Quotes of the Day:
“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”
- Voltaire
“Thus it has come about that our theoretical and critical literature, instead of giving plain, straightforward arguments in which the author at least always knows what he is saying and the reader what he is reading, is crammed with jargon, ending at obscure crossroads where the author loses its readers. Sometimes these books are even worse: they are just hollow shells. The author himself no longer knows just what he is thinking and soothes himself with obscure ideas which would not satisfy him if expressed in plain speech.”
- Major General Carl von Clausewitz
"A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices."
- William James
1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, JULY 10 (Putin's War)
2. Military briefing: is the west running out of ammunition to supply Ukraine?
3. With a Whimper – The Fall of Snake Island
4. Is Being Wrong So Bad?
5. Assessing the Role of China’s Aircraft Carriers in a Taiwan Invasion
6. US pressing even tougher chip bans on China
7. Criminal Trials Feature in Beijing Power Struggle
8. NATO recognises global power shift to the Indo-Pacific
9. The End of Magic Money
10. Inside a Uvalde Classroom: A Taunting Gunman and 78 Minutes of Terror
11. Congress Rejects Biden’s Defense Budget
12. Anthony Albanese's 13-word response to China's four demands
13. China warns Asean nations to avoid being used as 'chess pieces' by big powers
14. For NATO Allies, a New Division of Labor Won’t Be Easy
15. Chinese-built surveillance systems spread across junta-ruled Myanmar, including hundreds of Huawei cameras: sources
16. 'Twelve officers killed' in Ukrainian strike on Russian command post
17. Israel's Iron Dome would be ineffective against Russian missiles: Ukraine Defence Minister
18. Russian defence ministry says its forces hit Ukrainian hangars storing U.S.-made artillery weapons
19. China Lays Out Rules for Managing US Engagement in Asia Pacific
20. The Case That Could Blow Up American Election Law
21. US Special Operations Command's biggest exercise ever in Europe sends 'a strategic message' amid rising tension with Russia
1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, JULY 10 (Putin's War)
RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, JULY 10
Karolina Hird, Kateryna Stepanenko, Grace Mappes, and Frederick W. Kagan
July 10, 8:30 pm ET
Click here to see ISW's interactive map of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This map is updated daily alongside the static maps present in this report.
Russian forces are in the midst of a theater-wide operational pause in Ukraine. This operational pause has been largely characterized by Russian troops regrouping to rest, refit, and reconstitute; heavy artillery fire in critical areas to set conditions for future ground advances; and limited probing attacks to identify Ukrainian weakness and structure appropriate tactical responses. As ISW has previously noted, an operational pause does not mean a complete cessation of hostilities, rather that ongoing hostilities are more preparative in nature.[1]
Russian milblogger Rybar provided more evidence of tensions between the Russian military command and Russian war correspondents.[2] Russian war correspondents include journalists operating at the frontlines and Russian milbloggers commentating on information available in the open-source (and likely also drawn from friends in the military). Rybar noted that Russian military commanders responsible for wartime information operations are attempting to silence Russian milbloggers and war correspondents to conceal the Russian military’s blunders during the invasion of Ukraine. Rybar noted that Russian military commanders remain shaped by negative experiences during the Chechnya wars when war correspondents exposed problems at the frontline to the Kremlin and embarrassed Russian officers.
Rybar stated that the Russian Defense Ministry and possibly actors within the presidential administration are actively attempting to silence unofficial coverage of the Russian war in Ukraine. Rybar expressed support for a Telegram article by Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) Deputy Information Minister (and milblogger) Daniil Bezsonov that criticized the Kremlin's apparent effort to promote self-censorship among war correspondents.[3] Rybar noted that Adviser to the Russian Defense Minister Andrey Ilnitsky called for such self-censorship on May 26 and had encouraged Russian war correspondents to report on the war only from an ideological standpoint without getting into operational details.[4] Rybar speculated that the presidential administration or other Russian officials ordered Ilnitsky to promote censorship among war correspondents who publish frontline updates in real-time.[5]
Rybar noted that the relationship between the Russian military command and war correspondents particularly soured after Russian President Vladimir Putin met with war correspondents during the St. Petersburg Economic Forum on June 17. Rybar claimed that two prominent war correspondents told Putin about the “mess” at the frontlines during the closed-door meeting, effectively bypassing the Russian Defense Ministry in presenting their negative views directly to the commander in chief. The event Rybar is describing likely occurred: Kremlin Spokesperson Dmitry Peskov announced on June 12 that Putin would hold a largely closed-door meeting with Russian war correspondents, and Russian propagandist Margarita Simonyan confirmed that Putin had a “candid” and long conversation with frontline journalists after the event.[6] Rybar noted that Russian Defense Ministry began to identify war correspondents as a “threat” after this engagement whereas previously it had perceived them as a “poorly controlled problem.”
Putin likely held the June 17 meeting to defuse milblogger discontent, which had become evident and dramatic after the disastrous failed river crossing attempt at Bilohorivka in mid-May. If that was his aim, he failed to win them over, as the milbloggers have remained staunchly critical of the way the Russian high command is waging the war ever since. But Putin may also have obtained a more unvarnished view of what is occurring on the frontlines than he was getting from the chain of command.
The Russian information space would change significantly if the Ministry of Defense cracked down on the milbloggers and stopped them from operational reporting. ISW uses milbloggers and Russian war correspondents as sources of Russian claims on a daily basis, so the elimination of regular milblogger operational reporting would affect ISW’s approach to coverage. We will continue to observe and report on milblogger and war correspondent behavior and will flag significant changes in the Russian information space as we observe them.
Russian milbloggers are increasingly criticizing Russian strategy and military leadership by seizing upon recent successful Ukrainian strikes against Russian rear areas.[7] Russian milblogger Voennyi Osvedomitel’ underlined the threat posed by Western-provided high mobility artillery rocket system (HIMARS) and stated that HIMARS will complicate Russian logistics in a Telegram post on July 9.[8] Voennyi Osvedomitel’ cautioned that Russian air defense may be increasingly insufficient against Ukrainian strikes and called on Russian forces to improve coordination between intelligence and aviation in order to identify and target Western-provided weapons systems. Another milblogger with a small following, Nam Pishut iz Yaniny, complained that Russian military leadership is proving unable to defend against Western weapons being used against Russian positions.[9] Igor Girkin, a Russian nationalist who previously commanded militants during operations in Donbas in 2014, discussed recent Ukrainian strikes against Russian rear areas and criticized Russian troops for not targeting Ukrainian ground lines of communication (GLOCs) along which HIMARS and other Western weapons are delivered.[10] Girkin suggested that the ongoing operational pause is exposing easily-exploitable Russian vulnerabilities and called for Russian troops to start fighting in full force again. Girkin and other milbloggers are likely to continue voicing their discontent with Russian military leadership as Ukrainian capabilities are strengthened by Western weaponry and equipment.
Key Takeaways
- Russian forces are conducting a theater-wide operational pause in Ukraine and engaging in operations to set conditions for future offensives.
- Russian forces conducted limited probing operations northwest of Slovyansk.
- Russian forces are likely intensifying artillery and missile strikes west of Bakhmut in order to isolate the city from critical ground lines of communication (GLOCs).
- Russian forces conducted a limited and unsuccessful ground attack north of Donetsk City.
- Russian military leadership continues to form ad hoc volunteer units and private military company combat organizations partly comprised of older men and criminals to support operations in Ukraine.
We do not report in detail on Russian war crimes because those activities are well-covered in Western media and do not directly affect the military operations we are assessing and forecasting. We will continue to evaluate and report on the effects of these criminal activities on the Ukrainian military and population and specifically on combat in Ukrainian urban areas. We utterly condemn these Russian violations of the laws of armed conflict, Geneva Conventions, and humanity even though we do not describe them in these reports.
- Main Effort—Eastern Ukraine (comprised of one subordinate and 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
- Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts
- Activities in Russian-occupied Areas
Main Effort—Eastern Ukraine
Subordinate Main Effort—Southern Kharkiv, Donetsk, Luhansk Oblasts (Russian objective: Encircle Ukrainian forces in Eastern Ukraine and capture the entirety of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, the claimed territory of Russia’s proxies in Donbas)
Russian forces conducted limited probing operations northwest of Slovyansk near the Kharkiv-Donetsk Oblast border on July 10. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian troops conducted unsuccessful reconnaissance-in-force operations in Dolyna and Mazanivka, both within 20 km northwest of Slovyansk.[11] Russian forces also conducted artillery strikes southeast of Izyum and around Barvinkove.[12] The UK Ministry of Defense stated that Russian forces are concentrating artillery fire along the E40 Izyum-Slovyansk highway to secure ground lines of communication (GLOCs) through Donetsk Oblast.[13]
Russian forces continued to conduct artillery strikes near Siversk on July 10 but attempted no ground assaults in this area. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces are concentrating troops in the Bilohorivka area, likely to consolidate control of the Luhansk Oblast border and prepare for westward advances.[14] Russian forces shelled Hryhorivka, Verkhmokamyanske, Serebryanka, Bilohorivka, Pereizne, Vyimka, and Ivano-Darivka in addition to Siversk.[15]
Russian forces intensified artillery and missile strikes west of Bakhmut but did not conduct any confirmed ground attacks near Bakhmut on July 10. Russian forces conducted a missile strike against a residential area of Chasiv Yar, 10 km directly west of Bakhmut along the T0504 highway.[16] Russian forces have previously shelled a railway station in Chasiv Yar on July 9, suggesting that they are targeting transportation infrastructure around Bakhmut.[17] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces also shelled Kurdyumivka and Shumy, both within 25 km southwest of Bakhmut near critical roadways into the city.[18] Russian forces likely seek to isolate Bakhmut from Ukrainian lines of communication to the west and south, supporting their ongoing effort to interdict Ukrainian lines of communication along the Bakhmut portion of the E40 highway.
Russian forces conducted a limited ground attack north of Donetsk City on July 10. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian troops attempted to improve their tactical position in Novoselivka Druha, about 25 km due north of Donetsk City.[19] Russian forces continued to fire along the line of contact in the Avdiivka-Donetsk City area.[20]
Supporting Effort #1—Kharkiv City (Russian objective: Defend ground lines of communication (GLOCs) to Izyum and prevent Ukrainian forces from reaching the Russian border)
Russian forces did not conduct any ground assaults north of Kharkiv City on July 10, instead continuing air, artillery, and missile strikes on Kharkiv City and the surrounding settlements.[21] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces continue to focus on restraining Ukrainian assaults on the front line.[22]
Supporting Effort #2—Southern Axis (Russian objective: Defend Kherson and Zaporizhia Oblasts against Ukrainian counterattacks)
Russian forces conducted air, artillery, and missile strikes along the Southern Axis on July 10.[23] Russian forces shelled points in northwestern Kherson Oblast and eastern Mykolaiv Oblast and conducted a Ka-52 helicopter strike on Plotnytske, a small settlement in Kherson Oblast near Davydiv Brid.[24] Russian forces also hit the Kryvyi Rih region with Kalibr missiles.[25] Ukraine’s Southern Operational Command notably stated that Russian forces conducted a massive missile strike with S-300 anti-aircraft missiles on ground targets in Mykolaiv and Kherson Oblasts.[26] The use of anti-aircraft missiles in such a manner is inefficient, as such missiles carry small payloads and are optimized for destroying fragile aircraft in flight rather than ground targets. The reported Russian use of S-300 missiles in a ground attack role is also notable because of reports and indications that the Russians are having difficulty defending against Ukrainian manned air operations and missile strikes in the Southern Axis area. The decision to use S-300 missiles in this role in these circumstances may indicate that Russia is running out of surface-to-surface missiles or that it is running low on parts needed for the missiles’ air-to-air guidance or communications systems.
Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts (Russian objective: Expand combat power without conducting general mobilization)
Russian military leadership continued to intensify recruitment measures to support force generation efforts on July 10. Ukraine’s Main Intelligence Directorate (GUR) reported that private military companies (PMCs) are escalating recruitment drives to compensate for personnel losses among conventional forces fighting in Ukraine.[27] The GUR noted that PMCs are actively recruiting prisoners due to a lack of other volunteers, which is consistent with previous reporting that the Wagner Group PMC has been recruiting prisoners from the IK-7 Yablonevka and IK-6 Obukhovo penal colonies in St. Petersburg.[28] The GUR claimed that PMCs are recruiting prisoners irrespective of the nature of their crimes in exchange for full amnesty after serving time on the frontline.
Governor of Russia’s Primorsky Krai, Oleg Kozhemkayo, announced on July 9 that Russia is forming the “Tigr” volunteer naval infantry battalion to participate in combat in Ukraine.[29] Kozhemkayo said that not all volunteers have prior combat experience and that they will undergo 30 days of training prior to deployment. Social media users noted that footage of the “Tigr” battalion shows that the recruits are older than traditional military age and are likely in their 50s to 60s.[30] ISW has previously reported that Russian military leadership will continue to constitute such ad hoc, oblast, and regionally-based volunteer units as losses among professional troops mount.[31]
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)
Nothing significant to report.
[28] https://storage.googleapis dot com/istories/reportages/2022/07/04/chvk-vagner-verbuet-zaklyuchennikh-kolonii-peterburga-dlya-poezdki-na-donbass-idti-v-avangarde-pomogat-obnaruzhivat-natsistov/index.html
[29] https://vostokmedia dot com/news/society/10-07-2022/oleg-kozhemyako-rasskazal-o-formirovanii-dobrovolcheskogo-batalona-v-primorie
2. Military briefing: is the west running out of ammunition to supply Ukraine?
Are our factory lines up and running and producing ammunition? At what capacity?
Excerpt:
Military briefing: is the west running out of ammunition to supply Ukraine?
In May, when Washington ordered 1,300 Stinger anti-air missiles to replace those sent to Ukraine, the chief executive of Raytheon, the defence company that makes them, replied: “It’s going to take us a little bit of time.”
Paris, meanwhile, has sent 18 Caesar howitzers to Kyiv — a quarter of its total stock of the high-tech artillery — but it will take French company Nexter around 18 months to make new ones.
The Ukraine war has exposed the skimpiness of western defence stockpiles — especially of unglamorous but crucial supplies such as artillery shells that have been the mainstay of fighting. Lack of production capacity, labour shortages and supply chain snafus — especially computer chips — mean long lead times to replenish them.
The shortages, defence officials and analysts say, reveal the west’s complacency about potential threats since the end of the cold war, now shown up by the desire to shore up Ukraine with military support. Fetishes for high-tech weaponry and lean manufacturing have obscured the importance of maintaining stockpiles of basic kit, they add.
“Ukraine has been a lesson in how war is still often won through the classic elements of artillery, ground troops and occupation,” said Jamie Shea, a former Nato director of policy planning, now an associate fellow at Chatham House, a UK think-tank. “The military balance which has swung from the old to the new needs to shift back.”
Those scarcities may now be impinging on the west’s ability to quartermaster Kyiv’s war effort. Total annual US production of 155mm artillery shells, for example, would last less than two weeks of combat in Ukraine, according to Alex Vershinin, a US procurement expert who says the conflict marks “the return of industrial warfare”.
“It’s like the first world war’s great shell crisis,” said Shea, recalling a 1915 scandal when massive artillery use in trench warfare depleted British stocks, a shortage that led to high troop casualties and the resignation of prime minister HH Asquith.
Ben Wallace, the UK’s defence minister, has said western countries would struggle to wage a protracted war comparable to Russia’s assault on Ukraine as their ammunition stocks “are inadequate for the threats we face”. During a simulated war game last year, the UK’s ammunition ran out after eight days.
No one believes the west is about to exhaust its basic weaponry by supplying Ukraine. Officials say most of the equipment provided to Ukraine remains available or can be swapped out for similar systems. Russia’s defence budget last year of $66bn, even when combined with China’s $293bn of spending, is dwarfed by Nato members’ combined budget of over $1.1tn.
Stinger missiles being delivered to Ukraine © Sergei Supinsky/AFP/Getty Images
Even so, a large part of that Nato spending has been on advanced systems, such as fighter jets, that have not been deployed by the west in this conflict. Much of western defence over the past 20 years has been geared towards fighting counter-insurgencies in the Middle East rather than being ready for heavyweight tank and artillery battles such as those in Ukraine.
Compounding the supply problems has been a decades-long emphasis on lean manufacturing, financial efficiency and industrial consolidation, which has worked against military planners keen to maintain costly weapons inventories.
In the UK, low stockpiles meant it recently had to buy howitzers from a third party to send to Ukraine, reportedly a private Belgian dealer. In the US, the Pentagon works with just five main defence contractors; in the 1990s, the number was 51.
“The received wisdom has long been that the west will never fight an industrial war again,” said one western defence adviser. “As a result, almost nobody has kept up capacity to ramp up national production of key equipment.”
Western arms manufacturers are scrambling to secure supplies of scarce components and materials to make weapons and munitions that, until recently, were barely in demand. Some of the electronic components of Stinger missiles, last manufactured at scale 20 years ago, are no longer commercially available, according to Raytheon.
Alex Cresswell, chief executive of Thales UK, which makes the anti-tank NLAW missiles lauded in Ukraine, said the “UK has been running down [defence] stockpiles but not investing sufficiently enough to avoid obsolesce.”
As for the guided multiple-launch rocket systems made by Lockheed Martin that Kyiv has pleaded for so it can launch strikes behind enemy lines, the US has dispatched about a third of its total stock of 20,000-25,000 missiles.
But it cannot readily replace these with older versions because they use banned cluster weapons in their warheads, said Mark Cancian, a former Pentagon official now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think-tank.
Russian president Vladimir Putin, right, congratulates Major General Gennady Zhidko in 2017 © Kremlin Pool/Alamy
Russia also suffers from supply problems, officials and analysts added. Defence manufacturer UralVagonZavod is reportedly running triple shifts to refurbish old tanks. Ammunition supplies are being partly replenished from a massive storage depot in Belarus.
But the recent appointment of General Gennady Zhidko, former vice-minister of defence, as overall commander of Russian forces in Ukraine gives the military “institutional firepower in Moscow . . . so it has a powerful voice to make sure it gets the economy it needs”, said Mark Galeotti, a UK-based Russia expert.
Military experts have been scouring the Ukraine conflict for insights about the nature of modern war. Lesson “number one” so far is the importance of maintaining basic stockpiles, said Jack Watling, senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute think-tank.
“This isn’t new, but it’s something we have been determined to ignore for a very long time,” Watling told a warfare podcast. “Cheap munitions that you can use at scale are absolutely critical . . . [The west needs] to be much more disciplined about not always chasing the exquisite but instead understanding how the exquisite enables the fairly dull and mundane.”
Additional reporting by Sylvia Pfeifer in London
3. With a Whimper – The Fall of Snake Island
Yes this is an information age war as the article discusses. But there is also this on Russian weakness..
Excerpt:
Russia’s withdrawal demonstrates that the Russian military’s fundamental weakness is at sea. Russia can concentrate combat power at specific points, generating incremental gains and wearing down Ukrainian combat forces, as they have done in the Donbas. Elsewhere, Russia remains vulnerable. But Ukraine has yet to press an attack powerful enough to drive Russia back and jeopardize its strategic position, whether around Kherson or Kharkiv. Rather, it has conducted shaping operations designed to put Russia in a strategic bind, but not dislodge it.
Russia’s control of Kherson Oblast is its most crucial territorial possession. With Kherson in hand, and control of the Black Sea, it can prevent most Ukrainian exports from reaching the Mediterranean. It is this leverage that Russia hopes will crack Western morale and force a negotiated settlement in Moscow’s favor by the end of the year. At minimum, rising food and energy prices will spark international disorder, diverting Western attention. At best, hopes Russia’s high command, the West will fold under public pressure.
Russia’s loss of Snake Island presents the West with an opportunity to regain the strategic initiative and support Ukraine’s more active pressure on Russia. A tanker escort mission would fulfil both imperatives.
With a Whimper – The Fall of Snake Island
July 09, 2022
The Fall of Snake Island is an Inflection Point in the Ukraine War
Perception and reality are difficult to untangle in any conflict. But the Ukraine War is the first great power conflict waged fully in the Information Age. Both parties have sought to influence global narratives and manipulate international perception.
War is, nevertheless, a physical phenomenon. The fall of Snake Island demonstrates Russia’s physical inability to defeat Ukraine. The West should respond accordingly, pressuring Russia where it is most critical - in the maritime space.
Snake Island produced the Ukraine War’s first “internet meme”, a sign of its psychological importance to Kyiv and Moscow. The small, uninhabited outcrop’s garrison of a handful of Ukrainian Border Troops defiantly refused Russia’s demand to surrender. Ironically enough, the Russian warship that bombarded the island, the Black Sea Fleet’s flagship Moskva, was sunk some six weeks later near Snake Island.
Snake Island is well under a kilometer in area and has an elevation of only 45 meters. However, it has a dual political and strategic role. Politically, it marks the boundary of Ukrainian territorial waters, jutting out from the Danube Delta into the Black Sea. Militarily, a hostile power holding Snake Island can pressure Ukrainian, Romanian, and other naval and maritime movement in the Western Black Sea. Snake Island is a decisive maritime geographic point, a position from which one can limit hostile options and expand one’s own.
By taking Snake Island on the war’s first day, Russia gave itself a significant degree of leverage over Ukraine’s maritime position. Combined with the Moskva’s air defenses, it could prevent Ukrainian missile and drone attacks in the Black Sea, better cover its forces in Kherson Oblast, and over time threaten Odesa with bombardment or amphibious assault.
Ukraine, however, destroyed the Moskva in April. This was not only a psychological victory. It also removed from Russia a major mobile air defense platform. This left Russian forces on Snake Island and in the Western Black Sea vulnerable to attack. Ukraine kept up the pressure, hitting Russian attack craft and landing ships, and sporadically bombarding Snake Island. Russia sought to redeploy point air defenses to Snake Island, mitigating the effectiveness of Ukrainian missiles and UCAVs. However, armed with Western artillery, Ukraine could neutralize Russian point air defenses - some air defense platforms are designed to intercept small targets, but artillery shells or guided rockets are too small to identify.
Russia’s withdrawal demonstrates that the Russian military’s fundamental weakness is at sea. Russia can concentrate combat power at specific points, generating incremental gains and wearing down Ukrainian combat forces, as they have done in the Donbas. Elsewhere, Russia remains vulnerable. But Ukraine has yet to press an attack powerful enough to drive Russia back and jeopardize its strategic position, whether around Kherson or Kharkiv. Rather, it has conducted shaping operations designed to put Russia in a strategic bind, but not dislodge it.
Russia’s control of Kherson Oblast is its most crucial territorial possession. With Kherson in hand, and control of the Black Sea, it can prevent most Ukrainian exports from reaching the Mediterranean. It is this leverage that Russia hopes will crack Western morale and force a negotiated settlement in Moscow’s favor by the end of the year. At minimum, rising food and energy prices will spark international disorder, diverting Western attention. At best, hopes Russia’s high command, the West will fold under public pressure.
Russia’s loss of Snake Island presents the West with an opportunity to regain the strategic initiative and support Ukraine’s more active pressure on Russia. A tanker escort mission would fulfil both imperatives.
By escorting Ukrainian merchant shipping from Odesa, the West can alleviate Russia’s consciously induced global food crisis. Russia hopes to commandeer any available Ukrainian foodstuffs and repackage them as Russian products. But some 20 million tons of Ukrainian grain remain in silos. An escort mission, akin to Operation Earnest Will, under which the US defended Kuwaiti oil transports against Iranian disruption during the Iran Iraq War, would get these valuable foodstuffs into the global market.
Any escort mission would require an extensive de-mining effort, one beyond any operation the US and its allies have conducted since World War II. The US Navy has a handful of mine countermeasure ships. But the US’ Black Sea allies, namely Romania and Bulgaria, can provide additional support with their minesweeper fleets. Turkey must also be included given its status as a Black Sea power - this should form the basis of a NATO-Turkey rapprochement.
An escort mission can also create a buffer behind which Ukraine can build its strength. Odesa is a natural location for equipment stockpiling before a Kherson counteroffensive given its proximity to NATO-member Romania. A screen of Western warships separating Ukrainian merchantmen from Russian missiles can give Ukraine the time it needs to expand its capabilities, train units in-country, and deploy them when the time is right.
A de-mining and escort mission would also involve an air presence, primarily in Romania given its proximity to the maritime space in question. The US could increase extant fighter presence in Romania, while also forward-deploying a P-8 squadron to cover the Black Sea more effectively.
Finally, the US must confront and deter Russian warships still in the Eastern Mediterranean. Russia placed a major naval task force in the Levantine Basin before 24 February, including surface combatants, attack submarines, and shore-based anti-ship missiles and aircraft. Some of these forces are now trapped in the Black Sea, due to Turkey’s closure of the straits. The remainder, primarily surface combatants, must be outmuscled. This will require a robust naval deployment, likely including a Carrier Strike Group and additional surface combatants, submarines, and ground-based air support.
The Biden administration seems increasingly committed to European defense, and in turn, to Ukraine’s survival. This is commendable. It is not, however, ground forces that will shore up NATO’s eastern flank, but robust maritime presence that will protect NATO interests. The US must act decisively to break Russia’s Black Sea blockade.
Seth Cropsey is the founder and president of Yorktown Institute. He served as a naval officer and as deputy Undersecretary of the Navy and is the author of Mayday and Seablindness.
4. Is Being Wrong So Bad?
A refreshing, thoughtful essay. It caused me to reflect on what I have been getting wrong lately as well as what I might be getting wrong in assessments of the future.
And we should reflect on this excerpt today. Would a "Captain Huston" be promoted today if he did the equivalent in today's information age? Read the entire essay for complete context but think about this excerpt and ask who is today's Captina Huston? Can we have "Captain Huston's" in our military and in our government? If not, why not? And perhaps, if we cannot, might that be an indication for why we do not conduct effective influence operations? And of course note the need for Captain Huston to have top cover - effective influence operations requires senior leadership - not to necessarily plan and conduct influence activities themselves (though they do have a role) but to provide top cover to professional Captina Huston's who know what must be done and will do it given the proper latitude.
I do wonder who the PSYOPers in 4th POG have been treated for their recent recruiting video.
Excerpts:
As tempted as I was to slide down the path of moral equivalency, however, an unexpected student presentation during the exercise shook me out of it. His subject was a young John Huston, who had been hired along with other contemporary and future great directors, to film the war. The movie he eventually made, about San Pietro, was starkly realistic, revealing the grinding carnage of battle for both civilians and servicemen alike. The top American military brass hated the film. It was not the sort of propaganda movie they thought they had paid for. When he was accused of making an anti-war film, Huston did not disagree. “If I ever make anything other than an anti-war film, I hope you take me out and shoot me.” Hearing of the controversy, Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall asked to see the film. “This picture should be seen by every American soldier in training. It will not discourage but rather prepare them for the initial shock of combat.” As
a result of the film, Capt. Huston was decorated and promoted to major.
This caused me to return to the Foreign Affairs debate over NATO. As silly as the poll seemed at first, it is important to recall that there is likely no similar poll in Moscow or Beijing asking, “Was the invasion of Ukraine a mistake?” or, “Will we regret the crackdown in Hong Kong?” Does this matter? A society that allows loud and even impolite academic and policy debates and engages its most talented artists to portray war, warts and all, is one worth defending. It is also one that, in the long run, is likely to be more effective. Few individuals, organizations, or nations get things 100 percent right at first. They must learn, and to do so they must be honest and open, identify their mistakes, and come up with better methods and processes, so that next time they do better. That is one of the core principles of scholarship, and it is where academics and analysts can help decision-makers. What may seem like repetitive and even obsessive debate and score-keeping is part of a process to help make sense of and improve decision-making in a complex and confusing world. It can be messy, feelings can get hurt, and sometimes the incentives cause us to listen to the wrong people for too long while ignoring quieter but wiser voices. These are the costs and burdens of an open society, which we all know too well. This system of unrelenting and sharp debate and disagreement is better than any alternative. And the costs to sustain it, while they often seem high, are well worth it.
Is Being Wrong So Bad? - War on the Rocks
Editor’s Note: This is the introductory essay for Volume 5, Issue 3 of the Texas National Security Review, our sister publication. Be sure to read the entire issue.
I have a confession to make: I have been wrong quite a lot lately. I believed Vladimir Putin was pursuing a coercive bluff and would not invade Ukraine. I did not think Xi Jinping’s China would be so foolish as to crack down on Hong Kong. Donald Trump serving out his full four-year term shocked me as much as his election did. Uber struck me as an impractical fad that would never work out, and, in 2010, when a friend excitedly showed me an iPad he had purchased, I thought he had wasted his money. I also believed the Philadelphia Eagles’ 2018 Super Bowl victory was the start of a decades-long football dynasty.
Maybe I am just especially bad at understanding how the world works, an interpretation my daughters might favor. I doubt, however, that this is the whole story. While I am humble enough to admit mistakes, I am immodest enough to think I am smart, thoughtful, and careful in my analyses. And there have been times when I have been right about important questions. I have long pushed back against two popular predictions that have surfaced regularly since I began my academic career: first, that the world is at a nuclear tipping point and the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty regime is close to collapse, and second, that the dollar is about to lose its leading position as a reserve currency. The number of nuclear weapons states has stayed the same since I first heard this warning 30 years ago, and the dollar is strong and more central to the international economy than ever. While I am not sure what my batting average is, I confess I am more likely to highlight when I am right than linger on my misjudgments, be it in the classroom, casual conversation, or scholarly footnotes.
Why do I mention this? Events in recent years, such as China’s belligerence, America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, Russia’s brutal attack on Ukraine and ensuing military incompetence, and the vigorous and unified response of the United States and its allies, have inspired “spirited” exchanges — both online and in print — about who correctly predicted these events and who got them wrong. Other forecasts, yet untested, generate equally contentious debate. Will Russia use weapons of mass destruction? Will China invade Taiwan? Is the American-led order collapsing? Scholars and analysts of foreign policy and international relations often judge themselves, and are judged by the outside world, by the accuracy of their predictions. But as I read the excellent pieces in this issue, I began to wonder — is “prediction” the best way to assess and value expertise about world affairs?
As we all know, the analysts and scholars who make big, far-reaching forecasts based on their pet theories are often rewarded with greater prominence and exposure, regardless of whether they are right or wrong. The political psychologist Philip Tetlock captured this phenomenon in his classic, Expert Political Judgement: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? As Louis Menand pointed out in a review essay, Tetlock’s experiments revealed that foreign-policy experts were no better than “dart-throwing monkeys” in making predictions about future world events. The worst predictors, however, were part of a group that often receives the most attention and acclaim, those whom Tetlock, riffing off of Isaiah Berlin (who was riffing off of Leo Tolstoy, who was riffing off of the Greek poet, Archilochus), labelled “hedgehogs.” According to Menand, “A hedgehog is a person who sees international affairs to be ultimately determined by a single bottom-line force: balance-of-power considerations, or the clash of civilizations, or globalization and the spread of free markets.”
Hedgehogs aren’t all bad. As my international relations friends never tire of telling me, behind every policy decision lies a theory of how the world works. As Andrew Ehrhardt reveals in his article, “Everyman His Own Philosopher of History,” even the discipline more populated by foxes — history — has hedgehogs lurking around the corner, be they Immanuel Kant, Karl Marx, or Arnold Toynbee. Raphael BenLevi demonstrates, in this issue, that these underlying frameworks shaped how the United States developed and implemented its nuclear nonproliferation policies toward Iran. Philosophies of history and schools of grand strategy are not dissimilar.
The professional incentives to prioritize and reward hedgehogs, however, means that there is little motivation among analysts to admit mistakes, nor does anyone appear to keep track of and advertise when their predictions are wrong. On one level, this is not remarkable. We all suffer from what has been called the Lake Wobegon effect, named after a mythical place where, as Garrison Keillor put it, “all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.” The truth is that we are all heroes of our own stories. Each of us remembers, in sharp detail, everyone who has broken our heart. Rarely do we invest the same intellectual or emotional energy reflecting upon those whose hearts we’ve broken. Modesty, humility, and self-awareness are rarely rewarded in life, to say nothing of the scholarly and analytical community.
My hunch is that, if rigorously examined, even the most impressive policy prognosticator gets many things wrong. This shouldn’t surprise us. The social and political world are enormously complicated, context and circumstances are crucial yet ever-changing, and rarely does a new crisis or political event precisely resemble any that came before it. Our models and theories about the world are extremely sensitive to their underlying assumptions, which are more often posited than proven. Ex ante, decision-makers face radical uncertainty about an unknowable future. Most foreign policy problems are what former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger called “51/49” challenges, meaning that it was virtually a coin flip as to how they would turn out. Kissinger knows of what he speaks, as Marino Auffant demonstrates in his article, “Oil for Atoms.” The secretary of state’s efforts to keep the Western alliance unified during the 1970s energy crisis revealed a number of difficult, cross-cutting issues for actors with divergent interests. In a similar vein, Kathleen M. Vogel and Sonia Ben Ouagrham-Gormley highlight the extraordinary complexity and uncertainty surrounding big data and the threat of China hacking biomedical data. Nadiya Kostyuk and Erik Gartzke explain why the widely predicted cyber attacks that many feared Russia would launch against Ukraine have not materialized. Sahr Muhammedally and Dan Mahanty describe the moral and strategic dilemmas behind the effort to avoid civilian casualties during war.
In an ideal world, we would all acknowledge that this business is hard and confess our sins as loudly as our triumphs, less for an accounting or truth squad and more because it is useful to assess the assumptions about the world that go into our predictions (and it is good for our students to understand that we are imperfect, not omniscient). Epistemological modesty is an underrated virtue. And as a community, this would also cause us to be more skeptical of anyone who offers a simple, all-encompassing explanation for how the world works and never admits when they are wrong, a psychological profile more appropriate for cult leaders and authoritarian dictators than famous international relations professors.
That is unlikely to happen. Partly this is due to a culture of debate and discussion among all those analysts whose ability to predict the future is, to be blunt, pedestrian. I recently took part in a poll offered by the journal Foreign Affairs that asked whether NATO expansion was a mistake. They literally asked everyone remotely attached to the foreign-policy community or the so-called “blob” — I think my mailman took a pass when asked to participate. I have a particular interest in the question, not because I am an expert — far from it — but because I (randomly) seem to know, have worked for, worked with, hired, or been bitter rivals with the majority of the 17 people who, based on their policy experience, scholarship, or both, are actually qualified to provide an intelligent answer to the question (you all know who you are). In other words, I am the Kevin Bacon of the NATO expansion debate, and I have benefitted enormously over the years from these arguments. That said, I’ve always thought the debate a little, well, strange, in the way academic exchanges often are: NATO enlargement was obviously a difficult and consequential decision. It may have been right or wrong, and both sides made compelling arguments. But the narrow, obsessive focus on the issue, as opposed to all the other things going on in world politics, European statecraft, or Russian history over the past three decades, seemed a bit off and disconnected from how policy actually works.
What should we make of these fierce “Who was right?” exchanges? My first thought was that it matters who is making the decision. Whether I or my academic colleagues or think-tank friends are right or wrong is of little consequence to anything but our own egos. When those who make policy are wrong, it can be a matter of grave consequence. We see clear evidence of this today. Putin’s horrific blunders in Ukraine have cost countless lives and produced misery and fear.
I recently had an extraordinary opportunity to reflect upon the real-world consequences of decision-making while participating in a staff ride organized by the strategic studies students from the Bologna campus of my school, Johns Hopkins’ School of Advanced International Studies. The ride was based on the 1943–44 Italian campaign during World War II. I joined the group in the small town of San Pietro before we travelled to the Rapido valley. I knew far less about the campaign than I should have, but what I learned shocked me. The decision to invade Italy in the first place was an ugly and arguably wrong-headed grand-strategic compromise between Winston Churchill’s desire to protect British imperial interests in the Mediterranean and the preference of America’s military leaders to prepare for a cross-channel invasion of Europe. After landing in Italy in September 1943 and predicting that they would reach Rome the next month, the Allied forces instead slogged through a slow, painful, and costly advance across the Liri valley, arriving in the Rapido valley early in 1944. Standing before the deep, fast-moving river, the Rapido, in a narrow, open plain surrounded by mountains, it was obvious even to a nonmilitary expert like me how brutally difficult getting north would be. To achieve success, the allies would have had to capture the surrounding hills. On top of the highest hill, however, was a beautiful Benedictine monastery, founded in the early sixth century.
What happened next is well known. The Wehrmacht did not use the monastery for their strategic advantage, as the Allies had suspected it would. Instead, at great effort and expense, the German army carefully removed its artistic and historical treasures and returned them safely to the Vatican. The Allies, on the other hand, frustrated at their inability to advance, became convinced German troops were using the site to rain artillery fire on their positions and made the decision to bomb it. In the process, they destroyed one of the most venerated sites for Roman Catholics in the world. Furthermore, over 200 innocent men, women, and children who were sheltering in the abbey, believing they were safe, were killed. The rubble created an ideal spot for German soldiers to occupy and use to continue to stymie Allied efforts to take the valley, resulting in thousands more causalities.
The Allied campaign to take Monte Cassino and cross the Rapido succeeded only after four bloody tries — five months after the first failed effort. It was done at an extraordinary cost in terms of casualties and with little evidence that it did much to advance the overall Allied cause. This staff ride generated some uncomfortable insights into and even comparisons with the ongoing, horrific Russian invasion of Ukraine. It was hard to see the Italian campaign as anything but a tactical, strategic, grand-strategic, and moral fiasco.
As tempted as I was to slide down the path of moral equivalency, however, an unexpected student presentation during the exercise shook me out of it. His subject was a young John Huston, who had been hired along with other contemporary and future great directors, to film the war. The movie he eventually made, about San Pietro, was starkly realistic, revealing the grinding carnage of battle for both civilians and servicemen alike. The top American military brass hated the film. It was not the sort of propaganda movie they thought they had paid for. When he was accused of making an anti-war film, Huston did not disagree. “If I ever make anything other than an anti-war film, I hope you take me out and shoot me.” Hearing of the controversy, Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall asked to see the film. “This picture should be seen by every American solider in training. It will not discourage but rather prepare them for the initial shock of combat.” As a result of the film, Capt. Huston was decorated and promoted to major.
This caused me to return to the Foreign Affairs debate over NATO. As silly as the poll seemed at first, it is important to recall that there is likely no similar poll in Moscow or Beijing asking, “Was the invasion of Ukraine a mistake?” or, “Will we regret the crackdown in Hong Kong?” Does this matter? A society that allows loud and even impolite academic and policy debates and engages its most talented artists to portray war, warts and all, is one worth defending. It is also one that, in the long run, is likely to be more effective. Few individuals, organizations, or nations get things 100 percent right at first. They must learn, and to do so they must be honest and open, identify their mistakes, and come up with better methods and processes, so that next time they do better. That is one of the core principles of scholarship, and it is where academics and analysts can help decision-makers. What may seem like repetitive and even obsessive debate and score-keeping is part of a process to help make sense of and improve decision-making in a complex and confusing world. It can be messy, feelings can get hurt, and sometimes the incentives cause us to listen to the wrong people for too long while ignoring quieter but wiser voices. These are the costs and burdens of an open society, which we all know too well. This system of unrelenting and sharp debate and disagreement is better than any alternative. And the costs to sustain it, while they often seem high, are well worth it.
So yes, I’ve been wrong, and will continue to be wrong. And while I don’t plan on issuing many more mea culpas, I will keep trying to learn, especially from the great authors published in the Texas National Security Review. And come to think of it, maybe I haven’t been all that wrong. The Philadelphia Eagles have had a great offseason, and anything is possible…
Francis J. Gavin is the Giovanni Agnelli Distinguished Professor and the director of the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at the School of Advanced International Studies in Johns Hopkins University. He serves as chair of the editorial board of the Texas National Security Review.
5. Assessing the Role of China’s Aircraft Carriers in a Taiwan Invasion
Interesting speculation.
Conclusion:
China’s carrier force may wind up playing the same role the US Navy’s fast battleships did in the Pacific during World War Two. Those powerful warships, once the queens of battle, found themselves relegated to back up roles, providing fire support for amphibious landings and using their formidable antiaircraft batteries to help defend the now dominant carriers from air attack[17].
Assessing the Role of China’s Aircraft Carriers in a Taiwan Invasion
Michael G. Gallagher is an American expatriate and independent researcher living in Seoul, South Korea, with his Korean wife. He has MA and Ph.D. degrees in International Relations from the University of Miami in Coral, Gables, Florida. Prior to residing in South Korea, he has lived in Mainland China and Hong Kong. Divergent Options’ content does not contain information of an official nature nor does the content represent the official position of any government, any organization, or any group.
Title: Assessing the Role of China’s Aircraft Carriers in a Taiwan Invasion
Date Originally Written: June 1, 2022.
Date Originally Published: July 11, 2022.
Author and / or Article Point of View: The author believes that China in its present form poses a grave threat to the United States and its allies and that insufficient attention-at least in public- has been paid to certain aspects of Chinese military planning. This inattention may be the result of the U.S. Navy’s (USN) projecting its views of aircraft carrier strength onto its view of China.
Summary: Despite the publicity China’s carrier force has received in the press, the huge ships, as impressive as they are, may only play a secondary role in Chinese naval operations during a Taiwan invasion. The function of China’s carrier force will be to clean up any remaining opposition after Chinese forces decisively defeat the U.S. and Japanese fleets using a blizzard of cyberattack and missile barrages.
Text: China’s aircraft carriers have been in the news over the last few months. The Liaoning and its escorts conducted exercises in the South China Sea May of this year[1]. China’s second carrier and its first domestically built one, the Shandong, was recently spotted with several drones on its flight deck[2]. Meanwhile, the Chinese have just launched a third carrier, the Fujian, and planning for a fourth carrier, possibly nuclear-powered, is in the works[3]. There is even discussion of six People’s Liberation Army – Navy (PLAN) carrier groups by 2035[4].
Traditional reasons for building aircraft carriers includes sea control, showing the flag, having a mobile airfield that you and only you control, and the sheer prestige of having a large carrier force. However, none of these reasons cancel out the fact that aircraft carriers are an increasingly vulnerable weapons system that is already over 100 years old. The first full-fledged carrier was a converted battlecruiser, the Royal Navy’s HMS Furious. The Furious entered service during World War I in 1917[5]. The first specifically designed carrier was the Japanese Hosho, launched in 1921[6].
Apart from its carrier force, China has expended enormous resources since the mid-1990s on capabilities that are specifically designed to sink the USN’s nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and wrest control of the waters of the Western Pacific from the United States and its allies. To achieve this strategic end, the PLAN has acquired an impressive arsenal of land-based ballistic missiles like the DF-21 land-based anti-ship ballistic missile and the DF-26 “Guam Killers” Intermediate Range Ballistic Missile, which also has an anti-ship mode, H-6 medium-range bombers armed with ship-killing cruise missiles, a 79 boat strong submarine force, and numerous frigates and destroyers armed with anti-ship missiles[7][8][9][10].
If any assault against Taiwan is delayed until the late 2020s, China’s emerging hypersonic capability will likely play a significant role in in its attack plans. Mounted on either JL-2 or JL-3 Submarine Launched Ballistic Missiles or land-based weapons like the DF-26 Medium Range Ballistic Missile and the longer-range DF-41 Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM), nonnuclear hypersonic glide vehicles using kinetic energy impacts would devastate Anderson Air Force Base on Guam, Pearl Harbor, and the U.S. Navy’s huge Pacific Fleet base at San Diego[11][12][13].
Non-nuclear hypersonic warheads mounted on ICBMs could even strike high-value civilian targets in the U.S. like Boeing’s huge Everett, Washington factory. These weapons would be doubly effective if they could be deployed as Multiple Independent Reentry Vehicles. This potentially revolutionary advance was hinted at during China’s July 2021 hypersonic weapon test when the glide vehicle, mounted on a ballistic missile, may have released an extra payload while in flight[14].
Current U.S. Anti-Ballistic Missile systems like THAAD, Patriot-3 and the US Navy’s family of Standard missiles would have limited effectiveness against such weapons. And that gap in defensive capability may not be filled until around 2030[15].
The PLAN’s strong anti-carrier posture, when combined with the fiscal reality that it is less expensive to use a missile than put a carrier at risk, points to China’s carriers playing a clean-up role in a Taiwan invasion scenario. This scenario would begin with a blizzard of cyberattack and missile barrages, accompanied by wave after wave of cruise and ballistic missile strikes against American and Japanese bases on Guam, Okinawa and elsewhere. PLAN carriers would then sink any remaining hostile warships and force the smaller nations of Southeast Asia, plus Australia and New Zealand, to bend their knee to Beijing[16].
Still, even if China scored huge gains early in any conflict over Taiwan, the stealthy U.S. and Japanese submarine fleets could cripple any Chinese naval campaign. Chinese planners may assume that any enemy submarines at sea when the war began would be cut off from repair and resupply and would eventually wither on the vine. This may be a valid assumption if the Chinese plans do involve strikes on U.S. home ports and possibly parts of U.S. industrial infrastructure. However, until these U.S. and Japanese submarine forces run out of food, fuel, or munitions, they are still a threat.
Taiwan, the target of China’s violent, high velocity, high-technology assault, would almost certainly be forced to surrender. With Taiwan’s two potential saviors, the U.S. and Japanese fleets, having carriers resting on the bottom of the Pacific, the island democracy would be cut off from all possible aid by an impenetrable Chinese naval blockade. Messy amphibious assaults against contested beaches would not be necessary.
China’s carrier force may wind up playing the same role the US Navy’s fast battleships did in the Pacific during World War Two. Those powerful warships, once the queens of battle, found themselves relegated to back up roles, providing fire support for amphibious landings and using their formidable antiaircraft batteries to help defend the now dominant carriers from air attack[17].
Endnotes:
6. US pressing even tougher chip bans on China
Excerpts:
SEC filings show that six leading American companies, namely Qualcomm, Intel, Texas Instruments, Broadcom, Nvidia and Micron, sold a total of $75.6 billion worth of semiconductors in China in 2021.
That was a 30% increase over 2020, a 50% increase over 2017 and just over 40% of total market demand in China last year. Total American semiconductor sales in China were closer to 50% of total demand.
The figures for the top three American SPE makers – Applied Materials, Lam Research and KLA – show combined sales in China up 44% from 2020 to 2021 and up 3.5 times since 2017 to $14.5 billion.
East Asia will dominate chip-making for the foreseeable future. Image: Twitter
If shipments of Dutch and Japanese DUV lithography tools to China were stopped, shipments of American SPE to China would also be at risk.
As Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said at a July 6 news briefing, “This will only remind all countries of the risk of being solely dependent on the US in terms of technologies. And it will also prompt them to achieve independence and self-reliance in science and technology at a faster pace.”
When the US sanctioned Chinese tech giant Huawei, semiconductor and SPE suppliers that lost business made up the difference in a booming global market. If new sanctions are launched into a cyclical downturn, however, that will likely not be possible. But Chinese production, supported by a policy of import substitution, will probably continue to grow.
US pressing even tougher chip bans on China
US politicians calling for more blocks on chip-making tools to China, threatening US producers’ fast-rising sales of the gear
TOKYO – The US government is finding it easier to harass Chinese semiconductor producers than to support its own industry. As the CHIPS Act remains stalled in Congress and Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo warns that large foreign investments are at risk, tougher US sanctions against China are reportedly in the works.
Congress has been debating for a year and a half but has not yet reconciled the House and Senate versions of the CHIPS Act, which would provide US$52 billion in subsidies to domestic and foreign semiconductor companies that invest in America.
News reports indicate that the US government is putting pressure on the Netherlands to block ASML Holding NV from selling technology used in making a large proportion of the world’s chips to China. The Japanese government is also being prodded by the US to ban Nikon’s sales of similar chip-making technology to China, according to the reports.
The equipment in question is deep ultra-violet (DUV) lithography tools, which are used in the production of most semiconductors. Lithography is the technology used to transfer semiconductor designs, or circuit patterns, from the photomask to the surface of the wafer for fabrication.
Shipments of extreme ultra-violet (EUV) tools to China were embargoed during the Trump administration. EUV, which has a shorter wavelength than DUV, is used by TSMC of Taiwan and Samsung of South Korea to make chips with the world’s smallest 5-nanometer (nm) and 3-nm design rules.
DUV can be used to make 7-nm chips, but not as efficiently. This leaves China’s SMIC, which tries to compete with TSMC, far behind.
ASML is the world’s dominant producer of DUV lithography tools and the only producer of EUV tools. Nikon does not make EUV tools but is the second-ranked supplier of DUV tools, with US chip-maker Intel as its largest customer. Japan’s Canon also makes DUV tools, but they are not as advanced as Nikon’s.
ASML is the world’s leading DUV lithography tool maker. Image: Twitter
No American companies make DUV or EUV tools. Cymer, an American company acquired by ASML in 2013, supplies the EUV light source.
An embargo of DUV sales to China would be an attack on the entire Chinese semiconductor industry. But it would not – as is sometimes claimed – prevent China from making the many less-advanced semiconductor products it makes now.
Rather, it would make it difficult for China to expand production beyond what will be possible when all the tools delivered up to the implementation of the embargo are installed and operating. That might take an additional two years, some analysts estimate.
As for a new embargo, the Dutch and Japanese may not acquiesce to US pressure. Both have a lot to lose in not selling to China, as do the Americans.
An ASML spokesperson told media that the company was “unaware of any policy change” and added: “The discussion is not new. No decisions have been made, and we do not want to speculate or comment on rumors.” Nikon has not commented.
According to data from the industry association SEMI, sales of semiconductor production equipment (SPE) to customers in China increased by 58% in 2021, accounting for 29% of worldwide sales. That figure includes sales to non-Chinese companies with factories in China.
SPE sales to customers in South Korea and Taiwan rose by 55% and 45% respectively last year, each accounting for 24% of the total. That left Japan, North America, Europe and the rest of the world in single digits.
In the five years to 2021, SPE sales to customers in China increased 4.6 times. That included used equipment, a market that by now has all but dried up. China was the world’s largest buyer of semiconductor production equipment in both 2020 and 2021.
SEMI expects Taiwan to retake the lead this year, but no matter how that turns out, East Asia should continue to dominate the market.
Anti-China American politicians are incensed. Texas Congressman Michael McCaul told the press: “If the Biden administration is serious about securing the semiconductor supply chain in the United States and allied and partner countries, it’s absurd to let the Chinese Communist Party buy up and stockpile the global supply of tools and equipment to make semiconductors.”
US Congressman Michael McCaul wants more blocks on chips to China. Image: Twitter
But Congress is the bottleneck, not the Biden administration, and China’s aggressive capacity expansion has only slightly outstripped demand.
According to market research organization IC Insights, $31.2 billion worth of semiconductors were produced in China in 2021, of which $12.3 billion were made by Chinese companies. The rest came from the local fabs of TSMC, Samsung, Intel and other foreign companies.
In comparison, China consumed $186.5 billion worth of semiconductors in 2021, accounting for 36.5% of the world market. Only 17% of Chinese semiconductor demand was met by production in China and only 7% by Chinese companies. Those figures are likely to increase, but the fact remains that China is an enormous market opportunity for chip-makers.
A year earlier, in 2020, $22.7 billion worth of semiconductors were produced in China, of which $8.3 billion were made by Chinese companies – again according to IC Insights. Total Chinese demand amounted to $143.4 billion and China accounted for 36% of the global market.
Note that total semiconductor production in China increased by 37% in 2021 while production by Chinese companies increased by 48%. Over the past decade, semiconductor production in China has more than tripled.
SEC filings show that six leading American companies, namely Qualcomm, Intel, Texas Instruments, Broadcom, Nvidia and Micron, sold a total of $75.6 billion worth of semiconductors in China in 2021.
That was a 30% increase over 2020, a 50% increase over 2017 and just over 40% of total market demand in China last year. Total American semiconductor sales in China were closer to 50% of total demand.
The figures for the top three American SPE makers – Applied Materials, Lam Research and KLA – show combined sales in China up 44% from 2020 to 2021 and up 3.5 times since 2017 to $14.5 billion.
East Asia will dominate chip-making for the foreseeable future. Image: Twitter
If shipments of Dutch and Japanese DUV lithography tools to China were stopped, shipments of American SPE to China would also be at risk.
As Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said at a July 6 news briefing, “This will only remind all countries of the risk of being solely dependent on the US in terms of technologies. And it will also prompt them to achieve independence and self-reliance in science and technology at a faster pace.”
When the US sanctioned Chinese tech giant Huawei, semiconductor and SPE suppliers that lost business made up the difference in a booming global market. If new sanctions are launched into a cyclical downturn, however, that will likely not be possible. But Chinese production, supported by a policy of import substitution, will probably continue to grow.
Follow this writer on Twitter: @ScottFo83517667
7. Criminal Trials Feature in Beijing Power Struggle
Excerpts:
“They are going after the network of people he was laundering money for. Many corrupt politicians he was laundering money for are sweating because he definitely gave information on them to the authorities,” the risk consultant explained.
If Xiao refused to divulge information to the Chinese authorities, he was likely to face execution, the risk consultant said. Some former senior Chinese officials and possibly some current senior Chinese officials will be implicated by Xiao’s testimony, the risk consultant predicted.
“It takes years to unravel a fraud of such magnitude and clearly Xiao had many co-conspirators and corrupt officials who allowed a fraud of this size to happen,” said the investigator who declined to be named. “Xiao corrupted many government officials and was able to defraud approximately $55 billion through a succession of banks with the assistance of corrupt officials. The magnitude of Xiao’s fraud and corruption was capable of bringing down China’s economic system due to its sheer size of the fraud.”
There remain tens of billions of dollars missing from Xiao’s business empire, with much of it parked in Canada, the investigator disclosed. This is one of the reasons Beijing is unhappy with Canada in addition to the detention of Sabrina Meng Wanzhou, the chief financial officer of Huawei, a leading Chinese technology firm, in Canada from December 2018 to September 2021, he added.
China still wants to recover billions of dollars from Xiao’s businesses and with such a large network involved, Beijing will not want to expose too much that would allow other co-conspirators to destroy evidence or hide unlawfully obtained funds, the investigator explained.
Criminal Trials Feature in Beijing Power Struggle
Two criminal trials in China – one in open court in Changchun, the capital of Jilin province, nearly 1,000 km from Beijing, and the other under wraps in Shanghai – appear to be tools in President Xi Jinping’s power struggle against his rivals to ensure he gets a third term this autumn.
The first concerns former Public Security Vice Minister Sun Lijun (above), who pleaded guilty to accepting bribes, manipulating the Chinese securities market, and illegal possession of firearms at the Intermediate People’s Court in Changchun, Jilin on July 8, according to Chinese state media. Sun, who was formerly the most senior Chinese police official overseeing Hong Kong, was charged with accepting bribes totaling RMB646 million (US$96.3 million) and illegally possessing two guns. State prosecutors said that in 2018, Sun manipulated stocks by instructing allies to trade shares, which is a serious offense. Sun was tried in an open court, reported Chinese state media.
By contrast, Canadian officials were barred from attending the Shanghai trial of former billionaire Xiao Jianhua, who was born in China and holds Canadian citizenship and became connected to some of the most powerful people in the country before his downfall, according to media reports. The tycoon’s trial began on July 4, according to the Canadian embassy in Beijing. Till now, there has been virtually no mention of Xiao’s court hearing in Chinese state media.
By trying Xiao now, it clears the way for Xi’s election to a third term, Andre Wheeler, chief executive officer of Asia Pacific Connex, an Australian consulting firm, told Asia Sentinel.
“It is eliminating any integrity questions that may cloud the reputation of Xi. After all, Xi and his acolytes can point to a Chinese court that has found Xiao, and by association others in this network, guilty,” Wheeler said.
Sun’s trial in open court is “sending a clear message to political enemies (of Xi) that the Chinese government has information and will use it if any more political adversaries step out of line,” an investigator told Asia Sentinel.
To fulfill his “extremely bloated political ambition,” Sun was said to have groomed rebels within the Chinese Communist Party and seriously undermined the unity of the party, according to the anti-corruption agencies, the Central Commission of Discipline Inspection and National Supervisory Commission, Asia Sentinel reported on October 2, 2021.
Xi is expected to seek a third term at the 20th party congress in October or November. If he succeeds, it will break the two-term limit on Chinese presidents laid down by the late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping. The Shanghai Faction, also called the Shanghai Gang, led by former Chinese President Jiang Zemin and his former Vice President Zeng Qinghong as well as princelings (descendants of first-generation Chinese Communist leaders) oppose Xi’s bid for an extra term, reported Asia Sentinel on January 27.
There is a fairly high chance of a struggle within the corridors of power in Beijing in the next three months, a risk consultant told Asia Sentinel.
“Xi’s enemies have to go for a desperate high-stakes power struggle in the next three months. They are running out of time,” said the risk consultant, who declined to be named.
A China observer told Asia Sentinel, “Sun’s is a more clear-cut case of defiance against Xi’s supposed absolute hold on power, what with Sun’s attempt to build and maintain an independent clique within the Ministry of Public Security, with at least tacit backing of the Jiang faction. So of the two cases, Sun’s is being publicly conducted and made into an open warning to the Jiang faction ahead of the 20th party congress to not make any untoward move that would upset Xi’s continuance in power thereafter.”
Xiao’s case is more complicated, as it involved fund transfers and proxy holding of assets on behalf of prominent families including that of Xi himself, said the China observer who declined to be named. “So a public trial would risk inadvertent disclosure of detail that could be embarrassing to any or all sides.”
Wheeler said, “Essentially when a trial is held behind closed doors in China, it indicates there is information that needs to be suppressed in order for the party to save face. The other important element is that Xiao is a Canadian citizen, so a public hearing would give him access to Canadian consular and legal assistance that would make it more likely that any embarrassing information would make it into the public arena.”
On June 5, 2014, the New York Times published a statement by Xiao’s company Tomorrow Group, which admitted Kanghai Tianda, a company co-founded by Xiao, paid US$2.4 million in January 2013 to buy a 50 percent stake held by Xi’s sister and brother-in-law in CCB International Yuanwei Fund Management, a joint venture with China Construction Bank, a Chinese state-owned bank.
The Tomorrow Group said there was nothing unusual about the deal. Xi’s relatives ''voluntarily quit their legitimately operating business, bringing them a huge loss. Thus the family didn't make any extra profits on their family clout,'' said the Tomorrow Group’s statement.
Xi’s sister and brother-in-law divested their stake in the joint venture in January 2013, around the time when Xi, who was then newly appointed president, began his anti-corruption campaign which has netted over 100 “tigers” (senior officials).
A financial crocodile
On January 28, 2017, Xiao was abducted by Chinese agents from the Four Seasons hotel in Hong Kong to mainland China, which his female bodyguards failed to prevent. He was held for five and a half years before going to trial because authorities were milking information from him, such as who he was laundering money for, said the risk consultant. Xiao’s personal wealth is estimated at US$5 billion, but he was laundering 10 to 20 times more than that, estimated the risk consultant. “He was creating a systemic risk that was creating a financial contagion risk. He was playing with Chinese people’s money in banks, by putting their money in investment vehicles with high potential of losing money.”
In China, Xiao is known as “a big crocodile”, a nickname for a very wealthy person who is capable of wreaking havoc on the country’s financial system through dubious dealings.
“They are going after the network of people he was laundering money for. Many corrupt politicians he was laundering money for are sweating because he definitely gave information on them to the authorities,” the risk consultant explained.
If Xiao refused to divulge information to the Chinese authorities, he was likely to face execution, the risk consultant said. Some former senior Chinese officials and possibly some current senior Chinese officials will be implicated by Xiao’s testimony, the risk consultant predicted.
“It takes years to unravel a fraud of such magnitude and clearly Xiao had many co-conspirators and corrupt officials who allowed a fraud of this size to happen,” said the investigator who declined to be named. “Xiao corrupted many government officials and was able to defraud approximately $55 billion through a succession of banks with the assistance of corrupt officials. The magnitude of Xiao’s fraud and corruption was capable of bringing down China’s economic system due to its sheer size of the fraud.”
There remain tens of billions of dollars missing from Xiao’s business empire, with much of it parked in Canada, the investigator disclosed. This is one of the reasons Beijing is unhappy with Canada in addition to the detention of Sabrina Meng Wanzhou, the chief financial officer of Huawei, a leading Chinese technology firm, in Canada from December 2018 to September 2021, he added.
China still wants to recover billions of dollars from Xiao’s businesses and with such a large network involved, Beijing will not want to expose too much that would allow other co-conspirators to destroy evidence or hide unlawfully obtained funds, the investigator explained.
8. NATO recognises global power shift to the Indo-Pacific
Excerpts:
Instead of norms, we must seek power balance. And the central balance must be in the Indo-Pacific because that is the centre of the system.
In a vivid Washingtonian turn of phrase, Russia is ‘the hurricane’ coming fast and hard, while China is ‘climate change: long, slow, pervasive’.
In the Indo-Pacific, the great game is in full swing and NATO must come to play.
NATO recognises global power shift to the Indo-Pacific | The Strategist
The central balance of international power this century will be set in the Indo-Pacific.
So ends a 500-year stretch of history when the central balance was made in Europe and decided by the West. The United States played the decisive role in the last century as an Atlantic power; this century it’ll be as a Pacific power.
Systemic changes don’t come any bigger.
The shift to the Indo-Pacific is an international strategy version of the way the world is turning to new sources of power to deal with climate change. This is to be a century of decarbonisation and lots of de-Westernisation.
Even a world stepping back from peak globalisation won’t slow an Indo-Pacific reality that’s turned from long-term trend to today’s fact. The power balance will be set in the place where most of the world’s people live and where most of the world’s wealth will be created.
The West will matter greatly in determining the central balance that’ll be defined in the Indo-Pacific. But as in much else, no longer will the West dominate.
The message of last month’s NATO summit was that the security of Europe and the security of Asia are joined; that’s why the leaders of Australia, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea attended. As the first Japanese prime minister to attend a NATO summit, Fumio Kishida, observed:
[T]he security of Europe and of the Indo-Pacific is inseparable. Russian aggression against Ukraine is not a problem for Europe alone, but instead an outrageous act that undermines the very foundation of the international order …
Russian aggression against Ukraine clearly announced the end of the post–Cold War period. Attempts to unilaterally change the status quo with force in the background are ongoing in the East China Sea and South China Sea. I feel a strong sense of crisis that Ukraine may be East Asia tomorrow.
The international rules-based order is under attack by Russia, backed by China. And China is the state that shifts the system. When the rules are broken, the response turns to power. And in the system of states, that’s all about seeking a balance of power. Europe must join the Indo-Pacific in achieving that central balance.
NATO’s Madrid communiqué picked up the description of China as a systemic challenge that has been adopted by key European powers along with the US:
We are confronted by cyber, space, and hybrid and other asymmetric threats, and by the malicious use of emerging and disruptive technologies. We face systemic competition from those, including the People’s Republic of China, who challenge our interests, security, and values and seek to undermine the rules-based international order.
The reality of global power shifting to Asia has been an economic megatrend for many decades, as Japan lifted off in the 1960s and ’70s and Deng Xiaoping lit China’s rocket in 1978.
Offering more precision than history usually grants for megatrends, here’s the moment when the central balance started to shift from the Euro-Atlantic to the Indo-Pacific (or, as it was called at the time, the Asia–Pacific).
Date that transfer moment to midnight on 30 June 1997. On that night of monsoonal storms and choreographed drama, colonial rule came to an end in Hong Kong. Chinese troops standing like statues in the lashing rain rode across the border in the backs of open trucks as Hong Kong’s last governor sailed out of the harbour on the final voyage of Britain’s royal yacht.
Use June 1997 as a final-curtain moment for the European/Western ascendancy in Asia that lasted precisely 500 years. The half a millennium started in July 1497, when Vasco da Gama left Portugal to become the first European to sail around the Cape of Good Hope and reach India.
The Western power that da Gama presaged was part of the geopolitical zeitgeist on that stormy night in Hong Kong as China proclaimed the end of a humiliation. I used that thought in a book on Australian foreign policy a few years later: ‘Asia was at the end of the Vasco da Gama era. The symbolism was exquisitely encapsulated—Asia had suffered five centuries of Western intrusion and command, and Hong Kong’s handover marked the final page.’
A far deeper and still relevant discussion of the end of the da Gama era was offered by one of Australia’s great strategists, Coral Bell, in 2007.
Bell described ‘a landscape with giants: six obvious great powers (the United States, the European Union, China, India, Russia and Japan), but also several formidable emerging powers that are important enough, strategically or economically, to affect the relationships among the great powers’.
Noting the end of ‘the moment of unchallenged US paramountcy’—the unipolar moment she dated from 1991 to September 2001—Bell considered ‘the historically more familiar shape of a multipolar world, a world moreover in which power is more widely distributed than it has been for the past two centuries’. The most important change was ‘the end of Western ascendancy over the non-Western world’.
If the world got lucky, Bell mused, it might achieve a new concert of power for the 21st century based on the basic building blocks of rules (‘deals must be kept’) and sovereignty (‘the ruler gets to make the rules in their own domain’).
If luck soured, Bell wrote, the world faced ‘an inescapable clash of norms, which may for the foreseeable future always limit the level of consensus among governments’.
Russia’s war on Ukraine is a monumental trashing of norms. And China’s support for Russia kills the chances of concert or consensus, even though Beijing’s ‘no limits’ pact with Putin is shifting towards a ‘limited liability’ partnership because Russia becomes such a liability.
Instead of norms, we must seek power balance. And the central balance must be in the Indo-Pacific because that is the centre of the system.
In a vivid Washingtonian turn of phrase, Russia is ‘the hurricane’ coming fast and hard, while China is ‘climate change: long, slow, pervasive’.
9. The End of Magic Money
Excerpts:
Lessons Learned
Where does all this leave magic money? For the foreseeable future, it is off the table. The priority must be to control inflation, a necessary condition for upholding the credibility of the Fed, without which economic stability is impossible. Unfortunately, this struggle against inflation may take time. The three decades of low inflation and low interest rates running from roughly 1992 to 2022 were partly the result of globalization, which exerted a downward pressure on prices. Today, globalization has stalled, and the new vogue for stockpiling strategic commodities and “friend-shoring” supplies will be inflationary. Add in the aging of populations and the possibility that young workers will insist on a flexible approach to work, and the Fed may have to run tighter policy than in the past quarter of a century. The expectation that took hold in the late 1990s, that the Fed could be relied upon to cushion the economy from almost any type of shock, may have to be revised. The next few years could be bruising.
But, just as the stagflationary 1970s gave way to the stability and prosperity of later years, so the cycle will turn again. The Fed will get inflation under control, and central banks will once again work magic. Over the long sweep of post–World War II history, the art and science of central banking has advanced steadily, with each decade of experience building on the previous ones. Sometimes the most humiliating setbacks teach the most valuable lessons.
The End of Magic Money
Inflation and the Future of Economic Stimulus
July 11, 2022
Two years ago, I predicted in Foreign Affairs that the COVID-19 recession, coming on top of the financial crisis of 2008, would lead rich democracies to redefine the outer limits of their monetary and fiscal power, ushering in an “age of magic money.” Because central banks had a long record of containing inflation, the penalty for profligacy would likely not materialize; supersized stimuli could coexist with stable prices. Of course, the success of this experiment would depend on the continued inflation-fighting credibility of central banks, the Federal Reserve foremost among them. “If the Fed loses its independence, the age of magic money could end in catastrophe,” I noted.
Since then, the idea of magic money has been discredited. Although the Federal Reserve has yet to lose its independence, it has fumbled the inflation challenge in ways that I failed to take sufficiently seriously. For the first time in about two decades, the imperative of price stability will complicate central banks’ ability to achieve other objectives, from financial stability (it will be hard to cut interest rates to help weak borrowers) to employment stability (as it plays catch-up against inflation, the Fed will probably cause a recession). A few years ago, cartoonists regularly portrayed central bankers in Superman outfits. Now that inflation has returned, the monetary superheroes have lost their powers.
How long this fall to earth will endure depends on two questions. First, was the whole idea of magic money doomed from the get-go, or could it have succeeded if managed differently? Second, if some other approach could have worked, can the Fed learn lessons from its experience?
The Road Taken
Start with the first question, which is the more straightforward. Under the right conditions, magic money can undoubtedly be deployed successfully.
Both theory and experience teach that large economic stimuli—delivered by central bankers or budget authorities or both—need not destabilize prices. If a financial crash or a pandemic causes private spending to collapse, governments can print money and run budget deficits to push spending up again. If this intervention is well calibrated, demand will remain in balance with supply, causing no change in inflation. To be sure, the calibration is difficult, not least because government largess puts money into the hands of private companies and households, whose eagerness to spend is uncertain. But stimulus at least has a shot at balancing supply and demand. In contrast, not stimulating guarantees that demand will be too low, ushering in deflation and recession.
The idea of magic money has been discredited.
The government’s response to the 2008 financial crisis provides an illustration of this process. Central banks printed trillions of dollars, leading their critics to predict terrible inflation. But in the 36 quarters from 2009 to 2017, core inflation never exceeded the Fed’s two percent target, averaging only 1.5 percent. Far from being reckless, this first experiment with magic money was actually too timid: given the inflation undershoot, an even larger stimulus would have been appropriate. Even so, the stimulus was a success. It saved the U.S. economy from a repeat of the Great Depression of the 1930s.
At first, the response to COVID-19 was even more impressive. The pandemic caused U.S. GDP to collapse in the second quarter of 2020: output shrank at an annualized rate of 32 percent. This fall was four times deeper than the hit from the financial crisis in the fourth quarter of 2008; indeed, it was the sharpest ever contraction in the post–World War II period. The Fed responded aggressively, creating twice as much money as it had from 2008 to 2009. Likewise, the president and Congress delivered a budget stimulus that was twice as big as the 2009 version. By acting so vigorously, authorities demonstrated that they had learned the lesson of the last recession, when they undershot with their spending. They were also emboldened by the fact that inflation expectations were low, reducing the risk that a stimulus would set off an upward price spiral.
In the second half of 2020 and the first quarter of 2021, this mega-stimulus worked perfectly. The U.S. economy bounced back, almost recovering its pre-pandemic level of output. And despite the lavish money-printing, there was no sign of inflation. In the first quarter of 2021, the Fed’s preferred index of “core” prices was up just 1.7 percent from the previous year. As of March, the broader consumer price index remained well within the comfort zone.
If the authorities had been able to stop there, they would have pulled off a textbook example of macroeconomic stabilization. But from the spring of 2021 the experiment started to go wrong. How it failed provides lessons for policymakers attempting to navigate the current macroeconomic moment.
Don’t Blame the Bully Pulpit
When I proposed the idea of magic money back in 2020, the likeliest source of economic misjudgment appeared to reside in the White House. U.S. President Donald Trump had scant respect for the independence of the central bank, tweeting about it on more than 100 occasions. “My only question is, who is our bigger enemy, Jay Powell or Chairman Xi?” he fulminated in the summer of 2019, at a time when Fed Chair Jerome Powell was hiking interest rates more than Trump found congenial. The closest historical precedent for this bullying illustrated how serious the consequences could be. In the 1970s, President Richard Nixon slandered Fed Chair Arthur Burns. The browbeating contributed to the chronically timid monetary policy of that decade, and hence to stagflation.
Given this experience, Trump’s intemperate Fed commentary seemed to present the chief risk of magic money. It was easy to imagine a situation in which, because of the difficulty of calibrating the stimulus, there might be an initial spurt of inflation. Once that happened, the Fed might flinch from clamping down, allowing inflation to persist out of fear of pressure from the White House.
Presidential bullying is not the only reason central banks lose their grip on inflation.
The 2020 election changed this calculus. Unlike his predecessor, President Joe Biden showed no inclination to browbeat the Fed, on Twitter or elsewhere. His Treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, was herself a former Fed chair, and would therefore be the last person to attack the institution. In May 2022, with the inflation threat intensifying, Biden went out of his way to emphasize the independence of the central bank. “My predecessor demeaned the Fed, and past presidents have sought to influence its decisions inappropriately during periods of elevated inflation,” he wrote in The Wall Street Journal. “I won’t do this,” he added.
But it turns out that presidential bullying is not the only reason why central banks lose their grip on inflation. Starting in the spring and summer of 2021, the Fed committed three mistakes, opening the door to today’s price surge. Regrettably, very few observers, and certainly not this one, anticipated all three. But the good news is that two of these errors point to ways in which the Fed can reform its approach in the future, perhaps allowing an eventual return to the use of magic money.
Not a Passing Phase
The Fed’s first error has received by far the most attention, but it is also the hardest to learn from. It consisted in miscalibrating the balance between supply and demand, a challenge that, as noted already, is necessarily hard, given the unpredictable spending decisions of private citizens and companies.
The miscalibration began with the passage of the American Rescue Plan in March 2021. This was the third budgetary stimulus delivered by the U.S. Congress, and it crossed the line from appropriate support to dubious overreach. In March and April 2020, Washington had enacted a fiscal stimulus worth $2.4 trillion; in December it had followed up with a further $900 billion. With this extra spending in the pipeline, the U.S. economy was expected to grow by four percent between the fourth quarter of 2020 and the fourth quarter of 2021, a respectable performance. The March 2021 stimulus sloshed an extra $1.9 trillion of fuel onto the fire. Commenting on the likely upshot before the passage of the bill, the Brookings Institution forecast that by the end of 2021 the economy would be “operating above its maximum sustainable level.”
Confronted with this risk of inflationary overshoot, the Fed declined to raise interest rates or dial back its quantitative easing—the bond-buying program by which it affects longer-term interest rates. To some Fed critics, this was a clear error. If the central bankers had listened to forecasters such as the Brookings team, they would have headed off today’s inflation. But the truth is that forecasting in the midst of the pandemic was more art than science, and the Fed’s wait-and-see attitude was arguably understandable. Although the $1.9 trillion stimulus presented an obvious risk of overreach, it remained possible that other forces would conspire to dampen demand. To cite just one wild card, the contagious Delta variant of COVID-19 spread rapidly in the summer of 2021, leading to a surge in the total infection rate in August and September.
As the Fed sat on the sidelines, core inflation drifted up, reaching an annual rate of 3.4 percent by the second quarter of 2021 and 3.6 percent in the third quarter. Again, with the benefit of hindsight, the Fed should have hiked interest rates, snuffing out the inflation before it became serious. But the Fed justified procrastination by arguing that the inflation was merely “transitory.” COVID-19-related supply-chain snafus seemed to explain the upward pressure on prices; as workers returned to jobs and ports reopened, these bottlenecks would surely correct themselves. And to be fair to the central bankers, respected private economists shared this optimistic view. As late as November, the economics team at Goldman Sachs opined that “underlying supply-demand imbalances will … largely work themselves out, leaving inflation near the Fed’s goal.” That same month, Nobel Prize laureate Paul Krugman ascribed the inflation to supply-chain bottlenecks and called it “an excusable and manageable problem.”
Those who correctly predicted the price surge are entitled to their victory lap.
Of course, in retrospect, Team Transitory was wrong, and I shared in this error. Those who correctly predicted the price surge are entitled to their victory lap. If there’s a lesson from this episode, it’s that stimulus is inflationary when an economic shock damages supply more than demand: in hindsight, the striking fact about the emergence from the pandemic is that people resumed spending faster than they resumed work. But the larger point is that responding to an unprecedented health crisis combined with a record GDP shock is inescapably hard, and the familiar insight that supply shocks are different from demand shocks won’t make the response easier. The Fed already retains an economics faculty nearly eight times larger than Harvard University’s; if it had been obvious that people were going to return to work slowly, constraining supply, the central bankers would have tightened earlier. Telling the Fed to distinguish supply shocks from demand shocks is like instructing a sprinter to run fast. The advice is so obvious as to be useless.
Whatever the merits of the “transitory” debate, by the end of November 2021 it was over. Core inflation came in at 4.2 percent for the year to October, a marked acceleration since the summer. On November 30, Powell testified to Congress that it was time to retire the T word.
But then the Fed committed its second error. Rather than admitting its misjudgment and raising interest rates quickly, it waited more than three months to do so. When the hike finally came, in March 2022, it was the smallest it could be: 25 basis points, or a quarter of a percentage point. This was all the more remarkable because by the time of the March meeting the case for stronger medicine was clear: core inflation had climbed steadily, to 5.3 percent over the year through February, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24 was set to boost the cost of food and energy. Yet it was not until the Fed’s June meeting that it finally got serious, delivering a 75-basis-point hike. By then, more than six months had elapsed since Powell had given up on “transitory.”
Unlike the Fed’s wait-and-see approach in 2021, the excruciatingly slow course correction in the first half of 2022 was inexcusable. Faced with a negative shock to the economy, the Fed has always been quick to provide stimulus. But when it came to fighting inflation, it refused to provide the bitter medicine of rate hikes with anything like the same urgency.
Why was the Fed so languid? The reason lay in its misguided attachment to “forward guidance,” the practice of signaling interest-rate moves well ahead of implementing them. This speak-wait-act triple jump is useful when inflation is too low and the Fed, having already slashed the short-term interest rate to zero, has no room to cut further. In such circumstances, when policy has hit what central bankers call the zero lower bound, forward guidance allows the Fed to promise an extended period of rock-bottom short-term interest rates. A long period of guaranteed low short rates makes for lower long-term rates. Forward guidance thus becomes an additional way to provide stimulus to the economy.
This logic ceases to matter when the Fed faces the opposite challenge of high inflation. To bring inflation down, the Fed can raise the short-term interest rate as much as it likes: there is no upper bound, and therefore no pressing need for forward guidance. But in the wake of its admission that inflation was non-transitory, the Fed stuck to forward guidance anyway, floating the idea of raising rates, then waiting, then acting. The best rationalization of this behavior is that the Fed feared that a sudden rate hike would upset investors and cause a panicky market fall. But this concern is overblown. When the goal is to cool the economy and get inflation down, a market decline is desirable.
In short, the Fed’s fondness for forward guidance needs rethinking. By refusing to hike interest rates promptly, and by waiting half a year before delivering a 75-basis-point rise, the Fed allowed bad inflation to get worse, an error for which the economy will now pay dearly. But the good news is that the lesson from this mistake is straightforward. Sometimes the Fed should act without guiding the markets. Sometimes speed is the priority.
Pay Attention to Markets
The Fed’s last error was to ignore the financial bubble that inflated during 2021, signaling that trouble was brewing. As with the excessive fealty to forward guidance, the policy of ignoring the bubble reflected a deeply ingrained reflex among central bankers. Its origin dates back to 1996, when Fed Chair Alan Greenspan gingerly questioned Wall Street’s “irrational exuberance.” Stock prices proceeded to boom over the next year, and the Fed’s leaders concluded that commenting on markets was a fool’s errand. The best policy, they decided, was to keep quiet about booms, then cut interest rates after the busts to cushion the economy.
Calling market tops is hard, and the Fed’s caution is understandable. Given that central banks have one main policy instrument—the interest rate—they can’t respond to two separate signals if these point in different ways: if, for example, the economy looks weak while the stock market looks bubbly. But the Fed’s see-no-evil stance on bubbles has been taken too far. The last two recessions before the 2020 COVID-19 shock followed traumatic market corrections—the dot-com bust of 2000-2001 and the mortgage collapse of 2007-8. In modern financialized economies, asset prices are simply too important to ignore. They are both a signal of pressures to which the Fed ought to respond and a warning of disruption if the Fed does nothing.
In debates about this issue over the past twenty years, the see-no-evil camp has pointed to cases in which a central bank has raised interest rates to prick a bubble, only to reverse course when the hike harms the real economy. But this is a straw man. Nobody is suggesting that central bankers should tighten when unemployment is elevated, inflation is substantially below target, or growth is below trend: of course the real economy must be the priority. But sometimes the Fed confronts circumstances in which real-economy indicators are solid while financial ones look positively exuberant. Under these conditions, bubbly asset prices are a signal that the Fed should tighten more than if it were simply targeting inflation. Past examples include late 1998 and early 1999, when the Fed allowed the dot-com mania to run wild; and 2004–5, when it ignored the mortgage bubble.
When asset prices shoot up, pay attention.
In mid-2021, a policy of leaning against the financial winds would also have served the Fed well. On July 1, the tech-heavy Nasdaq index closed at 14,522, a scary 48 percent above its peak on the eve of the pandemic. Meanwhile real estate was frothy, cryptocurrencies were booming, and celebrities were forming Special Purpose Acquisition Companies (SPACs)—mechanisms for taking companies public while avoiding proper scrutiny. Even if the Fed thought that the incipient inflation was transitory, asset prices were screaming that the economy was running hot. Too much money was chasing too few savings instruments. If the Fed had factored financial signals into its decisions, it would have tightened earlier, and the economy might have been spared the 2022 inflation.
Hence the second clear lesson for future leaders of the Fed. When asset prices shoot up, pay attention. Depending on what is happening with the real economy, this could well be a signal to raise interest rates.
Lessons Learned
Where does all this leave magic money? For the foreseeable future, it is off the table. The priority must be to control inflation, a necessary condition for upholding the credibility of the Fed, without which economic stability is impossible. Unfortunately, this struggle against inflation may take time. The three decades of low inflation and low interest rates running from roughly 1992 to 2022 were partly the result of globalization, which exerted a downward pressure on prices. Today, globalization has stalled, and the new vogue for stockpiling strategic commodities and “friend-shoring” supplies will be inflationary. Add in the aging of populations and the possibility that young workers will insist on a flexible approach to work, and the Fed may have to run tighter policy than in the past quarter of a century. The expectation that took hold in the late 1990s, that the Fed could be relied upon to cushion the economy from almost any type of shock, may have to be revised. The next few years could be bruising.
But, just as the stagflationary 1970s gave way to the stability and prosperity of later years, so the cycle will turn again. The Fed will get inflation under control, and central banks will once again work magic. Over the long sweep of post–World War II history, the art and science of central banking has advanced steadily, with each decade of experience building on the previous ones. Sometimes the most humiliating setbacks teach the most valuable lessons.
10. Inside a Uvalde Classroom: A Taunting Gunman and 78 Minutes of Terror
It is still hard to grasp what an utter law enforcement failure that took place at Uvalde.
Inside a Uvalde Classroom: A Taunting Gunman and 78 Minutes of Terror
A teacher who survived the mass shooting recounts the harrowing attack and desperate wait for a rescue.
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“I kept waiting for someone to come,” Arnulfo Reyes, a teacher who was wounded in the shooting at Robb Elementary School, said about the delayed police response.Credit...Tamir Kalifa for The New York Times
By
July 10, 2022, 5:00 a.m. ET
UVALDE, Texas — The first shots came from the hallway outside the classroom. Arnulfo Reyes, a fourth-grade teacher at Robb Elementary School, quickly remembered the active shooter training he had rehearsed so many times and told his 11 students to lie under their desks and “act like you are asleep.”
A black shadow appeared at one of the classroom doors and a plume of fire flared from the tip of what looked like a rifle. Mr. Reyes felt a bullet piercing his arm, tearing off a chunk of flesh and bone. Then the gunman turned on the children. The rampage was so brutal and so swift, the teacher said, that he did not hear a single whimper from them as their bodies were shredded.
Mr. Reyes lay in a pool of his own blood for what seemed like an eternity until he heard police officers gathering in the hallway just outside the classroom door. His students lay silent, dead or dying; a few other children in an adjoining classroom were still alive, faintly calling for help. The officers will burst through and save us any minute now, he told himself. But the minutes ticked by, and no rescue came.
About a half-hour later, the gunman, sitting near where Mr. Reyes was sprawled on the floor, seemed to be taunting him. He leveled his gun at the teacher’s back and fired again.
“I think about it more and more. What could they have done differently?” Mr. Reyes said in an interview recounting the events of May 24, when a mass shooting at the school left 19 students and two teachers dead.
He described the agony that victims felt as the police who were gathered in the hallway postponed entering the classrooms where the gunman was holed up — waiting some 78 minutes in a delayed response that a preliminary law enforcement investigation suggests was complicated by a search for a key and a decision to try to protect the lives of the responding officers.
“I kept waiting for someone to come,” Mr. Reyes said. “But when I didn’t see anyone coming in, I just thought, nobody’s coming.”
More than a month after the tragedy, as Mr. Reyes tries to recover from the severe wounds he suffered, the memories of that day play repeatedly in his mind. The day began with a jovial year-end award ceremony, after which nearly half of Mr. Reyes’s 18 fourth-grade students had gone home with their parents. Eleven stayed because they wanted to watch “The Addams Family” movie.
“It was supposed to be an easy day, just before the summer break,” he recalled.
Out of nowhere, Mr. Reyes and his students heard what they now know were gunshots coming from the hallway. The powerful blasts sprayed debris into his classroom. “There were pieces of wall flying,” he said.
The gunman first entered room 112, which was connected to Mr. Reyes’s classroom through another door. He shot indiscriminately, the police said, fatally wounding two teachers, Irma Garcia and Eva Mireles, and several of their students.
Mr. Reyes turned to his students. “All right, we’ve already practiced this. Get under the desks, OK? Just close your eyes and act like you are asleep,” he remembered saying.
“I didn’t want them to see anything.”
Mr. Reyes does not remember if the gunman entered through the door that connected the two rooms or if he stepped back into the hallway. But the next thing he recalls is seeing a ghostly figure wearing a black hoodie over his head and what looked like a black medical mask that obscured half of his face.
“I just see this shadow and his eyes,” he said.
Then came two sparks from a rifle, aimed at him. “He shot me first,” he said. The impact sent a burning shock through his left arm that felt like hot lava, he said. A large chunk of his forearm was missing.
The gunman quickly turned his rifle on the students, unleashing a rain of fire that was so fast and merciless that it was over almost as soon as it began and there was nothing but silence in the room. “They were probably instantly killed,” Mr. Reyes said, though he said some of them might have died during the long wait. Maybe, he said, they were silent because “they were in shock.”
The first police officers arrived outside the classroom door about three minutes after the gunman entered the school, according to a preliminary timeline. After the initial attack, Mr. Reyes said, he could hear them talking to one another in the hallway just outside.
At one point, he heard one of the officers yell at the gunman: “Come out, we want to talk to you!” The gunman did not answer, though the police have said that two officers suffered grazing wounds when he fired a burst at the classroom door. The chatter from the police went quiet. “You didn’t hear anything anymore,” Mr. Reyes said.
Most of his students were probably beyond saving, Mr. Reyes said. But at least one surviving child in the classroom next door must have heard the officers too, he said, because he heard someone cry for help.
“Officers, come in,” he heard a small voice say. “We are in here.”
For several minutes, the gunman paced around the room, then perched on the teacher’s desk as Mr. Reyes lay sprawled face-down on the floor below. In what he believed was an attempt to taunt him — or to make sure he was dead — the gunman let a cup of water drip from a desk onto Mr. Reyes’s back. The gunman then smeared some of Mr. Reyes’s own blood on the teacher’s face and placed the teacher’s phone, which kept ringing as desperate relatives tried to reach him, on his back.
He seemed to be trying to elicit a reaction, Mr. Reyes said. “He was going to make sure I was dead, too. I mean, he had nothing to lose.”
A granite memorial given as a gift to Mr. Reyes is displayed at his home in Uvalde, Texas. Credit...Tamir Kalifa for The New York Times
Some 30 minutes after entering the room, apparently unsure whether Mr. Reyes might still be alive, the gunman shot him a second time, this time in his lower back. Mr. Reyes said he became certain at that point that he would not survive. “I’m not going to make it,” he told himself. “I’m going to bleed out.”
Then he heard the gunman return to room 112. More shots were fired. He later heard the gunman closing the blinds on a window facing the outside.
Mr. Reyes does not remember how much more time passed, but he suddenly heard tables sliding and loud stomps in the room next door. There was more gunfire. Then silence.
A man who was part of a Border Patrol team that had breached the classroom next door and killed the gunman approached Mr. Reyes, urging him to “get up if you can.” When he could not, the agent dragged him by the tip of his pants out of the carnage. “He asked for help carrying me. I was too heavy,” he said, sharing a rare smile.
Another agent, he said, suddenly shouted an expletive. “There’s kids under here!”
A few of them were still alive in the adjoining classroom. The school was suddenly a swarm of police officers, medics, ambulances and, outside, hysterical parents. Mr. Reyes was flown to a hospital in San Antonio, where he underwent several surgeries.
Doctors placed a metal plate about six inches long on his arm for his gaping wound, covering it with a skin graft from his right leg. A pair of drainage bags still collect fluids coming from his lower back and arm. He will not regain full movement in the arm, doctors have told him.
He is back now at his modest home in Uvalde, a city where he has lived since he was a young child. It is decorated with antiques and inspirational signs. “All You Need Is Love,” one of them reads, and: “It Takes A Big Heart To Help Shape Little Minds.”
He had dreamed of becoming a lawyer, he said, but 18 years ago he found his calling as an elementary schoolteacher, the last 10 of them at Robb Elementary.
After a difficult year of teaching remotely because of the pandemic, Mr. Reyes was happy to see his all of his students return to class in 2022. “This year was different, I could just feel it,” he said. “They had a tight bond. They wanted to learn.”
When he thinks about the students who died in his classroom that day, most of them barely 10 years old, he finds himself remembering them not in death, but in life.
There was Rojelio Torres, who had suddenly become serious about learning his multiplication and division. “He was very ambitious. He wanted to be good at everything.”
There was Jose Flores, who lived for lunch and recess and was a “corajudo,” meaning he would get flustered each time he failed to understand a lesson or math problem. “He would shut down and I would tell him, ‘Don’t do that.’ And he did, he learned how to control his frustration.” Josecito, as his family called him, was named to the honor roll for the first time on the day he was killed.
And who could forget Jayce Luevanos? He was the popular class clown who reminded Mr. Reyes of the flamboyant movie character Ace Ventura portrayed by Jim Carrey. Jayce liked to wear a T-shirt with the image of an ice chest that read, “I’m a little bit cooler than you.”
On a recent afternoon, Mr. Reyes sat next to a blue folkloric cross given to him by the mother of Tess Mata, one of the victims, and a block of granite engraved with photos of all the victims. A cousin, Belinda Aguilera, stopped by to check on him. “He’s doing better, thank God,” Ms. Aguilera said as she studied Mr. Reyes, who was sitting alone on a couch.
Ms. Aguilera, who lives near the school, said she was one of the people calling Mr. Reyes’s phone in a panic after hearing several gunshots. “You popped on my head because I knew you were there,” she told him, fighting back tears.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I feel like my phone call made him do that to you.”
No, no, Mr. Reyes said, trying to reassure her at a time when practically everyone has lost any sense of assurance. This is not on you, he said.
She didn’t seem convinced. She talked about the long road he had ahead of him. Not just the wounds healing — but everything else. “The pain will never go away,” she said.
11. Congress Rejects Biden’s Defense Budget
Has Congress ever not "rejected" the administration's budget? Doesn't it always add to or subtract from it? (if you can define that as a rejection).
Excerpts:
A bright spot is that both chambers dedicated money for the sea-launched nuclear cruise missile, known as SLCM-N. The Biden Administration wants to kill that program as a bow to the arms-control lobby, despite the advice of military commanders who want to keep it. The missile was conceived to deter Vladimir Putin from using a tactical nuclear weapon in Europe, an especially salient goal as the Russian dictator has spent much of 2022 making nuclear threats against the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
The House and Senate will have to iron out their differences, and the money will still have to be appropriated in a budget deal. The reality is that even the $45 billion plus-up won’t change the U.S. trajectory of managed military decline. Defense spending will stay at roughly 3% of the economy, down from between 5% and 6% in the 1980s when the U.S. was showing the Soviet Union it couldn’t win the Cold War.
But at least Congress has stepped in to prevent the Biden Administration from bleeding the U.S. military amid one of the most volatile world moments in 80 years.
Congress Rejects Biden’s Defense Budget
WSJ · by The Editorial Board
The House and Senate add to his request, but it’s still not enough.
July 10, 2022 5:48 pm ET
The Wasp-class amphibious assault ship USS Kearsarge in the Baltic Sea, June 6.
Photo: jonathan nackstrand/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Congress has been working on next year’s defense budget, and for the second year in a row members of both parties have rejected President Biden’s proposal as insufficient. This is a welcome development, though Washington is only starting to address the threats the U.S. faces.
The Senate Armed Services Committee recently passed a national defense authorization for 2023 that would provide the Pentagon $817 billion, up from the roughly $773 billion the Biden Administration requested, about a $45 billion difference. The House amended its initial draft in committee to add $37 billion to President Biden’s request. These increases are aimed in part at mitigating inflation, which is crushing the Pentagon’s buying power, especially on fuel and housing.
Both chambers included a 4.6% pay increase for service members, consistent with the Biden request. This in normal times would be generous but not with inflation at 8.6%. The services need to offer competitive pay to weather “arguably the most challenging recruiting year since the inception of the all-volunteer force,” as Marine Lt. Gen. David Ottignon put it earlier this year to Congress.
Army end strength in both proposals falls to 473,000 from 485,000, as Team Biden requested, not because the land branch doesn’t want the manpower but because it is struggling to fill openings.
Also important: Bailing out some of the water the U.S. Navy has been taking on. The Biden budget asked to build eight ships but retire 24, putting the fleet on track to shrink to 280 ships in 2027 from about 300. The amendment that added $37 billion to the House bill, sponsored by Democrats Elaine Luria and Jared Golden, offers money for five additional ships, including another destroyer and frigate.
Meanwhile, the House and Senate precluded some ship retirements. That would at least put the Navy on a more stable course, but the U.S. needs a larger and more lethal sea service within the decade to counter China’s growing naval power.
A bright spot is that both chambers dedicated money for the sea-launched nuclear cruise missile, known as SLCM-N. The Biden Administration wants to kill that program as a bow to the arms-control lobby, despite the advice of military commanders who want to keep it. The missile was conceived to deter Vladimir Putin from using a tactical nuclear weapon in Europe, an especially salient goal as the Russian dictator has spent much of 2022 making nuclear threats against the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
The House and Senate will have to iron out their differences, and the money will still have to be appropriated in a budget deal. The reality is that even the $45 billion plus-up won’t change the U.S. trajectory of managed military decline. Defense spending will stay at roughly 3% of the economy, down from between 5% and 6% in the 1980s when the U.S. was showing the Soviet Union it couldn’t win the Cold War.
But at least Congress has stepped in to prevent the Biden Administration from bleeding the U.S. military amid one of the most volatile world moments in 80 years.
Appeared in the July 11, 2022, print edition.
12. Anthony Albanese's 13-word response to China's four demands
Excellent response:
But addressing the press in Canberra on Monday morning, Mr Albanese pushed back, saying: "Look, Australia doesn't respond to demands. We respond to our own national interests."
Anthony Albanese's 13-word response to China's four demands
Anthony Albanese has responded to China's demands intended to help mend the relationship between the two countries after Chinese Foreign Affairs Minister Wang Yi took aim at Australia's former government.
Anthony Albanese responded to demands made by China's Foreign Affairs Minister Wang Yi. Source: AAP
But addressing the press in Canberra on Monday morning, Mr Albanese pushed back, saying: "Look, Australia doesn't respond to demands. We respond to our own national interests."
"We will cooperate with China where we can. I want to build good relations with all countries," he added.
"But we will stand up for Australia's interests when we must."
China's swipe at Morrison government
Mr Wang blamed the Coalition for the fractured relationship between the two countries, insisting the Morrison government continued to paint China as the enemy.
"The root cause of the difficulties in Chinese and Australian relations in recent years lies in the insistence of previous Australian governments to treat China as an 'opponent' and even a 'threat'," Mr Wang said.
Penny Wong met with Wang Yi on Friday. Source: AAP
Mr Albanese was questioned about claims from Chinese media that Ms Wong and her Chinese counterpart agreed to remove obstacles to get the China-Australia relationship back on track.
Mr Albanese described their meeting as "constructive" adding it was a "step forward" in the right direction.
The move comes after a turbulent two years which saw Sino-Australian relations rapidly deteriorate under the Morrison government.
Do you have a story tip? Email: newsroomau@yahoonews.com.
13. China warns Asean nations to avoid being used as 'chess pieces' by big powers
Especially because China is not playing chess but instead is playing "Go."
China warns Asean nations to avoid being used as 'chess pieces' by big powers
China's Foreign Minister Wang Yi said that many countries in the region were under pressure to take sides. PHOTO: EPA-EFE
(July 11) during a policy speech in the Indonesian capital that countries should avoid being used as “chess pieces” by major powers in a region at risk of being reshaped by geopolitical factors.
Speaking at the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) secretariat in Jakarta, Wang, who was speaking through a translator, said many countries in the region were under pressure to take sides.
“We should insulate this region from geopolitical calculations… from being used as chess pieces from major power rivalry and from coercion,” he said, adding: “The future of our region should be in our own hands.”
South-east Asia has long been an area of geopolitical friction between major powers given its strategic importance, with some countries in the region wary of choosing sides in the current US-China rivalry.
Wang’s speech comes just days after he attended a G-20 foreign ministers’ meeting in Bali and amid intense Chinese diplomacy that has seen him make string of stops across the region in recent weeks.
On the sidelines of the G-20, Wang held a five-hour meeting with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken with both describing their first in-person talks since October as “candid”.
Wang said on Monday he had told Blinken both sides should discuss the establishment of rules for positive interactions and to jointly uphold regionalism in the Asia-Pacific.
ST Asian Insider: Malaysia Edition
Understand Malaysia developments with bureau chief Shannon Teoh and team in weekly newsletter
“The core elements are to support Asean centrality, uphold the existing regional corporation framework, respect each other’s legitimate rights and interests in the Asia-Pacific instead of aiming to antagonise or contain the other side,” Wang said.
Responding to a question about Taiwan after his speech, Wang said Washington “by distorting and hollowing out the One China policy, is trying to play the Taiwan card to disrupt and contain China’s development”.
Tensions between Beijing and Taipei have escalated in recent months as the Chinese military conducted repeated air missions over the Taiwan Strait, the waterway separating the island from China.
China regards self-ruled Taiwan as a renegade province awaiting reunification with the mainland, by force if necessary. Taiwan says it will defend its freedoms and democracy, blaming China for the tensions.
Washington says it remains committed to its One China policy and does not encourage independence for Taiwan, but the United States is required to provide Taiwan with the means to defend itself under its US Taiwan Relations Act.
“The two sides across the (Taiwan) Strait will enjoy peaceful development. But when the one-China principle is arbitrarily challenged or even sabotaged, there will be dark clouds or even ferocious storms across the strait,” Wang said.
14. For NATO Allies, a New Division of Labor Won’t Be Easy
The US has been "dividing its labor" among the various theaters around the world for decades. I hope NATO can walk and chew gum at the same time.
For NATO Allies, a New Division of Labor Won’t Be Easy
The bloc’s formal designation of China as a threat is just a first step. Now comes the hard part.
By Jo Inge Bekkevold, a senior China fellow at the Norwegian Institute for Defence Studies.
U.S. President Joe Biden and other leaders pose for a photo during the NATO summit in Madrid on June 29.
U.S. President Joe Biden and other leaders pose for a photo during the NATO summit in Madrid on June 29. Stefan Rousseau - WPA Pool/Getty Images
For the first time since the Mongol invasion of Europe in the 13th century, Europe now views an Asian power as a direct security threat. Unlike Japan, which overran Europe’s East Asian colonies during World War II, China is a superpower with global reach. In NATO’s new Strategic Concept, adopted at its Madrid summit last month, the alliance identifies China’s ambitions and coercive policies as a challenge to its members’ interests, values, and security. However, focusing on China will be fundamentally different from the bloc’s traditional role of warding off territorial threats in Europe, with several fault lines between the United States and NATO’s European members already built in.
Five factors explain NATO’s landmark decision. Some have been familiar parts of the security debate for years; others gained salience only recently.
First—and most obviously—NATO’s strategy is responding to China’s rise and the emergence of a new bipolar international system, replacing the so-called U.S. unipolar moment of the 1990s and early 2000s. With China’s economy estimated to be 25 percent larger than the United States’ by 2026 (measured in GDP at purchasing power parity), Beijing has the resources to further increase a defense budget that is already four times larger than Russia’s. As realists such as political scientist Kenneth Waltz have emphasized, a bipolar power structure compels other states to choose a side. Although the United States announced its rebalance to Asia in 2011, geographic distance and a certain strategic sloth have slowed Europe’s response to China’s growing power. Thus, it has taken Europe and NATO another decade to categorize China’s rise as a security challenge.
For the first time since the Mongol invasion of Europe in the 13th century, Europe now views an Asian power as a direct security threat. Unlike Japan, which overran Europe’s East Asian colonies during World War II, China is a superpower with global reach. In NATO’s new Strategic Concept, adopted at its Madrid summit last month, the alliance identifies China’s ambitions and coercive policies as a challenge to its members’ interests, values, and security. However, focusing on China will be fundamentally different from the bloc’s traditional role of warding off territorial threats in Europe, with several fault lines between the United States and NATO’s European members already built in.
Five factors explain NATO’s landmark decision. Some have been familiar parts of the security debate for years; others gained salience only recently.
First—and most obviously—NATO’s strategy is responding to China’s rise and the emergence of a new bipolar international system, replacing the so-called U.S. unipolar moment of the 1990s and early 2000s. With China’s economy estimated to be 25 percent larger than the United States’ by 2026 (measured in GDP at purchasing power parity), Beijing has the resources to further increase a defense budget that is already four times larger than Russia’s. As realists such as political scientist Kenneth Waltz have emphasized, a bipolar power structure compels other states to choose a side. Although the United States announced its rebalance to Asia in 2011, geographic distance and a certain strategic sloth have slowed Europe’s response to China’s growing power. Thus, it has taken Europe and NATO another decade to categorize China’s rise as a security challenge.
Second, technological developments have finally forced Europe’s hand. Here, too, many European countries enjoying growing trade with China and preferring to view Beijing as a partner on all kinds of issues were slow to rise to the challenge. The opportunities for Beijing to weaponize cybertechnology, 5G, and other fourth industrial revolution technologies have brought China closer to Europe. More than any other topic, restricting Huawei’s operations in Europe has dominated the debate on China between Washington and European capitals over the last three or four years.
What accelerated Europe’s shift on China is a third factor: increased uncertainty in Europe about U.S. long-term commitments to trans-Atlantic security. As long as Washington was committed to containing the Soviet Union during the Cold War, Europe could take the U.S. security guarantee for granted. This, of course, is no longer the case. For the past decade, Europe has seen the United States gradually rebalancing its strategic focus and resources to Asia, and then-U.S. President Donald Trump abruptly awakened European elites to the possibility that a U.S. withdrawal from Europe could be just one election away. In hopes of binding the United States to Europe more closely, European NATO members are aligning themselves with Washington—including by shifting their stance on China sooner than they might otherwise have chosen.
The U.S.-China rivalry presents NATO with a different challenge than the U.S.-Soviet one.
Fourth, China’s ideological shifts also accelerated Europe’s categorization of China as a threat. Beijing’s increasingly authoritarian turn under Chinese leader Xi Jinping, its tightened grip on Hong Kong, and its iron rule policy in Xinjiang did much to destroy China’s image in Europe. The European Union’s decision in 2021 to put the European Union-China investment agreement on ice was a direct response to Beijing’s policy in Xinjiang against it Uyghur population. China’s more aggressive wolf-warrior diplomacy and increasing ability to block EU decisions in Brussels via its client states in Europe didn’t go unnoticed either.
The fifth factor accelerating NATO’s shift on China is the evolving Sino-Russian axis, most recently enhanced by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This is molding a distinct geopolitical divide. By stepping up its economic and diplomatic support for Russia since the start of the invasion, China has inserted itself as an actor into the most momentous war in Europe since 1945.
Nonetheless, even though the new Strategic Concept sends a strong signal of trans-Atlantic unity, it is too early to conclude that it enables a joint and well-coordinated U.S.-European approach on China. The reason for caution is geography. The U.S.-China rivalry presents NATO with a different challenge than the U.S.-Soviet one. During the Cold War, from its pivotal position in the Eurasian heartland, the Soviet Union constituted a threat to the entire Eurasian rim, from Europe all the way to the Far East, and it was a two-flank challenge to the United States. Europe was the core area of the Cold War strategic theater, and this consolidated not only a united threat perception among the United States and its European allies but also a common military strategy. China’s geographic position, on the other hand, does not preordain trans-Atlantic unity in a similar way.
Moving from strategy to policy implementing the Strategic Concept, the United States and European NATO members will find that the geopolitical logic of U.S.-China rivalry will shape a new, and not always easy, trans-Atlantic division of labor in three major ways.
First, from its geographic position on the Asian rim facing the Pacific Ocean, China represents a one-flank challenge to the United States. U.S. balancing of China will thus be largely regional, focusing on the Indo-Pacific with a lower priority for the trans-Atlantic flank. In fact, the new U.S. National Defense Strategy presented in March—after the Russian invasion of Ukraine had already started—clearly states that priority will be given to deter the China challenge in the Indo-Pacific. One important outcome of the war in Ukraine—and the consolidation of the European side of NATO with Finland and Sweden as new members—is a more balanced burden-sharing within NATO, which allows the United States to channel more resources to Asia over the long term. Even before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the debate had increasingly shifted toward putting Europe in a position to defend itself. With Germany and other European countries committing to greater defense expenditures in the wake of Russia’s war, European defenses will indeed be bolstered.
Secondly, balancing China in the Indo-Pacific theater will require the United States to lean more on Quadrilateral Security Dialogue members and other Asian partners than on NATO. In recent years, the larger European nations have eagerly deployed naval vessels to sail in Asian waters, though some of these deployments have been little more than symbolic. NATO is strengthening relations with its formal Asia-Pacific partners—Australia, Japan, South Korea, and New Zealand—with an agreement to step up cooperation in areas such as cybersecurity, other new technologies, and countering disinformation. Nevertheless, it is still nebulous how exactly European militaries will add value to U.S. balancing efforts in Asia. European navies have been in constant decline since the end of the Cold War, whereas the Chinese navy has surpassed its U.S. counterpart in terms of number of vessels. China is now building the equivalent of the entire French Navy every four years. Elbridge Colby, co-founder of the Marathon Initiative, has suggested that it might serve the United States better to have Europe play to its strengths in the Euro-Atlantic area, an opinion echoed by U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. Commenting on the British deployment of its new aircraft carrier, HMS Queen Elizabeth, to the Indo-Pacific region in 2021, Austin indicated that Britain is more helpful closer to home than in Asia.
Finally, due to its limited geographic reach across Eurasia, China will remain a lesser threat to European security than Russia. With Russia an openly belligerent threat for the foreseeable future, European resources will be pinned down at home, impeding the implementation of a joint trans-Atlantic approach in the Far East. For instance, NATO plans to increase the strength of its rapid reaction force dedicated to the defense of its Eastern European members nearly eightfold to 300,000 troops. Even though U.S. armed forces will remain engaged in Europe, the bulk of NATO’s increased presence along its Eastern European frontier will have to be provided by European countries. And the security challenges in Europe’s own neighborhood are by no means limited to Russia. At a time when the United States is increasingly preoccupied in Asia, Europe faces crumbling stability in the Middle East, North Africa and other regions directly affecting Europe, not least through potential migration and refugee crises.
Against this background, it is inevitable that the main challenge for the United States and European allies over the coming years will be to design a trans-Atlantic division of labor. The problem is that this division has to be crafted in a more sophisticated fashion than the simple logic of Europe deterring Russia while the United States balances China. Such a simplistic division of labor not only risks a trans-Atlantic drift, but it could also result in a gradual military transformation gap, leaving NATO and Europe behind as a second-rate defense force. Moreover, deterring Russia is no simple, one-dimensional task. In Eastern Europe, it is a land-based theater, whereas in Northern Europe, it is largely sea based. Each creates different requirements for trans-Atlantic collaboration.
The division of labor debate has already begun. The Aspen Strategy Group has made the simple and obvious recommendation that Washington and Europe strengthen the trans-Atlantic dialogue on China. Others emphasize how the United States could save billions of dollars by suggesting NATO transcend geographic boundaries by focusing on defending cyber and outer space. As these examples show, the discourse is still in its infancy. A successful strategy will require much more work and fine-tuning, including inputs from policymakers, diplomats, defense officials, and the wider strategic communities in the United States, Europe, and Asian partner countries. NATO’s belated acknowledgment in Madrid of a new global balance of power means this work can finally start.
Jo Inge Bekkevold is a senior China fellow at the Norwegian Institute for Defence Studies and a former Norwegian diplomat.
15. Chinese-built surveillance systems spread across junta-ruled Myanmar, including hundreds of Huawei cameras: sources
Of course they are spreading their surveillance systems. It is part of Chinese strategy and China also will have access to all the data collected that it can exploit for political and security purposes.
China seeks to export its authoritarian political system around the world in order to dominate regions, co-opt or coerce international organizations, create economic conditions favorable to China alone, and displace democratic institutions.
Chinese-built surveillance systems spread across junta-ruled Myanmar, including hundreds of Huawei cameras: sources
- Two Yangon-headquartered companies procured cameras and related technology from Huawei, Zhejiang Dahua Technology (Dahua) and Hikvision, sources said
- Observers say CCTV cameras pose a serious risk to Myanmar’s democracy activists as military and police use the technology to find and track dissidents
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Published: 12:02pm, 11 Jul, 2022
Myanmar’s junta government is installing Chinese-built cameras with facial recognition capabilities in more cities across the country, three people with direct knowledge of the matter said.
In tenders to procure and install the security cameras and facial recognition technology, the plans are described as safe city projects aimed at maintaining security and, in some cases, preserving civil peace, said the people who are or have been involved in the projects.
Since the February 2021 coup, local authorities have started new camera surveillance projects for at least five cities including Mawlamyine – the country’s fourth-largest -according to information from the three people who asked not to be identified for fear of reprisals by the junta.
Protesters in Yangon, Myanmar, hold a portrait of Aung San Suu Kyi while flashing the three-finger salute, a symbol of resistance, during an anti-junta protest in February last year. Photo: EPA-EFE
The new projects are in addition to five cities where camera systems touted as crime prevention measures were either installed or planned by the previous government led by Aung San Suu Kyi, according to the sources and local media.
A junta spokesman did not answer calls seeking comment. None of the 10 municipal governments, all of which are controlled by the junta, answered calls seeking comment. Reuters was not able to review the tenders or visit the cities to verify the installation of the cameras.
The junta is planning camera surveillance systems for cities in each of Myanmar’s seven states and seven regions, said one of the sources who was briefed on the junta’s plans on two occasions by different people.
The scale of the junta’s efforts to roll out camera surveillance systems has not been previously reported.
The tenders have been won by local procurement firms including Fisca Security & Communication and Naung Yoe Technologies Co, the three sources said. The companies source the cameras and some related technology from Chinese surveillance giants Zhejiang Dahua Technology (Dahua), Huawei Technologies Co Ltd and Hikvision, the three sources added.
Fisca and Naung Yoe, both headquartered in Yangon, did not respond to requests for comment.
Huawei and Dahua did not respond to requests for comment. Hikvision said in a statement it has never sold directly to Myanmar government authorities and its customers in overseas markets are distributors and integrators. It also said it had not sold facial recognition technology into the country.
A man adjusts a CCTV camera at the stall of video surveillance product maker Dahua Technology at the Security China 2018 exhibition in Beijing. Photo: Reuters
Hikvision did not respond to queries about whether it knows of cases where its hardware capable of running facial recognition software had been sold into Myanmar.
The three sources also said Myanmar procurement firms that won the tenders sometimes use facial recognition software developed by local and regional companies as the Chinese software licenses are costly. They did not name the software companies.
Closed-circuit television (CCTV) or video surveillance systems are used by many cities around the world to discourage crime. Increasingly controversial facial recognition software is also being employed, with the technology gaining ground in the United States for law enforcement purposes. Some sophisticated systems, such as those used in Chinese cities, use artificial intelligence to match real-time images of people against a database of images.
The people with direct knowledge of the Myanmar projects and human rights groups said they fear the new projects could be used to crack down on activists and resistance groups, both of which have been designated as terrorists by the junta in the wake of its coup.
They were not able to provide evidence of the junta’s intentions.
“Surveillance cameras pose a serious risk to [Myanmar’s] democracy activists because the military and police can use them to track their movements, figure out connections between activists, identify safe houses and other gathering spots, and recognise and intercept cars and motorcycles used by activists,” Human Rights Watch Deputy Asia Director Phil Robertson said in a statement.
Myanmar’s junta is engaged in widespread surveillance. It has installed intercept spyware at telecoms and internet providers to eavesdrop on communications of its citizens and deployed “information combat” units to monitor and attack dissenters online.
The army has officers dedicated to analysing surveillance camera feeds, said Nyi Thuta, a former captain who defected from the military in late February 2021. He said he was not aware of how many officers were assigned to this work, but described visiting CCTV control rooms staffed by soldiers in the capital Naypyidaw. Reuters was unable to independently verify this and the junta spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.
Police arrest a protester in Mawlamyine during a demonstration in February last year against the military coup. Photo: AFP
Mawlamyine held a tender for a camera surveillance system shortly after the coup, according to the three sources. The cities of Taunggyi and Dawei followed in the months after, two of them said.
The Mawlamyine tender was jointly won by Fisca and Naung Yoe, the two sources said. The tenders for Dawei and Taunggyi went to Fisca, said one source, adding that each city has seen hundreds of Dahua cameras installed this year.
In Mawlamyine, there are now over 200 Dahua cameras and more are due to be installed, another of the sources said.
Dahua cameras were installed this year in Myitkyina, the capital of Kachin, a region of ethnic unrest, one source said, adding that the government of Hpa-an city has begun early discussions about a camera system.
16. 'Twelve officers killed' in Ukrainian strike on Russian command post
"Eyes on" observation? UAS/drone surveillance? SIGINT? How did the Urkainians target this command post?
'Twelve officers killed' in Ukrainian strike on Russian command post
'Twelve of Putin's officers are killed' in strike on command post in occupied Kherson as 'Vladimir is enraged by failure of his S-400 defence system' while US-supplied HIMARS missiles inflict critical losses
- Ukraine has been striking deep behind Russian lines using HIMARS rockets
- One is thought to have destroyed Russian command posts in Kherson region
- Video shows ammo exploding after strike, which may have killed 12 officers
- Comes as Ukraine says it is preparing for a major counter-attack in the south
PUBLISHED: 05:04 EDT, 11 July 2022 | UPDATED: 07:58 EDT, 11 July 2022
Twelve Russian officers are thought to have been killed in a single rocket strike as Ukraine's armed forces inflict punishing losses with American-supplied weapons.
The attack targeted a command post in at Chornobaivka Airport, near the occupied southern city of Kherson, and is rumoured to have killed at least one general and one colonel. It is thought to have been carried out using US HIMARS rockets.
Video shows what appears to be an ammunition dump at the base exploding, as Russian Telegram channels report Putin is infuriated at the inability of Russia's S-400 anti-air systems to protect his armed forces.
It comes as Ukraine readies its million-strong military for a major offensive around Kherson, aiming to recapture territory seized by Russia early in the conflict.
Twelve Russian officers, including a general, have reportedly been killed after Ukraine struck a command post and ammo dump near Kherson using American rocket systems (pictured)
Chornobaivka Airport - near the city of Kherson which is now being used as a major Russian military base - was hit with US-made HIMARS at the weekend
Defence minister Oleksii Reznikov revealed President Zelensky has given his generals orders to draw up plans for the attack and come up with a list of equipment they need to get the job done.
Reznikov says his job will then be to go to Ukraine's western allies and make the case for those weapons to be handed over, as he did with HIMARS.
'We're people of the free world and with a real sense of justice and liberty,' he told The Times.
'We have approximately 700,000 in the armed forces and when you add the national guard, police, border guard, we are around a million strong.'
Chornobaivka Airport - where the latest HIMARS attack took place - is a strategically important airfield located in Ukraine's south that was captured by Russia in early in the war, and now serves as a military airfield.
It is hardly the first time the airstrip has been targeted by Ukrainian attacks, as a series of bombardments early in the war destroyed dozens of helicopters and inflicted heavy losses on Putin's men.
But as the frontline pushed further to the west, the airfield dropped out of range of Kyiv's men. However, with the arrival of American rocket systems it can be hit again.
The airfield is located close to Kherson, which is the only regional capital to have fallen to Putin's army and is set to be the focus of Ukraine's fight-back.
Putin is said to be furious at the seeming inability of his latest-generation anti-air system, the S-400 (pictured), to take down the HIMARS rockets
American-made HIMARS systems are being used by Ukraine (pictured) to target Russian command posts and ammo depots deep behind the frontline
Russian state TV war reporter Alexander Sladkov - who has links to the shadowy Wagner Group and typically posts pro-Kremlin propaganda - wrote overnight that Ukraine 'has struck several times at our decision-making centres with results.'
He added: 'The centres are small but important. I will not write here where, when, how much, and who [was hit] in order not to give out military secrets.
'My question is simple: when will this bull**** end?
'Can you **** the military-industrial complex so that we finally have the preventive [means to stop these missile attacks].'
One report claims Putin is so enraged that he is looking for scapegoats and turning on his own allies over the failure of the acclaimed S-400 missile defence system to perform effectively in the war.
Former prime minister Mikhail Fradkov, who was also Putin's longest-serving SVR foreign intelligence spy chief and now heads the board of weapons-maker Almaz-Antey, could be fired and even face criminal action over the failings, according to Telegram channel Sanctions RF.
So could the state-owned arms company's director-general Yan Novikov, said the report.
'Disassembling has begun in the Russian Defence Ministry due to the fact that the S-400…cannot properly protect airspace and is not even able to protect itself [from HIMARS attacks],' said the report.
Putin is said to be considering sacking Mikhail Fradkov, former prime minister and head of arms-maker Almaz-Antey, over the S-400s failings
Colonel Sergey Kuzminov (left) and Lt Colonel Alexey Tikhonov (right), have both been confirmed killed in Ukraine, bringing the total number of dead colonels to 62
Colonel Sergey Kens, 42, was also confirmed dead in Ukraine - though it is not clear when, where or how exactly he died
'The technical characteristics of the flagship air defence system were overestimated many times, and the money allocated for the development of the S-400 was successfully stolen.
'The deception surfaced recently, when the S-400s failed to shoot down a single HIMARS missile either in the Donbas or in the Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions.
'Not only that - during an attack on a military base in Ilovaisk, HIMARS missiles destroyed the S-400 complex, which was supposed to protect the area from air strikes.'
Meanwhile three more Russian colonels were reported dead today, bringing the total to at least 63 killed during the war so-far as Putin's officers suffer shockingly-high casualties.
Lieutenant Colonel Aleksey Tikhonov appeared to have been killed in the Kherson region, which has been under heavy Ukrainian bombardment.
Tikhonov, in his early 40s, from Nizhny Novgorod region, served with the 46th brigade of the Russian National Guard.
It is unclear exactly where, when or how he died. Russia often delays reporting deaths for weeks in an attempt to obfuscate the toll of the war from the public.
Colonel Sergey Igorevich Kuzminov, an elite paratrooper commander, also appeared to have been killed in Kherson.
Kuzminov, also from the from Nizhny Novgorod region, had served with the 106th airborne division.
The third to die was 42-year-old Colonel Sergey Kens, commander of the 810th Separate Marine Brigade.
It is not clear when, where or who Colonel Kens died, though his passing was confirmed by local media.
17. Israel's Iron Dome would be ineffective against Russian missiles: Ukraine Defence Minister
Israel's Iron Dome would be ineffective against Russian missiles: Ukraine Defence Minister
Last Updated: 11th July, 2022 11:38 IST
Ukrainian Defence Minister Oleksii Reznikov on Sunday explained why the Israeli Iron Dome will be ineffective against Russian cruise and ballistic missiles.
Written By
Image: AP/@Reznikov/Facebook
In a sharp response to comments previously made by Kyiv's ambassador to Israel, Ukrainian Defence Minister Oleksii Reznikov on Sunday explained why the Israeli Iron Dome will be ineffective against Russian missiles. Speaking at a televised address, General Reznikov highlighted that the Iron Dome is manufactured to intercept mostly low-impact, slow-moving missiles, and as Ukraine is facing Russian cruise and ballistic missiles, it will mostly be unable to "deliver 100% protection."
"We all know the example of Israel, which protects the sky quite well...we all know the name Iron Dome but even it does not give 100% protection...Iron Dome does not protect against cruise and ballistic missiles," Reznikov said, as quoted by Ukraine Pravda.
Reznikov went on and added that with Russia continuing its brutal rampage, Ukraine will need "another air defence system" being developed in Israel and is available in the Czech Republic and the US. Reznikov, however, refused to divulge details on whether Kyiv was mulling purchasing such missile defence systems to intercept surface-to-air attacks.
"We need to develop our air defence/anti-missile defence system or to obtain one, including from our partners," the Ukrainian Defence Minister said. His contradictory remarks came after the Ukrainian envoy to Israel, Yevgen Korniychuk, in June, pushed Kyiv to purchase the surface-to-air missile defence system from Tel Aviv.
"We need Israeli assistance...I mean that we need military-technical support. We need Iron Dome...which will allow us to save our civilian women and children from the shelling of Russian missiles," Korniychuk had said.
Zelenskyy says 'will reshuffle cabinet ' to enhance post-war planning
Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is eyeing the reconstruction of the ex-Soviet nation as the conflict continues unabated. On Sunday, the embattled President told local media that he will reshuffle his cabinet to secure global confidence, tackle corruption and instances of collusion as well as plan post-war recovery. His announcement came after Zelenskyy citing "usual diplomatic practice" dismissed Ukrainian ambassadors to the Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Norway, and India last Saturday. He directed the other diplomats to step up efforts to secure foreign ties as the country was gearing up to refurbish the tattered economy.
18. Russian defence ministry says its forces hit Ukrainian hangars storing U.S.-made artillery weapons
I would expect more of this (if true) Certainly the Russians have to target the supply depots and supplies, especially for artillery systems which are so important to the fight.
Russian defence ministry says its forces hit Ukrainian hangars storing U.S.-made artillery weapons
Ukrainian service members fire a shell from a M777 Howitzer near a frontline, as Russia's attack on Ukraine continues, in Donetsk Region, Ukraine June 6, 2022. REUTERS/Stringer TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY
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July 10 (Reuters) - Russian forces struck two Ukrainian army hangars storing U.S.-produced M777 howitzers, a type of artillery weapon, near Kostantinovka in the Donetsk region, the Russian defence ministry said on Sunday.
(This story refiles to add source to headline)
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Reporting by Reuters; Editing by Alison Williams
19. China Lays Out Rules for Managing US Engagement in Asia Pacific
So nice of China to provide "ROE."
China Lays Out Rules for Managing US Engagement in Asia Pacific
Bloomberg News
July 11, 2022 at 2:54 AM EDT
China has handed the US a blueprint for their co-existence in Asia Pacific, as the world’s two largest economies continue to clash in the region on security issues.
Chinese Foreign Minster Wang Yi said he’d made the proposal to his US counterpart Antony Blinken during their five-hour meeting in Bali over the weekend. Wang expanded on its details while addressing the secretariat of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in Jakarta on Monday.
“I told the US side very solemnly that our two sides should consider discussing the establishment of rules for positive interactions in APAC and jointly uphold open regionalism,” Wang said. “We look forward to feedback from the US side to the Chinese proposal.”
Wang identified China’s suggested “rules” as being: Support Asean centrality and uphold existing regional cooperation frameworks; respect each others’ legitimate rights and interests in the Asia Pacific; and promote stability while providing “more public goods” to the region.
“If China and the US can have sound interactions in APAC it could help release positive energy and also meet the expectations of all regional countries,” he added, saying achieving all this hinged on the US rising above its “hegemonic mentality.”
The US Embassy in Beijing didn’t respond immediately to an email requesting comment Monday.
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China and the US are increasingly vying for influence in the Indo-Pacific, where Beijing has territorial disputes with Washington’s allies. Chinese officials have also recently asserted the Taiwan Strait isn’t international waters, challenging Washington’s view of international law. In his speech, Wang described the question of democratically ruled Taiwan that the Communist Party considers part of its sovereign territory as “the core of China’s core interests.”
In that environment, President Joe Biden hosted the first Asean leaders summit in Washington its 55-year history in May and shortly after unveiled his Indo-Pacific Economic Framework as the US seeks limit China’s regional clout.
Wang is currently on an 11-day diplomatic blitz across the key strategic battleground, seeking to assuage regional suspicions of China’s intentions by emphasizing shared economic benefits. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has stoked fears Beijing could take military action in places like Taiwan.
As well as the proposal for the US, over the weekend Wang issued four demands to Australia to get relations back on track. That was quickly rejected by Australia, with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese saying the nation “doesn’t respond to demands.”
Most Asian nations have sought to maintain good relations with both countries. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told a security forum in Singapore last month that smaller nations should be “free to choose, free to prosper and free to chart their own course.”
Wang hit on this problem, saying many countries in Asean were “under pressure” to take sides. “We should insulate this region from geopolitical calculations, he added, and prevent them from being “used as chess pieces in major power rivalry.”
— With assistance by Colum Murphy, and Norman Harsono
20. The Case That Could Blow Up American Election Law
I am not a lawyer or legal scholar but I cannot see how this could be accepted as a rational argument and that any justice on the Supreme Court could even entertain this theory. it seems to go against the very foundation of our republican form of government - separation of power and checks and balances. This seems to be a recipe for imposing authoritarian government.
The Case That Could Blow Up American Election Law
A radical and baseless legal theory could upend the country’s most essential democratic process.
The Atlantic · by Thomas Wolf, Ethan Herenstein · July 11, 2022
Members of the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority just last week took the next step in a little-noticed, but extremely dangerous, project: attempting to jam into law a radical misinterpretation of the Constitution’s elections and electors clauses, which, if successful, would create electoral chaos across the country. Before next summer, and well in advance of the 2024 presidential election, the Court could strip state courts and state constitutions of their ability to check and balance state legislators when they make laws for federal elections, giving partisan majorities near-total control over how voters cast ballots and how those ballots are counted. And it would make the current Court—which already has a horrible track record on voting rights—the ultimate judge of whether the legislatures’ actions are legal.
The notion at the core of their project—the so-called independent-state-legislature theory—is on the fringes of American jurisprudence, so far out there that its few proponents have struggled to dredge up even the barest scraps of case law and history to substantiate it. But its supporters on the Court seem to believe they’ve found a shortcut around all of that with a case named Moore v. Harper, which they’ve just added to the Court’s docket for its term starting this fall.
The appeal traces back to this February, when the North Carolina Supreme Court undid an extreme partisan gerrymander of the state’s congressional map that would have given Republicans a large advantage in races for House seats. Several Republican state legislators asked the Supreme Court to restore the biased map for this spring’s primary elections. Their emergency filings claimed that the North Carolina state supreme court didn’t have the power to even review the legislatively drawn congressional map, despite the fact that the map violated several guarantees in the state’s constitution, because, in their view, neither state courts nor state constitutions should have a say in how federal elections are run.
If the legislators’ theory sounds radical, that’s because it is. It’s based on a stark misreading of the constitutional provisions that assign responsibility for regulating federal elections. Those clauses give that power to the “legislature” of each state (while reserving to Congress the ultimate power to set the rules). Fixating on the term legislature, proponents of the theory insist that the clauses grant exclusive and nearly unlimited power to those legislatures to run federal elections. The ordinary checks and balances of democracy—such as executive officers vetoing laws and courts reviewing and striking down the legislature’s acts—fall by the wayside. The theory would create a vacuum of lawlessness in the most dangerous of places: elections.
Unsurprisingly, the theory was a crucial instrument for would-be election subverters hunting for any lever to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. It was a prominent talking point in President Donald Trump’s public campaign to undercut the validity of the results. In interviews following the election, President Trump himself invoked the theory, saying that “the legislatures of the states did not approve all of the things that were done for those elections.” And it was a key element of the litigation challenging which ballots should be counted in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
The Supreme Court rejected these challenges in the fall of 2020, and that should have been the final word on the theory. But Justice Samuel Alito, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, wrote a “statement” validating the theory, in addition to dissents and concurrences to similar effect. And they sent the theory back out into the world with new momentum for a quick return. In doing so, these justices had, by the sheer power of their office, converted nonsense hastily cobbled together for desperate legal challenges into a litigation position that wouldn’t lead to the lawyers getting sanctioned. And they emboldened the North Carolina gerrymanderers to try their luck with the U.S. Supreme Court after they struck out with the North Carolina Supreme Court.
In March, the Court declined the legislators’ emergency petition with an unsigned order. But Alito—again joined by Thomas and Gorsuch—issued yet another dissent that all but asked the Republican legislators to file a full appeal to put their gerrymander back in place after the 2022 elections. (A concurrence from Justice Brett Kavanaugh suggested much the same.) The legislators obliged just 10 days later with a petition to the Supreme Court citing Alito’s dissent with its own meager citations as their justification. The Court has now repaid the favor by taking their appeal up for argument.
As is true with most decisions to grant a case a hearing, the justices did not explain their reason for taking the case. But Alito’s earlier dissent sheds light on the basic dynamic driving this dispute forward: a few justices actively stumping for an opportunity to turn their musings into law, as soon as possible, no matter how transparently baseless those musings are.
Alito’s dissent framed the theory at the core of the legislators’ appeal as an “exceptionally important and recurring question”—the sort of issue that the Court is normally supposed to step in and decide. But, to the extent that the theory is a “recurring question,” that’s only because these same justices keep talking about it. Indeed, the eight citations Justice Alito offered to support his call to take up the theory don’t show any recurring questions—other than ones that Alito, Thomas, and Gorsuch are asking themselves.
Four of Alito’s eight citations were to orders in 2020 election cases, but none of them supports the theory. Three of the four citations point to lawsuits that were based on the theory and were rejected, and the fourth had nothing to do with it. None contains even a shred of language suggesting that the theory might have merit or pointing to legitimate questions about its correctness. The fifth citation was to a concurrence (read: not even the majority view) in Bush v. Gore, the 2000 case that the Court itself essentially said should never be cited to resolve any future cases. That concurrence was hastily buried by the Court and lay untouched for decades, until Kavanaugh threw it into a footnote in a concurring opinion from a 2020 election case. The other three were dissents and concurrences from various 2020 elections cases … written by Alito, Thomas, and Gorsuch.
What’s more, Alito’s dissent cites no opinions from trial courts or appellate courts endorsing the theory or demonstrating a conflict among courts about its correctness—one of the most common grounds for the Supreme Court taking a case. And the dissent is devoid of other authorities, such as law-review articles, that a justice might reference to show the outline of a new, but valid, theory.
No wonder. In the two years since these justices have started touting the theory, a flurry of scholarship has debunked it from every conceivable angle: the plain meaning of the Constitution’s text, undisputed history of the founding era, a century of unbroken practice and precedent, and common sense. And there’s no meaningful difference of opinion among the lower courts. The legislators attempted to talk around these issues and beef the theory up in their filings, but their case is no stronger for it.
There’s no good reason, in other words, to believe that a case based on the theory can win. Except a few justices’ assertion that it might.
So when Alito writes that the Court “will have to resolve this question sooner or later,” he isn’t making an observation about the state of the law or some inevitable wave crashing upon the Court. He’s foretelling a crisis he’s creating.
If the Court follows through with transforming the legislators’ theory into law, American democracy will suffer. The theory wouldn’t just give broad license to extreme gerrymanders that would allow politicians to entrench themselves permanently against the voters’ will. It could also create pathways to invalidate basic and essential regulations created by state election officials to ensure that the machinery of elections works and that people can vote securely in emergencies. It could similarly undercut long-running state constitutional protections that shield people from discrimination at the ballot box and let them cast ballots in secret. It would place all the authority for future rule-making in the hands of state legislatures, among the most radically partisan political actors in the country today. It would hobble state courts’ authority to interpret these laws, limit state courts’ ability to review them for lawfulness under state constitutions, and put state courts under the superintendence of the country’s revanchist Supreme Court. That mayhem would result is an understatement.
The Court can still reject this dangerous theory. Only four votes are required to decide to hear a case, but five public votes are necessary to make law. Thus far, the justices have been moving their project forward through its below-the-radar and comparatively barebones emergency-appeals docket. Going forward, though, the case will be on what’s known as the Court’s merits docket, attracting everything that entails: full briefing by the parties (and this case has many of them) and friends of the court, public argument, and months of scrutiny in the press and on social media.
Any justice ultimately seeking to write an opinion in favor of the independent-state-legislature theory will struggle to produce a credible one in the face of the overwhelming facts and law opposing it. Any such opinion will be even more transparently judicial fiat than even the Court’s recent roundly, and rightly, derided opinions expanding gun rights and eliminating constitutional protections for abortion rights.
The task now is to expose the baselessness and the radicalness of these justices’ latest project, as the public awakens to just how dangerous this Court really is, and its reverence for the Court plummets. Then perhaps the justices who have been asking how far they can push things will start asking a different question: How long can they keep propping up the insupportable?
The Atlantic · by Thomas Wolf, Ethan Herenstein · July 11, 2022
21. US Special Operations Command's biggest exercise ever in Europe sends 'a strategic message' amid rising tension with Russia
US Special Operations Command's biggest exercise ever in Europe sends 'a strategic message' amid rising tension with Russia
US Army Green Berets fast-rope out of a Hungarian Mi-17 helicopter during Exercise Trojan Footprint, April 28, 2022.
US Army/Sgt. Hannah Hawkins
- More than 3,300 special operators from 30 countries took part in Trojan Footprint 22 in May.
- The exercise was twice as big as it was last year, sending a message about NATO's resolve and capabilities.
- The exercise and its message come as Russia's war on Ukraine clouds the future of European security.
As Russia's war against Ukraine raged on, US Special Operations Command hosted its biggest exercise ever in Europe.
More than 3,300 special operators from 30 countries took part in Trojan Footprint 22 in May, doubling the size of last year's version of the exercise and sending a message about the special-operations capabilities of NATO and its partners.
Trojan Footprint 22 focused on mission command for special-operations units that rotate between the Baltics and the Black Sea. Moreover, according to the exercise's planners, it set the conditions for increased interoperability between special-operations forces and conventional units during "during combined, joint, and multi-domain warfare."
US Navy SEALs, British Royal Marines, and Romanian naval special forces train in Romania during Exercise Trojan Footprint 22, May 6, 2022.
US Army/Spc. Michael Germundson
Coming just a few months after Russia renewed its attack on Ukraine, Trojan Footprint 22's main scenario reflected the pre-war situation.
"It was designed to be a slow-boil — a low-intensity conflict that can span years but creates constant pressure in various ways," Derek Coker, lead exercise planner, said in a press release. "The adversary attacks certain nations' ability to govern, creating internal dissonance and infighting that hacks away at the legitimacy of these governments, in essence trying to demonstrate that these nations are unable to govern themselves."
The exercise ran from May 2 to May 13, and among the more than 3,300 special operators were commandos from Sweden and Finland, which have applied for NATO membership.
Beyond its size, Trojan Footprint 22 was the first time an exercise had a combined joint force headquarters that simulated the joint command of several special-operations units from different NATO militaries.
Croatian army special forces joint terminal attack controllers identify a target for US Air Force F-16s during Exercise Trojan Footprint 22 in Croatia, May 11, 2022.
US Army/Sgt. Patrik Orcutt
From the US special-operations community, the 10th Special Forces Group took the lead. The Green Berets of the unit are always on the frontlines, training with and advising NATO allies and members in Europe.
Planning for exercises like Trojan Footprint begins more than a year in advance, and while its focus seems heavy on US special operations, it really improves interoperability of the forces involved, John Black, a retired Army Special Forces warrant officer, told Insider.
"For America to work with its allies [and] with an ever-changing threat situation globally, it's important for us to be able to work fluidly with another nation, and Trojan footprint provides a great base and foundation for that to happen," added Black, who was on the ground during Trojan Footprint 22.
Russia in the background
US pilots fly an AC-130J gunship over Poland during Exercise Trojan Footprint, May 6, 2022.
US Air Force/Staff Sgt. Max Daigle
The exercise took place amid unprecedented events in Europe. Russia's attack on Ukraine is the continent's largest conflict since World War II, and the exercise in May was the first time since the attack began in February that NATO special operators from so many countries have trained together.
While events in Ukraine were on the participants' minds, they didn't let that war take away from Trojan Footprint 22.
"From my perspective it really wasn't a focus or concern," Black said. "We just really wanted to work with our partnered nations to accomplish a large list of training tasks and improve our relationships with that country."
"It was great to see many nations that are very capable and have a fighting force. For me, this reinforced my belief in a safer tomorrow," the retired Green Beret added.
Croatian naval special forces and members of US Naval Special Warfare do a night-time dive exercise in Croatia during exercise Trojan Footprint, May 4, 2022.
US Army/Sgt. Patrik Orcutt
As the special-operations component of US European Command, Special Operations Command Europe is a constant presence in Europe and frequently trains with allies and partners there to build their capabilities and counter malign activities — mainly those of Russia.
"One of our priorities is building resilience against adversary efforts to undermine democratic processes and values. This joint, combined training in Europe will continue to build and strengthen those relationships with our allies and partners, establishing a common sight-picture for combat and peacekeeping missions abroad," Maj. Gen. David Tabor, the head of Special Operations Command Europe, said in the release.
Stavros Atlamazoglou is a defense journalist specializing in special operations, a Hellenic Army veteran (national service with the 575th Marine Battalion and Army HQ), and a Johns Hopkins University graduate.
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
