurturing American alliances and bolstering the U.S. technological edge. If the United States can advance a patient but firm long-term strategy toward this end, it will be well positioned to sustain its leadership, prosperity, and security.

What America Wants From China

A Strategy to Keep Beijing Entangled in the World Order

By Ryan Hass

November/December 2023

Published on October 24, 2023

Foreign Affairs · by Ryan Hass · October 24, 2023

In recent years, American officials have spoken publicly at great length about competition with China. In February, U.S. President Joe Biden declared in his State of the Union speech that the United States seeks “competition, not conflict” with China. But despite all the speeches, press conferences, and panel discussions, policymakers have not directly answered an essential question: What is the outcome they seek in this competition? When pressed, they often highlight the result the United States hopes to avoid: a new cold war or, even worse, a hot one. Privately, they add that the goal is to tilt the global balance of power toward the United States and its partners as much as possible.

The absence of a compelling vision of success for the United States’ strategy with China is dangerous. First, if the American people do not know the purpose of their country’s strategy, they will be less likely to support U.S. policy or make sacrifices in service of it. The absence of a vision also creates a vacuum in which American demagogues can frame the competition in ethnic terms, sowing the seeds of xenophobia and racism and tearing at the country’s social fabric. Likewise, framing the contest in existential terms pushes the United States to pursue policies that seek China’s collapse, while airbrushing the danger and self-harm that such a strategy would invite.

The absence of a clear goal also risks squandering the United States’ greatest advantage in a long-term competition with China: the cohesion of its global network of allies and partners. Governments aligned with Washington will hedge when they do not know the desired destination of U.S. strategy. They will not want to get trapped in a confrontation with China only to see the United States abruptly shift course and leave their countries exposed to Beijing’s retaliation.

To overcome this limitation, Washington needs to set an objective on China that would enjoy durable domestic support and be compatible with foreign partners’ priorities, allowing them to anticipate the direction of U.S. policy and its guiding logic. And despite U.S. leaders’ seeming inability or unwillingness to articulate it, the right objective is relatively easy to explain: Washington should aim to preserve a functioning international system that supports U.S. security and prosperity—and that includes China rather than isolates it. Meanwhile, the United States should maintain a strong military to deter China from using force against the United States or its security partners and seek to sustain an overall edge over China in technological innovation, particularly in fields with national security implications.

This strategy departs from the Cold War goal of aiming to isolate the Soviet Union and compel its collapse under the weight of its own contradictions. Today, Washington’s goal should be to keep China entangled in a global system that regulates interstate behavior and pushes Beijing to conclude that the best path to the realization of its national ambitions would be to operate within existing rules and norms.

Preserving a functioning global system that includes China will not be simple or straightforward. Washington has grown increasingly ambivalent in recent years about upholding the existing system, which it played an outsize role in designing. It cannot credibly keep China inside the tent if it is uncomfortable being there, as well. On trade, global health, climate change, and arms control, the United States has shown diminishing tolerance for accepting the requirements and limitations imposed by the current order. China will also seek to leverage its growing strength to revise elements of the existing system that it finds threatening to its illiberal form of governance. Beijing is determined to block intrusions on what it defines as its internal affairs. It wants to degrade the agenda-setting power of advanced democracies and take the lead in setting international standards. China is also working to make the world more economically dependent on Chinese goods and services and to shift the balance of military power in its favor.

American policymakers will face hard choices on whether to support adjustments that could help the existing system survive. If China ultimately balks at remaining in the system and instead invests its resources in mobilizing an anti-West bloc to oppose the international system, the United States will want the rest of the world to see Beijing as the culprit for the system’s fragmentation. For all its imperfections, the existing international system has contributed to preventing major-power conflict and enabled millions of people around the world to rise out of poverty in the decades since World War II. If China decides to chip away at that, it should pay a reputational price.

This strategy does not take for granted that China will emerge as a responsible stakeholder or that the U.S.-Chinese relationship will be anything other than intensely competitive. There is no reason for hope that further economic development will build pressure in China for political reform. This approach takes China for what it is: an aggressive, repressive, and selectively revisionist actor on the world stage. But following this path would take advantage of China’s craving for recognition as a major power that deserves a say in global affairs. The idea is to sharpen the choice for Beijing: China can enjoy broad acceptance of its continuing rise if it invests in preserving and adapting the existing system, or it can exit the order and prompt its fragmentation. Under the latter scenario, China could become the leader of a loosely organized and overmatched bloc of developing countries facing off against a more ideologically aligned grouping anchored by developed democracies.

LIFE AFTER XI

The speed of China’s rise has been alarming to many Americans. In the post–World War II era, no country has gotten as close to rivaling the United States’ comprehensive national power and influence as China has. Alongside its rapid economic growth, China has embarked on a massive military buildup, intensified its intimidation of Taiwan, asserted control over Hong Kong, expanded military outposts in the South China Sea, drawn blood at the border with India, and launched a campaign of brutal repression against ethnic minorities and dissidents in China.

To some observers, the Xi era represents a return of the authentic China, whereas the post-1979 era of “reform and opening” under the Chinese Communist Party leader Deng Xiaoping was an aberration. In this telling, China was briefly a collective leadership one-party state led by the CCP but has now reverted to its natural state of one-man rule as Xi has embraced his new title as the “core” of the party-state, a status the party endorsed in October 2022. According to this logic, there is no longer any check on Xi’s instincts, however reckless they may be.

It is true that Xi is impatient, ideological, and aggressive. But he is also mortal. Xi is now 70 years old, and it is impossible to predict whether his reign will extend for another five years or 15. But it will end. The United States needs a strategy that is capable of both contending with the present and looking beyond Xi to prepare for a future in which China will confront mounting structural constraints.

A Chinese flag in Beijing, July 2021

Tingshu Wang / Reuters

If history is any guide, there is a strong possibility that the pendulum of Chinese politics will swing when Xi leaves the scene. In 1976, the death of the longtime CCP leader Mao Zedong ushered in an unceremonious end to his Cultural Revolution, which had wreaked chaos on the Chinese people in service of consolidating Mao’s control of the country. In the years that followed, the party reinstated cadres that Mao had expelled, including Deng, who along with younger leaders, pivoted away from Mao’s ideological rigidity and concentration of power. A similar erasure of Deng’s legacy has unfolded in recent years as Xi has discarded the pragmatism, orderly transfers of power, division of authority between the CCP and the government, and modest foreign policy that were hallmarks of the Deng era.

The more that Xi’s inveterate Leninist instincts and lust for control hobble China’s economic and technological ambitions, the more likely China’s leaders will be to take a hard look at the country’s direction when Xi is gone. When that day comes, China’s leaders will need to decide whether they can better reach their goals by integrating into the global economy or by turning toward self-reliance and limited partnership with developing countries. Of course, a future Chinese leader may adopt Xi’s tendencies. But China’s political trajectory has not, and likely will not, travel a straight line for long.

China’s path after Xi also depends on other trends. The economist Derek Scissors has forecasted that China’s economy will grow briskly in the 2020s but slow down in the 2030s as it experiences the effects of an aging population, growing debt, and self-imposed constraints on private-sector innovation through government-directed allocation of capital, talent, and technology. He expects the gap between U.S. and Chinese GDP, which currently stands at $7 trillion, to narrow to $4 trillion by 2030 but then begin to widen again by midcentury. In other words, Beijing is neither on the cusp of peaking nor on a road to hegemony. It will be an enduring but constrained competitor to the United States.

INSIDE THE TENT

The American leaders who developed an international system out of the ashes of World War II were not driven by benevolence; they were guided by an aggressive pursuit of national interests. The victors of World War II appointed themselves permanent members of the UN Security Council, cementing their influence over future interstate disputes. Washington also secured buy-in for a proscription against the use of force to alter international boundaries, helping lock in place a status quo that has benefited the United States.

To this day, the United States sits at the center of many of the international institutions that govern the global commons, mediate disputes, and facilitate free trade. The United States’ positioning has allowed it to field the most powerful military in the history of the world and to amass roughly 25 percent of global GDP with only around four percent of the world’s population. Washington must hold on to the outsize benefits it derives from this system and keep China entangled in it.

Isolating China might feel satisfying, but as history shows, it would not serve U.S. interests. From the late 1940s through the 1970s, China was cast out of the U.S.-led system. During that period, Chinese leaders became embittered, unconstrained, and eager to foment revolution. Beijing aspired to bring down the system, including by arming Washington’s adversaries. China was poor then, so its interventions had limited effects. Today, however, U.S. rivals such as Iran, North Korea, Russia, and Venezuela could benefit from less restrained Chinese support in ways that would seriously harm U.S. national security.

Beijing is neither on the cusp of peaking nor on a road to hegemony.

Even short of arming hostile states, Beijing could withdraw contributions to Western-led institutions and invest significantly in organizations that could rival and ultimately replace today’s system. It could leverage its national resources to seek broad international backing for making the BRICS group, encompassing Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, the premier global agenda setter, displacing the G-7 and the G-20. Although China secured support for expanding the membership of BRICS at the group’s annual summit in August, it remains to be seen whether adding more members will add substance to what has thus far been a largely symbolic forum. Beijing could also redirect support for global development efforts to its preferred institutions, such as the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank, and withdraw support for the World Bank.

To reduce the risks of these outcomes, the United States will need to accept several uncomfortable truths. The first is that many people in poorer countries and non-Western countries see the current “rules-based order” as a predominantly white, Western system that is insufficiently attentive to their priorities and concerns. Leaders in some of those countries want to alter a system that they see as privileging a status quo that disadvantages them, and they view China as a champion of their cause. They see hypocrisy when Washington protests Russia’s invasion of Ukraine despite the many military interventions carried out by the United States—in Haiti, Iraq, Panama, and the Balkans—without UN Security Council authorization. Even as American officials reject the suggestion of equivalence between their actions and those of Russia, they should recognize the frustration of people and governments buffeted by crises not of their making, such as rising temperatures, global pandemics, food and energy insecurity, and economic instability.

Institutions and conventions will also need to adapt to power shifts within the international system. The Security Council will have to adjust to the redistribution of power since the end of World War II by giving permanent seats to Brazil, Germany, India, and Japan, the countries of the G-4 and the main aspirants to permanent council membership, which each exercise regional leadership and global influence. Washington should push for their admittance and force China to either go along or issue a public veto. At the same time, the United States should not continue blocking China from exercising a voting share in institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank that reflects its economic weight.

The balkanization of the postwar international system that would result from China’s exit would damage the United States’ long-term interests. There is no Western solution to climate change or pandemic prevention, for example. Those are global challenges that require the mobilization of global resources. Additionally, a breakdown in the trading system would leave all countries poorer, including the United States. A green energy transition would take longer and cost more if the United States and China were unable to coordinate. A bifurcation of global information systems into Western and Chinese blocs would hamper innovation and economic growth. Even as the United States works to safeguard Americans’ data, it must avoid preventing its companies from competing in the growing number of markets where Chinese technologies have made inroads.

Senior officials from China, Japan, and South Korea meeting in Incheon, South Korea, May 2023

Kim Hong-Ji / Reuters

For some, shaking up the existing international system is a risk worth taking, even if it winds up splintering the structure in place. In a speech earlier this year, the U.S. national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, asserted that the existing neoliberal economic order had failed American workers, fraying “the socioeconomic foundations on which any strong and resilient democracy rests.” Therefore, Sullivan argued, the United States must break with decades of international economic orthodoxy to ensure that the country can rebuild its manufacturing base, develop more resilient supply chains, and limit China’s ability to hold American security at risk.

Sullivan’s solution to the United States’ domestic challenges is misguided. In the aggregate, the United States has grown dramatically wealthier and more powerful through internationalized trade, but the rewards have been unevenly distributed in American society. Many countries in Europe, Asia, and elsewhere have recognized that free trade is not free and have developed social safety nets to help their workers handle the disruptions of globalization. The United States has performed poorly in this regard—a deficiency that is a symptom of its domestic politics rather than of the perils of globalized trade.

It would be a mistake for the United States to disavow the global trade architecture that it played a leading role in constructing. Doing so would break faith with the partners that bought into the doctrine of trade liberalization. This, in turn, would diminish Washington’s ability to set the agenda for the global economy. Today, many countries around the world are lowering barriers to trade, but the United States is raising them. If Washington continues down this path, it will hurt its own long-term competitiveness.

INTERNATIONAL ORDER 2.0

Rather than relying on past policy experiments in protectionism and industrial policy, American policymakers need innovative ways to make today’s global system better serve U.S. interests, address the concerns of U.S. partners, and incentivize China to stay on board. The best leaders have willing partners, not ones who must be coerced into compliance. The stronger the support the United States can attract for its vision, the costlier and riskier it will be for China to break away and fragment the system. Many of the United States’ partners understand the challenges China poses, but they also must contend with more immediate problems, such as mitigating the effects of climate change, providing adequate food for their populations, creating opportunities for economic development, and enhancing health security. Unless the United States can elicit contributions from China and other capable powers for addressing these challenges, it will bear the blame for failing to lead.

American policymakers therefore have the difficult task of convincing China to invest in multilateral solutions, even though Beijing often prefers to deliver assistance bilaterally so it can enjoy undiluted appreciation from recipient countries for its contributions. One way the United States can do this is by encouraging emerging powers and regional organizations to take the lead on collective responses to some global problems. It would be far easier to imagine the United States and China both supporting an African Union–led project to expand access to technology training, for example, than it would be to envision either of them supporting such a project led by the other.

Washington should also work with Beijing to develop norms of acceptable state behavior in ungoverned and undergoverned spaces. For example, the two countries could agree to refrain from activities in space that create orbital debris. This could lead over time toward norms against the use of kinetic antisatellite weapons in outer space. Both the United States and China would also benefit from establishing limits on the use of AI-enabled autonomous weapons systems in conflicts. Washington and Beijing could each work, for example, toward an understanding that humans must remain in control of all nuclear launch decisions. Similarly, even as each side engages in aggressive cyber-espionage against the other, both would benefit from identifying out-of-bounds targets for cyberattacks. Both countries should agree, for example, that hospitals and critical infrastructure are off-limits.

Washington must also work with partners to fortify other cornerstones of the international system, such as the principle that all states are equal under international law and that arms control supports global stability. These elements of global order have been under duress in recent years, particularly since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and China’s decision to flout a 2016 ruling by the International Tribunal of the Law of the Sea that Beijing’s territorial claims in the South China Sea were illegal.

The United States must also make clear that as the world’s sole superpower, it has a vital interest in preserving its security commitments and upholding the freedom of navigation. Those are potentially “go to war” issues, similar to China’s definition of its own “core interests.” To uphold the credibility of that posture, Washington needs to develop a more agile and integrated defense doctrine, invest significantly in long-range missiles and small dispersed weapons systems in East Asia, harden its bases in Asia, and build as broad and capable a coalition as possible to deter China from attacking the United States’ security partners or impeding lawful access to international waters and airspace.

COURSE CORRECTION

Even as it remains firm in upholding its vital interests, Washington needs to give Beijing cause to respond favorably to its efforts to keep China embedded in the international system. U.S. leaders should more openly acknowledge that they would welcome a more prosperous and less belligerent China—one that is responsive to the rights of its citizens and contributes more to addressing global challenges.

This affirmative framing of U.S. policy would signal that the United States is not hostile to China’s rise and would welcome a healthier relationship in the future. Biden should consider delivering a message to the Chinese people akin to the one that his predecessor John F. Kennedy sent to Soviet citizens in a commencement address at American University in 1963. Americans found communism “profoundly repugnant,” Kennedy said, but could still “hail the Russian people for their many achievements—in science and space, in economic and industrial growth, in culture and in acts of courage.” Kennedy also appealed to the common humanity of the two sides: “Our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.” Taking a similar tone when discussing China today could help prepare the ground for a U.S. strategy that looks beyond Xi and the current tensions with Beijing.

The United States will also need to restore discipline to its approach to Taiwan. Symbolic gestures by members of Congress and undisciplined public ruminations about the timing of possible future conflict by military leaders have unnerved U.S. allies and allowed Beijing to paint the United States as the instigator of escalation, when in fact Beijing’s tightening pressure on Taiwan is the main cause of rising tensions. American leaders should return to encouraging dialogue between China and Taiwan without preconditions and express openness to any peaceful resolution of cross-strait differences that enjoys the support of the Taiwanese people. They should also disavow any suggestions that the United States views Taiwan as a critical node or part of the United States’ defense perimeter. Taiwan is not an object of contestation between the United States and China: it is a society of 23 million people who should retain agency when it comes to their future.

Washington also needs to strengthen the incentives for fence-sitting countries to work with the United States by offering better access to the American market. Trade agreements are effective vehicles for pulling key countries closer and advancing the United States’ vision of rules-based, market-oriented trade. Trade agreements were used to powerful effect during the Cold War but have been largely discarded for domestic political reasons in recent years. Future American presidents will need to restore the strategic rationale for such tools of statecraft if the United States hopes to keep the influence it aspires to on the world stage. This will require enough political courage to make the national security case for drawing partners closer through trade rather than succumbing to populism and protectionism—currently the paths of least political resistance.

Finally, Washington will need to reinvest in multilateralism. Addressing global challenges through institutions such as the World Trade Organization, the G-20, and the UN can be cumbersome and inefficient. Decisions made in such forums occasionally go against U.S. preferences. But that is the price of preserving a global system that lowers barriers to transnational cooperation and sets boundaries for acceptable state behavior. The more the United States withdraws its leadership and its resources from multilateral bodies, the higher the likelihood that the international system will fragment and give way to a “might makes right” world, which would remove restraints on Chinese belligerence and raise the odds of direct military conflict between the United States and China.

IF IT AIN’T BROKE

Some critics of this approach will object to it on moral grounds, given the scale of China’s human rights violations, and instead urge Washington to isolate Beijing. But outrage is a weak weapon in diplomacy. And when the United States isolates countries, as it did Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela, they tend to even more flagrantly ignore American complaints about human rights because there is no longer any cost or consequence for doing so. A diplomatic decoupling with China would yield a similar result.

Others will argue that instead of tolerating China, the United States should seek to contain it or even engineer the downfall of the CCP. But any American pursuit of a Chinese collapse would backfire. It would alienate the United States from its partners, virtually none of whom have an interest in pursuing such a course. And it would expose American leaders as being dangerously naive about the limits of their leverage: China is too strong for the United States to invade or effect a regime change, and the opposite is true, as well.

Still others will question whether China would be amenable to such a relationship, given its leaders’ conviction that Washington’s endgame is to destroy Chinese communism. China’s leaders will never publicly embrace any U.S. strategy. They will chafe at Washington’s efforts to preserve its military deterrent and technological edge, and they will seek to undermine liberal features of the existing international system, most notably its privileging of individual liberty above social stability. But several factors could push Beijing toward grudging acceptance. Chinese leaders privately acknowledge that they are not prepared to assume responsibility for developing and leading an alternate international system. Beijing would like to nudge the existing international order so that it is more favorable to Chinese interests. It believes it is entitled to more power than it currently enjoys. These would be adjustments, however, not wholesale revisions. Indeed, what differentiates Beijing and Moscow most is that Moscow is prepared to act as a system-breaking power, whereas Beijing is not—at least so far.

Isolating China might feel satisfying, but it would not serve U.S. interests.

China’s rise since the late 1970s has coincided with its decision to integrate with the world and the institutions underpinning the global order. The country’s substantial economic and social progress over the past four decades would not have been possible if China had persisted in its Mao-era isolation. China’s national development goals in the coming decades likewise depend on remaining networked within an inclusive international system that sustains its access to foreign capital, technology, and markets.

Da Wei, one of China’s leading international relations scholars, has written that a collapse of the international system or its fragmentation would devastate China’s ability to modernize. Many other top Chinese experts with whom I regularly interact consistently underline this point. So, too, does the International Monetary Fund. The IMF has warned that severe fragmentation of the world economy could shave up to seven percent off total global output. Since China is the world’s largest trading power, it would be more exposed than most countries to the fallout under such a scenario.

So even though China’s leaders clearly want more recognition, insulation, and room to maneuver in the current international system, they must contend with the fact that any fracturing into rival blocs led by the United States and China would place Beijing at a deep disadvantage. In such a scenario, the United States presumably would lead an ideologically aligned group of major economies that control many advanced technologies and military capabilities, with China left leading an ideologically diverse grouping of developing countries that lag in military and technological capacity.

To keep China attuned to and sobered by that potential outcome, Washington must sustain and deepen coordination with as broad a coalition of countries as possible, not just advanced democracies in Europe and Asia. The goal is not to isolate or encircle China but to disabuse any notion that Beijing could succeed in forming a cohesive anti-Western coalition that could fulfill China’s development and security requirements. Washington will have the greatest effect along these lines by addressing other countries’ top challenges, not by attempting to organize efforts in opposition to China or Chinese initiatives.

Riding bicycles in Shanghai, June 2022

Aly Song / Reuters

Washington can afford magnanimity. It enjoys a sizable lead over China in national competitiveness. And as the political scientist Stephen Walt has argued, China has no viable path to achieving hegemony. The United States is a source of attraction for other countries when it looks to the future with optimism, manages its own affairs, and acts on its responsibilities as a global leader. These are factors within its power to control, not China’s.

Despite their respective ambivalence about certain features of the current international system, and the intensifying rivalry between them, the United States and China both want to avoid war and maintain stability. They both derive wealth and security from the existing system. And as the world’s two strongest countries, they are better able to contribute to collective problem-solving with existing institutions than they would be without them.

China’s ambitions will pose a sharp challenge to the United States well into the future. The best way for Washington to contend with this challenge is to keep China entangled in the international system while nurturing American alliances and bolstering the U.S. technological edge. If the United States can advance a patient but firm long-term strategy toward this end, it will be well positioned to sustain its leadership, prosperity, and security.

• RYAN HASS is a Senior Fellow, Director of the John L. Thornton China Center, and Chen-Fu and Cecilia Yen Koo Chair in Taiwan Studies in the Foreign Policy Program at the Brookings Institution. From 2013 to 2017, he served as Director for China, Taiwan, and Mongolia at the U.S. National Security Council.
• MORE BY RYAN HASS

Foreign Affairs · by Ryan Hass · October 24, 2023

18. No, Xi Jinping Is Not About to Attack Taiwan

Sun Tzu: "Never assume your enemy will not attack. Make yourself invincible."

Excerpts:

But unless his back is against the wall, Mr. Xi will likely conclude that the risks of an unsuccessful military adventure are too high. This provides an opportunity that the United States and Taiwan must use wisely.

Taiwan must accelerate its shift toward investing in defense capabilities that can survive — and prove lethal against — a potential attack. Since resupplying the island will be extremely difficult if conflict breaks out, it must make a greater effort to stockpile not only munitions, but also food, water and energy. It needs to adopt a whole-of-society approach to its defense that emphasizes national resistance, resilience and the willingness to fight.

The United States should do more to help Taiwan achieve these goals. It also needs to continue efforts to reconfigure its own military posture in East Asia, including spreading out American forces, making them more resilient and procuring more advanced long-range missiles that can outmatch China’s weapons. The overall goal of U.S. military strategy in the region should be to deny Beijing the ability to achieve a rapid, low-cost military victory over Taiwan.

Finally, the United States must also provide credible assurances to Beijing that as long as China refrains from using force against Taiwan, Washington will not support the island’s independence nor return to its past defense treaty with Taipei. Assurances like these can help to avoid war.

In the meantime, China’s rhetoric and aggressive maneuvers should be viewed not as a sign of imminent attack, but for what they are: a demonstration of Chinese resolve that it will not accept Taiwan’s permanent separation from China, and a chance for the P.L.A. to hone its skills — should Beijing one day feel compelled to use them.

OPINION

GUEST ESSAY

No, Xi Jinping Is Not About to Attack Taiwan

Oct. 29, 2023

By Bonnie S. Glaser

Ms. Glaser is managing director of the Indo-Pacific Program at the German Marshall Fund of the United States.

nytimes.com · by Bonnie S. Glaser · October 29, 2023

Credit...Andy Wong/Associated Press

To some observers, it may seem like Xi Jinping is itching to unify Taiwan with China.

The Chinese president has repeatedly asserted that doing so is vital to achieving his “China Dream” of national rejuvenation. He has instructed the Chinese military to be prepared by 2027 to take Taiwan by force, if necessary, and China increasingly uses its growing military might to intimidate Taiwan’s people into yielding to Chinese control. Last month, it staged large-scale naval drills involving an aircraft carrier in waters east of Taiwan and, days later, flew 103 warplanes toward the island — a single-day record.

But this bluster masks significant misgivings within China’s leadership about whether its largely unproven People’s Liberation Army forces can seize and control Taiwan at an acceptable cost, doubts that have very likely been accentuated by Russia’s military failures in Ukraine. In this light, a P.L.A. takeover of Taiwan is not inevitable nor, perhaps, even likely in the next few years, which gives the United States and Taiwan time to bolster their military capabilities and avert conflict.

Recent purges of senior Chinese generals, including the defense minister and two leaders overseeing the country’s nuclear and missile arsenal, hint at Mr. Xi’s lack of confidence in his military’s warfighting capability. While the reasons for these cabinet removals have not been made public, signs point to possible corruption and its impact on military preparedness. Officers who are lining their own pockets, if that is the case, are likely not taking seriously enough Mr. Xi’s instruction to be prepared to seize Taiwan by 2027. Mr. Xi has frequently admonished the P.L.A. to improve military training and strengthen combat readiness.

Russia’s debacle in Ukraine is a cautionary tale for Mr. Xi. Early in the war, the battle-hardened Russian military failed in the relatively straightforward task of crossing a land border to capture Kyiv. The P.L.A. would face even greater difficulty in crossing the Taiwan Strait. A large-scale amphibious invasion is among the most difficult military operations, requiring air and maritime superiority and the ability to sustain an invading force during a lengthy campaign.

For Mr. Xi, the political risks of anything less than a quick, low-cost and successful invasion are huge. A protracted stalemate could undermine his assertion that China is strong and powerful again, jeopardizing his goals of national rejuvenation and a powerful military. Even more worrying for Beijing is the possibility of defeat at the hands of a well-equipped, dug-in and defiant Taiwan, aided by the potential intervention of U.S. forces. It’s a nightmare scenario that could weaken Mr. Xi’s hold on power and even threaten Communist Party rule.

The Chinese leader can also not help but grasp the heavy price being paid by Russia in Ukraine: military casualties estimated at nearly 300,000 and counting; a severe weakening of the Russian economy because of international sanctions; incalculable harm to its global reputation; and an accelerated decline in Russia’s national power.

It’s a perilous time for Mr. Xi to court such danger.

China’s economy is facing long-term slower growth. This raises the specter of dissatisfaction or even social instability if the government continues to prioritize security and political control over economic well-being. Thousands of demonstrators across the country protested Mr. Xi’s obsession with control late last year, taking to the streets to denounce strict Covid policies, which were subsequently lifted. Some demonstrators voiced rare demands for political change, including Mr. Xi’s removal. Domestic support for a potential bloody war over Taiwan might not last long. Because of China’s now-lifted one-child policy, its armed forces are mostly composed of sons with no siblings. Their parents expect those soldiers to support them in old age and may take to the streets if casualties were to rise.

Yet another factor likely to restrain Mr. Xi is the prospect of the United States aiding Taiwan. Bipartisan support in the U.S. Congress for Taiwan’s security has never been stronger, and President Biden has repeatedly said the United States would support Taiwan militarily if China attacked. My conversations with Chinese experts suggest that Beijing firmly believes the United States values Taiwan as an important strategic bulwark in containing China and will intervene to prevent a Chinese takeover of the island.

Still, there are scenarios where Mr. Xi may feel compelled to take military action. If a future Taiwan government pushes for formal independence through a referendum or constitutional revision, Mr. Xi could conclude that the political risks of inaction — to him and the Communist Party — outweigh the risk of war. A move by an American president or Congress to restore diplomatic recognition to Taiwan — or return to the defense treaty that it had with Taipei before the United States switched diplomatic recognition to Communist China in 1979 — could similarly force Mr. Xi’s hand, even if he is not confident of battlefield success.

Even without such an outright trigger, the upcoming January elections in Taiwan could result in another four, or even eight, years of rule by the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party. Mr. Xi may decide to strike if he begins to feel that Taiwan is slipping further from his grasp, especially if the United States continues to bolster Taiwan’s military and its own forces in the region.

But unless his back is against the wall, Mr. Xi will likely conclude that the risks of an unsuccessful military adventure are too high. This provides an opportunity that the United States and Taiwan must use wisely.

Taiwan must accelerate its shift toward investing in defense capabilities that can survive — and prove lethal against — a potential attack. Since resupplying the island will be extremely difficult if conflict breaks out, it must make a greater effort to stockpile not only munitions, but also food, water and energy. It needs to adopt a whole-of-society approach to its defense that emphasizes national resistance, resilience and the willingness to fight.

The United States should do more to help Taiwan achieve these goals. It also needs to continue efforts to reconfigure its own military posture in East Asia, including spreading out American forces, making them more resilient and procuring more advanced long-range missiles that can outmatch China’s weapons. The overall goal of U.S. military strategy in the region should be to deny Beijing the ability to achieve a rapid, low-cost military victory over Taiwan.

Finally, the United States must also provide credible assurances to Beijing that as long as China refrains from using force against Taiwan, Washington will not support the island’s independence nor return to its past defense treaty with Taipei. Assurances like these can help to avoid war.

In the meantime, China’s rhetoric and aggressive maneuvers should be viewed not as a sign of imminent attack, but for what they are: a demonstration of Chinese resolve that it will not accept Taiwan’s permanent separation from China, and a chance for the P.L.A. to hone its skills — should Beijing one day feel compelled to use them.

Bonnie S. Glaser (@BonnieGlaser) is the managing director of the Indo-Pacific Program at the German Marshall Fund of the United States. She has worked on China issues as a consultant for the Defense and State Departments.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.

nytimes.com · by Bonnie S. Glaser · October 29, 2023

19. The Other Group of Viruses That Could Cause the Next Pandemic

I never heard of paramyxovirus. But I am not a science guy.

Conclusion:

The next pandemic won’t necessarily be a paramyxovirus, or even a flu virus or a coronavirus. But it has an excellent chance of starting as so many other known pandemics have—with a spillover from animals, in parts of the world where we’ve invaded wild habitats. We may not be able to predict which pathogen or creature might be involved in our next big outbreak, but the common denominator will always be us.

The Other Group of Viruses That Could Cause the Next Pandemic

Flu viruses and coronavirus started the last few pandemics. Could the next one be a paramyxovirus?

By Katherine J. Wu

The Atlantic · by Katherine J. Wu · October 29, 2023

Whether it begins next week, next year, or next decade, another pandemic is on its way. Researchers can’t predict precisely when or how the outbreak might begin. Some 1.6 million viruses are estimated to lurk in the world’s mammalian and avian wildlife, up to half of which could spill into humans; an untold number are attempting exactly that, at this very moment, bumping up against the people hunting, eating, and encroaching on those creatures. (And that’s just viruses: Parasites, fungi, and bacteria represent major infectious dangers too.) The only true certainty in the pandemic forecast is that the next threat will be here sooner than anyone would like.

But scientists can at least make an educated guess about what might catalyze the next Big One. Three main families of viruses, more than most others, keep scientists up at night: flu viruses, coronaviruses, and paramyxoviruses, in descending order of threat. Together, those groups make up “the trifecta of respiratory death,” Sara Cherry, a virologist at the University of Pennsylvania, told me.

Flu and coronavirus have a recent track record of trouble: Since 1918, flu viruses have sparked four pandemics, all the while continuing to pester us on a seasonal basis; some scientists worry that another major human outbreak may be brewing now, as multiple H5 flu viruses continue to spread from birds to mammals. The past two decades have also featured three major and deadly coronavirus outbreaks: the original SARS epidemic that began in late 2002; MERS, which spilled into humans—likely from camels—in 2012; and SARS-CoV-2, the pandemic pathogen that’s been plaguing us since the end of 2019. Common-cold-causing coronaviruses, too, remain a fixture of daily living—likely relics of ancient animal-to-human spillovers that we kept transmitting amongst ourselves.

Read: Bird flu has never done this before

Paramyxoviruses, meanwhile, have mostly been “simmering in the background,” says Raina Plowright, a disease ecologist at Cornell. Unlike flu viruses and coronaviruses, which have already clearly “proven themselves” as tier-one outbreak risks, paramyxoviruses haven’t yet been caught causing a bona fide pandemic. But they seem poised to do so, and they likely have managed the feat in the past. Like flu viruses and coronaviruses, paramyxoviruses can spread through the air, sometimes very rapidly. That’s certainly been the case with measles, a paramyxovirus that is “literally the most transmissible human virus on the planet,” says Paul Duprex, a virologist at the University of Pittsburgh. And, like flu viruses and coronaviruses, paramyxoviruses are found in a wide range of animals; more are being discovered wherever researchers look. Consider canine distemper virus, which has been found in, yes, canines, but also in raccoons, skunks, ferrets, otters, badgers, tigers, and seals. Paramyxoviruses, like flu viruses and coronaviruses, have also repeatedly shown their potential to hopscotch from those wild creatures into us. Since 1994, Hendra virus has caused multiple highly lethal outbreaks in horses, killing four humans along the way; the closely related Nipah virus has, since 1998, spread repeatedly among both pigs and people, carrying fatality rates that can soar upwards of 50 percent.

The human versions of those past few outbreaks have petered out. But that may not always be the case—for Nipah, or for another paramyxovirus that’s yet to emerge. It’s entirely possible, Plowright told me, that the world may soon encounter a new paramyxovirus that’s both highly transmissible and ultra deadly—an “absolutely catastrophic” scenario, she said, that could dwarf the death toll of any epidemic in recent memory. (In the past four years, COVID-19, a disease with a fatality rate well below Nipah’s, has killed an estimated 7 million people.)

All that said, though, paramyxoviruses are a third-place contender for several good reasons. Whereas flu viruses and coronaviruses are speedy shape-shifters—they frequently tweak their own genomes and exchange genetic material with others of their own kind—paramyxoviruses have historically been a bit more reluctant to change. “That takes them down a level,” says Danielle Anderson, a virologist at the Doherty Institute, in Melbourne. For one, these viruses’ sluggishness could make it much tougher for them to acquire transmission-boosting traits or adapt rapidly to spread among new hosts. Nipah virus, for instance, can spread among people via respiratory droplets at close contact. But even though it’s had many chances to do so, “it still hasn’t gotten very good at transmitting among humans,” Patricia Thibault, a biologist at the University of Saskatchewan who studied paramyxoviruses for years, told me.

The genetic stability of paramyxoviruses can also make them straightforward to vaccinate against. Our flu and coronavirus shots need regular updates—as often as annually—to keep our immune system apace with viral evolution. But we’ve been using essentially the same measles vaccine for more than half a century, Duprex told me, and immunity to the virus seems to last for decades. Strong, durable vaccines are one of the main reasons that several countries have managed to eliminate measles—and why a paramyxovirus called rinderpest, once a major scourge of cattle, is one of the only infectious diseases we’ve ever managed to eradicate. In both cases, it helped that the paramyxovirus at play wasn’t great at infecting a ton of different animals: Measles is almost exclusive to us; rinderpest primarily troubled cows and their close kin. Most flu viruses and SARS-CoV-2, meanwhile, can spread widely across the tree of animal life; “I don’t know how you can eradicate that,” Anderson told me.

The problem with all of these trends, though, is that they represent only what researchers know of the paramyxoviruses they’ve studied—which is, inevitably, a paltry subset of what exists, says Benhur Lee, a virologist at Mount Sinai’s Icahn School of Medicine. “The devil we don’t know can be just as frightening,” if not more, Lee told me. A pattern-defying paramyxovirus may already be readying itself to jump.

Researchers are keyed into these looming threats. The World Health Organization highlights Nipah virus and its close cousins as some of its top-priority pathogens; in the U.S., paramyxoviruses recently made a National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases list of pathogens essential to study for pandemic preparedness. Last year, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced a hefty initiative to fund paramyxovirus antiviral drugs. Several new paramyxovirus vaccines—many of them targeting Nipah viruses and their close relatives—may soon be ready to debut.

Read: We have a mink problem

At the same time, though, paramyxoviruses remain neglected—at least relative to the sheer perils they pose, experts told me. “Influenza has been sequenced to death,” Lee said. (That’s now pretty true for SARS-CoV-2 as well.) Paramyxoviruses, meanwhile, aren’t regularly surveilled for; development of their treatments and vaccines also commands less attention, especially outside of Nipah and its kin. And although the family has been plaguing us for countless generations, researchers still don’t know exactly how paramyxoviruses move into new species, or what mutations they would need to become more transmissible among us; they don’t know why some paramyxoviruses spark only minor respiratory infections, whereas others run amok through the body until the host is dead.

Even the paramyxoviruses that feel somewhat familiar are still surprising us. In recent years, scientists have begun to realize that immunity to the paramyxovirus mumps, once thought to be pretty long-lasting and robust, wanes in the first few decades after vaccination; a version of the virus, once thought to be a problem only for humans and a few other primates, has also been detected in bats. For these and other reasons, rubulaviruses—the paramyxovirus subfamily that includes mumps—are among the potential pandemic agents that most concern Duprex. Emmie de Wit, the chief of the molecular-pathogenesis unit at Rocky Mountain Laboratories, told me that the world could also become more vulnerable to morbilliviruses, the subfamily that includes measles. If measles is ever eradicated, some regulators may push for an end to measles shots. But in the same way that the end of smallpox vaccination left the world vulnerable to mpox, the fall of measles immunity could leave an opening for a close cousin to rise.

The next pandemic won’t necessarily be a paramyxovirus, or even a flu virus or a coronavirus. But it has an excellent chance of starting as so many other known pandemics have—with a spillover from animals, in parts of the world where we’ve invaded wild habitats. We may not be able to predict which pathogen or creature might be involved in our next big outbreak, but the common denominator will always be us.

The Atlantic · by Katherine J. Wu · October 29, 2023

20.  A World at War

Excerpts:

More accurate language around “peace” may help these governments to reengage with the struggle for it. Describing negotiations over a cease-fire as a “peace process,” as if peace were just around the corner rather than years or decades away, all too often leads to early claims that it has been achieved just because the guns have temporarily fallen silent. This misconception leads to disengagement. New, more accurate framing that differentiates between stages of conflict management, conflict resolution, and peace building, as well as a more honest account of the prospects for progress into the next stage, would lead to a more honest account of what is possible and practical—or morally acceptable. In particular, this new approach to language would help to establish realistic expectations of what can be achieved in the short, medium, and long terms. It would also prevent the all-too-familiar rush to declare success that scuppers the continuation of many peace processes.

Most important, a new approach to mediation is needed. Formal peace-building processes and practices were expanded and professionalized during the post–Cold War period, and they presume or require dynamics—including geopolitical cooperation and successful peace settlements and political transitions—that no longer exist. Today’s world is defined by geopolitical competition and requires something very different. In responding to these challenges, mediators must become more creative and collaborative. They must become advocates for their own cause, making the public case for peace, and they must secure diplomatic support and engage with a wide variety of groups, including civil society. In particular, mediators must work closely with, and empower, local peace builders, absorbing local knowledge and involving key players in peace processes, which must no longer seek to perpetuate status quo power dynamics. Mediators must also work closely with—and at times provide support to—regional blocs, play a greater role in supporting bilateral negotiations, and empower conflicting parties to create sustainable peace once the guns have been silenced.

Meanwhile, those seeking to make peace will need to engage nontraditional actors—middle powers, humanitarian organizations, and actors from the private sector. These partnerships should harness the potential of the environmental, social, and corporate governance agenda to carve out a role for the private sector in supporting peace, forge new models of geopolitical cooperation, and use aid to support peace rather than serve as a substitute for it. These are big asks. But they are also the basic requirements for building sustainable peace, stopping the proliferation of conflict, and aiming for more than the temporary quelling of violence.

A World at War

What Is Behind the Global Explosion of Violent Conflict?

By Emma Beals and Peter Salisbury

October 30, 2023

Foreign Affairs · by Emma Beals and Peter Salisbury · October 30, 2023

Violent conflict is increasing in multiple parts of the world. In addition to Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, and the Israeli offensive on Gaza, raising the specter of a wider war in the Middle East, there has been a surge in violence across Syria, including a wave of armed drone attacks that threatened U.S. troops stationed there. In the Caucasus in late September, Azerbaijan seized the disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh—forcing an estimated 150,000 ethnic Armenians to flee their historical home in the territory and setting the stage for renewed fighting with Armenia. Meanwhile, in Africa, the civil war in Sudan rages on, conflict has returned to Ethiopia, and a military takeover of Niger in July was the sixth coup across the Sahel and West Africa since 2020.

In fact, according to an analysis of data gathered by the Uppsala Conflict Data Program, conducted by the Peace Research Institute Oslo, the number, intensity, and length of conflicts worldwide is at its highest level since before the end of the Cold War. The study found that there were 55 active conflicts in 2022, with the average one lasting about eight to 11 years, a substantial increase from the 33 active conflicts lasting an average of seven years a decade earlier.

Notwithstanding the increase in conflicts, it has been more than a decade since an internationally mediated comprehensive peace deal has been brokered to end a war. UN-led or UN-assisted political processes in Libya, Sudan, and Yemen have stalled or collapsed. Seemingly frozen conflicts—in countries including Ethiopia, Israel, and Myanmar—are thawing at an alarming pace. With the Russian invasion of Ukraine, high-intensity conflict has even returned to Europe, which had previously enjoyed several decades of relative peace and stability. Alongside the proliferation of war has come record levels of human upheaval. In 2022, a quarter of the world’s population—two billion people—lived in conflict-affected areas. The number of people forcibly displaced worldwide reached a record 108 million by the start of 2023.

Until now, the international response from European Union member states, the United Kingdom, and the United States, all of whom invested heavily in peace building in the wake of the Cold War, has been to shift the goal posts of “peace” from conflict resolution to conflict management. But events in the Middle East and elsewhere are a reminder that conflict can be managed for only so long. As fighting flares worldwide and the root causes of conflict remain unresolved, traditional peace building and development tools look increasingly ineffective. The result is that aid bills grow, refugees are displaced, and fractured societies continue to suffer. A new approach to resolving and managing conflicts and their impact is urgently needed.

BROKEN MACHINERY

Having fallen between 1990 and 2007, the total number of conflicts worldwide began to rise in 2010, the Uppsala Conflict Data Program found. The number of civil and interstate wars, and the fatalities they cause, are now at their highest levels since the mid-1980s, and the UN declared in January that the number of violent conflicts worldwide is at its highest level since the end of World War II. Wars that are halted are increasingly likely to reignite within a year, as happens about five times a year on average.

Wars are becoming more common, and difficult to end, for a number of reasons. One is the changing nature of conflict. Twenty-first-century wars tend to be fought between states and armed groups committed to different causes with access to relatively advanced weaponry and other forms of technology, as well as money earned from natural resources and criminal activity. Complex, multiparty conflict became the norm after the Soviet Union collapsed, which removed the binary organizing principle of West-Soviet competition that shaped many earlier wars. More recently, conflicts have also become increasingly internationalized. Countries including Russia, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States regularly become drawn, whether indirectly or directly, into foreign wars, as has been seen repeatedly in conflicts in the Middle East and Africa. The more local and international parties that are involved in a conflict, the harder it is to end it.

The UN, once the go-to conflict mediator, has been sidelined. The UN’s loss of influence has been driven by geopolitical competition, which has divided powerful states. The UN Security Council is particularly affected by these forces. It has seized up, plagued by growing international rivalries between the United States, Russia, and China and by an increasingly transactional approach to international politics. Deadlock at the Security Council means that the UN can offer neither solutions nor censure for war crimes or aggression. UNSC-mandated peacekeeping and transition teams are becoming rarer and are often short-lived, and UN envoys, peacekeepers, and other officials increasingly lack leverage and credibility with conflict parties. This June, for example, Mali sought the withdrawal of a decadelong UN peacekeeping presence because of tensions between the government and the mission, including a disagreement over their role and mandate. Sudan’s rival warlords reportedly refused to even speak to their country’s UN Special Envoy Volker Perthes, before he resigned in September. UN peacekeeping chief Jean-Pierre Lacroix has stated that divisions within the Security Council mean UN missions are no longer able to achieve “the ultimate goal of peacekeeping”—devising durable political solutions—and must instead settle for “intermediate goals” such as “preserving cease-fires.”

Increasingly overwhelmed by a series of global crises and new policy priorities, including Russian aggression in Europe and an assertive China, many high-level policymakers in the United States and Europe see limited value in intervening militarily or investing significant political capital in far-flung conflicts that they regard as of little strategic consequence. Attention has instead shifted to dealing with the consequences of conflicts—waves of refugees and cross-border smuggling of drugs and weapons, in particular—rather than their causes.

LOWERING THE BAR

Faced with this array of challenges, the perception of what is possible among UN officials and Western countries who once threw their weight behind peacemaking—principally EU member-states led by France and Germany, as well as the United Kingdom and the United States—is changing. A former UN official who worked for decades on international peace processes notes that the numerous barriers to mediation make it “almost impossible” to end modern conflicts. In practice, UN intervention today often serves to de-escalate conflicts or, in a best-case scenario, initiate a fragile political process that few expect to work. In private, many veteran mediators and policy officials argue that the ambitions of many international mediation efforts are tacitly limited to bilateral dealmaking designed to achieve short-term détente or limited goals, such as the 2022 agreement that allowed Ukrainian grain to pass through the Black Sea. Marginalized during negotiations, and lacking broad peace agreements and political transitions in which they can play a significant role, UN mediators have lost much of their raison d’être. Most other peace-building tools—including inclusive political dialogue, accountability, transitional justice, and security sector reform—cannot succeed without political processes to anchor them.

Elsewhere, the aspirations of many Western diplomats have quietly shifted to pursuing or supporting containment or de-escalation, avoiding the search for peaceful and sustainable resolution to conflicts. Efforts by the United States to describe the Abraham Accords—which sought to normalize Arab relations with Israel—as “a peace process” highlight this change. The accords in practice fail to address the drivers of the Israel-Palestinian conflict, as has become disastrously clear in the Israel-Hamas war.

International aspirations for long-term solutions are particularly low in the Middle East and North Africa. The current phase of Yemen’s civil war has slowed to a near-halt following negotiations between the Houthi rebels—who sparked the conflict by seizing the capital in 2014—and Saudi Arabia, which intervened to oust them in 2015. But the UN and the Houthis’ domestic rivals have been excluded from negotiations, and the chances of a meaningful political settlement appear low. Many Yemenis, including the veteran researcher Nadwa al-Dawsari, expect either a return to fighting sooner or later, or the continuation of a limbo state of “no war, no peace” if the Houthi-Saudi channel remains the main negotiation track.

Syria’s so-called frozen conflict is also seeing an alarming but predictable uptick in violence and instability because of the lack of progress of negotiations. On one track, negotiations between the “Arab Liaison Committee,” which is composed of Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Egypt and the Arab League, and the Syrian government have stalled. At the same time, the UN-led peace process in Syria is detached from the conflict’s drivers. It is pursuing limited objectives, including a new constitution to be drafted by a committee that has not met in 18 months, and a yet-to-begin process, led by the UN, that seeks to build mutual confidence between Syria and the Arab Liaison Committee, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States. This process is largely divorced from current political and military developments, including a recent spike in violence across the country.

VIOLENCE CANNOT BE CONTAINED

Until recently, some international officials appeared to think an end to fighting was a good-enough goal. In late September, U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, touting the Biden administration’s foreign policy bona fides, claimed that the Middle East was “quieter today than it has been in two decades.” But Hamas’s brutal attacks in Israel a week after his comments and Israel’s ongoing military response in Gaza, as well as surging violence across Syria, show the limits of containment.

Containment does not resolve conflicts and requires active management. This means proactive efforts to address grievances, quell violence, advance negotiations, and take action to deal with increasing instability or unexpected events. Whereas reducing violence is a sensible initial goal, once conflicts are de-escalated, attention all too often shifts elsewhere. It is easy, then, to miss warning signs that fighting is about to restart. This is a particular problem when armed actors or regimes remain in control after failed peace processes or during political transitions. Without accountability for their past misdeeds, such groups feel free to repeat violence. For this reason, Sudan’s generals appear to have believed that they would not be held to account by the UN, their international backers (particularly Saudi Arabia and the UAE), or the states engaged in supporting the transition process (including Norway, the United Kingdom, and the United States) when they began to fight each other in April. Sudanese activists and diplomats based in the capital rightly pointed out that they had repeatedly warned that the men who have governed the country since the 2019 military coup were gearing up for war with one another. But these warnings were either dismissed or watered down in Western capitals, including Washington, in part because no conflict had yet broken out and because officials did not see Sudan as a priority.

Both regional actors and Western diplomats and analysts have long argued that the status quo in Gaza and the West Bank is unsustainable. But international attention has been focused elsewhere. Regional normalization efforts led by the Trump administration built ties between Israel and former Arab adversaries including Bahrain and the UAE. The Abraham Accords have been sustained by the Biden administration, which has energetically pursued an Israeli-Saudi deal. But these efforts have completely failed to address the drivers of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Despite this, even as the war between Israel and Hamas escalated, U.S. officials, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken, declared that Washington still hoped to continue Israeli-Saudi normalization negotiations.

THE AID TRAP

All too often, humanitarian aid has become a panacea for managing unresolved conflict. Take Syria, where, 12 years after the war began, the UN aid funding requests for 2023 included $4.81 billion for programs inside the country and $5.7 billion to support refugees. Similar sums are being expended in Sudan and Myanmar, both of which are suffering conflicts and have vacant UN political envoy roles and no discernible peace process. Violence grinds on unabated, and civilians subsist on meager aid provision—in areas where they can be reached. As the number of conflicts rises, the price tag for aid keeps growing.

Donors cannot keep up with the growing cost of war. Funding for aid appeals increased by an average of ten percent year on year between 2012 and 2018 but then tapered off. Yet UN appeals for funds have continued to grow, quadrupling in number between 2013 and today. Of the 406 million people in need of humanitarian assistance in 2022, 87 percent lived in a country in the midst of high-intensity conflict, and 83 percent in a protracted crisis.

Aid, in these circumstances, cannot be the only answer. Refugee return requires a fundamental shift in local dynamics that allows those fleeing violence and persecution to safely return home, access their properties, and reintegrate into society without discrimination. At the same time, postconflict justice and development require management by suitable governments that are willing to address the violations committed during the conflict and provide adequate governance free of discrimination to facilitate a productive economic environment in which corruption and illicit activity are combated. Locally led peace building that heals the social fractures caused by conflict requires civic space to conduct dialogue, address grievances, and secure inclusive decision-making and governance.

BLESSED ARE THE PEACEMAKERS

The world is at an inflection point, and it is still possible to galvanize support for a new approach to resolving conflict. To achieve this, creative and courageous leadership is needed from a broad coalition of politicians, business leaders, the UN, peace builders, and local communities—aligned with a renewed ambition to make peace. Without aspiring to, and placing a value on, sustainable peace, it is all too easy to accept least-bad outcomes and to forget the enormous human and resource toll of doing so.

First and foremost, any effort at renewing peacemaking for the twenty-first century needs political will from powerful states, principally the United States and the other permanent members of the UN Security Council. This point was explicitly made by UN Secretary-General António Guterres in his recently published policy brief, “New Agenda for Peace,” a vision that places the responsibility for securing the peace and upholding international norms in the hands of individual countries rather than the multilateral system. If governments that say they believe in a rules-based order—including those in Brussels, London, and Washington—are willing to uphold international laws and norms, then there may be some hope for the future. But if they are not, then the current race to the bottom is certain to continue.

More accurate language around “peace” may help these governments to reengage with the struggle for it. Describing negotiations over a cease-fire as a “peace process,” as if peace were just around the corner rather than years or decades away, all too often leads to early claims that it has been achieved just because the guns have temporarily fallen silent. This misconception leads to disengagement. New, more accurate framing that differentiates between stages of conflict management, conflict resolution, and peace building, as well as a more honest account of the prospects for progress into the next stage, would lead to a more honest account of what is possible and practical—or morally acceptable. In particular, this new approach to language would help to establish realistic expectations of what can be achieved in the short, medium, and long terms. It would also prevent the all-too-familiar rush to declare success that scuppers the continuation of many peace processes.

Most important, a new approach to mediation is needed. Formal peace-building processes and practices were expanded and professionalized during the post–Cold War period, and they presume or require dynamics—including geopolitical cooperation and successful peace settlements and political transitions—that no longer exist. Today’s world is defined by geopolitical competition and requires something very different. In responding to these challenges, mediators must become more creative and collaborative. They must become advocates for their own cause, making the public case for peace, and they must secure diplomatic support and engage with a wide variety of groups, including civil society. In particular, mediators must work closely with, and empower, local peace builders, absorbing local knowledge and involving key players in peace processes, which must no longer seek to perpetuate status quo power dynamics. Mediators must also work closely with—and at times provide support to—regional blocs, play a greater role in supporting bilateral negotiations, and empower conflicting parties to create sustainable peace once the guns have been silenced.

Meanwhile, those seeking to make peace will need to engage nontraditional actors—middle powers, humanitarian organizations, and actors from the private sector. These partnerships should harness the potential of the environmental, social, and corporate governance agenda to carve out a role for the private sector in supporting peace, forge new models of geopolitical cooperation, and use aid to support peace rather than serve as a substitute for it. These are big asks. But they are also the basic requirements for building sustainable peace, stopping the proliferation of conflict, and aiming for more than the temporary quelling of violence.

• EMMA BEALS is a Nonresident Fellow at the Middle East Institute and a Senior Adviser at the European Institute of Peace.
• PETER SALISBURY is an Adjunct Professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.
• MORE BY EMMA BEALSMORE BY PETER SALISBURY

Foreign Affairs · by Emma Beals and Peter Salisbury · October 30, 2023

​21. As the Israel-Hamas war rages, the U.S. wants to offer Israel advice — and get advised

This is where we should consider recalling some general officers who have experience in this type of war and relationships with Israel.

ALL THINGS CONSIDERED | OCT 27

As the Israel-Hamas war rages, the U.S. wants to offer Israel advice — and get advised

https://wamu.org/story/23/10/27/as-the-israel-hamas-war-rages-the-u-s-wants-to-offer-israel-advice-and-get-advised/?utm_source=pocket_saves

Quil Lawrence

LISTEN3:36

An Israeli soldier walks past a house damaged during the Hamas attack in Kibbutz Kfar Azza, Israel, on Friday. The Kibbutz was attacked on Oct. 7.

Maya Alleruzzo / AP

U.S. military advisers recently dispatched to Israel in advance of a possible incursion into Gaza include a Marine special operations commander with experience in urban warfare, in places like Fallujah and the fight against ISIS in the Iraqi city of Mosul. The two militaries have a history of collaboration.

“The relationship between the Israeli Special Operations Forces and U. S. Special Operations Command has been longstanding. It’s very robust,” said retired Marine Gen. Mark Schwartz, former deputy commander of U.S. joint special operations who served as U.S. Security Coordinator for Israel and the Palestinian Authority from 2019 to 2021.

Schwartz said the Israelis have long experience dealing with Gaza — there’s even a mock city, over half-a-mile square, used for training in the Negev desert. But he’s concerned that with the size of the force preparing to enter Gaza, most will be new at this.

“The vast majority of those forces that have been activated, they’ve never served in Lebanon, they didn’t serve the last time an incursion happened in Gaza. And as they’re putting their lives at risk, trying to deal with urban room clearing. These young men and women are having to make split-second decisions on ‘who do I shoot or do I not shoot’ based on who they find in a room and the threat that they perceive,” he said.

Hard-earned lessons

American generals sent to Israel may be able to offer some lessons from their own struggle to mitigate civilian casualties after two decades of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. And the U.S. may have intelligence about specific technology that Hamas may have obtained from Iran – which spent years helping militants in Iraq build booby traps and mines to attack American troops.

But having a high-level liaison to Israel also allows for two-way communication.

“The bigger role would be to liaise with Israel to make sure that Israeli military operations are anticipated by the United States,” said Dan Byman, author of A High Price: The Triumphs and Failures of Israeli Counterterrorism.

“We’re also seeing an array of militant groups, many of which are tied to Iran, attacking not only Israeli but also U. S. forces. Military operations by Israel could excite these, whether it’s an operation that kills large numbers of civilians or simply something that changes the status quo,” said Byman.

The U.S. may need to prepare bases in the region for any backlash, and even prepare its own response, as it did this week against Iranian forces in Syria.

Having this ongoing high level cooperation can help the U.S. sway Israel — as it may have already done to delay the ground invasion, said Byman.

“Part of the Biden administration’s approach has been to hug Israel quite tightly as a way of saying to Israelis, America is behind you, but also giving Israelis the willingness to trust the United States. And I think should military operations go into overdrive during a ground invasion, the United States could offer suggestions, could to push for course corrections that other countries simply would not be trusted [to give],” said Byman.

That may mean course corrections like the one the U.S. slowly made in Iraq and Afghanistan, especially regarding protecting civilians, said Gen. Schwartz. The Israeli military is obligated by the laws of war to protect civilians in Gaza, but it’s also in their interest, he said.

“Well, if you want to have any opportunity to try to leverage human intelligence to find out where the hostages are located, you certainly want to mitigate the pain and suffering on the civilian populace and, candidly I think Israel’s failed in that,” said Schwartz.

That’s the kind of candid appraisal that might just be heeded from a high-ranking U.S. military official working closely with Israel, he adds.

Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

22. America’s Three-Front War

Conclusion:

In his famous TV address, “A Time for Choosing,” Ronald Reagan noted that peace could be easily obtained through surrender, but that was not the American way. “We face,” he warned, “the most evil enemy mankind has known,” clearly referring to Communism. He quoted Winston Churchill: “When great forces are on the move in the world” we learn what we are truly made of. And like it or not, they “spell duty.”

America is at another time of testing and choosing. Those who hate us and revile us and wish to bury us believe they can outlast us. They have been wrong in the past. What shall it be today? Can we wage a three-front war against evil? Of course, we can. As President Reagan said in his first inaugural address, “With God’s help, we can and will resolve the problems which now confront us. And after all, why shouldn’t we believe that? We are Americans.”

America’s Three-Front War

https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/10/americas-three-front-war/

By LEE EDWARDS

​  October 29, 2023 6:30 AM

America must provide the necessary offensive weapons for Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan, as they struggle against powers who seek to eliminate them and to dethrone us.

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hat do Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan have in common? They constitute a three-front war being waged between America and its allies and a genocidal axis of Iran, Russia, and Communist China. Each front is crucial to America’s interests. Terrorists everywhere, particularly in Iran, are weighing America’s response to Hamas’s no-limits invasion of Israel. Russia’s Vladimir Putin is hoping that America will use the Israeli crisis as an excuse to halt further aid to Ukraine, ensuring its defeat. China’s Xi Jinping will ramp up pressure on Taiwan, believing that a three-front war is one front too many for an America weary of its heavy responsibilities as the leader of the free world​.

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But there can be no equivocation — America must provide the necessary offensive weapons for all three embattled countries. In an exemplary display of bipartisanship, the Biden administration and Congress have pledged to give Israel “all it needs” to defeat Hamas. If that means increasing the U.S. defense budget, now at a manageable 3.1 percent of the GDP, so be it. Those who want to freeze U.S. aid to Ukraine must answer the question: “What price freedom?” As for Taiwan, Congress should revise the Taiwan Relations Act, so as to allow the U.S. to provide offensive as well as defensive weapons to that island democracy.

The stakes of the three-front war confronting America are as high as in any conflict since World War II. What we do will determine the future of each nation and the cause of freedom around the world. We can look for guidance to Barry Goldwater, a founding father of the conservative movement, who wrote in The Conscience of a Conservative: “There is no difficulty in identifying the day’s overriding political challenge: it is to preserve and extend freedom.” That was true in 1960, at the height of the Cold War, and it is just as true today in our fractured world.

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The New York Times Shows How Principled It Really Is

As with every aspect of U.S. foreign policy, we must balance pragmatism and idealism. Idealism says that we must keep faith with three long-time friends and allies: Israel since 1948 and U.S. recognition; Ukraine since 1991 and the dissolution of the Soviet empire; and Taiwan since World War II when, as the Republic of China, it tied up 1 million Japanese troops on mainland China.

Pragmatism says we must help Israel in pursuit of peace and stability in the Middle East; bring about a decisive Ukrainian victory that would discourage further imperial acts by Russia; and preserve the independence of Taiwan, a key link in the South China Sea (and manufacturer of 91 percent of the semiconductors used in advanced computing).

The present three-front war calls to mind the Cold War that occupied us for more than four decades in that it is ideological as well as geopolitical. And the ideology is America’s historic adversary: Communism.

Two decades ago, Michael Waller, writing for the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, updated Georgetown professor Stefan Possony’s ground-breaking study, “International Terrorism: The Communist Connection.” Waller verified Possony’s conclusion: that the Soviet Union had conducted a decades-long cultivation and infiltration of Islamic terrorist organizations in the Middle East. The study estimated that Moscow had expended millions of dollars as part of its global campaign to wage “wars of national liberation.” Updating Possony, Waller described these Soviet efforts as essential to the formation of Hezbollah and Hamas. We can be certain that would-be terrorists who interacted with the Soviets would have studied Felix Dzerzhinsky, the first head of what became the KGB, who declared: “We stand for organized terror — this should be frankly admitted. Terror is an absolute necessity.” Bolshevik founder Vladimir Lenin was equally blunt: “The onslaught on the enemy must be pressed with the greatest vigor; attack, not defense, must be the slogan of the masses; the ruthless extermination of the enemy will be their task.”

More fromLEE EDWARDS

Taking Down the ‘Evil Empire’

Putin the Marxist-Leninist

It is no coincidence that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was ordered by Vladimir Putin, a former KGB colonel, who lamented that “the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.” His invasion of Ukraine, seizure of Crimea, and occupation of two regions of Georgia are all part of his plan to reconstruct an empire initiated by Lenin.

Communist China’s ever bolder displays of military strength by sea and air are intended to intimidate Taiwan and are straight out of the Chinese Communist Party’s playbook. Acquisition of Taiwan is a major goal of the CCP, which must constantly demonstrate its power to stay in power. At the same time, the CCP continues its genocidal policy of eliminating Uyghur religion and culture in Western China.

In his famous TV address, “A Time for Choosing,” Ronald Reagan noted that peace could be easily obtained through surrender, but that was not the American way. “We face,” he warned, “the most evil enemy mankind has known,” clearly referring to Communism. He quoted Winston Churchill: “When great forces are on the move in the world” we learn what we are truly made of. And like it or not, they “spell duty.”

America is at another time of testing and choosing. Those who hate us and revile us and wish to bury us believe they can outlast us. They have been wrong in the past. What shall it be today? Can we wage a three-front war against evil? Of course, we can. As President Reagan said in his first inaugural address, “With God’s help, we can and will resolve the problems which now confront us. And after all, why shouldn’t we believe that? We are Americans.”

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LEE EDWARDS is founder and chairman emeritus of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com