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Quotes of the Day:
“Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.”
– Oscar Wilde
"Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less."
– Marie Curie
"Competition is the law of the jungle, but cooperation is the law of civilization."
– Peter Kropotkin
1. How Snatching American Citizens Turned Into a Tool of Hostile Governments
2. American Schools and Foreign Money
3. Chinese Spy Agency Rising to Challenge the C.I.A.
4. Indian Envoy Hails Relationship With Russia, Bypassing Western Pressure
5. US Navy shoots down more than a dozen drones, missiles in Red Sea
6. Increased US partnership with the Philippines coming in 2024
7. Why Israel can't accept a ceasefire
8. New in 2024: Eric Smith plans a return to the job of top Marine leader
9. China Sanctions US Research Firm and 2 Individuals Over Reports on Human Rights Abuses in Xinjiang
10. Out of the Trenches
11. Biden Endangers U.S. Troops
12. Washington's 'Ship of Fools' Delude Themselves About Russia's Intent
13. Without elections of its own to bother with, China picks its favored candidates in the US and Taiwan
14. Where Did the Military Go Wrong With Gen Z?
15. The Rebirth of Russian Spycraft
16. Reversing America’s Ruinous Support for Israel’s Assault on Gaza - War on the Rocks by Ryan Evans
17. Reasons for hope in Ukraine
18. A Russian officer surrendered and sold out his comrades, helping Ukraine's special forces cross a key river
19. How Ukrainian special forces secured a critical Dnipro River crossing in southern Ukraine
20. How the US can push back against authoritarianism in China and beyond
21. America is only as secure as its least-secure drone
22. The U.N. Piles On Israel
23. US Foreign Policy Is a Scam Built on Corruption
1. How Snatching American Citizens Turned Into a Tool of Hostile Governments
Our citizens are pawns.
So many aspects to this issue from Russia to China to dual citizens to treatment of journalists to Iran and Afghanistan to north Korea (and more).
But consider the countries that are exploiting this phenomena. They all have a lot in common as malign actors who do not respect the rule of law.
Excerpts:
At stake in this human tug of war is the U.S. ideal that citizens born abroad, or to foreign parents, are equally American. Federal law and Supreme Court precedent, built up over the late 20th century, recognizes Americans’ right to claim multiple citizenships.
But Iran, to pick one example, does not. There, the Classification D risk is so high that official guidance warns Iranian Americans not to visit the country of their ancestry ever, for any reason, and to make a will if they do. Tens of thousands disregard the warning annually.
Matthew Pottinger, a former deputy national security adviser, says he would regularly argue with Cui Tiankai, Beijing’s former ambassador to the U.S., over Beijing’s inclination to treat the American-born children of Chinese immigrants as Chinese nationals, including by denying them visits by U.S. diplomats, a right enshrined in a Sino-U.S. consular treaty.
“What they were saying is, in effect, American citizenship is a cute, quaint idea, but really ethnically Chinese people belong to Beijing,” he said. “This is a fundamental challenge to the notion of American citizenship.” China, for its part, says it applies laws equally regardless of nationality and opposes what it calls foreign interference in its legal affairs. It says many dual Chinese American citizens fly in on their Chinese passports, expecting both the privilege of visa-free entry and the protection of American power.
How Snatching American Citizens Turned Into a Tool of Hostile Governments
Travelers in countries representing nearly a quarter of the world’s population face a heightened risk of arrest—and of becoming pawns in a geopolitical struggle with Washington
https://www.wsj.com/world/american-hostages-hostile-governments-cc7343a8?mod=hp_lead_pos7
By Drew HinshawFollow
, Joe ParkinsonFollow
and Aruna ViswanathaFollow
Dec. 27, 2023 12:01 am ET
The problem was staring up from a deck of cards, handed from one presidency to the next.
As the Trump administration exited the White House, its national security team left behind some 30 baseball-style cards for the incoming Biden staff, monuments to an ancient practice that had somehow become a grave 21st-century challenge. Each bore the photo of an American held hostage abroad.
Since then, the problem has metastasized into what the Biden administration calls a national emergency. The risk of Americans being held on spurious charges by a foreign government is now so widespread that the State Department warns U.S. citizens against traveling to countries accounting for nearly a quarter of the world’s population. In diplomatic parlance, those nine nations are classified “D” for the risk of detention.
Classification D is America’s gathering new reality: an increasingly piratical global system where the taking and trading of foreign citizens—once the preserve of guerrilla bands or fundamentalist insurgencies—has become a tactic deployed by nuclear states.
The Biden administration has brought at least 45 Americans home—mostly via prisoner trades such as last week’s that returned 10 Americans from Venezuela. And yet it says around 30 U.S. citizens are still unjustly detained abroad, an estimate that doesn’t account for the eight still presumably held in Gaza after Hamas’s attack on Israel in October.
The tally does encompass Americans grabbed in countries ranging from Syria and Afghanistan to China—and our colleague, Evan Gershkovich, a Wall Street Journal reporter arrested in Russia in March on an espionage charge that he, his government and employer all strongly deny.
Shortly before he vanished into Moscow’s Lefortovo prison, Gershkovich had been proposing we join him to report on the ease with which Russia’s police state can sweep up Americans and trade them as hostages. “Totally undercovered,” he said.
The 32-year-old reporter had all-too-presciently picked up on how the U.S. and its rivals now conduct their affairs in a language of prisoner trading. Since 2020, federal law obliges the executive branch to designate which U.S. citizens abroad are “wrongfully detained” and make efforts to free them. Usually, that means bartering over human lives.
Evan Gershkovich, arrested on an espionage charge, stands inside a defendants’ cage in a Moscow courtroom. PHOTO: NATALIA KOLESNIKOVA/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
China, Russia and other governments often balk at the “wrongfully detained” label, as Americans would too if foreign diplomats weighed in to declare U.S. court verdicts invalid.
Whatever the case, Washington’s rivals have found a remarkably efficient way to reduce America’s international reach.
U.S. corporations that once imagined their futures in mainland China have largely stopped sending executives to the world’s second-largest economy, for fear they’ll get stuck there. American athletes and chess grandmasters whose predecessors competed in Moscow through some of the Cold War’s tensest moments stepped back from that peacemaking tradition after Russia arrested basketball gold medalist Brittney Griner on drug charges. Following Gershkovich’s arrest, even Western news agencies that based foreign correspondents in Moscow under Joseph Stalin pulled out. In a remarkable restriction on American travel freedoms, the U.S. currently bans its passport holders from entering North Korea, to avoid handing supreme leader Kim Jong Un another human pawn.
U.S. officials privately categorize these nations as “abductor states” and fear their numbers will grow until Washington can find some way to deter a ploy that seems to work.
“I sat in there for years thinking, how does the U.S. solve this issue?” said Trevor Reed, a former Marine who spent almost three years in Russian prisons on charges the U.S. government said were bogus, before being traded last year for a Russian pilot convicted of drug smuggling. “There have to be costs. And the costs the U.S. has been trying to impose are either ineffective or not the right ones.”
After the arrest of our colleague in March, we spent the year speaking to former detainees and their family members, policy makers and hostage negotiators from the U.S., Europe, Turkey, Egypt, Israel and Qatar, trying to wrestle with how their governments should navigate this new age of abduction. The same questions hung over the Journal: How to report on a global crisis that had swept into our newsroom?
We haven’t been able to reach Gershkovich, who has now spent 271 days in the same prison where Stalin once tortured and executed dissidents. But we believe he would have wanted the Journal to investigate the opaque structures and individuals that carried out his wrongful arrest and now hold his fate in their hands. He is our closest connection to the small but growing list of other unjustly jailed Americans, isolated from a world being made smaller by their imprisonment.
Among them: Austin Tice, a freelance journalist from Texas, detained by Syria’s government since 2012; Kai Li, a Long Island businessman held by China since 2016; Paul Whelan, a former Marine and corporate security executive from Michigan, arrested, like Gershkovich, by the Kremlin’s spy agencies, in 2018. Their faces stare out from placards brought to the White House gates by relatives in a growing “Bring Our Families Home” campaign.
A card showing Austin Tice, an American detained by the Syrian government. PHOTO: NIKI CHAN WYLIE FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
For years, one team of White House officials after the next has grappled with the problem of mostly ordinary travelers who stumbled into America’s geopolitical disputes.
On one end of the government are Justice Department officials. Determined to uphold the tradition of an independent judicial system, they recoil at the principle that Vladimir Putin should be able to kidnap his way into obtaining presidential clemency for Russians convicted of serious crimes in America.
On the other end are the U.S. diplomats who are tasked with bringing innocent Americans home. Why, they wonder, does a superpower with nearly two million people in its prisons and jails not have more stock to trade?
The disconnect favors autocracies. Several U.S. officials, frustrated by the asymmetry between Washington and the police states that can easily grab its citizens without worrying about the pieties of Western-style rule of law, reached for the same metaphor to explain the imbalance: America is playing checkers, they told us, and its rivals are playing chess.
The Biden administration, which spent months debating how to bring home Americans while deterring others from being taken, has attempted a pairing of concessions and threats. It has openly and explicitly acknowledged its willingness to make prisoner trades—a signal its predecessors were reluctant to send—while pledging tougher sanctions for offenders.
Russian arms trafficker Viktor Bout, second from right, is traded for U.S. basketball star Brittney Griner, in an airport exchange captured by Russian media. PHOTO: FSB/ZUMA PRESS
Prisoner exchanges have reunited dozens of Americans with their families, including Griner, swapped in last year’s Cold War-style airport runway swap for Viktor Bout, an arms trafficker nicknamed “Merchant of Death.”
Those deals have also provoked grave debates within and outside the U.S. government over whether, with each concession, the White House is putting a target on the backs of Americans abroad. Repeatedly, longtime national security officials told us that while they understand why Griner had to be freed, the lopsided trade may have encouraged Russia to seize more Americans, Gershkovich included.
The unacceptable alternative, the administration argues, would be to leave an innocent citizen in prison, on the unproven theory that by doing so, Washington deters its rivals: “When it comes to getting Americans out of jail and back home, and unjustly detained anywhere in the world, I’m happy to take any criticism that comes my way for that,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken told reporters ahead of a deal with Iran to release five Americans in exchange for the U.S. freeing Iranian prisoners and agreeing to unfreeze $6 billion in oil revenue. “I view it as job one to do everything I can to bring Americans home.”
In the Qatari capital this July, U.S. officials held their first hostage exercise on foreign soil, modeling with their Qatari counterparts an abduction of four aid workers by a terrorist group.
Less than three months later, Hamas burst into southern Israel in a surprise attack that took more than 200 citizens of dozens of countries hostage, including around 12 Americans, an international kidnapping far beyond the U.S. government’s imagined scenario.
The difference between what America’s hostage specialists had anticipated and the crisis they soon faced isn’t remotely unique to Gaza—it stretches back years, across agencies and throughout presidential administrations.
In 2015, families frustrated with the way their government managed Islamic State’s abductions of American aid workers and journalists helped persuade President Barack Obama to establish a Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs and built up a multiagency bureaucracy to handle the crisis.
Within a year, this new interlocking government machinery, built in response to stateless jihadists, had to regear itself to a very different problem. In March 2016 North Korea sentenced Otto Warmbier, a University of Virginia student to a hard labor camp for stealing a poster. Later, China stopped two American siblings from leaving the country until their estranged father, a former bank executive, returned to China to face fraud charges.
In each case, the U.S. determined the detentions were unjust—an adversary attempting to extract a concession or strike a blow against Washington.
The new institutions set up to manage this spate of cases proved an imperfect fit. Many foreign governments recoiled at meeting a special presidential envoy with the word “hostage” in his title, as accepting a meeting appeared tantamount to a public confession of kidnapping.
Washington itself struggled to impose clear rules to determine whether an American was effectively a hostage or arrested in good faith on suspicion of committing actual crimes. In July 2019, Swedish police arrested the rapper known as A$AP Rocky on assault charges. Even though the White House had no reason to suspect political motives, the case captured the attention of President Trump, who dispatched his presidential hostage envoy, Robert O’Brien, to Stockholm, former administration officials said. A Swedish court ordered the rapper to pay about $1,300 in damages.
Robert O’Brien, presidential hostage envoy in the Trump administration, carried around a set of cards to keep front-of-mind the Americans detained overseas. PHOTO: NIKI CHAN WYLIE FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Still, for families and diplomats struggling for answers, there was now a door to knock on: “There is a set of officials, in an office in the State Department, whose job it is to deal with these issues,” said Vina Nadjibulla, a senior research fellow for the Soufan Center who has written about hostage diplomacy and whose Canadian ex-husband Michael Kovrig became a symbol of the crisis during his nearly three years in a Beijing prison. “No other country has that. And that is a huge improvement.”
In 2020, the U.S. passed the Levinson Act, obliging the State Department to use consistent criteria to decide who qualifies as “wrongfully detained,” a designation that paves the ground for U.S. diplomats to then negotiate their release. Did the U.S. government have information suggesting their innocence? Was the person imprisoned mainly because they are American? Was their arrest an attempt to force a concession from Washington? The new Biden administration asked every embassy in the world to review which U.S. citizens imprisoned by their host governments might meet those marks.
Pause to consider what a breakdown in global trust that 160-plus nation audit signaled. Rather than defer to due process of other nations, America was erecting something like a shadow appeals court, in which the State Department, often without access to much underlying evidence, would determine which faraway verdicts seemed valid and which merited an intervention by the U.S. government.
Robert Levinson, a former FBI agent who went missing in Iran in 2007, is now presumed dead. PHOTO: NIKI CHAN WYLIE FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
This new system soon encountered a case study in its own shortcomings. In August 2021, police in Moscow’s airport arrested American Marc Fogel—a history teacher at the high school where U.S. Moscow embassy staff sent their children—for possessing less than an ounce of medically prescribed marijuana. Six months later, Griner, the basketball Olympian, was detained at the same airport for flying in with vape cartridges containing minor amounts of prescription hashish oil.
Griner’s subsequent charge of drug possession sparked nationwide outrage. Her talent agency secured regular contact with the White House. She was quickly added onto the wrongfully detained list. Fogel, currently serving 14 years in a maximum-security penal colony, hasn’t made the cut.
The State Department doesn’t comment on individual cases. Publicly explaining a decision to designate one American as wrongfully detained and not another could hypothetically prove incriminating or unhelpful for the one left behind, U.S. officials argue. Griner’s arrest came days before Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, as Russian police singled out Americans for scrutiny. Still, Fogel’s defenders find it hard to believe that Griner’s fame, connections and potency as a political symbol weren’t the determining factor.
“Because he is a teacher, and not a star, he is a victim of the arbitrary nature of the wrongful-detention designation,” Anne Fogel said of her brother. “This Christmas we are going to put on a brave face. Support my 94-year-old mother, soon to be 95. And support my sister-in-law and my nephews who are in their 20s and had their lives ripped out from under them.”
Three months after Gershkovich was detained, Putin’s security agencies turned their attention to another American journalist in Russia. This time—like a lot of Americans imprisoned abroad—she was holding two passports.
Alsu Kurmasheva had flown home to visit her ailing mother in the southern Russian city of Kazan when she was arrested then later charged with failing to register as a foreign agent and spreading false news about the military. The charges, which she denies, carry up to five and 10 years’ imprisonment respectively. The mother of two adolescent girls shares a four-person cell with sometimes five other inmates, the air so cold that the ink in her pen freezes as she writes home, her family says.
Journalist Alsu Kurmasheva, a joint Russian-American citizen, attends a court hearing in Kazan, Russia. PHOTO: ALEXEY NASYROV/REUTERS
Born in Russia and a U.S. citizen since 2014, Kurmasheva personifies another pressure point for the U.S. and open societies trying to deter foreign abduction. To Washington, Kurmasheva is a U.S. citizen, and the State Department is reviewing whether to designate her as wrongfully held. But in the glass cage where she is tried, she is treated by law as Russian—and no U.S. diplomat has been allowed to visit her in jail. The Kremlin didn’t reply to requests for comment.
“Alsu is the mother of two young children who miss her very much,” said her American husband of 21 years, Pavel Butorin. “She is an American whose rights must be upheld.”
At stake in this human tug of war is the U.S. ideal that citizens born abroad, or to foreign parents, are equally American. Federal law and Supreme Court precedent, built up over the late 20th century, recognizes Americans’ right to claim multiple citizenships.
But Iran, to pick one example, does not. There, the Classification D risk is so high that official guidance warns Iranian Americans not to visit the country of their ancestry ever, for any reason, and to make a will if they do. Tens of thousands disregard the warning annually.
Matthew Pottinger, a former deputy national security adviser, says he would regularly argue with Cui Tiankai, Beijing’s former ambassador to the U.S., over Beijing’s inclination to treat the American-born children of Chinese immigrants as Chinese nationals, including by denying them visits by U.S. diplomats, a right enshrined in a Sino-U.S. consular treaty.
“What they were saying is, in effect, American citizenship is a cute, quaint idea, but really ethnically Chinese people belong to Beijing,” he said. “This is a fundamental challenge to the notion of American citizenship.” China, for its part, says it applies laws equally regardless of nationality and opposes what it calls foreign interference in its legal affairs. It says many dual Chinese American citizens fly in on their Chinese passports, expecting both the privilege of visa-free entry and the protection of American power.
Cards showing U.S. citizens detained in recent years by the Iranian government; some were freed as part of a September deal, while others were released earlier. PHOTO: NIKI CHAN WYLIE FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
China has been holding numerous Chinese Americans in so-called exit bans in recent years, blocking them from leaving the country even though they aren’t charged with any crime. Californian Henry Cai fears he will soon enter his seventh year stuck in China, because of a debt dispute. He refers to himself as a “bargaining chip” in U.S.-China relations. U.S. advisory firms Kroll and Mintz Group, as well as Japanese financial firm Nomura, have all had executives or employees held in recent months. China’s Foreign Ministry didn’t respond to requests for comment, and the companies either declined to comment or didn’t reply.
Dual national families want to see Washington pay more attention to these cases. There are dozens of such U.S. citizens held in China and Russia alone, many of them not on the State Department’s wrongful detention list, but who are “picked on because of their ethnicity and used as easy pawns in this game,” said Jon Huntsman Jr., the only American to have served as ambassador to both countries.
If recent history is any guide, there will be more to come.
Beijing and Moscow have both radically expanded their legal definitions of espionage in the past two years, widening the asymmetry with American jurisprudence. Foreigners conducting seemingly ordinary business activities in those countries could now potentially be charged with national security offenses that risk decadeslong prison sentences. In May, Chinese authorities sentenced 78-year-old U.S. citizen and Hong Kong permanent resident John Shing-wan Leung to life for an espionage conviction. Whelan is scheduled to be released in 2034. If Gershkovich’s case ends with a conviction—as has every Russian espionage trial since the Soviet Union fell—he faces up to 20 years in a penal colony.
By comparison, Chinese nationals, sometimes posing as tourists, have intruded into U.S. military bases, a missile range, a rocket launch site and other sensitive premises dozens of times in recent years, in what U.S. officials describe as a form of espionage. Under federal, state and local law, it is difficult to prosecute those cases as anything more than ordinary trespassing.
A Chinese woman was arrested in 2019 trying to sneak into Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate with four cellphones, a thumb drive containing malware, and a faraday pouch to shield one of the phones from incoming cellular signals. She was sentenced to eight months for unlawful entry and making false statements to the U.S. Secret Service.
“Unfortunately, we’re not meeting the challenge with dispatch, in terms of an internal strategy that would remind the world that if you take an American, there’s going to be hell to pay,” said Huntsman, the ambassador. “We’re big, open, we’re transparent, we’re an easy target, and we’re very deliberative on the government side…and all these things argue against the swift recovery of Americans abroad.”
Write to Drew Hinshaw at drew.hinshaw@wsj.com, Joe Parkinson at joe.parkinson@wsj.com and Aruna Viswanatha at aruna.viswanatha@wsj.com
2. American Schools and Foreign Money
Money is influence. And the quest for dollars from anywhere on the part of academic institutions creates vulnerabilities.
American Schools and Foreign Money
A House bill, the Deterrent Act, seeks more disclosure about donations from overseas.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/foreign-money-american-universities-congress-higher-education-china-russia-3e0c099d?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=1
By The Editorial Board
Follow
Updated Dec. 26, 2023 6:45 pm ET
PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES/ISTOCKPHOTO
Congress is debating how to address the intellectual corruption of America’s elite universities, and one idea is to require that academic institutions disclose funding from U.S. adversaries.
The House this month passed the Deterrent Act, 246-170, to shine a light on the billions of dollars that flow from foreign entities to U.S. colleges and universities. Some donations are well-intentioned, but China’s Communist Party and others have used money as a lever to push propaganda, filch research, and censor free exchange. Often the terms of these cash infusions are confidential.
Section 117 of the Higher Education Act requires schools that receive federal funds to report twice a year to the Education Department any gifts from, and contracts with, a foreign source of more than $250,000 a year. But the statute’s loose language—and lack of enforcement—has led institutions to ignore the rules.
A 2019 report by a Senate Homeland Security subcommittee found that foreign-government spending on U.S. schools was “effectively a black hole.” It drilled into the Chinese government’s sponsorship of more than 100 Confucius Institutes on U.S. campuses. These programs are funded, controlled and largely staffed by a branch of China’s Ministry of Education known as Hanban.
The report found that “nearly 70 percent of U.S. schools that received more than $250,000 from Hanban failed to properly report that amount” to DOE. Most Confucius institutes on campus have since been closed.
Former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos improved compliance with new standards and investigations. The effort caused schools to acknowledge they’d failed to report some $6.5 billion as required under law, according to a 2020 DOE report.
The report also found that most foreign funds flow to the largest and wealthiest schools, often via intermediaries or through anonymous donations that mask countries of origins—including Russia, China, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. It found that some schools had contracts with Chinese tech giant Huawei (whose equipment and services the U.S. bars from use in government contracts), and cited examples of donations used to disseminate “propaganda” and project “soft power.”
The Deterrent Act—co-sponsored by GOP Reps. Michelle Steel and Virginia Foxx—would lower the reporting threshold to $50,000 for donations from most foreign entities, and $0 for donations from countries “of concern”—including Russia, China, North Korea and Iran. Universities would be required to provide more detail about gifts and contracts—including those to individual faculty or staff. Reports would become annual.
Campuses would need waivers for contracts with a country or entity of concern, and universities with large endowments would have to report “investments of concern” made with those nations. Much of this information would be made public—with some exceptions for privacy—and the law would impose penalties for noncompliance. Sens. Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) and Thom Tillis (R., N.C.) have introduced a companion bill in the Senate.
Academic institutions oppose the bill, pointing to improved compliance of late while claiming it would prove too burdensome. Congress should steer clear of dictating classroom instruction. But taxpayers subsidize higher education with tens of billions annually, and the schools have invited scrutiny of how they operate with their contempt for classical liberal inquiry and tolerance.
3. Chinese Spy Agency Rising to Challenge the C.I.A.
NY Times catching up to yesterday's Wall Street Journal reporting.
Chinese Spy Agency Rising to Challenge the C.I.A.
By Edward Wong, Julian E. Barnes, Muyi Xiao and Chris Buckley
Edward Wong and Julian E. Barnes report on diplomacy and national security from Washington. Muyi Xiao covers China on the visual investigations team. Chris Buckley is chief China correspondent.
The New York Times · by Chris Buckley · December 27, 2023
The ambitious Ministry of State Security is deploying A.I. and other advanced technology to go toe-to-toe with the United States, even as the two nations try to pilfer each other’s trade secrets.
The Chinese spies wanted more. In meetings during the pandemic with Chinese technology contractors, they complained that surveillance cameras tracking foreign diplomats, military officers and intelligence operatives in Beijing’s embassy district fell short of their needs.
The spies asked for an artificial intelligence program that would create instant dossiers on every person of interest in the area and analyze their behavior patterns. They proposed feeding the A.I. program information from databases and scores of cameras that would include car license plates, cellphone data, contacts and more.
The A.I.-generated profiles would allow the Chinese spies to select targets and pinpoint their networks and vulnerabilities, according to internal meeting memos obtained by The New York Times.
The spies’ interest in the technology, disclosed here for the first time, reveals some of the vast ambitions of the Ministry of State Security, China’s main intelligence agency. In recent years, it has built itself up through wider recruitment, including of American citizens. The agency has also sharpened itself through better training, a bigger budget and the use of advanced technologies to try to fulfill the goal of Xi Jinping, China’s leader, for the nation to rival the United States as the world’s pre-eminent economic and military power.
The Chinese agency, known as the M.S.S., once rife with agents whose main source of information was gossip at embassy dinner parties, is now going toe-to-toe with the Central Intelligence Agency in collection and subterfuge around the world.
Today the Chinese agents in Beijing have what they asked for: an A.I. system that tracks American spies and others, said U.S. officials and a person with knowledge of the transaction, who shared the information on the condition that The Times not disclose the names of the contracting firms involved. At the same time, as spending on China at the C.I.A. has doubled since the start of the Biden administration, the United States has sharply stepped up its spying on Chinese companies and their technological advances.
This article is based on interviews with more than two dozen current and former American officials, most of whom spoke on condition of anonymity, and a review of internal Chinese corporate documents and public M.S.S. documents.
Workers installing a traffic surveillance camera near a residential complex in Beijing. Credit...Ng Han Guan/Associated Press
A Game of Ghosts
The competition between the American and Chinese spy agencies harks back to the K.G.B.-versus-C.I.A. rivalry of the Cold War. In that era, the Soviets built an agency that could pilfer America’s most closely held secrets and run covert operations while also producing formidable political leaders, including Vladimir V. Putin, the president of Russia.
But there is a notable difference. Because of China’s economic boom and industrial policies, the M.S.S. is able to use emerging technologies like A.I. to challenge American spymasters in a way the Soviets could not. And those technologies are top prizes in espionage efforts by China and the United States.
“For China in particular, exploiting the existing technology or trade secrets of others has become a popular shortcut encouraged by the government,” said Yun Sun, director of the China program at the Stimson Center, a Washington-based research institute. “The urgency and intensity of technological espionage have increased significantly.”
The M.S.S. has intensified its intelligence collection on American companies developing technology with both military and civilian uses, while the C.I.A., in a change from even a few years ago, is pouring resources into collecting data on Chinese companies developing A.I., quantum computing and other such tools.
Though the U.S. intelligence community has long collected economic intelligence, gathering detailed information on commercial technological advances outside of defense companies was once the kind of espionage the United States avoided.
But information about China’s development of emerging technologies is now considered as important as divining its conventional military might or the machinations of its leaders.
David Cohen, the agency’s deputy director, said that under President Biden, the C.I.A. was making investments and reorganizing to meet the challenge of collecting on Chinese advances. The agency has started both a China mission center and a technology intelligence center.
“We’ve been counting tanks and understanding the capability of missiles for longer than we have been as sharply focused on the capability of semiconductors or A.I. algorithms or biotech equipment,” Mr. Cohen said in an interview.
Semiconductors, or chips, being packaged at a Promex facility in Santa Clara, Calif.Credit...Jim Wilson/The New York Times
But some policymakers say privately that the effort is still falling short, and that Chinese companies and the military are surprising the U.S. government with their advances.
In China, the status of the Ministry of State Security has only grown under Mr. Xi, who prizes bold intelligence action and a powerful security state.
In October 2022, the Communist Party promoted the ministry’s head, Chen Wenqing, to be the party’s top security official and a member of the 24-member Politburo, the first spy chief in decades to ascend to that body. His replacement, Chen Yixin, a longtime aide to Mr. Xi, has raised the public profile of the M.S.S. He has also been given a broad mandate, which encompasses leading a crackdown on American and other foreign companies that conduct corporate investigations of Chinese firms, including for military ties and human rights violations.
The ministry has the foreign responsibilities of the C.I.A. and the domestic mandate of the F.B.I., combined with an authoritarian edge. The M.S.S. is charged with carrying out intelligence collection and operations overseas, as well as limiting foreign influence within China and clamping down on so-called subversive activities. Its mission is avowedly political: to defend the Communist Party against all perceived threats.
The current minister, Mr. Chen, has repeatedly emphasized loyalty to Mr. Xi. In June, he told officers to “wholeheartedly embrace” Mr. Xi’s “core” status.’’
Under Mr. Chen, the ministry is embracing social media to spread messages about threats. “The United States’ multifaceted obstruction, containment and suppression will only make China more battle hardened and self-reliant,” it said on a new WeChat account.
President Xi Jinping of China prizes bold intelligence action and a powerful security state.
In August, the ministry made separate announcements asserting that it had caught two Chinese citizens spying for the C.I.A., one recruited by an American agent in Japan and the other in Italy. In October, the ministry and Chinese state television announced a case in which a researcher at a defense industry institute had been recruited by a U.S. agent while he was a visiting scholar at an American university. He then transferred copies of secret documents to the Americans after he returned to China, before being detained in 2021.
The announcements suggested the C.I.A. had been rebuilding a network within China that Chinese counterintelligence officers decimated more than a decade ago.
The C.I.A. does not say whether people detained overseas on espionage charges are spies for the United States. But at least some of the Chinese citizens detained were working for the United States, according to people briefed on American intelligence reports. There is no evidence, however, that the M.S.S. has cracked the network, they said, and the Italy case is more than a year old.
The M.S.S. is making its own aggressive moves abroad, including recruiting a far-right Belgian politician and harassing ethnic Chinese critics of the party. One agent hired a local private investigator to physically attack a Chinese American candidate for U.S. Congress on Long Island, according to a Justice Department indictment. Another man is accused of helping to set up an organization in New York that lured in dissidents.
A Chinese Agency on the Offense
The central government in Beijing established the Ministry of State Security in 1983 during a reshuffling of security units. For decades, the agency struggled to win favor with party leaders. Its Chinese rival, the intelligence services of the People’s Liberation Army, had greater resources and better tradecraft, especially in cyberespionage.
The Ministry of State Security gradually improved its tactics, got bigger budgets and even built business expertise. Some M.S.S. officers who would be working under cover as business people were sent to private sector offices for training, said Peter Mattis, a former C.I.A. analyst and co-author of a book on Chinese espionage.
Chinese agents also expanded their foreign recruitment targets, including among U.S. citizens.
U.S. intelligence agencies were alarmed after discovering that the Shanghai M.S.S. had recruited an American student in China, Glenn Duffie Shriver, and got him to apply to the C.I.A. and State Department. Mr. Shriver was sentenced in 2011 to four years in prison. “It was a big sign of improved tradecraft from M.S.S., for the first time targeting non-Chinese Americans and attempting penetration of the U.S. intelligence community,” said John Culver, a former U.S. intelligence analyst.
Glenn Duffie Shriver was recruited by the M.S.S. while studying in China.Credit...F.B.I.
The case has had far-reaching consequences. It made U.S. counterintelligence officers more suspicious of applicants for U.S. government jobs who had studied in China or had contacts there, and it turned their attention to M.S.S. provincial bureaus.
The bureaus are their own fiefs, based outside of the agency’s national headquarters, which is in the secretive Xiyuan compound of northwest Beijing. Under Mr. Xi, they have become more aggressive in operations overseas, with some specializing in recruiting and running informants in the United States.
The bureau in Jiangsu Province, next to Shanghai, is another one focused on getting American secrets, and particularly defense technologies, U.S. officials said.
Its officers recruited Ji Chaoqun shortly before he went to the United States in 2013 to study engineering at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, according to the Justice Department and court documents. His M.S.S. handler, Xu Yanjun, got him to provide the names of at least nine people in the United States for the Chinese spy agency to try to recruit to get aerospace and satellite technologies.
Mr. Ji eventually joined the U.S. Army Reserves, where he aimed to get a security clearance so he could eventually apply to work in the C.I.A., F.B.I. or N.A.S.A. He was arrested in Chicago in 2018 and sentenced this year to eight years in prison. Mr. Xu, his handler, was arrested in Brussels in 2018, in a related operation run by the F.B.I., becoming the first M.S.S. agent to be extradited to the United States.
Unlike Russian operatives, M.S.S. case officers generally avoid working undercover in the United States, preferring instead to run agents or assets from outside and recruit online, including using jobs ads with no apparent ties to China, U.S. officials said.
Around 2018, a Singaporean agent for the M.S.S. “created a fake consulting company that used the same name as a prominent U.S. consulting firm and posted online job ads under that company name,” said Michael C. Casey, director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center.
The Scramble for Tech
The M.S.S. often directly hires from universities, especially for core positions, according to a review of more than 30 online job ads from the agency. In recent years, it has sought technology experts, including hackers, according to two people with knowledge of the recruiting efforts.
Beijing’s most acute worry is that the United States and its allies could choke China off from technological know-how vital for economic and military growth. Mr. Xi has stressed that risk.
President Biden looking at IBM’s System One quantum computer during a tour of a facility in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.Credit...Erin Schaff/The New York Times
Mr. Chen, the minister of state security, wrote in an article in September that “core technologies” remained under the control of other nations, and that reaching “technological self-reliance” was an urgent task.
Chinese government experts openly admire the collection capabilities of American spy agencies and their technology. Chinese intelligence journals often carry studies examining U.S. operations. A recent study of U.S. national security services by the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, the main M.S.S. research institute, said, “Drawing on an in-depth assessment of the relevant methods of the United States, China should choose what works and dispense with what does not.”
The M.S.S. has also been elevating experts on the United States. Early this year, one such analyst, Yuan Peng, president of the main research institute, appeared under a new name, Yuan Yikun, as a vice minister of the ministry itself. Earlier in his career, Mr. Yuan often mixed with American scholars, some of whom saw him as a coolheaded observer of Washington.
While president of the research institute, Mr. Yuan became a champion of Mr. Xi’s sweeping concept of “overall national security,” which casts the United States as the main threat to China’s ascent.
“Biden said ‘America is back,’ but the world is not the same as it was, and if it can’t keep up with massive global changes, then this changing world will inevitably slip from U.S. control,” Mr. Yuan wrote in an international strategy assessment published in early 2022. “In judging current American grand strategy a few decades from now, its biggest mistake may be seen as choosing China as an enemy.”
‘Think Like a Wall Street Analyst’
One of the first major decisions by William J. Burns, the C.I.A. director, was to create the China Mission Center. The idea was to ensure that stations all over the world, not just in Asia, focused on collecting intelligence on China.
Mr. Burns took the step after a strategic review that was led by Michael Collins, a career intelligence officer. Under Mr. Burns, Mr. Collins was appointed director of strategy, with a mandate to help improve the agency’s work on China.
One of the first major decisions by William J. Burns, the C.I.A. director, was to create the China Mission Center.Credit...Haiyun Jiang /The New York Times
The China challenge requires the United States “to be smart on critical domains like biotechnology and semiconductors,” said Mr. Collins, who now leads the National Intelligence Council, a coordinating body across spy agencies. “We have to be better.’’
To get a sharper understanding of which technologies China is targeting, the C.I.A. has begun asking American executives and scholars for insights about what Chinese companies are trying to develop. American universities and companies, often approached by Chinese investors and researchers, have knowledge of the specific technologies, U.S. officials said.
But officials said it was important to bring in people with deeper knowledge of China’s commercial and technological ambitions. For now the spy agencies are struggling to get information to policymakers as quickly as they want it.
Last year, a Canadian firm, TechInsights, revealed that China’s leading chip maker, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation, had developed a seven-nanometer chip. The U.S. government was unaware of the advance and was surprised that the Chinese firm had made the leap so quickly, said Jimmy Goodrich, an expert on Chinese technology who advises the RAND Corporation.
“The intelligence community is just not set up institutionally to be adept at understanding China’s commercial and tech issues,” he said “It’s hard to do. And more important, you really have to think like a Wall Street analyst, market researcher, talking to everyone up and down the supply chain.”
(A U.S. official said American intelligence agencies had assessed that the company had at least the capability to produce the smaller chip before the Canadian report.)
Part of the problem is that U.S. intelligence agencies favor information from satellites, intercept programs and human spies. One senior U.S. official said analysts were overlooking valuable insight from nonclassified sources in China.
“The U.S. intelligence community can do amazing things on focused targets,” said Mr. Mattis, the former C.I.A. analyst. “But it sometimes can struggle with broad-based awareness like understanding China’s technology prowess.”
China’s leading chip maker, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation, developed a seven-nanometer chip.Credit...Qilai Shen for The New York Times
Edward Wong is a diplomatic correspondent who has reported for The Times for more than 24 years from New York, Baghdad, Beijing and Washington. He was on a team of Pulitzer Prize finalists for Iraq War coverage. More about Edward Wong
Julian E. Barnes covers the U.S. intelligence agencies and international security matters for The Times. He has written about security issues for more than two decades. More about Julian E. Barnes
Muyi Xiao is reporter on the Visual Investigations team, which combines traditional reporting with advanced digital forensics. She has been covering China for the past decade. More about Muyi Xiao
Chris Buckley, the chief China correspondent for The Times, reports on China and Taiwan from Taipei, focused on politics, social change and security and military issues. More about Chris Buckley
The New York Times · by Chris Buckley · December 27, 2023
4. Indian Envoy Hails Relationship With Russia, Bypassing Western Pressure
Cool name.
Excerpts:
In a reflection of how India is trying to walk the line between Western pressure and its relationship with Russia, this is the second year in a row that Mr. Modi has skipped his traditional in-person summit meeting with Russia’s leader, Vladimir V. Putin.
Happymon Jacob, who teaches Indian foreign policy at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, said that apart from India’s increased purchases of Russian oil, the relationship has been less close since the Ukraine invasion.
Still, he said, India will remain reliant on Russia to some degree, particularly in the energy and defense sectors.
“Russia is the only country that has provided India with nuclear reactors — notwithstanding the fact that India signed a nuclear deal in 2008 with the United States,” he said.
During Mr. Jaishankar’s visit on Tuesday, India and Russia agreed to the construction of future power-generating units of the Kudankulam nuclear power plant in southern India, which is being built with assistance from Russia.
Indian Envoy Hails Relationship With Russia, Bypassing Western Pressure
India’s foreign minister is on a 5-day diplomatic trip to Moscow to reinforce economic and defense ties. But some signs of strain are showing.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/27/world/asia/india-russia-ukraine-energy.html
India’s foreign minister, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, left, and his Russian counterpart, Sergei V. Lavrov, in Moscow in 2022. A meeting between the diplomats is part of Mr. Jaishankar’s current five-day stop in Russia. Credit...Pool photo by Maxim Shipenkov
By Sameer Yasir
Reporting from New Delhi
Dec. 27, 2023
Updated 6:16 a.m. ET
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India’s foreign minister met with his Russian counterpart in Moscow on Wednesday, as part of a diplomatic visit highlighting the two countries’ close economic ties despite mounting international pressure to isolate Russia over its war in Ukraine.
From the start of the Ukraine war in 2022, India has taken a neutral stance on the conflict, citing its longtime ties with Russia and insisting on its right to navigate an increasingly multipolar world its own way. Russia has long been the most important military supplier for India, and as international sanctions began constricting Russian oil sales, India rapidly expanded its purchases to become one of the chief buyers of discounted Russian petroleum.
Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei V. Lavrov, said on Wednesday that his country’s relationship with India goes beyond bilateral ties. The two countries are interested in “building an international political and economic system that would be open and fair for everyone,” he said in televised remarks ahead of the meeting.
India’s foreign minister, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, said that he expected to discuss “the state of multilateralism and the building of a multipolar world order” with his Russian counterpart.
“We will focus on bilateral cooperation in different spheres, adjusting it to changing circumstances and demands,” Mr. Jaishankar said, according to a Russian video broadcast. “We will discuss the international strategic situation, conflicts and tensions where they are.”
More on India
Despite the Biden administration’s efforts to make supporting Russia costly, American officials have avoided open criticism of India. Instead, President Biden and others have courted Prime Minister Narendra Modi, seeing India as a potential ally to counter China’s rising economic and military influence. That courtship has continued even after American law enforcement officials accused Indian officials in November of plotting the assassination of an American Sikh activist in the United States.
Mr. Jaishankar’s meeting with Mr. Lavrov on Wednesday comes halfway through a five-day visit in Russia that is expected to cover many facets of the two countries’ relationship, including cooperation on nuclear power projects, trade, civil aviation and defense.
A career diplomat whose book about how India must carefully chart a multilateral diplomatic path is seen as a definitive take on the country’s foreign policy under Mr. Modi, he has portrayed the close relationship between India and Russia as one of the few constants in a rapidly changing world.
“Typically, defense, nuclear and space are collaborations you only do with countries with whom you have a high degree of trust,” Mr. Jaishankar told members of the Indian diaspora in Moscow on Tuesday.
But the relationship shows signs of strain. Indian officials are increasingly worried that Russia’s pariah status will drive Moscow ever closer to China. On another potential competitive front, all three countries are more forcefully portraying themselves as providing leadership and a model for developing nations around the world.
In a reflection of how India is trying to walk the line between Western pressure and its relationship with Russia, this is the second year in a row that Mr. Modi has skipped his traditional in-person summit meeting with Russia’s leader, Vladimir V. Putin.
Happymon Jacob, who teaches Indian foreign policy at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, said that apart from India’s increased purchases of Russian oil, the relationship has been less close since the Ukraine invasion.
Still, he said, India will remain reliant on Russia to some degree, particularly in the energy and defense sectors.
“Russia is the only country that has provided India with nuclear reactors — notwithstanding the fact that India signed a nuclear deal in 2008 with the United States,” he said.
During Mr. Jaishankar’s visit on Tuesday, India and Russia agreed to the construction of future power-generating units of the Kudankulam nuclear power plant in southern India, which is being built with assistance from Russia.
Ivan Nechepurenko contributed reporting.
Sameer Yasir is a reporter based in New Delhi. He joined The Times in 2020. More about Sameer Yasir
5. US Navy shoots down more than a dozen drones, missiles in Red Sea
It appears we are doing pretty well defensively. BUt defensive actions do not prevent or deter attacks. Are we going to begin to take offensive action to effectively defend commerce? When are we going to being to eliminate the threats from hostile actors?
Excerpts:
According to U.S. Central Command, U.S. assets including the Laboon and F/A-18 Super Hornets from the Eisenhower Carrier Strike Group “shot down twelve one-way attack drones, three anti-ship ballistic missiles, and two land attack cruise missiles in the Southern Red Sea that were fired by the Houthis over a 10 hour period” on Tuesday.
“There was no damage to ships in the area or reported injuries,” CENTCOM said.
US Navy shoots down more than a dozen drones, missiles in Red Sea
navytimes.com · by Diana Correll · December 26, 2023
The Navy destroyer Laboon and other U.S. assets shot down more than a dozen drones and missiles in the Red Sea on Tuesday — just days after the ship took down four unmanned aerial vehicles in the same waters.
The incident is the latest episode where U.S. warships in the Middle East have intercepted air drones and missiles that officials claim originated from Iran-allied Houthi rebels in Yemen, amid heightened tensions in the region stemming from the Israel-Hamas war.
According to U.S. Central Command, U.S. assets including the Laboon and F/A-18 Super Hornets from the Eisenhower Carrier Strike Group “shot down twelve one-way attack drones, three anti-ship ballistic missiles, and two land attack cruise missiles in the Southern Red Sea that were fired by the Houthis over a 10 hour period” on Tuesday.
“There was no damage to ships in the area or reported injuries,” CENTCOM said.
RELATED
USS Laboon shoots down four drones in Red Sea
U.S. Central Command said the drones “were inbound” to the destroyer.
No other details were immediately available, and CENTCOM did not say whether the attack targeted the Laboon.
Navy destroyers Laboon, Carney and Mason, have all taken down drones and missiles in recent weeks, while also providing assistance to commercial vessels in the region.
For example, the Laboon shot down four drones, which “were inbound” to the destroyer, as it conducted a patrol in the Southern Red Sea on Saturday, and the Carney took down 14 attack drones in the Red Sea on Dec. 16.
U.S. Central Command said in a statement this month that the U.S. has “every reason to believe that these attacks, while launched by the Houthis in Yemen, are fully enabled by Iran.” As a result, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced on Dec. 18 the creation of a multinational task force to help protect civilian ships in the region.
The Laboon is part of the Dwight D. Eisenhower’s carrier strike group, which departed Norfolk, Virginia, in October for a scheduled deployment. The carrier transited the Strait of Hormuz into the Persian Gulf last month.
6. Increased US partnership with the Philippines coming in 2024
It is fascinating to watch this alliance develop and ebb and flow over the past 40 years. Although it cannot be easily quantified, I think that the sustained personal diplomatic and military and intelligence community relationships built with foresight and sustained over time has served US interests well. I will not forget when President George W. Bush in 2001 overruled Rumselfd's objections to supporting the Philippines against its terrorist and insurgent threats because he had told President Arroyo that he would do so. That decision is paying off now.
Increased US partnership with the Philippines coming in 2024
navytimes.com · by Geoff Ziezulewicz · December 26, 2023
In 2023, the U.S. and the Philippines announced a historic pact that would open up several bases on the island archipelago nation to American forces for the first time in decades.
While the agreement does not allow the U.S. to permanently station troops in Philippine territory, several of the newly accessible bases abut the South China Sea to the north.
Plans are already underway to fortify the newly accessible bases.
The coming year will likely see Washington and Manila expand their cooperation and ready their respective navies to counter China’s assertions of ownership over parts of the South China Sea.
Old salts shouldn’t expect anything similar to the Navy’s former and massive presence at Subic Bay, which ended in 1992, but the new agreement marks a significant change forged largely out of maritime interests.
China and the Philippines, along with Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan, have been locked in increasingly tense territorial disputes over the busy and resource-rich South China Sea. Washington lays no territorial claims to the strategically important waters but has deployed its warships and aircraft for patrols that it says promote freedom of navigation and the rule of law. In turn, that military presence has infuriated Beijing.
At the announcement of the new deal in February, Austin thanked Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., whom he briefly met in Manila, for allowing the U.S. military to broaden its presence in the Philippines — Washington’s oldest treaty ally in Asia.
“I have always said that it seems to me that the future of the Philippines and, for that matter, the Asia-Pacific will always have to involve the United States, simply because those partnerships are so strong,” Marcos told Austin.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
About Geoff Ziezulewicz
Geoff is the editor of Navy Times, but he still loves writing stories. He covered Iraq and Afghanistan extensively and was a reporter at the Chicago Tribune. He welcomes any and all kinds of tips at geoffz@militarytimes.com.
7. Why Israel can't accept a ceasefire
Excerpts:
Very reasonably, the Biden Administration has been asking the Israelis to hurry up with their fighting, instead of prolonging the suffering of Gaza’s civilians. And just as reasonably, the Biden Administration has been asking the Israelis to use less air power, less artillery and more infantry to reduce civilian casualties. But to move faster in Gaza’s intricate urban terrain would sharply increase Israeli casualties. The same is true of any imposed reduction in artillery fire and air strikes. And to do both simultaneously would not just add to Israeli casualties but multiply them.
Because the leaders on both sides know those things, and because they respect each other, there is a back-and-forth process of mutual accommodation day by day. But the unavoidable reality is that Israel cannot end its offensive, nor even accept protracted ceasefires in exchange for hostages.
Why Israel can't accept a ceasefire
Hamas has dictated the parameters of victory
BY EDWARD LUTTWAK
unherd.com · by Edward Luttwak · December 23, 2023
During their protected wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, America’s leaders and generals could never define victory. Hamas, by contrast, has a clear understanding of what it looks like. Now that the terror group has demonstrated the failure of Israel’s deterrence, it insists it will not any more short ceasefires in exchange for hostages, but only a complete end to Israel’s offensive, which would of course leave it in full control of Gaza.
What would this entail? Most immediately, this would also hand Hamas the millions of dollars in aid that will arrive from Western nations, as well as the billions coming from Qatar, Kuwait and other oil-rich countries. And while these funds are intended for welfare distributions and for civilian reconstruction, Hamas will of course use them to rebuild its underground tunnel networks, and to fund its military training, propaganda and political units in and out of Gaza.
The reason it would get away with this is straightforward: Hamas has never pretended to be fighting for the well-being of Gaza’s population, or for Palestine as a national cause. It serves global Islam —the Umma — that rejects all nationalisms and demands supremacy over all other religions. In other words, it accepts no responsibility for the dead and wounded of the war, or for Gaza’s reconstruction.
Hence, if there is a permanent ceasefire, Hamas can start to prepare its next surprise attack, hoping for another October 7 of indiscriminate killings and rapes. If anyone in Gaza objects, Hamas will also act as it did in the past, shoving sacks over their heads and shooting them in front of crowds.
And yet, steadfastly ignoring this inevitability, retired generals and even, in an unguarded moment, Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, have urged the Israelis to reduce their bombing or even their attacks altogether, in order to win over Gaza’s population. Yet this is to forget that such a formula failed in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan: populations dominated by brutal extremists cannot be “won over”.
For the Israelis, however, there is clarity: because Hamas defines its victory so clearly, so can the Israelis. While the “complete end of the offensive” that Hamas, the UN and countless American and British undergraduates demand would mean a complete defeat for Israel, the continuation of the war — sine die, as they say in diplomacy — is the essential precondition of victory.
In this sense, little has changed since 1948: the Israelis might have to keep fighting on their own without US support. As soon as the first of Israel’s wars started on May 15, 1948, the US and the British, then very much the senior partner in the Middle East, imposed a total arms embargo on everyone involved. This favoured the Arab armies, who already had their British-supplied kits of small arms, machine-guns, field artillery and even a few aircraft and tanks, while the Jews only had rifles and submachine guns. It was very much the goal of the British Foreign Office and US State Department that the newly proclaimed State of Israel should be defeated as soon as possible, so as to preserve the stability of British power over the region.
But, then, something entirely unexpected happened: the Jews started winning. As a result, having favoured war to put a quick end to Israel, the Brits then had to end it to save their collapsing Arab allies. And the resourceful Foreign Office had the necessary remedy, promptly backed by the obedient State Department: on June 11, 1948, the UN Security Council imposed a total ceasefire, after 26 days of fighting. Had the Israelis not resumed fighting on July 9, Israel could not have emerged as a viable state.
Even so, this set the pattern for all subsequent UN ceasefires in the region: as soon as Israel launches its counteroffensives and starts winning, the UN General Assembly demands an immediate ceasefire, and pressure builds on the UN Security Council to actually order one.
But here the continuity ends. Everything else is very different now that Israel is a stronger, more self-sufficient military power. The US can certainly help to deter Hezbollah, and is the only power that can disarm the Houthi menace in the Red Sea and Suez Canal. But only Israel can incapacitate Hamas, by fighting in one alley, tunnel and bunker after another right across the Gaza Strip.
Very reasonably, the Biden Administration has been asking the Israelis to hurry up with their fighting, instead of prolonging the suffering of Gaza’s civilians. And just as reasonably, the Biden Administration has been asking the Israelis to use less air power, less artillery and more infantry to reduce civilian casualties. But to move faster in Gaza’s intricate urban terrain would sharply increase Israeli casualties. The same is true of any imposed reduction in artillery fire and air strikes. And to do both simultaneously would not just add to Israeli casualties but multiply them.
Because the leaders on both sides know those things, and because they respect each other, there is a back-and-forth process of mutual accommodation day by day. But the unavoidable reality is that Israel cannot end its offensive, nor even accept protracted ceasefires in exchange for hostages.
Instead, its forces must persist until every basement and tunnel has been cleared and Hamas’s cadre of trained fighters has been drastically reduced. Nor is the capture of Yahya Sinwar, the top Hamas leader in Gaza, a realistic goal — with the help of Sinai Bedouin smugglers, it would be all too easy for him to escape and join Hamas’s other leaders in their five-star suites in Doha.
Of course, although essential, destroying the military power of Hamas cannot by itself bring about a permanent state of peace in Gaza. But if Hamas can no longer subject Gaza’s population to their perpetual war, it will be victory enough.
unherd.com · by Edward Luttwak · December 23, 2023
8. New in 2024: Eric Smith plans a return to the job of top Marine leader
Please come back healthy with a new lease on life.
New in 2024: Eric Smith plans a return to the job of top Marine leader
marinecorpstimes.com · by Irene Loewenson · December 26, 2023
At various points in 2023, four different generals were in charge of the Marine Corps.
First there was Gen. David Berger, who retired in July after a four-year term as commandant in which he sought to remake the Marine Corps into a force ready for a fight in the Indo-Pacific.
Then there was Gen. Eric Smith, Berger’s assistant commandant, who acted as commandant before finally becoming commandant in September after getting Senate confirmation.
Then, on Oct. 29, Smith went into cardiac arrest and was hospitalized for two and a half weeks. Lt. Gen. Karsten Heckl briefly took charge, as the most senior general in Marine Corps headquarters. Gen. Christopher Mahoney became the acting commandant Nov. 3 once the Senate confirmed him as assistant commandant.
RELATED
Top Marine, recovering from cardiac arrest, plans to return to work
Gen. Eric Smith signaled his desire to resume the commandant job when he can and wished Marines a happy birthday.
Smith, who is out of the hospital, has signaled he intends to get back to work as soon as he can.
If or when Smith returns, he likely will release the commandant’s planning guidance, which lays out his priorities for the Marine Corps, sometime in 2024.
Smith already has made clear his commitment to continuing and even accelerating the controversial service overhaul that Berger launched, Force Design 2030. While serving as acting commandant, Smith released brief interim guidance emphasizing crisis response and modernization, naval integration, quality of life, recruitment and retention, and making good use of the Reserve.
As of this article’s publication date, it’s unclear when, exactly, Smith will return to his office.
But if he is back to work by New Year’s, perhaps there will be just one person in charge of the Marine Corps in 2024.
About Irene Loewenson
Irene Loewenson is a staff reporter for Marine Corps Times. She joined Military Times as an editorial fellow in August 2022. She is a graduate of Williams College, where she was the editor-in-chief of the student newspaper.
9. China Sanctions US Research Firm and 2 Individuals Over Reports on Human Rights Abuses in Xinjiang
Given how Americans are unlawfully detailed I would not attempt to challenge this by trying to travel to China.
It is interesting that they are being sanctioned not for human rights abuses themselves, but for reporting on Chinese human rights abuses. China doth protest too much. It is threatened by reporting on its actions. So what is the proper response? More aggressive reporting.
Excerpts:
In a paper published in June 2022, Morgret wrote, “The Chinese government is undertaking a concerted drive to industrialize the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR), which has led an increasing number of corporations to establish manufacturing operations there. This centrally-controlled industrial policy is a key tool in the government’s efforts to forcibly assimilate Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples through the institution of a coerced labor regime.”
Such reports draw from a wide range of sources, including independent media, non-governmental organizations and groups that may receive commercial and governmental grants or other outside funding.
China has long denied such allegations, saying the large-scale network of prison-like facilities through which passed hundreds of thousands of Muslim citizens were intended only to rid them of violent, extremist tendencies and teach them job skills. Former inmates describe harsh conditions imposed without legal process and demands that they denounce their culture and sing the praises of President Xi Jinping and the Communist Party daily.
China Sanctions US Research Firm and 2 Individuals Over Reports on Human Rights Abuses in Xinjiang
Los Angeles-based research and data analytics firm Kharon, its director of investigations, and a human rights analyst will be barred from China
Published 12/27/23 05:53 AM ET|Updated 1 hr ago
Associated Press
themessenger.com · December 27, 2023
China says it is banning a United States research company and two analysts who have reported extensively on claims of human rights abuses committed against Uyghurs and other Muslim minority groups native to the country’s far northwestern region of Xinjiang.
Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning was quoted as announcing late Tuesday night that Los Angeles-based research and data analytics firm Kharon, its director of investigations, Edmund Xu, and Nicole Morgret, a human rights analyst affiliated with the Center for Advanced Defense Studies, would be barred from traveling to China. Also, any assets or property they have in China will be frozen and organizations and individuals in China are prohibited from making transactions or otherwise cooperating with them.
In a statement on the Ministry of Foreign Affairs website, Mao said the sanctions against the company, Xu and Morgret were retaliation for a yearly U.S. government report on human rights in Xinjiang. Uyghurs and other natives of the region share religious, linguistic and cultural links with the scattered peoples of Central Asia and have long resented the Chinese Communist Party's heavy-handed control and attempts to assimilate them with the majority Han ethnic group.
In a paper published in June 2022, Morgret wrote, “The Chinese government is undertaking a concerted drive to industrialize the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR), which has led an increasing number of corporations to establish manufacturing operations there. This centrally-controlled industrial policy is a key tool in the government’s efforts to forcibly assimilate Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples through the institution of a coerced labor regime.”
Such reports draw from a wide range of sources, including independent media, non-governmental organizations and groups that may receive commercial and governmental grants or other outside funding.
China has long denied such allegations, saying the large-scale network of prison-like facilities through which passed hundreds of thousands of Muslim citizens were intended only to rid them of violent, extremist tendencies and teach them job skills. Former inmates describe harsh conditions imposed without legal process and demands that they denounce their culture and sing the praises of President Xi Jinping and the Communist Party daily.
China says the camps are all now closed, but many of their former inmates have reportedly been given lengthy prison sentences elsewhere. Access to the region by journalists, diplomats and others is tightly controlled, as is movement outside the region by Uyghurs, Kazaks and other Muslim minorities.
“By issuing the report, the United States once again spread false stories on Xinjiang and illegally sanctioned Chinese officials and companies citing so-called human rights issues,” Mao was quoted as saying.
“If the United States refuses to change course, China will not flinch and will respond in kind,” Mao was quoted as telling reporters at an earlier news briefing.
The U.S. has slapped visa bans and a wide range of other sanctions on dozens of officials from China and the semi-autonomous city of Hong Kong, including the country's former defense minister, who disappeared under circumstances China has yet to explain. China's foreign minister also was replaced this year with no word on his fate, fueling speculation that party leader and head of state for life Xi is carrying out a purge of officials suspected of collaborating with foreign governments or simply showing insufficient loyalty to China's most authoritarian leader since Mao Zedong.
Hong Kong's government has cracked down heavily on freedom of speech and democracy since China imposed a sweeping national security law in response to massive anti-government protests in 2019.
Neither Xu or Morgret could immediately be reached for comment, and it wasn't clear what degree of connection, if any, they had with the U.S. government.
themessenger.com · December 27, 2023
10. Out of the Trenches
This requires more debate.
Excerpt from T.X. Hammes:
Between the world wars, visionaries developed innovative new concepts and behaviors, with Germany creating the blitzkrieg combined-arms attack and Japan perfecting aircraft carrier–based warfare. Allied leaders paid a huge price in blood and treasure when they failed to adapt. Success in future conflicts will require integrating new technologies into winning strategies. The first step is to reject the idea that nothing is changing.
Excerpt from Stephen Biddle's response:
It has now been over 30 years since transformation advocates began arguing that warfare is being revolutionized. Yet battle outcomes still differ only by degree from the past. Is this really the right way to think about military change?
Out of the Trenches
by T. X. Hammes
Published on December 13, 2023
Foreign Affairs · by November/December 2023Published on December 13, 2023 · December 13, 2023
In “Back in the Trenches” (September/October 2023), Stephen Biddle contends that the war in Ukraine more closely resembles World War I and World War II than a military revolution and does not reflect a revolutionary change in the character of warfare. To support his argument, he asserts that armies lost a greater percentage of tanks in those wars than the Russians and Ukrainians are losing today in Ukraine. Biddle points out that the United Kingdom lost 98 percent of its tanks in the 1918 Battle of Amiens.
What he fails to mention, however, is that 80 percent of those losses were the result of mechanical failures, not damage inflicted during combat. In World War II, hundreds of divisions were engaged in mobile warfare. In contrast, the war in Ukraine now features small infantry-led fights in which tanks play a minimal support role. Even so, tank losses exceed 50 percent for both sides. Clearly, new technology is having an effect. In the entire Nagorno-Karabakh conflict that took place in the fall of 2020, over 75 percent of Armenian vehicle losses were caused by drones, according to the open-source organization Oryx. In Ukraine, hundreds of videos show vehicles being destroyed by drones. The fact that $400 drones are laying waste to armor from miles away represents a significant tactical shift.
A core element of Biddle’s argument is that the number of casualties inflicted per round of artillery fired “exceeds the world war rates, but not by much.” Yet Biddle goes on to put the World War II figure at three casualties per 100 rounds fired and the figure for the Ukrainian army today at eight casualties per 100 rounds fired—a 266 percent increase. And the Ukrainians have achieved that gain even though they are firing mostly unguided rounds, some of which are decades old, from a set of global suppliers that have uneven quality-control standards. Something is making these systems much more effective. The answer is drones. As Biddle notes, they permit the army to observe and adjust its artillery missions.
Biddle contends that precision munitions have had little effect on the battlefield. But he neglects to mention the Ukrainians’ highly effective use of extensive surveillance, an agile command-and-control system, and long-range rocket launchers and missiles such as HIMARS and Storm Shadow. He also ignores the dozens of videos showing cheap Ukrainian drones targeting as few as two soldiers. Ukraine certainly believes that drones have had a huge impact. In May, it ordered 200,000 more of them for delivery by year’s end.
Anyone looking at the German and Allied offensives of 1918 would have seen little that was new. Both were based on massed infantry and artillery. The German storm troopers’ task-organized infantry-arms teams that pierced through Allied trenches did not appear to foreshadow the breakthroughs in penetration and encirclement of World War II. Nor did the British tank brigades at Amiens foretell the mechanized formations that allowed the Germans to dominate land warfare from
1939 to 1940. Yet in hindsight, it is clear that the new tactics and equipment of armored forces dramatically changed ground warfare in World War II.
Today, by combining satellite surveillance with drones, militaries can precisely target high-value assets deep behind enemy lines and launch mass attacks against even low-value targets such as individual fighting positions. Despite having a limited number of precision weapons, Ukraine has shown how powerful new technologies can be if they are integrated operationally. It does not take great imagination to envision the impact of tens of thousands of drones that orbit over a battlefield until they detect and attack a target.
Between the world wars, visionaries developed innovative new concepts and behaviors, with Germany creating the blitzkrieg combined-arms attack and Japan perfecting aircraft carrier–based warfare. Allied leaders paid a huge price in blood and treasure when they failed to adapt. Success in future conflicts will require integrating new technologies into winning strategies. The first step is to reject the idea that nothing is changing.
T. X. Hammes
Distinguished Research Fellow, Center for Strategic Research, National Defense University
BIDDLE REPLIES:
Length constraints preclude a full debate, so I will focus on a couple of key points.
As I argued in my article, artillery has become more lethal, but at a steady, continuous, roughly linear rate of around an additional 0.05 casualties per hundred rounds per year for over a century now, much of it driven by progressive changes in caliber and fuses. The data show no evidence that drones or improved precision have caused any sudden changes in casualty numbers.
Nobody is arguing that nothing changes. The issues are the rate of change in the nature of warfare and the reasons for it. What the war in Ukraine shows is incremental change, because adaptation to new technologies limits their impact on the battlefield.
Consider drones. Ukraine has enough drones today to “swarm” the Russians on key fronts if it wants to. But drones spur adaptation; for example, combatants can counter swarms of cheap drones by using omnidirectional jamming, which discourages swarming. On YouTube, viewers see the drone missions that succeed, not those that fail. But studies show that the latter now far outnumber the former. The Royal United Services Institute, a British think tank, has estimated that only one mission in three succeeds; other sources put the figure at one in every seven to ten. These results do not mean that drones are useless, but they do not reflect transformational impact on warfare, which would explain the merely incremental changes in observed battlefield outcomes.
It has now been over 30 years since transformation advocates began arguing that warfare is being revolutionized. Yet battle outcomes still differ only by degree from the past. Is this really the right way to think about military change?
Foreign Affairs · by November/December 2023Published on December 13, 2023 · December 13, 2023
11. Biden Endangers U.S. Troops
US bases as "enemy drone catchers."
Biden Endangers U.S. Troops
Three more American service members are hurt, as U.S. bases became enemy drone catchers.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-troops-injured-iraq-iran-houthis-strike-biden-administration-4773fa27?mc_cid=cd1efac802&mc_eid=70bf478f36
By The Editorial Board
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Dec. 26, 2023 6:40 pm ET
U.S. Army soldiers board a CH-47 Chinook helicopter at Al Asad Air Base, Iraq, July 7. PHOTO: U.S. ARMY
It was going to happen sooner or later: American service members would be seriously hurt as Iran-backed militias conduct lethal target practice against U.S. bases in the Middle East. When will President Biden do his duty as Commander in Chief and protect Americans deployed abroad?
Iranian proxies have attacked U.S. forces in the Middle East about 100 times since October, and on Monday an explosive drone made it past U.S. defenses at a base in Iraq. Two Americans were wounded and a third is in critical condition.
The Administration conducted retaliatory strikes on three facilities used by Kataib Hezbollah, the Iranian proxy group responsible for the attack. Defense secretary Lloyd Austin issued a statement saying his “prayers” are with the wounded. Which is nice, but Mr. Austin isn’t a chaplain. The U.S. defense chief’s job is to deter such attacks and defend his troops from being too-easy targets for Shiite militias.
The White House response was worse. The National Security Council’s Adrienne Watson issued a statement announcing the reprisal and insisted that the “President places no higher priority than the protection of American personnel serving in harm’s way.”
This is demonstrably false, and the bromide is insulting. Mr. Biden’s highest priority, whispered by the White House every day, is avoiding escalation with Iran or its proxies. Mr. Biden is afraid—we use that word advisedly—of being involved in a larger conflict, which might not be popular in an election year. But that anxiety is now interfering with his core obligation to defend U.S. forces.
Iranian front groups have been trying to kill U.S. troops for months. Yet Mr. Biden offered the military equivalent of a wrist slap after Americans suffered traumatic brain injuries in attacks this autumn.
The Administration may want the public to think the latest retaliatory strikes were more substantive than the previous pinpricks on weapons stores. U.S. Central Command took the unusual step Monday night of saying that the strikes “likely killed” a number of militants. But the Associated Press, citing Iraqi officials, says the U.S. killed all of one militant. Some 18 were wounded.
Americans who sign up to serve in uniform know the risks, but serving as drone catchers because Washington refuses to deter the enemy isn’t supposed to be among the occupational hazards. And Mr. Biden’s token strikes haven’t deterred Iran’s proxies in Iraq or anywhere else.
The Houthis, another Iran-backed military, are also unimpressed with the new U.S. coalition to protect commercial shipping in the Red Sea. The terrorists are escalating despite U.S. restraint in response. The U.S. military said Tuesday afternoon that American ships and fighter jets had shot down no fewer than 12 drones, three antiship ballistic missiles, and two land attack cruise missiles, ostensibly at multiple targets. All were fired by the Houthis in a 10-hour period.
Does that sound like an organization worried about how America might respond? The U.S. hasn’t punished the Houthis for taking the world economy hostage, though the U.S. knows the location of Houthi launch sites, radars, weapons and military leadership. The Houthis are betting the U.S. and friends lack the political will to punish their piracy.
***
Behind all of this is Iran, though the White House refuses to speak this truth or do much about it. Mr. Biden frets that Iran could accelerate its nuclear program, or further unleash its proxies and create trouble for Iraq’s government that hosts U.S. military trainers and anti-ISIS intelligence assets. Tehran is exploiting the U.S. fear of escalation to its own benefit.
The irony is that the biggest tonic for disorder in the Middle East would be restoring American deterrence. That would mean warning Tehran that its military and nuclear assets are at risk if it doesn’t call off the proxy dogs. For all the Biden fears of Tehran, the recent empirical record—the U.S. strike that killed Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani, for instance—counsels that Iran backs down when it faces severe costs for its assaults.
Restoring deterrence in the Middle East would require the Biden Administration to admit that its approach to Iran hasn’t worked and demands a course correction. The alternative is a continuing spiral of violence the Administration says it desperately wants to avoid. And sooner or later more Americans will be in critical condition, or dead.
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The Iran-backed Houthi rebel group in Yemen has been ramping up attacks on Israeli and U.S. targets in retaliation for Israel’s strikes in Gaza. WSJ’s Shelby Holliday reports on the group’s rise in Yemen, and the threats it’s currently posing in the Middle East. Photo: Mohammed Huwais/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Copyright ©2023 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
Appeared in the December 27, 2023, print edition as 'Biden Endangers U.S. Troops'.
12. Washington's 'Ship of Fools' Delude Themselves About Russia's Intent
Excerpts:
Yet, as we have warned, Washington is on the cusp of awarding Putin that which he cannot militarily achieve: Russian domination of eastern and central Europe and renewed opportunity for Moscow to reassert itself in the Balkans and Caucasus.
Discerning what’s at play here is not a difficult task, especially when it comes to assessing the Kremlin’s strategy. The Budapest Memorandum alone should be dispositive. In exchange for Ukraine’s giving up its nuclear arsenal, Russia was prohibited from “threatening or using military force or economic coercion against Ukraine.” But Putin violated the 1994 agreement twice, with his illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014 and his invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The Minsk agreements in 2014 and 2015, ending Putin’s first invasion of Ukraine, proved worthless too.
Why would anyone in Washington believe this time might be different?
Moreover, how could anyone on Capitol Hill believe that Kyiv would be so naïve as to trust Putin after all that has happened over the past decade? Poland does not trust him, nor do the Baltic States.
Washington's 'Ship of Fools' Delude Themselves About Russia's Intent | Opinion
Published 12/27/23 06:00 AM ET
Col. (Ret.) Jonathan Sweet and Mark Toth
themessenger.com · December 27, 2023
On Christmas Day, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his generals sent a strong message with the violent destruction of the Russian naval landing ship Novocherkassk while it was docked in Feodosia, Crimea. The vessel was suspected of carrying Iranian-made drones.
With the hit, Zelenskyy’s messaging was threefold: One, Kyiv has no intention of negotiating away any of its territory, regardless of how many “peace feelers” Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin may have floated in Washington and Brussels. Two, Ukraine remains intent on militarily retaking the entire Crimean Peninsula. And three, the Ukrainian army will fight on, with or without U.S. military aid and economic support.
While Ukraine continues to push back against Russia, Washington remains at war with itself. Ideally, the Christmas weekend should have brought hope to the Ukrainian people in their fight against Russian aggression. Instead, it became another lost weekend.
Putin likely is taking notice. If he has put out feelers about negotiating a ceasefire, it’s not about finding lasting peace. More likely, he wants to further divide Capitol Hill and use beltway politics to buy time so that Moscow can reset its badly mauled army and fight another day — the same tactic Putin used in Chechnya.
We know how this could end: If Washington policymakers accept Putin’s overtures for their own political expediency, the result could be a badly destabilized eastern Europe — and potentially, a fractured NATO.
Yet, as we have warned, Washington is on the cusp of awarding Putin that which he cannot militarily achieve: Russian domination of eastern and central Europe and renewed opportunity for Moscow to reassert itself in the Balkans and Caucasus.
Discerning what’s at play here is not a difficult task, especially when it comes to assessing the Kremlin’s strategy. The Budapest Memorandum alone should be dispositive. In exchange for Ukraine’s giving up its nuclear arsenal, Russia was prohibited from “threatening or using military force or economic coercion against Ukraine.” But Putin violated the 1994 agreement twice, with his illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014 and his invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The Minsk agreements in 2014 and 2015, ending Putin’s first invasion of Ukraine, proved worthless too.
Why would anyone in Washington believe this time might be different?
Moreover, how could anyone on Capitol Hill believe that Kyiv would be so naïve as to trust Putin after all that has happened over the past decade? Poland does not trust him, nor do the Baltic States.
Moscow’s unending war crimes should be proof enough — actions such as the downing of Malaysian Airlines MH17 over Ukraine by Russia-backed separatists in July 2014; Russia’s crimes against humanity in Bucha, Mariupol, Bakhmut and other population centers; the kidnapping of Ukrainian children; the weaponization of winter by attacking Ukraine’s electrical grids and nuclear power plants; and the destruction of grain storage facilities in Odessa.
Peace and goodwill among mankind is a laudable goal, but Putin will never be the man who achieves it. The Russian president’s notion of peace is simply a “time out” to prepare for his next military move — and if he is left undefeated or unchecked, he eventually will reach beyond Ukraine.
Imagine if, on Dec. 7, 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Congress had decided to ignore the Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor, Wake Island, and the Philippines, or that they had foolishly set aside Nazi Chancellor Adolf Hitler’s declaration of war four days later. What would the global world order have looked like for the past 81 years?
We are veering into similar territory now, with Russia, China, Iran and North Korea.
Putin’s war in Ukraine is one more Russian assault on the global order as we have known it since the end of World War II. Washington cannot afford any more “lost weekends” in confronting him and ensuring his defeat. Russia is weakened; what are we waiting for?
Peace is possible only if Putin loses in Ukraine. Letting his army survive to fight another day would be bad enough; rewarding him by negotiating away any Ukrainian territory should be unfathomable.
On a bipartisan basis, the U.S. Ship of State is foundering. We can’t help but recollect Stanley Kramer’s 1965 “Ship of Fools,” in which a fictional passenger ship is headed to Nazi Germany in 1933 and the characters, in their own ways, are in denial of the world order devolving around them, slipping ever closer to chaos.
Zelenskyy and his generals are under no such delusions. They know the dark world that Putin’s victory would bring about, and they are urgently considering mobilizing 500,000 more Ukrainian troops to prevent it.
“Ship of Fools” ends when one character asks moviegoers, “What has all of this to do with us?” His answer to the audience was, “Nothing.” But in our reality, the war in Ukraine has everything to do with us — and with the fate of the Western world for generations to come. Two world wars did away with the concept of isolationism.
Still, Putin seems to be betting on America saying “this has nothing to do with us after all.” If we do, then we have become a “Ship of Fools” deserving of our fate, and many more lost weekends lie ahead for us as a people. We can do the right thing and find the resolve in the new year to ensure that Ukraine wins and Putin decisively loses.
Col. (Ret.) Jonathan Sweet served 30 years as a military intelligence officer and led the U.S. European Command Intelligence Engagement Division from 2012 to 2014.
Mark Toth, an economist and entrepreneur, is a former board member of the World Trade Center, St. Louis.
themessenger.com · December 27, 2023
13. Without elections of its own to bother with, China picks its favored candidates in the US and Taiwan
Excerpts:
At the same time, given that chaos and instability in America’s domestic situation are very much in China’s interest, another Trump presidency is a tempting prospect. Whether it is Trump or Biden, Beijing will find ample opportunities to exploit. The prospect of either would enable it to advance the erosion of America’s capabilities and will to resist China’s expansionist goals.
Having had to face a strong woman leader in Taiwan for the past eight years, the one potential president Beijing definitely does not want to confront is Haley, who showed a tough-minded approach toward America’s adversaries, especially China, at the U.N. and in her campaign.
It is ironic that the two most vociferous exponents of the argument that Trump presents an existential threat to America’s democracy are Biden and the Democrats on one side and former New Jersey Governor and GOP presidential candidate Chris Christie on the other. Despite the reality, however, that both have the potential to derail Trump’s candidacy politically, neither Biden nor Christie will step aside and allow Haley an unimpeded opportunity to eliminate the Trump danger. Christie is now merely splitting the anti-Trump primary vote. And Biden is probably the only Democrat who cannot defeat Trump in 2024.
The national interest requires more from each of them if they believe the fate of the Republic depends on this election.
Without elections of its own to bother with, China picks its favored candidates in the US and Taiwan
BY JOSEPH BOSCO, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR - 12/26/23 10:00 AM ET
https://thehill.com/opinion/international/4376678-without-elections-of-its-own-to-bother-with-china-picks-its-favored-candidates-in-the-us-and-taiwan/?utm
China’s President Xi Jinping speaks at a dinner with business leaders during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) conference Wednesday, Nov. 15, 2023, in San Francisco. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu)
The West’s adversaries — China, Russia, Iran and North Korea — share the common goal of undermining America’s leadership in the international order.
They are coordinating more closely than anything observed on the world stage since the collusion of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Imperial Japan, the Axis powers of World War II.
Like the West’s mortal enemies from that earlier generation, today’s geostrategic opponents employ a variety of instruments to divide, weaken and subvert America’s democracy.
They exploit the West’s very strengths — freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly — to sow discord and dissension, suspicion and even paranoia among Americans. They strive to turn citizen against citizen, group against group, each vying to save U.S. democracy from the other side’s perceived threats.
America’s foes hope to foment domestic clashes to such an intense degree that the tensions will approach a new U.S. civil war. Preoccupied with fighting one another, Americans would be effectively disabled from coping with the multifront external aggression.
U.S. adversaries are betting that the open democratic system they see as the U.S. arrogantly touting its governance model for the world will prove to be its own undoing. Chain’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin said in their joint statement in 2022 that each country (by which they mean each ruling regime) can ”decide whether their State is a democratic one.”
Two authentic democracies, recognized by the world as such, challenge that authoritarian presumption. The United States and Taiwan will hold critical elections in 2024, each with three viable contenders.
President Xi and the Chinese Communist Party are so afraid of the Chinese people, they refuse to allow them to express themselves through elections, preferring instead to intervene in Western elections and try to influence the results most favorable to CCP interests.
On Taiwan, they oppose Vice President William Lai, the candidate of the incumbent Democratic Progressive Party, which refuses to accept China’s distorted version of Taiwanese history and its sinister plan for Taiwan’s future. The DPP reflects the views of the Taiwanese people who, having rid their country of Chiang Kai-Shek’s anti-communist dictatorship decades earlier, have no desire to submit to an even more vicious oppression under the CCP.
Taiwan’s voters will decide next month whether Lai or his challengers, who favor closer relations with China — Kuomintang candidate Hou Yu-ih and former Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je of the Taiwan’s People Party — are more likely to advance Taiwan’s security interests.
In the United States as well, China has multiple candidates to consider, with recent polls indicating the field has narrowed to incumbent Democratic President Joe Biden and, for the Republicans, either former President Donald Trump or the surging former South Carolina Governor and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley.
Unlike with Taiwan, where Beijing’s antipathy to the DPP candidate is a matter of public record, it has kept its counsel on which American it would find most conducive to China’s interests. But, based on recent history, its relative preferences can be deduced.
The Trump administration was the first in 40 years to challenge the wishful thinking dominating U.S. foreign policy that generous Western engagement would steadily move China away from its anti-Western hostility and into what Richard Nixon called “the family of nations.”
But those transformative policies on China and Taiwan were the work of the impressive foreign policy and national security team Trump had appointed and enabled —until he soured on them — rather than the consequence of any policy determination of Trump himself. Haley was part of that impressive original team as she encountered America’s friends and foes at the U.N.
Trump’s public remarks since the 2020 election, as well as revelations of his private views from his former appointees,reveal his lack of substantive convictions on matters of foreign policy. That posture is quite welcome in Beijing and Moscow but is so contrary to the positions of Haley and the other former Trump appointees that there is no prospect of their reuniting under a possible Trump presidency.
For that reason, China — which, according to intelligence reporting, interfered in the 2022 midterm elections — has indicated a preference for Trump in 2024, expecting his presidency, without its earlier “hardline” national security team, to be far more accommodating this time around.
Beijing would also not be unhappy with another Biden term, even though its policies are now closer to those of the early Trump tenure than Trump himself presently is. It also could harbor the expectation that Biden and his team will revert to their more dovish, Obama-era policies.
Biden’s capitulation on Afghanistan and his protracted, temporizing response to Russia’s aggression in Ukraine probably weigh in Xi’s mind in favor of another Biden term — especially with the inexperienced Kamala Harris waiting in the wings.
At the same time, given that chaos and instability in America’s domestic situation are very much in China’s interest, another Trump presidency is a tempting prospect. Whether it is Trump or Biden, Beijing will find ample opportunities to exploit. The prospect of either would enable it to advance the erosion of America’s capabilities and will to resist China’s expansionist goals.
Having had to face a strong woman leader in Taiwan for the past eight years, the one potential president Beijing definitely does not want to confront is Haley, who showed a tough-minded approach toward America’s adversaries, especially China, at the U.N. and in her campaign.
It is ironic that the two most vociferous exponents of the argument that Trump presents an existential threat to America’s democracy are Biden and the Democrats on one side and former New Jersey Governor and GOP presidential candidate Chris Christie on the other. Despite the reality, however, that both have the potential to derail Trump’s candidacy politically, neither Biden nor Christie will step aside and allow Haley an unimpeded opportunity to eliminate the Trump danger. Christie is now merely splitting the anti-Trump primary vote. And Biden is probably the only Democrat who cannot defeat Trump in 2024.
The national interest requires more from each of them if they believe the fate of the Republic depends on this election.
Joseph Bosco served as China country director for the secretary of Defense from 2005 to 2006 and as Asia-Pacific director of humanitarian assistance and disaster relief from 2009 to 2010. He served in the Pentagon when Vladimir Putin invaded Georgia and was involved in Department of Defense discussions about the U.S. response. Follow him on Twitter @BoscoJosephA.
14. Where Did the Military Go Wrong With Gen Z?
These two short letters may be the two most succinct yet thorough explanations for our recruiting woes. We can argue with them but I would argue that perception is reality and these two perceptions are likely the reality for many members of Gen Z.
- OPINION
- LETTERS
Follow
Where Did the Military Go Wrong With Gen Z?
Military families observe a defense establishment that appears to be absorbed by DEI and woke ideology.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/gen-z-military-recruiting-woke-dei-war-on-terror-40893e4f?utm_campaign=dfn-ebb&utm
Dec. 26, 2023 12:28 pm ET
The Times Square military recruiting station in New York, July 17, 2015. PHOTO: BEBETO MATTHEWS/ASSOCIATED PRESS
As a grandfather and veteran, I thank Rep. Mike Gallagher and Prof. Kevin Wallsten for their op-ed “Why Doesn’t Gen Z Want to Be All It Can Be?” (Dec. 14). If the next generation is largely unwilling to serve in the armed forces, then the nation’s future is at best uncertain.
The armed forces have in the past drawn from families and regions that emphasize traditional values, including patriotism. But when those families observe a defense establishment that appears to be absorbed by DEI and woke ideology, is it any surprise that many young, potential soldiers will turn away?
Christopher L. Lawlor
Carmel, Ind.
Alongside much of the authors’ hand-wringing and pearl-clutching, there isn’t one word dedicated to considering the perspective of Gen Z. Allow me to elucidate. Gen Z doesn’t remember 9/11, yet America was at war for most of their lives in Afghanistan and Iraq. And for what? Nothing has been won, unless you count the millions of dead Iraqis, Afghans, Yemenis, etc.
Color me unsurprised that Gen Z isn’t gung-ho to go to war. Everything they have seen in their lives has shown them that war is a costly mistake. Maybe that’s the most reasonable opinion to have.
Jonathan Grey
15. The Rebirth of Russian Spycraft
Excerpts:
As Russia prepares to enter a third year of war, its intelligence agencies know that the Kremlin supports them and shares their paranoia and prejudices. This reality suggests that the spy services can count on the Kremlin’s protection. But it doesn’t mean that Putin himself is more secure in power.
For much of the past 20 years, Putin has struggled with the challenge of how to control his vast security and intelligence community, spread over an enormous country and abroad. In the early 2000s, he destroyed former President Boris Yeltsin’s concept of competing spy services, making the FSB the top agency. After Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, Putin tried to bring his intelligence forces to heel by sending several middle-rank officers to jail on corruption charges. But this did not result in tighter Kremlin control of the agencies. Now, with the war in Ukraine, Putin has tried to avoid the mistakes of the past and keep his intelligence forces loyal. He has also succeeded in making them stronger, for the time being, than at any previous point in the war.
But it is unclear if any of this has improved his control over them. And so far, Putin has done nothing to fix the problem: he is unwilling to repeat Stalin’s mistakes of purging his agencies on an industrial scale, but he also understands that unlike during the Soviet years, when the Communist Party controlled the KGB, he has few other ways to rein them in. If things began to go badly for Russia in the war, this one-sided dynamic could mean that Putin’s spies might be in no rush to save him.
The Rebirth of Russian Spycraft
How the Ukraine War Has Changed the Game for the Kremlin’s Operatives—and Their Western Rivals
December 27, 2023
Foreign Affairs · by Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan · December 27, 2023
In April 2023, a prominent Russian national with suspected ties to Russian intelligence pulled off an impressive escape from Italian authorities. Artem Uss, a Russian businessman and the son of a former Russian governor, had been detained in Milan a few months earlier on charges of smuggling sensitive U.S. military technology to Russia. According to an indictment issued by a federal court in Brooklyn, New York, in October 2022, Uss had illegally trafficked in the semiconductors needed to build ballistic missiles and a variety of other weapons, some of which were being used in the war in Ukraine. But while Uss was awaiting extradition to the United States, he was exfiltrated from Italy with the help of a Serbian criminal gang and returned to Russia.
The escape, which was reported in The Wall Street Journal last spring, was only one of a series of recent incidents suggesting how much Russia’s intelligence forces have regrouped since the start of the war in Ukraine. Back in the spring of 2022, in the months after Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his invasion, the Russian intelligence agencies had seemed disoriented and confused. One by one, European countries had kicked out Russia’s diplomats; according to one British estimate, some 600 Russian officials were expelled from Europe, of which perhaps 400 were believed to be spies. The FSB, Russia’s internal security service, had also badly misjudged the kind of resistance that Russian forces would face in Ukraine, assuming that Russia could quickly take Kyiv. This contributed to Russia’s humiliating performance.
Now, Russia’s foreign intelligence network appears to be back with a vengeance. And it is becoming more inventive, increasingly relying on foreign nationals—such as the Serbian gang that assisted Uss, for instance—to help it get around restrictions on Russians. Before the war, Western intelligence agencies mostly dealt with Russian operations being carried out by Russian nationals. That is no longer the case. Today, Russian intelligence activities draw on a range of foreign nationals, and that includes not only spying on the West and tracking arms shipments to Ukraine but also applying growing pressure on Russian exiles and opponents of the Putin regime who have fled abroad since the war started. Evidence of such activity is turning up everywhere from Georgia and Serbia to NATO countries such as Bulgaria and Poland. In early 2023, for example, British officials arrested five Bulgarians who were accused of spying for Russia, including in an effort to keep tabs on Russian exiles in London.
At the same time, Russia’s spy agencies also appear to have shifted their orientation. Before the war, there was a division of labor among the three principal intelligence services—the SVR (foreign intelligence), the GRU (military intelligence), and the FSB (domestic security). In the past, it was generally understood that the SVR mostly focused on political and industrial espionage and the GRU on military issues, while the FSB was primarily focused on Russia itself, using its foreign branch mainly to conduct operations against Russians abroad and to keep friendly regimes in neighboring countries in power. Now, these distinctions are no longer so clear: all three agencies are deeply involved in the war in Ukraine, and all three have been actively recruiting new assets among Russia’s most recent exiles abroad.
The return of Moscow’s spying apparatus has significant implications for the West in its efforts to counter Russian meddling and Russian intelligence operations. If recent indications are correct, Russian intelligence activities in Europe and elsewhere may pose a significantly greater threat than had been assumed in the early stages of the war. At the same time, these changes offer insight into Putin’s own wartime regime and the extent to which it is increasingly rebuilding Russia’s spy agencies according to earlier models from the Soviet decades. Putin is not only attempting to make up for the Soviet KGB’s failure in its confrontation with the West in the late twentieth century. He is also trying to restore the glory of Stalin’s formidable secret service, which had considerable success against the West in the decades from the Bolshevik Revolution to World War II.
THE HUNDRED YEARS’ WAR
Before Russia began its full-scale war in Ukraine in 2022, the country’s intelligence services looked fairly weak. They had long suffered from interagency infighting and turf wars, as well as from a breakdown in trust between the generals and the rank and file, which led to significant delays and failures in getting information from the ground to the top level. Russian intelligence operations, meanwhile, increasingly became known chiefly for their sloppiness, as in the cases of the botched poisonings of the former Russian military officer Sergei Skripal in the United Kingdom in 2018 and the opposition leader Alexei Navalny in 2020. In short, the Russian spy services seemed to have lost much of their former luster, a problem that burst into the open with the embarrassing misreading of Ukraine in the planning for Russia’s invasion.
But as the war in Ukraine entered its second year, the Russian intelligence agencies regrouped and found a new sense of purpose. Instead of dwelling on their mistakes and questioning why they had so utterly failed to anticipate Ukrainian resistance in the initial invasion, the agencies moved on, taking new strength from the fact that they were withstanding a confrontation with the entire West. They have not only increased their activities in Europe and in neighboring countries; the FSB has also stepped up its efforts to fight back Ukrainian ops on Russian soil. That Putin didn’t make any radical changes in the security services despite the catastrophe of 2022 has been seen as a virtue: since the tumultuous 1990s, there has been a widely shared view both among the intelligence leadership and the rank and file that any attempt to overhaul the agencies will weaken their capabilities.
Underlying this new activity, however, has also been a larger goal: revitalizing Russia’s overall intelligence war against the West. This is a war that for the main Russian agencies goes back to the earliest years of the Soviet era. As Russian intelligence officials see it, the war in Ukraine has launched the third round of a great spy war that has been playing out since 1917.
Putin is trying to restore the glory of Stalin’s formidable secret service.
The first round of this struggle, in which early Soviet operatives faced off primarily against their British counterparts, started soon after the Bolshevik Revolution. In that original conflict, Soviet agents successfully compromised any chance of fomenting resistance to the Bolshevik regime from abroad. They did this by conducting a massive and very successful false-flag operation, code-named Trust, in which they lured politically active Russian émigrés, as well as British spies, to the Soviet Union to help a fake anti-Bolshevik organization. These anti-Soviet activists were in this way identified and killed. The conflict reached its peak during World War II, when Russian spies successfully penetrated British intelligence and, in the United States, got access to the Manhattan Project and stole the secrets of the atomic bomb. Overall, Soviet officials believed they won this first round with the West.
The second round of the intelligence war, however, didn’t end so well for Moscow. During the Cold War, the KGB failed to save the Soviet regime it swore to protect. Then, in the early 1990s, the agency was nearly destroyed after being split apart and dismembered. The collapse left lasting scars on Putin, who witnessed it firsthand, and his security elite, as they struggled to rebuild a Russian state that had lost its former power. (Putin ultimately built the FSB on the KGB’s former foundations.)
Now, with the onset of a new grand conflict with the West, Russia’s intelligence agencies are seeking to reverse the setbacks that unfolded at the end of the Cold War. And they sense a new opportunity, seeing the war in Ukraine as the opening salvo in the third round of the intelligence war. The sense of continuity with their Soviet predecessors has even taken visible form in Russia: in September, Sergei Naryshkin, Russia’s head of foreign intelligence, inaugurated a new statue to the founder of the Soviet secret police in the courtyard of the SVR’s Moscow headquarters. And in November, the FSB reinforced that message by celebrating the 100th anniversary of the OGPU, the Soviet secret police, and stressing the role of the OGPU in crushing political émigré organizations.
But the continuity goes well beyond celebrating early Soviet exploits. In the run-up to the war and since, Putin has made notable use of former KGB generals who share his eagerness to avenge the humiliation of the Soviet collapse. Nikolai Gribin, who in the 1980s served as deputy head of foreign disinformation operations at the KGB’s foreign intelligence branch, has a lead role in a new Russian think tank launched in 2021, the National Research Institute for the Development of Communications, which seeks to shape pro-Kremlin opinion in countries near Russia, with a particular focus on Belarus. (Gribin himself has authored several research reports on public opinion in Belarus.) In the 1980s, Alexander Mikhailov served in the KGB’s infamous Fifth Directorate—the branch given the task of rooting out ideological subversion, including dissidents, musicians, and church leaders—and ran disinformation operations for the FSB in the 1990s. Since the fall of 2021, a few months before the invasion, Mikhailov has been the FSB’s unofficial mouthpiece for the Russian media, promoting the agency’s view of events in Ukraine. As Russian intelligence portrays it, the war pits the United States and Europe against Russia, with the Ukrainians serving merely as the puppets of their Western spymasters.
Putin giving a speech near the FSB's headquarters in Moscow, June 2022
Aleksey Nikolskyi / Sputnik / Kremlin / Reuters
Along with Putin, Russia’s spy agencies have also drawn some important lessons from the earlier Soviet intelligence wars. Because it pitted Russia directly against the West, the war in Ukraine has prompted the Kremlin and its spy agencies to rethink several major national security questions that hadn’t been closely studied since 1991. For example, there was the question of Russia’s borders and whether to close them. The Kremlin decided against doing so, and that has benefited the intelligence services, which can use the new exodus of Russian nationals to Europe and other neighboring countries to help make up for the expulsions of Russian diplomats from European capitals. Putin has clearly set out to avoid the mistakes made during the Cold War, when the Soviets significantly restrained the cross-border movement of people, hampering Soviet intelligence.
But there was another pressing problem for the Kremlin: how to enforce discipline within the ranks. Putin could have followed Stalin’s approach, embarking on large-scale purges and mass repressions. But he seems to have learned that those measures ultimately backfired for the Soviets. Putin understands that instilling fear is a useful tool but that outright purges would hurt the agencies—as they did in the 1930s when the Soviets’ foreign intelligence lost its most talented agents. Thus, the head of the FSB’s foreign intelligence branch, Sergei Beseda, was initially detained and held incommunicado after the first disastrous days of the Ukraine invasion. But after several weeks, he was reinstated, and the broader purges in military intelligence and the FSB that many expected after Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the Wagner paramilitary company, led a mutiny in June 2023 never materialized.
Overall, Putin has taken a flexible, pragmatic approach to his intelligence services, playing between the ever-present fear of purges and encouraging the agencies to be more innovative at regaining ground in the West. One result seems to have been a noticeable rise in more ambitious foreign operations over the past year, including alleged sabotage operations, as well as the exfiltration of the Russian operative in Italy and stepped up recruitment efforts in several NATO countries, as is apparent in the case of a member of Germany’s BND intelligence agency who was arrested in December 2022 on charges of allegedly transferring highly-classified information to the Russian government, and is now on trial for treason.
SPIES LIKE US
In staging their comeback, Russia’s spy agencies have also internalized another important lesson from the Soviet years: the strategic use of ideology. In the 1930s, Moscow was able to win over many Westerners to the Soviet cause by aiming its arguments at Western deficiencies rather than promoting Marxist doctrine. At the time, Soviet agents learned that they didn’t really need to sell a full-fledged communist ideology; instead, they could portray the Soviet Union as an alternative to Western imperialism, emphasizing the West’s double standards and hypocrisy and offering in contrast a leader who stood up against global powers. These ideas are exactly what Russian agencies can now pedal to potential allies and recruits in Russia’s new intelligence war with the West.
As Russia prepares to enter a third year of war, its intelligence agencies know that the Kremlin supports them and shares their paranoia and prejudices. This reality suggests that the spy services can count on the Kremlin’s protection. But it doesn’t mean that Putin himself is more secure in power.
For much of the past 20 years, Putin has struggled with the challenge of how to control his vast security and intelligence community, spread over an enormous country and abroad. In the early 2000s, he destroyed former President Boris Yeltsin’s concept of competing spy services, making the FSB the top agency. After Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, Putin tried to bring his intelligence forces to heel by sending several middle-rank officers to jail on corruption charges. But this did not result in tighter Kremlin control of the agencies. Now, with the war in Ukraine, Putin has tried to avoid the mistakes of the past and keep his intelligence forces loyal. He has also succeeded in making them stronger, for the time being, than at any previous point in the war.
But it is unclear if any of this has improved his control over them. And so far, Putin has done nothing to fix the problem: he is unwilling to repeat Stalin’s mistakes of purging his agencies on an industrial scale, but he also understands that unlike during the Soviet years, when the Communist Party controlled the KGB, he has few other ways to rein them in. If things began to go badly for Russia in the war, this one-sided dynamic could mean that Putin’s spies might be in no rush to save him.
- ANDREI SOLDATOV is a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis and Co-Founder and Editor of Agentura.ru, a watchdog of the Russian secret services’ activities.
- IRINA BOROGAN is a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis and Co-Founder and Deputy Editor of Agentura.ru.
-
They are the co-authors of The Compatriots: The Russian Exiles Who Fought Against the Kremlin.
Foreign Affairs · by Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan · December 27, 2023
16. Reversing America’s Ruinous Support for Israel’s Assault on Gaza - War on the Rocks by Ryan Evans
Conclusion:
Washington can and should be empathetic and sympathetic with how Israel arrived at this moment, but it ought not continue to sustain one of the greatest human disasters of the 21st century. This calamity is not in America’s interests, nor does it even serve the interests of the Israeli people. And it only guarantees misery, starvation, and death for the people of the Gaza Strip.
Reversing America’s Ruinous Support for Israel’s Assault on Gaza - War on the Rocks
warontherocks.com · by Ryan Evans · December 27, 2023
Since the brutal attacks by Hamas on Oct. 7, I have been filled with a familiar sense of dread as the Israeli government has squandered the sympathy and support of so many across the globe. Tragically, this is where comparisons with 9/11 hold the most explanatory power. What took America about two-and-a-half years from the smoldering ruins of the World Trade Center to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, Israel accomplished in weeks. In the wake of the attack, President Joe Biden flew to Israel, where he delivered a strident message of support to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders, while cautioning them to avoid the mistakes that the United States made after the 9/11 attacks. But that advice fell on deaf ears amidst the rage, shame, and political maneuvering in the wake of Hamas’ bloody rampage. Despite America’s considerable leverage, Biden has not yet been willing to do what it takes to restrain Israel. The result has been a horror show for Palestinians in Gaza, as well as for the hostages held in Gaza and their families.
Israel’s military operation in Gaza is both strategically and morally unrecoverable. The legacy of this maximalist assault will haunt Israel for years. Its costs have cascaded around the world and acutely affect Israel’s closest partner, the United States. U.S. policy ought to reflect these realities, first by threatening to withhold further material and political support to Israel unless it announces an immediate ceasefire to allow humanitarian aid to flow, complies with the laws of war should combat resume, and commits to a positive political program on Palestinian governance of Gaza.
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An Unrecoverable Disaster
For military action to succeed, it must serve an achievable policy aim. Netanyahu’s declared aim was not just the defeat of Hamas, but its elimination. This aim has been described by experts and close observers of the region as basically impossible, an assessment with which I agree. This is due to the group’s embeddedness in Palestinian society and the proven ability of Islamist militant groups to adapt, survive, and endure conflict and repression. More than two months after announcing that aim, Netanyahu defined elimination downward in a Christmas op-ed. He also detailed two other “prerequisites for peace,” demanding that the Gaza Strip be de-militarized and “Palestinian society” be “deradicalized” — the latter of which is at best slippery and at worst a recipe for endless strife.
That Israel’s policy is so maximalist and therefore likely unachievable is bad enough, but it also offers nothing about how Gaza will be governed and by whom whenever hostilities cease. To what point, then, has Israeli military strategy aimed? The Israeli military has been engaged in a clearance operation at a large scale, bisecting the Gaza Strip while pushing its population southward into “safe” areas, searching for hostages, and seizing underground infrastructure. While tactically effective, these efforts cannot deliver on Netanyahu’s maximalism. It is certainly true that Hamas and associated militant groups have suffered grievous casualties, but its number of cadres was never the group’s main source of political power. In fact, this war may even leave Hamas more powerful. Nor has Israel been successful in getting back most of the hostages seized by Hamas on Oct. 7. In fact, the character of Israeli military operations has only put their lives at greater risk (earlier this month, for example, three shirtless Israeli hostages waving a white flag were shot and killed by Israeli forces). This does not speak to a coherent military strategy. It speaks to the absence of one. What we are seeing is nothing more than a large-scale punitive operation — or, in other words, an exercise in collective punishment.
In a 1864 letter to representatives of the city of Atlanta, Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman famously observed: “War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it.” War is indeed always inherently defined by violence, death, and destruction. But modern professional militaries are capable of more measured, more careful, yet still effective operations against urban enclaves. This was most famously demonstrated by the U.S. military and its Iraqi and coalition partners during the retaking of Mosul from the self-proclaimed Islamic State, which was defeated soundly. Such modern approaches do not drain out war’s cruel essence (nothing can) but they can make a difference in the scale and severity of suffering experienced by non-combatants.
That is not the path that Israel chose. A Washington Post investigation dove into the grisly reality:
Israel has carried out its war in Gaza at a pace and level of devastation that likely exceeds any recent conflict, destroying more buildings, in far less time, than were destroyed during the Syrian regime’s battle for Aleppo from 2013 to 2016 and the U.S.-led campaign to defeat the Islamic State in Mosul, Iraq, and Raqqa, Syria, in 2017.
This has come at a predictable human cost. An estimated 20,000 Gazans have died since the conflict began. Among the dead are roughly 5,000 children. And tens of thousands more have been wounded while over 80 percent of Gazans have been displaced.
The unprecedented scale of the damage to buildings and the high non-combatant death toll would seem to verify the reporting of an Israeli publication, +972 Magazine. At the end of November, the magazine published an investigation by Yuval Abraham into the Israeli military’s targeting practices in Gaza. Abraham found that restrictions on targeting had been relaxed to permit strikes on a wider range of structures, even when Israeli forces knew in advance that non-combatant casualties would be high. One passage is worth quoting in full:
[T]he Israeli army has files on the vast majority of potential targets in Gaza — including homes — which stipulate the number of civilians who are likely to be killed in an attack on a particular target. This number is calculated and known in advance to the army’s intelligence units, who also know shortly before carrying out an attack roughly how many civilians are certain to be killed.
In one case discussed by the sources, the Israeli military command knowingly approved the killing of hundreds of Palestinian civilians in an attempt to assassinate a single top Hamas military commander. “The numbers increased from dozens of civilian deaths [permitted] as collateral damage as part of an attack on a senior official in previous operations, to hundreds of civilian deaths as collateral damage,” said one source.
Israel has not only considered and accepted this high rate of non-combatant deaths privately. It has also defended it publicly. A spokesman for the Israel Defense Forces described their killing of two Palestinian civilians for each single militant as “tremendously positive.” The real ratio may not be 2:1. One analysis argues it is as high as 10:1. Whatever the actual figure is, Israeli tactics and operational design guarantee high non-combatant casualties. The Israel Defense Forces know this, as does Israel’s government. This is being done knowingly, conspicuously, and unapologetically.
As if all of this wasn’t bad enough, Netanyahu has been needling his Western partners to pressure Egypt to accept Gazans into the Sinai. This is concerning for many reasons, not least because some of Netanyahu’s right-wing partners have been agitating for Gaza to depopulated of Palestinians. This idea — nothing less than ethnic cleansing — was even explored in an internal Israeli government paper.
In sum, Israel is unable to succeed even by its own metrics and is uninterested in exploring any realistic political outcome for Gaza, all while its military actions are delivering nothing useful toward a better and safer reality for Israelis or Palestinians. The only results of the operation even worth speaking of today are its immense destruction and grotesque disregard for the survival of non-combatants, to include women, children, the elderly, and the infirm. The long-term political, strategic, and moral costs of killing large numbers of civilians far outweigh the time-limited tactical benefits of continuing to wipe out Hamas terrorists.
As analysts like Audrey Kurth Cronin have explained, there was room for a more productive and less heinous campaign to defeat (not eliminate) Hamas from the outset. A successful campaign would have been aimed at the group’s main sources of political power. It would have considered Hamas’ well-known strategy of provoking a disproportionate military response and its use of human shields. But for a variety of reasons — some of them related to the rage and shame after Hamas’ hideous pogrom, and surely others to the ideology and cynicism of Netanyahu and his allies — such options were tabled. Israel accepted a fight on the political and strategic terms dictated by Hamas. Well-meaning American analysts continue to make arguments about how Israel can wage a more effective military campaign, but it is simply too late.
It would be difficult to overstate to the extent that Israel has cocked this up. As Garrett M. Graff wrote, “After 9/11, the U.S. got almost everything wrong.” So too has Israel after Oct. 7.
The Burden of Leadership
Many people know the line from Sherman’s letter that I quoted above. Fewer know the words that follow: “those who brought war into our Country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out.” Hamas — in all its raw depravity and sadism — deserves our curses and maledictions. And Netanyahu has been tested in this world-historical moment and been found unprepared, unfit, and unworthy.
What of Biden? First, it is worth crediting the Biden administration for one thing: Its diplomacy and deterrent signals have (mostly) kept the war from spilling over into the countries surrounding Israel and the Palestinian Territories.
Aside from that, however, U.S. policy has been a failure. After Biden offered unqualified support to Israel in the aftermath of its darkest days, the Israeli government has rebuffed Washington’s calls to protect non-combatant life and to commit to a plausible political program for postwar Gaza. Practically unfettered American diplomatic and military support to Israel has only allowed Netanyahu to lodge his country into a dead end. The way in which the Israeli prime minister is conducting this war seems to be driven by his own political weaknesses rather than Israel’s actual needs.
The damage to American interests has already been profound, even setting aside the reputational costs of running interference for war crimes in one place while opposing them elsewhere. Vital shipping lanes and U.S. military outposts are under assault from Iranian-backed militants. The war in Gaza has also been a material and political diversion from two far more important theaters: Ukraine, where the outcome of the war remains on a knife’s edge, and the Indo-Pacific, where the United States and its treaty allies have struggled to assemble the diplomatic, economic, and military efforts required to contain the rise of the People’s Republic of China. And the threat of Islamist terrorism in the West is at its highest in many years.
We cannot know if Biden sees the problem clearly. As president, he has often stubbornly resisted changing course even when sailing into the shoals. While Biden is becoming more public in his criticisms of Israel on civilian casualties and other matters, Netanyahu can ignore him in the absence of a credible and clearly communicated threat to cut off and withhold American support. And so that is what the president ought to do: communicate that military and intelligence support will be cut off within a short period of time absent a ceasefire; substantial, observable, and enduring changes to Israeli operations and targeting practices if hostilities resume after a ceasefire; a public declaration committing Israel to allowing all Gazans to return to their communities (or whatever is left of them), forswearing the mass relocation being suggested by the Israeli right; a promise that Israel will contribute to reconstruction costs; and a commitment to a political process to establish a new, non-Israeli, and non-Hamas political authority to govern Gaza.
The threat (and yes, that’s what it is) I propose must be communicated and enforced on a tight timeline to be successful because Netanyahu will always run out the clock when given room to do so. To be sure, there could be negative consequences for Israel if the White House were to deliver this threat during ongoing ceasefire and hostage-release negotiations, but too many people are being killed in Gaza to justify waiting longer. To allow Israel to continue this high-intensity phase of the operation until the end of January, as Netanyahu reportedly plans, ought to be unacceptable to Biden.
It is possible to hold the following views and translate them into a policy that is internally consistent. First, the attacks of Oct. 7 were heinous and cannot be set outside of the context in which Israel’s military campaign is unfolding. Second, while there was a great deal of international sympathy and support for Israel after Hamas’ grisly onslaught, we also witnessed an appalling level of antisemitism, including in some elite Western institutions. These hateful voices denied and devalued the suffering of Israelis and Jews. Third, the high civilian toll of the Israeli operation is also heinous and is baked into its operational concept and targeting practices. Despite the insistence of Israel’s leaders and most devoted advocates, Israel is not adhering to the laws of war: a choice, not a necessity. And finally, the United States ought not to be supporting this operation any further, at least not in anything like its current form.
The peoples of Israel and Palestine are held hostage by poor, extreme, and self-interested leadership, leading them eagerly into death’s embrace. The result is predictable. As former U.K. Defence Secretary Ben Wallace wrote, Netanyahu’s methods will “fuel the conflict for another 50 years.” The Israeli prime minister is unrepentant. On Christmas Eve, he said, “We are intensifying the war in the Gaza Strip.”
Washington can and should be empathetic and sympathetic with how Israel arrived at this moment, but it ought not continue to sustain one of the greatest human disasters of the 21st century. This calamity is not in America’s interests, nor does it even serve the interests of the Israeli people. And it only guarantees misery, starvation, and death for the people of the Gaza Strip.
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Ryan Evans is the founder of War on the Rocks.
Commentary
warontherocks.com · by Ryan Evans · December 27, 2023
17. Reasons for hope in Ukraine
Excerpts:
Obviously, Putin wouldn’t mind a deal with the West whereby he retains the territories he’s seized and remains unpunished, while Ukraine agrees to a ceasefire that enables him to lick his wounds, rearm and prepare to launch another attack. Some Western analysts and policymakers would like Ukraine to agree. That’ll never happen, because Ukrainians aren’t in the mood for suicide — and if they have to die, they would prefer to go down fighting.
Putin knows all this, of course, which means that his olive branches aren’t signs of a sudden desire for peace on his part. Rather, they demonstrate his realization that the most he can hope to attain is a few square kilometers here and there, but no more. Meanwhile, he’ll get reelected president in March and there’ll be absolutely no one else to blame for the steadily deteriorating conditions of life in Russia and the massive numbers of Russian dead and walking dead.
Putin, in a word, is in trouble, and he knows it. One had only to view his uneven performance during the marathon press conference to see that he’s lost his way.
Ironically, it’s Putin, and not the West, who should be depressed. If Ukraine can maintain the status quo, it will have won, though more modestly than it would have hoped. If Russia cannot alter the status quo significantly, it will have lost, far more significantly than it could have expected. And the seemingly cocksure Putin doubtless knows that.
Reasons for hope in Ukraine
BY ALEXANDER J. MOTYL, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR - 12/26/23 12:00 PM ET
https://thehill.com/opinion/international/4376665-hope-for-ukraine/
Children, wearing traditional Ukrainian clothes, take part in Christmas celebrations in the village of Pyrogove, near Kyiv on December 25, 2023, amid Russian invasion in Ukraine. (Photo by Sergei SUPINSKY / AFP)
Why the glum faces? Why are policymakers and analysts suddenly persuaded that Ukraine is on the brink of losing its war with Russia and falling victim to its predations?
After all, little has changed on the frontline since the summer, when optimism reigned. But now the talk is all of stalemate, deadlock and stalled offensives.
Why should stalemate suddenly connote defeat? The indisputable fact is that Ukraine, which was expected to fold in a few weeks, is not only alive, but it’s also managed to push Russia from half the territory it seized in the first few weeks of the war. While these gains may fall short of our hopes and expectations, they are not sufficient to produce the palpable despondence spreading throughout the West.
To be sure, the Ukrainians’ much heralded offensive failed to produce a breakthrough. As a result, the Kremlin has adopted a cocky tone and reportedly has developed plans for seizing all of Ukraine by 2026. And yes, the U.S. Congress is dithering about more aid for Ukraine.
But the absence of a breakthrough does not spell disaster, all the more so as Ukraine has for several months effectively pursued the defensive strategy that Western policymakers are only now suggesting it adopt. Russia was even more insufferably arrogant before it invaded in early 2022, so the Kremlin’s mood is ultimately meaningless as a barometer of capacity. And, finally, does anyone seriously believe the U.S. won’t reach some accommodation over borders and Ukraine aid? It may be late and Ukrainians will unnecessarily die, but it will come.
What, then, has tipped the Western mood from optimism to pessimism, even as, objectively, there are few grounds for such a shift? One reason is that our expectations and hopes were unrealistically exalted. We wanted the Russians to be smashed, but we ignored two simple facts: Russia had built extensive defensive networks that would not be easy to breach in any circumstances and the West had failed to provide Ukraine with the weapons needed to do so.
Instead, we assumed that, just as the Ukrainians had fairly easily driven the Russians from Kyiv, Chernihiv, Sumy, Kharkiv and Kherson provinces, so, too, they would work their magic again along the entire front. Even a non-military expert could have concluded that those kinds of miracles don’t happen. Now the dominant view is that the war may last for two or more years, a prospect that unnerves the West as much as it does Ukraine.
Another reason for the change in mood is what appears to be Donald Trump’s irresistible march toward a second term. It’s bad enough that he may in the process destroy American democracy, but there’s also the possibility that he may set out to destroy NATO, empower Russia and thereby, wittingly or unwittingly, strangle Ukraine. The good news is that none of these alarmist scenarios will happen overnight. Which means that American democracy, like Ukraine, has until mid-2025 to deal with Trump’s challenge. Of course, given his unpredictability, it’s also possible that Trump will arm Ukraine to the teeth and push it to invade Russia.
Meanwhile, as all these mood swings are taking place, Ukraine is actually in the advantageous position of defending its territory and not advancing. Its casualties will decline, while those of Russia will increase. As of today, Ukrainian forces are killing about 1,000 Russians daily. If they can sustain that kill rate — and there is no reason why they cannot, especially if Western aid is forthcoming and Ukraine abjures risky offensive strategies — it would translate into 365,000 Russian deaths annually. That goal may be unrealistic, but 150,000 annually is not, as it roughly corresponds to Ukraine’s kill rate over the last two years.
It was in just this spirit that the Estonian Ministry of Defence recently concluded that “The objective therefore should be to inflict a sustained rate of attrition of at least 50,000 killed and severely wounded Russian troops per six months to consistently degrade the quality of Russian force,” thereby “increasing the risk of domestic strife for the Russian regime.”
The last point about domestic strife is central. Russian President Vladimir Putin is reported to be willing to sacrifice 100,000 soldiers over the next two years. Ukraine can easily accommodate him, but the question is: Can the Russians? Do they really want the number of killed and maimed fathers, sons and brothers to approach a million? Do businesspeople want their work force to be so seriously depleted? Do generals want to see their armed forces reduced by half?
Independent Russian and Western analysts point to rumblings of discontent among mothers and wives of soldiers; to fissures within the elites, with some supporting Putin and others fearing he’s leading the country to disaster; to a weakening economy in which military-related sectors are booming while consumer goods sectors are in decline and the price of eggs is going through the roof.
It’s in this light that Putin’s recent overtures to the West need to be seen. He told a reporter that Russia would never attack a NATO country; at his press conference on Dec. 14 he seemed to suggest he wanted to improve relations with America. It’s important to note that, while seemingly offering olive branches, Putin has only reinforced his genocidal plans for Ukraine. What, then, is going on?
Obviously, Putin wouldn’t mind a deal with the West whereby he retains the territories he’s seized and remains unpunished, while Ukraine agrees to a ceasefire that enables him to lick his wounds, rearm and prepare to launch another attack. Some Western analysts and policymakers would like Ukraine to agree. That’ll never happen, because Ukrainians aren’t in the mood for suicide — and if they have to die, they would prefer to go down fighting.
Putin knows all this, of course, which means that his olive branches aren’t signs of a sudden desire for peace on his part. Rather, they demonstrate his realization that the most he can hope to attain is a few square kilometers here and there, but no more. Meanwhile, he’ll get reelected president in March and there’ll be absolutely no one else to blame for the steadily deteriorating conditions of life in Russia and the massive numbers of Russian dead and walking dead.
Putin, in a word, is in trouble, and he knows it. One had only to view his uneven performance during the marathon press conference to see that he’s lost his way.
Ironically, it’s Putin, and not the West, who should be depressed. If Ukraine can maintain the status quo, it will have won, though more modestly than it would have hoped. If Russia cannot alter the status quo significantly, it will have lost, far more significantly than it could have expected. And the seemingly cocksure Putin doubtless knows that.
Alexander J. Motyl is a professor of political science at Rutgers University-Newark. A specialist on Ukraine, Russia and the USSR, and on nationalism, revolutions, empires and theory, he is the author of 10 books of nonfiction, as well as “Imperial Ends: The Decay, Collapse, and Revival of Empires” and “Why Empires Reemerge: Imperial Collapse and Imperial Revival in Comparative Perspective.”
18. A Russian officer surrendered and sold out his comrades, helping Ukraine's special forces cross a key river
A Russian officer surrendered and sold out his comrades, helping Ukraine's special forces cross a key river
Business Insider · by Paul Squire
Military & Defense
Paul Squire
2023-12-26T16:05:58Z
A Ukrainian special-forces soldier walking in the water at night along the Dnipro River.
AP
- A Russian officer helped Ukrainian special forces secure a key river this fall, the AP reported.
- The report said the officer and 11 other troops surrendered along the Dnipro River.
- The intel they gave helped Ukraine establish a bridgehead on an island, according to the AP.
A Russian officer who said he opposed the invasion of Ukraine surrendered and provided intel that helped Ukrainian special forces secure part of a key river this fall, the Associated Press reported.
Amphibious troops with Ukraine's elite Center 73 special-forces unit had been trying for months to take Russian positions along the Dnipro River, the AP reported.
This story is available exclusively to Business Insider subscribers. Become an Insider and start reading now.But after Russian forces blew up a dam upstream and flooded villages and towns in June, Ukrainian forces were forced to pull back. By the time the waters receded in July, Russian troops were able to retake their side of the river, according to the AP.
The AP report said that one unit of Center 73 was tasked with retaking an island near the village of Krynky but that the Kremlin's forces drove them off under a hail of gunfire and Iskander missiles.
Not long after that, a Russian officer who said he opposed the war was transferred to the front lines, the report said. The officer approached Ukrainian intelligence and offered to surrender along with 11 other troops he said were also disillusioned with Russian President Vladimir Putin's invasion, the outlet reported.
The Russian troops surrendered to Ukrainian special forces and fed them information about the remaining Russian forces, the AP reported.
That helped the special forces stage a breach in the Russian position and establish control of an occupied village across the river, the report said. Ukraine still holds the area.
The foothold is a small breakthrough in a war that has become a grinding, bloody stalemate between Ukrainian defenders and Russia's invasion forces. Beyond the bridgeheads, the Dnipro remains a formidable natural barrier between Ukraine and Russian-occupied territory.
Business Insider · by Paul Squire
19. How Ukrainian special forces secured a critical Dnipro River crossing in southern Ukraine
How Ukrainian special forces secured a critical Dnipro River crossing in southern Ukraine
Ukrainian special forces officers spent six months on their mission to establish a bridgehead across the Dnipro River in southern Ukraine after an explosion destroyed the dam upstream
ByMSTYSLAV CHERNOV Associated Press and LORI HINNANT Associated Press
December 26, 2023, 12:21 AM
ABCNews.com · by ABC News
KHERSON, Ukraine -- Their first battle plan was outdated the moment the dam crumbled. So the Ukrainian special forces officers spent six months adapting their fight to secure a crossing to the other side of the Dnipro River in southern Ukraine.
But it wasn’t enough just to cross the river. They needed backup to hold it. And for that, they needed proof that it could be done. For one of the officers, nicknamed Skif, that meant a flag — and a photo op.
Skif, Ukrainian shorthand for the nomadic Scythian people who founded an empire on what is now Crimea, moves like the camouflaged amphibian that he is: Calculating, deliberate, until the time to strike.
He is an officer in Center 73, one of Ukraine’s most elite units of special forces — frontline scouts, drone operators, underwater saboteurs. Their strike teams are part of the Special Operations Forces that run the partisans in occupied territories, sneak into Russian barracks to plant bombs and prepare the ground for reclaiming territory seized by Russia.
Their mission on the more dynamic of the two main fronts in the six-month counteroffensive reflects many of the problems of Ukraine’s broader effort. It’s been one of the few counteroffensive successes for the Ukrainian army.
By late May, the Center 73 men were in place along the river’s edge, some of them almost within view of the Kakhovka Dam. They were within range of the Russian forces who had controlled the dam and land across the Dnipro since the first days after the February 2022 full-scale invasion. And both sides knew Ukraine’s looming counteroffensive had its sights on control of the river as the key to reclaim the occupied south.
In the operation’s opening days, on June 6, an explosion destroyed the dam, sending a wall of reservoir water downstream, killing untold numbers of civilians, and washing out the Ukrainian army positions.
“We were ready to cross. And then the dam blew up,” Skif said. The water rose 20 meters (yards), submerging supply lines, the Russian positions and everything else in its path for hundreds of kilometers. The race was on: Whose forces could seize the islands when the waters receded, and with them full control of the Dnipro?
For most Ukrainians who see them on the streets in the nearly deserted frontline villages of the Kherson region, they are the guys in T-shirts and flip-flops — just regular people. The locals who refused to evacuate have all become accustomed to the sounds of war, so even their unnerving calm in the face of air raid alarms, nearby gunfire and artillery doesn’t seem unusual.
AP joined one of the clandestine units several times over six months along the Dnipro. The frogmen are nocturnal. They transform themselves from nondescript civilians into elite fighters, some in wetsuits and some in boats. In the morning, when their operations end, they’re back to anonymity.
They rarely take credit for their work and Ukrainians rarely learn about their operations. But Russian military statements gleefully and erroneously announcing the destruction of Center 73 are an indication of their effectiveness.
The men had the most modern equipment, night-vision goggles, waterproof rifles that can be assembled in a matter of seconds, underwater breathing apparatus that produces no surface bubbles, and cloaks that hide their heat signature during nighttime raids.
It was a matter of days before the start of the counteroffensive, and Center 73 had already located the Russian positions they would seize on the Dnipro River islands. Skif’s men were within earshot of the June 6 explosion that destroyed the Kakhovka Dam, flooded vast stretches of the Kherson region, and upended Skif’s attack plan.
An AP investigation found Russian forces had the means, motive and opportunity to blow up the dam.
Both the Russians and Ukrainians retreated from the river to regroup — Russians to the south and Ukrainians to the north.
Abandoned homes, clubs, shops became headquarters, with banks of computer screens filling the rooms and improvised weapons workshops nearby. Always secretive, frequently changing locations, they meticulously plan every operation, they sleep only a few hours during the day with curtains closed.
They wake around sunset, load gear into a 4X4 and drive to a different point on the riverbank to scout new routes for a counteroffensive, provoke Russian forces into shooting at them to pinpoint the enemy’s location, retrieve soggy caches of supplies with their boat. Periodically, they captured a Russian soldier stuck in a tree or found a clutch of landmines washed up on shore.
And they themselves were stuck. Other special forces took part in battles in eastern Ukraine, the other main front in the counteroffensive. Skif's men waited patiently for the water to subside so they could seize positions and lay the groundwork for the arrival of infantry and marines in the Kherson region.
Skif, a veteran of the 2022 battle for Mariupol who had survived 266 days as a prisoner of war, wanted to fight. He had been part of Center 73 before Mariupol and rejoined after he was freed in a POW exchange.
Ukraine created its special forces in response to Russia’s lightning-fast annexation of Crimea and invasion of Donbas in 2014, a precursor to the wide-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
“We realized that we were much smaller in terms of number than our enemy,” said Oleksandr Kindratenko, a press officer for Special Operations Forces. “The emphasis was placed on quality. These were supposed to be small groups performing operational or strategic tasks.”
He said they were trained and equipped in part by Europeans, including those from NATO countries, but their own recent battle experience means they are now as much teachers as students.
Tasks that the unit considers routine — scouting as close to Russians as possible, planting explosives under their noses, underwater operations — most soldiers would consider high-risk. High-risk missions are practically a death wish.
Skif knew he first had to plan and persuade the generals that if his men could secure a bridgehead — a strategic crossing point — it would be worthwhile to send troops. And that would mean high-risk river missions.
“My phone book is a little graveyard,” he said. “A lot of good, decent people are dead. They were killed on the battlefield. One burned to death in an armored truck. One was shot by howitzers. Somebody stepped on a landmine. Everyone died differently, and there are so many of them.”
The water retreated in July. The Russians and Ukrainians advanced again toward the river from opposite directions, the Russians from the south and Ukrainians from the north.
Groups of Center 73 scouted and advanced along the river. The mission for Skif’s unit was to reclaim an island near the dam, now a web of cracked mud and dead trees. Their network of spies in the Kherson region, as well as drones and satellite images, told them where Russian forces had re-positioned.
They disembarked the boats and moved in, walking through the bare branches of the forest through swarms of mosquitoes so loud their bodycam picked up the sound. One of the men tripped a wire connected to a grenade and flung himself as far as he could away from the Russian explosive.
Just as the shrapnel pierced his back, mayhem broke out. The injured Ukrainian crawled toward the unit’s waiting boat 3 kilometers (2 miles) away, as the Russian troops who set the boobytrap rained gunfire on them. Skif’s men made it to the boat, which sprang a leak, and retreated back to their side of the Dnipro. Russians established their position on the island, and it took weeks more for the Ukrainians to expel them.
Then new orders came. Go upstream and breach Russian defenses beneath a destroyed railway bridge.
The men had an often-underestimated advantage over their Russian enemy: Many Ukrainians grow up bilingual and understand Russian communications intercepted in real time, while Russian soldiers need a translator for Ukrainian.
So when Skif’s unit started picking up Russian radio communications by the railway bridge, they immediately grasped how many men they were up against and the kind of munitions they would face. They made the crossing, avoided the Russians, and waited for backup,
That’s when their advantage evaporated. In a single battle, the Russians sent Iskander missiles and dozens of drones, dropping hundreds of grenades.
“In the air, they had absolute dominance compared to us and they held the ground,” he said.
The backup was nowhere near enough. Ukrainian forces retreated under heavy fire. More men out of commission and another difficult task ahead.
A lucky thing happened soon after that battle. A Russian officer who claimed he’d been opposed to the war since its beginning was sent to the front in Kherson. It was, he later said, every bit as bad as he’d feared.
He made contact with Ukrainian intelligence and said he had 11 comrades who felt similarly. The group surrendered to Skif and his men.
The Russians told Skif exactly what he needed to know about their unit on the island they were now tasked with taking, just outside the village of Krynky.
He was sure he could take the island and more with 20 experienced men. But not without the promise of sufficient backup so Ukrainian regular forces could hold the territory. Fine, his commander said. He’d get the backup — if he returned with footage of his unit in the village hoisting the Ukrainian flag.
And that’s how, in mid-October, a Ukrainian drone carrying the national blue and yellow flag came to fly above Krynky at just the moment Skif and his men made their way to the occupied village across the river. They got their photo op to prove the road was cleared, sent it to the military headquarters, and established the bridgehead.
Multiple Ukrainian brigades were sent to hold the position and have been there ever since.
But nighttime temperatures are dipping well below freezing, and Ukrainian forces are vastly underequipped compared to the Russians nearby. Holding and advancing in winter is much harder on soldiers’ bodies and their morale.
In recent weeks, Russia has sent waves of glide bombs — essentially enormous munitions retrofitted with gliding apparatus to allow them to be launched from dozens of kilometers (miles) away, as well as swarms of grenade-launching drones and Chinese all-terrain vehicles, according to the Institute for the Study of War and the Hudson Institute, two American think-tanks analyzing open-source footage from the area.
In a news conference earlier this month, Russian President Vladimir Putin addressed the battle and acknowledged Russian forces had pulled back “several meters.” But he insisted Ukrainian forces were battling pointlessly and losing far more than they gained.
“I don’t even know why they’re doing this,” Putin said.
Despite having never fully controlled the territory during the six-month counteroffensive, Russia claims it as its own.
And Ukrainian forces and Center 73 keep fighting into the new year.
“This is our work,” Skif said. “No one knows about it, no one talks about it, and we do it with little reward except to benefit our country.”
___
Hinnant reported from Paris. Associated Press journalists Alex Babenko, Yehor Konovalov and Felipe Dana in Kherson, Ukraine; Samya Kullab and Illia Novikov in Kyiv, Ukraine, contributed to this report.
ABCNews.com · by ABC News
20. How the US can push back against authoritarianism in China and beyond
How the US can push back against authoritarianism in China and beyond
by Elaine Dezenski & Nate Sibley December 26, 2023 10:15 AM
Washington Examiner · December 26, 2023
Government officials and anti-corruption activists from more than 180 countries met this month in Atlanta for the 10th annual conference on the U.N. Convention Against Corruption. With the world’s anti-corruption attention focused on the U.S., America must demonstrate anti-corruption leadership to counter the rise in authoritarianism, especially in China.
Much of the U.N.’s anti-corruption framework emanated from America’s leadership and a clear objective to globalize efforts to end foreign bribery. But much of the geopolitical conversation on corruption, transparency, integrity, and good governance has been ceded to kleptocratic and authoritarian regimes that seek to gaslight the world into disregarding their own egregious corruption.
TWELVE DAYS OF WEX-MAS: IMPEACHMENT INQUIRY BECOMES 2024 LIGHTNING ROD
Unfortunately, U.N. meetings can be leveraged to amplify their propaganda. As a prime example, officials from Russia, the archetypal kleptocracy, organized a side event at the U.N. anti-corruption conference titled “Together Against Corruption!” China, meanwhile, hosted its own presentation on how its notoriously corrupt Belt and Road Initiative has boosted “good practices” and commitments to “upholding integrity” among 140 partner countries. That’s a rather tricky narrative to back up when a steady stream of Belt and Road Initiative projects happens to be linked to specific instances of corruption and undue influence. Put bluntly, it’s complete nonsense.
Beyond the endemic corruption of the Belt and Road Initiative, Beijing has engaged in its own pernicious forms of gaslighting, boldly redefining sacred terms such as human rights and democracy for the benefit of a narrative that supports China’s dominance in global affairs and a new global order.
In the face of Chinese efforts to claim the mantle of global governance leadership, the U.S. needs to demonstrate that its own approach can deliver tangible prosperity gains for populations wary of Western promises about democracy. Now U.S. officials have an unexpected ace up their sleeve — if they know how to use it.
The bipartisan Foreign Extortion Prevention Act, which Congress has just passed as part of the National Defense Authorization Act, promises to become the most globally consequential U.S. anti-corruption legislation since the landmark Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977. It would effectively criminalize the solicitation of bribes by foreign officials worldwide under U.S. law, addressing a long-standing criticism that the FCPA unfairly burdens U.S. firms without holding those who demand illicit payments from them accountable.
The primary purpose of FEPA is to protect American businesses from predatory foreign officials, especially in Belt and Road Initiative partner countries where crooked leaders often collude with Chinese state-owned companies to cut out competition in return for kickbacks. Under the law, foreign officials who receive or demand a bribe from a U.S.-listed company would be subject to American criminal prosecution — creating a powerful incentive for foreign officials to engage in fair and open business practices. That is why FEPA has been backed by a broad coalition including not only governance and national security experts but also pro-business groups such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
While the threat of prosecution on its own will likely improve business conditions and reduce private sector risk, FEPA could also be leveraged by the U.S. government to supplement the law enforcement capacities in allied countries with a weak rule of law or insufficient prosecutorial resources or those whose judicial system is compromised by the very corruption that honest leaders are seeking to root out.
In a sense, FEPA could act as a surrogate criminal enforcement mechanism that leverages America’s substantial expertise and capacity for prosecuting corruption. Utilizing FEPA in this way could also be a critical tool to push back against China and other autocratic regimes that have weaponized corruption to entrench favorable political regimes via political and financial assistance, including through the Belt and Road Initiative.
In Malaysia, Chinese officials used Belt and Road Initiative funding to help former Prime Minister Najib Razak embezzle more than a billion dollars, while simultaneously offering to tap the phones of Wall Street Journal reporters who were investigating the scandal. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Chinese bribes and empty promises of infrastructure that was never built helped prop up a dictatorship in exchange for Beijing being given a green light to extract massive amounts of valuable critical minerals such as cobalt and copper.
To counter the corrupting influence of China and other authoritarian regimes, America must assist those honest officials who are fighting corruption domestically without resources to prosecute cases or the political capital to dislodge the influence purchased by Beijing, Moscow, Tehran, and other regimes that seek to undermine the rule of law.
The Foreign Extortion Prevention Act could be a critical tool in that fight if only America is brave enough to use it effectively — and promote a fact-based counternarrative that calls out the malign behaviors of regimes that employ corruption as a state weapon.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Elaine Dezenski is senior director and head of the Center on Economic and Financial Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Nate Sibley is a research fellow for Hudson Institute’s Kleptocracy Initiative.
Washington Examiner · December 26, 2023
21. America is only as secure as its least-secure drone
Excerpts:
U.S. policymakers must also go on offense to take steps to bolster the domestic drone industry to level the playing field against subsidized foreign competition. American companies can out-innovate and out-manufacture anyone, as long as it’s a fair competition.
Such support can take several forms, including manufacturing tax credits to incentivize domestic production of drones and drone components. Similar efforts, such as the CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act, have quickly jump-started U.S. solar panel and semiconductor manufacturing, spurring hundreds of billions of dollars in domestic private investments in these critical industries.
Additional measures should include federal and state grant programs to proactively provide law enforcement, first-responder, and other drone users funds to replace their Chinese-made drones with secure technology, similar to the “rip and replace” effort to remove Huawei technology from U.S. networks.
The CCP has spent years working to dominate the global drone market and make the U.S. and our allies reliant on its products. This has had the two-fold effect of giving Beijing open-door access to our most sensitive sites and infrastructure, while hampering the development of domestic drone industries. Passage of the American Security Drone Act is a major step forward in countering these effects, even if much more must still be done.
America is only as secure as its least-secure drone
BY MARK MONTGOMERY, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR - 12/26/23 11:00 AM ET
https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/4368093-america-is-only-as-secure-as-its-least-secure-drone/
Recent reports of China’s People’s Liberation Army hackers infiltrating into the networks and systems of dozens of critical U.S. infrastructure facilities — power plants, transportation systems, and water utilities — in preparation for future attacks or disruptions, should raise alarm in Washington.
But China’s preparations extend well beyond cyber malicious activity. For years, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has maintained “eyes in the sky” above America’s critical national infrastructure in the form of commercial drones, which are persistently collecting sensitive data and information that could be passed to Beijing.
This surveillance isn’t just passive data collection; it’s a strategic mapping of our critical infrastructure, potentially laying the groundwork for targeted cyberattacks or even physical sabotage that could endanger our water supply, shut our lights off, and prevent our military from mobilizing effectively.
How did we get here? We handed China the keys. Our reliance on cheap, commercially-available drones, manufactured by Chinese companies which are obligated by law to assist in CCP-sponsored state espionage activities, has left U.S. industry and state and local governments beholden to an authoritarian state with a clear agenda to infiltrate, exploit, and dominate. These drones, used by inspectors, regulators, law enforcement, and even federal agencies, represent a major security threat.
China’s dominance in the drone market isn’t accidental. Unfair practices like state subsidies and market dumping have given Chinese drone companies control of 70 percent of the global market. They flooded the market, undercutting American and European manufacturers and infiltrating both public and private sectors. But the CCP’s drones come with a high price tag in terms of vulnerability.
This isn’t just negligence; it’s self-inflicted harm that will take decades to remedy. But thankfully, Congress has begun to wake up to the threat.
The American Security Drone Act (ASDA), included within this year’s National Defense Authorization Act, is a crucial step toward securing our skies and data. It prohibits the purchase and use of risky CCP drones by federal agencies, severing a direct pipeline of sensitive information to Beijing. The ASDA builds upon the 2020 NDAA, which banned the Department of Defense from using these drones. Now, the policy extends to the rest of the federal government.
It wasn’t easy. For years, national security advocates faced well-funded lobbying campaigns against ASDA by DJI, the leading global drone manufacturer (and a company on a Pentagon blacklist for alleged ties with the Chinese military). DJI fought hard again this year, launching the pressure group Drone Advocacy Alliance to do its bidding. Fortunately, they were unsuccessful.
This win comes at a critical time. Coinciding with China’s escalating aggression in the South China Sea and increasing malicious cyberactivity, ASDA’s passage serves as a powerful testament to the commitment of U.S. lawmakers to prioritize national security. The same playbook must be studied as the U.S. seeks to reduce its dependence on China for other critical resources and technologies, from rare earths to EV batteries.
With the federal government now aligned on the threat posed by Chinese-made drones, it is incumbent on every state to adopt similar country-of-origin restrictions. It doesn’t matter whether it is a federal agency or state official using insecure drones to monitor power transmission lines or other critical infrastructure. China will still be able to access the same data and use it to its advantage. America is only secure as its least-secure drone.
State and local law enforcement drones of Chinese origin patrolling the skies above military facilities and naval bases pose an ongoing significant intelligence risk to U.S. military forces.
A growing number of states already have such restrictions in place, with many more expected to take up similar legislation in forthcoming legislative sessions. To be effective and minimize disruption, these policies must include transition periods and financial support for state and local agencies to procure trustworthy drones from U.S. and allied manufacturers.
U.S. policymakers must also go on offense to take steps to bolster the domestic drone industry to level the playing field against subsidized foreign competition. American companies can out-innovate and out-manufacture anyone, as long as it’s a fair competition.
Such support can take several forms, including manufacturing tax credits to incentivize domestic production of drones and drone components. Similar efforts, such as the CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act, have quickly jump-started U.S. solar panel and semiconductor manufacturing, spurring hundreds of billions of dollars in domestic private investments in these critical industries.
Additional measures should include federal and state grant programs to proactively provide law enforcement, first-responder, and other drone users funds to replace their Chinese-made drones with secure technology, similar to the “rip and replace” effort to remove Huawei technology from U.S. networks.
The CCP has spent years working to dominate the global drone market and make the U.S. and our allies reliant on its products. This has had the two-fold effect of giving Beijing open-door access to our most sensitive sites and infrastructure, while hampering the development of domestic drone industries. Passage of the American Security Drone Act is a major step forward in countering these effects, even if much more must still be done.
Mark Montgomery is a retired U.S. Navy Rear Admiral and Senior Director of the Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
22. The U.N. Piles On Israel
- OPINION
- LETTERS
The U.N. Piles On Israel
Wild allegations increase pressure on Israel to leave Hamas in power and set precedents that will hurt America’s ability to fight terrorists.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/un-united-nations-anti-israel-bias-hamas-war-3aadbd4a
Dec. 26, 2023 1:40 pm ET
Members of the United Nations Security Council vote in New York on resolutions regarding the Israel-Hamas conflict, Dec. 22. PHOTO: SARAH YENESEL/SHUTTERSTOCK
Regarding your editorial “Hamas’s Friends at the United Nations” (Dec. 20): The current conflict has demonstrated how dangerous it is that utterly biased officials can use the imprimatur of the U.N. to make wholly false accusations against Israel. Three officials in particular—Navi Pillay and Miloon Kothari on the Israel-Palestine Commission of Inquiry and Francesca Albanese as the special rapporteur for Palestine—are guilty of absurdly restrictive mischaracterizations of Israel’s right of self-defense, exculpation of terrorist attacks and false and inflammatory allegations of Israeli war crimes. These combine to increase international pressure on Israel to leave Hamas in power, and they set precedents that will hinder America’s future ability to defend itself against terrorists.
The blatant bias of these three U.N. officials, both prior to their appointments and in their subsequent performance, means that their appointments were, and their service are, contrary to U.N. ethics rules. The appropriate remedy is to terminate their appointments.
Orde F. Kittrie
Senior fellow, Foundation for Defense of Democracies
23. US Foreign Policy Is a Scam Built on Corruption
Wow. This is quite an argument that I am sure will resonate with some.
I do admire how he puts together his "facts and evidence: to support his argument. (e.g., 800 hundred overseas military bases). On the other hand it is a valid critique that we have not won our wars for the last two decades (or more).
I wonder how President Eisenhower would read this if he were alive today.
US Foreign Policy Is a Scam Built on Corruption
The $1.5 trillion in military outlays each year is the scam that keeps on giving—to the military-industrial complex and the Washington insiders—even as it impoverishes and endangers America and the world.
JEFFREY D. SACHS
Dec 26, 2023
Common Dreams
16
On the surface, US foreign policy seems to be utterly irrational. The US gets into one disastrous war after another -- Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Ukraine, and Gaza. In recent days, the US stands globally isolated in its support of Israel’s genocidal actions against the Palestinians, voting against a UN General Assembly resolution for a Gaza ceasefire backed by 153 countries with 89% of the world population, and opposed by just the US and 9 small countries with less than 1% of the world population.
In the past 20 years, every major US foreign policy objective has failed. The Taliban returned to power after 20 years of US occupation of Afghanistan. Post-Saddam Iraq became dependent on Iran. Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad stayed in power despite a CIA effort to overthrow him. Libya fell into a protracted civil war after a US-led NATO mission overthrew Muammar Gaddafi. Ukraine was bludgeoned on the battlefield by Russia in 2023 after the US secretly scuttled a peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine in 2022.
To understand the foreign-policy scam, think of today’s federal government as a multi-division racket controlled by the highest bidders.
Despite these remarkable and costly debacles, one following the other, the same cast of characters has remained at the helm of US foreign policy for decades, including Joe Biden, Victoria Nuland, Jake Sullivan, Chuck Schumer, Mitch McConnell, and Hillary Clinton.
What gives?
The puzzle is solved by recognizing that American foreign policy is not at all about the interests of the American people. It is about the interests of the Washington insiders, as they chase campaign contributions and lucrative jobs for themselves, staff, and family members. In short, US foreign policy has been hacked by big money.
As a result, the American people are losing big. The failed wars since 2000 have cost them around $5 trillion in direct outlays, or around $40,000 per household. Another $2 trillion or so will be spent in the coming decades on veterans’ care. Beyond the costs directly incurred by Americans, we should also recognize the horrendously high costs suffered abroad, in millions of lives lost and trillions of dollars of destruction to property and nature in the war zones.
The costs continue to mount. US Military-linked outlays in 2024 will come to around $1.5 trillion, or roughly $12,000 per household, if we add the direct Pentagon spending, the budgets of the CIA and other intelligence agencies, the budget of the Veteran’s Administration, the Department of Energy nuclear weapons program, the State Department’s military-linked “foreign aid” (such as to Israel), and other security-related budget lines. Hundreds of billions of dollars are money down the drain, squandered in useless wars, overseas military bases, and a wholly unnecessary arms build-up that brings the world closer to WWIII.
Yet to describe these gargantuan costs is also to explain the twisted “rationality” of US foreign policy. The $1.5 trillion in military outlays is the scam that keeps on giving—to the military-industrial complex and the Washington insiders—even as it impoverishes and endangers America and the world.
To understand the foreign-policy scam, think of today’s federal government as a multi-division racket controlled by the highest bidders. The Wall Street division is run out of the Treasury. The Health Industry division is run out of the Department of Health and Human Services. The Big Oil and Coal division is run out of the Departments of Energy and Interior. And the Foreign Policy division is run out of the White House, Pentagon and CIA.
Each division uses public power for private gain through insider dealing, greased by corporate campaign contributions and lobbying outlays. Interestingly, the Health Industry division rivals the Foreign Policy division as a remarkable financial scam. America’s health outlays totaled an astounding $4.5 trillion in 2022, or roughly $36,000 per household, by far the highest health costs in the world, while America ranked roughly 40th in the world among nations in life expectancy. A failed health policy translates into very big bucks for the health industry, just as a failed foreign policy translates into mega-revenues of the military-industrial complex.
The more wars, of course, the more business.
The Foreign Policy division is run by a small, secretive and tight-knit coterie, including the top brass of the White House, the CIA, the State Department, the Pentagon, the Armed Services Committees of the House and Senate, and the major military firms including Boeing, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon. There are perhaps a thousand key individuals involved in setting policy. The public interest plays little role.
The key foreign policy makers run the operations of 800 US overseas military bases, hundreds of billions of dollars of military contracts, and the war operations where the equipment is deployed. The more wars, of course, the more business. The privatization of foreign policy has been greatly amplified by the privatization of the war business itself, as more and more “core” military functions are handed out to the arms manufacturers and to contractors such as Haliburton, Booz Allen Hamilton, and CACI.
In addition to the hundreds of billions of dollars of military contracts, there are important business spillovers from the military and CIA operations. With military bases in 80 countries around the world, and CIA operations in many more, the US plays a large, though mostly covert role, in determining who rules in those countries, and thereby on policies that shape lucrative deals involving minerals, hydrocarbons, pipelines, and farm and forest land. The US has aimed to overthrow at least 80 governments since 1947, typically led by the CIA through the instigation of coups, assassinations, insurrections, civil unrest, election tampering, economic sanctions, and overt wars. (For a superb study of US regime-change operations from 1947 to 1989, see Lindsey O’Rourke’s Covert Regime Change, 2018).
In addition to business interests, there are of course ideologues who truly believe in America’s right to rule the world. The ever-warmongering Kagan family is the most famous case, though their financial interests are also deeply intertwined with the war industry. The point about ideology is this. The ideologists have been wrong on nearly every occasion and long ago would have lost their bully pulpits in Washington but for their usefulness as warmongers. Wittingly or not, they serve as paid performers for the military-industrial complex.
There is one persistent inconvenience for this ongoing business scam. In theory, foreign policy is carried out in the interest of the American people, though the opposite is the truth. (A similar contradiction of course applies to overpriced healthcare, government bailouts of Wall Street, oil-industry perks, and other scams). The American people rarely support the machinations of US foreign policy when they occasionally hear the truth. America’s wars are not waged by popular demand but by decisions from on high. Special measures are needed to keep the people away from decision making.
In theory, foreign policy is carried out in the interest of the American people, though the opposite is the truth.
The first such measure is unrelenting propaganda. George Orwell nailed it in 1984 when “the Party” suddenly switched the foreign enemy from Eurasia to Eastasia without a word of explanation. The US essentially does the same. Who is the US gravest enemy? Take your pick, according to the season. Saddam Hussein, the Taliban, Hugo Chavez, Bashar al-Assad, ISIS, al-Qaeda, Gaddafi, Vladimir Putin, Hamas, have all played the role of “Hitler” in US propaganda. White House spokesman John Kirby delivers the propaganda with a smirk on his face, signaling that he too knows that what he is saying is ludicrous, albeit mildly entertaining.
The propaganda is amplified by the Washington think tanks that live off of donations by military contractors and occasionally foreign governments that are part of the US scam operations. Think of the Atlantic Council, CSIS, and of course the ever-popular Institute for the Study of War, brought to you by the major military contractors.
The second is to hide the costs of the foreign policy operations. In the 1960s, the US Government made the mistake of forcing the American people to bear the costs of the military-industrial complex by drafting young people to fight in Vietnam and by raising taxes to pay for the war. The public erupted in opposition.
From the 1970s onward the government has been far more clever. The government ended the draft, and made military service a job for hire rather than a public service, backed by Pentagon outlays to recruit soldiers from lower economic strata. It also abandoned the quaint idea that government outlays should be funded by taxes, and instead shifted the military budget to deficit spending which protects it from popular opposition that would be triggered if it were tax-funded.
It has also suckered client states such as Ukraine to fight America’s wars on the ground, so that no American body bags would spoil the US propaganda machine. Needless to say, US masters of war such as Sullivan, Blinken, Nuland, Schumer, and McConnell remain thousands of miles away from the frontlines. The dying is reserved for Ukrainians. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) defended American military aid to Ukraine as money well spent because it is “without a single American service woman or man injured or lost,” somehow not dawning on the good Senator to spare the lives of Ukrainians, who have died by the hundreds of thousands in a US-provoked war over NATO enlargement.
This system is underpinned by the complete subordination of the U.S. Congress to the war business, to avoid any questioning of the over-the-top Pentagon budgets and the wars instigated by the Executive Branch. The subordination of Congress works as follows. First, the Congressional oversight of war and peace is largely assigned to the House and Senate Armed Services Committees, which largely frame the overall Congressional policy (and the Pentagon budget). Second, the military industry (Boeing, Raytheon, and the rest) funds the campaigns of the Armed Services Committee members of both parties. The military industries also spend vast sums on lobbying in order to provide lucrative salaries to retiring members of Congress, their staffs, and families, either directly in military businesses or in Washington lobbying firms.
It is the urgent task of the American people to overhaul a foreign policy that is so broken, corrupted, and deceitful that it is burying the government in debt while pushing the world closer to nuclear Armageddon.
The hacking of Congressional foreign policy is not only by the US military-industrial complex. The Israel lobby long ago mastered the art of buying the Congress. America’s complicity in Israel’s apartheid state and war crimes in Gaza makes no sense for US national security and diplomacy, not to speak of human decency. They are the fruits of Israel lobby investments that reached $30 million in campaign contributions in 2022, and that will vastly top that in 2024.
When Congress reassembles in January, Biden, Kirby, Sullivan, Blinken, Nuland, Schumer, McConnell, Blumenthal and their ilk will tell us that we absolutely must fund the losing, cruel, and deceitful war in Ukraine and the ongoing massacre and ethnic cleansing in Gaza, lest we and Europe and the free world, and perhaps the solar system itself, succumb to the Russian bear, the Iranian mullahs, and the Chinese Communist Party. The purveyors of foreign policy disasters are not being irrational in this fear-mongering. They are being deceitful and extraordinarily greedy, pursuing narrow interests over those of the American people.
It is the urgent task of the American people to overhaul a foreign policy that is so broken, corrupted, and deceitful that it is burying the government in debt while pushing the world closer to nuclear Armageddon. This overhaul should start in 2024 by rejecting any more funding for the disastrous Ukraine War and Israel’s war crimes in Gaza. Peacemaking, and diplomacy, not military spending, is the path to a US foreign policy in the public interest.
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JEFFREY D. SACHS
Jeffrey D. Sachs is a University Professor and Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, where he directed The Earth Institute from 2002 until 2016. He is also President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network and a commissioner of the UN Broadband Commission for Development. He has been advisor to three United Nations Secretaries-General, and currently serves as an SDG Advocate under Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. Sachs is the author, most recently, of "A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism" (2020). Other books include: "Building the New American Economy: Smart, Fair, and Sustainable" (2017) and "The Age of Sustainable Development," (2015) with Ban Ki-moon.Full Bio >
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
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