Quotes of the Day:

"Special operations forces are clearly a remarkable advantage for us. They add value in every endeavor."

– U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III during April 30 testimony to the House Armed Services Committee.

“The human brain is a complex organ with the wonderful power of enabling man to find reasons for continuing to believe whatever it is that he wants to believe.”

– Voltaire

“A man cannot understand the art he is studying if he only looks for the end result without taking the time to delve deeply into the reasoning of the study.”

– Miyamoto Musashi

1. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, May 3, 2024

2. Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, May 3, 2024

3. United States-Japan-Australia Trilateral Defense Ministers' Meeting (TDMM) 2024 Joint Statement, May 2, 2024

4. Opinion The dangerous new call for regime change in Beijing

5. The Death of a Treaty Could Be a Lifesaver for Taiwan

6. China increases aggressive moves against Taiwan as island prepares to inaugurate new president

7. Taiwan issued dire warning about Russia-China dual threat

8. China-Taiwan Weekly Update, May 3, 2024

9. China publicizes for the first time what it claims is a 2016 agreement with Philippines

10. Mark Helprin Asks: Are Americans Ready for War?

11. Activist Groups Trained Students for Months Before Campus Protests

12. America’s War Machine Runs on Rare-Earth Magnets. China Owns That Market.

13. Special operations veterans ask Army to not cut tuition, certification benefits

14. Larry Summers Says Campus Uproar Buoys US Adversaries

15. Is Vietnam warming to Nato-style weaponry? A rugged South Korean howitzer holds clues

16. Disaffection and Despair: Behind the Military’s Recruitment Woes

17. Former national security advisor gives chilling warning about World War Three

18. With Chinese warships anchoring in Cambodia, the US needs to respond

19. the information tool – are we wielding it correctly?

20. China trying to develop world ‘built on censorship and surveillance’

21. No, College Curriculums Aren’t Too Focused on Decolonization

22. Is ‘the Media’ Really Under Attack?

1. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, May 3, 2024

https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-may-3-2024

Key Takeaways:

• Ukrainian officials continue to highlight that Russia’s main goal for 2024 remains the seizure of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts as Russian forces plan for their summer 2024 offensive operation.
• The first deliveries of resumed US military assistance reportedly arrived in Ukraine earlier this week, although it will likely take several additional weeks before Western weapons and ammunition arrive to frontline areas at scale.
• Ukrainian officials indicated that Russian forces in Ukraine have not significantly increased in size in recent months but that the Russian military continues to improve its fighting qualities overall despite suffering widespread degradation, especially among elite units since the start of the war.
• Ukrainian officials indicated that the Russian military will likely maintain its current personnel replacement rate and will not generate the significant number of available personnel needed to establish strategic-level reserves for larger-scale offensive operations in 2024.
• Pavlyuk stated that neither Russian nor Ukrainian forces will be able to achieve victory in Ukraine solely through attritional warfare – a consistent throughline that Ukrainian officials and military analysts have emphasized in recent months.
• Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu issued a notably candid assessment of recent Russian advances in Ukraine and refrained from sweeping claims about the success of the Russian war effort, possibly in an attempt to temper domestic expectations about Russia’s near future successes in Ukraine ahead of the summer 2024 Russian offensive operation.
• A Russian insider source, who has routinely been accurate about past Russian military command changes, claimed on May 2 that the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) has replaced several high-level Russian commanders in recent months.
• NATO stated on May 2 that it is “deeply concerned” about intensifying Russian hybrid operations on NATO member territory and that these operations constitute a threat to Allied security.
• UK Foreign Minister David Cameron announced the United Kingdom’s intent to provide long-term support for Ukraine and stated that Ukrainian forces can conduct long-range strikes within Russia with UK-provided weapons.
• Russian forces recently marginally advanced near Kupyansk, Avdiivka, and Donetsk City.
• Rostec General Director Sergei Chemezov announced that Russian state-owned defense conglomerate Rostec is increasing its production of all variants of guided glide bombs during a May 3 meeting with Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin.

RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, MAY 3, 2024

May 3, 2024 - ISW Press

Download the PDF

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, May 3, 2024

Angelica Evans, Riley Bailey, Nicole Wolkov, Grace Mappes, and Frederick W. Kagan

May 3, 2024, 9:05pm ET 

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

Click here to see ISW’s 3D control of terrain topographic map of Ukraine. Use of a computer (not a mobile device) is strongly recommended for using this data-heavy tool.

Click here to access ISW’s archive of interactive time-lapse maps of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. These maps complement the static control-of-terrain map that ISW produces daily by showing a dynamic frontline. ISW will update this time-lapse map archive monthly.

Note: The data cut-off for this product was 1:15pm ET on May 3. ISW will cover subsequent reports in the May 4 Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment.

Ukrainian officials continue to highlight that Russia’s main goal for 2024 remains the seizure of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts as Russian forces plan for their Summer 2024 offensive operation. Ukrainian Ground Forces Commander Lieutenant General Oleksandr Pavlyuk reiterated during an interview with The Times published on May 3 that Russia’s offensive goals in 2024 are to seize all of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts and that Russian forces may attempt to seize the rest of Zaporizhia Oblast in 2024 if they seize Donbas.[1] Ukrainian Main Military Intelligence Directorate (GUR) Deputy Chief Major General Vadym Skibitskyi stated in an interview with The Economist published on May 2 that Russian forces will likely continue pursuing their longtime goal of reaching the administrative borders of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts over the summer as other Ukrainian officials have recently noted.[2] Pavlyuk reiterated that Russian forces have a plan to seize Kharkiv or Sumy cities but noted that it is unclear how serious this plan is or whether Russian forces will be capable of capturing one or both of the cities.[3] ISW continues to assess that Russian forces would struggle to seize Kharkiv City but that a Russian offensive operation in the area would likely draw and fix Ukrainian forces from other areas of the frontline.[4] Pavlyuk stated that Ukrainian forces are doing everything possible to stop Russian efforts to seize Chasiv Yar but noted that Russian forces have an estimated 10-to-1 artillery advantage over Ukrainian forces and “total air superiority,” likely referring to Russian forces' ability to indiscriminately conduct glide bomb strikes in the area.[5] Skibitskyi stated on May 2 that Russian forces will not imminently seize Chasiv Yar although it is “probably a matter of time” before the settlement falls, which is consistent with ISW’s assessment that Russian forces may take Chasiv Yar but are unlikely to do so immediately.[6]

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky stated that Ukraine is also paying increased attention to the Pokrovsk (Avdiivka) direction, where Russian forces have recently made tactically significant advances and are “pressing” on Ukrainian positions.[7] Zelensky warned that Russian forces are preparing to expand their offensive operations in Ukraine, likely referring to the anticipated Summer 2024 Russian offensive operation, and that Ukraine is facing a “new stage” of the war.[8] Pavlyuk expressed hope that US and European military assistance will arrive in frontline areas in the near future and help blunt Russian assaults this summer and contest the theater-wide initiative in the future.[9]

The first deliveries of resumed US military assistance reportedly arrived in Ukraine earlier this week, although it will likely take several additional weeks before Western weapons and ammunition arrive in frontline areas at scale. The New York Times reported on May 3 that the first installment of US military assistance comprised of anti-armor rockets, missiles, and 155-mm artillery shells arrived in Ukraine on April 28, four days after US President Joe Biden signed a bill providing roughly $60 billion in military assistance to Ukraine, and that a second installment of unspecified aid arrived on April 29.[10] The New York Times, citing an unnamed Spanish official, reported that Spanish missiles for Patriot air defense systems recently arrived in Poland and will arrive at the frontline in Ukraine “soon.” The New York Times reported that Germany’s newly pledged Patriot air defense system is not expected to arrive in Ukraine until late June at the earliest but that the Patriot’s arrival could coincide with the arrival of the first F-16 fighter jets.[11] Unnamed officials told The New York Times that it could take several months for a substantial number of Western weapons and equipment to arrive in Ukraine, however.[12] A senior US official, citing a confidential US military assessment, stated that Russia likely will continue to make marginal gains in the east and southeast in the leadup to the May 9 Victory Day holiday but that Russian forces likely do not have enough manpower concentrated in unspecified frontline areas to conduct an immediate large-scale offensive effort. The US military assessment concluded that the Ukrainian frontline will not collapse in the near term despite severe Ukrainian ammunition shortages. The US military assessment is consistent with ISW’s ongoing assessment that Russian forces will likely attempt to build on tactical gains to pursue operationally significant gains in key sectors, such as near Chasiv Yar and Avdiivka, in the weeks before US military assistance arrives to frontline Ukrainian units at scale but that these Russian gains will not portend a collapse of the Ukrainian defense.[13]

Ukrainian officials indicated that Russian forces in Ukraine have not significantly increased in size in recent months but that the Russian military continues to improve its fighting qualities overall despite suffering widespread degradation, especially among elite units since the start of the war. Pavlyuk stated that roughly 510,000 to 515,000 Russian personnel are currently deployed in occupied Ukraine.[14] Ukrainian officials reported in January 2024 that Russian forces had roughly 462,000 personnel deployed in Ukraine and noted that this was the entire land component of the Russian military at the time.[15] Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed in December 2023 that there were 617,000 Russian personnel in the “combat zone,” likely referring to all Russian military personnel in the zone of the “special military operation,” which includes areas within Russia bordering Ukraine.[16] These figures likely encompass combat personnel and other military personnel who perform support functions and do not represent the immediate combat power that Russian forces have and can commit to offensive operations in Ukraine. Putin previously signed a decree in December 2023 claiming that the Russian military has a total of 2.039 million personnel, 1.32 million of whom are combat personnel, suggesting a roughly 60 to 40 ratio between Russian combat and non-combat personnel on average.[17] The specific breakdown between Russian combat and non-combat personnel in Ukraine is unclear. The overall marginal increase in the size of the Russian deployment to occupied Ukraine between January and April 2024 indicates that Russian forces have likely committed the majority of recently generated forces to ongoing offensive operations instead of efforts to establish strategic-level reserves.[18]

Skibitskyi stated that the current Russian military is unrecognizable from the force that launched the full-scale invasion in February 2022.[19] Skibitskyi noted that Russia’s once-elite airborne (VDV) and naval infantry elements have been completely degraded and that Russia will not be able to reconstitute them to their former combat capabilities for at least a decade.[20] Russian forces have heavily degraded relatively elite units by employing them in attritional ground assaults and counterattacks regardless of their designated functions and elite capabilities.[21] Degradation and the Russian military command’s decision to commit all forces along the frontline to more or less similar operations have transformed all Russian units in Ukraine regardless of their formal designations into motorized rifle units — mechanized infantry responsible for conducting combined arms ground assaults. Skibitskyi acknowledged that the Russian military is improving in some respects, however, and stated that the Russian military is now operating as a “single body, with a clear plan, under a single command.”[22] The Russian military has demonstrated an uneven propensity for operational, tactical, and technological innovation and learning, particularly with operational planning.[23] The Russian military is now entirely comprised of less-elite de facto motorized rifle units, but these units continue to innovate and adapt to fighting in Ukraine while relying on materiel and manpower advantages to increasingly pressure Ukrainian forces and exploit Ukrainian vulnerabilities.[24]

Ukrainian officials indicated that the Russian military will likely maintain its current personnel replacement rate and will not generate the significant number of available personnel needed to establish strategic-level reserves for larger-scale offensive operations in 2024. Pavlyuk stated on May 2 that Russia intends to “mobilize” about 100,000 more personnel for use in offensive operations this June and July and 300,000 more personnel by the end of 2024.[25] Pavlyuk is likely referring to ongoing crypto-mobilization efforts and efforts to recruit contract service personnel and is likely not referencing another call-up of reservists similar to Russia‘s September 2022 partial mobilization. Skibitskyi stated that Russia is also “generating a division of reserves,” likely between 15,000 and 20,000 personnel, in central Russia to use in Russia’s anticipated Summer 2024 offensive. The “division of reserves” that Skibitskyi is referring to is likely included in Pavlyuk’s figure of 100,000 personnel that Russia intends to generate for use in June or July. Pavlyuk stated that Russian forces suffer about 25,000 to 30,000 killed and wounded personnel per month, indicating that Russian forces intend to generally maintain the current number of forces fighting in Ukraine in 2024 and are unlikely to generate significantly more available personnel. ISW has observed recent reports that the Russian military has intensified crypto-mobilization efforts, which are likely intended to maintain replacement rates during intensified offensive operations this spring and expected offensive operations this summer.[26] ISW continues to assess that Russia will struggle to form strategic-level reserves while sustaining the current replacement rate or an increased replacement rate during intensified offensive operations.[27] The Kremlin would likely have to conduct another wave of partial mobilization to generate the manpower required to both sustain the tempo of current Russian offensive operations and successfully form strategic-level reserves in the near term. ISW continues to assess that the Kremlin will rely on crypto-mobilization efforts and remains unlikely to conduct another unpopular wave of partial mobilization.[28]

Pavlyuk stated that neither Russian nor Ukrainian forces will be able to achieve victory in Ukraine solely through attritional warfare – a consistent throughline that Ukrainian officials and military analysts have emphasized in recent months.[29] Pavlyuk stated that the Russian military command does not care about high losses in Ukraine and that Ukraine will only be able to win the war through technological superiority and the international isolation of Russia. Former Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief General Valerii Zaluzhnyi notably assessed in a November 1 essay that military parity resulted in the onset of a positional front in Ukraine and that neither Russian nor Ukrainian forces would be able to break through this positional front without achieving a technological advantage over the other.[30] The rough parity in forces and means has since degraded with the delay of US military assistance to Ukraine, but Russian forces are still unable to make operational-level gains in the near term. Pavlyuk stated on May 3 that Russian forces have advantages over Ukrainian forces in artillery and aviation but suggested that Ukrainian forces can obtain a technological advantage over Russian forces using drones.[31] Pavlyuk stated that drones have enabled both Russian and Ukrainian forces to conduct aerial reconnaissance up to 30 kilometers behind the front line and that neither force can concentrate forces within 30 kilometers of the front for an offensive effort. Pavlyuk noted that drones have forced both Russian and Ukrainian forces to operate in smaller infantry groups to avoid the enemy’s reconnaissance fire complex (RFC) and noted that Ukrainian forces have moved away from moving in battalion- or company-sized groups. Pavlyuk’s statements are consistent with ISW’s recent observations and forecasts about Russian forces’ offensive prospects, and Russian forces seem content to make grinding, attritional gains at the tactical level in the near term despite the disproportionately limited benefit these gains offer to Russia at such a high cost.[32]

Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu issued a notably candid assessment of recent Russian advances in Ukraine and refrained from sweeping claims about the success of the Russian war effort, possibly in an attempt to temper domestic expectations about Russia’s near future successes in Ukraine ahead of the summer 2024 Russian offensive operation. Shoigu claimed during a conference call with Russian military leadership that Russian forces have seized 547 square kilometers of territory in Ukraine since January 1, 2024.[33] ISW has observed evidence confirming that Russian forces have seized approximately 516 square kilometers in 2024 as of April 29, and Shoigu’s claim is notably more realistic than previous claims that surpassed ISW’s assessed Russian advances by roughly 100 square kilometers.[34] Shoigu also reiterated the Russian Ministry of Defense’s (MoD) previous claims that Russian forces have seized Novobakhmutivka, Semenivka, and Berdychi and ongoing Kremlin information operations aimed at overestimating Ukrainian manpower and equipment losses.[35] Shoigu claimed that Russian forces are continuing to break into Ukrainian strongholds along the entire frontline and are forcing Ukrainian forces to retreat from their positions in unspecified areas. Shoigu previously used a similar conference call in December 2023 to downplay Russian operations in Ukraine as an “active defense,” likely in an effort to temper expectations about Russia’s forces’ months-long operation to seize Avdiivka.[36] Shoigu may hope to similarly temper domestic expectations about Russian forces anticipated Summer 2024 offensive operation, particularly since Russian forces will be facing better-equipped Ukrainian forces than the Russian military command likely previously expected.

A Russian insider source, who has routinely been accurate about past Russian military command changes, claimed on May 2 that the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) has replaced several high-level Russian commanders in recent months. The insider source claimed that the Russian MoD recently replaced Eastern Military District (EMD) Commander Colonel General Sergei Kuzmenko with Lieutenant General Alexander Sanchik and Southern Military District [SMD] Commander Colonel General Sergei Kuzovlev with Colonel General Gennady Anashkin in late March 2024.[37] The insider source claimed that former Western Military District (WMD) Commander Colonel General Yevgeny Nikiforov dropped out of an ongoing competition for the commander of the newly reformed Moscow Military District (MMD) and is now the Chief of Staff of the Russian Ground Forces.[38] The insider source did not offer claims about the command of the newly reformed Leningrad Military District [LMD], which is reportedly under the command of former Russian Ground Forces Chief of Staff Colonel General Alexander Lapin, or about the “Dnepr” Grouping of Forces, which is under the command of Russian Airborne (VDV) Forces Commander Colonel General Mikhail Teplinsky.[39] The insider source claimed that the Russian MoD also appointed Lieutenant General Alexei Podivilov to SMD Chief of Staff and that the role of EMD Chief of Staff is currently vacant.[40] The insider source claimed that the Russian MoD has made no changes to the command of the Central Military District [CMD], which Colonel General Andrey Mordvichev has commanded since January 2023 with Lieutenant General Denis Lyamin as his chief of staff since October 2023.[41] Russia’s military district commanders have all recently commanded a corresponding “grouping of forces” in Ukraine, and it is highly likely that the new commanders also assumed responsibility of their military district’s respective grouping of forces.[42] ISW cannot confirm the insider source’s claims but notes that the source has been highly accurate about past military command changes.[43]

The Russian military has increasingly highlighted Mordvichev in recent months and credited him with the capture of Avdiivka in mid-February 2024.[44] The Kremlin has decided to heavily obscure the status of current military district commanders in recent months, and Mordvichev’s public prominence and the lack of changes within the CMD at a time of reported widespread changes suggests that Mordvichev has the favor of his superiors and/or the Kremlin. The Russian military command has attempted to establish the Central Grouping of Forces (comprised almost entirely of CMD elements) as an operational maneuver force west of Avdiivka, and elements of four CMD brigades are currently attempting to exploit a tactical penetration northwest of Avdiivka.[45] The Russian military command may also believe that command changes may be too disruptive to what it views as an offensive operation in the Avdiivka area that could achieve tactically or even operationally significant gains.

The Kremlin has made previous command changes following the culmination of Ukrainian and Russian operational efforts and in preparation for previous offensive operations, notably publicly confirming the identities of all four military district commanders ahead of its failed Winter-Spring 2023 offensive effort in eastern Ukraine.[46] The Kremlin may have decided to change the leadership of the military districts in preparation for its expected summer offensive effort, which is forecasted to begin in late May or in June.[47] Anashkin’s reported appointment to SMD commander in late March 2024 notably aligns with the intensification of the Southern Grouping of Forces’ effort to seize Chasiv Yar, and Anashkin may have assumed command of the SMD (and likely the Southern Grouping of Forces) to specifically oversee the effort to seize Chasiv Yar and possible subsequent offensive operations in the direction of Kostyantynivka.[48] Russian President Vladimir Putin may currently seek to reduce Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu's power by balancing him with rivals, and these reported recent command changes may play into factional balancing efforts as previous command changes have.[49] Command changes do not necessarily have immediate battlefield and operational effects, however, and it will likely take some time before new commanders prove their abilities one way or another, should reports of these changes prove accurate.

NATO stated on May 2 that it is “deeply concerned” about intensifying Russian hybrid operations on NATO member territory and that these operations constitute a threat to Allied security. NATO stated that it is concerned about recent malign activities including those resulting in recent investigations and charges in Czechia, Estonia, Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and the United Kingdom (UK).[50] NATO reported that these malign activities are part of intensifying Russian hybrid activities including “sabotage, acts of violence, cyber and electronic interference, disinformation campaigns” that Russia conducts directly and through proxies. NATO stated that it will continue to boost its resilience, counter hybrid threats, and ensure that member states are prepared to deter and defend against such attacks. The Norwegian Police Security Service reported on May 2 that it discovered an unspecified number of Russian intelligence agents operating in Vestland County who may have been preparing to sabotage critical infrastructure.[51] The German Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) summoned the Russian Charge d’Affaires in Germany on May 3 over reports that Russian hackers under the Russian General Staff’s Main Directorate’s (GRU) control conducted cyberattacks against Germany’s Social Democratic Party as well as German logistics, defense, aerospace, and information technology (IT) companies in 2023.[52] ISW also observed recent reports that the Kremlin is pursuing hybrid operations against NATO member states using GPS jamming and sabotaging military logistics.[53]

UK Foreign Minister David Cameron announced the United Kingdom’s intent to provide long-term support for Ukraine and stated that Ukrainian forces can conduct long-range strikes within Russia with UK-provided weapons. Cameron visited Kyiv on May 2 and 3 and stated that Ukraine has a right to self-defense by striking military targets inside Russia “just as Russia is striking inside Ukraine” and that the UK has no issue if Ukraine chooses to use UK-provided weapons to conduct these strikes.[54] ISW has not yet observed Ukraine conduct strikes against military or industrial targets inside Russia using Western-provided weapons. Cameron announced that the UK intends to provide three billion pounds (about $3.7 billion) of annual military assistance to Ukraine “for as long as is necessary.”[55] Cameron also met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal about assistance to Ukraine and began negotiations for a new agreement on a century-long UK-Ukraine relationship to build strong security, trade, scientific, technological, educational, and cultural relationships.[56]

Kremlin officials reacted to Cameron’s statement about Ukrainian strikes on May 3 with boilerplate rhetoric accusing the UK of “provocations” against Russia. Kremlin Spokesperson Dmitry Peskov stated that the Kremlin views Cameron’s statement as a “direct escalation.”[57] Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) Spokesperson Maria Zakharova accused the West of openly encouraging “Ukrainian crimes” of striking Russian territory and threatened a “crushing blow of retaliation” against Western states if Ukraine strikes the Kerch Strait Bridge (which is notably in occupied Crimea, not Russian territory).[58] Russian ultranationalist milbloggers largely parroted the Russian officials’ outage, with one milblogger calling the statement a casus belli.[59] Russia is extraordinarily unlikely to initiate an open war with NATO, which Russia would certainly lose at this time because Ukraine uses Western-provided weapons to strike legitimate targets in Russia. Russian officials have levied this rhetoric for months in an effort to coerce the West into self-deterrence from providing Ukraine with the weapons it needs to defend against the Russian invasion and striking legitimate Russian military targets both in occupied Ukraine and in Russia.[60] Cameron’s May 3 statement permitting the use of UK weapons in long-range strikes against Russian territory as well as the recent US decision to provide long-range ATACMS to Ukraine both directly counter this Russian effort.

Russian President Vladimir Putin attempted to downplay recent tension in Tajik-Russian relations in a May 3 phone call with Tajik President Emomali Rahmon discussing Russian government crackdowns against Central Asian migrants living in and entering Russia following the March 22 Crocus City Hall terrorist attack. The Kremlin stated that Putin and Rahmon “exchanged views” about cooperation to fight terrorist threats and issues regarding migration.[61] The Kremlin reported that both leaders blamed “certain forces, including those from Tajikistan” for attempting to “artificially escalate” the situation regarding labor migrants’ entry into Russia, but expressed confidence that Tajikistan and Russia could jointly suppress these efforts and maintain their “time-tested fraternal relations.” The Tajik readout of the phone conversation notably did not include such accusations.[62] Putin and Rahmon both agreed to improve ministerial and departmental coordination regarding migration and to fight terrorism and extremism.[63] Putin’s call with Rahmon was likely an attempt to downplay and control recent public complaints from senior Tajik officials regarding the treatment of Tajik citizens living in Russia and mass detentions of Tajik citizens entering Russia at airports and border checkpoints.[64]

The Uzbek Foreign Labor Migration Agency’s office in Russia claimed on May 3 that Russian law enforcement did not detain Uzbek citizens at Vnukovo, Sheremetyevo, Domodedovo airports in Moscow or at border crossings in Orenburg, Samara, and Saratov oblasts as some Telegram channels claimed.[65] Human rights and migrant rights activist Valentina Chupik told Russian opposition news outlet Agentstvo on May 2 that starting on May 24 Russian airports detained about 4,500 migrants at Russian airports and refused a similar number from entering Russia at land border crossings. Chupik stated that about half of the detainees were Uzbek citizens while Kyrgyz and Tajik citizens each made up a quarter of the detainees.[66] Remittances from Russia to Uzbekistan appear to be declining and consist of a smaller portion of Uzbekistan’s yearly GDP in comparison to Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.[67]

Reuters reported on May 2 that Russian military personnel are operating at a military base currently hosting US forces in Niger.[68] A senior US defense official told Reuters that Russian forces are using a separate hangar from US forces at Airbase 101 near the Diori Hamani International Airport in Niamey, Niger. The official told Reuters that the situation is “not great” but is manageable in the short term. US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin stated during a press conference that Russian forces are in a separate compound and do not have access to US forces or equipment and that he currently does not see a significant issue in terms of US force protection.[69] Kremlin Spokesperson Dmitri Peskov did not confirm or deny reports that Russian forces are present at the base but stated that Russia is “developing ties” with various African countries.[70] The American Enterprise Institute’s Critical Threats Project (CTP) reported on April 12 that the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD)-controlled Africa Corps arrived in Niger and assessed that the Africa Corps' arrival will challenge US efforts to remain in Niger in the immediate term and create long-term opportunities for the Kremlin to create conventional and irregular threats that strategically pressure Europe.[71]

Key Takeaways:

• Ukrainian officials continue to highlight that Russia’s main goal for 2024 remains the seizure of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts as Russian forces plan for their summer 2024 offensive operation.
• The first deliveries of resumed US military assistance reportedly arrived in Ukraine earlier this week, although it will likely take several additional weeks before Western weapons and ammunition arrive to frontline areas at scale.
• Ukrainian officials indicated that Russian forces in Ukraine have not significantly increased in size in recent months but that the Russian military continues to improve its fighting qualities overall despite suffering widespread degradation, especially among elite units since the start of the war.
• Ukrainian officials indicated that the Russian military will likely maintain its current personnel replacement rate and will not generate the significant number of available personnel needed to establish strategic-level reserves for larger-scale offensive operations in 2024.
• Pavlyuk stated that neither Russian nor Ukrainian forces will be able to achieve victory in Ukraine solely through attritional warfare – a consistent throughline that Ukrainian officials and military analysts have emphasized in recent months.
• Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu issued a notably candid assessment of recent Russian advances in Ukraine and refrained from sweeping claims about the success of the Russian war effort, possibly in an attempt to temper domestic expectations about Russia’s near future successes in Ukraine ahead of the summer 2024 Russian offensive operation.
• A Russian insider source, who has routinely been accurate about past Russian military command changes, claimed on May 2 that the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) has replaced several high-level Russian commanders in recent months.
• NATO stated on May 2 that it is “deeply concerned” about intensifying Russian hybrid operations on NATO member territory and that these operations constitute a threat to Allied security.
• UK Foreign Minister David Cameron announced the United Kingdom’s intent to provide long-term support for Ukraine and stated that Ukrainian forces can conduct long-range strikes within Russia with UK-provided weapons.
• Russian forces recently marginally advanced near Kupyansk, Avdiivka, and Donetsk City.
• Rostec General Director Sergei Chemezov announced that Russian state-owned defense conglomerate Rostec is increasing its production of all variants of guided glide bombs during a May 3 meeting with Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin.

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

• Russian Main Effort – Eastern Ukraine (comprised of two subordinate main efforts)
• Russian Subordinate Main Effort #1 – Capture the remainder of Luhansk Oblast and push westward into eastern Kharkiv Oblast and encircle northern Donetsk Oblast
• Russian Subordinate Main Effort #2 – Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast
• Russian Supporting Effort – Southern Axis
• Russian Air, Missile, and Drone Campaign
• Russian Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts
• Russian Technological Adaptations
• Activities in Russian-occupied areas
• Ukrainian Defense Industrial Base Efforts
• Russian Information Operations and Narratives
• Significant Activity in Belarus

Russian Main Effort – Eastern Ukraine

Russian Subordinate Main Effort #1 – Luhansk Oblast (Russian objective: Capture the remainder of Luhansk Oblast and push westward into eastern Kharkiv Oblast and northern Donetsk Oblast)

Russian forces recently advanced southeast of Kupyansk amid continued fighting on the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line on May 3. Geolocated footage published on May 2 shows a Russian armored vehicle, reportedly of the Russian 1st Guards Tank Army (Moscow Military District [MMD]) operating in central Kyslivka (southeast of Kupyansk).[72] Russian milbloggers claimed on May 3 that elements of the Russian 47th Tank Division (1st Guards Tank Army [GTA]) also achieved a tactical breakthrough immediately south of Kyslivka towards Kotlyarivka and advanced 480 meters in depth, but ISW has not observed visual confirmation of these claims.[73] Kharkiv Oblast Head Oleh Synehubov reported that Russian forces in the Kupyansk direction have reconstituted their assault units with more equipment and fresh convict recruits and renewed assault operations.[74] Synehubov stated that Russian forces periodically focus on different directions along the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line to find weaknesses in the Ukrainian defense and are currently focusing on the Kyslivka and Tabaivka (both southeast of Kupyansk) directions. Fighting also continued northeast of Kupyansk near Synkivka; east of Kupyansk near Petropavlivka; southeast of Kupyansk near Stelmakhivka and Berestove; southwest of Svatove near Novoyehorivka, Hrekivka, Makiivka, and Nevske; west of Kreminna near Terny, Yampolivka, and Torske; and south of Kreminna near the Serebryanske forest area and Bilohorivka.[75]

Russian Subordinate Main Effort #2 – Donetsk Oblast (Russian objective: Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast, the claimed territory of Russia’s proxies in Donbas)

Positional engagements continued in the Siversk direction (northeast of Bakhmut) on May 3, but there were no confirmed changes to the frontline in this area. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian attacks east of Siversk near Verkhnokamyanske, southeast of Siversk near Spirne and Vyimka, and southwest of Siversk near Rozdolivka.[76]

Russian forces continued assaults east of Chasiv Yar on May 3, but there were no confirmed changes to the frontline. Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces are improving their tactical positions near Chasiv Yar through small infantry-led assaults and denied Ukrainian reports that Russian forces aim to seize Chasiv Yar by May 9, claiming that Russian forces will wait until Ukrainian forces in Chasiv Yar are sufficiently vulnerable to intensify offensive operations.[77] Ukrainian Khortytsia Group of Forces Spokesperson Lieutenant Colonel Nazar Voloshyn stated that Russian forces are taking significant personnel losses during infantry-led “meat assaults” in the Chasiv Yar area.[78] Fighting continued northeast of Chasiv Yar near Bohdanivka, near the Novyi Microraion in eastern Chasiv Yar, east of Chasiv Yar near Ivanivske, and southeast of Chasiv Yar near Klishchiivka and Andriivka.[79] Elements of the Russian 98th Airborne (VDV) Division, 17th Artillery Brigade (likely a new unit), and 58th Spetsnaz Battalion (1st Donetsk People’s Republic [DNR] Army Corps [AC]) are reportedly operating near Chasiv Yar.[80]

Russian forces recently marginally advanced northwest of Avdiivka amid continued positional fighting in the area on May 3. Geolocated footage published on May 3 indicates that Russian forces recently marginally advanced within central Ocheretyne (northwest of Avdiivka).[81] Additional geolocated footage published on May 3 indicates that Russian forces recently marginally advanced west of Solovyove (south of Ocheretyne and northwest of Avdiivka).[82] Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces control part or most of Arkhanhelske (northeast of Ocheretyne and north of Avdiivka) and one milblogger claimed that Russian forces advanced 3.85 kilometers wide and two kilometers in depth into central Arkhanhelske.[83] A Ukrainian serviceman expressed concern about recent Russian advances near Arkhanhelske and claimed that these advances could complicate Ukrainian defensive efforts in the area by allowing Russian forces to conduct a wider range of possible offensive operations from Ocheretyne.[84] Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces advanced along three windbreaks east of Novooleksandrivka (northwest of Ocheretyne and Avdiivka); northwest of Keramik (northeast of Ocheretyne and north of Avdiivka); towards Novopokrovske and Sokil (both southwest of Ocheretyne and west of Avdiivka) from Solovyove; up to 200 meters in depth west of Semenivka and Berdychi (both just northwest of Avdiivka); and in the direction of Nevelske from Pervomaiske (both southwest of Avdiivka).[85] A Russian milblogger emphasized that Russian forces must advance to Ukraine’s next defensive line as quickly as possible and gain a foothold in the area before US military assistance arrives to Ukrainian forces near Avdiivka.[86] Another Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces are focusing efforts to consolidate their flanks before making further advances and asserted that this shows that Russian frontline commanders have become more competent.[87] Fighting also continued northwest of Avdiivka near Kalynove and west of Avdiivka near Umanske, Yasnobrodivka, and Netaylove.[88]

Russian forces recently marginally advanced southwest of Donetsk City amid continued fighting west and southwest of Donetsk City on May 3. Geolocated footage published on May 3 indicates that Russian forces recently marginally advanced northwest and west of Novomykhailivka (southwest of Donetsk City).[89] Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces are advancing from Novomykhailivka towards Paraskoviivka (southwest of Donetsk City).[90] Fighting continued west of Donetsk City near Krasnohorivka and Heorhiivka and southwest of Donetsk City near Kostyantynivka and Vodyane.[91] Elements of the Russian 155th Naval Infantry Brigade (Pacific Fleet) are reportedly operating near Novomykhailivka and elements of the Russian 238th Artillery Brigade (8th Combined Arms Army [CAA], Southern Military District [SMD]) are reportedly operating near Krasnohorivka.[92]

Fighting continued in the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast border area on May 3 but there were no confirmed changes to the frontline. Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces advanced on the southern outskirts of Urozhaine (south of Velyka Novosilka), but ISW has not observed visual confirmation of this claim.[93] Positional fighting also continued near Staromayorske (south of Velyka Novosilka).[94] A Russian milblogger amplified footage of Russian aircraft recently striking a bridge across the Mokri Yaly River connecting Velyka Novosilka with Vremivka.[95] Elements of the Russian 64th Motorized Rifle Brigade (35th CAA, Eastern Military District [EMD]) are reportedly operating near Hulyaipole in western Zaporizhia Oblast.[96]

Russian Supporting Effort – Southern Axis (Russian objective: Maintain frontline positions and secure rear areas against Ukrainian strikes)

Positional fighting continued near Robotyne and Verbove (east of Robotyne) in western Zaporizhia Oblast on May 3.[97] Several milbloggers noted that Russian forces have failed to make more significant tactical gains in the Robotyne area despite conducting routine frontal assaults against the settlement for several months.[98] One milblogger claimed that the seizure of Robotyne would only offer Russian forces a small informational victory.[99] Elements of the Russian 291st Motorized Rifle Regiment (42nd Motorized Rifle Division, 58th Combined Arms Army [CAA], Southern Military District [SMD]) and the 7th Airborne (VDV) Division are reportedly operating near Robotyne.[100]

Positional engagements continued in east (left) bank Kherson Oblast and near islands in the Dnipro River Delta on May 3. Positional fighting continued near Krynky, and Ukrainian Southern Operational Command Spokesperson Captain Third Rank Dmytro Pletenchuk stated that small Russian assault groups are unsuccessfully trying to regain lost positions on Nestryha Island (southwest of Kherson City).[101] A Russian milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces have recently intensified night-time raids in an unspecified part of the Dnipro River with first-person view (FPV) drone and artillery support.[102] Elements of the Russian 810th Naval Infantry Brigade (Black Sea Fleet [BSF]) are reportedly operating in the Krynky area.[103] A Russian milblogger, who has an avowed bias against VDV and “Dnepr” Grouping of Forces Commander Colonel General Mikhail Teplinsky, continued to claim on May 2 that elements of the 76th VDV Division are preparing to redeploy from the Robotyne area to the Krynky area to relieve elements of the 104th VDV Division.[104] ISW has not yet observed confirmation that elements of the 76th VDV Division are planning to or have redeployed from the Robotyne area to elsewhere in Ukraine, however.[105]

Russian Air, Missile, and Drone Campaign (Russian Objective: Target Ukrainian military and civilian infrastructure in the rear and on the frontline)

Russian forces conducted limited missile strikes against Ukraine on May 2 and May 3, primarily targeting Kharkiv Oblast. Ukrainian officials reported on May 3 that Russian forces struck Chuhuiv, Kharkiv Oblast with two S-300 missiles and civilian objects in Derhachi and Kholodnohirskyi raions with glide bombs, including a D-30 universal joint glide munition (UMPB).[106] Kharkiv Oblast Prosecutor’s General Office reported on May 2 that Russian forces struck a non-functioning enterprise near Ostroverkhivka on May 2 with an unspecified number of Grom E-1 missiles.[107] A Russian milblogger amplified drone footage on May 2 purporting to show Russian forces striking a Ukrainian IRIS-T air defense system near Ostroverkhivka with two unspecified missiles.[108] ISW cannot verify that Russian forces did strike a Ukrainian IRIS-T air defense system near Ostroverkhivka. Ukrainian Southern Operational Command Spokesperson Captain Third Rank Dmytro Pletenchuk reported that Russian aircraft struck Snake Island, Odesa Oblast with an unspecified type and number of missiles on May 3.[109]

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

Rostec General Director Sergei Chemezov announced that Russian state-owned defense conglomerate Rostec is increasing its production of all variants of guided glide bombs during a May 3 meeting with Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin. Chemezov stated that Rostec and JSC Tactical Missile Corporation continue to work to adapt aerial bombs to unguided and guided glide bombs with unified planning and correction modules (UMPC).[110] The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) claimed that guided glide bombs with UMPC allow Russian aircraft to conduct strikes a “safe distance” from the frontline.[111] ISW previously assessed that Russian forces used guided and unguided glide bomb strikes to tactical effect in their seizure of Avdiivka in February 2024, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky stated in late April 2024 that Russian forces had used over 9,000 glide bombs against Ukraine since the start of 2024.[112]

The Kremlin-controlled Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) continues to provide support for Russian military operations in Ukraine. ROC Metropolitan Kirill of Stavropol and Nevinnomyssk stated on April 22 that Russian forces operating in Ukraine currently have 309 ROC chaplains but need an additional 1,300 full-time chaplains.[113] Kirill claimed that 60 to 70 percent of the total ROC representatives working in occupied Ukraine are “volunteer clergy.” ISW recently reported the ROC is preparing a special training course for clergy deployed to combat zones in Ukraine.[114]

Russian officials are furthering efforts to send confiscated civilian firearms and vehicles to the Russian military for use in Ukraine. Russian State Duma “Special Military Operation” Working Group Chairperson Andrei Turchak, Duma Deputy Vasily Piskarev, and Federation Council Senator Alexander Khinshtein submitted a bill to the State Duma on May 3 that would simplify procedures for the Russian government to transfer confiscated and unclaimed firearms and ammunition to the Russian military for use in Ukraine.[115] Turchak claimed that 70,000 of the 250,000 seized firearms held at Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) regional offices across Russia are functional.[116] Republic of Buryatia Head Alexei Tsydenov instructed the republic’s MVD office to create a mechanism for transferring confiscated civilian vehicles to the Russian military for use in Ukraine.[117] Tsydenov claimed that Buryatia confiscated 266 vehicles in 2023. Russian milbloggers previously appealed to the heads of several Russian federal subjects to send boats confiscated from poachers to the Kherson Oblast frontline, claiming that the Russian “Dnepr” Grouping of Forces operating along the Dnipro River sorely needed the vessels.[118]

Russian Technological Adaptations (Russian objective: Introduce technological innovations to optimize systems for use in Ukraine)

Nothing significant to report.

Ukrainian Defense Industrial Efforts (Ukrainian objective: Develop its defense industrial base to become more self-sufficient in cooperation with US, European, and international partners)

ISW is not publishing coverage of Ukrainian defense industrial efforts today.

Activities in Russian-occupied areas (Russian objective: Consolidate administrative control of annexed areas; forcibly integrate Ukrainian citizens into Russian sociocultural, economic, military, and governance systems)

Russian occupation authorities continue to forcibly deport Ukrainian civilians from occupied Ukraine to Russia and deeper into Russian-occupied Ukraine. Ukraine's State Security Service (SBU) reported on May 3 that Zaporizhia Oblast occupation migration department head Nikolai Opryshko and his deputy Konstantin Razygrin forcibly deported Ukrainian civilians from occupied Zaporizhia Oblast to Rostov Oblast and then moved them to Russia’s border with Latvia.[119] The SBU reported that Russian officials forced the Ukrainian civilians to walk to a Latvian border post as ”refugees to the European Union (EU)” in an attempt to facilitate migrant tension. The Kherson Oblast occupation administration reported on May 2 that Russian officials brought 10 minors from occupied Kherson Oblast to the “Ocean” children’s camp in Primorsky Krai and encouraged them to apply to vocational schools in Russia.[120] The Kherson Oblast occupation administration stated that they will bring an additional 200 minors from occupied Kherson Oblast to the "Ocean" children’s camp in 2024. The Ukrainian Resistance Center reported on May 1 that Kherson Oblast occupation authorities are forcibly moving Ukrainian civilians from Hola Prystan, Kokhaniv, and Hladkivka to occupied Crimea and deeper into occupied Kherson.[121]

Hospitals in Russian-occupied Luhansk Oblast are reportedly threatening to confiscate newborns from mothers if neither of the newborn’s parents can prove that they have Russian citizenship. Luhansk Oblast Military Administration Head Artem Lysohor reported on May 1 that mothers who give birth at hospitals in occupied Luhansk Oblast will be required starting on May 6 to prove that at least one of the newborn’s parents has Russian citizenship in order for the hospital to discharge the newborn. If this report is accurate, such actions violate Article II(d) of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which defines genocide as “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.”[122]

Russian occupation officials continue efforts to militarize and indoctrinate Ukrainian youth in occupied Ukraine. The Luhansk People’s Republic (LNR) stated on May 1 that it is developing a new textbook that presents recent history in occupied Luhansk Oblast in accordance with Russian education standards.[123] Zaporizhia Oblast occupation official Vladimir Rogov stated on May 2 that 200 children recently participated in Russian military-patriotic youth organizations Movement of the First’s and Yunarmiya’s military-patriotic games in occupied Berdyansk and Melitopol.[124]

Russian Information Operations and Narratives

Russian officials continue to deny Russian war crimes in Ukraine and attempt to deflect from their crimes by accusing Ukrainian forces of war crimes. The Russian Permanent Mission to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons denied on May 3 the US Department of State (DoS) May 2 report that Russian forces are violating the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), claiming that Russian forces have destroyed their “entire chemical arsenal.”[125] Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) Spokesperson Maria Zakharova claimed that the US DoS report is speculation and claimed that the US and Ukraine are covering up for Ukraine‘s use of chemical weapons.[126] Kremlin officials have repeatedly accused Ukrainian forces of committing war crimes to distract from Russian forces’ war crimes and discredit Ukraine, and the Ukrainian General Prosecutor’s Office reported on May 3 that Russia is intensifying information operations to this effect.[127] The Ukrainian General Staff reported on May 3 that Russian forces have used chemical weapons on the battlefield 444 times in April 2024, 71 more times than in March 2024.[128] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces primarily conduct chemical attacks using K-51 grenades and have used these grenades at least 1,891 times from February 2023 to April 2024.

The Kremlin continues an information operation aimed at falsely portraying Russia as a religiously tolerant state while deliberately repressing religious freedoms in Ukraine. The US Commission on International Religious Freedom published its annual report on May 1, which continued to place Russia on a list of “particular concern” after the commission gave this designation to Russia in December 2023.[129] Russian Ambassador to the US Anatoly Antonov responded to this report, calling it unsubstantiated and claiming that the US is attempting to interfere in Russian internal affairs and undermine “interfaith harmony.”[130] Antonov also claimed that the US is disregarding Ukraine’s attempts to “repress” the Ukrainian Orthodox Church Moscow Patriarchate (UOC MP), which is not an independent church but an extension of the Russian state and an instrument of Russian hybrid warfare. Russian MFA Special Representative for Religious Freedom Gennady Askaldovich accused the US Commission on International Religious Freedom’s report of being biased against Russia.[131] ISW has extensively tracked Russia’s religious persecution efforts in Ukraine aimed at eradicating any independent Ukrainian culture or sense of national identity in occupied territories.[132]

Significant activity in Belarus (Russian efforts to increase its military presence in Belarus and further integrate Belarus into Russian-favorable frameworks and Wagner Group activity in Belarus)

Nothing significant to report.

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

2. Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, May 3, 2024

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/iran-update-may-3-2024

Key Takeaways:

• Yemen: The Houthi movement said it will expand its attacks into the eastern Mediterranean. The Houthis' Shahed-136 can reach the eastern Mediterranean, but Houthi attacks into the Mediterranean will probably be less effective than their attacks into the Red Sea.
• The same capabilities that enable the Houthis to target the Mediterranean to impose costs on Israel can be used in future conflicts—including or excluding Israel—to threaten maritime shipping and impose costs on the West.
• Ceasefire Negotiation: Hamas is slowing its response to an Egyptian-proposed ceasefire that satisfies Hamas’ maximalist demands.
• Post-War Gaza Strip: The Netanyahu government is seeking Saudi, Emirati, US, and Egyptian involvement in the post-war Gaza Strip.
• Military Operations in the Gaza Strip: Palestinian militias conducted indirect fire attacks targeting Israeli forces in the Netzarim corridor.
• West Bank: Israeli security services seized a shipment of smuggled M4/M16 rifle components. These components cannot be assembled into complete rifles, but their existence implies additional shipments with the remaining components for a complete rifle.
• Iran: The Tehran interim prayer leader said that Iran’s April 13 attack targeting Israel served as a useful cross-border exercise between Iran and its regional partner and proxy militias. This suggests that Iran is learning from the April 13 attack to improve its capabilities for future operations.

IRAN UPDATE, MAY 3, 2024

May 3, 2024 - ISW Press

Download the PDF

Iran Update, May 3, 2024

Johanna Moore, Alexandra Braverman, Annika Ganzeveld, and Brian Carter

Information Cutoff: 2:00 pm ET 

The Iran Update provides insights into Iranian and Iranian-sponsored activities abroad that undermine regional stability and threaten US forces and interests. It also covers events and trends that affect the stability and decision-making of the Iranian regime. The Critical Threats Project (CTP) at the American Enterprise Institute and the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) provides these updates regularly based on regional events. Click here to see CTP and ISW’s interactive map of Israeli ground operations. This map is updated daily alongside the static maps present in this report.

CTP-ISW defines the “Axis of Resistance” as the unconventional alliance that Iran has cultivated in the Middle East since the Islamic Republic came to power in 1979. This transnational coalition is comprised of state, semi-state, and non-state actors that cooperate to secure their collective interests. Tehran considers itself to be both part of the alliance and its leader. Iran furnishes these groups with varying levels of financial, military, and political support in exchange for some degree of influence or control over their actions. Some are traditional proxies that are highly responsive to Iranian direction, while others are partners over which Iran exerts more limited influence. Members of the Axis of Resistance are united by their grand strategic objectives, which include eroding and eventually expelling American influence from the Middle East, destroying the Israeli state, or both. Pursuing these objectives and supporting the Axis of Resistance to those ends have become cornerstones of Iranian regional strategy.

We do not report in detail on war crimes because these activities are well-covered in Western media and do not directly affect the military operations we are assessing and forecasting. We utterly condemn violations of the laws of armed conflict and the Geneva Conventions and crimes against humanity even though we do not describe them in these reports.

The Houthi movement said it will expand targeting of maritime shipping into the Mediterranean Sea, which is probably part of an Iranian-led effort to impose an unofficial economic blockade on Israel. The Houthi movement announced on May 3 that it will begin targeting ships in the eastern Mediterranean that are bound for Israel.[1] The Houthi military spokesperson called this the “fourth phase of escalation.” The Houthis' Shahed-136 can reach the eastern Mediterranean.[2] Iran and its so-called “Axis of Resistance” have repeatedly called for an unofficial blockade on Israel in recent months.[3] Tehran and its allies appear to be operating on the theory that severe economic disruption would compel Israel to accept defeat in the Gaza Strip and that such economic pressure could ultimately collapse the Israeli state. Iranian leaders have repeatedly said in recent months that part of their theory on how to destroy Israel revolves around stoking instability and terror in Israel to catalyze reverse migration away from Israel.[4]

The Houthis will likely fail to disrupt trade around Israel’s Mediterranean ports in the same way that the Houthis did around the Red Sea. The Houthis have been somewhat successful in decreasing the number of imports entering Israel from the port of Eliat. Eilat saw an 80 to 85% drop in revenue between November and December 2023.[5] The Houthis can achieve this effect because the movement can launch dozens of short-range drones and missiles into the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden. The distances involved in targeting the Mediterranean Sea means that the Houthis have a much more limited suite of munitions to choose from and thus a more limited stockpile of individual systems to use. The Houthis also presumably lack a robust targeting regime in the Mediterranean Sea, whereas the Iranian Behshad supports Houthi targeting in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden.[6]

The same capabilities that enable the Houthis to target the Mediterranean to impose costs on Israel can be used in future conflicts—including or excluding Israel—to threaten maritime shipping and impose costs on the West. Both the Houthis and Iran have expressed aspirations to improve their capabilities to enable attacks into the Indian Ocean and Straits of Gibraltar, thus preventing shipping from entering the Mediterranean Sea or traveling around the Cape of Good Hope.[7] Attacks targeting these shipping lanes could severely impact global shipping prices. The Houthis or Iran could improve upon the capabilities they are currently employing in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden to impose economic costs on the West in the future. The Houthis and Iran could impose these costs at times and for reasons of their own choosing.

Hamas is delaying its response to an Egyptian-proposed ceasefire that satisfies Hamas’ maximalist demands. The ceasefire proposal includes a three-phased plan for the release of Israeli hostages, a ceasefire lasting up to five years, and the gradual withdrawal of all Israeli forces from the Gaza Strip. Hamas believes any ceasefire is an interim “rest” before Israel’s ultimate destruction.[8] The head of Hamas in the Gaza Strip, Yahya Sinwar, is the key decision-maker in the negotiations because he has control over Hamas’ forces in the Gaza Strip. Egyptian officials told the Wall Street Journal on May 3 that Sinwar has not yet responded to the proposal.[9] Sinwar has previously refused ceasefire proposals.[10] US and Israeli officials have noted since April 2024 that Hamas has been intransigent in negotiations and refusing to agree to a ceasefire despite Israeli concessions.[11]

The Netanyahu government is seeking regional involvement in a post-war plan for the Gaza Strip. Netanyahu’s government is considering shared “oversight” of the Gaza Strip with the United States and some Arab countries after the war according to Israeli officials cited by The New York Times.[12] The United States, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates would share responsibility for redevelopment, education, and security in the Gaza Strip for a period lasting between seven to ten years. Gazans would vote to join a unified Palestinian state with the West Bank after the oversight period. The proposal does not specify if the unified government would constitute a sovereign Palestinian state according to The New York Times. Unspecified Arab officials have rejected the plan because it does not outline a clear path towards a Palestinian state. Israel would share these responsibilities in exchange for diplomatic normalization with Saudi Arabia.

Key Takeaways:

• Yemen: The Houthi movement said it will expand its attacks into the eastern Mediterranean. The Houthis' Shahed-136 can reach the eastern Mediterranean, but Houthi attacks into the Mediterranean will probably be less effective than their attacks into the Red Sea.
• The same capabilities that enable the Houthis to target the Mediterranean to impose costs on Israel can be used in future conflicts—including or excluding Israel—to threaten maritime shipping and impose costs on the West.
• Ceasefire Negotiation: Hamas is slowing its response to an Egyptian-proposed ceasefire that satisfies Hamas’ maximalist demands.
• Post-War Gaza Strip: The Netanyahu government is seeking Saudi, Emirati, US, and Egyptian involvement in the post-war Gaza Strip.
• Military Operations in the Gaza Strip: Palestinian militias conducted indirect fire attacks targeting Israeli forces in the Netzarim corridor.
• West Bank: Israeli security services seized a shipment of smuggled M4/M16 rifle components. These components cannot be assembled into complete rifles, but their existence implies additional shipments with the remaining components for a complete rifle.
• Iran: The Tehran interim prayer leader said that Iran’s April 13 attack targeting Israel served as a useful cross-border exercise between Iran and its regional partner and proxy militias. This suggests that Iran is learning from the April 13 attack to improve its capabilities for future operations.

Gaza Strip

Axis of Resistance objectives:

• Erode the will of the Israeli political establishment and public to sustain clearing operations in the Gaza Strip
• Reestablish Hamas as the governing authority in the Gaza Strip

Palestinian militias have targeted Israeli forces with mortar and rocket fire at least four times in the northern Gaza Strip since CTP-ISW's last data cut off on May 2. The National Resistance Brigades and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) fighters mortared Israeli forces operating in Sheikh Ajlin, in southwest Gaza City.[13] PIJ fighters also mortared Israeli forces in an unspecified area of the Netzarim corridor.[14] Hamas fighters targeted Israeli forces in the Netzarim corridor using its Rajum rocket platform.[15]

Recorded reports of attacks; CTP-ISW cannot independently verify impact.

Hamas launched one rocket attack targeting Nirim on May 3.[16]

West Bank

Axis of Resistance objectives:

• Establish the West Bank as a viable front against Israel

Israeli forces have engaged Palestinian fighters in at least two locations in the West Bank since CTP-ISW's last data cutoff on May 2.[17] Unspecified Palestinian fighters clashed with Israeli forces near Tulkarm on May 2 according to Palestinian media.[18] The Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade targeted Israeli forces and armored vehicles in Jaba, Jenin governorate, with ”machine guns” on May 3.[19]

The IDF interdicted a shipment of smuggled M4/M16 rifle components in an unspecified area of the Jordan Valley on May 3.[20] The IDF reported it seized 14 bolt carrier groups and 30 upper receivers for M4/M16-pattern rifles. The individual pieces interdicted are not enough on their own to assemble an entire weapon. Smugglers have presumably tried or will try to smuggle the remaining 16 bolt carrier groups not in the shipment and the additional necessary pieces for a complete rifle into the West Bank. Israeli forces arrested the weapons smugglers.[21] Unnamed Israeli officials have previously acknowledged that Israeli forces are not able to interdict every smuggling attempt at the Jordanian border[22]

The United Kingdom imposed sanctions on May 3 on four individual Israeli settlers and two settler groups for inciting and perpetrating violence against Palestinian communities in the West Bank.[23] The United Kingdom stated that the groups and individuals were responsible for perpetrating human rights abuses.

Shin Bet arrested a 35-year-old Israeli settler on May 3 suspected for his involvement in the murder of a Palestinian man in April 2024.[24] Israel arrested the man in relation to settler violence targeting Palestinians in the West Bank following the kidnapping and subsequent murder of an Israeli boy on April 12.[25]

This map is not an exhaustive depiction of clashes and demonstrations in the West Bank.

Southern Lebanon and Golan Heights

Axis of Resistance objectives:

• Deter Israel from conducting a ground operation into Lebanon
• Prepare for an expanded and protracted conflict with Israel in the near term
• Expel the United States from Syria

Iranian-backed fighters, including Lebanese Hezbollah, have conducted at least five attacks from southern Lebanon into northern Israel since CTP-ISW's last data cutoff on May 2.[26] The IDF stated that Hezbollah fired a barrage of at least 10 rockets from Lebanon targeting unspecified sites near Mount Meron on May 3.[27] Israeli media reported that Hezbollah fired approximately 18 rockets towards the Mount Meron area.[28] The IDF said that the rockets landed in open areas without injuries or material damage.[29]

The IDF reported that it intercepted a drone over Julis, Lebanon on May 3. Unspecified fighters launched it from Lebanon on May 3.[30]

Recorded reports of attacks; CTP-ISW cannot independently verify impact.

Iran and Axis of Resistance

Israel likely conducted an airstrike targeting a Syrian Arab Army (SAA) building south of Sayyida Zeinab, Rif Dimashq, on May 2. Syrian media reported that Israel conducted an airstrike targeting a Syrian state security headquarters near Najha, Rif Dimashq, resulting in the destruction of the building.[31] The Syrian Ministry of Defense stated that Israel’s airstrike injured eight SAA soldiers and caused material damage.[32] An unnamed Syrian security source told Reuters that the strike targeted a building operated by Syrian security forces and denied that Lebanese Hezbollah or Iranian forces operated the site.[33]

Iranian Armed Forces General Staff Deputy Chief Brig. Gen. Aziz Nasir Zadeh discussed expanding military and defense cooperation with Azerbaijani Deputy Defense Minister Karam Mustafayev in Tehran on May 3.[34] Mustafayev is also the army commander of the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic, which is an Azerbaijani exclave in western Armenia.[35] The Iranian regime has historically opposed Azerbaijani and Turkish efforts to establish the Zangezur corridor between Azerbaijan proper and Nakhchivan because such a corridor would sever Iran’s land access to Russia and Europe via Armenia.[36] It is unclear whether Armenia’s growing estrangement with Russia has changed Iran’s position on this issue, however. Azerbaijan and Iran agreed in October 2023 to build a transportation route between Azerbaijan and Nakhchivan via Iranian territory as an alternative to the Zangezur Corridor.[37]

Tehran Interim Friday Prayer Leader Mohammad Hassan Abu Torabi Fard stated on May 3 that Iran’s recent drone and missile attack targeting Israel was an “exceptional opportunity” to display Iranian military capabilities.[38] Torabi Fard added that the display of Iranian weapons in the attack could "create wealth” for Iran. These statements are consistent with CTP-ISW's assessment that Iran is using its attack on Israel to promote Iranian military exports.[39] Torabi Fard also stated that Iran’s attack on Israel was a "valuable experience” for Iran’s Axis of Resistance. He described the attack as a "large cross-border exercise.”[40] Torabi Fard’s characterization of the attack as a military exercise is consistent with CTP-ISW's assessment that the Iranian regime is very likely studying its attack on Israel to understand how to defeat US and partner air defenses in the future.[41]

The Islamic Resistance in Iraq—a coalition of Iranian-backed Iraqi militias—claimed that it conducted two long-range missile attacks targeting Beer Sheva and Tel Aviv on May 2.[42] Israeli officials and media have not commented on the attacks at the time of this writing. The Islamic Resistance in Iraq claimed that it used “Arqab” cruise missiles in the attacks.[43] The Islamic Resistance in Iraq previously claimed two “Arqab” cruise missile attacks targeting Israel in January 2024.[44] The Islamic Resistance in Iraq separately claimed that it conducted an attack targeting an unspecified “vital target” in the Dead Sea using “appropriate weapons.”[45]

Iranian-backed Iraqi militia Asaib Ahl al Haq Leader Qais al Khazali reiterated that Iraq needs to expel foreign forces during a speech on May 3 for the anniversary of Asaib Ahl al Haq’s founding.[46] Khazali also emphasized the need to achieve “monetary sovereignty” and to elect a new parliament speaker.

US Central Command (CENTCOM) conducted a preemptive strike targeting three one-way attack drones in Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen on May 2.[47] CENTCOM determined that these systems presented an imminent threat to US, coalition, and merchant vessels in the region.

3. United States-Japan-Australia Trilateral Defense Ministers' Meeting (TDMM) 2024 Joint Statement, May 2, 2024

Alliance relationships and "mini-laterals.' Rather than hub and spoke I think the like minded democracies are creating a web of silk like strength that will be able to effectively defend the mutual interests of all partners.

Excerpts:

Inclusive Partnerships:

• Deepen engagement with ASEAN Member States (including through the ADMM-Plus framework), Pacific island countries, India, the Republic of Korea, and like-minded partners and allies to uphold and reinforce free and open international order.
• Coordinate capacity building engagements with regional partners.

The Ministers affirmed that trilateral defense cooperation is essential to maintain regional stability, transparency, and respect for international rules and norms. They reiterated their firm determination to keep the Indo-Pacific free, open, secure, and prosperous while continuing to expand the scope of defense cooperation.

Views on north Korea (like most in the national security community, no one is paying attention to the potential internal instability in the north and the catastrophes that could result from it).

The Ministers are deeply concerned about North Korea's nuclear and missile development. They strongly condemn North Korea's repeated launches of missiles, including intercontinental ballistic missiles and other launches using ballistic missile technology, which are serious violations of United Nations Security Council resolutions. The Ministers strongly condemn the increasing military cooperation between North Korea and Russia, including North Korea's export and Russia's procurement of North Korean ballistic missiles in violation of UNSC resolutions, as well as Russia's use of these missiles against Ukraine. The Ministers remain committed to working with the international community to address North Korea's serious threat to the region. They reiterate their call on North Korea to immediately resolve the abductions issue and cease its human rights violations.

United States-Japan-Australia Trilateral Defense Ministers' Meeting (TDMM) 2024 Joint Statement, May 2, 2024

defense.gov

Australian Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Defence Richard Marles, Japanese Minister of Defense Kihara Minoru, and U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin III convened a Trilateral Defense Ministerial Meeting in Hawaii on May 2, 2024. This was the thirteenth meeting among the defense leaders of the three nations and highlighted the landmark achievements made in implementing activities and practical areas of cooperation set forth in the 2023 Joint Statement.

The Ministers are united by our shared values and determination to deepen cooperation to promote the security, stability, and prosperity of the Indo-Pacific and beyond.

The Ministers welcomed and acknowledged the significance of each country's recently implemented strategic documents, underscoring their deep strategic alignment and shared values. They affirmed the important role that the trilateral partnership contributes to realizing a free and open Indo-Pacific and the significant progress over the past year demonstrating their growing trilateral coordination at all levels and across all domains.

The Ministers reiterated their strong opposition to any attempts by the People's Republic of China (PRC) to unilaterally change the status quo by force or coercion in the South and East China Seas. This includes concerning and destabilizing actions in the South China Sea, such as unsafe encounters at sea and in the air, the militarization of disputed features, and the dangerous use of coast guard vessels and maritime militia, including interference with routine maritime operations, and efforts to disrupt other countries' offshore resource exploration. They strongly objected to China's claims and actions that are inconsistent with international law including the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), and which undermine international rules, standards, and norms. They resolved to work together to support states being able to exercise their rights and freedoms in the maritime domain, including the freedoms of navigation and overflight, consistent with UNCLOS.

The Ministers emphasized the importance of peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait. They called for the peaceful resolution of cross-Strait issues.

The Ministers reaffirmed their enduring commitment to a peaceful, secure, and prosperous Southeast Asia, where sovereignty is respected, international law is followed, and nations can make decisions free from coercion. They reaffirmed their commitment to ASEAN centrality and unity as well as ASEAN-led regional architecture. They recognized the importance of strengthening cooperation with Southeast Asian partners including the Philippines and welcomed the second meeting of Australia, Japan, Philippines, and United States Defense Ministers and Secretary also being held in Hawaii.

The Ministers committed to deepening cooperation with Pacific island countries, by supporting their needs and efforts in the implementation of the Pacific Islands Forum's 2050 Strategy for the Blue Pacific Continent. The Ministers affirmed they will continue expanding regional engagement with Pacific counterparts, particularly through the Pacific Islands Forum of which Australia is a member, and other inclusive Pacific architectures.

The Ministers welcomed the U.S. Coast Guard's deployment of the Harriet Lane Cutter in its inaugural Operation Blue Pacific patrol in Oceania in early 2024. This deployment offered opportunities for the U.S. Coast Guard to work alongside Pacific island countries to share best practices on maritime domain awareness and support efforts led regionally by the Forum Fisheries Agency to combat illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing activities.

The Ministers are deeply concerned about North Korea's nuclear and missile development. They strongly condemn North Korea's repeated launches of missiles, including intercontinental ballistic missiles and other launches using ballistic missile technology, which are serious violations of United Nations Security Council resolutions. The Ministers strongly condemn the increasing military cooperation between North Korea and Russia, including North Korea's export and Russia's procurement of North Korean ballistic missiles in violation of UNSC resolutions, as well as Russia's use of these missiles against Ukraine. The Ministers remain committed to working with the international community to address North Korea's serious threat to the region. They reiterate their call on North Korea to immediately resolve the abductions issue and cease its human rights violations.

The Ministers noted the progress on the introduction of counterstrike capabilities by Japan and investment in long-range strike capabilities by Australia. They confirmed that Australia and Japan would work closely together, and with the United States as these capabilities are introduced.

The Ministers acknowledge the significant progress made by Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States over the past year to implement AUKUS, and noted the positive contribution the AUKUS partnership has on the security and stability in the region. Recognizing Japan's strengths and its close bilateral defense partnerships with all three AUKUS countries, the Ministers acknowledged that AUKUS partners are considering cooperation with Japan on AUKUS Pillar II advanced capability projects.

The Ministers welcomed the August 2023 entry into force of the Japan-Australia Reciprocal Access Agreement (RAA), which will enable deeper trilateral cooperation and enhance interoperability by facilitating Australian Defence Force presence alongside the United States Forces in Japan and Japanese Self-Defense Forces alongside the United States Forces in Australia. They marked the inaugural reciprocal deployments of Japan's F-35A aircraft to Australia and Australia's F-35A aircraft to Japan in 2023 as the first cooperative activities under the RAA. Additionally, Ministers welcomed upcoming activities planned for trilateral F-35 joint training in 2025 and 2026. They noted progress on trilateral training using ranges in Australia and the successful conduct of Japan's first anti-air and anti-ship missile launch in Australia in 2023. The Ministers commit to leveraging the RAA to enable Japan's participation, alongside the United States Armed Forces, in force posture activities in Australia over the coming year.

The Ministers welcomed the historic inaugural achievements and activities in trilateral work over the past year and reaffirmed their intent to increase the complexity and scope of their work together. Since 2022, the three militaries have conducted multiple coordinated Asset Protection Missions, undertaken trilateral transits in the South China Sea, and increased the complexity of trilateral Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) cooperation including actual operations in the maritime and air domains. They committed to expanding trilateral ISR cooperation.

The Ministers welcomed Australia's valuable inaugural participation in the U.S.-Japan command post exercise, KEEN EDGE, in February, and the work underway to advance closer operational collaboration.

The Ministers reaffirmed their vision toward a networked air defense architecture among the United States, Japan, and Australia to counter growing air and missile threats in the Indo-Pacific region, including broadening missile defense information sharing and incorporating future capabilities. They announced their intent for the U.S. Armed Forces, Australian Defence Force, and Japan Self-Defense Forces to conduct an inaugural regional air and missile defense live fire exercise in 2027 at Exercise TALISMAN SABRE.

Today Ministers signed the trilateral Research, Development, Test, and Evaluation (RDT&E) Projects Arrangement. Science and technology cooperation is vital to maintain their collective edge and deepen their defense cooperation. This landmark arrangement allows the respective defense organizations to pursue areas of interest for operationally-relevant advanced collaboration. Through this arrangement the ministries will further discuss cooperative opportunities in the areas of collaborative combat aircraft and autonomous systems and composite aerospace materials.

Reflecting the critical role the trilateral partnership plays in upholding regional stability, the Ministers committed to enhance our defense cooperation across the following areas:

Trilateral Activities and Exercises:

• Conduct trilateral F-35 Joint Strike Fighter trainings in all three countries in the next two years, including exercises such as:
• Exercise COPE NORTH 2025 – United States
• Exercise BUSHIDO GUARDIAN 2025 – Japan
• Exercise PITCH BLACK 2026 – Australia
• Continue increasing the frequency and complexity of high-end trilateral exercises in northern Australia such as Exercise SOUTHERN JACKAROO.
• Increase opportunities and enhance the complexity of ISR cooperation.
• Regularize Asset Protection Missions for the U.S. Forces and the Australian Defence Force by Japan Self-Defense Forces and transits by Australia, Japan, the United States, and other partners.
• Accelerate and deepen trilateral information-sharing cooperation.
• Continue trilateral policy and strategy dialogues on regional issues.

Expanded Cooperation:

• Pursue trilateral Research Development Test and Evaluation (RDT&E) Arrangement cooperative opportunities in operationally-relevant advanced technologies.
• Boost strategic capabilities cooperation across multiple domains, including the conduct of an inaugural joint and combined live fire air and missile defense exercise in 2027 at Exercise TALISMAN SABRE.
• Increase Japan's participation in Australia-U.S. force posture cooperation activities.

Inclusive Partnerships:

• Deepen engagement with ASEAN Member States (including through the ADMM-Plus framework), Pacific island countries, India, the Republic of Korea, and like-minded partners and allies to uphold and reinforce free and open international order.
• Coordinate capacity building engagements with regional partners.

The Ministers affirmed that trilateral defense cooperation is essential to maintain regional stability, transparency, and respect for international rules and norms. They reiterated their firm determination to keep the Indo-Pacific free, open, secure, and prosperous while continuing to expand the scope of defense cooperation.

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4. Opinion The dangerous new call for regime change in Beijing

Let me say that I beleive China seeks to export its authoritarian political system around the world in order to dominate regions, co-opt or coerce international organizations, create economic conditions favorable to China alone, and displace democratic institutions.

Be careful what you ask for. For all those who advocate for the collapse of the PRC and the CCP I request to see your strategy and plans for what comes next? How do you expect to be prepared for the collapse of the PRC/CCP? What preparations do you recommend we make to deal with a collapse PRC/CCP? "Show me the money (plans)"

That said, change must come from within. Effective change can only come from within. But what we all overlook is the reason for why change is justified. Article 21 of the Universal Declaration of Human RIghts describes that it is the right of people to determine their own government. Specifically, self determination of government is a human right. 

UN Declaration of Universal Human Rights

Article 21 

1. Everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country, directly or through freely chosen representatives. 

2. Everyone has the right of equal access to public service in his country. 

3. The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government; this shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures.

https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights

Opinion 

 The dangerous new call for regime change in Beijing

Republicans criticize Biden for being too soft on China. Their preferred approach is much more dangerous.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/05/03/china-republicans-strategy-biden-weak/

By Fareed Zakaria

Columnist|

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May 3, 2024 at 6:45 a.m. EDT

President Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping shake hands before a meeting of the Group of 20 in Bali, Indonesia, on Nov. 14, 2022. (Alex Brandon/AP)

The world is a tense place these days, with Europe consumed by its biggest land war since 1945 and conflict continuing to convulse the Middle East. These tensions would pale into insignificance, however, if a third arena were to erupt — in Asia, involving the United States and China. Those tensions have in fact calmed down in recent months as both Washington and Beijing have sought to stabilize their relationship. But there are now cries in Washington to change that.

In an essay in Foreign Affairs, Matt Pottinger and Mike Gallagher argue that the United States should adopt a Cold War-style containment policy toward China, a strategy whose goal should be a victory that would encourage the Chinese people to “explore new models of development and governance.” Pottinger acknowledged on my CNN show last week that “an effective U.S. strategy might naturally lead to some form of regime collapse.” Pottinger was Donald Trump’s senior-most aide on China policy, and Gallagher, a former congressman, chaired the House select committee on China. Their views will likely shape the next Republican administration.

Pottinger and Gallagher argue that President Biden’s strategy — managing competition with China — does not go nearly far enough. The authors accuse the Biden administration of pursuing a 1970s-style détente policy toward China when it should be pursuing a 1980s-style Reaganite policy designed to push Beijing to the brink. According to them, we should welcome more friction and tension with China.

This is an important essay because it lays out clearly the alternative strategy being proposed by some on the right. By putting their cards on the table, Pottinger and Gallagher help us understand the reckless, dangerous and utterly impractical nature of their preferred policy.

China today bears little resemblance to the Soviet Union of the 1970s and 1980s. The Soviet Union was an unnatural empire, cobbled together after World War II, with a decrepit economic model that had started to fail by the mid-1970s. China is the world’s second-largest economy and largest trading nation. Unlike the Soviet Union’s totally state-owned economy, China has a mixture of private and public sector. Ninety-two percent of China’s exports come from a vibrant private sector, including 42 percent from firms with foreign investors. Despite its recent troubles, the Chinese economy is still growing at around 5 percent and, because of its size, is likely to stay the world’s second-most important economy for decades.

The Soviet Union was an isolated economy, whereas China is deeply integrated into the global system. Trade between the United States and the Soviet Union peaked at several billion dollars a year. China and the United States do that much trade every few days. The Soviet Union’s gross domestic product was around $3.2 trillion at its peak, roughly 7.5 percent of world GDP. Today, China’s GDP is about 20 percent of global GDP.

Most fundamentally, the Soviet Union was largely a natural resource economy — a Siberian Saudi Arabia — deriving much of its growth from extractive industries such as oil, gas, coal, nickel and aluminum. China is a diversified manufacturing powerhouse with an increasingly sophisticated information technology industry that is second only to the United States. In fact, looking back, it’s clear that in the 1970s, the Soviet economy had stalled, before receiving a last lifeline when global oil prices quadrupled. By the 1980s, oil prices had collapsed — and then so did the Soviet Union.

Were the United States to embark on a policy of containment, it would likely find itself alone. China is the largest trading partner of over 120 countries around the world, far more than the United States can claim.

And most of these countries are eager to maintain good ties with Beijing. Eighty-two percent of Nigerians, for example, say Chinese investment has been a boon to their economy. Even European nations — America’s closest allies — have made clear that they view China as much as a partner as they do a rival. French President Emmanuel Macron noted last year that even in the worst-case situation of a conflict over Taiwan, Europe should be careful not to mimic U.S. hostility toward Beijing. And while he was criticized for those remarks, as one German businessman noted to me, “We all privately believe what Macron said publicly.” German Chancellor Olaf Scholz was in China last month, hoping to deepen economic ties between the two countries.

American strategies of regime change have rarely worked. Think of Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea, Iraq and Afghanistan. And they are unlikely to work this time, especially in a country like China, where the regime is broadly credited with bringing major economic progress for its people. After decades of poverty and misery, average incomes in China grew ninefold from 1978 to 2015.

The current bellicosity on the right reminds me of the growing demands for regime change against Iraq two decades ago. But this would be even worse. Because of China’s size and engagement with the world, a strategy of containment and overthrow would take the United States down a hair-raising path. Sustained confrontation would unravel the global economy, risk isolating the United States, and raise the odds of a world war over Taiwan. It is worth some sober reflection before embarking down this road.

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Opinion by Fareed Zakaria

Fareed Zakaria writes a foreign affairs column for The Post. He is also the host of CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS. Twitter

5. The Death of a Treaty Could Be a Lifesaver for Taiwan

The Death of a Treaty Could Be a Lifesaver for Taiwan

The New York Times · by John Ismay · May 3, 2024

Since pulling out of an arms-limitation agreement with Russia in 2019, the U.S. has quickly developed new weapons that could be used to stop a Chinese invasion force.

In this photo provided by the U.S. Army, the Typhon Strategic Mid-Range Fires (SMRF) System, formerly known as a Mid-Range Capability system, arrived in Philippines in April.Credit...Ryan DeBooy/U.S. Army

By  John Ismay

Reporting from Washington

May 3, 2024, 10:07 a.m. ET

During a military exercise with the Philippines that began last month, the U.S. Army deployed a new type of covert weapon that is designed to be hidden in plain sight.

Called Typhon, it consists of a modified 40-foot shipping container that conceals up to four missiles that rotate upward to fire. It can be loaded with weapons including the Tomahawk — a cruise missile that can hit targets on land and ships at sea more than 1,150 miles away.

The weapon, and other small mobile launchers like it, would have been illegal just five years ago under the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which prohibited U.S. and Russian forces from having land-based cruise or ballistic missiles with ranges between about 300 miles and 3,400 miles.

In 2019, President Donald J. Trump abandoned the treaty, in part because the United States believed Russia had violated the terms of the pact for years. But U.S. officials said that China, with its growing long-range missile arsenal, was also a reason the Trump administration decided to withdraw.

The decision freed the Pentagon to build the weapons that are now poised to defend Taiwan from a Chinese invasion. It also coincided with a rethinking of modern war by U.S. Marine Corps leaders. They recommended retiring certain heavyweight and cumbersome weapons like 155-millimeter howitzers and tanks — which they thought would be of little use against Chinese forces in the Pacific — and replacing them with lighter and more flexible arms like truck-mounted anti-ship missiles.

At the time, the Pentagon had no land-based anti-ship weapons. Other militaries, however, already did. Then in April 2022, Ukrainian ground troops used a similar weapon, Neptune anti-ship cruise missiles launched from trucks, to sink the Russian cruiser Moskva in the Black Sea.

Despite the success of the Moskva attack, a group of retired Marine generals publicly criticized the Corps’ plans to prioritize similar weapons at the expense of more traditional arms. They said the service was focusing on China to the detriment of other potential threats, and that getting rid of tanks and some heavy artillery would leave Marines unprepared for a major conflict in other parts of the world.

At a meeting of the Defense Writers Group in December 2022, Gen. David H. Berger, then the Marines’ top general, acknowledged that he had been criticized by former colleagues but said his decisions were informed by intelligence reports the retirees could not obtain.

U.S. military and civilian leaders believed that President Xi Jinping of China planned to follow through on his many pledges to reunite Taiwan with Beijing by diplomatic means, or by force if necessary. And the Moskva’s hull rusting on the seafloor pointed to a possible way to dissuade Beijing from military action.

Pentagon officials believed that deterring China would not require a missile like the newest Tomahawk, which can attack ships with the equivalent of about a half-ton of TNT, nor even one like Ukraine’s Neptune, which carries a warhead about a third of that size.

Instead, positioning even smaller missiles to disable Chinese frigates, destroyers and amphibious craft could be enough, U.S. officials came to think, given their belief that Mr. Xi would try to invade only if he believed he would succeed in a relatively bloodless operation before American troops responded.

Targeting officers selected a Navy missile called SM-6, for Standard Missile 6, that seemed right for the job.

With a warhead about half the size as the one carried by the Neptune, the SM-6 could evade a Chinese warship’s defenses and, on impact, change the crew’s mission from invasion to survival.

Setting squadrons of Chinese amphibious ships packed with troops ablaze in the Taiwan Strait, Pentagon officials believed, would not only protect the de facto independent island but may also make Mr. Xi’s own grip on power within the Communist Party untenable.

Without the legal restrictions of the I.N.F. Treaty, the Pentagon began experimenting with existing assets.

Sealed canisters containing Tomahawk and SM-6 missiles were mounted onto small trucks and hidden in shipping containers.

Publicly, the Navy says the missile has a maximum range of about 115 miles. But the SM-6 can in fact reach targets at ranges of 290 miles, officials confirmed to The New York Times, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive weapons capabilities.

In the event of hostilities with China, the Philippines could invoke its longstanding mutual defense pact with Washington, inviting U.S. forces to deploy mobile missile launchers to any of the nine Philippine military bases that the Pentagon has secured access to in the past decade.

Some of those partner bases are clustered on Luzon Island, where SM-6 missiles could threaten Chinese ships in the waterway between the northernmost reaches of the Philippines and Taiwan.

Last year the Pentagon gained access to a base on Balabac Island in southwestern Philippines. From there, the same weapon could reach China’s collection of militarized reefs in the Spratly Islands, which have become a major base of operations for Beijing’s efforts to control the South China Sea.

A new security agreement signed in August between Washington and Tokyo could offer a third strategic location for Taiwan’s defense in case of war — military bases in Japan’s far western Ryukyu chain. From one such facility on Yonaguni Island, where U.S. forces train with their Japanese counterparts, an SM-6 could hit any target surrounding Taiwan and threaten bases on the Chinese mainland right across the strait.

With the longer-range Tomahawk, truck-based launchers and Typhons secreted on small islands within a thousand miles of the Chinese mainland could largely obviate one of Beijing’s greatest perceived strengths: missiles developed in China that its military leaders claim could sink an American aircraft carrier sent to defend Taiwan.

A New Pacific Arsenal to Counter China

With missiles, submarines and alliances, the Biden administration has built a presence in the region to rein in Beijing’s expansionist goals.

John Ismay is a reporter covering the Pentagon for The Times. He served as an explosive ordnance disposal officer in the U.S. Navy. More about John Ismay

The New York Times · by John Ismay · May 3, 2024

6. China increases aggressive moves against Taiwan as island prepares to inaugurate new president

China increases aggressive moves against Taiwan as island prepares to inaugurate new president

The island democracy elected William Lai to be its new president in January

By Eryk Michael Smith Fox News

Published May 4, 2024 4:00am EDT

foxnews.com · by Eryk Michael Smith Fox News

Video

Taiwan's election shows people ‘firmly rejected reunification with China’: Helen Raleigh

The Federalist senior contributor Helen Raleigh breaks down the significance of Taiwan’s election amid China tensions.

KAOHSIUNG — Virtually every day, the People’s Republic of China does something unprecedented — its coast guard briefly boarding a Taiwanese tourist boat, flying military aircraft ever closer to Taiwan or increasing harassment of Taiwanese fishing boats in the South China Sea.

"This is a problem," says Dean Karalekas, author of "Civil-Military Relations in Taiwan: Identity and Transformation." "Because these unprecedented actions are creating a new normal. Beijing hopes that we (the West) will sit by and watch as they take over Taiwan, just as we did when they used these same salami-slicing tactics to take over the South China Sea."

The world began noticing more of China’s hostile actions following the visit to Taiwan by former U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in 2023, but the strategy has been in place for some time.

"China’s plan to ‘normalize’ military encroachments was planned long before Pelosi’s visit," Taipei Times columnist and political commentator C. Donovan Smith told Fox News Digital. "The military exercises were far too complex and logistically complicated to have been planned in the short span of time between the announcement of her trip and her arrival in Taiwan."

TAIWAN ELECTION: RULING PARTY CANDIDATE WINS TIGHTLY CONTESTED PRESIDENTIAL RACE, UPSETTING CHINA'S AMBITIONS

President-elect William Lai votes in southern Taiwan's Tainan city Jan. 13, 2024. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)

Surrounding Taiwan in a mock "quarantine" and performing missile "tests" in 2023 was also intended to push Taiwanese voters toward politicians and parties more friendly to China. But, as has been the case in the last three elections here, Beijing’s ploys were ineffectual. Taiwan in January elected the incumbent vice president, William Lai, to take over from two-term President Tsai Ing-wen. Both Tsai and Lai are members of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP).

The incoming Taiwan president has repeatedly pledged to make no changes to policies in place over the last eight years. Beijing, however, sees William Lai (Lai Ching-te) as a "splittist" and a supporter of Taiwan independence. Lai previously did voice support for independence but has tried to walk that back. China, however, does not forgive nor forget. Many political experts believe Beijing will ratchet up pressure as Lai enters office later this month.

Chinese President Xi Jinping waves at an event to introduce new members of the Politburo Standing Committee at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing Oct. 23, 2022. (AP Photo/Andy Wong, File)

A recent example of China’s attempts to establish this "new normal" is changes to airspace rules. China is close to finishing a massive new airport serving Xiamen in Fujian Province. Just 6.2 miles away, however, sits the island of Kinmen, which has remained a part of the Republic of China (ROC), better known as Taiwan, since 1949.

Kinmen Airport is strategically important for Taiwan. In 2015, the two sides worked out a deal to change a flight path that was a bit too close for Taiwan’s comfort. But in February, Beijing unilaterally backed out of the deal, announcing that, from May 16, new air routes would begin operating to "further optimize airspace" around the area.

FOR CHINA'S MILITARY PLANNERS, TAIWAN IS NOT AN EASY ISLAND TO INVADE

A fighter jet flies in the direction of Taiwan as seen from the 68-nautical-mile scenic spot, the closest point in mainland China to the island of Taiwan, in Pingtan in southeastern China's Fujian Province Aug. 5, 2022. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)

Few China watchers think China picked the day arbitrarily, says Karalekas.

"Beijing has a pattern of testing new leaders of enemy states. They tested Bush with the EP-3E spy plane incident. They tested (then-Japanese prime minister) Naoto Kan with the Senkaku boat collision. We can expect them to test Lai by creating some sort of mini-crisis around the time he takes office on May 20."

"I think China is really ramping up threats," Eric Hsu told Fox News Digital. Hsu lives in southern Taiwan’s biggest city, Kaohsiung, has worked on historical restoration projects and hosts a podcast on Taiwan history.

He says he isn’t only worried about military hardware, but also what he termed, "brainwashing videos and moves by KOLs," (Key Opinion Leaders, a term used to describe internet influencers).

Military vehicles equipped with a U.S.-made TOW 2A missile during a live fire drill in Pingtung, Taiwan, July 3, 2023. (REUTERS/Ann Wang)

Hsu places much of the blame at the feet of local opposition parties seen by many as more friendly to Beijing. Describing the current domestic political situation, he said Taiwan faces "not just an enemy at the gate, but also enemies within." South Taiwan is a DPP stronghold, but not everyone in the south agrees that the opposition parties are the problem.

Another resident of Kaohsiung, a self-employed businessperson and mother, Ms. Lin, thinks the DPP hasn’t been sincere in reaching out to China.

"They’ve had eight years, and now they will get at least another four," Lin told Fox News Digital. "What Taiwan needs are brave leaders, people willing to try new solutions, and I don’t see any such people in the current DPP leadership."

TAIWAN PRESIDENT-ELECT CHOOSES NEW FOREIGN, DEFENSE MINISTERS AS CHINA ANNEXATION THREATS INTENSIFY

Soldiers disembark from AAV7 amphibious assault vehicles during the Han Kuang military exercise, which simulates the China's People's Liberation Army invading the island July 28, 2022 in Pingtung, Taiwan. (Annabelle Chih/Getty Images)

The main opposition party, the Kuomintang (KMT), denies it is "China-friendly" and instead says it is "peace-friendly." Chinese dictator Xi Jinping has met with the KMT’s Ma Ying-jeou twice, first in Singapore in 2015 when Ma was in office as ROC (Taiwan) president. It was the first time since the end of WWII top leaders from China and Taiwan sat in the same room. Each side in 2015 chose to ignore official titles and address each other as "Mr. Xi" and "Mr. Ma." On April 10,, "Mr. Xi" and former Taiwan president "Mr. Ma" met again, this time in Beijing.

Some experts see such meetings between the KMT and China favorably, arguing that any dialogue is good and – if nothing else – provides a way for China to save face as it continues its policy of mandatory "reunification," which China now says may need to be achieved by force. Others in Taiwan and abroad see Ma’s meetings as straying far too close to an acceptance of the idea that Taiwan is a part of China.

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A Chinese warship sails during a military drill near the Taiwan-controlled Matsu Islands near the Chinese coast April 8. (Reuters/Thomas Peter)

As it stands, the ruling DPP says it’s content with the status quo, including keeping Taiwan’s official name, the Republic of China. The KMT is generally more in favor of talks with Beijing under a mutual respect "consensus" idea that boils down to agreeing that both sides are "China," but each side is free to interpret what this "one China" means.

The problem with the KMT’s thinking, central Taiwan-based newspaper columnist and political commentator Michael Turton told Fox News Digital, is that "Xi’s goal is the complete subjugation of Taiwan, just like Hong Kong. Two of China’s ambassadors abroad have already indicated that Taiwanese opposed to Beijing rule will be shipped off to concentration camps. Given this goal, how can there ever be dialogue with mutual respect?"

Eryk Michael Smith is a Taiwan-based correspondent who since 2007, has worked both as a broadcast journalist for the island's only English-language radio station, ICRT, as well as with numerous other publications and local news outlets. Smith's journalism focuses on Taiwan-China relations, local politics, as well as science and technology developments in the greater China region. He is based in Taiwan's largest southern city, Kaohsiung. He can be followed @ErykSmithTaiwan

foxnews.com · by Eryk Michael Smith Fox News

7. Taiwan issued dire warning about Russia-China dual threat

I do not think the headline matches the text. I do not see Taiwan issuing a dire warning, just us. The real issue is can we fight two wars simultaneously. As the analysis and assessments "mature over time" will that mean we will be able to defend against two simultaneous threats?

Excerpts:

"We see China and Russia, for the first time, exercising together in relation to Taiwan and recognizing that this is a place where China definitely wants Russia to be working with them, and we see no reason why they wouldn't," Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines said on Thursday.

She was responding to a question from Sen. Mike Rounds (R-SD), who asked whether one of the countries would assist the other in a conflict with the U.S. and its allies.

Asked whether the Pentagon was taking its knowledge of enhanced Beijing-Moscow collaboration in its planning, Kruse said: "From the Department of Defense perspective, that would certainly be the case, and it just has to be taken into account whether or not we actually believe there would be two full-up fronts. That is analysis and assessments that will mature over time."

Taiwan issued dire warning about Russia-China dual threat

Published May 03, 2024 at 9:21 AM EDT

Updated May 03, 2024 at 2:54 PM EDT

Newsweek · by Micah McCartney · May 3, 2024

Russia and China are strengthening their military cooperation, including on Taiwan, U.S. intelligence officials warned during a congressional hearing on Thursday.

"Bottom line is that basically, if we were to have a conflict with one, the chances are we would have a second front," Lt Gen. Jeffrey Kruse, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, said.

Moscow-Beijing ties have soared to new heights since the countries announced a "no limits" partnership shortly before Russia's February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Increased bilateral trade has helped buoy Russia's heavily sanctioned economy, while Russia has provided China with cheap oil and natural gas.

China maintains it is neutral regarding the Russia-Ukraine war but censors social media content critical of Moscow's war, which Beijing has neither condemned nor labeled an invasion.

"We see China and Russia, for the first time, exercising together in relation to Taiwan and recognizing that this is a place where China definitely wants Russia to be working with them, and we see no reason why they wouldn't," Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines said on Thursday.

Russian President Vladimir Putin meets with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping at the Kremlin in Moscow on March 21, 2023. On May 2, U.S. intelligence officials said China-Russia military cooperation is stronger than ever. Russian President Vladimir Putin meets with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping at the Kremlin in Moscow on March 21, 2023. On May 2, U.S. intelligence officials said China-Russia military cooperation is stronger than ever. Sergei Karpukhin/AFP via Getty Images

She was responding to a question from Sen. Mike Rounds (R-SD), who asked whether one of the countries would assist the other in a conflict with the U.S. and its allies.

Asked whether the Pentagon was taking its knowledge of enhanced Beijing-Moscow collaboration in its planning, Kruse said: "From the Department of Defense perspective, that would certainly be the case, and it just has to be taken into account whether or not we actually believe there would be two full-up fronts. That is analysis and assessments that will mature over time."

China claims democratic Taiwan as its territory, though the ruling Chinese Communist Party in Beijing has never ruled there, and vows to someday bring it into the fold—through force if necessary.

Though Washington switched official relations from Taipei to Beijing in 1979, the U.S. maintains friendly ties with Taiwan and is the self-ruled island's greatest weapons supplier.

For decades, U.S. administrations have maintained a careful policy of "strategic ambiguity" to keep China guessing whether the U.S. would commit troops to Taiwan's defense in the event of an assault.

Russia and China have conducted several five military drills since 2022, including last year in the Sea of Japan and the East China Sea.

In March, Chinese and Russian warships joined Iran in a series of exercises in the Gulf of Oman, with China's defense ministry saying the drills were to meant to "jointly maintaining regional maritime security."

While China denies it has provided Russia with lethal weaponry, Chinese companies are the source of drones and most drone-related components being used by invading Russian forces, Ukrainian researchers have said.

Washington has sanctioned a number of the Chinese firms allegedly involved in such activities. In recent months, the Biden administration has also introduced sanctions targeting firms and financial institutions involved in transactions with Russia across a range of industries.

Last month, the U.S. accused Beijing of providing the Kremlin with satellite imagery to assist its forces in Ukraine, and Chinese forces.

China's foreign ministry and Taiwan's de facto embassy in the U.S. did not immediately respond to written requests for comment.

Newsweek · by Micah McCartney · May 3, 2024

8. China-Taiwan Weekly Update, May 3, 2024

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/china-taiwan-weekly-update-may-3-2024

Key Takeaways

• The PRC eased cross-strait trade and travel restrictions after hosting a Kuomintang delegation. The PRC ended the trade bans after hosting the KMT delegation as a form of economic coercion that aims to reduce domestic support for the Democratic Progressive Party in Taiwan.
• President-elect Lai Ching-te announced his national security cabinet picks on April 25. The reshuffling of cabinet posts is telling of Lai’s intent to stay the course in cross-strait policy.
• The CCP signaled during US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s visit to the PRC the potential for cooperation in US-PRC relations while asserting that US actions—including economic measures against the PRC and support for Taiwan–risk competition and instability.
• The Chinese Coast Guard and Chinese Maritime Militia failed to block a Philippine Coast Guard resupply mission near Scarborough Shoal on April 30. This is the latest PRC effort to enforce the CCP’s territorial claims in the South China Sea.
• CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping will visit France, Serbia, and Hungary from May 5 to 10 as part of a charm offensive to build ties with the European states and block the formation of a stricter EU policy on China.
• The PRC hosted “reconciliation” talks between Fatah and Hamas in Beijing and endorsed the strengthening of the Palestinian Authority. Hosting the intra-Palestinian talks is a relatively low-cost, low-risk way for the PRC to bolster its diplomatic reputation and signal its intent to play an active diplomatic role in the Middle East.

CHINA-TAIWAN WEEKLY UPDATE, MAY 3, 2024

May 3, 2024 - ISW Press

Download the PDF

China-Taiwan Weekly Update, May 3, 2024

Authors: Nils Peterson, Matthew Sperzel, and Daniel Shats of the Institute for the Study of War

Editors: Dan Blumenthal and Frederick W. Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute

Data Cutoff: April 30 at 5pm ET

The China–Taiwan Weekly Update is a joint product from the Institute for the Study of War and the American Enterprise Institute. The update supports the ISW–AEI Coalition Defense of Taiwan project, which assesses Chinese campaigns against Taiwan, examines alternative strategies for the United States and its allies to deter the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) aggression, and—if necessary—defeat the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). The update focuses on the Chinese Communist Party’s paths to controlling Taiwan and cross–Taiwan Strait developments.

Key Takeaways

• The PRC eased cross-strait trade and travel restrictions after hosting a Kuomintang delegation. The PRC ended the trade bans after hosting the KMT delegation as a form of economic coercion that aims to reduce domestic support for the Democratic Progressive Party in Taiwan.
• President-elect Lai Ching-te announced his national security cabinet picks on April 25. The reshuffling of cabinet posts is telling of Lai’s intent to stay the course in cross-strait policy.
• The CCP signaled during US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s visit to the PRC the potential for cooperation in US-PRC relations while asserting that US actions—including economic measures against the PRC and support for Taiwan–risk competition and instability.
• The Chinese Coast Guard and Chinese Maritime Militia failed to block a Philippine Coast Guard resupply mission near Scarborough Shoal on April 30. This is the latest PRC effort to enforce the CCP’s territorial claims in the South China Sea.
• CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping will visit France, Serbia, and Hungary from May 5 to 10 as part of a charm offensive to build ties with the European states and block the formation of a stricter EU policy on China.
• The PRC hosted “reconciliation” talks between Fatah and Hamas in Beijing and endorsed the strengthening of the Palestinian Authority. Hosting the intra-Palestinian talks is a relatively low-cost, low-risk way for the PRC to bolster its diplomatic reputation and signal its intent to play an active diplomatic role in the Middle East.

Cross-Strait Relations

The People’s Republic of China (PRC) eased cross-strait trade and travel restrictions after hosting a Kuomintang (KMT) delegation. The PRC ended the trade bans after hosting the KMT delegation as a form of economic coercion that aims to reduce domestic support for the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) in Taiwan. KMT Caucus Whip Fu Kun-chi traveled to the PRC on April 26, where he met with CCP officials throughout the weekend. Fu met with General Administration of Customs Deputy Director Zhao Zenglian on April 28. Zhao announced during the meeting that the PRC would lift its ban on imports of Wendan pomelos and two types of fish from Taiwan.[1] The PRC implemented the bans as a form of economic punishment after then-US Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi arrived in Taiwan in August 2022.[2] The PRC’s import bans significantly reduced income for Taiwanese exporters, as the PRC is an important export market for the banned goods, especially Wendan pomelos. The PRC accounted for over two-thirds of Taiwan’s pomelo exports before the ban.[3] Director General of the Ruisui Township Farmers’ Association Huang Sheng-huang claimed that the PRC accounted for 90% of Wendan pomelo exports from Hualien County, Fu Kun- Chi’s district. [4]The change in CCP policy signals to farmers and fishermen in Taiwan that they stand to benefit from the KMT’s cross-strait engagements and lose from the DPP’s.

Fu also met with Ministry of Culture and Tourism Vice Minister Rao Quan the same day, during which Rao announced the PRC would allow Fujian residents to travel to Taiwan’s Matsu islands again.[5] The Matsu Islands make up an archipelago close to the PRC coast. Representatives from the agriculture and travel industries have called for the ROC government to reciprocate the PRC’s loosening. Chairman of the Travel Agent Association of Taiwan Hsiao Bo-ren urged Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) to respond in kind.[6] A program on the PRC state-run China Central Radio and Television posted on its WeChat on April 30, calling on the DPP to lift restrictions to allow tourism to return to normal and stop obstructing cross-strait exchanges.[7]

The PRC’s use of economic bargaining chips to influence Taiwan’s politics is not new. The PRC ended its suspension of Taiwanese grouper imports in December 2023, two weeks before the presidential election, citing action from the KMT to address quality concerns.[8] KMT Vice Chairman Andrew Hsia, who has held numerous meetings with CCP officials since assuming his role in 2021, travelled to the mainland earlier that year to lobby for an end to the import suspension.[9] TAO spokesperson Zhu Fenglian accredited the successful negotiations to the CCP and KMT’s mutual recognition of the 1992 Consensus, which the DPP does not recognize. The 1992 Consensus states that both sides agree there is only one China, and that Taiwan is part of the only China. The CCP claims that China is the PRC, while the KMT simply acknowledges the differences in interpretations of “one China.”

Fu met with Taiwan Affairs Office (TAO) Director Song Tao and Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) Chairman Wang Huning on April 27. Wang stated that both sides of the Taiwan Strait belong to the Chinese nation and expressed hope for greater cross-strait exchanges.[10] Fu echoed Wang’s sentiments and advocated for greater cooperation between the CCP and KMT on their “common political basis.”[11] Wang’s role as CPPCC chairman, which is a leading United Front organization, and as deputy leader of the Central Leading Group for Taiwan Affairs make him one of the top CCP officials responsible for overseeing the PRC’s policy toward Taiwan. TAO spokesperson Zhu Fenglian also stated on April 27 that the PRC is willing to donate prefabricated houses to Hualien County, where a recent earthquake wrought extensive damage.[12]

Taiwan

President-elect Lai Ching-te announced his national security cabinet picks on April 25. Old hands from President Tsai Ing-wen’s cabinet comprise the picks, although they will serve in different capacities. National Security Council (NSC) Secretary-General Wellington Koo will head Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense (MND) and current Foreign Minister Joseph Wu will replace Koo at the NSC. Lin Chia-lung, the current Secretary General to the President and former ambassador-at-large for Taiwan's digital New Southbound Policy initiatives, will head the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA). Former deputy minister of the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) and current vice chairman of the Straits Exchange Foundation Chiu Chui-cheng will become minister of the MAC. National Security Bureau (NSC) Director General Tsai Ming-yen will remain in his post.

The reshuffling of cabinet posts is telling of Lai’s intent to stay the course in cross-strait policy. During a presidential candidate debate in December, Lai praised Tsai In-wen’s diplomatic line and touted his qualifications to continue her policy, being her vice president.[13] The PRC regards the DPP as a separatist party that wants to pursue formal Taiwanese statehood (as opposed to the Republic of China) and suspended diplomatic communication with the DPP government in 2016. TAO Spokesperson Zhu Fenglian described Taiwan independence workers as “war makers” during the election season, referring to Lai.[14] The TAO responded to Lai’s victory in the January presidential election by condemning the DPP’s “separatist plots” and vowing to resist the DPP’s “independence provocations.”[15] Lai previously described himself as a “pragmatic worker for Taiwan independence” during his premiership in 2017, but later stated that there was no need to formally declare Taiwan’s independence from the ROC.[16]

China

The CCP signaled during US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s visit to the PRC the potential for cooperation in US-PRC relations while asserting that US actions—including economic measures against the PRC and support for Taiwan–risk competition and instability. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken met CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping and PRC Foreign Minister Wang Yi in separate meetings during his trip to the PRC on April 26. Xi’s comments in the PRC readout largely took a positive tone about US-PRC relations. Xi said the two countries should be partners, not rivals, and that they should engage in win-win cooperation and implement the “San Francisco Vision” of his and US President Joe Biden’s meeting in November 2023. Xi said the PRC is willing to cooperate, but cooperation must go both ways; that the PRC is not afraid of competition, but competition should be about common progress and not a zero-sum game; and that the PRC does not form alliances and the United States likewise should not form “small circles” – a reference to US-led multilateral regional partnerships that exclude and target the PRC.[17] Wang Yi also praised the San Francisco meeting and said that US-PRC relations have “generally stopped declining and stabilized.” His remarks focused far more than Xi’s on accumulating “negative factors” in the relationship, however. Wang urged the United States to stop arming Taiwan, refrain from sending “wrong signals” to Taiwan “separatists,” and not use Taiwan as a tool to contain China. Wang also criticized the United States for “endless measures to suppress China’s economy, trade, science and technology.” He said it should stop promoting the “false narrative” of PRC “overcapacity” and lift “illegal sanctions” and tariffs. Wang finally stressed that the Asia-Pacific should “not become a battleground for major powers.” He urged the United States to stop “forming small circles,” stop “coercing” countries in the region to choose sides and stop deploying intermediate-range missiles to the region.[18]

A PRC readout claimed that Wang and Blinken’s meeting produced a five-point consensus. The consensus included agreements to 1. Stabilize and develop US-PRC relations in accordance with the San Francisco “consensus;” 2. Maintain exchanges at all levels and in newly established consultation mechanisms in various fields, including military, drugs, climate change, and AI; 3. Hold a variety of dialogues including the first China-US Intragovernmental Dialogue on Artificial Intelligence, dialogues on Asia-Pacific Affairs, US-PRC military affairs, and consular consultations; 4. Embrace people-to-people and cultural exchanges; 5. Continue consultations on international and regional hotspot issues.[19] The US readout about the meeting did not reference any five-point consensus, however. It said Blinken and Wang discussed the next steps for advancing cooperation on counternarcotics, military-to-military communication, talks on artificial intelligence risks and safety, and facilitating people-to-people exchanges.[20]

The PRC responded to Blinken’s accusations that the PRC provided dual-use goods to Russia by accusing the United States of denigrating its “normal trade with Russia” and “aggravating the crisis” through aid to Ukraine. Blinken raised the issue of PRC provision to Russia of dual-use components and machine tools during his meetings with top PRC officials.[21] He said in an interview after his trip that the PRC is providing “invaluable support to Russia’s defense industrial base” which is helping Russia overcome the effects of sanctions and export controls.[22] An MFA spokesperson claimed the PRC has “never done anything to fan the flames or seek profit from the crisis.” He said the PRC’s “right to normal trade and economic exchanges” with countries including Russia should not be interfered with. He also noted US military aid to Ukraine and remarked that it is clear “who exactly is fueling the flame and aggravating the crisis.”[23] The PRC readouts of Blinken’s meetings with Xi Jinping and Wang Yi did not mention the issue of PRC support for Russia’s defense industry.[24]

The PRC expressed muted opposition following the passage of a US law to force the sale or ban of TikTok in the United States. US President Joe Biden signed a bill on April 24 to force TikTok’s PRC parent company ByteDance to fully divest from TikTok within 270 days or face a ban in the United States.[25] An MFA spokesperson responded to the ban on the day it passed by saying the MFA had already expressed its “principled position” on the issue.[26] The MFA previously expressed its strong opposition to a TikTok “divest or ban” bill on March 14. It accused the United States of overstretching the concept of “national security” to hinder foreign competition, said the attempt to force the sale of TikTok was based on “sheer robbers’ logic,” warned that the US moves would eventually backfire, and claimed the US government has never found evidence that TikTok poses a national security threat.[27] TikTok called the law unconstitutional and said it would fight the legislation in US courts.[28]

Northeast Asia

Japan

The Chinese Coast Guard (CCG) confronted a delegation of Japanese officials en route to inspect the Senkaku Islands on April 27. The PRC Embassy in Japan said on April 28 that the CCG carried out unspecified “law enforcement measures” and that the PRC lodged “stern representations” with the Japanese government.[29] The PRC Ministry of Foreign Affairs Spokesman Linjian reiterated PRC claims on April 27 that the Japanese-administered Senkakus, what the PRC refers to as Diaoyu Dao, are PRC territory.[30] The delegation of Japanese officials included Defense Minister Tomomi Inada and a member of the Japanese Diet.[31]

The PRC did not increase the number of CCG vessels operating in the vicinity of the Senkakus to confront the Japanese delegation. Four CCG vessels operated in the Senkaku Islands on April 27.[32] This is consistent with the trend of CCG incursions of between two and four vessels occurring daily in Senkaku Island waters since April 2023. Up to eight CCG vessels routinely intrude into the Senkaku Island waters on the first of every month.[33] The intent of these incursions is to exert the PRC’s claims of sovereignty over the Senkakus.

Southeast Asia

Philippines

The Chinese Coast Guard (CCG) and Chinese Maritime Militia (CMM) failed to block a Philippine Coast Guard (PCG) resupply mission near Scarborough Shoal on April 30. This is the latest PRC effort to enforce the CCP’s territorial claims in the South China Sea.[34] The CCG deployed four ships, the CMM deployed six ships, and the PCG and BFAR deployed two ships.[35] The CCG and CMM vessels hit the PCG and BFAR vessels eight times with high-pressure water cannons and rammed the vessel three times. The PCG ship suffered damage to its superstructure while the BFAR suffered minimal hull and electrical damage.[36] The Philippines' resupply mission was successful, nonetheless.[37] The CCG also reinstalled a floating barrier covering the entrance of Scarborough Shoal on April 30 to prevent Philippine ships from accessing the shoal.[38] The CCG previously placed this barrier at Scarborough Shoal on September 20, 2023, and February 22, 2024, which the PCG then removed.[39]

The harassment is consistent with ongoing CCG actions to enforce PRC territorial claims inside the nine-dash line. The PRC rejected a 2016 Permanent Court of Arbitration ruling that declared the nine-dash line territorial claims unlawful.[40] The PRC has normalized CCG harassment of the PCG and supply ships near the Second Thomas Shoal, also a prominent feature inside the nine-dash line, since December 2023 to render the Philippines unable and unwilling to defend its claim to the Second Thomas Shoal. The CCG harassed the PCG and associated supply ships six times at the Second Thomas Shoal between November 2021 and November 2023.[41] The number of such incidents at the Second Thomas Shoal has nearly doubled since December 1, 2023. The methods of harassment that the CCG employs have remained constant during the past three years. The CCG shines military-grade lasers to blind the PCG crews, sprays water cannons to immobilize supply ships and injure Filipino sailors, and rams PCG ships.[42]

The CCP used a similar strategy in 2012 that resulted in the Philippines withdrawing from the Scarborough Shoal, indicating the party’s intent with CCG activity around disputed shoals is to gain and enforce control of that territory. The CCP engaged in negotiations with the Philippines in 2012 to end a standoff at the Scarborough Shoal, which Manilla administered at the time, while steadily increasing the number of Chinese Coast Guard ships near the shoal.[43] This resulted in the Philippines withdrawing its ships from the shoal in mid-June 2012 under a now-disputed agreement that the PRC would do the same.[44] The CCP subsequently kept its ships near the shoal and achieved its political objective of gaining de facto control of the Scarborough Shoal by July 2012.[45]

CCP-controlled media outlets portrayed the United States-Philippines Exercise Balikatan 2024 as a threat to regional stability. The exercise runs from April 22 to May 10 and will include test missions across all domains, including a Philippine-US-French trilateral naval exercise in the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone (EEZ).[46] The naval exercises will occur in the Philippines’ EEZ rather than territorial waters because France and the Philippines have not yet completed a visiting forces agreement.[47] The party-controlled Xinhua and People’s Daily media outlets framed the exercise as a bellicose provocation that destabilizes the region.[48]

Europe

CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping will visit France, Serbia, and Hungary from May 5 to 10 as part of a charm offensive to build ties with the European states and block the formation of a stricter EU policy on China. The Xi-Macron meetings will include discussions of Ukraine and the Israel-Hamas War and Sino-French trade and scientific cooperation.[49] The PRC Ministry of Foreign Affairs statement emphasized the necessity of avoiding “confrontation between camps” and the desire for France to push the EU to “pursue a positive and pragmatic policy towards China.”[50] Bloomberg also reported that the EU is considering additional restrictions on PRC companies for supporting Russia.[51]

The PRC claimed that European governments are manufacturing fears of a “China spy threat” after Germany and the United Kingdom arrested several individuals for spying for the PRC.[52] Germany arrested three German nationals on April 22 who prosecutors said are “strongly suspected of having worked for a Chinese secret service since an unspecified date before June 2022.” The prosecutors said that the individuals supplied the PRC Ministry of State Security (MSS) with information about military technology, including machine parts for the operation of powerful ship engines and a “special laser.”[53] Germany arrested an aide to far-right PRC-friendly German MEP Maximilian Krah on April 23 on suspicion of being an “employee of a Chinese secret service” and spying on “Chinese opposition figures” in Germany.[54] A PRC spokesperson on April 26 claimed Germany’s espionage cases were “completely fabricated.” The PRC summoned the German ambassador to lodge protests.[55] The UK also arrested two people it accused of spying for the PRC on April 26.[56] The PRC embassy in the UK called the UK spy cases “malicious slander” and “anti-China political manipulation.[57]

The PRC has used spies in Europe to monitor and influence European policy toward the PRC. An investigation by European media Der Spiegel, Financial Times, and Le Monde published in December 2023 found that an MSS agent named Daniel Woo directed former far-right Belgian MP Frank Creyelman from 2019 to 2022 to report on confidential meetings in the European Parliament, attack the reputations of “anti-China” politicians and activists, and spread pro-PRC narratives on issues such as Covid-19, the PRC repression of Uighurs, and pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. European intelligence services also identified Woo as the PRC contact of other far-right and pro-Russia European politicians as well as a recruiter of spies in countries including Germany and Poland. [58]

Russia and Iran

PRC Defense Minister Dong Jun’s speech at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization on April 26 called on member states to be a model for “unity and cooperation” amidst current instability in global governance. He emphasized the necessity of security so that member states may effectively develop in a stable environment.[59] Dong also engaged in a flurry of meetings at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization meeting on April 26 in Astana, Kazakhstan. He met with defense ministers of Pakistan, Russia, Iran, Kyrgyzstan, Belarus, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan to discuss the international security situation and unspecified “issues of common concern.”[60] Dong’s April 26 meeting with Iranian Defense Minister Mohammad Ashtiani occurred after PRC Special Envoy for Middle Eastern Affairs Zhai Jun met with Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Ali Bagheri on April 25 in Moscow to discuss “the situation in the Middle East.”[61]

Israel-Hamas War

The PRC hosted “reconciliation” talks between Fatah and Hamas in Beijing and endorsed the strengthening of the Palestinian Authority. The PRC invited representatives of Fatah and Hamas to Beijing on April 26 to negotiate “intra-Palestinian reconciliation” between the two major factions.[62] A PRC MFA spokesperson said on April 30 that the two sides “expressed their political will to achieve reconciliation through dialogue and consultation, discussed many specific issues and made positive progress, and unanimously agreed to continue this dialogue process and strive for the early realization of Palestinian unity and reunification.”[63] Another MFA spokesperson said on April 26 that the PRC supports strengthening the authority of the Palestinian Authority (PA).[64] PRC Foreign Minister Wang Yi laid out the PRC position in an interview published the same day as the talks. Wang said the PRC supports an immediate ceasefire, unimpeded humanitarian assistance to Gaza, preventing regional escalation, and correcting “historical injustice” to the Palestinian people by promoting reconciliation between Palestinian factions and establishing an independent State of Palestine with UN membership.[65] The April 26 talks followed PRC MFA envoy Wang Kejian’s trip around the Middle East from March 10-17, which included meetings with PA and Israeli officials and the PRC’s first publicly acknowledged meeting with Hamas since its terror attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023.[66] The PRC has never directly criticized Hamas.

The PRC’s hosting of and statements about intra-Palestinian negotiations reflect its intent to play an active diplomatic role in the resolution of the Gaza war and the broader Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The talks also serve the propaganda purpose of portraying the PRC as an important and responsible mediator in the conflict in contrast to the United States. The PRC has repeatedly criticized Israel’s military operations in Gaza and US support for Israel while calling for an internationally mediated ceasefire.[67]

Hosting the intra-Palestinian talks is a relatively low-cost, low-risk way for the PRC to bolster its diplomatic reputation. A failure to bring about Fatah-Hamas reconciliation would amount to maintenance of the status quo and would not draw significant criticism of the PRC. A success in the negotiations, which is very unlikely, would present an opportunity for the PRC to embellish its reputation in a similar way to the Beijing-mediated Saudi Arabia-Iran rapprochement in March 2023. The PRC said after the Saudi-Iran negotiations that “China has no selfish interests in the Middle East, respects the status of the Middle East countries as its masters, and opposes geopolitical competition in the Middle East... China will continue to contribute Chinese wisdom and put forward Chinese suggestions to achieve peace and tranquility in the Middle East, and play its role as a responsible great power.”[68]

9. China publicizes for the first time what it claims is a 2016 agreement with Philippines

China publicizes for the first time what it claims is a 2016 agreement with Philippines

BY CHRISTOPHER BODEEN

Updated 9:45 AM EDT, May 3, 2024

AP · May 3, 2024

TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) — For the first time, China has publicized what it claims is an unwritten 2016 agreement with the Philippines over access to South China Sea islands.

The move threatens to further raise tensions in the disputed waterway, through which much of the world’s trade passes and which China claims virtually in its entirety.

A statement from the Chinese Embassy in Manila said the “temporary special arrangement” agreed to during a visit to Beijing by former president Rodrigo Duterte allowed small scale fishing around the islands but restricted access by military, coast guard and other official planes and ships to the 12 nautical mile (22 kilometer) limit of territorial waters.

The Philippines respected the agreement over the past seven years but has since reneged on it to “fulfill its own political agenda,” forcing China to take action, the statement said.

“This is the basic reason for the ceaseless disputes at sea between China and the Philippines over the past year and more,” said the statement posted to the embassy’s website Thursday, referring to the actions of the Philippines.

President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. and Duterte have denied forging any agreements that would have supposedly surrendered Philippine sovereignty or sovereign rights to China. Any such action, if proven, would be an impeachable offense under the country’s 1987 Constitution.

However, after his visit to Beijing, Duterte hinted at such an agreement without offering details, said Collin Koh, senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies based in Nanyang Technological University, Singapore and an expert on naval affairs in the Indo-Pacific region, particularly Southeast Asia.

“He boasted then that he not only got Chinese investment and trade pledges, but also that he secured Philippine fishermen access to Scarborough Shoal,” Koh said, referring to one of the maritime features in dispute.

Beijing’s deliberate wording in the statement “is noteworthy in showing that Beijing has no official document to prove its case and thus could only rely mainly on Duterte’s verbal claim,” Koh said.

Marcos, who took office in June 2022, told reporters last month that China has insisted that there was such a secret agreement but said he was not aware of any.

“The Chinese are insisting that there is a secret agreement and, perhaps, there is, and, I said I didn’t, I don’t know anything about the secret agreement,” said Marcos, who has drawn the Philippines closer to its treaty partner the U.S. “Should there be such a secret agreement, I am now rescinding it.”

Duterte, who nurtured cozy relations with Chinese President Xi Jinping during his six-year presidency while openly being hostile to the United States for its strong criticism of his deadly campaign against illegal drugs.

While he took an almost virulently anti-American stance during his 2016 visit to Washington’s chief rival, he has said he also did not enter into any agreement with Beijing that would have compromised Philippine territory. He acknowledged, however, that he and Xi agreed to maintain “the status quo” in the disputed waters to avoid war.

“Aside from the fact of having a handshake with President Xi Jinping, the only thing I remember was that status quo, that’s the word. There would be no contact, no movement, no armed patrols there, as is where is, so there won’t be any confrontation,” Duterte said.

Asked if he agreed that the Philippines would not bring construction materials to strengthen a Philippine military ship outpost at the Second Thomas Shoal, Duterte said that was part of maintaining the status quo but added there was no written agreement.

“That’s what I remember. If it were a gentleman’s agreement, it would always have been an agreement to keep the peace in the South China Sea,” Duterte said.

House Speaker Ferdinand Martin Romualdez, Marcos’s cousin and political ally, has ordered an investigation into what some are calling a “gentleman’s agreement.”

China has also claimed that Philippine officials have promised to tow away the navy ship that was deliberately grounded in the shallows of the Second Thomas Shoal in 1999 to serve as Manila’s territorial outpost. Philippine officials under Marcos say they were not aware of any such agreement and would not remove the now dilapidated and rust-encrusted warship manned by a small contingent of Filipino sailors and marines.

China has long accused Manila of “violating its commitments” and “acting illegally” in the South China Sea, without being explicit.

Apart from China and the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Taiwan and Brunei also have overlapping claims in the sea that is rich in fishing stocks, gas and oil. Beijing has refused to recognize a 2016 international arbitration ruling by a U.N.-affiliated court in the Hauge that invalidated its expansive claims on historical grounds.

Skirmishes between Beijing and Manila have flared since last year, with massive Chinese coast guard cutters firing high-pressure water cannons at Philippine patrol vessels, most recently off Scarborough Shoal late last month, damaging both. They have also accused each other of dangerous maneuvering, leading to minor scrapes.

The U.S. lays no claims to the South China Sea, but has deployed Navy ships and fighter jets in what it calls freedom of navigation operations that have challenged China’s claims.

The U.S. has warned repeatedly that it’s obligated to defend the Philippines — its oldest treaty ally in Asia — if Filipino forces, ships or aircraft come under an armed attack, including in the South China Sea.

___

Associated Press writer Jim Gomez contributed to this report from Manila, Philippines.

AP · May 3, 2024

10.

If we had to go to war and mobilize the nation, I think this would shift the college protest chants to "Hell no. We won't go."

Sobering is right. I am depressed and only somewhat optimistic.

Excerpts:

Were China to attack Taiwan, Mr. Helprin says, it would present a situation in which China can hit Taiwan because it’s not the U.S., while the U.S. can’t hit China. So what’s the solution? Here Mr. Helprin launches into an explanation at once expansive and detailed, rather like one of his novels. The import: Since the area of operations would be disadvantageously confined to the sea and Taiwan itself, the U.S. will need to harden its Pacific bases against China’s missiles, bombers and special forces; swell its Pacific fleet with ships both large and small (aircraft carriers and attack submarines, but also motor-torpedo boats, mine-sweepers, escort vessels, etc.); boost production of long-range aircraft, manned and unmanned; upgrade its nuclear deterrent; and harden Taiwan to the extent possible.

“I don’t think that we will meet the challenge,” Mr. Helprin says after this catalog, “but with responsible leadership we could. That’s the tragedy. Take a strong horse and give him one weak and clueless rider after another, and pretty soon the horse is no longer strong.”

Perhaps the core of the problem is American policymakers’ fear of risk and attendant accountability. If a U.S. administration tried to mount the sort of defense posture Mr. Helprin counsels, something might go wrong, someone would have to pay a political price, and no one at the moment seems inclined to pay any sort of price for anything. As soon as I use the phrase “fear of risk” he points out that “in 1940 Churchill sent all the tanks in Britain to North Africa to fight the Germans. That denuded Britain of tanks, and at the time it was still possible that Sea Lion”—Hitler’s plan to invade the U.K.—“could have happened. The British would have had no tanks to use in defense. It was a risk. Churchill took it. War is about risk.”

...

What about the long term? Very little about today’s cultural landscape suggests that America’s political class and citizenry understand the threats or are prepared to counter them with force. What’s going to get us ready? “A strong leader on a white horse isn’t going to do it,” Mr. Helprin says. “The only way that can happen, I think, unfortunately, is distress and defeat. A depression, a big loss in a war, invasion, Gotterdammerung.”

He trails off. It’s a solemn thought. “Still,” he says, “there is so much good in this country, so much courage that we may yet summon well steeled resolve.”

Mark Helprin Asks: Are Americans Ready for War?

As our enemies advance, a prescient author considers what it would take for the U.S. to avoid defeat. The answer is sobering.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/mark-helprin-asks-are-americans-ready-for-war-novelist-scholar-0214b82b?mod=MorningEditorialReport&mod=djemMER_h

By Barton Swaim

Follow

May 3, 2024 2:29 pm ET

Mark Helprin ILLUSTRATION: BARBARA KELLEY

Earlysville, Va.

Free nations prefer peace to war, but that preference is complicated by the continued existence of nations led by criminals, ideologues and irredentists. In a fallen world, war eventually comes, wanted or not.

And it’s coming. Iran and its proxies, having started one war in Israel, don’t appear reluctant to consider another with the U.S. A Russian victory in Ukraine, even a partial one, would make eventual confrontation with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization almost inevitable. China menaces Taiwan. And the possibility that Kim Jong Un isn’t plotting an attack on South Korea—or on the U.S.—is a bet only a fool would take.

These admittedly rather basic reflections occurred to me as I read Mark Helprin’s latest novel, “The Oceans and the Stars.” The book, which went on sale on Oct. 3, relates fictional circumstances that became far easier to credit four days later. Mr. Helprin’s novel imagines a war launched by Iran against the U.S. and Israel, a political class that views national security exclusively as a means of gaining electoral advantage, a perpetually irritable American president whose chief goal is to avoid blame, and an army of terrorists capable of savagery so repellent that Western elites refuse to contemplate it.

There are other anticipatory details. Mr. Helprin’s story, written between 2019 and 2022, somehow counters the American news media’s outrage over Israel’s inadvertent targeting of World Central Kitchen aid workers in April of this year. The novel’s hero, a U.S. Navy captain, observes that compared with Israel, “we’ve killed vastly many more of our own in friendly fire, thousands actually, yet we find it hard to accept that someone else can do it.”

Last month I visited Mr. Helprin’s home here, some 10 miles north of Charlottesville. On the wall of his vast and spacious library I spy a framed August 1941 photograph of Winston Churchill on the deck of the H.M.S. Prince of Wales, the ship on which the prime minister met FDR to enlist the U.S. in the struggle against fascism. I came to Earlysville—I say this at the risk of melodrama—to ask Mr. Helprin the sort of question that Churchill had contemplated in the years before that photograph was taken: Are we ready to fight?

The answer today is plainly no. But neither were the British in 1935. What does America need to do to get ready?

In Mr. Helprin’s office I indulge my habit of scanning other people’s bookshelves, noting row after row of the U.S. Naval Institute’s Proceedings, Janes Fighting Ships, Strategic Survey and other technical journals one seldom encounters outside university libraries. “I’ve been reading those cover to cover since the 1960s,” he says. No reader of “The Oceans and the Stars,” or of his many essays and op-eds on war and defense, is likely to doubt him.

As we sit down, Mr. Helprin doesn’t wait for me to ask a question. “It might not be a gracious thing to do, but let me begin with an ‘I told you so,’ ” he says. Briefly he catalogues several unheeded warnings he has published over the decades. One of those appeared in these pages under the headline “What to Do About Terrorism, Really,” on May 10, 1995.

The essay urged the Clinton administration to remember, the recent Oklahoma City bombing notwithstanding, that terrorism has always come mainly from abroad and would surely remain that way. Mr. Helprin envisaged a cataclysm brought about by “a few former Soviet tactical warheads in a business jet piloted by a young mullah with a grudge against Sears Roebuck.” He was slightly off—the cataclysm, when it came six years later, involved four passenger jets rather than a private plane and warheads, and the target was New York and Washington, not Chicago. But he saw something others didn’t.

Any discussion of U.S. leadership abroad has to start, as ours does, with America’s humiliating 2021 retreat from Afghanistan, a colossal exhibition of weakness and confusion and almost certainly a catalyst of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Hamas’s attack on Israel.

Our faltering in Europe and the Middle East is the reason, Mr. Helprin says, we need to adopt a “bastion strategy.” Meaning what? “No, we’re not going to give up on a forward defense in Europe and Asia. But as an emergency measure, as a reserve, in case the forward defenses fail—and they are under tremendous pressure now both because of our isolationism and our disintegration and the world situation externally—if those should fail, we have a bastion.”

The bastion is the Western Hemisphere. “Of course I’m talking about the Monroe Doctrine. Essentially, Russia, China and other nations may not interfere in this half of the globe, but we may interfere in theirs.”

Yet Russia, China and Iran are making enormous inroads in South America, “and we can’t allow them to do that. If South America goes, we’re done for. People think we’re protected by the oceans, and we are to an extent. But even so, in the [American] Revolution, when the tiny wooden ships would take a month to cross the Atlantic, it was a closely run thing. The British were still able to transport huge armies and supplies to the United States with that kind of transport.”

Another strategic priority is the protection of Europe. “A lot of people think we should concentrate more heavily on China because China is more powerful than Russia and more of a developing threat. That’s true,” he says. “China is the bigger, more immediate threat. But Europe is more valuable.”

I think I agree, but I have to ask why Europe is more valuable. “Our economic relationships to the European nations, which are the greatest other than those with Canada and Mexico. Not just trade, but the interplay of science and culture. We are, in so many ways, joined to Europe as we are to nowhere else. Also physically, in terms of a position in Earth’s geography: If the North Atlantic is controlled by hostile powers, if it falls under Russian dominance, then we’re pretty much”—again—“done for.”

I assume that he will get to Taiwan, and he does: “Our strategy there is based on a faulty premise. You know what that premise is?” he asks. I don’t. “If you read all the studies and military journals on defending Taiwan, they all talk about penetrating bombers and missiles and so on to strike Chinese bases. Really? China is a nuclear-armed state, and we’re going to attack Chinese bases on the country’s mainland? . . . That would set up a nuclear standoff. We’re not going to do that.”

Were China to attack Taiwan, Mr. Helprin says, it would present a situation in which China can hit Taiwan because it’s not the U.S., while the U.S. can’t hit China. So what’s the solution? Here Mr. Helprin launches into an explanation at once expansive and detailed, rather like one of his novels. The import: Since the area of operations would be disadvantageously confined to the sea and Taiwan itself, the U.S. will need to harden its Pacific bases against China’s missiles, bombers and special forces; swell its Pacific fleet with ships both large and small (aircraft carriers and attack submarines, but also motor-torpedo boats, mine-sweepers, escort vessels, etc.); boost production of long-range aircraft, manned and unmanned; upgrade its nuclear deterrent; and harden Taiwan to the extent possible.

“I don’t think that we will meet the challenge,” Mr. Helprin says after this catalog, “but with responsible leadership we could. That’s the tragedy. Take a strong horse and give him one weak and clueless rider after another, and pretty soon the horse is no longer strong.”

Perhaps the core of the problem is American policymakers’ fear of risk and attendant accountability. If a U.S. administration tried to mount the sort of defense posture Mr. Helprin counsels, something might go wrong, someone would have to pay a political price, and no one at the moment seems inclined to pay any sort of price for anything. As soon as I use the phrase “fear of risk” he points out that “in 1940 Churchill sent all the tanks in Britain to North Africa to fight the Germans. That denuded Britain of tanks, and at the time it was still possible that Sea Lion”—Hitler’s plan to invade the U.K.—“could have happened. The British would have had no tanks to use in defense. It was a risk. Churchill took it. War is about risk.”

Our technological superiority, Mr. Helprin thinks, has fooled us into believing that war is about neat, danger-free solutions. “We have been acclimated to situations in which we control everything,” he says. “We completely control the air. We completely control logistics. We have bases to which we can retreat, and on those bases we have McDonald’s.” Mr. Helprin stops himself: “This isn’t to say that individual units and soldiers haven’t fought like hell and suffered. But in terms of the larger picture of war, we haven’t fought for survival in a long time.”

A more fundamental problem than any matter of strategic confusion is the simple matter of recruitment. The country can’t find enough people willing to fight for it.

Here I quote from a passage in Mr. Helprin’s 1991 novel, “A Soldier of the Great War.” The story’s hero, Alessandro, on trial for desertion (he is innocent), correctly points out that although the Italian government can force young men into the field, it needs their “consent” if they’re going to fight. “That’s nonsense,” the judge says.

But of course it isn’t. The U.S., which did away with the draft in 1973, depends for its existence on men willing to fight for it, and recruitment has dropped precipitously in recent years.

Mr. Helprin feels this matter keenly, having, as he puts it, avoided the draft in 1969. He did so legally, having been declared ineligible—“4-F,” in military jargon—as a result of a long childhood sickness. “Something was wrong with my brain,” he says. “There’s a name for it, which I’ve forgotten—something convulsive disorder.” Later he felt he could have gotten around the 4-F designation if he’d wanted to.

Then, in May 1969, he happened to see a funeral for a young soldier who’d been killed in Vietnam. “He was about my age. . . . That’s when I understood that he may have died in my place.” Soon after that Mr. Helprin, who is Jewish and was born in Manhattan, took Israeli citizenship, becoming a dual national; he enlisted in the Jewish state’s military and served for two years. (Several years later he relinquished his Israeli citizenship.)

But back to the 2020s. Why is the number of men willing to fight and die for the United States decreasing? Mr. Helprin mentions an education system that trains young people to distrust their country and a military bureaucracy enthralled by woke ideology.

So what can we do about that in the short term? Without pausing Mr. Helprin says: “We can depoliticize the military completely.”

That won’t be easy, I say. “It might not be so hard,” he replies. “You don’t have to do anything. You just have to stop doing stupid things. The military is a million education programs meant to indoctrinate and train. Exclude, from all that indoctrination and training, anything having to do with ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ ”—he signals quotation marks—“anything having to do with racism, anything about how bad America is, the ‘gender’ crap, all that. Just stop doing it.”

He has a point. An executive order from the commander in chief would likely accomplish for the U.S. military what Gov. Ron DeSantis did by signing legislation banning DEI in Florida public universities. If the military were to scrap every last shred of DEI training tomorrow, nobody but activist busybodies would regret it, and the benefits would reverberate for a decade.

What about the long term? Very little about today’s cultural landscape suggests that America’s political class and citizenry understand the threats or are prepared to counter them with force. What’s going to get us ready? “A strong leader on a white horse isn’t going to do it,” Mr. Helprin says. “The only way that can happen, I think, unfortunately, is distress and defeat. A depression, a big loss in a war, invasion, Gotterdammerung.”

He trails off. It’s a solemn thought. “Still,” he says, “there is so much good in this country, so much courage that we may yet summon well steeled resolve.”

Mr. Swaim is a Journal editorial page writer.

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On May 2, 2024 Republican Senators Tom Cotton and Joni Ernst grilled the Director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines, over threats at the southern border and a plan to bring Gazan refugees to the U.S. homeland. Image: Mark Schiefelbein/Associated Press

Copyright ©2024 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

Appeared in the May 4, 2024, print edition as 'Are Americans Ready for War?'.

11. Activist Groups Trained Students for Months Before Campus Protests

Some much to unpack. 

Excerpts:

“We took notes from our elders, engaged in dialogue with them and analyzed how the university responded to previous protests,” said Sueda Polat, a graduate student and organizer in the pro-Palestinian encampment. 

Though there isn’t a centralized command overseeing the student movement opposing Israel’s invasion of Gaza, there are connections between longstanding far-left groups and the protesters. 

I suggest we compare the actions on these campuses to Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals. I have pasted a summary below this article. But we should keep this in mind from Saul Alinsky:

According to Alinsky, the main job of the organizer is to bait an opponent into reacting. "The enemy properly goaded and guided in his reaction will be your major strength."

Now we have to conduct the in-depth analysis to determine who are these "organizers?" While many are highly motivated and idealistic students I would submit that there are multiple layers of organizers. You have the idealists who believe in what they are doing and they are motivating other idealists as well as those who just want to play at protesting or want to be part of something for the fun of it and to be part of a social movement. Then you have those who have racist ideologies and so seek to exploit both anti-semiticism on one side and islamophobia on the other side. They do not really care about either side. They just want to project their racist ideology to be able to influence people to attack their racial targets. The third and most dangerous level are the outside influencers who are in the background providing funding, support, shadow leadership, and training using cutouts or proxies so their identifies are not revealed because if the actual protestors on the surface were really exposed to their identifies and strategies and the truth, the movement would wither and fade away or collapse outright. These are not the funders and supporters at the George Soros (contributed tens of millions to political movements through his Open Society foundation) or Koch Brothers (contributed nearly $30 million to political movements) level who may be actively funding elements for their own political agendas (outside actors love that some focus on George Soros as the enemy because it allows them to hide in plain sight and prevents their exposure). These are outsiders from hostile nation states who have influenced these loose organizations at each level with proxies or long time sleepers who are being activated to conduct subversive activities. What is their goal? To attack and undermine US government legitimacy and through subversion weaken the political system of the US so that hostile governments gain greater freedom of action to execute their global strategies. Yes I sound like a conspiracy theorist. But in my conspiracy it is outside agents and actors who are the real malign actors who are happy to exploit the conspiracy theories on the level where Americans attack each others (namely the progressives versus the conservatives). They are happy to see the hatred between American groups and they are going to stoke that hatred for their advantage. But at every level there is the common theme from Alinsky stated above - to goad the enemy and guide his reaction. But ultimately this deep network of malign external actors is exploiting what may have started as organic protests by those who are idealists and believed in a cause and driving actions with a hidden hand through proxies that are likely never going to be exposed because our own political and legal system will be used against us to protect them. If we find yourself hating one side or the other of these organizations conducting public political activities (progressives or conservatives) we may want to consider that we are being effectively manipulated by outside actors and that the enemy is not necessarily our fellow Americians - regardless of their expressed political beliefs.

Activist Groups Trained Students for Months Before Campus Protests

Left-wing groups and veteran demonstrators provided guidance and support before rise of pro-Palestinian encampments

https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/student-campus-protests-veteran-activist-groups-17ccd094?mod=hp_lead_pos7

By Tawnell D. HobbsFollow

, Valerie BauerleinFollow

 and Dan FroschFollow

May 3, 2024 9:00 pm ET

The recent wave of pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses came on suddenly and shocked people across the nation. But the political tactics underlying some of the demonstrations were the result of months of training, planning and encouragement by longtime activists and left-wing groups.

At Columbia University, in the weeks and months before police took down encampments at the New York City campus and removed demonstrators occupying an academic building, student organizers began consulting with groups such as the National Students for Justice in Palestine, veterans of campus protests and former Black Panthers. 

They researched past protests over Columbia’s expansion into Harlem, went to a community meeting on gentrification and development and studied parallels with the fight over land between Palestinians and Israelis. They attended a “teach-in” put on by several former Black Panthers, who told them about the importance of handling internal disputes within their movement.

“We took notes from our elders, engaged in dialogue with them and analyzed how the university responded to previous protests,” said Sueda Polat, a graduate student and organizer in the pro-Palestinian encampment. 

The pro-Palestinian encampment at Columbia occupied a central location at the New York City campus. PHOTO: SARAH BLESENER FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Though there isn’t a centralized command overseeing the student movement opposing Israel’s invasion of Gaza, there are connections between longstanding far-left groups and the protesters. 

The National Students for Justice in Palestine, or NSJP, has been around some two decades and has more than 300 chapters across the U.S., many of which have helped organize the college encampments and building occupations.

NSJP has for months called on students to stand strong against colleges until they divest themselves of investments in entities doing business with Israel. Its social-media pages have become a scroll of encouragement to protesting students, with videos showing activity at encampments and around the world. As early as October, NSJP was promoting a “day of resistance” with demonstrations at colleges.

Over time, the messages from the national group became more pointed. “The Student Movement for Palestinian Liberation will not be silenced; we will escalate until our demands are met,” NSJP posted on social media on April 25. 

‘No divestment, no commencement’

That same day on X, the group posted drawings with “friendly advice” to protesting students. One suggested they wear comfortable clothes and running shoes and bring water, an energy bar and a bandanna in case of surveillance. Another referred to police as “pigs” and offered this advice: “If someone is arrested, don’t linger too long or pigs will kettle the march,” referring to a crowd-control tactic. “Free the comrade, or else get their name and birthdate for jail support and keep it moving.”

On April 29, the group announced a new chant on social media: “No divestment, no commencement.” University administrators have been concerned that coming graduations could be interrupted by protesters.

NSJP didn’t respond to emails seeking comment. 

Some students at the Columbia encampment busied themselves on laptops during the days of protest. PHOTO: STEPHANIE KEITH/GETTY IMAGES

Some of the group’s campus chapters have been suspended by universities, including at Columbia.

For the last decade, donations to NSJP have been received and administered by the Wespac Foundation, according to Howard Horowitz, Wespac’s board chairman. The donations are passed on to NSJP “for projects in the United States,” he said, declining to provide further details. 

Wespac, a nonprofit based in Westchester County near New York City, is decades old, according to its website. It has supported humanitarian causes, as well as organizations that propagate antisemitism, according to the Anti-Defamation League. Wespac has posted support of pro-Palestinian protests on social media and posted videos in which protesters held signs that refer to President Biden as “Genocide Joe.”

Robert Herbst, a representative for Wespac, said “Wespac has not coordinated, trained or strategized with protest participants, nor do we support organizations that have supported violence, antisemitism or terrorism.” 

Resistance 101

In March, there was a “Resistance 101” training scheduled at Columbia with guest speakers including longtime activists with Samidoun: Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, a Vancouver, British Columbia-based group that celebrated the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel. The administration twice barred the event, citing some of the organizers’ known support of terrorism and promotion of violence. Columbia students hosted the event virtually nonetheless, which prompted Columbia President Minouche Shafik to suspend several of them. 

During the session, which lasted nearly two hours, Samidoun coordinator Charlotte Kates encouraged students “to build an international popular cradle of the resistance,” according to a recording posted on YouTube.

“There is nothing wrong with being a member of Hamas, being a leader of Hamas, being a fighter in Hamas,” Kates said. “These are the people that are on the front lines defending Palestine.”

Samidoun didn’t respond to emailed requests for comment. The German government banned the group last November after saying it supported terrorism and antisemitism, and incited the use of violence to enforce political interests.

Robert Pape, a political scientist at the University of Chicago who studies political violence, said outside organizers are only one factor in the protests. He said they are successfully leveraging student anger over the violence in Gaza, which many young people not conversant in the region’s complicated history are watching on social media.

Anne-Marie Jardine, a student arrested in a protest at the University of Texas at Austin, said images from the war on social media helped motivate her involvement in the movement. “It’s one thing to hear it on the news, but another to see children covered in blood,” she said. 

Sueda Polat, addressing the media, was among those who negotiated with campus administrators. PHOTO: YUKI IWAMURA/ASSOCIATED PRESS

New York City police moved in Tuesday night and cleared out the encampment at Columbia. PHOTO: JEENAH MOON FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Pape said university and national leaders should expect protests to continue through the summer and fall. “You have a major dynamic happening in the world that is a major concern,” Pape said.

Jacob Schmeltz, a senior political-science major at Columbia, went home to Montclair, N.J., for Passover and said he felt so uncomfortable with the antisemitic rhetoric on campus, he hasn’t come back.

“This should be the time I should be able to enjoy my senior year,” he said. “But instead I have felt so rejected by much of the Columbia community that have refused to call out the incidents of antisemitism on campus.”

Protesters have denied assertions of antisemitism, noting that many of those in the encampments are Jewish themselves.

Discipline and rigor

Polat said student organizers at Columbia learned the discipline and planning needed to pull off an effective protest movement not only from their work with veteran demonstrators and outside groups, but from participating in Black Lives Matter marches or student labor organizing. 

Some tools they learned were practical, such as how to raise money via student fundraisers and donations from friends and supporters to buy tents for encampments.

An encampment at the University of California, Los Angeles, on Wednesday, hours before police took it down. PHOTO: MIKE BLAKE/REUTERS

Saree Makdisi, a University of California, Los Angeles, English professor and member of the school’s chapter of Faculty for Justice in Palestine, said his school’s encampment had organized self-defense teams on the front lines. Participants, who were confronted several times by pro-Israel counterprotesters, had to undergo nonviolent de-escalation training. The training was put on by students who themselves had received prior training in nonviolent resistance. “There’s a whole set of discipline and procedures that go into it,” he said.

UCLA’s encampment was taken down following a confrontation with police Thursday morning.

Makdisi said that his generation of pro-Palestinian student protesters in the U.S. during the 1980s weren’t nearly as disciplined and organized as the students he encountered at the UCLA encampment.

“We had a lot of affect and feeling. But there’s a different kind of rigor to these students that is really striking,” he said. 

Erin Ailworth contributed to this article.

Write to Tawnell D. Hobbs at tawnell.hobbs@wsj.com, Valerie Bauerlein at Valerie.Bauerlein@wsj.com and Dan Frosch at dan.frosch@wsj.com

Rules for Radicals

https://www.citizenshandbook.org/rules.html

In 1971, Saul Alinsky wrote an entertaining classic on grassroots organizing titled Rules for Radicals. Those who prefer cooperative tactics describe the book as out-of-date. Nevertheless, it provides some of the best advice on confrontational tactics. Alinsky begins this way: What follows is for those who want to change the world from what it is to what they believe it should be. The Prince was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. Rules for Radicals is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away. His "rules" derive from many successful campaigns where he helped poor people fighting power and privilege.

For Alinsky, organizing is the process of highlighting what is wrong and convincing people they can actually do something about it. The two are linked. If people feel they don't have the power to change a bad situation, they stop thinking about it.

According to Alinsky, the organizer, especially a paid organizer from outside, must first overcome suspicion and establish credibility. Next the organizer must begin the task of agitating: rubbing resentments, fanning hostilities, and searching out controversy. This is necessary to get people to participate. An organizer has to attack apathy and disturb the prevailing patterns of complacent community life where people have simply come to accept a bad situation. Alinsky would say, "The first step in community organization is community disorganization."

Through a process combining hope and resentment, the organizer tries to create a "mass army" that brings in as many recruits as possible from local organizations, churches, services groups, labor unions, corner gangs, and individuals.

Alinsky provides a collection of rules to guide the process. But he emphasizes these rules must be translated into real-life tactics that are fluid and responsive to the situation at hand.

Rule 1: Power is not only what you have, but what an opponent thinks you have. If your organization is small, hide your numbers in the dark and raise a din that will make everyone think you have many more people than you do.

Rule 2: Never go outside the experience of your people.

The result is confusion, fear, and retreat.

Rule 3: Whenever possible, go outside the experience of an opponent. Here you want to cause confusion, fear, and retreat.

Rule 4: Make opponents live up to their own book of rules. "You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity."

Rule 5: Ridicule is man's most potent weapon. It's hard to counterattack ridicule, and it infuriates the opposition, which then reacts to your advantage.

Rule 6: A good tactic is one your people enjoy. "If your people aren't having a ball doing it, there is something very wrong with the tactic."

Rule 7: A tactic that drags on for too long becomes a drag. Commitment may become ritualistic as people turn to other issues.

Rule 8: Keep the pressure on. Use different tactics and actions and use all events of the period for your purpose. "The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition. It is this that will cause the opposition to react to your advantage."

Rule 9: The threat is more terrifying than the thing itself. When Alinsky leaked word that large numbers of poor people were going to tie up the washrooms of O'Hare Airport, Chicago city authorities quickly agreed to act on a longstanding commitment to a ghetto organization. They imagined the mayhem as thousands of passengers poured off airplanes to discover every washroom occupied. Then they imagined the international embarrassment and the damage to the city's reputation.

Rule 10: The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative. Avoid being trapped by an opponent or an interviewer who says, "Okay, what would you do?"

Rule 11: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, polarize it. Don't try to attack abstract corporations or bureaucracies. Identify a responsible individual. Ignore attempts to shift or spread the blame.

According to Alinsky, the main job of the organizer is to bait an opponent into reacting. "The enemy properly goaded and guided in his reaction will be your major strength."

See also 10 Principles for Public Media

And Co-operation First

And IAF Organizing pdf

And Post-Alinsky Organizing

The Citizen's Handbook / Home / Table of Contents

The Citizen's Handbook / Charles Dobson / citizenshandbook.org

https://www.citizenshandbook.org/rules.html

12. America’s War Machine Runs on Rare-Earth Magnets. China Owns That Market.

A strategic vulnerability. How did we let this happen?

America’s War Machine Runs on Rare-Earth Magnets. China Owns That Market.

U.S. defense needs are pushing revival effort after decades of deindustrialization

https://www.wsj.com/business/china-rare-earth-magnets-us-production-782677e5?mod=hp_lista_pos1

By Jon EmontFollow

 | Photographs by Katie Hayes Luke for The Wall Street Journal

Updated May 4, 2024 1:24 am ET

The American war machine depends on tiny bits of metal, some as small as dimes. Rare-earth magnets are needed for F-35 jet fighters, missile-guidance systems, Predator drones and nuclear submarines.

The problem: China makes most of the world’s rare-earth magnets, with 92% of the global market share.

Now, Washington is doling out hundreds of millions of dollars in grants and tax credits to revive magnet-making in America. Defense manufacturers are on a clock.

A U.S. law in 2018 restricted the use of made-in-China magnets in American military equipment, shriveling the list of potential suppliers to a small number in Japan and the West. By 2027, the curbs will extend to magnets made anywhere that contain materials mined or processed in China, covering nearly all of the current global supply.

After three decades of post-Cold War deindustrialization, rebuilding the industry—against China’s market heft—is an uphill battle, even with government help. Only one company in the U.S. is in production of the dominant type of rare-earth magnet. 

“We’re not going to be able to simply flip a switch and get to where we want to be,” said Anthony Di Stasio, a senior U.S. defense official. “The only thing that you can really judge success on right now is how many positive ripples have you made from throwing the rock into the lake.”

The office Di Stasio runs in the Defense Department is diving into supply chains to invest in the pieces and parts that make the military work. Much of what they invest in is processing minerals and making metals, betting that regardless of how, for example, submarine technology evolves, the same building blocks will be needed.

“Let’s go as close to the dirt as we can so we know we’re still going to need it in 15 years,” said Di Stasio.

Rare-earth metals at Noveon Magnetics’ Texas facility.

The Defense Department in the past few years has committed more than $450 million toward rare earths and the magnets they power. The Energy Department is offering its own incentives because the magnets are also critical for electric vehicles.

The funding is helping a German magnet-maker set up its first North American factory, which broke ground in March, two decades after its last U.S. factory shut down. The facility, in Sumter, S.C., will buy rare earths locally. Those supplies could come from other projects that are receiving government funding—such as processing plants coming up in California and Texas, owned by American and Australian miners, respectively.

Their highest hurdle is low Chinese prices. A U.S. Commerce Department probe in 2022 found that China’s dominant position enabled it to set prices low enough to make production unsustainable for competitors.

In the West, mines and processing facilities face more regulations. There are only a small number of experts left in the field, requiring pricey workarounds such as importing foreign talent, sending Americans abroad for training and automating.

“If you want it to be commercially viable, how are you going to accomplish it, because there’s a reason we don’t do it domestically anymore,” said Moshe Schwartz, a senior fellow for acquisition policy at the National Defense Industrial Association, a trade group representing the defense industry.

Pushing defense suppliers to buy more-expensive magnets that are made in the U.S. would raise costs and have a knock-on effect, potentially affecting how many defense systems such as submarines and jet fighters the Defense Department is able to buy, Schwartz said. 

Rare-earth metals, on top, are used for manufacturing magnets. Magnet blocks, bottom, after the sintering furnace.

The other question is who else will buy the magnets. Defense demand, while considerable, isn’t enough. Other industries that use magnets, such as makers of EVs, wind turbines and MRI machines, would need to be willing to pay more today in exchange for a reliable supply chain.

At least one major player, General Motors, has agreed to buy American-made magnets when production starts. Some others say they are interested.

“If you think about how many bloody noses and black eyes and coronaries people had over the past two years over supply-chain disruptions, and how many millions were lost, having a regionally or near-shored product…is very valuable,” said Kirk Anderson, director of government affairs for Nidec Motor, a Japanese company that manufactures motors in the U.S.

Nidec is in talks to buy magnets from a U.S. company that has received government funding.

‘Scattered to the four winds’

The first rare-earth magnets were discovered in the 1960s by scientists at a U.S. Air Force laboratory. In the following two decades, military investments led to more-powerful versions capable of maintaining their pull in extremely high and extremely low temperatures. That allowed for new engineering feats, such as the advanced electronic-warfare systems of F-15 jet fighters that can work up to 70,000 feet in the sky.

U.S. scientists were at the forefront of rare-earth magnet research in the 1960s. PHOTO: THE U.S. AIR FORCE RESEARCH LABORATORY

These magnets were expensive, limiting their applications. In the 1980s, scientists at GM and Sumitomo, a Japanese company, separately invented a new type of rare-earth magnet. They used less-expensive materials but which were so powerful they could attract objects hundreds of times their own weight, improving the torque and efficiency of electrical motors, said John Ormerod, an industry consultant.

By the late 1980s, the U.S. was one of the top producers, second only to Japan. The minerals were mined and processed in California and manufactured into magnets in the Midwest. GM spun off a magnet division called Magnequench, selling to the auto, electronics and defense industries.

By then, China had entered the game. A Chinese rare-earth mining boom coupled with lower Asian labor costs eroded U.S. advantages. In 1995, GM divested from Magnequench, which was acquired by an investment group that included a Chinese state-run company. The deal was approved by the U.S. government.

One engineer, Mitchell Spencer, was dispatched to the port city of Tianjin in 1998 to help set up what he was told would be a sister factory to the magnetics plant in Anderson, Ind. Shortly after he returned to Indiana, Magnequench closed the Anderson plant and eventually its entire U.S. manufacturing operations.  

“I built my own gallows,” Spencer said. U.S. talent, he said, was “scattered to the four winds.”

Back to the future

The breakdown in supply chains during the Covid-19 pandemic rang alarm bells. Pandemic-era funding enabled the government to back Texas-based Noveon Magnetics, a startup that had begun small-scale magnet production in 2018. The company received around $29 million to boost production at its San Marcos, Texas, facility.

Magnets made there are used in cruise missiles, missile-defense systems and helicopters.

As tensions with China rose, the Defense Department between 2020 and 2022 announced $45 million in funding for MP Materials—America’s dominant rare-earth miner—to set up facilities to process minerals in the U.S. The first such facility came online last year. The company plans to start making magnets in Texas by next year.

Noveon Magnetics received around $29 million in pandemic-era funding.

Around $250 million also went to Australia’s Lynas Rare Earths to build a rare-earth processing complex in Seadrift, Texas. Last year, the government announced nearly $100 million for the German company, VAC, for its South Carolina magnet-making facility.

VAC had hung on for decades as one of the West’s few rare-earth magnet makers and now plans to mass-produce magnets at its U.S. facility. It has sent U.S. workers to Germany for training, and will automate to save on costs. Its magnets will be around 50% more expensive than Chinese ones depending on the specifications, executives said.

Companies have encountered unexpected challenges, including an organized campaign by fake pro-China social-media accounts that cybersecurity researchers dubbed “Dragonbridge.” After Lynas, the Australian producer, announced its Texas plant, a flurry of online posts from accounts posing as locals argued the project would be environmentally destructive and affect community health.

More recently, a drop in prices of rare earths, caused in part by expanding Chinese production, has raised concerns over new projects. On an earnings call held earlier this year, an analyst asked executives at MP Materials if they would reconsider their plans given current low prices.

“What I would tell you on that is that we’re talking about a Western-world supply chain that basically doesn’t exist,” said Chief Executive James Litinsky. “Even though the environment is tough, from what we’re hearing from customers, there’s still a desire for this supply chain to exist.”

At its Texas facility, Noveon Magnetics recycles used magnets to create brand new magnets designed to customer specs.

Write to Jon Emont at jonathan.emont@wsj.com

13. Special operations veterans ask Army to not cut tuition, certification benefits

The letter from SOAA is where: https://soaa.org/wp-content/uploads/SECARMY-TA-Letter.pdf

But please note that SOAA is not advocating for these benefits exclusively for SOF personnel, it wants all soldiers to have access to these benefits. It is only pointing out the effects on the SOAA constituency.

Special operations veterans ask Army to not cut tuition, certification benefits

A group of special operations veterans say an Army plan to cut education programs will hurt promotion and retention of elite soldiers.

BY PATTY NIEBERG | PUBLISHED MAY 3, 2024 2:07 PM EDT

taskandpurpose.com · by Patty Nieberg · May 3, 2024

Special operators are asking the Army not to cut benefits that help soldiers pay for secondary education and vocational training for civilian jobs post-military service.

David Cook, director of the Special Operations Association of America said that an Army proposal to cut civilian tuition and certification assistance could mean special operators like Green Berets and Rangers would lose a key path for promotions, leading to lower retention rates.

“The nature of special operations is that you have to volunteer to get selected, you have to go through the most rigorous training in the world and you go in every day with people that are better than you,” Cook, a former psychological operations soldier, told Task & Purpose. “Along with the fact that the Army evaluations have included secondary education to be promoted for senior enlisted ranks – then special operations promotion rates are higher than the conventional Army – which means that tuition assistance is a vital incentive for special operators to take advantage of.”

The group’s letter comes amid reports that the Army is considering cuts to two major assistance programs. The cuts, first reported by Military.com, come as the services and Congress are working through funding for the fiscal year 2025 budget.

“This is a vital tool not only to draw in recruits, but to retain them as well. With more focus on formal education for enlisted Service Members needed for promotion and career progression, tuition assistance is a fundamental incentive,” Cook wrote in a letter to Army Secretary Christine Wormuth.

Of the two programs on the chopping block, the larger and more widely used is the Tuition Assistance Program which pays up to $4,000 per year or $250 per semester hour for civilian classes. The program pays for up to 130 semester hours of undergraduate credit — enough for a for year degree at most colleges — and 39 semester hours of graduate credits.

The service is also reportedly reviewing the Army Credentialing Assistance Program, introduced in 2020, which gives soldiers $4,000 to pursue courses and exams for civilian industry-recognized credentials in various occupations. Aviation-related credentials for active duty soldiers are limited to $1,000 in Army funds. Soldiers can take courses to enhance skills for their current MOS or for a civilian job they plan to pursue after military service, according to the Department of Defense.

According to the Army National Guard, the most popular certifications are information technology and project management.

“The world is built by tradesman, everything that we do requires trade,” said Lt. Col. Jeff Drawe, an Idaho National Guardsmen who took advantage of the program in 2020 to do a 30-hour welding course that lasted five Saturdays and cost $595. “Regardless of your employment situation, if you’re ever laid off you’ll always be able to find employment.”

Idaho Army National Guard Lt. Col. Jeff Drawe’s desire to continue learning led him to completing an introductory welding course at the College of Western Idaho in December. The course consisted of 30 hours of instruction over five Saturdays. Drawe used the Idaho National Guard’s State Education Assistance Program to pay the course’s $595 tuition. (U.S. National Guard photo by Master Sgt. Becky Vanshur)

‘A small investment’

In his letter, Cook also said the programs are a “small investment” into the Army’s “Taking Care of People” priority listed in its 2025 budget request overview.

In an interview with Task & Purpose, Cook compared the value of the tuition assistance program to the GI bill for soldiers and the American economy after WWII.

“There’s a whole host of reasons why the United States went into an economic windfall after WWII but the GI Bill was one because it gave servicemembers an entitlement to go out and get a formal education,” he said. “The tuition assistance program is not comparable to the GI Bill post-WWII but the fact that it gives soldiers an incentive, an avenue or a pathway to gain formal education while you’re serving is something that means a lot, especially to noncommissioned officers.”

Cook also noted that many retired soldiers, especially Special Forces, try to find jobs in the private defense world after service with jobs that almost always require a bachelor’s degree at minimum. But degrees can also impact soldiers who pursue full Army careers, he said.

“When we look at two promotion packets for senior enlisted folks and one’s got a bachelor’s degree and the other one doesn’t, then you’re gonna take the one with formal education – among other things, of course,” he said, “but the Army gives that to everyone so the tuition assistance program and formal college education is something that sets you apart and those evaluations.”

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In 2023, more than 100,000 soldiers used the tuition assistance program which

cost the Army around $278 million, Cook said in his letter. Of the $185.9 billion proposed Army budget for 2025, the $278 million tuition assistance cost represents only 0.15% of the entire plan, he added.

At a Congressional hearing on the Army’s fiscal year 2025 budget, federal lawmakers questioned the cuts impact on recruiting – a major issue plaguing the service over the last few years. In Fiscal Year 2022, the Army recruited 45,000 new soldiers, missing a goal of 60,000 recruits by 25%. Last fiscal year, the Army fell 10,000 recruits short of its goal of 65,000, a 15% miss.

Wormuth told lawmakers that the Army had not made any decisions on cuts to two financial assistance programs.

“It’s a great program. We support it. We know our soldiers value certifications that they can then use when they leave the Army. The challenge we have is we didn’t frankly really put any guardrails around the program to help us scope it,” Wormuth said.

The Army is now looking to put limits on the program to curb growing costs across the service, she said.

“Rather than having soldiers be able to pursue an unlimited number of credentials every year in perpetuity, we may look at saying that soldiers could do one certification a year. Maybe have sort of a cap on the number of certifications they can get over the duration of their time in the Army — really just to try to manage the costs of the program a little bit better,” she said. “Those kinds of guardrails are very similar to what our sister services have done in the Air Force and the Navy.”

The Army as a ‘path forward’

Cook said the assistance programs for further education or vocational certifications are part of the attraction for young enlisted troops who join the Army for a “million different reasons” other than just wanting to serve their country.

“One of them is that some people don’t have a clear pathway forward, or a way to pay for it,” Cook said. “That pathway is very valuable to an entire population of young people who can’t take student loans out or don’t have the means to go to college the traditional way.”

Cook admits he was “not the best student” when he started college. But after joining the Army at 25, Cook said he matured, learned structure and then became a “double offender” finishing his master’s degree too. In his letter, Cook noted the “staggering” financial burden of a secondary education on an NCO salary.

“It would be extremely difficult for me to go to school full time with two toddlers and a stay-at-home mom,” he said. “The fact that I knocked out two degrees on active duty could not have been done without the tuition assistance program on an enlisted salary.”

NCO salaries range from Privates with less than two years of experience making around $24,000 annually to Staff Sergeants with eight years of experience making just over $51,000.

The latest on Task & Purpose

• Army captain gives up his rank to enlist in the Marine Corps
• Army fires commander of Germany-based air defense unit
• Navy offers some sailors $100,000 to reenlist
• Army general bans most work texts after duty day
• Air National Guard officer and state senator arrested for burglary

taskandpurpose.com · by Patty Nieberg · May 3, 2024

​14. Larry Summers Says Campus Uproar Buoys US Adversaries

That is because the "uproar" is also a result of our adversaries' efforts.

Larry Summers Says Campus Uproar Buoys US Adversaries

By Edward Dufner

May 3, 2024 at 3:46 PM EDT

Updated on May 3, 2024 at 4:39 PM EDT

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-03/summers-says-campus-uproar-craven-schools-buoy-us-adversaries?sref=hhjZtX76

Former Harvard University President Larry Summers renewed his criticism of college protests stemming from Israel’s war against Hamas, saying the increasingly chaotic scenes on American campuses were encouraging US adversaries.

Occupied buildings, disrupted commencement plans and scuffles with police send a terrible signal to countries such as Russia, China, Iran and North Korea at the “most dangerous geopolitical moment” in decades, Summers said Friday on Bloomberg Television’s Wall Street Week with David Westin.

“It seems to me that anybody sitting in one of those countries has to be taking great encouragement from the spectacle that is being made by our young future elites on so many of our leading college campuses, and even more by the craven responses that are typifying university leaderships,” Summers said.​

​Lawrence H. Summers, former US Treasury Secretary and Bloomberg Television contributor, says he’s appalled by the pro-Palestinian protests being held on the campus of Harvard University, where he was once president. He joins David Westin on “Wall Street Week.”

Summers’ remarks built on a litany of scoldings directed at college demonstrators and university administrators since the Oct. 7 terror raid on Israel by Hamas. That assault, which killed more than 1,200 Israelis, created a widening rift on campuses as some students sought to blame Israel for provoking the attack — an assertion that immediately stirred claims of antisemitism.

The tumult has only grown since then, with Israel’s bombardment of Gaza — and the death of thousands of civilians — keeping protests alive. This week, as protesters erected encampments on dozens of campuses, police in riot gear retook an occupied building at Columbia University and dismantled barricades and tents at the University of California at Los Angeles.

President Joe Biden on Thursday defended the rights of demonstrators but declared that “order must prevail.”

Months of turmoil have already toppled campus presidents, bitterly divided students, upset powerful alumni and prompted investigations by Congress.

The uproar has stoked accusations of antisemitism as well as concern about suppression of free speech for pro-Palestinian voices. This week, university leaders have drawn reproach for bringing in police to oust demonstrators in what critics called a heavy-handed crackdown.

Summers has been outspoken in chiding schools including Harvard for failing to stamp out antisemitic behavior on campus, and he renewed that line of criticism Friday.

“I predicted that given the craven weakness they showed in the wake of Oct. 7 that come the spring, which is always protest time on college campuses, there would be a massive and ugly disruption,” Summers said. “And that’s where it’s been.”

(Updates with additional context about campus turmoil in seventh paragraph)

15.  Is Vietnam warming to Nato-style weaponry? A rugged South Korean howitzer holds clues

ChinaDiplomacy

Is Vietnam warming to Nato-style weaponry? A rugged South Korean howitzer holds clues

• South Korea’s durable K9 howitzer has attracted interest from Hanoi as it seeks to diversify from Russian arms
• But a shift to Nato-standard weapons could signal Vietnam’s intent to counter China, analysts say
• Seong Hyeon Choi
• + FOLLOWPublished: 9:00am, 4 May 2024
• https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3261183/vietnam-warming-nato-style-weaponry-rugged-south-korean-howitzer-holds-clues

South China Morning Post · May 4, 2024

During a visit to South Korea last year, Phong personally confirmed the high standards of howitzer, according to the South Korean defence ministry. “He said that if the K9 howitzers were introduced in Vietnam, they could be deployed to the 204th artillery brigade,” the ministry said.

Vietnamese Defence Minister Phan Van Giang and other delegates were given a demonstration of the K9 during a visit to South Korea in March last year.

The K9 is a 155mm/52 calibre self-propelled howitzer developed and manufactured by South Korea’s Hanwha Aerospace. It can carry up to 48 projectiles and is capable of firing six rounds per minute with a range of 60km (37 miles).

Since its introduction in 1999, the K9 has become one of the South Korean defence industry’s biggest exports, accounting for more than half of howitzer orders worldwide.

More than 1,400 K9 units have so far been or will be exported to eight countries – Turkey, Poland, Finland, Estonia, India, Norway, Australia, and Egypt – six of them Nato member states or US allies.

The 155mm bore is a Nato-standard artillery shell that is rarely manufactured in Russia or China, with Chinese PLZ-45 howitzers being one of the few exceptions.

03:23

Xi Jinping says Vietnam is a ‘diplomatic priority’ as Chinese leader seeks closer bilateral ties

Xi Jinping says Vietnam is a ‘diplomatic priority’ as Chinese leader seeks closer bilateral ties

Vietnam is reportedly seeking to buy up to 108 K9 howitzers to replace its obsolete artillery. According to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, Vietnamese artillery consists of decades-old weapons systems, including 30 Soviet-era 152.4mm self-propelled howitzers and 360 Chinese Type 63 multiple rocket launchers.

It also operates an unknown number of US-made howitzers captured during the Vietnam war, but Nato-standard weapons systems make up a relatively small part of the country’s arsenal.

According to Nguyen Khac Giang, a visiting fellow for the Vietnam Studies Programme at Singapore’s ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, Vietnam’s interest in the K9 howitzer is part of a strategy to “diversify” its arms sources beyond Russia, which supplies about 80 per cent of its weaponry.

“A key factor in Vietnam’s interest is South Korea’s willingness to transfer technology, a significant advantage as Hanoi looks to boost its domestic military production capabilities,” Giang said.

“A potential acquisition of the K9 would also support Vietnam’s ongoing efforts to modernise its military hardware.”

Yang Uk, a research fellow at the Asan Institute for Policy Studies in Seoul, said ammunition compatibility would be a key challenge in acquiring the South Korean weapons, since it would require Vietnam’s military to replace all of its 152mm Russian artillery shells.

However, he said, the K9 would be a “good weapons system” in containing Chinese military power, considering its price and capabilities.

“The ammunition itself will be completely different, so this could mean that [Vietnam’s] large-calibre firearms would gradually move to the Nato standard,” Yang said.

“It means that Vietnam is willing to be equipped with the capabilities to counter China … If you look at previous cases, India has also introduced the K9 to respond against Pakistan, but it also has the implication of countering China.”

Vietnam has sought to pursue a balanced strategy amid prolonged US-China rivalry. Despite their territorial disputes in the South China Sea, China and Vietnam have maintained relatively stable relations, in contrast to the military tensions between Beijing and Manila, also a rival claimant.

Chinese Defence Minister Dong Jun travelled to Vietnam last month for his first trip outside China since taking office, and agreed with his Vietnamese counterpart to set up a naval hotline.

China willing to boost military ties with Vietnam, ‘unite closely’

Meanwhile, Washington has reportedly offered to sell Vietnam F-16 jets, according to Reuters, as Hanoi upgraded US relations to its highest diplomatic status – alongside China and Russia – when President Joe Biden visited last September.

“China, a major arms exporter itself, is likely to view the increasing flow of South Korean arms into Southeast Asia with concern, seeing it both as competition in the arms market and as a geopolitical challenge, particularly when these arms are exported to countries involved in maritime disputes with China,” Giang said.

Kapil Kajal, an Asia-Pacific land warfare analyst at the global military intelligence company Janes, agreed that South China Sea tensions put Beijing at a disadvantage when it came to being a major weapons supplier to Hanoi.

He said that while Vietnam’s procurement of defence equipment from South Korea focused on supply chain diversification, it was also a part of its “hedging strategy” amid US-China tensions.

China’s Xi Jinping calls on Vietnam to use ‘political wisdom’ to manage ties

“Vietnam seeks to maintain a balance between its relationship with major powers to avoid over-reliance on any single country,” Kajal said.

“This allows Vietnam to enhance its bilateral relationships with multiple countries … Vietnam’s import of Nato-standard weapons may signal a strategic shift towards interoperability with Nato forces, potentially enhancing ties with the US and its allies.”

Zachary Abuza, a professor at the National War College in Washington, who specialises in Southeast Asia, said the Russian invasion of Ukraine had pushed Vietnam to find alternative sources of weapons, as international sanctions on Russia cast increased uncertainty over its defence supply chain.

However, Hanoi, he said, would refrain from buying weapons from Beijing as China posed a “military threat” to Vietnam, with more Nato-standard weapons gradually expected to appear in the Vietnamese military.

“China poses a military threat to Vietnam. Hanoi would never buy weapons from Beijing, and Beijing would be unlikely to sell weapons to Hanoi,” Abuza said.

“I think Vietnam has been interesting … without a doubt, you are going to see a lot more Nato-standard weapons, but it will be in certain sectors and slowly.”

South China Morning Post · May 4, 2024

Disaffection and Despair: Behind the Military’s Recruitment Woes

Disaffection and Despair: Behind the Military’s Recruitment Woes

What we have asked our all-volunteer force and our military families to endure.​'

https://www.thebulwark.com/p/disaffection-despair-all-volunteer-force-crisis

WILL SELBER

MAY 03, 2024

Members of the U.S. Army Albany recruiting battalion during an Army & Veterans Community Covenant Signing Ceremony designed to foster and sustain the community's partnership in improving the quality of life for Soldiers and their Families, at the Palace Theater in Albany Wednesday morning November 19, 2008 (Photo by John Carl D’Annibale /Albany Times Union via Getty Images)

THE YOUNG, TWENTYSOMETHING AIRMAN knocked gingerly on my door. It was time for his out-processing appointment with me, his squadron commander. After we exchanged pleasantries, I asked him why he decided to separate from the military after four years.

“Sir, it’s not that I hate the Air Force. I appreciate everything it’s done for me. But I can make a lot more doing the same job as a contractor,” he said. “And as a contractor, I don’t have to move every four years, which is easier on my wife and our children. Military life is just too hard on the family.”

He wasn’t alone in feeling that way. From 2021 to 2023, I heard scores of my outgoing airmen relay their regrets about leaving the service. Nearly all of them were grateful for the experience. But the high operations tempo, the cutbacks in services, and the stresses on family life made it just too hard to stay—especially when there were higher-paying jobs outside the service. The decision to move into civilian life was fairly straightforward.

As the United States faces a daunting array of national security threats around the world, one of the gravest dangers is going largely unnoticed at home: The all-volunteer force is in crisis. Without serious reforms, it will not survive—let alone perform well in a shooting war with a near-peer adversary.

The all-volunteer force (AVF) was established in 1973, in the waning years of the Vietnam War, following a 1970 recommendation of President Nixon’s Gates Commission. The United States had relied on conscription to fight its earlier wars dating back to the Revolution. Complaints, protests, and public arguments against the draft were not unheard of—but the anti-draft protests during the Vietnam War roiled the country in a new way, spurring the implementation of the AVF.

The AVF was instituted in 1973, and after a transition period, the United States was left with a professional, comparatively small, and motivated force. This was the force in place as the Cold War ended and the Gulf War was fought. This was the force in place during a series of smaller deployments in the 1990s (when, according to some analysts, “AVF 2.0” emerged, relying more on reservists and contractors). This was the force in place as a computer-driven “revolution in military affairs” moved into high gear—meaning that a smaller, more technologically advanced, better trained force could overcome a larger, less advanced one.

And this was the force in place on September 11, 2001.

Today, this force is on the verge of collapse, primarily due to overuse: It was not designed to fight a two-decade-long war in multiple theaters while simultaneously managing the liberal international order.

The AVF’s problems are not limited to recruiting, but its recruitment problem is the most visible symptom of many lingering issues. Underneath the hood, the AVF suffers from an exhausted workforce using aging equipment in the context of a cumbersome bureaucracy that is resistant to change. Families are similarly overextended, and their unaddressed frustrations have taught them to be wary of the government’s inability to fix systemic issues. And recently retired service members—the veterans of the 9/11 generation—are in particularly bad shape. The Veterans Administration (VA) is not set up to adequately support veterans who spent twenty years fighting two unsuccessful and unpopular wars while incurring PTSD, moral injury, and other harms.

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Families

While many words have been written (including by me) about the reasons for the military’s recruitment woes—especially the drop in active-duty service members who would recommend service—not enough attention has been paid to the role that military families play in not only supporting those in the service, but in recommending service to others. According to a Blue Star Family survey, only 32 percent of military families would recommend military service, a staggering 22 percent drop in seven years.

“Quality-of-life issues may be more tolerable during a war because we can see the purpose for the sacrifices,” said Jessica Strong, the senior director of applied research for Blue Star Families and herself a military spouse. These quality-of-life issues, she told The Bulwark, “are less tolerable when there’s no clear reason.”

Foremost among the quality-of-life challenges military families face is military spouse unemployment. A whopping 22 percent of military spouses were unemployed in 2021, the last time an estimate was made. That number is presumably lower today, as the strong job market right now has made it possible for many military spouses to re-enter the workforce. Then there is the further problem of underemployment—having some work, such as a part-time job, but not full employment—which affects almost a third of military spouses, according to U.S. Veterans Magazine. These are major concerns pushing people out of the military or preventing them from joining in the first place.

“There are jobs available for military spouses. However, maintaining a career is nearly impossible,” Sarah Pflugradt, an Air Force veteran and a military spouse, told The Bulwark. “Spouses with master’s degrees don’t want to take a job that pays $17 an hour just to be employed.”

Even with the rise in teleworking, the constant churn of military life is difficult. Through my twenty-year Air Force career, I moved fourteen times—disruptions that can make it difficult or impossible for military families to make friends and build community ties. I also deployed six times, and spent about half my time away from home. When you take into account the grueling work hours and the high operational tempo, you can get a sense of how stressful military life is for families.

“The military is hard on spouses and kids,” Jade Ferrell, whose mother serves in the military, told The Bulwark. “When my mother was deployed, my father was basically a single parent, and he didn’t have adequate military support.”

It’s not all downside: Military children get to see the world, gain resilience, and acquire different, larger perspectives on the United States and the need to defend it at home and abroad.

“I loved military life. I loved to travel,” Alexandra Linge, whose father serves in the military, told The Bulwark. “Now it’s kind of weird not moving every 3-4 years.”

The frequent moving also makes successfully navigating the military’s never-ending bureaucracy, especially the DoD’s Tricare military medical system, a virtually impossible task. Forty percent of service members reported their families waited for two months or more to see a specialist.

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Constant moves, long nights, the steady drumbeat of war, and the lack of career opportunities for spouses all play a significant role in the AVF crisis. But the biggest impediment to recruitment and retention is the experience of recently retired or separated service members.

The 9/11 Generation

Hundreds of thousands of career service members with multiple deployments to Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and Africa will retire over the next five to ten years. No other generation in American history has had to carry such a burden. Roughly half of the 9/11 generation of veterans have seen combat, nearly double the rates of previous generations. Many, like myself, are reeling from wounds both visible and invisible. They will struggle, or have struggled, with reintegrating into a civilian world that seemed to forget about the wars fought in their name even while those wars were still underway.

“It wasn’t going off to war that eventually drove me to drinking,” one Air Force veteran who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, Adam Saxe, told The Bulwark. “It was coming home after the war, and feeling like a total stranger in the land I went to protect. The guys that stayed home spent their twenties and thirties building a life. I missed out on all that, and buried that painful reality in liquor.”

I’ve experienced this firsthand since my retirement in January. Civilians still commonly say “Thank you for your service”—but after that ritualized sentiment, conversation often abruptly halts. Sometimes it’s hard to tell if they don’t know what else to say, or just don’t want to talk about it. Although several organizations and projects have been created to help veterans transition, many veterans feel alone in handling problems associated with the post-9/11 wars.

The statistics are shocking. Nearly a third of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans have or will deal with PTSD sometime in their lives. Although DoD is playing catch-up on traumatic brain injuries, 400,000 veterans/service members reported TBIs between 2000 and 2019. More than 500,000 veterans/service members have been diagnosed with cancer over the last two decades, with many cases likely due to exposure to burn pits and operating in regions with lax environmental regulations. All of these issues lead to high rates of substance abuse and incarceration.

And most jarringly, despite DoD’s best efforts, suicide has claimed more lives than combat during the post-9/11 wars.

The problems with mental health could prove to be the most difficult for the VA to manage. Since 2020, the VA inspector general found issues with the provision of care for mental health in nearly half of its routine inspections. The issues ranged from problems with mental health screening to failures to follow up with routine care, in some cases leading to suicide or homicide.

“The VA learned a lot from Vietnam-era veterans and has dedicated significant effort towards its own capacity-building,” a senior VA official told The Bulwark on condition of anonymity so as to speak freely. “Nonetheless, the system is oversaturated and likely won’t be able to accommodate the immense needs of the veteran community, leading to significant gaps in their ability to access timely and meaningful healthcare—particularly in the realm of mental health.”

Part of the problem is that the VA is straining under an avalanche of claims. With the implementation of President Joe Biden’s much touted PACT Act, which expands care and benefits to veterans exposed to burn pits and other toxins, the VA is handling even more claims than usual, causing significant strain on an already overworked force.

The VA’s problems will only multiply as more disaffected 9/11-generation combat veterans retire from active duty. Like their Vietnam-era brethren, Afghanistan combat veterans, while proud of their service, feel angry, humiliated, and betrayed by America’s retreat from Afghanistan.

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“The military doesn’t do enough for the mental health of its members,” military spouse Katie O’Brien, whose husband deployed for two years to Afghanistan, told The Bulwark. Her husband “was completely devastated watching Afghanistan fall. He’s a pro at compartmentalizing problems, but I could tell it hurt him deeply.”

As the demoralizing conclusions of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars recede into history, these problems will remain—for both recent veterans and service members still on active duty, further eroding the AVF.

Active Duty

The AVF is small—too small. The Army is authorized to have 494,000 personnel, but only has 445,000, and hopes to get to 470,000 within the next five years. The Navy is short about 16,000 sailors and, worryingly for the future of the force, the dearth of junior sailors is particularly acute. The Air Force is facing such serious personnel shortfalls that it’s offering pilots as much as $600,000 to stay in the service. Only the Marine Corps and Space Force, the two smallest services, met their recruitment goals last year—barely.

This underweight AVF faces the most complex and dangerous geopolitical landscape since the Cold War. European Command is knee-deep in helping the Ukrainians while bolstering our NATO allies, which includes more and bigger exercises. Central Command is sparring with Iran and its proxies in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen, while providing security assistance to the Israeli Defense Forces. Indo-Pacific Command is keeping a steady eye on Chinese revanchism throughout the Pacific. Add the persistent threat of radical Islamic terrorism, and it should come as little surprise that the U.S. military is in some ways just as busy as it was during the heights of the Iraq and Afghanistan War, despite being at its smallest size since World War II.

After years of being told to do more with less, the AVF is under enormous strain. Lack of sleep is a persistent problem. This, too, I saw firsthand. Most of my airmen’s work schedules changed constantly, from the graveyard shift one day to a mid-afternoon shift the next and a dawn shift after that. These changes affected not only their health, but their family lives, too. It’s little wonder the military has the highest divorce rate of any career field.

The financial strains associated with military service don’t help. Partly due to inflation, the men and women of the AVF are struggling to put food on the table. A whopping 24 percent of active-duty troops face some type of food insecurity. Hundreds of thousands of military families live on base to offset rising housing costs, but face unconscionable conditions. While the DoD works to improve childcare costs, its daycare centers have been slow to report abuse, sapping what’s left of confidence in the system and driving some families to costlier private options.

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When service members suffer, the military suffers. After two decades of war, DoD has an enormous problem with readiness, “the ability of military forces to fight and meet the demands of assigned missions.” Its personnel are tired, demoralized, and fighting with older equipment not likely to withstand the rigors of conflict against either Russia or China. The Navy is struggling to keep pace with the expanding Chinese Navy—its total number of ships is about half of the 529 it had at the end of the Cold War and at least 80 short of what it says it needs. To reach those goals, the Navy plans to hang onto older ships long past when it expected to retire them. The Air Force—with its active inventory of aircraft now “the oldest, smallest, and least ready in its 76-year history”—has been slow to the drone fight, as it remains wedded to an antiquated style of aerial combat. Both the Army and Marine Corps are restructuring their forces, causing howls of indignation and opposition in cultures that are often resistant to change. It is little wonder that DoD is “freaking out” about a potential conflict with China.

‘The Pitch or the Product?’

DoD is trying everything it can think of to mitigate the recruitment crisis. The Air Force even tried luring retired members back into the force. (Sorry, I’ll pass.) The Navy is starting to allow new recruits to join without a GED or a high school diploma. The Army has found some success with its future-prep course, which provides recruits ninety days of preparatory training so as to meet military standards before even shipping off to basic training. Yet, despite all of the new ideas, the military will struggle to meet its recruitment goals in 2024.

“Does the recruiting crisis ultimately come down to the pitch or the product? If it’s the product, that’s a much bigger problem,” Gil Barndollar, a senior fellow at Defense Priorities who served as a Marine infantry officer from 2009 to 2016, told The Bulwark.

The product is the problem. The creation of the AVF gave rise to what is now known as the civilian-military gap, in which the general public understands very little about the military, and the military is disconnected from broader American society. The result is a mirage of stability. The vast majority of Americans assume that defending the country is something other people do, which can leave those who volunteer feeling misunderstood, neglected, and abandoned.

The United States now faces stark choices. While the idea of mandatory national service (military or civilian) is a subject of perennial discussion, it’s unlikely to happen in today’s political environment. The United States needs to do more to address this crisis now, or we won’t be able to rely on the AVF in the next war.

There are plenty of policy changes available to address the issue. Congress’s proposed 15 percent pay increase for junior enlisted service members would help offset inflation and make entry pay more competitive. A proposed GI Bill for Child Care would provide grants of up to $15,000 per kid for six to nine months while spouses re-enter the workforce. Instead of pumping veterans full of pills, the VA could allow combat veterans to use alternative medicine, like cannabis, psilocybin, and MDMA, to treat PTSD and moral injury.

While spending more money on the VA, military families, and modernization efforts are a key part in dealing with this crisis, it will not be enough. The military and the civilians they protect are going to have to close the civ-mil gap and learn about each other again. There’s no panacea for a problem this complex, but there are three important steps that could help ameliorate it. First, DoD needs to lower its force-protection threshold and allow civilians back on base. Pre-9/11 restrictions were nowhere near as tight, allowing more interactions between civilians and the military. There were still restricted areas, and there always will be. But some areas could be open to the public like they used to be.

Second, we need to start educating our children about the armed forces. Recruiters would have an easier time fighting military stereotypes if our children understood the basic structure of the military—not to mention the reality of military life as distinct from what’s in movies and video games.

Third, to restore confidence in the AVF, the military must start holding its senior leaders accountable. It’s been nearly two half years since the fall of Kabul, and nobody in uniform has been relieved of duties. During World War II, generals were routinely removed from command for being ineffective. That only happened once in Afghanistan, when Secretary of Defense Robert Gates relieved General David McKiernan of command in 2009.

“There needs to be more accountability throughout the military, and not just for poor battlefield decisions, but also for problems in garrison too,” Allison Jaslow, the CEO of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, told The Bulwark.

The liberal international order depends on the strength of the United States Armed Forces. Great power competition has returned. Spending more is necessary but not sufficient for the national defense. The United States must find a way to rebuild, reinforce, and reinvigorate its military—and quickly.

Share this article with a friend who served—and then ask them for their perspective.

17. Former national security advisor gives chilling warning about World War Three

4% GDP. And our debt?

Former national security advisor gives chilling warning about World War Three

•  General H.R. McMaster was special adviser to Donald Trump
•  He warned the world is 'on the cusp' of another global conflict
•  McMaster encouraged the White House to up defense spending to 4% of GDP

By BETHAN SEXTON FOR DAILYMAIL.COM

PUBLISHED: 01:41 EDT, 3 May 2024 | UPDATED: 02:09 EDT, 3 May 2024

Daily Mail · by Bethan Sexton For Dailymail.Com · May 3, 2024

A former national security adviser has warned the globe 'could be on the cusp of another World War.'

General H.R. McMaster, who served as a special adviser to former president Donald Trump, urged Washington and the UK to increase their defense spending in anticipation of the global conflict.

He cautioned that a series of 'cascading crises' such as Israel's war on Hamas and the Russian invasion of Ukraine could spell disaster.

McMaster advised the White House to increase defense spending to 4 percent of GDP - twice as much currently required of NATO nations. The money should be spent on high-tech missile systems such as Israel's Iron Dome, according to the geopolitical expert.

'We could be on the cusp of another World War,' he told British broadcaster LBC Radio's Andrew Marr. 'I know that sounds dramatic, but I think we have to take it seriously so we can prevent that from happening.'

Former national security adviser H.R. McMaster has warned that 'we could be on the cusp of another World War'

He cautioned that a series of 'cascading crises' such as Israel's war on Hamas and other conflicts could spell disaster. Pictured: Damage in Gaza on April 7

The former adviser to Donald Trump warned that Vladimir Putin's ongoing occupation of Ukraine shows now signs of abating as he is not 'interested in a deal'. Pictured: Ukrainian soldiers on the frontline, March 6

Firefighters fighting a blaze at a home after Russian strikes, in the town of Derhachi, Kharkiv region, amid the Russian invasion in Ukraine on April 26

McMaster added that a 4 percent defense spend would still be 'a historic low relative to Cold War levels.'

'It's a heck of a lot cheaper to prevent a war than to have to fight,' he said. 'I think that every country is going to have to develop these kinds of defenses and long-range missiles, hypersonic missiles are important.

'Maybe [former US President] Ronald Reagan had it right with Star Wars, with space-based capabilities as well.'

He explained the conflicts unfolding around the world pose ever increasing threats to the West.

As well as Gaza and Ukraine, unrest has bubbled over in places such as Haiti, Venezuela and Sudan.

Renewed military activity in Taiwan has also reignited fears of a future invasion by Beijing.

McMaster advocated for the White House to increase defense spending to 4 percent of GDP and invest in long range missiles or system's similar to Israel's Iron Dome

Other threats to Western stability include the gang warfare unfolding in Haiti (pictured) following the resignation of its Prime Minister

A woman carrying a child runs from the area after gunshots were heard in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, on March 20

The Venezuelan crisis also continues to pose safety concerns for the US. Pictured: A rally for Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina on May 2

When grilled on how his former boss would deal with the global turmoil if re-elected in November, McMaster stood by Trump, stating he was right to call for NATO nations to increase defense spending.

'We know for sure Trump will demand burden sharing and reciprocity, but I think Europe is on board with that now,' he said, adding that he expected the former president to stand with besieged nations 'when presented with the facts'.

He praised Trump for calling out Germany's 'unwise decision' to become over reliant on Kremlin gas exports via Nord Stream 2.

However, he criticized his ex-boss for 'gullibility' in thinking he could ever strike a deal with Vladimir Putin and made a jibe about 'useful idiot' Tucker Carlson following his interview with the autocrat.

'Putin is not interested in a deal,' McMaster explained. 'Putin wants to drag everybody else down, under the theory that he can be the last man standing and he can restore the Russian Empire.

'He's been quite clear about that when he did the interview with that useful idiot, Tucker Carlson.'

McMaster slammed Trump for misunderstanding Putin's aims and branded Tucker Carlson a 'useful idiot' after he sat down for an interview with the autocrat earlier this year

His comments come after Taiwan reported renewed military activity near the island by China, reigniting fears of an invasion by Beijing

His comments come after US Assistant Secretary of Defense for Space Policy Dr. John Plumb revealed that Russia is developing a nuclear anti-satellite weaponry.

Recently, France's President Emanuel Macron stated he would be willing to send troops to Ukraine if Putin's forces break through to the frontline.

The suggestion has been rebuffed by the US government, but Putin warned that a direct conflict between Russia and NATO states would arise if allied forces are sent to Ukraine.

Daily Mail · by Bethan Sexton For Dailymail.Com · May 3, 2024

​18. With Chinese warships anchoring in Cambodia, the US needs to respond

With Chinese warships anchoring in Cambodia, the US needs to respond

Defense News · by Rep. Rob Wittman and Craig Singleton · May 3, 2024

The recent mooring of Chinese warships at Cambodia’s Ream Naval Base marked the unofficial inauguration of China’s first overseas naval post in the Indo-Pacific region and only its second overall. These latest deployments, which demand a robust American government response, signal how China plans to leverage its expanding global military footprint to thwart U.S. forces from intervening in a Taiwan crisis.

For years, Chinese and Cambodian officials insisted that refurbishments at Ream Naval Base — a deep-water facility located along the coast of the Gulf of Thailand — were never intended to accommodate Chinese military vessels. But those denials evaporated when Chinese corvettes docked at Ream Naval Base, which now boasts a near-replica of the 363-meter-long pier installed at China’s only other overseas naval base in Djibouti.

Both piers are large enough to berth any ship in China’s fast-growing naval force, including its new, approximately 300-meter-long Type 003 Fujian aircraft carrier, which will undergo sea trials this year. Meanwhile, the U.S. Navy’s fleet is almost half the size it was 40 years ago.

Cambodian Defence Minister Tea Banh, left, and China's Ambassador to Cambodia Wang Wentian, center, take part in a groundbreaking ceremony at the Ream Naval Base in Preah Sihanouk province on June 8, 2022. (Pann Bony/AFP via Getty Images)

Yet, Ream Naval Base and Djibouti represent only two nodes in Beijing’s broader overseas basing strategy. Earlier this year, the U.S. intelligence community warned Congress that China is pursuing other naval bases and expanded military access in Burma, Cuba, Equatorial Guinea, Pakistan, Seychelles, Sri Lanka, Tanzania and the United Arab Emirates. Gaining a foothold in any of these locations, many of which are situated near sensitive U.S. military sites, would provide China’s People’s Liberation Army with a vantage point to monitor and control vital maritime routes.

From left, a satellite image shows a naval base in Djibouti with Chinese military presence, and a near-replica pier in Cambodia's Ream Naval Base that China uses. (Courtesy of BlackSky)

In Cambodia’s case, that includes the Strait of Malacca, through which 30% of the world’s trade flows.

While China remains intent on rivaling U.S. dominance, Beijing is not seeking to mirror America’s expansive and expensive global military presence. Instead, China’s aim is to neutralize the American network’s effectiveness.

A satellite image shows Cambodia's Ream Naval Base, with the left in June 2022 and the other in July 2023. (Courtesy of BlackSky)

More specifically, China’s little-understood forward edge defense doctrine centers around deploying military assets abroad where China’s adversaries — principally the U.S. — are strongest, such as the Middle East. In certain cases, China is eyeing new naval outposts adjacent to brick-and-mortar U.S. bases; elsewhere, its focused on establishing a presence near maritime choke points frequented by American military vessels.

By pre-positioning its military in this manner, Chinese strategists assess Beijing stands a reasonable chance of striking American military facilities and other high-value targets — and even during a war over Taiwan — thereby complicating Washington’s ability to dispatch these and other forces to China’s periphery.

Similarly, in projecting power from farther flung locales, such as West Africa, China could gravely complicate Washington’s ability to rapidly deploy U.S. military assets stationed along America’s Eastern Seaboard to the fight in Asia.

So far, Cambodia has incurred no costs whatsoever for its decision to host Chinese forces. In other instances, diplomatic interventions designed to counter China’s basing strategy have fallen short. For example, U.S. warnings to the United Arab Emirates in 2021 led to a brief halt in China’s covert base building there, yet construction quietly resumed two years later. The White House dispatched a different high-level delegation to Equatorial Guinea, also in 2021, only to discover later that nearby Gabon had already agreed to host Chinese forces on its soil.

It’s past time for Washington to jettison its ad hoc, absent-minded approach toward Beijing’s basing pursuits. Through enhanced oversight and better coordination, Congress can and should lead the way to ensure policies are in place to anticipate and thwart China’s moves in countries where the U.S. government assesses Beijing is seeking new or expanded military access agreements.

For starters, the Defense Department should immediately appoint a senior official to synchronize internal strategy and resourcing on this matter. The White House should similarly appointment someone to lead the interagency’s response and planning. At present, no single official or office within the Defense Department or White House has that responsibility.

Beyond routine oversight, lawmakers should consider ordering a comprehensive assessment from the Defense Department to scrutinize how new Chinese military installations might shift the global power balance and complicate U.S. force posture in key regions. Such an assessment could also spur Congress to consider granting new or expanded authorities to executive branch agencies and the intelligence community to counter China’s military moves, just as it did during the Cold War to thwart the Soviet Union’s push for overseas basing primacy.

Last, Congress should also dispatch delegations to countries with current or potential Chinese basing sites, not only to reinforce diplomatic ties but to offer tangible support that could dissuade them from hosting a Chinese military facility.

Barring swift U.S. action, the Chinese warships now anchored in Cambodia may soon set course for new Chinese outposts. Should such deployments unfold, it could mark a strategic encirclement that leaves Taiwan — and U.S. interests in the Indo-Pacific — vulnerable.

Rep. Rob Wittman, R-Va., is the vice chair of the House Armed Services Committee. Craig Singleton, a former U.S. diplomat, is a senior China fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies think tank.

19. the information tool – are we wielding it correctly?

Important thoughts from one of my many mentors.

Excerpts:

Why is this so important? With a vast governmental apparatus, the United States has too many voices in government promoting shades of policy yet without a coherent understanding that how our panoply of voices are reinforcing the problem.. Put otherwise, these groups seek the very types of distinctions we see across government to assure their internal belief is correct that government lies ably, constantly, and compellingly. That government—regardless of party— doesn’t seem able (or willing) to clarify differences between news sources further proves their point as more ‘fake news’ rather than different interpretations of the same information. Those differences illustrate a freedom of speech exercised through the free press we cherish but violent extremists contort those facts to see alternative, malevolent explanations for differences, for the role of the press, for the need to quash those of differing persuasions, and worse.

I am not advocating a single information cabinet post or tsar; that is not the American way nor would it be successful. But I am keen to figure what we can do to address this problem because it affects us at home and abroad. We are not aggressive enough in countering missteps in our presentations or inconsistencies in messaging, whether it’s on Taiwan, on China, on Russia, on Namibia, or Chicago. Perhaps we are too concerned with spokespeople who are deft at putting out the message but not at assuring it’s the most accurate message. We just put out too many differing responses that others delight in picking apart. These things matter.

the information tool

are we wielding it correctly?

https://cynthiawatson.substack.com/p/the-information-tool?r=7i07&utm

CYNTHIA WATSON

MAY 03, 2024

The four important categories of instruments a society has are diplomatic (country-to-country conversations, discussions on treaties, demarches, and the like), military, informational, and economic. After all these years, I lean towards informational as the hardest for Americans to use effectively not because we lack resources to get the world out but because a free society has so many outlets for information whether aimed at home or abroad.

The means of information come in many categories. It can be governmental or non-governmental, truthful or disinformation to shape decisions, malicious or even in its ‘temperament’, accurate and inaccurate (differentiated from truthful in that inaccurate information does not have to be government driven, though it can be. Bad information just happens some times. There are actually events called accidents.), and wide-spread or closely held. Information can include official documents issued for a policy, press statements, congressional testimony, government reports, judicial branch decisions, and archival information. On the non-governmental side, the private media stories, reports, not-for-profit and academic studies, and ‘special’ transfer of information to the public on a website or network. These lists merely scratches the surface as in a democracy the freedom of speech is more highly cherished than any other freedom for most people. The other freedoms flow from speech in many ways.

The ways that information spreads can also occur through a multitude of approaches. Traditional outlets, online services, ‘dark web’ information, conferences, and an even longer list of ways we disseminate information makes is ubiquitous in this age. Domestic information can confuse international and visa-versa.

And therein lies the problem that worries me today. We are failing profoundly at addressing the disinformation problem. I didn’t need to hear an exceptionally chilling William and Mary student’s year long investigation a week ago to figure this out but it was a harsh reminder of what has taken root in our society.

Disinformation has become synonymous with ‘fake news’ which is an element of the issue. I won’t rehash all of that we have learned about the dangers of social media over the past several years, such as repeating outright lies or skewing and shading facts. I also am not talking about the willful decision—and there do appear people willingly flagging this point purely for personal advantage rather than because of societal fears— many citizens have taken to reject traditional news outlets altogether although I personally find it inexplicable.

There is a decided and serious divide between news not being legitimate and news not aligning with our individual partisan preferences. Opinion is not fact nor are political views necessarily truth reflections of existing conditions. They simply are not. That distinction between actual events and partisan preferences is real but has eroded dramatically over the past decade. This concern also allows many people to abandon trust in anyone else, regardless of the evidence. We no longer know how to follow a logic trail, preferring to pursue our long-held views over eveidence they might be factually and demonstrable incorrect. Instead, far too many of us—right and left but especially on the right—are in this surreal world where we ignore what we don’t like but act as cheerleaders for that which appeals to our preferences.

This is contributing substantially to driving radical hate groups underground where they are primarily speak with like-minded haters. Our inability to break through to deter violent extremists from expanding their cell memberships based on mutual misinformation and hatreds leaves open the door to violence spilling out into society and the world. How often do we remind ourselves that Timothy McVey, the man who brought down the Federal Building in Oklahoma City in April 1995, was a violent extremist with similarly ideas to many who we will find on line today?

Just over a decade ago, U.S. officials became aware of and acted upon Islamic violent extremists recruiting over the internet. We still know Islamic cause in that violent extremism exists under the west Africa but I suspect our homegrown groups now exceed those in Africa or the Middle East. Fed by paranoia, a sense of disenfranchise, rejection, and isolation within society, these groups are particularly prone to accept unbelievably fantastical disinformation yet we are not doing much to stop this or any of the other disinformation.

Why is this so important? With a vast governmental apparatus, the United States has too many voices in government promoting shades of policy yet without a coherent understanding that how our panoply of voices are reinforcing the problem.. Put otherwise, these groups seek the very types of distinctions we see across government to assure their internal belief is correct that government lies ably, constantly, and compellingly. That government—regardless of party— doesn’t seem able (or willing) to clarify differences between news sources further proves their point as more ‘fake news’ rather than different interpretations of the same information. Those differences illustrate a freedom of speech exercised through the free press we cherish but violent extremists contort those facts to see alternative, malevolent explanations for differences, for the role of the press, for the need to quash those of differing persuasions, and worse.

I am not advocating a single information cabinet post or tsar; that is not the American way nor would it be successful. But I am keen to figure what we can do to address this problem because it affects us at home and abroad. We are not aggressive enough in countering missteps in our presentations or inconsistencies in messaging, whether it’s on Taiwan, on China, on Russia, on Namibia, or Chicago. Perhaps we are too concerned with spokespeople who are deft at putting out the message but not at assuring it’s the most accurate message. We just put out too many differing responses that others delight in picking apart. These things matter.

What do you think about this topic? Where do you see information as a priority within this society? Where does it matter if we don’t assure access to clarity and accuracy? How can we change violent extremists’ minds beyond cartoonish infomercials on the topic, leading them to turn off to anyone criticising them? Do you see this undermining our global role in any ways?

Thank you for considering these concerns in ACC. I thank you for reading this column, especially if you send me feedback. Thank the subscribers who are invaluable.

Have a good weekend outdoors planting or watching the Kentucky Derby or however you savour your time.

Be well and be safe. FIN

20. China trying to develop world ‘built on censorship and surveillance’

My belief: China seeks to export its authoritarian political system around the world in order to dominate regions, co-opt or coerce international organizations, create economic conditions favorable to China alone, and displace democratic institutions.

What fascinates and frustrates me is that Americans are so afraid of US surveillance capabilities (and we should be wary of all government surveillance) yet China seems to get a pass from the American people and the international community. We will work hard to limit US surveillance capabilities but yet it seems those people who fear US surveillance do nothing to contribute to preventing the development of Chinese surveillance activities. Why is that?

China trying to develop world ‘built on censorship and surveillance’

Al Jazeera English · by Al Jazeera Staff

China is exporting its model of digital authoritarianism abroad with the help of its far-reaching tech industry and massive infrastructure projects, offering a blueprint of “best practices” to neighbours including Cambodia, Malaysia and Vietnam, a human rights watchdog has warned.

In 2015, two years after kicking off its massive Belt and Road initiative, China launched its “Digital Silk Road” project to expand access to digital infrastructure such as submarine cables, satellites, 5G connectivity and more.

Keep reading

list of 4 itemsend of list

Article 19, a United Kingdom-based human rights group, argues that the project has been about more than just expanding access to WiFi or e-commerce.

The Digital Silk Road “has been just as much about promoting China’s tech industry and developing digital infrastructure as it has about reshaping standards and internet governance norms away from a free, open, and interoperable internet in favour of a fragmented digital ecosystem, built on censorship and surveillance, where China and other networked autocracies can prosper”, the watchdog said in a report released in April.

The 80-page report describes how the Chinese state is inextricably linked to its tech industry, a key player in the Digital Silk Road project, as private companies like Huawei, ZTE, and Alibaba serve as “proxies” for the Communist Party.

China has signed dozens of technical standard agreements with 49 countries participating in the Belt and Road, while other countries in the region including Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, and Thailand have agreed on further communiques with Beijing on digital infrastructure.

The Asia Pacific region is particularly important to Beijing, Article 19 said, as it holds a “strategic significance for China as it rolls out next-generation technologies and seeks global partners in normalising its authoritarian approach to internet governance”.

Some countries, like Cambodia, have modelled their digital governance on China, according to Article 2019. Since 2021, the Southeast Asian country has been working to build a “National Internet Gateway” in the style of China’s “Great Firewall” that limits access to many Western media outlets, Wikipedia, and social media sites like Facebook and X.

Others have also expressed concern about the project.

“The Cambodian government says this will bolster national security and help crack down on tax fraud. But the impact on Cambodian network connections will affect anyone who connects with those networks, which could have serious consequences for social and economic life, as well as potentially endanger free expression,” the Internet Society warned in December.

Nepal and Thailand are both reportedly interested in building a similar firewall, according to Article 19, and have played an active role in monitoring ethnic minority Tibetans and Uighurs living abroad on behalf of Beijing.

Under President Xi Jinping, the line between the Communist Party and the Chinese state has blurred considerably. The Party has also extended its influence deep into the private sector, with cells established in more than 90 percent of China’s top 500 companies, according to Article 19.

These companies, including tech giants, have been drafted into Beijing’s “united front” influence campaign to improve China’s image abroad and expand its global influence, Article 19 said, despite promises that they are independent of the state.

Concerns about data, privacy and potential influence campaigns have helped energise a push in the United States to ban TikTok, the wildly popular China-owned video app. Those behind the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act argue the app could allow the Chinese government to access user data and influence Americans.

Security concerns have also affected the businesses of companies like Huawei and ZTE not only in the US but in other democracies including Australia, Canada, Japan, New Zealand and the UK. In the US, the two firms have been designated “national security threats” and banned from the construction of critical infrastructure.

Beyond China’s borders, the closer ties between the state and tech companies have also raised questions about how issues like data privacy or censorship will be handled abroad by Chinese tech companies, who operate undersea cables that grant them de facto control of huge swaths of global internet traffic.

Article 19 said it was “plausible that China would share such data with allied authoritarian governments or exploit it as part of its influence operations over others. Without greater transparency and oversight, it is impossible to rule out these concerns.”

Al Jazeera English · by Al Jazeera Staff

21. No, College Curriculums Aren’t Too Focused on Decolonization

For weekend reflection. I anticipate the knee jerk reaction from those who have hardened their thinking on these subjects. This may be where the two sides' "truths" can equally co-exist.

No, College Curriculums Aren’t Too Focused on Decolonization​

Critics of campus demonstrations are aiming at the wrong target. We need to study more history, not less.

Howard French

Howard W. French

By Howard W. French, a columnist at Foreign Policy.

Foreign Policy · by Howard W. French

• United States
• North America
• Africa
• Howard W. French

May 2, 2024, 6:37 PM

On April 18, 1955, Indonesian President Sukarno took to the dais before a gathering unlike any that had ever been convened. “How terrifically dynamic is our time,” he exclaimed. “We can mobilize all the spiritual, all the moral, all the political strength of Africa and Asia on the side of peace. Yes, we! We, the people of Asia and Africa!”

The participants who converged that day on a provincial Indonesian city were of widely diverse backgrounds. They came from 29 countries, and their languages, religious beliefs, and politics were as varied as their national dress. What they all shared was what Sukarno called “a common detestation of colonialism in whatever form it appears,” and together, their nations accounted for more than half of the world’s population.

Sukarno posed a rhetorical question to the delegates: “How is it possible to be disinterested about colonialism?” And he had good reason to wonder. A front-page headline that day in the Observer, his country’s sole English-language newspaper, had stated pointedly, “United States Refuses to Send Message to Asian-African Conference.”

In interviews before this meeting, which would come to be known as the Bandung Conference, then-U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had flatly stated that Washington had no intention of sending anyone to Bandung and would not dignify the event with its recognition. Worse still, in private, Dulles’s aides poured racially tinged contempt on the gathering, reportedly mocking it as “the Darktown Strutter’s Ball.”

Soon, Bandung rightly came to be widely seen as the epoch-making progenitor of the Non-Aligned Movement, which would loosely draw together scores of countries freed from imperial rule. The delegates who gathered in Indonesia vowed to defend the rights of these newly emerging states and to resist pressure from the era’s two superpowers to choose sides in the immensely costly and perilous Cold War contest. They also demanded, among other things, respect for the equality of all races, the sovereignty of small nations, and the settlement of international disputes by peaceful means.

The Bandung era has occupied my thoughts for most of the past four years as I have neared completion of a book about the advent of independence on the African continent. But it has been front of mind for me for entirely different reasons since the recent gripping rise of a movement on U.S. campuses—originating on my own, at Columbia University—to demand an end to the war in Gaza and a new and free political order for Palestinians.

For months now, the birth of this campus movement has generated a spate of editorials and commentaries slighting the worthiness of decolonization as a topic; dismissing its relevance to the tragically vexed relationship between Israel and Palestine; and perhaps most surprising of all, seeking to blame the demonstrations and unrest at U.S. universities such as mine on a supposedly excessive focus on anti-colonialism in college curriculums.

Some of this voguish scorn for the topic of decolonization seems politically driven and of questionable good faith. Other currents have been more intellectual in nature. But both are seriously misguided. In the United States, the public has long been conditioned to believe that the most important achievements in living memory were those of what Hollywood and popularizing historians commemorate as the Greatest Generation. These were the Western men—who, when compared to the actual record, have been disproportionately represented as white—credited with the defeat of totalitarianism in Nazi Germany and Japan in World War II.

By emphasizing D-Day and figures such as U.S. Gen. George Patton and U.K. Field Marshall Bernard Law Montgomery, popular depictions of this conflict commonly promote an inflated impression of the contributions of the United States and Britain in defeating Germany’s Adolf Hitler. Dating back to the time of that conflict, serious scholars have always known that the Soviet Union—itself totalitarian—carried the brunt of the battle against Nazi Germany.

The point here is not to denigrate the courage or sacrifices of the Westerners who fought in that war, and even less to question the imperative of defeating the Nazis. Rather, it is to challenge how Westerners have celebrated their history in ways that have wrongly overshadowed or crowded out of the picture another 20th-century story of freedom. Although this may seem jarring to a Western public, this story was at least as significant, and arguably greater, than the Allied triumph in World War II.

This other story of freedom, badly neglected when not outright scorned nowadays, was the triumph of “a movement of moral justice and political solidarity against imperialism,” in the words of the eminent Duke University historian Prasenjit Duara, that belongs under the heading of decolonization.

Between 1945 and 1965, this movement saw more than 50 nations emerge from European rule that dated back, in some cases, to five centuries. Working together, they not only achieved formal independence under new flags and anthems, but also helped democratize global governance, turning the United Nations General Assembly into at least a partial check on the power of the Security Council, most of whose members were the imperial powers whose most ardent wish was to cling to their prerogatives.

This desire extended beyond the U.N. to the new global financial arrangements then being engineered. Countries from what would become popularly known as the Third World sent delegates to the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference, which laid the foundation of a new global economic system and established the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. John Maynard Keynes, the celebrated British economist who also served as a delegate, deplored non-Westerners’ presence at the historic New Hampshire gathering and complained that it was “the most monstrous monkey-house assembled for years.”

But how is it that of all places, I have wondered, the United States has found so little room to embrace—or better, celebrate—the story of global decolonization? Why have so many recent commentators there treated it almost like a bad word? After all, the United States’ own national foundation is rooted in liberation from colonial rule. In that same Bandung speech, Sukarno noted, “On the 18th day of April, 1775, just 180 years ago, Paul Revere rode at midnight through the New England countryside, warning of the approach of British troops and of the opening of the American War of Independence, the first successful anti-colonial war in history.”

What might we learn if we opened our minds to the actual record of the colonial past in what became the nonaligned world? We would come to see how European nations led by Britain and France enlisted colonial subjects from Asia and Africa to labor, fight, and die in large numbers for the cause of European freedom in the 20th century. We would see how Europe’s old powers partially financed their recovery from the devastation of World War II on the backs of Asian and African miners and farmers, whose exports of tin, manganese, cocoa, rubber, and many other commodities replenished European treasuries.

We would learn that even in the postwar years, some European countries briefly sustained a regime of forced labor on Africans that was not far removed from enslavement. We would come to see how a tiny minority of British settlers in Kenya employed violence on a massive scale and confined native populations to tightly policed camps in the 1950s so that they could control the country’s richest farmlands. We would learn of the attempt to get into the colonial game by imperial latecomers such as Italy, which killed as much as one-eighth of the population of Ethiopia through aerial bombing and poison mustard gas in the 1930s. We would see how Portugal, still unsated after centuries of colonial rule, fought to sustain its control over colonies in present-day Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau into the 1970s, aligning itself with apartheid-ruled South Africa in the process.

We would understand how little Europeans invested in education, health care, and basic infrastructure in the African colonies that they ruled, making the continent’s relative poverty and instability today a lot less mysterious.

We would learn that at the Berlin Conference of 1884-85, Europe justified its claims over Africa and its wealth on the basis of the supposed “white man’s burden.” Its tutorship promised to bring education to the continent. Yet in the early decades of the 20th century in British-ruled places such as the Gold Coast (present-day Ghana), for instance, only a tiny percentage of children went to primary school, and the colonial government had still not bothered to open a single high school. We would learn that by the time it obtained independence from Belgium in 1960, the Democratic Republic of the Congo entered the world as a new nation of 15 million people with only 30 university graduates, and how Brussels almost immediately backed a secessionist movement in Congo so that it could control the country’s formidable storehouse of minerals.

Could it really be true that Western schooling and especially higher education have expended too much focus on subjects such as these? This is only the barest of catalogs—I’ve said nothing of catastrophic colonial famine in India, or the German genocide in colonial Namibia, or the 19th- and 20th-century partition of China by European powers and the promotion of opium addiction there by Britain. Many in the United States would be surprised to learn that their country, too, participated in the trafficking of opium to China, which was an early source of the fortunes of famous families such as the Astors, the Roosevelts, and the Forbes.

Or is it the case, rather, that most of us learn little or nothing about this colonial past, and of the grand narrative of freedom explaining how imperial rule was overcome around the world? The political tableau of the scores of countries that have gained independence in the past three-quarters of a century is, of course, a mixed one, but, as we must also learn, so is that of the West.

A lot of the anxious criticism of anti-colonial learning, I believe, is motivated by a desire to shield Israel from inclusion in a history so ugly and tragic. The wish is understandable, but questions such as these will ultimately be resolved by facts more than arguments. Israel once proudly ranged itself on the anti-colonial side of history, working assiduously in the 1950s and 60s to build strong relations with newborn states in Africa to share with them lessons and techniques of nation building. This, too, is little known nowadays. Israel’s best assurance of being on the right side of the colonial question in the future will depend on ending its dominion over millions of Palestinians and helping to usher in the birth of another new independent state.

Update, May 3, 2024: This article has been updated to provide additional examples of prominent U.S. families that profited from the opium trade.

Foreign Policy · by Howard W. French

22. Is ‘the Media’ Really Under Attack?

Excerpts:

There are no easy ways to counter such attacks, especially those presented as financial moves. It is hard enough to measure media pluralism in practice, let alone promote it. (U.S. journalist A. J. Liebling famously observed that there was only freedom of the press for those who owned one.) Yet the situation is not hopeless, and sometimes outsiders can make a difference. For example, foreign news media organizations can choose whether they want to sell to oligarchs allied with an autocratic regime, and democratic governments can incentivize them not to do so.

As today’s strongmen employ new tactics, they take great care to maintain plausible deniability. Liberal bloggers can still criticize Orban, and even investigative journalism is tolerated in Hungary to some degree. In Turkey, some critical low-circulation outlets have survived. But especially in more repressive regimes, TV and local newspapers are now largely under the control of governments invested in controlling public opinion and, increasingly, spreading disinformation to do so.

In the 1990s, many Westerners were under the illusion that only democracies were capable of learning from their experience, while autocracies were incapable of reckoning with their mistakes and would all end like the Soviet Union. Three decades later, it’s clear that they were wrong: Autocrats are learning from history, and they are developing techniques that have repressive effects but do not look all that repressive.

Of course, we should not go from one extreme to the other and assume that today’s autocrats are invincible. But to counter them and support “the media,” we need to appreciate the difference between strengthening the resistance of individual journalists, the resilience of the press as a collective, and the economic and legal staying power of independent news media organizations.

Is ‘the Media’ Really Under Attack?

We need a new framework to understand how today’s autocrats control public opinion.

By Jan-Werner Müller, a professor of politics at Princeton University.

Foreign Policy · by Jan-Werner Müller

• United States

May 3, 2024, 2:30 PM

As another World Press Freedom Day arrives, news media organizations will dutifully display lists of journalists imprisoned or killed around the world, from Belarus to Myanmar. It is important to acknowledge these victims. But it’s also time to recognize that analysts and policymakers need a new framework to understand how a new generation of authoritarian leaders disables critical coverage without putting journalists in jail or physically harming them.

As today’s autocrats—and aspiring autocrats, such as former U.S. President Donald Trump and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni—seek to acquire and keep power, they are often careful to avoid measures that are reminiscent of the 20th century’s violent dictatorships. Instead, they follow what social scientists Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman call the “spin dictator” model. This approach relies on controlling information flows: Autocratic governments are still holding elections—many of them free—but they ensure that these elections are never fair. They tilt the political playing field through tactics such as implementing legal measures that harm opposition parties’ chances and manipulating the media landscape.

In regimes that seek to avoid outright repression, unilaterally shaping public opinion is a crucial precondition for winning elections. Yet while it’s true that “the media” is under attack, it’s not helpful to think of it as a monolithic target. As autocratic leaders develop new tactics, speaking of “the media” is a grammatical, conceptual, and—above all—political mistake. We need a more fine-grained understanding of how today’s autocrats seek to control public opinion by using different techniques against three specific targets: individual journalists, the press as a collective actor, and the owners of news media organizations.

Authoritarian leaders and their aspirants have developed and shared a number of tactics to control or silence individual journalists. One very crude way to do this is to turn to lawsuits. For instance, the far-right Meloni—celebrated by commentators for becoming more moderate in office—successfully sued prominent investigative journalist Roberto Saviano for libel after he criticized her and another far-right leader, Matteo Salvini. The penalty was only around $1,050—and he would only have to pay if he repeated the offense—but the action sent a clear and threatening message to other reporters in Italy.

Leaders also intimidate journalists in more informal but arguably more insidious ways. One common tactic they use is to systematically discredit journalists as biased against their administrations. This leads journalists, under relentless political pressure, to practice what media critic Jay Rosen calls “refuge-seeking” rather than truth-seeking: They try to insulate themselves from charges of partisanship by presenting all perspectives on an issue as valid—what in the United States is known as “bothsidesism.” Under normal circumstances, this is a respectable practice. But as reporters try to counter charges of bias, they give credence to proto-authoritarian, pseudoscientific, or fringe views, including those only kept alive by lobbyists and special interests. (Climate change denial is one example.)

The leadership of news organizations can also cave, as shown by CNN’s infamous 2023 “town hall” with Trump, much criticized even within the network. At the time, CNN’s new leadership was concerned that the network had alienated conservative viewers. To remedy this, CNN decided to interview Trump in front of what turned out to be an audience of his supporters. What followed was a comprehensive failure of journalism at the individual level (the moderator, Kaitlan Collins, was no match for Trump) and the institutional level (CNN effectively aired a commercial for Trump’s 2024 election campaign).

The lesson should be clear: Authoritarian leaders weaponize traditional journalistic ethics centered on newsworthiness, balance, and objectivity. In attempting to prove their innocence, journalists end up playing—and usually losing—their game. The proper response should not be to exclude politically dangerous figures from all coverage, but to avoid covering them in a framework of their own choosing. These politicians should not determine an interview’s agenda or setting, and they need to face journalists who ask hard questions, not ones who are satisfied with outrageous quotes that will boost traffic but harm democracy.

Anti-democratic leaders have also learned to attack the press as a collective actor. One way they do this is by sowing division among members of the press. Although journalists compete with each other, ideally they share an ethos defined by a commitment to holding the powerful accountable and finding what U.S. journalist Carl Bernstein called “the best obtainable version of the truth.” Less obviously, this ethos should also include a commitment to each other—a basic solidarity, compatible with competition, such that an attack on one is understood as an attack on all.

But in the United States, for instance, those commitments have faltered. In a tactic that escalated in 2020, Trump would pick on individual members of the White House press corps, ridiculing them, defaming them, refusing to answer them, or even removing them from the room. As a seasoned reality TV actor, Trump enjoyed the performance of feuding with reporters, especially female ones. (Collins was once banned for asking Trump inconvenient questions.) Other journalists had a choice to keep cooperating and fall victim to a Trumpian game of divide and rule or to defend the press as a collective—for example, by walking out and agreeing on tough rules of engagement with Trump in the future. At the time, they chose the former.

Leaders also weaken the Fourth Estate as a collective actor by refusing to give regular press conferences. Narendra Modi has never given a solo press conference as India’s prime minister, relying instead on his extraordinary personality cult centered on mass rallies and the sophisticated use of social media. Meloni also likes to avoid press conferences and prefers to communicate to the public with carefully curated videos. In the past, politicians needed a professional press corps; today, they can often circumvent it through social media.

Finally, autocrats ensure that news media organizations cannot operate properly, including by attacking their owners. (“News media organizations” is a pedantic mouthful, but a necessary one, given that plenty of professional media organizations have nothing to do with what Dame Frances Cairncross’s 2019 report on journalism in the United Kingdom called “public interest news”). Public broadcasters can be filled with partisans, cronies can buy private news media organizations and make them subservient to the government, and governments can harass outlets with tax investigations.

Sometimes, leaders silence critical outlets in ways that are hard to trace. In 2014, Nepszabadsag, Hungary’s major opposition newspaper, was acquired by an Austrian firm, Vienna Capital Partners, which formed a subsidiary for its interests in Hungary. The subsidiary closed the paper, which was critical of the government, in 2016, citing financial reasons. But the journalists working at the paper had every reason to suspect that Orban was to blame.

Authoritarians with a stronger grip on power or greater geopolitical leverage tend to be more shameless. In 2009, Turkey’s tax authorities fined Dogan Media Group $2.5 billion for alleged tax fraud after then-Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government accused its founder, Aydin Dogan, of using his outlets to defame the administration. Erdogan said he had no control over the case, but many observers in Turkey saw the decision as a political move to silence critical media outlets. Eventually, Dogan sold all media assets, including popular TV channel CNN Turk, to a conglomerate that is mainly active in construction and real estate and, above all, friendly toward Erdogan.

There are no easy ways to counter such attacks, especially those presented as financial moves. It is hard enough to measure media pluralism in practice, let alone promote it. (U.S. journalist A. J. Liebling famously observed that there was only freedom of the press for those who owned one.) Yet the situation is not hopeless, and sometimes outsiders can make a difference. For example, foreign news media organizations can choose whether they want to sell to oligarchs allied with an autocratic regime, and democratic governments can incentivize them not to do so.

As today’s strongmen employ new tactics, they take great care to maintain plausible deniability. Liberal bloggers can still criticize Orban, and even investigative journalism is tolerated in Hungary to some degree. In Turkey, some critical low-circulation outlets have survived. But especially in more repressive regimes, TV and local newspapers are now largely under the control of governments invested in controlling public opinion and, increasingly, spreading disinformation to do so.

In the 1990s, many Westerners were under the illusion that only democracies were capable of learning from their experience, while autocracies were incapable of reckoning with their mistakes and would all end like the Soviet Union. Three decades later, it’s clear that they were wrong: Autocrats are learning from history, and they are developing techniques that have repressive effects but do not look all that repressive.

Of course, we should not go from one extreme to the other and assume that today’s autocrats are invincible. But to counter them and support “the media,” we need to appreciate the difference between strengthening the resistance of individual journalists, the resilience of the press as a collective, and the economic and legal staying power of independent news media organizations.

Foreign Policy · by Jan-Werner Müller

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