Quotes of the Day:
"A politician thinks of the next election – a statesman of the next generation."
- James Freeman Clarke
"A share in the sovereignty of the state, which is exercised by the citizens at large, in voting at elections is one of the most important rights of the subject, and in a republic ought to stand foremost in the estimation of the law…That portion of the sovereignty, to which each individual is entitled, can never be too highly prized. It is that for which we have fought and bled."
- Alexander Hamilton
"The United States has a strategy based on arithmetic. They question the computers, add and subtract, extract square roots, and then go into action. But arithmetical strategy doesn't work here. If it did, they would already have exterminated us with their airplanes."
- Gen Vo Nguyen Giap
1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, MAY 27 (PUTIN'S WAR)
2. Snake Island: Why Ukraine just won’t let it go
3. It’s Game On in the Pacific
4. China’s ‘threat’ in the Pacific is being way overblown
5. Chinese and Russian propaganda work in tandem to blame the West for war in Ukraine
6. America’s Pivot to Asia 2.0: The Indo-Pacific Economic Framework
7. Anti-US axis creeping into view in Asia
8. Why laser weapons are the future of missile defense
9. 78 Minutes (Uvlade, Texas)
10. Whose Marine Corps? Why a Force Design battle is losing sight of the basics
11. Military briefing: Ukraine’s battlefield agility pays off
12. Myron Pitts: Fort Liberty? No, let’s choose one of our heroes for Fort Bragg’s new name
13. Steel Graveyard: Russia Has Lost Over 1,000 Tanks in Ukraine
14. The GOP Foreign Policy Civil War Is Real
15. Opinion | America May Be Broken Beyond Repair
16. The real reason gas is so damn expensive: Don’t just blame oil prices, blame refineries too
17. FDD | Top Russian Bank Launches Apparent Attempt to Evade Sanctions
18.
1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, MAY 27 (PUTIN'S WAR)
RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, MAY 27
Kateryna Stepanenko and Mason Clark
May 27, 7:30pm ET
Russian forces began direct assaults on Severodonetsk on May 27 despite not yet having fully encircled the town. Russian forces have performed poorly in operations in built-up urban terrain throughout the war to date and are unlikely to be able to advance rapidly in Severodonetsk itself. Russian forces continue to make steady and incremental gains around the city but have not yet encircled the Ukrainian defenders. Ukrainian forces continue to maintain defenses across eastern Ukraine and have slowed most Russian lines of advance. Russian forces will likely continue to make incremental advances and may succeed in encircling Severodonetsk in the coming days, but Russian operations around Izyum remain stalled and Russian forces will likely be unable to increase the pace of their advances.
Key Takeaways
- Russian forces began direct assaults on built-up areas of Severodonetsk without having fully encircled the city and will likely struggle to take ground in the city itself.
- Russian forces in Lyman appear to be dividing their efforts—attacking both southwest to support stalled forces in Izyum and southeast to advance on Siversk; they will likely struggle to accomplish either objective in the coming days.
- Russian forces in Popasna seek to advance north to support the encirclement of Severodonestk rather than advancing west toward Bakhmut.
- Positions northeast of Kharkiv City remain largely static, with no major attacks by either Russian or Ukrainian forces.
- Russian forces continue to fortify their defensive positions along the southern axis and advance efforts to integrate the Kherson region into Russian economic and political structures.
We do not report in detail on Russian war crimes because those activities are well-covered in Western media and do not directly affect the military operations we are assessing and forecasting. We will continue to evaluate and report on the effects of these criminal activities on the Ukrainian military and population and specifically on combat in Ukrainian urban areas. We utterly condemn these Russian violations of the laws of armed conflict, Geneva Conventions, and humanity even though we do not describe them in these reports.
ISW has updated its assessment of the four primary efforts Russian forces are engaged in at this time. We have stopped coverage of Mariupol as a separate effort since the city’s fall. We had added a new section on activities in Russian-occupied areas:
- Main effort—Eastern Ukraine (comprised of one subordinate and three supporting efforts);
- Subordinate Main Effort—Encirclement of Ukrainian troops in the cauldron between Izyum and Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts
- Supporting effort 1—Kharkiv City;
- Supporting effort 2—Southern Axis;
- Activities in Russian-occupied Areas
Main Effort—Eastern Ukraine
Subordinate Main Effort—Southern Kharkiv, Donetsk, Luhansk Oblasts (Russian objective: Encircle Ukrainian forces in Eastern Ukraine and capture the entirety of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, the claimed territory of Russia’s proxies in Donbas)
Russian forces began direct assaults on built-up areas of Severodonetsk on May 27 without having fully encircled the city and cut off the Ukrainian defenders. Geolocated videos confirmed that Chechen units seized a hotel located in the northern part of Severodonetsk on May 27. Severodonetsk Military-Civil Administration Head Oleksiy Stryuk reported that Ukrainian forces previously repelled Russian attacks on the hotel on May 26, but Russian forces captured the position sometime on May 27.[1] Luhansk Oblast Head Serhiy Haidai said that Russian forces also conducted offensive operations just southeast of Rubizhne toward Severodonetsk.[2] Russian forces also continued to push on Severodonetsk via Ustynka and Borisvske just 9km and 14km southeast of the city, respectively.[3] The Luhansk People’s Republic (LNR) falsely claimed that Russian forces cut off all routes and surrounded Severodonetsk, trapping Ukrainian units in the Severodonetsk cauldron, though this is untrue and Russian forces have not yet fully encircled Ukrainian defenders.[4] Ukrainian sources differed on the extent of Russian advances, with Stryuk estimating that Russian forces have encircled approximately two-thirds of Severodonetsk’s perimeter and Haidai stating Russian forces have only reached the city’s outskirts.[5]
Russian forces likely seek to advance toward Slovyansk from Lyman to the north due to stalled operations south of Izyum.[6] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces shelled two settlements approximately 30km and 35km southeast of Izyum and conducted limited attacks south from Lyman.[7] Russian forces have been unable to advance south from Izyum on the E40 highway due to Ukrainian resistance along the road and may now be changing their approach to attack toward Slovyansk from the northeast. The Ukrainian General Staff also noted that Russian forces in Kharkiv Oblast are training personnel to replenish infantry, tank, and artillery units, and deployed the 29th Separate Railway Brigade from Smolensk to Kharkiv Oblast, likely to generate new forces and restore logistics to attempt to resume stalled offensive operations southeast of Izyum.[8]
Russian forces in Lyman are additionally attacking southeast toward Siversk as part of ongoing efforts to encircle Ukrainian defenders in the town.[9] Russian forces will likely attempt to seize the roads leading to Severodonetsk from the northwest to sever Ukrainian ground lines of communication (GLOCs) in Luhansk Oblast.[10] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces fired mortars and rocket-propelled grenades on settlements within a 20km range of northwestern Siversk and launched an airstrike on Siversk on May 27.[11] Russian forces in Lyman appear to be dividing their efforts—attacking both southwest to support stalled forces in Izyum and southeast to advance on Siversk; they will likely struggle to accomplish either objective in the coming days based on past Russian performance.
Russian forces attempted to seize access to two highways east and northeast of Popasna on May 27 in a continued effort to partially disrupt Ukrainian GLOCs to Severodonetsk. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces continued assaults against villages adjacent to the T1302 highway from Bakhmut to Lysychansk, just northeast of Popasna.[12] Russian forces also attacked east of Popasna to secure access to the T1303 highway to Lysychansk.[13] Russian forces are likely prioritizing the Lysychansk direction, rather than advancing toward Bakhmut, to support Russia’s main effort operations in Severodonetsk.
Supporting Effort #1—Kharkiv City (Russian objective: Withdraw forces to the north and defend ground lines of communication (GLOCs) to Izyum)
Russian forces did not launch any ground assaults against Ukrainian defenders north of Kharkiv City on May 27. Russian forces continued systematic shelling of Ukrainian-liberated villages to preserve their defensive positions near the Ukrainian-Russian state border.[14] Ukraine’s Security Service reported that entire Russian units rioted and refused to conduct an offensive operation on Kharkiv City, though ISW cannot independently confirm this claim.[15]
Supporting Effort #2—Southern Axis (Objective: Defend Kherson against Ukrainian counterattacks)
Russian forces continued to fortify their positions along the southern axis.[16] Ukrainian Military Intelligence Directorate (GUR) Representative Vadym Skibitsky reported that Russian forces are currently building a third line of defense in Kherson Oblast and are consolidating their control over railroads, airfields, and ports.[17] The Zaporizhia Oblast Military Administration also said that Russian forces transferred land, air, and sea military equipment from Crimea on May 26, including 24 "Grad” MLRS systems.[18] The Ukrainian Southern Operational Command reported that Russian forces also continued to deploy reservists from Crimea.[19] The UK Defense Ministry noted that Russian forces deployed 50-year-old T-62 tanks from storage to the southern axis.[20]
Russian forces launched an unsuccessful ground attack near the Kherson-Mykolaiv Oblast border and continued artillery and airstrikes throughout southern Ukraine, the first attack near Kherson for several weeks.[21] This attack is unlikely to be part of a wider offensive operation. Russian forces also launched a missile strike on the Motor Sich Plant in Zaporizhia City on May 26 but missed the target and damaged residential infrastructure nearby.[22]
Activity in Russian-occupied Areas (Russian objective: consolidate administrative control of occupied areas; set conditions for potential annexation into the Russian Federation or some other future political arrangement of Moscow’s choosing)
Russian forces continued to set conditions for the long-term occupation of Ukraine’s southern regions. Ukrainian Military Intelligence Directorate (GUR) Representative Vadym Skibitsky reported that Russian occupation forces are likely preparing for referendums on the occupied territories in September or October.[23] Russian occupation authorities began transitioning Zaporizhia Oblast to the Russian time zone and introducing Russian license plates; they also promised to establish new subsidy and tax systems in the near future.[24] Russian occupation officials are additionally reportedly attempting to create an Internal Ministry subordinate to the Kherson Oblast Civil-Military Administration to support occupation administration and possibly support integration with Russia’s own Internal Ministry.[25] The Zaporizhia Oblast Military Administration reported that Russian authorities continued to hand out Russian passports to Melitopol residents, which will allow the Kremlin to mobilize and control the movements of inhabitants of the occupied territories and conscript them for military service. These efforts will also allow the Kremlin to claim it is protecting Russian citizens, as it did in the DNR and LNR prior to February 24.[26]
Russian occupation officials are struggling to subdue Ukrainian partisan activity in the south. The GUR intercepted a call with a Melitopol resident who noted a rise in unspecified partisan activity in Kyrylivka, a coastal town just south of Melitopol.[27] GUR representative Skibitsky also claimed that Russian forces began avoiding bridges and roads, likely to avoid Ukrainian partisan attacks.[28]
Immediate items to watch
- Russian forces are likely reinforcing their grouping north of Kharkiv City to prevent further advances of the Ukrainian counteroffensive toward the Russian border. Russian forces may commit elements of the 1st Tank Army to northern Kharkiv in the near future.
- Russian forces are unlikely to advance rapidly in direct assaults against Severodonetsk, but supporting operations to fully encircle the town will likely continue to secure incremental gains.
- Occupation forces in Mariupol will continue to strengthen administrative control of the city but are likely unsure of what the ultimate annexation policy will be.
- Russian forces are likely preparing for Ukrainian counteroffensives and settling in for protracted operations in southern Ukraine.
2. Snake Island: Why Ukraine just won’t let it go
More than just psychological importance. It appears there is some military significance to this rocky outcrop.
But even if the first story was not completely correct (fog of war) it is still a great story. I do believe that the soldier did flip the Russians the bird and told them to eff off. That is what soldiers do when facing possible death. The fact they were captured and later exchanged does not diminish their action in my opinion. I am glad they lived to fight another day. I commend the PSYOP personnel who put this story to good use to motivate people.
Snake Island: Why Ukraine just won’t let it go
The rocky Black Sea outcrop where 13 Ukrainian border guards famously refused to surrender has taken on a new significance
By
Joe Barnes
26 May 2022 • 8:38pm
The invasion of Ukraine was just hours old when Russia’s flagship Moskva was famously told to ‘go f–k yourself’ by a lone but resolute Ukrainian voice on Snake Island.
Three months later, the seemingly insignificant, rocky outcrop in the Black Sea has earned near-mythical status as a symbol of Ukrainian resistance.
But Snake Island has gained a new significance in recent weeks: as a possible key to unlocking the looming global food shortage sparked by a Russian blockade on Ukraine’s Black Sea ports.
Without a working air defence system, experts say that Snake Island’s size and lack of cover make it all but indefensible.
Russia has tried to fortify its position. However, Ukraine has carried out bloody raids on their positions, detailed in extraordinary drone footage taken at the beginning of this month.
How Ukraine fought back
Andriy Zagorodnyuk, a former Ukrainian defence minister, said that the Russian grip over Snake Island “becomes less critical if we destroy everything that arrives”.
The former minister, who now advises Volodymyr Zelensky’s government, said that the island was being used, alongside two Russian-controlled oil rigs, to control and blockade maritime shipping.
“We need to deny their access to our territorial waters,” he added. “It’s very much pressing from an economic survival perspective should the war drag on.”
The Snake Island fightback has proved that Ukraine’s aerial presence remains effective, despite suggestions that Russia would completely control the skies over the country within days of its invasion.
The Ukrainian military has deployed the Turkish-made Bayraktar drones to strike resupply vessels, while its airforce used fighter jets to dole out serious damage to Russian positions.
Footage released by Ukraine’s armed forces on May 8 showed a drone strike taking down a Russian helicopter hovering over the island.
Two days earlier, another video showed a Russian short-range missile system and patrol vessel being obliterated.
The video footage of Ukrainian fighter jets destroying Russians is also a powerful tool in the information war.
Slick videos of battlefield victories with accompanying music, released quickly by the Ukrainian ministry of defence, have helped boost morale and instil pride.
The modern-day myth
Russian missile cruiser Moskva (pictured on patrol in 2015) Credit: AFP / Max DELANY / Getty
Clips of helpless Russians being bombed by heroic Ukrainians have become the calling cards of Ukraine’s military operations.
And it all started, arguably, on Snake Island.
As the first day of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine drew to a close on Feb 24, Moscow’s naval flagship landed on the shores of Snake Island.
In the face of death, a brave Ukrainian border guard spoke five words now symbolic of Kyiv’s heroic resistance.
In the full audio clip, the Moskva sailors can be heard saying: “This is a Russian military ship. I suggest you lay down your weapons and surrender to avoid bloodshed and unnecessary victims. Otherwise, we will open a bomb strike on you.”
It took Roman Gribov a matter of seconds to decide that he would respond with a short, sweet and simple act of defiance.
“Well, this is it,” the Ukrainian told a female colleague. “Should I tell him to go f--- himself? Just in case.”
And then it was done. His message was sent. Words immortalised. Himself, his team and the Snake Island outpost were from that moment on symbols of Ukraine’s valiant resistance.
Initial reports said the 13 Ukrainian border guards were murdered by Russians after refusing to surrender. They were posthumously awarded Kyiv’s highest military honour.
Kyiv later said its defenders had instead been captured and were being held by the invading forces. They were later handed back in a prisoner exchange.
The legacy
Some Ukrainian military units wear embroidered patches, commemorating the defenders of Snake Island Credit: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
When The Telegraph contacted the Ukrainian border guards to arrange an interview, officials said they were unavailable. The Telegraph understands that Mr Gribov is still in hospital with post-traumatic stress disorder after his time as a Russian prisoner of war.
His words meanwhile have been immortalised, and can now be found in merchandise, including T-shirts and mugs.
Mr Gribov has even filed for an EU trademark for his infamous riposte.
Ukrainians queued for hours in the hope of securing their own piece of history: a commemorative Snake Island postage stamp.
The design – the result of a national competition – shows a lone Ukrainian soldier on the island, raising a middle finger at the looming Moskva battleship. Artist Boris Groh’s creation became an instant sensation, selling out a million stamps and 20,000 envelopes.
Many Ukrainians remember where they were when they first heard about Snake Island.
Volodymyr Laktionov, 34, from Ukraine’s Black Sea port city of Mykolaiv, was at his local citizens’ defence volunteer centre making petrol bombs when the original fight for Snake Island was announced.
Mr Gribov’s vulgar retort has become a rallying cry for resistance across Ukraine, as in this street poster in Odesa Credit: Scott Peterson/Getty Images
“I think I read about it on Telegram,” he told The Telegraph last week, while taking tea in a Mykolaiv cafe.
“They just said that a Ukrainian soldier had told a Russian warship to ‘go f--- yourself’. It’s been a great motivator for everyone throughout the war.”
Oleksandr Syenkevych, the mayor of Mykolaiv, echoed the Snake Island defenders when Russians demanded his surrender some weeks later Credit: Colin Freeman
“Go F--- Yourself” response has become a general slogan of defiance for all Ukrainians. Oleksandr Syenkevych, the mayor of Mykolaiv, issued the same response a week later when Russian forces attempted to capture the city and ordered him to surrender.
“It’s quite a rude expression really, not the kind of thing you would say in front of your mother,” Mr Laktionov added. “But it’s quite popular among politicians to use it now – the war has legitimised it.”
He even has a pair of commemorative socks at home embroidered with “Go F--- Yourself”. And while they may not last as souvenirs to hand on to the next generation, he certainly intends to pass the Snake Island story on.
“If I ever have kids, I will definitely tell them about it. It’s a great tale of patriotism.”
Snake Island’s importance belies its tiny size Credit: Aleksey Loginov
3. It’s Game On in the Pacific
Excerpts:
These are the U.S. answers to China’s assertive moves into the Pacific, which go back at least 15 years. China has exploited the U.S. absence and inattention and Australia’s wrong-footed diplomacy, especially over the past nine years of Coalition government, which not only lacked action on the Pacific’s leading priority, climate change, but vigorously supported coal. But China has serious liabilities in the Pacific, including its own climate record. As Blinken underscored in his May 26 address, “Today about 20 nations are responsible for 80 percent of emissions. China is number one. The United States is number two.”
There are also systemic and cultural differences. Pacific nations are democracies. They are also deeply religious. The risk to religious freedoms from becoming a “China-Pacific Island Country” will resonate deeply throughout the Pacific. This too needs urgent amplification.
As Micronesia’s President Panuelo put it in his entreaty to other Pacific leaders to reject China’s development of a bloc of China-Pacific Island Countries, “geopolitics like these are the kind of game where the only winning move is not to play.” We will soon see if other Pacific nations concur.
It’s Game On in the Pacific
Australia’s new government and the United States are both moving urgently to boost ties with Pacific Island countries as the scope of China’s ambition becomes clear.
Advertisement
The first week of the new Australian Labor Government has already been one for the ages. Arguably, not since John Curtin became Australia’s prime minister in October 1941 – just weeks before the eruption of the Pacific War – has a new Australian government faced such immediate and urgent challenges. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, leader of the Australian Labor Party, and his foreign minister, Senator Penny Wong, on their second day in office, attended the scheduled Quad summit in Tokyo on May 24, where they met their U.S., Japanese, and Indian counterparts. Before flying to Tokyo, Wong recorded a message to Pacific nations, stressing the drastically different policies, agenda, and outlook of her new government, stressing in particular that Canberra will be sure to listen to, and then act on, Pacific needs.
On May 26, her fourth day in office, Wong delivered a speech to the Pacific Islands Forum in Suva, Fiji, that was carefully calibrated to reiterate how distinct the new Australian government is from its predecessor in ways that will transform its relationship with the Pacific.
This rapid elevation of the Pacific to the top of the Australian government’s priorities is due to China’s audacious Pacific Islands agenda. That agenda is to create a bloc of so-called “China-Pacific Island Countries.” China seeks to persuade governments to sign on through a series of meetings in eight of the Pacific countries in question and then a gathering of 10 Pacific nations with Chinese officials at the Pacific Islands Forum on May 30.
China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, began his tour on May 26 in Solomon Islands, the nation that one month ago signed a controversial security deal with China that “changed everything.” China’s Xinhua media outlet, in an effort to build momentum, reported effusively on May 27 about Solomon Islands’ enthusiasm for China ties. Wang will also visit Kiribati, Samoa, Fiji, Tonga, Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea, and Timor-Leste by June 4.
Wang travels through the Pacific armed with two documents – the “China-Pacific Islands Countries Common Development Vision” and the “China-Pacific Island Countries Five Year Plan on Common Development” – he seeks to have adopted at the May 30 joint meeting. On the eve of the Australian election, President of the Federated States of Micronesia David Panuelo wrote to leaders across the Pacific urging them not to sign what he believes is “the single-most game-changing proposed agreement in the Pacific in any of our lifetimes.” Panuelo appended the two documents to his letter, all of which were published online on May 25.
Panuelo points out in his letter – essential reading for any student of the Pacific – that the intent of these benignly titled documents is “intrinsically tying the whole of our economies and societies to them,” meaning China. The textually thin but monumentally consequential documents will allow China “control over our communications, infrastructure, our ocean territory and the resources within them, and our security space” which will vastly erode “our sovereignty,” he argued.
In more echoes of World War II, the China-Pacific Islands Countries bloc, ominously depicted in this map, closely resembles the southern portion of Japan’s Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, the creation of which sparked the Pacific war. This was not lost on Panuelo, who warned of the “terrifying scenario” that allowing China to realize its strategic ambitions will mean “we become stuck in the crossfire of the bigger countries who ought to be benevolent hegemons for our Pacific Region.”
As far as what signing onto China’s “Common Development” deal will entail, the Pacific have already had a taste of that. Press freedom was so sharply curtailed during Wang’s visit in Honiara it led the Media Association of the Solomon Islands to boycott coverage of Wang’s visit. And in Kiribati, Wang’s second stop, it has been revealed that its border, closed by COVID-19, was “forced” to open for the Chinese entourage.
Advertisement
The U.S. and Australia – which Panuelo refers to as “benevolent hegemons” – are in a high stakes contest to blunt China’s fast-paced transformation of the Pacific Islands. Both nations are working in unison, taking care not to lecture to the Pacific, but instead offer alternatives that retain the core values, freedoms and features of Pacific nations.
In the few days since taking office, Penny Wong has led the effort in putting Australia’s case forward, encapsulated in her May 26 speech in Suva. The case she made to the Pacific Islands Forum is profoundly more palatable than it would have been only one week ago under the previous government. Climate action is now the leading focus of the new government, ensured by both Wong’s party and the swathe of “teal independents” that put climate action as their number one priority. Wong has also addressed economic needs, like allowing more people into Australia to work on better terms. This too has been very well received in beleaguered Pacific economies.
The fruits of Wong’s diplomacy in Fiji and the quieter groundwork the U.S. has been laying over the past months, landed a big win on May 26 when the White House announced that Fiji was joining the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity (IPEF). This is the alternative to China’s “Common Development” deal. The IPEF was launched in Tokyo on May 23 by U.S. President Joe Biden with 12 initial partners including Australia, India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Japan, South Korea, and Vietnam that together represent 40 percent of the world’s GDP. IPEF is designed to deepen the U.S. economic engagement in the Indo-Pacific as well as strengthen domestic economies and institutions. Fiji’s move to join is going to greatly blunt Wang’s efforts.
As well as devising IPEF and other broad Indo-Pacific policies, the White House has been moving forward at pace over the past months to boost its efforts in the Pacific Islands specifically. In February, the White House had achieved the rare feat of unifying Democrats and Republicans in Congress through the administration’s lack of action on moving the Compacts of Free Association negotiations forward. But after Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s visit to Fiji on February 12, there has been a very noticeable uptick in White House and State Department activity.
While this has been welcome, it has not always succeeded. The security deal Solomon Islands signed with China just ahead of the U.S. delegation’s arrival in Honiara in late April was an immense diplomatic failure both Australia and the United States will have to own and contend with. The Pacific Islands were notably absent this week from Blinken’s landmark speech on the administration’s approach to China, also on May 26. This was an interesting tactic or omission, especially given what is occurring in the Pacific at the same time.
The administration’s recent attention to the Pacific follows a substantial increase in attention from Congress. From 2021, a slew of bills and resolutions have been introduced aimed at countering China as well as reaffirming relations with Pacific nations that have been neglected or absent. There are 10 Pacific nations and territories where the U.S. has no diplomatic presence at all, a situation Congress and the White House now wish to address. The Blue Pacific Act, the Eagle Act and the Honoring Oceania Act all speak to the reinvigoration of U.S. Pacific engagement.
These are the U.S. answers to China’s assertive moves into the Pacific, which go back at least 15 years. China has exploited the U.S. absence and inattention and Australia’s wrong-footed diplomacy, especially over the past nine years of Coalition government, which not only lacked action on the Pacific’s leading priority, climate change, but vigorously supported coal. But China has serious liabilities in the Pacific, including its own climate record. As Blinken underscored in his May 26 address, “Today about 20 nations are responsible for 80 percent of emissions. China is number one. The United States is number two.”
There are also systemic and cultural differences. Pacific nations are democracies. They are also deeply religious. The risk to religious freedoms from becoming a “China-Pacific Island Country” will resonate deeply throughout the Pacific. This too needs urgent amplification.
As Micronesia’s President Panuelo put it in his entreaty to other Pacific leaders to reject China’s development of a bloc of China-Pacific Island Countries, “geopolitics like these are the kind of game where the only winning move is not to play.” We will soon see if other Pacific nations concur.
Patricia O’Brien
Patricia O’Brien is a historian, author, analyst and commentator on Australia and Oceania. She is a faculty member in Asian Studies at Georgetown University and in the Department of Pacific Affairs, Australian National University, and is Adjunct Faculty in the Pacific Partners Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), Washington DC
4. China’s ‘threat’ in the Pacific is being way overblown
Excerpts:
If China really has benign intentions, it should welcome this opportunity. The compact, a mechanism created by Pacific states, could help ensure China’s activities are well-coordinated and targeted alongside those of other partners.
Amplifying threat narratives also feeds into Australia’s perceived need to “compete” by playing whack-a-mole with China, rather than by formulating a coherent, overarching regional policy that responds to the priorities of Pacific states.
There is a risk some Pacific states may overestimate their ability to manage China. But for the time being it is understandable why at least some would entertain Chinese overtures.
New Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong has rushed to Fiji days into the job with sought-after offers of action on climate change and expanded migration opportunities. Pacific leaders might be wondering what Australia will offer next.
China’s ‘threat’ in the Pacific is being way overblown
Alarmist reports on China’s supposed strategic intent in region overstate the importance of draft and not yet final deals
But does this overstate their importance?
And Pacific states and people have reason to be concerned. The restrictions on journalists during Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi’s visit to the Solomon Islands demonstrate the potential consequences for transparency of dealing closely with China.
And there are questions about the implications of the Solomon Islands-China security agreement for democracy and accountability.
But before we work ourselves into a frenzy, it is worth pausing for a breath. The leaked drafts are just that: drafts. They have not yet been signed by any Pacific state.
At least one Pacific leader, Federated States of Micronesia president David Panuelo, has publicly rejected them. Panuelo’s concerns are likely shared by several other Pacific leaders, suggesting they’re also unlikely to sign.
China wields powerful tools of statecraft – particularly economic – but Pacific states are sovereign. They will ultimately decide the extent of China’s role in the region.
Children look out to sea from the Red Beach landing site near Honiara in the Solomon Islands in a file photo. Photo: AFP / Torsten Blackwood
First, these documents contain proposals rather than binding obligations.
If they are signed, it’s not clear they will differ in impact from the many others agreed over the last decade. For example, China announced a “strategic partnership” with eight Pacific states in 2014, which had no substantive consequences for Australia.
So common – and often so ineffectual – are “strategic partnerships” and “memoranda of understanding” that there is a satirical podcast series devoted to them.
Second, the drafts contain proposals that may benefit Pacific states. For example, a China-Pacific Islands free trade area could open valuable opportunities, especially as China is a significant export destination.
Third, the drafts cover several activities in which China is already engaged. For example, China signed a security agreement with Fiji in 2011, and the two states have had a police cooperation relationship since.
It’s worth remembering Australia and New Zealand provide the bulk of policing assistance. The executive director of the Pacific Island Chiefs of Police is even a Kiwi.
The drafts do contain concerning provisions. Cooperation on data networks and “smart” customs systems may raise cybersecurity issues. This is why Australia funded the Coral Sea Cable connecting Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea to Australia.
Provisions relating to satellite maritime surveillance may cause friction with existing activities supported by Australia and its partners.
Greater Chinese maritime domain awareness of the region – meaning understanding of anything associated with its oceans and waterways – would also raise strategic challenges for Australia, New Zealand, and the US.
But there is a risk of over-egging the implications based on our own anxieties.
China’s interests
Much of China’s diplomacy has been opportunistic and not dissimilar to what Australia and other partners are doing.
Although the region is strategically important to Australia, the southern Pacific islands are marginal to China. And apart from Kiribati and Nauru, the northern Pacific islands are closely linked to the US.
China’s interest may primarily be about demonstrating strategic reach, rather than for specific military purposes.
So, amplifying narratives about China’s threatening presence may unintentionally help China achieve its broader aim of influencing Australia.
Given the accelerating frequency of natural disasters in the region due to climate change, it is only a matter of time before the Australian and Chinese militaries find themselves delivering humanitarian relief side-by-side. Being on sufficiently cordial terms to engage in even minimal coordination will be important.
Australian troops in an assistance mission to the Solomon Islands in a file photo. Photo: WikiCommons / Gary Ramage /Australian Defence Force
If China really has benign intentions, it should welcome this opportunity. The compact, a mechanism created by Pacific states, could help ensure China’s activities are well-coordinated and targeted alongside those of other partners.
Amplifying threat narratives also feeds into Australia’s perceived need to “compete” by playing whack-a-mole with China, rather than by formulating a coherent, overarching regional policy that responds to the priorities of Pacific states.
There is a risk some Pacific states may overestimate their ability to manage China. But for the time being it is understandable why at least some would entertain Chinese overtures.
New Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong has rushed to Fiji days into the job with sought-after offers of action on climate change and expanded migration opportunities. Pacific leaders might be wondering what Australia will offer next.
5. Chinese and Russian propaganda work in tandem to blame the West for war in Ukraine
No surprise here. But we need to have a superior narrative.
Excerpts:
ASPI found that PRC diplomats and state media calibrated their messaging differently for different regions of the world. This investment in tailored and multi-lingual influence reflects the CCP’s strategy of targeting regions—particularly Africa, South America and Southeast Asia—that have rapidly emerging economies, and often Western colonial histories, for specific attention. Beijing’s alignment with the Kremlin’s propaganda demonstrates how the CCP seeks opportunity from crisis, mobilising in response to perceived threats and using contemporary events as vehicles for the projection of its political power.
For some, this situation has become untenable. Professor and former US diplomat David L. Sloss suggests that the time has come to ban both Russian and Chinese state media from US social media platforms. This position may sound extreme to some given how fundamental freedom of speech is to democracy. Yet authoritarian regimes are exploiting democratic openness in their political warfare campaigns and calibrated strategic responses must be taken to shift this calculus.
Chinese and Russian propaganda work in tandem to blame the West for war in Ukraine | The Strategist
A new ASPI report demonstrates that in the early days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, social media posts by Chinese diplomats on US-owned platforms almost exclusively blamed the US, NATO and the West for the conflict. Chinese diplomats amplified Russian claims about US biological weapon labs in Ukraine and linked this disinformation narrative with conspiracy theories about the origins of Covid-19. Chinese state media mirrored these narratives while replicating the Kremlin’s language describing the invasion as a ‘special military operation’. As Western governments collectively encouraged Silicon Valley to restrict the reach of Russia’s disinformation ecosystem, China’s propaganda system quickly became an alternate vehicle for the Kremlin’s false narratives.
The information campaigns of the People’s Republic of China are designed to reinforce efforts to shape its operating environment so that the party-state’s power can be consolidated and expanded, not just domestically but also globally. The PRC information campaign responding to events in Ukraine is not taking place in isolation, but instead is being tied to the party-state’s key strategic interests. Understanding how, and why, this is occurring requires acknowledging deeply rooted threat perceptions that the Chinese Communist Party has long articulated and, more importantly, the strategies through which it attempts to deal with those threats.
The CCP strongly believes that threats to its political power are just as likely, if not more likely, to emerge due to the organisation of ‘hostile forces’ outside the PRC. The party is convinced that outside actors, specifically the US, actively attempt to create instability within China (including economic instability and political instability). In more recent history, ‘colour revolutions’ and ‘jasmine revolutions’ are often cited as examples of incidents in which those alleged efforts have ultimately triggered crises. The data in ASPI’s report demonstrates that the events unfolding in Ukraine are being cited as a further example justifying this threat perception.
The themes that the report identifies on sanctions and ‘anti-China’ disinformation are also tied to the growing number of sanctions, tariffs and export restrictions from the US and other countries, in response to the party’s policies in Hong Kong and Xinjiang, and more broadly its policies and strategies for science and technology security and military–civil fusion. The narrative reinforces the policy drivers behind a number of ongoing PRC efforts, such as the development of China’s Digital Currency Electronic Payment system. Meanwhile, the themes (in apparent collusion with Russia) that we identify suggesting that the US has violated international biological weapons conventions are also being tied to Chinese attempts to deflect responsibility for the country’s early mismanagement of Covid-19. The report’s data suggests that, in terms of its international-facing propaganda, the Russia–Ukraine conflict offers the CCP an opportunity to reassert enduring preoccupations that it perceives as fundamental to its political security.
Chinese diplomats’ persistent criticism of security blocs, NATO expansionism and the US military-industrial complex might equally apply to security relationships in the Indo-Pacific such as AUKUS and the Quad. ASPI has already identified pro-CCP social media networks targeting the Quad and the evolving security architecture in the Indo-Pacific region.
Our sample of data was taken before the Silicon Valley platforms reassessed their measures to limit the reach of Russian disinformation (including via Chinese state media). In the early stage of the conflict, tweets about Ukraine by Chinese diplomats performed better than unrelated content, particularly when the content attacked or blamed the West. PRC foreign ministry spokespeople continue to flirt with fringe alternative media outlets to bridge into Western political discourse framed around anti-imperialism, for example by amplifying claims associating NATO and the Ukrainian government with neo-Nazis.
ASPI found that PRC diplomats and state media calibrated their messaging differently for different regions of the world. This investment in tailored and multi-lingual influence reflects the CCP’s strategy of targeting regions—particularly Africa, South America and Southeast Asia—that have rapidly emerging economies, and often Western colonial histories, for specific attention. Beijing’s alignment with the Kremlin’s propaganda demonstrates how the CCP seeks opportunity from crisis, mobilising in response to perceived threats and using contemporary events as vehicles for the projection of its political power.
For some, this situation has become untenable. Professor and former US diplomat David L. Sloss suggests that the time has come to ban both Russian and Chinese state media from US social media platforms. This position may sound extreme to some given how fundamental freedom of speech is to democracy. Yet authoritarian regimes are exploiting democratic openness in their political warfare campaigns and calibrated strategic responses must be taken to shift this calculus.
6. America’s Pivot to Asia 2.0: The Indo-Pacific Economic Framework
Seven observations on IPEF from the author. Perhaps he will be "Napoleon's corporal" for State. If he doesn't get IPEF then we have some work to do.
Excerpts:
Through IPEF, the United States hopes to economically engage the Indo-Pacific and counter China’s increasing economic and political influence in the region. With around 60 percent of global population, the region is going to be the main driver of economic growth in the world in the next few decades. According to the White House, the region “supports 3 million American jobs” and is “the source of nearly $900 billion in foreign direct investment in the United States,” while U.S. FDI in the region totaled around $969 billion in 2020. What’s more, the United States is the “primary exporter of services to the region.”
In short, U.S. (and many global) policy and economic elites see the course of this century’s geopolitics and geoeconomics to be determined in this region.
America’s Pivot to Asia 2.0: The Indo-Pacific Economic Framework
As long as IPEF lacks clear incentives, it will be hard to transform the framework into meaningful action.
Advertisement
On his Asia trip, U.S. President Joe Biden announced on Monday that Japan, India and 10 other countries have committed to join the U.S.-led Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF). Those countries include Australia, Brunei, Indonesia, South Korea, Malaysia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. Not included, at least for now, are Taiwan, three ASEAN member states (Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar) and China (obviously). But the door to their future membership remains (at least theoretically) open.
Through IPEF, the United States hopes to economically engage the Indo-Pacific and counter China’s increasing economic and political influence in the region. With around 60 percent of global population, the region is going to be the main driver of economic growth in the world in the next few decades. According to the White House, the region “supports 3 million American jobs” and is “the source of nearly $900 billion in foreign direct investment in the United States,” while U.S. FDI in the region totaled around $969 billion in 2020. What’s more, the United States is the “primary exporter of services to the region.”
In short, U.S. (and many global) policy and economic elites see the course of this century’s geopolitics and geoeconomics to be determined in this region.
From Pivot 1.0 to Pivot 2.0
In 2011, then-U.S. President Barack Obama, on a trip to Asia, introduced the U.S. Pivot to Asia, which had both geopolitical components (such as increasing the U.S. military presence in the region) and geoeconomic ones (such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP). Through the TPP, Obama wanted the United States, not China, to write “the rules of the road in the region” or “write the rules of the global economy” in this century. Obama hoped the TPP would be materialized by December 2012; as it turned out, negotiations lasted until 2015.
In their 2016 electoral campaigns, both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump opposed the TPP due to anti-globalization (i.e. anti-FTA) sentiments in the United States. President Trump then torpedoed the TPP immediately after taking office in 2017. Since then, the U.S. Indo-Pacific policy has been increasingly lopsided, defined more by geopolitical formations (such as the Quad and AUKUS) than (geo)economic initiatives and trade pacts.
In the meantime, in 2021, after around 10 years of painstaking negotiations, China and other Indo-Pacific countries signed the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), the largest free trade deal in the world. All ASEAN countries and some close U.S. allies (Australia, Japan, New Zealand, and South Korea) joined RCEP. It entered into force on January 1, 2022.
On the other hand, Japan and others negotiated and revived the TPP (or what was left of it after the U.S. withdrawal) and called it Comprehensive and Progressive Transpacific Partnership (CPTPP). It was ratified in 2018. The United States has ruled out the possibility of rejoining this FTA, however. Instead, Washington has argued that the region needs to move beyond it. Enter IPEF, the second coming of the U.S. Pivot to Asia.
Advertisement
While the Pivot’s geopolitics developed substance (through the likes of the Quad and AUKUS), the U.S. Indo-Pacific policy lacks geoeconomic heft. IPEF aims to fill this gap. According to the White House, the goal of the IPEF is to tackle:
21st century economic challenges ranging from setting the rules of the road for the digital economy, to ensuring secure and resilient supply chains, to helping make the kinds of major investments necessary in clean energy infrastructure and the clean energy transition, to raising standards for transparency, fair taxation, and anti-corruption.
Obama’s legacy of the Pivot is almost impossible to miss in IPEF. His discourse about the TPP’s objective (“writing the rules of the road”) resonates clearly in the quote above. In this sense, IPEF is the United States’ second attempt at a Pivot to Asia. U.S. policymakers have noticed that the United States is left sitting on the outside of the Indo-Pacific’s two main trade blocs (RCEP and CPTPP).
How to Interpret IPEF and Its Challenges
In what follows, I offer seven observations about the visions behind and the challenges ahead of IPEF.
First, it is important to determine what IPEF is not. It is certainly not an FTA like RCEP and the CPTPP. It has not involved, nor has it promised to involve in the future, negotiations to remove tariffs or increase market access. For now, IPEF is best understood as a vision, a signal, a statement of purpose, or an attempt by the United States to catch up with the Indo-Pacific’s evolving history, geography, and (geo)economics.
Second, IPEF’s ultimate vision is to reinstate U.S. “economic leadership” in the Indo-Pacific region and enable the United States – as both Obama and Biden have envisioned – “to [re]write the rules of the road” for the Indo-Pacific, and global, economy.
Third, a major contradiction here is that “rules of the road” require a framework with binding commitments based on specific rules and regulations. This specificity is normally formalized through FTAs with clear rules and dispute settlement mechanism. IPEF does not offer any of that. Even before this trip, the Biden team had to water down IPEF to attract more countries to it.
The White House has argued that this aspect of IPEF is a “feature,” not a “bug,” as it gives more flexibility to the participants to act upon the components that are completed without having to wait for all of IPEF to be completed. While this is a theoretically beautiful thought process, we do not have many – in fact, any – historical precedents of such a loosely defined framework creating enough obligations and incentives to create history-changing momentum.
Fourth, the conceptual baggage of IPEF (setting “rules,” “standards,” and “principles”) has already appeared and been tested in both the Blue Dot Network (BDN) launched in 2019 by the Trump administration and the Build Back Better World (B3W) initiative launched in 2021 by the Biden administration. BDN was defined as “a mechanism to promote robust standards […] for quality infrastructure projects” and B3W as an initiative to promote “high standards and principles” in areas that overlap with IPEF’s issue areas. Both B3W and BDN were defined in terms of countering China and its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Neither has so far produced much tangible substance and momentum. The United States should watch out that IPEF does not meet the same fate as BDN and B3W.
Advertisement
Fifth, from the list of excluded countries (China and its close ASEAN partners such as Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos), it is hard not to infer that IPEF’s trajectory has been – and will likely be – defined more by the United States’ geopolitical objectives than global economic dynamics. Another layer of complexity for the U.S. is that, since 2011, the Pivot to Asia has been constantly derailed by geopolitical emergencies elsewhere, such as in the Middle East or now in Ukraine.
Sixth, the most herculean challenge for the United States is to persuade IPEF members to disentangle their economies from China’s. It is worth remembering that other than the U.S., each and every country that has joined IPEF previously joined China in signing an actually binding FTA, namely, RCEP. For them, that was much more of a commitment than joining IPEF.
This challenge becomes even greater given that IPEF, in trying to set standards and principles, will inevitably create obligations while “lacking incentives.” It remains to be seen if, how, and why IPEF partners should not be “skeptical” and should work against their own economic interests (i.e., economic engagement with China) in the absence of IPEF incentives (such as access to the U.S. market).
Seventh and finally, for IPEF to succeed, U.S. policymakers should try to do two things simultaneously: They should, first, get their domestic act together by properly addressing the U.S. population’s anti-globalization sentiments and economic concerns; and, second, merge initiatives such as IPEF (and B3W and BDN) with already existing FTAs, such as the Japan-led CPTPP, which are the results of years of painstaking negotiations. Only then can the United States use its economic might, soft power, and geopolitical leverage to start writing – or better, co-writing with partners – the rules of the road for the global economy.
Mohammadbagher Forough
Mohammadbagher Forough is a research fellow at the German Institute of Global and Area Studies (GIGA) in Hamburg, Germany, and a research associate at Clingendael – Netherlands Institute of International Relations in The Hague, Netherlands. He holds a Ph.D. in International Relations. Follow him on Twitter @Mohamad_Forough.
7. Anti-US axis creeping into view in Asia
Axis of what? We need a pithy new name since "evil" has already been deployed.
But seriously the chess board (or Go or Paduk board) is gaining clarity.
And the subtitle asks the key question: are they synchronizing their hostile policies and actions?
Anti-US axis creeping into view in Asia
Are China, Russia and North Korea starting to coordinate their military provocations against America’s Asian allies?
SEOUL – Russian and Chinese warplanes buzzed South Korea on Tuesday (May 24) evening, then this morning (May 25) North Korea test-fired three ballistic missiles.
The incidents will have Japanese, South Korean and US defense planners knotting their brows for this convergence of events has an unmistakable precedent: The sequence of events exactly mirror a series of joint Chinese and Russian flypasts that preceded a North Korean ICBM test on March 24.
While huge questions hang over coordination between Beijing, Moscow and Pyongyang – or lack thereof, given that no official security architecture links the three nations – the timing of the events looks far from coincidental.
On Tuesday, US President Joe Biden was in Japan, winding up the first Asia trip of his presidency following three days in South Korea.
In Japan, Biden unveiled the new, US-led Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, summited with leaders of the Quad security dialog bloc and in a shock announcement stated that the US would defend Taiwan militarily in the event of a Chinese invasion.
Though White House handlers talked back the statement, a person familiar with military affairs told Asia Times that Biden is seeking to signal to Beijing that the US would not take the same hands-off approach to a Chinese invasion of Taiwan that it has taken in Ukraine.
Prior to Russia’s February 24 invasion, Washington and London, the source stated, had revealed that they would not fight for Ukraine, which may have influenced Russian decision-making.
Biden may thus be seeking to dissuade Beijing from any military adventurism around Taiwan by signaling less “strategic ambiguity” and more “strategic clarity.” He is certainly working to rally democratic allies against Russia while strengthening security ties in the Indo-Pacific.
But these various moves may be generating unintended pushback as Asian powers aligned against the US look to be upgrading their own military coordination.
Asked about the possible emergence of two opposed trilateral security groupings in the region, Chun In-bum, a retired South Korean general, said he did not know if that shift was underway but acknowledged the risks that configuration would present.
“That is a scary question – South Korea, the US and Japan versus China Russia and North Korea,” Chun told Asia Times. “This is a bad omen”
Chinese troops under a Russian flag in a file photo. Image: RT
According to South Korea’s Joint Chief of Staff, at 7:56 AM on May 24 two Chinese H-6 bombers entered the South Korean Air Defense Identification Zone, or KADIZ, from northwest of Ieodo, a submerged rock south of the Korean island of Jeju. It then exited the zone at around 9:33 AM.
The ownership of the reef is disputed between China and Korea, and Seoul maintains a naval base on Jeju, a popular holiday destination. Korea scrambled its own warplanes to monitor the sortie.
Later, the two Chinese warplanes joined four Russian warplanes, including two TU-95 bombers and entered the KADIZ together at 9:58 AM. They then left the zone at 10:15 AM.
An ADIZ is a unilaterally drawn geometry with no force in international law. Neither South Korea’s nor Japan’s sovereign air space – i.e. the space above its territory, extending 12 nautical miles outward from its coastline – was penetrated.
But regional defense chiefs were on alert again this morning when North Korea test-fired three ballistic missiles, including a suspected intercontinental ballistic missile, or ICBM. The missiles were fired from Sunan, close to Pyongyang and the site of the capital’s international airport, between 6:00 AM and 6:42 AM.
This morning’s test firings took place just hours after Biden had left Tokyo on Tuesday evening. In a typical response, South Korea’s Joint Chiefs called the launches “a serious provocative act.”
The source familiar with military affairs – who spoke to Asia Times on condition of anonymity as he did not have clearance to speak to media – was confident that the Chinese and Russian drills were coordinated but doubted North Korea had joined the huddle.
Yet this morning’s and yesterday’s events exactly mirror – in terms of the parties involved; the incidents themselves; and the sequencing – Chinese, Russian and North Korean actions two months ago in March.
On March 23, Chinese warplanes flew through the KADIZ. Russian warplanes flew through the KADIZ the following day, March 24 – exactly one month after the invasion of Ukraine.
Also on March 24, hours after the Russian jet sorties fly-by, North Korea tested-fired an ICBM, marking its first test of such a long-range weapon since 2017.
This screen-grab image taken from North Korean broadcaster KCTV in 2019 shows North Korean leader Kim Jong Un watching the launch of a ballistic missile at an unknown location. Photo: AFP / KCTV
The near-identical patterns of March 23/24, and May 24/25, could simply be a coincidence. After all, North Korea has conducted 19 missile tests this year while China and Russia have staged multiple flights in the air space around the flashpoint peninsula.
A spokesperson for the Ministry of National Defense in Seoul confirmed to Asia Times that there had been a similar flypast by Chinese and Russian warplanes in January but did not have wider data on the number of incidents, nor did he confirm the date.
North Korea conducted six missile tests that month. Earlier sorties by Russian and Chinese planes took place on November 11, 2021. There were no North Korean missile tests that month.
As Washington extends its web of regional defense networks – from its bilateral defense treaties with Australia, Japan and South Korea to the more recent Quad and AUKUS multilaterals – regional competitors appear to be closing ranks.
While China and Russia have strong defense ties and share similar doctrines and kit, they are not linked by any formal treaty. They have, however, been conducting an increasing range of joint drills since the giant Vostok 2018 military drills in the Russian Far East. Their ongoing joint exercises include both aerial and naval components.
Moreover, in February, three weeks before the assault upon Ukraine, Beijing and Moscow announced an “Unlimited Partnership” that was strongly defined by security issues: Both supported each other’s positions on Taiwan and NATO expansionism, and critiqued AUKUS.
Independently-minded North Korea operated closely with both the USSR and China during the Korean War but, though it shares Beijing and Moscow’s anti-US posture, has sought strategic independence in the decades since.
“The Chinese and the Russians are not very fond of the North Korean nuclear missile program,” said Andrei Lankov, a Russian expert on North Korean who teaches at Seoul’s Kookmin University: Neither county, after all, favors events that compel the US to upgrade military activities in the region.
Even so, China and North Korea maintain a mutual treaty that dates back to the post-Korean War era. Neither country has any such treaty with another nation. And recent events suggest North Korea may be betting into bed with China and Russia once more.
A US Air Force B-1B Lancer bomber flying over South Korea with US and South Korean fighter jets during a joint military drill. Photo: South Korean Defense Ministry via AFP
In January, China and Russia stymied US moves in the UN Security Council to add further sanctions on North Korea. And China and North Korea have both refused to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine or join Western sanctions on Moscow.
But how far the three nations are on the same page as regards their ongoing military moves is a mystery.
“The Chinese and Russians did a joint press conference about joint tabletop exercises in 2018, and the question about the third triangulation point, North Korea, is a very interesting one,” said Alexander Neill, a Singapore-based security consultant. “It is difficult to corroborate conjecture but the timing [of the sorties and launches] is interesting and it has happened twice.”
Lankov wondered if the change global situation since the invasion of Ukraine was influencing matters. “Before February 24, I would have smiled at this,” Lankov said, referring to trilateral security moves. “But now, I am not so sure.”
A fog of opacity around a possible emerging anti-US axis is – naturally – in place.
“The Chinese have unofficially denied any coordination with the North Koreans,” said Chun. “But there was definite coordination between the Chinese and Russians, and it would make sense that the Chinese and the Russians would have notified the North Koreans [of their aerial drills] – and a notification is, itself, coordination.”
These matters will not go unnoticed by generals and admirals. “Anyone on the security side has to think of worst-case scenarios,” Chun said.
Follow this writer on Twitter at @ASalmonSeoul
8. Why laser weapons are the future of missile defense
Lasers seem to make much more sense than missiles to me. I hope the skunk works is going all in on lasers.
Why laser weapons are the future of missile defense
While the legacy of the Reagan administration’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) may have initially put the US ahead in directed energy-based missile defense capabilities, Israel, Russia and China have started to deploy and accelerate the development of similar systems in response to new missile threats and the mixed success at best of traditional missile defense platforms.
There are basic principles of physics that make laser or other directed energy-based missile defense systems superior by potentially orders of magnitude to “shooting down bullets with bullets”, as most prevailing systems aim to do.
Iraqi missile attacks during the 1991 Gulf War, Iran’s expanding missile arsenal and the failure of Israeli airstrikes to destroy Hezbollah’s missile launchers during the 2006 Lebanon War prompted Israel to build a layered missile defense system. Currently, Israel fields the Iron Dome, David’s Sling and Arrow systems.
The Iron Dome is a surface-to-air missile system designed to defend against short-range projectiles. According to figures released by Israeli defense officials, Iron Dome has a 90% hit success rate and during Operation Pillar of Defense in 2012 the system was credited with hitting 84% of incoming projectiles.
These figures, however, are contested by some analysts, with their claimed 90% success rate not supported by public evidence. In addition, Iron Dome proved ineffective against even shorter-range rockets and mortar attacks launched from nearby Gaza, which has driven Israel to develop laser-based defenses to augment the system.
David’s Sling is the next layer of Israel’s layered missile defense system. It is designed to defeat short-range ballistic missiles, large-caliber rockets and cruise missiles at an altitude of 15 kilometers and a range of 45 to 300 kilometers.
Unlike the Iron Dome’s Tamir interceptors, David Sling’s Stunner missiles contain no explosive warheads and use hit-to-kill to destroy their targets similar to the US Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system. However, in contrast to the Iron Dome’s US$50,000 price tag per interceptor, each THAAD Stunner missile costs US$1 million.
An Israeli Iron Dome anti-rocket system and an American Patriot missile defense system are shown during a joint US-Israel military exercise on March 8, 2018. Photo: AFP / Getty / Jack Guez
The Arrow system, meanwhile, forms the theater-level layer of Israel’s missile defense system and is intended to defeat short and medium-range ballistic missiles. It uses two interceptor missiles, the Arrow 2 and Arrow 3, both of which have directed-fragmentation explosive warheads.
The Arrow 2 has an estimated coverage of 90 kilometers and a maximum intercept altitude of 50 kilometers, while the exoatmospheric 2-stage Arrow 3 can reach double the altitude of the Arrow 2.
Russia has a long history of developing missile defense systems, with Soviet engineers starting work on such in the 1950s and successfully intercepting an intermediate ballistic missile in 1961. After the breakup of the Soviet Union, most missile defense projects were stopped but some were preserved.
At present, Russian doctrine follows a three-tiered approach, allowing the creation of anti-access/area-denial bubbles to preserve its nuclear deterrent and ensure regime survival.
The first tier of Russia’s missile defense systems includes long-range systems such as the S-500, S-400 and S-300. The S-500 is the latest of these systems, which entered serial production this year. It is designed to counter stealth aircraft, ballistic and cruise missiles and low-orbit satellites.
According to official Russian sources, the S-500 can engage targets at an altitude of 100-200 kilometers and a range of 500-600 kilometers, depending on the target’s size, speed and radar cross-section. In May 2018, a US intelligence source said that the S-500 struck a target 481 kilometers away during a test, showing the S-500’s missile-hitting prowess.
Russia’s second-tier defenses consist of the mid-range Buk M3 surface-to-air missile and its variants. The Buk M3 is designed to increase radar coverage of air defense zones and at the same time supplement limited inventories of long-range air defense missiles.
Although the system first entered service in 1980, it has been steadily upgraded to the point that the latest M3 variant is reportedly more capable than older generation S-300 systems. With its new 9M317M missiles and upgraded electronic components, the so-called Buk M3 has a maximum engagement range of 70 kilometers, minimum engagement range of 2.4 kilometers and maximum engagement altitude of 35 kilometers.
The last tier of Russia’s missile defense system consists of short-range systems that are often attached to ground units for low-level air defense and higher-tier Russian missile defense systems to offset their vulnerability against low-flying threats. They also provide point defense for critical assets. Such systems include the Tunguska and Pantsir combination gun-missile launchers and the Tor short-range missile system.
A Pantsir-S air defense missile system on display at the ARMY 2020 International Military and Technical Forum, in Vladivostok, Russia. Photo: Sputnik / Vitaliy Ankov
The wars in the Middle East and Ukraine have cast doubts on the performance of Russia’s second and third-tier defenses. In 2020, at least 23 Pantsir systems were destroyed by Turkish Bayraktar and Anka drones in Syria and Libya, despite the fact the systems were expressly designed to counter these low and slow flying threats.
China fields a similar layered defense system, fielding both Russian-bought and domestic platforms. In designing its missile defense system, China seems to have combined elements of Russian and US systems to combine the best features of both.
Its first-tier missile defense systems include the Russian-bought S-400 and the HQ-9 interceptors. The S-400 is a mobile long-range surface-to-air missile system capable of engaging targets up to a range of 400 kilometers It carries two separate radar systems, which can detect aerial targets to a range of 600 kilometers and can simultaneously engage 80 aerial targets.
This is supplemented by the indigenous HQ-9, which is derived from the Russian S-300 and US Patriot systems, having several variants with ranges of 100 to 300 kilometers. China is also developing a successor to the HQ-9 known as the HQ-18, which is reportedly reverse-engineered from the newer Russian S-300V and is reputedly capable of intercepting hypersonic weapons.
For its second line of missile defense, China also fields the HQ-19 interceptor, which is analogous to the US THAAD with a hit-to-kill interceptor instead of an explosive warhead. It also has the DN-3 hit-to-kill interceptor, which is roughly on par with the US Standard SM-3 missiles used by the Aegis system.
China also uses the HQ-16, which incorporates elements from Russia’s Buk air defense system but uses a vertical launch configuration to give it 360-degree coverage. Another notable Chinese mid-tier missile defense system in development is the HQ-29, which is a counterpart to the US Patriot PAC-3.
China’s HQ-9’s on parade in Beijing. Image: Xinhua
The HQ-29 combines highly responsive airframe and altitude control motors to generate an angle-of-attack that would not be achievable with actuator-driven aerodynamic control surfaces alone.
For its third layer of missile defense, China employs short-range missile systems and combination gun-missile launchers. The mainstay of China’s short-range missile defense includes the HQ-7 system reverse-engineered from the French Crotale missile launcher.
It also employs the Type 95 combination gun-missile launcher equipped with four 25-millimeter cannons and four QW-2 short-range heat-seeking missiles. As with Israel and Russia, China is also developing laser weapons for its J-20 fighter, which could give it defense capabilities against hypersonic missiles.
While Israel, Russia and China deploy formidable, complex and expensive layered missile defense systems, they are by no means fool-proof. In almost all cases, it is not high-tech missiles that pose the greatest threat to these layered defenses but low-cost saturation assaults, including swarming drone attacks, that have defeated these costly and mostly unproven systems.
For Israel, it could be argued it called for a ceasefire during Operation Protective Edge in 2014 not because it had achieved its military objectives but rather because it had run out of interceptor missiles. Hamas fired thousands of rockets against Israel and ended the conflict with its capabilities still intact, essentially winning by not losing.
For Russia, the fact that Ukrainian drones are blowing up its air defense systems which were designed specifically to shoot them down is confounding. This startling success of Ukraine’s drones can be attributed to multiple factors, such as Ukrainian electronic warfare capabilities, smart drone tactics and Russia’s perplexing decision to withhold most of its air force from the fighting in Ukraine.
Drone swarms could be deployed together with stealthy manned platforms such as the F-35 and F-22 to hit Chinese missile batteries, flood enemy radar scopes with multiple targets and force them to waste limited missiles and ammunition on expendable decoys before manned systems or missile strikes are launched.
Counter-drone technology research and operation efforts are helping to prepare for the potential threat of drone swarms. Photo: Lockheed Martin
While currently no missile defense system can defend against hypersonic weapons, it may still be possible to defend against them. Current midcourse-intercept missile defenses can’t defend against hypersonic glide vehicles, as they fly at a lower altitude and atmosphere than traditional ballistic missiles.
Existing space and terrestrial radars may also have difficulty tracking lower-altitude maneuverable gliders. However, since hypersonic weapons are slower than an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) during their terminal phase, meaning it might be possible to intercept them during that stage of flight.
As such, future missile defense concepts may emphasize terminal, narrow area defense rather than global or regional coverage. While global and regional interceptor-based defense systems won’t become obsolete overnight, they may be complemented by numerous directed-energy point defense weapons such as lasers that can shoot down missile volleys, drones, and hypersonics in their terminal flight stage.
The US, Israel, Russia and China have all developed prototype laser weapons that can perform such roles. However, laser weapons pose their own technical challenges, such as huge power consumption, high initial costs and relatively bulky equipment that limits maneuverability.
While missiles destroy their targets instantaneously on impact, a laser must be focused on a target for a few seconds to destroy it, which may not be desirable for targets moving at thousands of kilometers per second.
Still, advances in laser technology including more efficient and compact power sources, artificial intelligence-assisted beam modulation and further miniaturization of key components are making the idea of low-cost, numerous and dispersed laser-based missile defenses an emerging reality.
In the long term, as envisaged by Reagan’s SDI, space-based directed-energy weapons will be the best defense against ballistic missiles in both boost and mid-course phases. This will not make terminal phase missile defense and defense against hypersonics obsolete. It will, however, be capable of nullifying a substantial portion of the 10,000 or so nuclear ballistic missiles now in service – over 90% of which are owned and operated by the US and Russia.
9. 78 Minutes (Uvlade, Texas)
There are no words to describe this tragic and horrendous failure. The breakdowns here are byond tragic based on the reporting. I have seen what are described as the town's SWAT team on social media and (if they are true) they are pretty well kitted up, Again some commenters on social media say that it is time to end the practice of the local police getting military equipment and participating in "cosplay." They sure look good in the photos.
78 Minutes
That’s how long police say they left children locked in a classroom with a gunman as they repeatedly called 911, begging for help.
We were told today, in the latest version of events offered by authorities in Texas, that police left children locked in a classroom with a gunman for 78 minutes as they repeatedly called 911 begging for help, not knowing that their would-be rescuers were standing idly by. If there is a more poignant and more savage allegory for a country with a clear and urgent reason to solve an obvious policy problem that lacks either the will or courage to do so, it couldn’t be imagined by a vengeful god.
I don’t know why these children had to die like this, terrorized. I have wondered, when I’ve been too weak to counsel myself against wondering, how the surviving children from that classroom will live now. I think about the kids calling 911—just as they were told to do, just as we, adults, have always told them to do—hearing the operator, and requesting help. I want to know why their classmates’ lives are over. I want them to come back. I want none of this to have ever happened. I want this country to change.
At times like these, I think we ought to have some kind of language for the uniquely contemporary experience of grieving after the mass murder of children, or some ritual for comforting ourselves. It’s hard to grieve in a nation of anxious strangers, and there will be so much more grief. But I wish there were some word for that other, darker emotion, bred sui generis by these hellish events.
By the time the estimated death toll was emerging in news reports the day of the Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde, Texas, my husband had already picked up our small children from school and preschool, and had taken them to a nearby park to play while I cooked their dinner. As the news alerts lit up my phone, I started to feel dizzy, then nauseated, then panicked—I texted my husband asking if he wouldn’t mind bringing the kids home right away, as I felt something like a raw-edged ache in my ribs that I knew wouldn’t be soothed until I held each of their little bodies in my arms. My husband texted back. They’re having such a good time, he said. Why bring them inside? It’s finally warm and sunny out.
Immediately, I felt ridiculous. I was ridiculous. I’ve been ridiculous so many times in the hours since, glancing in on my sleeping children with hawkish nervousness, like a first-time mother fretting over a newborn; pacing on the front porch awaiting their arrival home, unfocused and unsteady until I can see their faces and hear their voices. I know it’s a statistical anomaly. I know it almost never happens. I know there are a million things I worry less about that happen with greater regularity and worse effects; but those things are unfortunate, and this is evil. Misfortune is awful, but this was something worse. This was torture. This was cruel. This was intentional. The distinction matters.
In fact, the notion that this massacre could have been avoided—and if not avoided via gun policy, then at least potentially ameliorated by faster, more proactive police intervention—is part of why contemplating it for very long induces vertigo. As soon as preliminary details about Uvalde began to surface in the news, the entire decade of valiant efforts to reform American gun laws in the name of the 20 first graders murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, suddenly seemed in vain. Over the past few years, when mass shootings have happened, furious Twitter users have prepared to bat back politicians’ measly well-wishes with tweets about the worthlessness of “thoughts and prayers”; this time, there was hardly even much of that. People just seemed wounded, somewhere between angry and resentful and helpless and plaintive. It was happening again, but nobody bothered to say they couldn’t believe it.
I’ve never had a hard time with difficult subject matters; on the contrary, handling sensitive topics is a key aspect of my vocation. And while I have reviewed rape kits and scores of victim interviews, witnessed a pair of executions and read multiple autopsy reports, interviewed victims of every type of abuse and exploitation at every level of granular detail with gratitude for the honors—I still struggled, stomach in my throat, with the second-day reporting.
It was hard to find anyone genuinely unaffected, even if, as usual, the affectation some chose was delusional bravado or childish disinterested ennui or whatever bullshit mien. Online, uncharacteristically, the majority of people seemed rightly horrified, and rightly struck with that same sense of helpless, terrorized grief.
I haven’t let my children see me upset; they’re too young to understand, and I don’t want to explain to them, yet, that there are people in the world who want to kill them. I can’t explain why. I don’t understand why. I don’t understand why this country produces people who want to do these things, and, knowing that we do, why we make it so easy for them to do so. I wouldn’t have the words to explain.
I barely have any as it stands. Maybe just a language for this weird, modern grief would be enough for now, a way to say: I’m terrorized, helpless, devastated—and alone. What is there to say, and whom to say it to? The world splits open in Uvalde, Texas, and every heart breaks in isolation. My kids come up the steps after school, and they don’t know why I can’t let them go.
10. Whose Marine Corps? Why a Force Design battle is losing sight of the basics
Whose Marine Corps? Why a Force Design battle is losing sight of the basics
That was how former Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work framed the increasingly intense discussion about the future of the Marine Corps at a recent Center for Strategic and International Studies panel discussion in Washington.
Using this narrow and legalistic framing, he argued that the child ― in this case the U.S. Marine Corps ― belonged to the commandant, and that the grandparents, the retired Marines pushing back against planned structural changes, should cease contending for custody of the child.
RELATED
It's "not a custody fight. It’s a fight for the life of the child," said retired. Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper.
First off, it is not a commandant’s Marine Corps; the Marine Corps belongs to all Marines past and present, living and dead. It is all of our Marine Corps.
It became our Marine Corps the moment we earned our eagle, globe and anchor. It will remain our Marine Corps for the rest of our lives.
On a moral/ethos level, we, all of us, love and care for the Marine Corps. That commitment, that ethos, can sometimes be underappreciated or misunderstood. Yet it is our touchstone. We must never lose that commitment, that sense of ownership.
While some few of us at any one time may have some legal authority over elements of the Marine Corps, we, all of us, have moral authority; it is our Corps; we care about it; we should not allow anyone to make us feel that caring for our Corps and sometimes questioning its path is somehow “not our job.”
And, although some few may see this keen sense of belonging as a problem, it is truly one of the Corps’ strengths. Consider how many corporate executives would give much to have their employees think, work, and act with our sense of commitment.
Second, positions held are not career steppingstones; they are temporary occasions for serious, self-sacrificing stewardship.
Stewards live with an unrelenting sense of what came from the self-sacrifices of the past. The respect, the power, the lives and the capabilities that they hold in the present all came from the physical and intellectual efforts, and in some cases the heroic self-sacrifices, made by others: Marines, parents, teachers, coaches, pastors and priests and patriots of every occupation.
Our ethos must continue to develop Marine leaders and commanders who not only understand but, by every action, manifest that they live with deep awareness of that legacy. The veterans that made us U.S. Marines and mentored us throughout our lives provided living, consistent examples of respect for our legacy.
We learned that if Marines of their caliber spent time developing a capability, then we had a sacred duty to understand why that capability, that training, that character, that skill set was needed. We learned to seek the experience, counsel and wisdom of those of all ranks who went before us. And it was not hard for us to do. We wanted to learn from those who went before us. We wanted to be good stewards.
Number three, our legacy and heritage include hosting rigorous and professional discussions about our Marine Corps, writ large and inclusive of all Marines, all those who have served with Marines, and all who love and care for Marines.
We saw this during the adoption of maneuver warfare doctrine. In the schoolhouses, the media and around the Corps itself, difficult and complex discussions about the theory took place.
Regrettably, the discussion about Force Design 2030 and the future of our beloved Corps is degenerating into a partisan street fight, complete with much disinformation, straw man characterizations of opposing positions and slanderous ad hominem attacks.
We need to move the discussion from a gangland street fight to a rules-based boxing match. Punch hard but fairly; no dirty, below-the-belt punches.
During the 1980s, the Marine Corps Gazette and Marine Corps Times provided a place for hard-fought yet professional debates to take place within the Marine Corps and helped discourse to flourish in our classrooms and throughout the force — but always in the spirit of making better Marines and winning battles at lower cost in life.
In closing, I urge all to reflect deeply on our long-standing bedrock principles and to consider carefully the following points:
· We need to move from waging information campaigns against one another after serious decisions about our Corps future have been made to a much more inclusive and transparent process before decisions are made.
· We need to move from generalizations and straw man characterizations of contending views to serious, in-depth discussions about operational capabilities and the dependencies they have, discussions befitting professionals.
· We need to clearly articulate a future end-state and the means by which we will get there to include, rigorously red-teamed transitions that minimize exploitable opportunities by this nation’s enemies each step of the way.
· We need to return to a time when we “cast our nets widely” and think deeply and carefully about our own dynamic, complex adaptive system, and the many other dynamic complex systems with which we operate.
This is our Marine Corps, and we all have roles to play in helping it adapt to an increasingly complex future.
We must never denigrate or marginalize those who want to help shape its future. We must encourage, rather than suppress, different perspectives and life experiences. Open, inclusive stress-testing of hypotheses about our Corps make for both a stronger, more relevant Corps and a more cohesive and unified Corps.
Let’s revitalize “Gung Ho”— working together.
Retried Marine Corps Gen. Charles C. Krulak served as 31st commandant of the Marine Corps. He is father of the Crucible, the three block war, the strategic corporal and the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab.
11. Military briefing: Ukraine’s battlefield agility pays off
We should no longer be surprised by how well the Ukrainian conduct military operations, to include decentralized ones.
I think Iraq and Afghanistan thinking clouds our judgment of how we view partners. We have too many people who look at friends, partners, and even allies through the lens of the Afghan and Iraqi armies. No one should be surprised by how smart, competent, motivated, dedicated, and inspired are the Ukrainian forces and people. Most of our training models are built on either peacetime assumptions for US military personnel in ideal conditions or assumptions about less competent foreign forces. It is amazing how quickly soldiers learn when faced with life and death situations.
Military briefing: Ukraine’s battlefield agility pays off
Russian forces attempted to cross the Siverskyi Donets river in eastern Ukraine this month using a pontoon bridge, but their tanks and armoured vehicles were picked off by Ukrainian artillery. So they tried it again. And again. And again.
The Russian army made nine attempts to cross the river in the second week of May, according to Ukrainian defence chiefs. Russia lost about 80 tanks or other vehicles and more than 400 men in the ill-fated operation, analysts have calculated using open source data. It is part of a pattern of Russian behaviour since the invasion began three months ago.
By contrast, Ukraine’s forces have proved to be agile, using the leeway afforded to company and even platoon commanders to shape their tactics according to the conditions on the ground.
Decentralised mission command — following strategic objectives set by military chiefs while giving lower ranks tactical autonomy — is standard Nato doctrine. Ukraine’s forces began to study it after independence in 1991, but only embraced it after Russia started its separatist war in the eastern Donbas region in 2014. Kyiv adopted far-reaching defence reforms in 2016 and US, UK and Canadian forces provided extensive training.
“We have a different style and Ukraine’s is pretty similar to western doctrine — the freedom to adapt and achieve the goals according to their understanding of the situation,” said Mykhailo Samus, director of the New Geopolitics Research network, who spent 12 years in the Ukrainian armed forces. “The Soviet model is to follow the exact written instructions of their commanders.”
Russia lost about 80 tanks or other vehicles in its ill-fated attempts to cross the Siverskyi Donets river in eastern Ukraine this month © Ukrainian Presidential Press Office/AP
Blindly following orders from high command and persisting with failed tactics on the battlefield have been features of Russia’s full-scale invasion, whether it is repeated deployment of helicopters to a captured air base in the south — which were destroyed by Ukrainian shelling — or it is multiple attempts to seize Hostomel airport using lightly armed special forces and paratroopers.
“For a Russian infantry officer the risk of being punished by his commander is much more significant than the risk of losing his men or being killed himself,” said Oleksiy Melnyk, a former Ukrainian Air Force officer who spent 10 years under Soviet command. “If you see this order is a way to disaster, you have to tell your commander. That is what Russian officers are afraid of the most.”
Ukraine’s dispersed style of fighting — small groups springing ambushes along with hit and run attacks — inflicted severe damage on Russian forces as they advanced on Kyiv early in the invasion. But perhaps the best example of decentralisation was the defence of Mariupol.
Ukrainian forces resisted a Russian attack and siege, diverting thousands of Moscow’s troops for nearly three months with no outside assistance or orders, until they were told last week by President Volodymyr Zelensky that their mission was over.
Ukraine is building a corps of non-commissioned officers, corporals and sergeants who can make tactical decisions on the battlefield and are regarded as the backbone of western armies.
Ukraine’s drive to create a western style corps of NCOs is still in its early stages, according to Jack Watling, senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a think-tank in London. But Ukraine also has a high number of troops and reservists with combat experience from the 2014-15 Donbas war serving alongside more recent recruits.
A Ukrainian serviceman walks past a destroyed aircraft at Antonov airport in Hostomel, Ukraine. Russia made multiple attempts to seize the facility, but failed © Vadim Ghirda/AP
Melnyk said Ukraine’s military retained some of the culture of the volunteers battalions created hastily to defend the country in 2014 and subsequently incorporated into the army and national guard.
“Many of them were formed and structured almost like civilian companies or non-governmental organisations,” he said. “They didn’t pay so much attention to military rank but to people with real leadership skills who could take command.”
Liudmyla Buimister, a Ukrainian MP and army commander, said the fighters in her territorial defence battalion were high calibre even if many of them had only had a few months of military training.
“The volunteers are mainly people who in their civilian lives have been quite successful. They are quite gifted. They are not your linear infantry, even if they are being used as such.”
Territorial defence battalions are the responsibility of Ukraine’s regional governors, which have adopted the wartime title of heads of military administrations. Several have become household names commenting on the course of the war in their area, giving the impression of a regionalised command structure.
A US official said the fragmented and autonomous nature of the Ukrainian military made it hard for Washington to gauge the strength of Kyiv’s forces, particularly in the east, although this might also be due to Ukrainian secrecy over troop deployment and casualty numbers.
Ukraine’s military has a centralised command structure, setting overall strategic objectives, like in most other western countries, Samus said. Even territorial defence units, when engaged in combat operations, fall under the control of General Valerii Zaluzhny, Ukraine’s commander-in-chief.
The autonomy and nimbleness that Ukraine’s military displayed in the early days of Russia’s full-scale invasion may be reduced as the war continues, analysts and officials said.
“One of the reasons it was so decentralised was the system wasn’t prepared for a crisis,” said an adviser on defence and intelligence in Ukrainian government. “People had to do what they had to do. We’re not in that position any more. The bureaucrats are back in Kyiv. We have a lot of people trying to get themselves into the process. I fear we’ll be less efficient.”
If and when the Ukrainian army receives more heavy weaponry from the west and tries to push the Russians out of the Donbas and in the south, tighter co-ordination will be required and allowing units battlefield autonomy will become “more complicated”, Samus said.
Meanwhile, in a sign that they were aware of their flaws and adapting their tactics, some Russian commanders were shifting from simple frontal attacks to surprise missions and advancing in multiple directions. For example, this had enabled them to seize the Donbas town of Popasna earlier this month, Samus said.
“It doesn’t mean Russian doctrine has changed, but in some directions maybe they have a more effective general.”
Additional reporting by John-Paul Rathbone
12. Myron Pitts: Fort Liberty? No, let’s choose one of our heroes for Fort Bragg’s new name
I support Fort Liberty said no soldier on Fort Bragg ever.
This is telling:
Ty Seidule, a retired Army one-star general and vice-chair of the Naming Commission, said in a news conference Tuesday: “We listened very carefully to local sensitivities,” in picking the name.
Really?
There were more than 34,000 submissions to the Naming Commission, a list that was eventually narrowed to 87 possible names. “Liberty” was not on the shortlist, Seidule himself says. The eight people on the commission made the choice, he said.
The commission is not necessarily the final word on the name change. It will submit a final report to U.S. Congress by Oct. 1. So, there’s your assignment. If you are similarly unimpressed by the new name, reach out to Congressmen Richard Hudson, whose district includes Fayetteville, and North Carolina’s U.S. Senators Richard Burr and Thom Tillis.
Myron Pitts: Fort Liberty? No, let’s choose one of our heroes for Fort Bragg’s new name
| The Fayetteville Observer
Show Caption
Hide Caption
VIDEO: 82nd paratroopers prepare to deploy to Poland
Paratroopers with the 82nd Airborne Division continue to deploy from Fort Bragg to Europe amid a growing Russian presence in the Ukraine.
Rachael Riley, The Fayetteville Observer
“Fort Liberty.”
That is the proposed new name for Fort Bragg that a congressional commission came up with after many months of discussion and, allegedly, community input.
With all due respect, and as a Fayetteville native: I can’t stand it.
The name sounds generic. The name sounds dull.
The Army post soon to be formerly known as Fort Bragg is anything but generic. That post, which began as Camp Bragg in 1918, has a long and storied history that has a veritable hall of heroes. To ignore all of them and choose a name that sounds like it came from a focus group represents a massive missed opportunity.
Ty Seidule, a retired Army one-star general and vice-chair of the Naming Commission, said in a news conference Tuesday: “We listened very carefully to local sensitivities,” in picking the name.
Really?
There were more than 34,000 submissions to the Naming Commission, a list that was eventually narrowed to 87 possible names. “Liberty” was not on the shortlist, Seidule himself says. The eight people on the commission made the choice, he said.
The commission is not necessarily the final word on the name change. It will submit a final report to U.S. Congress by Oct. 1. So, there’s your assignment. If you are similarly unimpressed by the new name, reach out to Congressmen Richard Hudson, whose district includes Fayetteville, and North Carolina’s U.S. Senators Richard Burr and Thom Tillis.
Meanwhile, I am still scratching my head as to how we got here — to Fort Liberty.
The goal of the name changes, approved as part of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2021, was to remove names connected to the Confederacy from Fort Bragg, eight other Southern installations and other federal assets. That part makes sense.
The rebels fought against the United States of America, and on behalf of the enslavement of Black Americans, so they fought against freedom itself. Their names shouldn’t have been on U.S. installations from the giddy-up.
As for a new name, I was far from alone in assuming Fort Bragg had an embarrassing wealth of choices, and the only question was who it would be. I looked forward to the Naming Commission's announcement right up until it landed with a thud on Tuesday afternoon.
Now we learn Fort Bragg will be the only one of the nine Southern installations that will NOT be named for a person if the Naming Commission has its way.
That is not a distinction that anyone around here wanted, far as I know.
On the contrary, over the years, I have seen dozens and dozens of perfectly fine names suggested in response to articles I wrote back when a name change for Fort Bragg was only an idea.
They included unassailable possibilities like Gen. Roscoe Robinson Jr., who commanded the 82nd Airborne and was the first African American to become a four-star general; and Gen. Matthew “Bunker” Ridgeway, the 82nd’s first commander and Supreme Allied Commander Europe in World War II.
They included several Medal of Honor recipients, as well. The Naming Commission accepted such a suggestion as a guide for other Army posts. The commission recommended that Fort Pickett, Virginia; Fort Polk, Louisiana, and Fort Rucker, Alabama, all be named for Medal of Honor recipients.
Not to mention, Fort Bragg’s history includes those paratroopers who fought in the D-Day invasion in World War II and in many other wars, and the Special Forces operatives over the years and who are on point at this very hour, the leading edge of national defense.
Seidule said the Liberty name came out of local community meetings. He said it embodies the Special Forces motto, “To free the oppressed” and an 82nd Division song that goes, “We’re all American and proud to be, for we’re the soldiers of liberty.”
Initial social media reaction on The Fayetteville Observer Facebook page and in my Facebook group, Community Conversations with Myron, have not been favorable toward Fort Liberty.
One person called the choice, “lazy.”
One man wrote the name reminded him of the fictional military base on “F Troop,” a 1960s satirical sitcom; someone else responded that the post from the show was named Fort Courage. “Courage” by the way, unlike Liberty, did make the naming commission’s short list.
Deanna L. Rosario wrote: “I literally saw no one comment that we should call it Liberty. We should have kept it as Bragg but for Edward S instead of Braxton.”
Many people in the Facebook comments support keeping the name just as is, which is not by law an option. Some vowed they will still call it Fort Bragg, to which I say, fine. Knock yourself out. I am sure there are folks who still call Fayetteville Technical Community College, “FTI.”
Other people are more resigned to the Bragg name change.
I asked N.C. Rep. John Szoka, a veteran, about it.
He said: “If we have to rename Fort Bragg, which Congress decided we have to do, Fort Liberty is fine. I think after a few years people will get used to it.”
He added, however, that something will be lost either way.
During his years of service, Szoka said he worked with military officers from numerous countries: “In every case, there were two U.S. Army posts that they all knew, Fort Bragg and Fort Hood. Fort Bragg for the 82nd Airborne and Special Forces and Fort Hood for armor and mechanized infantry divisions. The mention of those two posts' names always had the same response: great respect for the capabilities and power projection that they possess.”
In my view, that part does not have to change with the name.
The way I see it is that a later generation of foreign officers will all know about Fort Cavazos, the proposed name for Fort Hood, after Gen. Richard Cavazos, a decorated hero of the Vietnam War.
They will also know about Fort Liberty, named for liberty, or if the community actually does get some input, after one of our own heroes.
13. Steel Graveyard: Russia Has Lost Over 1,000 Tanks in Ukraine
1000 tanks seems to be an unbelievable number to me.
Steel Graveyard: Russia Has Lost Over 1,000 Tanks in Ukraine
Russian Tank Losses Mounting in Ukraine – Ukraine has become the graveyard of Russian tanks, and according to a senior U.S. defense official, it is believed that almost 1,000 main battle tanks (MBTs) have been destroyed or otherwise rendered inoperable. Additional Russian losses in Ukraine reportedly include at least 50 helicopters, three dozen fighter-bomber aircraft, and at least 350 artillery pieces. Russia has also lost more personnel in the three months of the war than the Soviet Union lost during the 10-year-long conflict in Afghanistan.
Those numbers are more conservative than figures from the Ukrainian General Staff, which claimed that its forces had destroyed 187 aircraft, 155 helicopters, 71 air defense systems, 1,688 vehicles, eight ships, a light speedboat, 76 fuel vehicles, and 215 unmanned aerial vehicles – along with 970 Russian tanks, 2,389 armored personnel vehicles, 431 artillery systems, and 151 multiple launch rocket systems.
The fact remains that a lot of Russian tanks have been destroyed in the three-month-long war, and the Kremlin is far from seeing victory. The problem has gotten so great in fact that the days of the tank could be coming to an end.
Phillips Payson O’Brien, a professor of strategic studies at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and author of How the War Was Won: Air-Sea Power and Allied Victory in World War II, has gone so far as to suggest that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine should be seen as the last “20th-century war,” and that the tank will no longer continue to play a dominant role on the battlefield.
He argued that at the time of its invasion in February, Russia held not just a significant numerical advantage over Ukraine in terms of the number of tanks in its arsenal, but a qualitative edge as well. Russia’s tanks were judged to be among the very best in the world.
Yet, instead of rolling over Ukrainian positions, the tanks proved to be easy targets, and now the destroyed hulks of Russian MBTs – many with their turrets blown off thanks to the well-known “jack-in-the-box” flaw – litter fields around the country.
“The tank’s vulnerabilities—it is ill-suited to many types of terrain, inflexible in its movements, and the opposite of stealthy—have been known for years, but until this war, they had not been exposed so clearly,” O’Brien added.
Russia’s losses have become a propaganda coup for Kyiv, and now visitors to the Ukrainian capital will be greeted by Russian tanks. Yet instead of rolling in as part of a victory parade or even successfully capturing the city in battle, the tanks are war trophies put on display to mock the Russian efforts, not to mention President Vladimir Putin’s ambitions.
The losses of tanks are so great that Moscow is literally scraping the bottom of the barrel, as 60-year-old T-62s are now being deployed to bolster the numbers, Forbes.com reported. The Kremlin has maintained stockpiles of thousands of the older armored vehicles, and whilst many were considered barely usable, Russia is working around the clock to get as many as possible into working order.
It is hard to imagine how those obsolete machines will do when more modern tanks, such as the T-90M, are failing to turn the tide of battle. At this rate, Russia may need to call up its few dozen T-34s, the iconic World War II tank that helped drive the Nazis out of Ukraine 80 years ago. Russia acquired those surplus T-34s from Laos in 2019, and the plan was to use them in films, and museum displays, but soon it wouldn’t be surprising to see them rolling across Ukraine again.
Moscow almost seems that desperate.
Now a Senior Editor for 1945, Peter Suciu is a Michigan-based writer who has contributed to more than four dozen magazines, newspapers and websites. He regularly writes about military hardware, and is the author of several books on military headgear including A Gallery of Military Headdress, which is available on Amazon.com. Peter is also a Contributing Writer for Forbes.
14. The GOP Foreign Policy Civil War Is Real
Teis kind of conflict within either party is not good for the nation.
The GOP Foreign Policy Civil War Is Real
Sen. Rand Paul held up the $40 billion Ukraine aid package that was signed into law by President Joe Biden. “No matter how sympathetic the cause, my oath of office is to the national security of the United States of America,” Paul said. “We cannot save Ukraine by dooming the U.S. economy.”
But the commonwealth’s senior senator, who had wanted the bill to pass without any delay, had a different take. “Anyone concerned about the cost of supporting a Ukrainian victory should consider the much larger cost should Ukraine lose,” Sen. Mitch McConnell said in a speech on the Senate floor.
McConnell prevailed in many ways. He voted with the majority inside both his party and the Senate to send the legislation to Biden’s desk. It is now the law of the land. He is his chamber’s Republican leader and is poised to remain so if the GOP retakes the Senate majority following the midterm elections in November.
But all 11 votes against the package in the Senate, like all 57 votes against it in the House, came from Republicans like Paul. This included Sen. Josh Hawley, an ambitious Missouri Republican who used the measure as a hook for denouncing what was once the dominant foreign policy strain inside their party just 20 years ago.
“This goes far beyond targeted military assistance,” Hawley wrote. “This package treats Ukraine as a client state of America, a fraught relationship that will put us on the hook for financing the war and then the reconstruction.” The senator went on to call for repealing “a Wilsonian globalism that seeks to remake the world” and replacing it with “a robust, realistic American nationalism.”
More surprisingly, the president of the uber Reaganite Heritage Foundation stands with Rand. Kevin Roberts argued in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that “U.S. aid to Ukraine is about our interests, not theirs. And sympathy for Ukraine does not pre-require trust in Congress, least of all through yet another of its fake, frenzied, ‘must pass’ fire drills.”
Like Hawley, Roberts drew broader foreign policy conclusions from the debate over Ukraine aid. “Was conservatism well served by accusing skeptics of the Iraq War of ‘hating their country’?” he asked, referring to David Frum’s “Unpatriotic Conservatives” cover story in the Bush-era National Review. And in an interview with Axios, Roberts cast his lot with Tucker Carlson, Peter Thiel, the Kochs, the Cato Institute, and others seeking a conservative foreign policy realignment.
It’s not just the president of Heritage. A major driver of these discussions is the once and perhaps future president of the United States, the reigning titular leader of the Republican Party, Donald Trump. Trump more than any other figure left, right or center popularized the phrase “endless wars” and called on Washington to end them.
So it might be said that the more hawkish Republicans remain more or less dominant while advocates for restraint are ascendant. McConnell and Paul have often worked together for the good of the party, as have even McConnell and Trump. But he won’t let the up-and-coming populists and libertarians, who have often quarreled themselves, win without a fight.
The newcomers will likely gain reinforcements in J.D. Vance, who has to be considered the favorite to replace retiring Republican Sen. Rob Portman, and perhaps even Blake Masters in Arizona. That’s not enough to put McConnell in the minority, but it is a caucus within the caucus.
Since the end of the Cold War, whenever conservatives have started to have an argument over foreign policy, the dialogue was short-lived. Consider how the 1990s Buchanan presidential bids gave way to the nomination of George W. Bush in 2000, followed by John McCain eight years later. Similarly, conservative opposition to the Kosovo war fell to the desire for a more activist foreign policy after 9/11 and the Republicans who opposed Barack Obama on Libya and Syria were once again sidelined when Mitt Romney won the presidential nomination in 2012.
It remains to be seen whether this time is different and where other rising Republicans — think Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis — take their stand. But the GOP’s Mitch and Rand Show isn’t going off the air anytime soon.
Now a 1945 Contributing Editor, W. James Antle III is the Washington Examiner’s politics editor. He was previously managing editor of the Daily Caller, associate editor of the American Spectator, and senior writer for the American Conservative. He is the author of Devouring Freedom: Can Big Government Ever Be Stopped? You can follow home on Twitter: @Jimantle.
15. Opinion | America May Be Broken Beyond Repair
I hope this depressing assessment is wrong.
I will remain bullish on our great American experiment. We are capable of a corrective.
Conclusion:
The real nightmare is not that the repetition of nihilist terrorism brings American politics to an inflection point, but that it doesn’t. The nightmare is that we simply stumble on, helpless as things keep getting worse.
Opinion | America May Be Broken Beyond Repair
Michelle Goldberg
America May Be Broken Beyond Repair
May 27, 2022
Credit...Damon Winter/The New York Times
By
Opinion Columnist
In an ad released last year, Blake Masters, a leading candidate in Arizona’s Republican Senate primary, cradles a semiautomatic weapon. “This is a short-barreled rifle,” he said, ominous music playing in the background. “It wasn’t designed for hunting. This is designed to kill people.”
For Masters, this isn’t an argument against allowing such guns to proliferate. Rather, it’s an acknowledgment of why access to these weapons is, for the right, a matter of existential importance. “The Second Amendment is not about duck hunting,” said Masters. “It’s about protecting your family and your country. What’s the first thing the Taliban did when Joe Biden handed them Afghanistan? They took away people’s guns.” Guns, in this worldview, are a guarantor against government overreach. And government overreach includes attempts to regulate guns.
These days, it’s barely remarkable when Republicans issue what sound like threats against those who’d dare curtail their private arsenals. “I have news for the embarrassment that claims to be our president — try to take our guns and you’ll learn why the Second Amendment was written in the first place,” Randy Fine, a state representative in Florida, tweeted on Wednesday.
It will be impossible to do anything about guns in this country, at least at a national level, as long as Democrats depend on the cooperation of a party that holds in reserve the possibility of insurrection. The slaughter of children in Texas has done little to alter this dynamic.
Republicans have no intention of letting Democrats pass even modest measures like strengthened background checks, and as long as the Democratic senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema refuse to amend the filibuster, Republicans retain a veto over national policy. Victims of our increasingly frequent mass shootings are collateral damage in a cold civil war, though some Democrats refuse to acknowledge it, let alone fight it.
Fine’s words echoed Donald Trump’s during the 2016 election, when he said that “Second Amendment people” might be able to stop a President Hillary Clinton from appointing Supreme Court justices. What was once a barely concealed insinuation of violence has morphed, especially since Jan. 6, into an even more forthright menace. As ProPublica has reported, dozens of members of the Oath Keepers militia were arrested in connection with the attack on the Capitol, but that hasn’t stopped the organization from “evolving into a force within the Republican Party.”
In Shasta County, a conservative part of rural Northern California, a militia-aligned faction has secured a majority on the board of supervisors, in what members of the movement see as a blueprint that can be deployed nationally. Throughout the country, reported The New York Times, “right-wing Republicans are talking more openly and frequently about the use of force as justifiable in opposition to those who dislodged him” — meaning Trump — “from power.” Expecting those same Republicans to collaborate with Democrats on public safety is madness.
The horrifying irony, the hideous ratchet, is that the more America is besieged by senseless violence, the more the paramilitary wing of the American right is strengthened. Gun sales tend to rise after mass shootings. Republicans responded to the massacre in Uvalde by doubling down on calls to arm teachers and “harden” schools. An article in The Federalist argued that parents must home-school so that kids can learn “in a controlled environment where guns can be safely carried for self-defense or locked away when not in use.” It’s a vision of a society — if you can call it that — where every family is a fortress.
Guns are now the leading cause of death for American children. Many conservatives consider this a price worth paying for their version of freedom. Our institutions give these conservatives disproportionate power whether or not they win elections. The filibuster renders the Senate largely impotent. Trump, a president who lost the popular vote, was able to appoint Supreme Court justices who are poised to help overturn a New York state law restricting the carrying of concealed weapons. It’s increasingly hard to see a path to small-d democratic reform.
And so among liberals, there’s an overwhelming feeling of despair. Even as people learn the names of all those murdered children, the most common sentiment is not “never again,” but a bitter acknowledgment that nothing is going to change. America is too sick, too broken. It is perhaps beyond repair.
Two years ago, David French, an anti-Trump conservative, published a book, “Divided We Fall,” warning of the possible crackup of the United States. It included two chapters imagining scenarios for how the dissolution of the country might happen. One involved a mass shooting at a school in California, to which the state’s people reacted “with white-hot rage.” French envisioned furious state politicians defying the Second Amendment, leading to a nullification crisis and blue-state secession.
He meant it as a cautionary tale, but rereading the chapter after Uvalde, it feels less bleak than our reality. In French’s scenario, atrocity has the effect of energizing people rather than immobilizing them. They are determined to fight, not resigned to defeat. They have audacity and hope.
The real nightmare is not that the repetition of nihilist terrorism brings American politics to an inflection point, but that it doesn’t. The nightmare is that we simply stumble on, helpless as things keep getting worse.
16. The real reason gas is so damn expensive: Don’t just blame oil prices, blame refineries too
The real reason gas is so damn expensive: Don’t just blame oil prices, blame refineries too
As summer driving season begins, the prospects for cheaper gas look bleak.
Domestic Economics Reporter
May 28, 2022
Gasoline prices are up. That is not a big surprise. People are no longer staying home, and the summer driving season is kicking off. Meanwhile, Russia, a major oil producer, has been cut off from the American market.
Gas prices sit at $4.59, according to the Energy Information Administration, surpassing the immediate post-Russian-invasion high of $4.32 and well up from $3 a year ago.
But whatever pressures — political or otherwise — there are on bringing down gas prices, there are big structural reasons that cheap gas isn’t in the United States’ future. Even if more oil was flowing freely out of American wells and tankers full of Russian crude were welcome in the U.S., it would still have to get refined into gasoline (or diesel, or jet fuel).
And that’s where the problem is.
ADVERTISEMENT
“We were seeing gasoline demand at or slightly above pre-pandemic levels. We are seeing distillate demand above pre-pandemic levels. And that demand is being met with significantly less refinery capacity as we had rationalization that occurred during the pandemic,” said Gary Simmons, chief commercial officer of Valero, which operates more than a dozen refineries in the United States and Canada, said in a call with analysts.
“Has the oil market run out of refining capacity? Given how the system is behaving, we think the answer may well be ‘yes,’” Morgan Stanley Equity Analyst Martijn Rats wrote in a note earlier this month.
In other words, demand for gasoline has returned, but the ability to meet it has been reduced — or rationalized — away during the pandemic. And looking ahead, it doesn’t seem like there are many options to improve refinery capacity. It takes years to expand existing facilities, and the trend in the industry hasn’t been to add more capacity but to shut down or convert them to produce renewable diesel.
“There isn’t enough capacity to meet higher-than-expected demand,” said Gregory Brew, an oil historian at Yale University.
U.S. refinery capacity was precarious before the pandemic
ADVERTISEMENT
It’s not hard to understand why refiners are reluctant to build new facilities — and why the public and regulators would rather they not. “Every U.S. refinery site is more or less a Superfund site in waiting,” said Rory Johnston, founder of Commodity Context, noting that no completely new refineries had been built since 1977.
The industry has dealt with the problem by expanding existing facilities, which means more oil can be refined, but if something goes wrong — like an explosion — it means a bigger hit to the industry’s ability to produce gasoline and diesel. It creates fragility in the system that wouldn’t exist if you had the exact same refinery capacity in different places.
“No one is going to build a new refinery on the East Coast of the United States this year, next year or the year after,” Johnston said.
The most recent Energy Information Administration data put refining capacity at about 18 million barrels per day in February, while in the months before the pandemic shut down vast swathes of the economy, it was around 19 million barrels per day. And less oil is going into U.S. refineries daily: According to the most recent EIA data, it stands at almost 16 million barrels per day, which is well above the pandemic low of just under 13 million barrels, but a decline from the almost 16.5 million barrels per day in February 2020.
ADVERTISEMENT
The global supply chain has its own hang-ups
Refining capacity has expanded in the Middle East and China. There have been limited exports, along with Russian exports drying up following its invasion of Ukraine.
“Outside the Middle East and China, atmospheric distillation capacity has contracted by ~1.9 mb/d since 4Q19, the largest decline in at least 30 years. New capacity has been added in China and the Middle East, but this has not translated into additional exports of oil products,” Rats wrote.
The climate connection
Refiners got caught between the energy transition that was being predicted and the one that actually happened: an economy thirsty for oil and fuel and not getting it from the usual places.
For now, that means profits, but it could also mean fragility going forward.
“This is not a problem that is going to go away; hurricanes will make it worse potentially,” said Patrick De Haan, a petroleum analyst at GasBuddy.
Thanks to Lillian Barkley for copy editing this article.
17. FDD | Top Russian Bank Launches Apparent Attempt to Evade Sanctions
Excerpts:
Treasury should examine the nature of the relationship between Sberbank and New Opportunities. If the department determines the latter is owned or controlled by the former or has engaged in dealings designed to circumvent U.S. sanctions, Treasury should designate New Opportunities to maintain the efficacy of U.S. sanctions against Sberbank.
Furthermore, given that Russian sanctions-evasion efforts will likely continue to mount as Moscow faces unprecedented Western economic pressure, Treasury should consider designating Russia as a jurisdiction of primary money laundering concern under Section 311 of the USA PATRIOT Act. Doing so would help counter Russian sanctions evasion and increase the economic pressure on Moscow as it wages its unprovoked war against Ukraine.
FDD | Top Russian Bank Launches Apparent Attempt to Evade Sanctions
fdd.org · by John Hardie Research Manager and Senior Research Analyst · May 27, 2022
Russian media reported last week that state-owned Sberbank, the country’s largest financial institution, had sold some of its assets to an obscure company established in March. The sale likely reflects an attempt to shield those assets from Western sanctions, which Russia’s Finance Ministry now predicts will cause the country’s economy to shrink by as much as 12 percent this year.
Sberbank reportedly said that “as part of a strategy update,” it had sold streaming platforms Okko, Okko Sport, and Zvuk as well as cloud service provider SberCloud, fintech company Evotor, and biometrics firm STC. Sberbank did not disclose the sale’s terms, saying only that it “was made at a fair market value.”
The new owner of the assets is JSC New Opportunities, a Moscow-based company created on March 24 with 10,000 rubles (around $175) in authorized capital, the legal minimum for a non-public joint stock company in Russia. New Opportunities is owned by a former stock-transfer agency representative named Tatiana Portnykh, an unknown figure who also owns four similar companies created between April and May, all with 10,000 rubles in authorized capital. Interfax reported that Portnykh is New Opportunities’ sole owner, but the company’s file in Russia’s Unified State Register of Legal Entities says that information is restricted pursuant to a Russian law that allows such information to be withheld to combat sanctions.
Citing an unnamed source familiar with Sberbank’s plans for its non-financial “ecosystem,” in which the bank had invested heavily prior to the war, Russian media outlet RBC reported that Sberbank sold the assets due to Western sanctions. The sanctions threaten the business of the sold companies, all of which work with foreign suppliers, the source said.
The U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned Sberbank on February 24, barring U.S. financial institutions from processing transactions for the Russian bank or providing it with correspondent or payable-through accounts. On April 6, in coordination with the United Kingdom, Treasury imposed full blocking sanctions against Sberbank and its majority-owned subsidiaries, while leaving in place a carve-out for energy-related transactions. The European Commission has proposed removing Sberbank from the SWIFT international financial messaging system, though that measure has not yet come to pass.
Russian oligarchs and officials have for years sought to shield their assets from sanctions by hiding them behind shell companies and associates. Now, Russian banks and companies are adopting similar techniques in an effort to circumvent Western sanctions, a senior Treasury Department official told the Financial Times in late March.
Sergei Shishkin, acting CEO of Okko, the video streaming platform, insists New Opportunities is “not affiliated with the Sber group” and therefore is “not subject to the current U.S. or EU sanctions.” However, a Sberbank representative said the bank “will maintain partnerships with” the sold companies and will continue “joint marketing and operational activities with” Okko and Zvuk, the audio streaming platform.
Fyodor Kravchenko, managing partner of Russia’s Collegium of Media Lawyers, believes the sale probably reflects an attempt “to avoid negative consequences for [Sberbank’s] media assets.” Likewise, pointing to the fact that New Opportunities “is an obscure new structure,” Denis Kuskov, CEO of the Telecom Daily research agency, asserted that Sberbank likely sold the assets “solely to circumvent sanctions” and may later regain de jure control over them.
Treasury should examine the nature of the relationship between Sberbank and New Opportunities. If the department determines the latter is owned or controlled by the former or has engaged in dealings designed to circumvent U.S. sanctions, Treasury should designate New Opportunities to maintain the efficacy of U.S. sanctions against Sberbank.
Furthermore, given that Russian sanctions-evasion efforts will likely continue to mount as Moscow faces unprecedented Western economic pressure, Treasury should consider designating Russia as a jurisdiction of primary money laundering concern under Section 311 of the USA PATRIOT Act. Doing so would help counter Russian sanctions evasion and increase the economic pressure on Moscow as it wages its unprovoked war against Ukraine.
John Hardie is research manager and a senior research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), where he contributes to FDD’s Center on Economic and Financial Power (CEFP). For more analysis from John and CEFP, please subscribe HERE. Follow FDD on Twitter @FDD and @FDD_CEFP. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research center focused on national security and foreign policy.
fdd.org · by John Hardie Research Manager and Senior Research Analyst · May 27, 2022
18. The Anti-Vaccine Movement’s New Frontier
If I was interested in conducting subversion against the US and trying to undermine the politics and culture of American society this is one line of effort I would exploit. This would complement another line of effort - the fentanyl epidemic that is killing 100,000 Americans too. Undermining people's health and damaging a nation's health care system is one way to undermine the legitimacy of the government. We should see what foreign governments are either causing or contributing to these problems and exploiting them to meet their strategic goal of weakening America.
Anti-vax proponents view this as freedom of choice. But they should consider the "research" they are following and examine how that "research" is being amplified and being used to subvert America. Think about Unrestricted Warfare.
With great freedom comes great responsibility. (to borrow from a comic book character)
The Anti-Vaccine Movement’s New Frontier
Credit...Photo illustration by Jamie Chung for The New York Times
A wave of parents has been radicalized by Covid-era misinformation to reject ordinary childhood immunizations — with potentially lethal consequences.
Credit...Photo illustration by Jamie Chung for The New York Times
Send any friend a story
As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. Anyone can read what you share.
By
- Published May 25, 2022Updated May 27, 2022
Listen to This Article
Audio Recording by Audm
The mother of four brought her children, ranging in age from grade school to high school, to the doctor’s office last summer for their annual checkup. When their pediatrician, Robert Froehlke, said that it was time for shots and several boosters and then mentioned the Covid vaccine, her reaction stunned him. “I’m not going to kill my children,” Froehlke recalls her saying, as she began to shake and weep. He ushered her out of the examination room, away from her children, and tried to calm her. “We’re just trying to help your kids be healthy,” he told her. But he didn’t press the issue; he sensed that she wasn’t persuadable at that moment. And he didn’t want to drive her away from his practice altogether. “That really shook me up,” he says.
In his 14 years of practicing medicine in Littleton, a Denver suburb, Froehlke had seen parents decline their children’s vaccines for the sake of a more “natural” lifestyle. He had also seen parents, worried about overstressing their children’s bodies, request that vaccinations be given on different schedules. But until the past nine months or so, he had rarely seen parents with already vaccinated children refuse additional vaccines. Some of these parents were even rejecting boosters of the same shots they unquestioningly accepted for their children just a few years earlier.
Froehlke estimates that he has faced around 20 such parents, maybe more: a father who said he had done his own research and sent Froehlke a ream of printouts from right-wing and anti-vaccine websites to prove it; a mother (who is a nurse) who adamantly refused routine boosters for a kindergarten-age daughter — and then later, when the child got sick with Covid-19, asked Froehlke without success to give the deworming drug ivermectin to her. The overall number of these new doubters in his practice hasn’t been large, he says, but considering it was almost zero before the pandemic, the trend is both notable and worrisome.
These parents are not uneducated, Froehlke told me. Some of them are literally rocket scientists at the nearby Lockheed Martin facility. What has happened, he suspects, is that rampant misinformation related to the Covid-19 vaccines, and the fact that pundits like Tucker Carlson on Fox News have devoted a lot of time to bashing them — among other untruths, he has suggested that the vaccines make people more likely to contract Covid-19, not less — has begun to taint some people’s view of long-established vaccines. “I think we’re going to see more of this, more spillover of persons who had previously vaccinated their children and who are now not going to vaccinate,” he says.
Such doubt has been accompanied by, and may have been augmented by, an erosion of confidence in medical expertise generally. “We used to be able to persuade more, with our background and training,” he says. Parents trusted his advice because he was a doctor. Now, when he cites the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or other official guidelines, skeptical parents sometimes accuse him of being a shill — of having been lied to and taken in by some vast conspiracy. “It’s very concerning, this lack of trust,” he says.
Southern California; Savannah, Ga.; rural Alabama; Houston — pediatricians in all these places told me about similar experiences with parents pushing back against routine vaccines. Jason Terk, a pediatrician in Keller, Texas, called the phenomenon “the other contagion” — a new hesitation or refusal by patients to take vaccines they previously accepted. Eric Ball, a pediatrician in Orange County, Calif., said the number of children in his practice who were fully vaccinated had declined by 5 percent, compared with before the pandemic. He has been hearing more questions about established childhood vaccines — How long has it been around? Why give it? — from parents who vaccinated older children without much hesitation but are now confronted with the prospect of vaccinating babies born during the pandemic. Some of these parents end up holding off, he says, telling him they want to do more research. “There’s a lot of misinformation about the Covid vaccines, and it just bleeds into everything,” he says. “These fake stories and bad information get stuck in people’s heads, and they understandably get confused.”
In another part of Orange County, Kate Williamson reports seeing more reluctance in her pediatric practice. Though she notes that vaccine hesitancy is not new — doctors in relatively conservative Orange County, in particular, have weathered earlier anti-vaccine flare-ups — the politicization of the issue seems different this time. “I have this worry in the back of my mind — that we’re up against something that we have never seen before,” she says. “To have something that could be anti-science as part of a political identity and culture is very concerning.”
In Savannah, according to a pediatrician named Ben Spitalnick, many first-time parents have been asking questions about vaccines that he had not heard in the past. Two years of seeing the doubts about Covid vaccines expressed on social media, he thinks, is causing parents to question other science as well. He and his colleagues — like Williamson and Ball — inform parents that they should find other doctors if they choose not to vaccinate their children. And, he told me, a number of patients have indeed left his practice.
If this dynamic continues, it could threaten decades of progress in controlling infectious disease. The C.D.C. has registered a 1 percentage point drop in childhood vaccinations since the pandemic began. Ninety-four percent of American kindergartners were up to date with their vaccines in the 2020-21 school year, compared with 95 percent the previous year, meaning that not only have vaccinations in this age group fallen below the C.D.C.’s 95 percent target, but also some 35,000 fewer children were vaccinated that year. Ball, Williamson and Spitalnick estimate that the volume of skeptical questions has increased by 5 to 10 percent over the past three years. “It doesn’t sound big,” Spitalnick says. “But it’s an awful lot of babies. That could also get you below herd immunity.”
While there is a lack of data about how widespread this newfound intransigence toward vaccines is, the possibility that it may be spreading worries nearly every expert I queried. The anti-vaccine movement is “so strong, so well organized, so well funded, I doubt it will stop at Covid-19 vaccines,” says Peter Hotez, the dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine. “I think it’s going to extend to childhood vaccinations.”
Political affiliation may be an important factor behind what Froehlke and others are experiencing. Though his practice is in Jefferson County, which leans progressive, he sees many patients from nearby Douglas County, which is more conservative. (It went for Trump by more than 7 points in 2020.) And Froehlke thinks he may be seeing more newly minted naysayers than some of his peers — a couple of other pediatricians I spoke to in Denver had not seen more doubters — simply because more of his patients lean to the right politically.
David Broniatowski, an associate professor at George Washington University who studies online misinformation, says that because Covid vaccines have become so charged politically, one of the largest groups in the country, white conservatives, may have also become the most susceptible to the skulduggery swirling around vaccines. “To my mind, they are a vulnerable audience that is targeted for manipulation by a pretty small number of grifters,” Broniatowski says. “It’s a crazy scenario where a dominant demographic in the country may be the most vulnerable population right now.”
In 2019, even before the pandemic struck, the World Health Organization listed growing vaccine hesitancy as one of its top 10 threats to global health. W.H.O. officials often refer to the contagion of misinformation that foments vaccine hesitancy as an “infodemic”: mountains of incorrect and sometimes flagrantly conspiratorial information about diseases that leads people to avoid lifesaving medical practices, like the vaccines used to fight them. Now the pandemic has given anti-vaccine advocates an opportunity to field-test a variety of messages and find new recruits. And one message in particular seems to be resonating widely: Vaccines and vaccine mandates are an attack on freedom.
Although it is convenient to refer to anti-vaccine efforts as a “movement,” there really is no single movement. Rather, disparate interests are converging on a single issue. Many reject the “anti-vaccine” label altogether, claiming instead to be “pro-vaccine choice,” “pro-safe vaccine” or “vaccine skeptical.” For some, there may be a way to make money by pushing the notion that vaccines are dangerous. For politicians and commentators, the “tyranny” of vaccine mandates can offer a political rallying cry. For states like Russia, which has disseminated both pro- and anti-vaccine messages on social media in other countries, vaccines are another target for informational warfare. For conspiracy-minded private citizens, vaccine misinformation can be a way to make sense of the world, even if the explanations they arrive at are often nightmarish and bizarre.
The process of swaying people with messaging that questions vaccines is how disinformation — deliberately fabricated falsehoods and half-truths — becomes misinformation, or incorrect information passed along unwittingly. Motivated by the best intentions, these people nonetheless end up amplifying the contagion, and the damaging impact, of half-truths and distortions. “This is a deadly movement,” Peter Hotez told me. “With things like terrorism and nuclear proliferation, we have lots of infrastructure. For this, we don’t have anything.”
Credit...Photo illustration by Jamie Chung for The New York Times
In 1904, the U.S. Supreme Court heard the case of Henning Jacobson, a Swedish immigrant and minister who refused to comply with a vaccine mandate in Massachusetts. He had been fined $5, equivalent to about $170 today. At issue was how much control states had over residents’ bodies. It was part of a fight that stretches back to the very first vaccine mandates, in the 19th century, and the backlashes they inspired. The arguments against mandatory vaccination then were similar to those we hear now: Vaccines are dangerous; they kill children; they infringe on personal freedom. The remarkable constancy of these claims over time is due, in part, to the fact that vaccines raise legitimately complicated and enduring questions about how much autonomy any individual should surrender for the greater good and how to apportion risk between individuals and society. In Jacobson’s case, the court ultimately ruled that states did have the power to mandate vaccination when public safety was threatened — but not if individuals could show that the vaccine would harm or kill them.
In the early 20th century, as improvements in sanitation blunted the spread of many diseases, public-health authorities moved away from outright mandates to policies of persuasion. Vaccine science accelerated, too. When the polio vaccine became widely available in 1955, it helped children avoid the frightening paralytic conditions caused by the virus, including the loss of the ability to breathe. A decade later, scientists licensed a vaccine for the measles virus, which was still sickening tens of thousands yearly and killing hundreds. In 1980, the World Health Organization declared that the smallpox virus, which kills up to 30 percent of the people it infects, had finally been eradicated through vaccination. Today, childhood infections that were often fatal or disabling as recently as the mid-20th century — diphtheria, rubella, whooping cough, measles, mumps, polio — very rarely cause deaths in the developed world. Such public-health successes are why some scientists regard vaccines as the single greatest medical advance in human history.
But that very triumph has, paradoxically, hindered the effort to counter vaccine skepticism. In the developed world, only a small portion of the population has seen the death and suffering caused by the diseases of eras past; vaccines, in the minds of many, have come to pose a greater threat than the diseases that they have helped nearly vanquish. In a sense, vaccines have become victims of their own success.
The modern iteration of the anti-vaccine movement is often traced to 1998. That February, a group of doctors and scientists held a news conference at the Royal Free Hospital in London. They had potentially incendiary findings to discuss, which were about to appear in The Lancet, a prestigious medical journal. Their paper speculatively proposed a link between the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine, the first dose of which is commonly given to children during their second year of life, and regressive autism, a mysterious condition whose prevalence seemed to be spreading. The single vaccine against the three viruses, the paper’s authors suggested, might cause an inflammatory disease of the gut, and the resulting intestinal dysfunction could affect the brain’s development. “I cannot support the continued use of the three vaccines given together,” Andrew Wakefield, the British gastroenterologist who had led the research, said. “My concerns are that one more case of this is too many.”
His words still reverberate around the world. Other skeptics had objected to vaccines over the course of the 20th century — for example, blaming the whooping-cough vaccine for causing neurological problems in children. But the medical establishment convincingly disproved the idea that the whooping-cough vaccine could lead to lasting neurological damage. By contrast, the doubts Wakefield expressed about a relatively new childhood vaccine — the combined MMR shot had been introduced in Britain only in 1988 — prompted a wave of fear about vaccines that continues to this day.
Measles immunization rates quickly dropped in parts of London, and within years, outbreaks began occurring in Britain and elsewhere in Europe. What seems to have been lost on the general public and the media was just how weak, scientifically speaking, The Lancet paper about the MMR vaccine really was. The study, which involved only 12 subjects, was so small as to render firm conclusions impossible. It had no comparison group of nonautistic children, and the subjects were not chosen randomly, a flaw in the study that could have possibly introduced significant bias into the results. At best, the paper should have been used to spur stronger studies that confirmed or refuted its speculation. Instead, many media outlets, including “60 Minutes,” treated Wakefield as one side in an ongoing scientific debate about MMR vaccine safety, when in reality there wasn’t much debate at all among most scientists.
Wakefield’s position started to unravel in fairly short order. In 2001, after he declined to conduct a larger study to substantiate or refute the contents of The Lancet study, the funding for his work at University College London dried up, according to Mark Pepys, then head of the university’s department of medicine at the Royal Free campus, and Wakefield left his job there. In February 2004, a British investigative journalist named Brian Deer began publishing what would become a series of damning articles in The Sunday Times of London and later The BMJ, formerly The British Medical Journal. His investigations revealed apparent conflicts of interest and included, among other shortcomings, evidence of what he said was scientific fraud: Medical records suggested that some of the children had developmental problems before they received the vaccines. Deer also found that Wakefield’s work had been funded by a lawyer representing parents of autistic children who thought they had been harmed by vaccines; the lawyer needed evidence to support the claim that vaccines had damaged the children he represented and had paid Wakefield to find it. The month after Deer’s first article appeared, 10 of Wakefield’s 12 co-authors from the original 1998 paper issued a “retraction of an interpretation.” “We wish to make it clear that in this paper no causal link was established between MMR vaccine and autism,” they wrote.
In 2010 — the same year that a whooping-cough epidemic in California led to the death of 10 infants, nine of them unvaccinated, and also sent more than 800 people, most of them young children, to the hospital — Britain’s General Medical Council stripped Wakefield of his medical license. He had breached medical ethics by subjecting children to unwarranted and potentially painful procedures, the council charged. Soon after that, The Lancet retracted the 1998 paper, which a British gastroimmunologist described in testimony as “probably the worst paper” ever published in the journal’s history.
In the early 2000s, Wakefield landed in Texas, where he worked for one autism-related charity and co-founded another. He still has an ardent base of supporters and, where he can find a receptive audience, gives talks about the supposed dangers of vaccines. Those appearances have included speaking to the Somali immigrant community in Minneapolis that, some years after his visits in 2010 and 2011, experienced a measles outbreak stemming from a decline in vaccinations; and video Q. and A. sessions for paying members at his film-production website.
Wakefield has also directed films such as “Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe,” a 2016 documentary that, along with other familiar anti-vaccine attacks, charges that the C.D.C. is hiding data showing that vaccines are dangerous. The documentary was scheduled to run in that year’s Tribeca Film Festival, which was co-founded by the actor Robert De Niro, who has an autistic son; De Niro then pulled the film after an uproar. And yet “Vaxxed” was featured on Amazon Prime’s home page for a time. It was finally removed from the streaming service after the California congressman Adam Schiff publicized its presence there in 2019. Even as at least 16 well-designed epidemiological studies by different researchers around the world, using different methods, have failed to find a link between vaccines and autism, Wakefield still contends that vaccines are dangerous and that he’s the victim of a smear campaign. (Wakefield did not respond to requests for comment made through his publisher and his film-production website.)
How did a paper with such a small sample size and an obviously weak design — a paper that was ultimately retracted — have such an outsize influence around the world? “He made news; he gave lots of press conferences,” Dorit Reiss, a professor at the University of California, Hastings College of Law, who studies vaccine policy, told me. “And the media was very supportive.” And research that could persuasively refute his contention was initially lacking, notes Daniel Salmon, the director of the Institute for Vaccine Safety at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “It took a couple years to do studies showing that it wasn’t true,” Salmon says. “In those couple years, Wakefield traveled the world saying vaccines caused autism.”
Seven years after the notorious Lancet paper, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., son of the assassinated senator, jumped into the vaccine-autism fray. In 2005, Rolling Stone and Salon, an online publication, co-published an article by Kennedy in which he argued that thimerosal, the mercury-laden preservative used in some vaccines, was damaging children’s brains and could be driving what many had come to call the “autism epidemic.” Kennedy has said that his exploration of vaccine science that led to the article was spurred by a conversation with a mother of an autistic boy who, armed with stacks of scientific papers, persuaded him that the onset of her son’s autism coincided with his early-childhood vaccinations. He was already familiar with mercury’s toxicity from his work as an environmental lawyer.
Kennedy’s article, which opens with a description of a secretive government meeting supposedly convened by the C.D.C. where the use of mercury compounds in vaccines was discussed, had all the makings of a thriller about government malfeasance. But soon after it appeared, the article, which had been fact checked by Rolling Stone, required several corrections. Kennedy got numbers wrong. He took quotes out of context, making them seem more sinister than they really were. In 2011, after the journalist Seth Mnookin brought more attention to the article’s flaws in his book “The Panic Virus,” Salon removed the article from its site entirely.
Numerous well-designed studies have failed to support a connection between thimerosal in vaccines and autism. And the supposed link became even harder to argue for when the preservative was removed from childhood vaccines in 2001 — it remains in some versions of the flu vaccine — and the diagnosed cases of autism continued to rise. Kennedy, like Wakefield, nonetheless maintains that vaccines are dangerous. But he seems to have shifted the focus of his blame from mercury. Sometimes he faults the aluminum present in certain vaccine adjuvants, the substances designed to spark an enhanced response from the immune system. (As was the case with thimerosal, properly conducted epidemiological research has failed to support a link between the small quantities of aluminum in vaccines and any disorder.)
But Kennedy’s current position has moved away from scientific claims toward an even more unsettling assertion. Vaccine mandates and government efforts to manage the pandemic, he argues, are a form of totalitarian oppression. “We have witnessed over the past 20 months,” he said in a recent speech, “a coup d’état against democracy and the demolition, the controlled demolition, of the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights.”
Anti-vaccine protesters in San Francisco in 2015.
In 2014, someone with measles, one of the most contagious viruses known to humanity, visited Disneyland in Orange County. Like the coronavirus, the measles virus spreads through the air we breathe. One hundred forty-seven people across the United States contracted the virus, some directly from that infected person, others from travelers who brought the disease home with them. (Additional cases linked to the California outbreak occurred in Canada and Mexico.) At least 45 percent were unvaccinated, according to the C.D.C.; another 43 percent had an unknown vaccination status — meaning many of them could have been unvaccinated as well. Although the available data is incomplete, as many as 20 percent of those who caught the measles ended up in the hospital.
Until then, California had allowed medical and “personal belief” exemptions to school vaccine mandates. Most states have some form of exemptions for reasons of personal or religious beliefs, a legacy from the 1960s and ’70s, when, as a way to mollify resistance and get mandates passed, legislators included these loopholes. A parent or pupil could say they didn’t believe in the shot and visit a doctor for counseling, and that was enough to avoid having to get it. For decades these exemptions had not posed much threat to public health: Only about 0.5 percent of Californians asked for one. But since the mid-2000s, the number of people requesting exemptions had been rising, reaching 3 percent by the early 2010s. The advent of social media and its ability to facilitate the flow of bad information may have been one factor behind this trend. Celebrities like the television personality Jenny McCarthy, who claimed that her son developed autism after receiving childhood vaccines, helped popularize the idea that vaccines could injure children. But after what became known as the “Disneyland outbreak,” state legislators tried to address what they deemed was a source of the problem by passing a bill, called SB277, that did away with personal-belief exemptions.
That was when anti-vaccine rhetoric began to shift from the idea that vaccines harmed children toward what David Broniatowski of George Washington University calls the “don’t-tell-me-what-to-do freedom movement.” It represents the moment when what had been a mostly scientific and medical argument became a political one.
Around the same time, Renee DiResta, a researcher at the Stanford Internet Observatory, a cyber-policy center where she studies online anti-vaccine activity, started seeing what she describes as a “weird libertarian crossover”: vaccine opponents networking with Second Amendment and Tea Party activists. One reason for this outreach, DiResta says, is that arguments about the supposed dangers of vaccines had proved ineffective in blocking SB277, because no good evidence supported the claim that vaccines were injurious. To keep their movement alive, anti-vaccine advocates therefore needed a new line of attack. They hoped to recruit a larger army as well.
California-based anti-vaccine groups had long used the hashtag #cdcwhistleblower on Twitter, a reference to the spurious claims of C.D.C. malfeasance that would be central to Wakefield’s conspiratorial documentary “Vaxxed.” But the hashtag only occasionally traveled beyond the confines of the anti-vaccine crowd. So different hashtags with broader appeal — #TCOT (top conservatives on Twitter), #2A (Second Amendment) and even #blm (Black Lives Matter) — were included in tweets. The tactic paid off. According to an analysis by DiResta and Gilad Lotan, a data scientist, there had not been much overlap between what they call “Tea Party conservative” and “antivax” Twitter before 2015. But around this time, a new space emerged between the two realms, a domain they labeled “vaccine choice” Twitter. Its participants were obsessed with the ideas of freedom and government overreach.
These online groups, quite small in number, proved to be very adept at leveraging the viral potential of social media to make themselves seem large. Although surveys have repeatedly indicated that the great majority of parents support vaccination, these activists fostered, DiResta says, “a perception among the public that everyone was opposed to this policy.” To her dismay, some California Republican politicians adopted this new rhetoric of “parental choice,” despite the fact that SB277 had several Republican co-sponsors. They seemed to have sensed a wedge issue, she says, “an opportunity to differentiate themselves from Democrats,” who held a majority in the Legislature. “It was pure cynicism.” Many of their own children were vaccinated, she points out. But the rhetoric galvanized people in a way that previous anti-vaccine messaging hadn’t.
Richard Pan, a pediatrician and California state senator who was one of the two lead authors of SB277, confirms that until 2015, the discourse around vaccines was basically civil. When he sponsored earlier legislation in 2012 that required people who wanted medical exemptions to visit a doctor first, the actor and comedian Rob Schneider testified against the bill, arguing that the effectiveness of vaccines had not been proved and suggesting that they caused autism. (In 2017, Schneider told Larry King that he had become more politically conservative over time and was against “any form of taking away people’s rights.”) That was basically the extent of the high-profile resistance.
But by the time SB277 was being debated in 2015, lawmakers began receiving death threats. Pan’s home address was posted online. Protesters showed up outside legislators’ offices. Some of them were closed when the staffs felt threatened by anti-vaccine protesters. And when Jerry Brown, then governor, signed the bill into law, the actor and comedian Jim Carrey tweeted, “This corporate fascist must be stopped.” (Carrey dated Jenny McCarthy for five years in the late 2000s.) “This is when things start getting less civil,” Pan told me.
In 2019, they got even worse. That year, the country experienced major measles outbreaks in under-vaccinated communities in Washington State, New York, California and elsewhere. The 1,282 documented cases were more than the C.D.C. had registered in a single year since 1992. The outbreaks were nearly enough to make the virus endemic again, meaning that after its eradication from the United States 19 years earlier, measles almost became re-established in the country.
In California, authorities had discovered that certain doctors were, in Pan’s words, “selling” vaccine exemptions — and they were making lots of money doing so. Pan sponsored a bill in response that would establish oversight of doctors who offered exemptions. Now what had been largely a campaign of online harassment started spilling into real life. He began hearing epithets with racial overtones — “Pol Pot,” “Chinese spy,” “Go home” — hurled his way. (Pan, who was born in the United States, is of Taiwanese descent.) Protesters shut down the Capitol building in Sacramento that September by screaming and chanting in the public gallery as the legislators debated the bill. Earlier the same week, while walking down the street, Pan was punched in the back by someone livestreaming the assault on Facebook. The bill was finally signed on Sept. 9, 2019, and a few days later, a woman threw a menstrual cup filled with what appeared to be blood on legislators, yelling “that’s for the dead babies!” According to Pan, in the entire history of the California Legislature — during which many contentious issues have been debated, from slavery to abortion to gun rights — no one had ever thrown anything at legislators. “So far, the only ones to do that are the antivaxers,” he says.
With Donald Trump’s arrival on the national political scene, the politicization of vaccines that was happening in California accelerated in the national arena. Figures like Wakefield and Kennedy reached new levels of visibility: Wakefield attended Trump’s inaugural ball, where he called for a “shake-up” of the C.D.C. — he has refused to divulge who invited him to the event — and Kennedy told The Washington Post that the president was considering appointing him to lead a commission on vaccine safety. Trump himself had already thrown fuel on the anti-vaccine fire. While campaigning for president, he repeated the by-then thoroughly debunked claim that vaccines cause autism. “That took this fringe issue,” David Broniatowski says, “and made it a political issue associated with the parties.”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. with supporters at the State Capitol in Olympia, Wash., where they opposed a bill to tighten measles, mumps and rubella vaccine requirements for school-age children in 2019.Credit...Ted S. Warren/Associated Press
One chilly afternoon this past January, Kennedy took the microphone in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, before a crowd of maybe a few hundred people, some of whom carried signs reading, “We will not comply,” “Resist medical tyranny” (accompanied by a swastika) and “Land of the free you can’t mandate me.” A march earlier that day, involving several thousand people, included members of the far-right nationalist group the Proud Boys, firefighters wearing helmets and even a few Buddhist monks from New England. They had gathered for a rally billed as Defeat the Mandates: An American Homecoming. Its speakers included many of the country’s best-known vaccine skeptics: the vaccine researcher Robert Malone; the activist Del Bigtree; and, of course, Kennedy.
“What we’re seeing today is what I call turnkey totalitarianism,” he told his audience. “They are putting into place all these technological mechanisms for control that we’ve never seen before.” He continued: “Even in Hitler’s Germany you could cross the Alps into Switzerland. You could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did.” But no longer, he suggested: “The mechanisms are being put in place that will make it so that none of us can run and none of us can hide.”
Reaction was swift, including from his own wife, the actress Cheryl Hines. On Twitter, she called the Anne Frank reference “reprehensible and insensitive.” But outrage over the allusion to Frank belied the deeper issue, which is just how influential Kennedy and other figures in the anti-vaccine movement have become. Kennedy is chairman of an organization named Children’s Health Defense; it applied for the permit to hold the Washington rally. The nonprofit group, which says it aims to “end childhood health epidemics by working aggressively to eliminate harmful exposures,” churns out online articles that sow doubt about vaccine safety. And it has expanded aggressively during the pandemic. In January 2020, the Children’s Health Defense website received just under 84,000 monthly visits from the United States, according to the tracking firm Similarweb. As of this March, that number had reached more than 1.4 million monthly visits, a 17-fold increase in traffic. (Revenue, coming from donations and fund-raising events, was already surging before the pandemic, according to the group’s tax filings, to $6.8 million in 2020 from just under $1.1 million in 2018.)
By one measure, C.H.D.’s reach now occasionally outstrips that of bona fide news outlets. Indiana University’s Observatory on Social Media, whose CoVaxxy Project follows how vaccine-related content is shared on Twitter, has found that the organization’s vaccine-related posts — these might falsely claim that thousands of people have died from being vaccinated, for example, or that the risks of Covid-19 boosters outweigh the benefits — are frequently shared more widely than vaccine-related items from CNN, NPR and the Centers for Disease Control. In some weeks, the vaccine-related content of the Children’s Health Defense was shared more widely than that of The New York Times or The Washington Post.
Kennedy, who did not respond to questions submitted through his publisher, embodies a seeming contradiction of the anti-vaccine movement that presents a particularly difficult challenge for lay people. He has done important work as an environmental lawyer, and though other members of his family have publicly criticized his anti-vaccine crusade, he still bears the name of one of the country’s best known Democratic political families. He brings a certain amount of credibility to his cause. Many other figures who routinely question the safety and utility of vaccines have credentials that can seem impressive. They include Wakefield; Malone, the researcher who claims to have invented the mRNA vaccine (35 years ago, he and several colleagues published an important paper in the field, but other scientists say that he didn’t “invent” the technology, which hundreds of scientists have since worked on); and Judy Mikovits, a researcher whose 2009 paper linking chronic fatigue syndrome to a viral infection was retracted from the journal Science. Mikovits, who was fired from her job as research director of the Whittemore Peterson Institute for Neuro-Immune Disease in Reno, Nev., has published a best-selling book about supposed malfeasance in science titled “Plague of Corruption.”
Numerous experts told me that a good way to understand what motivates many players in the anti-vaccine movement is through the lens of profit. There are several levels of profiteering. The first involves social media companies. Historically, the algorithms that drive their platforms, some argue, have fed users more and more of what they respond to without regard for whether it’s true. “It’s not some sophisticated technology,” says Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who studies misinformation on social media. “It turns out we’re primitive jerks. And the most outrageous stuff, we click on it.”
Facebook and other social media companies have, they claim, taken steps to counter the proliferation of vaccine-related misinformation on their sites. Facebook now says that it is helping to “keep people healthy and safe” by providing reliable information on vaccines. But Farid and others doubt that Facebook, in particular, will ever rid itself entirely of such material because attention-grabbing content is, in the attention economy, immensely valuable. “The business model, that’s really the core poison here,” Farid says. A partial solution, he thinks, would be changes to regulatory laws allowing individuals to hold social media companies legally responsible — through lawsuits — for harm connected to content they promote: “You should be held accountable for what you’re promoting, particularly because they’re making money from it.” Aaron Simpson, a spokesman for Meta, the parent company of Facebook, told me in an email that the company has “every incentive” to purge misinformation from its platforms because it makes money from ads, and advertisers have repeatedly said they don’t want their ads appearing next to misinformation. And yet, in the past, prominent anti-vaccine activists have themselves been advertisers on Facebook.
Peter Hotez, of Baylor College of Medicine, points to the many anti-vaccine books sold on Amazon, some of them best sellers in their respective categories. Amazon, he says, is probably the largest purveyor of anti-vaccine books in the world. And then there are the individual figures who create anti-vaccine content. The Center for Countering Digital Hate, a nonprofit headquartered in Washington, published a report in March last year titled “The Disinformation Dozen.” It estimated that around two-thirds of all anti-vaccine content on Facebook and Twitter comes from just 12 sources, including Kennedy’s Children’s Health Defense. If social media platforms simply enforced their own standards on these 12 people and their organizations, the report argued, most vaccine-related disinformation circulating online might disappear.
Facebook strongly disputes this finding. Simpson, the spokesman, says that the center does not clearly lay out how it defines anti-vaccine content, and its analysis focused on an overly narrow set of content — just 483 posts from 30 groups — that wasn’t representative of the hundreds of millions of posts about Covid-19 vaccines that users have actually shared. By the company’s own calculation, content from these 12 personalities accounted for just 0.05 percent of the total views of vaccine-related content. Nonetheless, more than three dozen pages associated with these individuals have been removed, a process that Simpson says was already underway when the Center for Countering Digital Hate put out its report. Imran Ahmed, chief executive of the center, says of Facebook’s challenge to its work, “If they had any questions about methodology, they had a year and a half to ask us.”
Some “disinformation dozen” figures, like Joseph Mercola, an osteopathic physician, offer products directly. He presides over a multimillion-dollar business selling supplements and other merchandise online. (Mercola’s businesses and brand is worth more than $100 million, according to a 2017 affidavit he filed for insurance purposes.) Customers may reach his storefront through a circuitous route, which, according to Ahmed, is also a common occurrence in the anti-vaccine universe: Seemingly distinct websites are linked to one another, forming a gigantic virtual spider web to trap unwitting visitors.
Through a foundation, Mercola has partly funded two other organizations, the National Vaccine Information Center and the Organic Consumers Association. Together their websites receive more than 800,000 visits yearly, and they link to his storefront site and his book. Mercola says that the idea that these “small nonprofits” would drive business his way is “complete and unsupported conjecture.” (According to Mercola’s own numbers, visitors referred from those sites resulted in no sales and just four visitors in April.) He insisted via email that the real goal of the Center for Countering Digital Hate and other critics is “controlling information, same as any authoritarian government has ever done.”
Other anti-vaccine advocates solicit donations directly. They may, like Mercola, initially seem to provide useful information to those seeking a more “natural” lifestyle. But once potential customers are drawn in, they quickly become the target of ads and solicitations for money, says DiResta of the Stanford Internet Observatory. She followed one prominent anti-vaccine figure named Larry Cook for years, monitoring his Facebook group “Stop Mandatory Vaccination.” He would send his audience, often new mothers, Facebook ads that said, for example, “Parents, not only can any vaccine given at any age kill your child, but if this unthinkable tragedy does occur, doctors will dismiss it as ‘Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.’” (SIDS has no connection to vaccines.)
DiResta was herself the mother of a toddler at the time, and she found these ads “profoundly disturbing.” Once people joined the Facebook group, DiResta says, they would find links to Amazon products, to “detoxes” for sale and occasionally to GoFundMe campaigns advertised as helping to fund Cook’s activism. (Until last year, Cook’s website explicitly noted that his operation wasn’t a nonprofit, and that donated money went directly into his bank account and might be used to pay his personal bills. That text has since disappeared.) Cook openly discussed his strategy in his Facebook group. DiResta showed me screenshots from 2019 in which he refers to targeting women in Washington State who have a “parenting interest.” “The goal here is to help parents start to question the safety and efficacy of vaccines,” he writes.
In 2020, Facebook shut down the group’s site because it violated its “dangerous individuals and organizations” policy. But Cook, who did not respond to a request for comment through his website, remains active online, as do other figures in the movement. Wakefield has held recorded talks that were offered to people who paid to become members of the website for the Health Freedom Summit. He also offers question-and-answer sessions to paying members of the website of his production company, 7th Chakra Films. Bigtree, the chief executive of an anti-vaccine nonprofit group called Informed Consent Action Network, takes donations through the group’s website; the organization also received a $165,632 loan in 2020 through the government’s Paycheck Protection Program, according to a database maintained by ProPublica. (Children’s Health Defense got $145,399 from the program that year, and two of Mercola’s companies together received $617,500. In all cases, the loans were forgiven.) “They’re profiting off advocacy,” says Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan. “This is their motive. I think they’ll all lose some of their power if people understand that it’s just a big grift.”
A woman is arrested at the State Capitol in Sacramento in September 2019 after protesting a bill that tightened oversight of doctors giving vaccine exemptions.Credit...Rich Pedroncelli/Associated Press
The picture of the world these professional vaccine agitators paint — full of conspiracies and cover-ups, with a dangerous medicine being forced on the populace — could be seen as a form of advertising. “I look at these companies and go, ‘Yeah, these are well-run marketing organizations,’” Ahmed told me. They often employ what he calls “a marketing funnel”: a net of interconnected websites that lead users down a rabbit hole until finally, somewhere, they are asked to buy something or donate money.
The movement also has mysterious benefactors. Bigtree’s Informed Consent Action Network has received significant funding from the Selz Foundation, which is controlled by the wealthy hedge-fund manager Bernard Selz and his wife, Lisa. The foundation gave ICAN nearly $1.8 million in 2018, more than two-thirds of the nonprofit’s revenue that year, according to tax filings. It’s unclear what the Selzes’ interests are — they didn’t respond to a request for comment — but through their foundation, they have also donated to a legal fund for Andrew Wakefield and to his autism-related charities.
None of this means that these actors don’t actually believe the arguments they make. Kennedy earned more than $345,000 from Children’s Health Defense in 2020, according to tax filings, up from $255,000 the year before — a lot for your average American, but perhaps not for someone of Kennedy’s pedigree. He has pushed back against the idea that he is motivated by profit. “Probably I’ve lost 80 percent of my income because of what I’m doing,” he told Infowars, the conspiracy website run by Alex Jones, “along with a lot of friendships.”
Bigtree, who earned $221,707 from ICAN in 2020 and who was the executive producer of Wakefield’s documentary “Vaxxed,” points out that, as a producer for NBC’s show “The Doctors,” he was part of a team that won an Emmy. “You don’t leave a job like that to make money and be hated and get attacked by papers like yours,” he told me. “You obviously do it because you see something so important that you’re trying to save people’s lives.”
The Defeat the Mandates march in Washington on Jan. 23 this year.
There is no single, simple answer to why anti-vaccine rhetoric finds such fertile ground in the minds of so many. But one factor is that many vaccine-related conspiracy theories contain sprinklings of truth. The inclusion of such kernels of fact may constitute a deliberate strategy, Kolina Koltai, who studied vaccine-hesitancy as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Washington, told me. They lend a sheen of legitimacy to the distortions around them. “Misinformation takes something that’s true and decontextualizes it,” she says. But in some cases, those kernels represent real problems that, in an ideal world, would be solved.
One of these truths is that vaccines occasionally do cause frightful reactions in people. These “adverse events,” as they are euphemistically known, are exceedingly rare. Although the link is inconclusive, some evidence suggests that one in every one million children who receive the MMR vaccine, for example, will develop encephalitis, a potentially dangerous inflammation of the brain. Between one and three in every million recipients of the flu vaccine will be stricken by a terrifying paralytic condition called Guillain-Barré syndrome. As Peter Hotez points out, though, your chances of being struck by lightning — 1 in 500,000, according to the C.D.C. — may be greater than the likelihood of being afflicted with adverse side effects. These conditions are also treatable. More important, the diseases themselves are more likely to lead to these conditions than the vaccines. The flu can trigger Guillain-Barré, as well as numerous other disorders. A measles infection leads to encephalitis in about one in every 1,000 cases, far exceeding the comparable risk associated with the measles vaccine. This rule holds for the Covid-19 vaccines as well: The clotting disorders and heart inflammation very occasionally linked with the vaccines also occur — and are much more common — in actual Covid-19 infections.
Psychologically speaking, however, adverse events loom large in the imagination of those already fearful of vaccines. Daniel Salmon of Johns Hopkins, who was also a former head of vaccine safety in the National Vaccine Program Office, says that we could learn about how to better manage this anxiety from the way the government handles commercial plane crashes. The National Transportation Safety Board quickly investigates aviation accidents. It’s nimble, independent and, maybe above all, trusted by the public. And it spares little expense to understand why accidents occur. In part that’s because if there is even the slightest inkling that your plane might go down — and that that risk is regarded as acceptable — people will stop flying altogether and the industry will collapse. “It’s not just about preventing rare accidents,” he says. “It’s about making the public confident that things are very safe.”
But instead of feeling confident about vaccines, a growing segment of the population may be primed to feel more anxious and doubtful about them, and that doubt may be seeping into their relationship with medical science — or governmental mandates — in general. Kate Williamson, one of the pediatricians I spoke to in Orange County, told me that because vaccine skepticism has become linked with patients’ political leanings, many doctor-patient conversations are now much harder. Merely bringing up “science” at all can be interpreted as a personal attack. “Politics for a lot of people, it is an identity,” she says. “It is a culture. I feel like if I talk about science, then I’m going against their political identity.”
Eric Ball, another pediatrician in Orange County, is vice chairman of the local American Academy of Pediatrics chapter. He told me that when California passed SB276 in 2019 — which tightened the oversight of exemptions — he and his colleagues felt emboldened to push for similar legislation in other states. Today, just three years later, these same doctors are embattled. “We’re completely on the defensive,” he said. “Now we just want to hold on to what we have. I worry about what’s going to happen in the next several years and that we’ll start seeing more kids with measles and whooping cough.”
On the ground, violence related to vaccines appears to be escalating. In December, an enraged man attacked workers at a mobile vaccine clinic in Tustin, in Orange County, calling them “murderers.” It took seven police officers with tasers, aided by workers and patients, to subdue him. Late last year, another man used his car to strike a vaccine worker in Los Angeles. In Colorado, unknown assailants have tossed firecrackers into mobile vaccine tents, forcing the companies in charge to hire security. Last spring, a woman plowed her minivan through a vaccine tent in Tennessee as she shouted, “No vaccine!”
Perhaps most ominous, from a public-health perspective, is that school mandates have started to come under attack in state legislatures. Numerous states have already passed laws restricting or prohibiting mandates for the Covid-19 vaccine. And in a few, including Ohio and Pennsylvania, bills have been proposed that would weaken school vaccine mandates or even prohibit them altogether. “I’m not sure that the people fighting for these bills truly believe in them, but they’re doing it because it’s politically expedient,” Jason Terk, the pediatrician in Keller, Texas, told me. “It matters not to them that there might be consequences to these bills passing.”
None of these legislative efforts have succeeded in becoming law yet, but they highlight a broader development that’s easy to overlook. “During the pandemic, the antivax movement was able to springboard to the mainstream,” Koltai says. “I don’t think it’s that taboo anymore to be vaccine-hesitant.”
Sean O’Leary, vice chairman of the Committee on Infectious Diseases at the American Academy of Pediatrics, suspects that, hesitancy aside, we are probably in for outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases in the near future. Young children are undervaccinated. Polio and measles are already flaring up in some parts of the developing world, where the pandemic has stymied vaccination efforts. He worries that one of those infections will hop to the United States, where it would now find a public-health infrastructure that is stretched very thin and a combustible population of under-vaccinated bodies to burn through. “We’re potentially staring at a huge problem in the coming months to years,” O’Leary says. “Now you add in potentially more people refusing vaccines — we’re setting ourselves up for really bad outbreaks here.”
Credit...Photo illustration by Jamie Chung for The New York Times
Prop stylists: Megumi Emoto and Andrea Greco. Vaccines: The Brooklyn Hospital and Gramercy Pediatrics.
Moises Velasquez-Manoff is a writer based in California. His last article for the magazine was on long Covid, the mysterious set of ailments that afflict some people after Covid-19 infection. He is also the author of the book “An Epidemic of Absence: A New Way of Understanding Allergies and Autoimmune Diseases.” Jamie Chung is a photographer from Pennsylvania based in New York. This is his 10th cover for the magazine. He won an American Photography Award this year.
De Oppresso Liber,
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow, Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation
Senior Advisor, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy
Editor, Small Wars Journal
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
Phone: 202-573-8647
