Quotes of the Day:
"The Constitution is the guide which I never will abandon."
- George Washington
“In the end, it’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years”
- Abraham Lincoln
“A house divided against itself cannot stand.”
- Abraham Lincoln
“It is much easier at all times to prevent an evil than to rectify mistakes.”
- George Washington
1. Ukraine Conflict Update 3 (Institute for the Study of War)
2. Brilliant strategy or too much information? The U.S. shares Ukraine secrets with the world
3. Give Joe Biden Credit For His Handling of the Ukraine Crisis
4. Joe Biden Is Convinced Russia Will Invade Ukraine. Putin Will Regret it.
5. The Cyber Social Contract
6. The Pros and Cons of ‘Deterrence by Disclosure’
7. US Army Pacific Commander: Next war will be violent, very human, unpredictable and long
8. U.S. says Russia has a list of Ukrainians to kill or detain after an invasion.
9. China’s Ukraine Crisis
10. Behind China’s Warning Against a Russian Invasion Is a Desire to Protect Ties With the U.S.
11. Kremlin says no concrete plans for summit with Biden over Ukraine
12. Would Sanctions Mean Russia Launches a Cyberwar Against America?
13. Words Versus Deeds in Biden’s Indo-Pacific Strategy
14. Flunking the New York Times Test: Making Sense of Russian “Covert” Action
15. How to Respond to Gray Zone Aggression in the Indo-Pacific
16. Assessing China’s Strategy to “Hide Capabilities and Bide Time”
17. Biden Agrees to Putin Summit Provided Russia Pulls Back From Ukraine Attack
18. India’s Stance on Ukraine Leaves West Scrambling As Jaishankar Calls Out Hypocrisy, Slams China
19. The New York Times’ fake news has a Russian accent
20. Why Russia won’t invade Ukrainistan
21. Human rights? China won that Winter Olympics battle. Almost.
22. In an Information War, Be Careful What You Amplify
23. Workplace Harassment Undermines Pentagon Spying in Europe, Documents Say
1. Ukraine Conflict Update 3 (Institute for the Study of War)
UKRAINE CONFLICT UPDATE 3
Institute for the Study of War, Russia Team
Russia will likely attack Ukraine the week of February 21, 2022. The Kremlin has deployed sufficient military forces and set informational conditions to conduct offensive operations including limited incursions into unoccupied Ukraine, a comprehensive air and missile campaign, and large-scale mechanized drives on Kyiv and other major Ukrainian cities.
Key Takeaways February 20
- Kremlin Spokesperson Peskov claimed Ukraine cannot and will not implement the Minsk II Accords, marking a significant change in Kremlin rhetoric that Russia could use as a pretext for further escalation.
- The Belarusian Defense Minister announced Russian troops deployed in Belarus will remain in the country after the conclusion of Russian-Belarusian exercises—enabling an indefinite Russian military presence in Belarus.
- Russia began testing its nuclear early warning system as part of ongoing exercises intended to deter any NATO response to Russian actions against Ukraine.
- French President Emmanuel Macron proposed a renewed ceasefire (unsuccessfully, as of publication) in Donbas in back-to-back phone calls with Putin and Zelensky.
- The Kremlin intensified its disinformation efforts to generate the false appearance of a Ukrainian genocide against Russians in Donbas through evacuation efforts and false claims of Ukrainian targeting of civilians.
- A CBS national security correspondent claimed the US has intelligence that Russian commanders already received direct orders to invade Ukraine, but no US official confirmed the claim.
- Turkish officials decried the further imposition of sanctions on Russia and refrained from condemning Russia’s military buildup to retain its balancing relationship with the Kremlin.
Key Events February 19, 2pm EST – February 20, 2pm EST
Military Events
Belarusian Defense Minister Viktor Khrenin announced Russian forces currently deployed to Belarus will remain there indefinitely during a press briefing about the conclusion of joint Russian-Belarusian “Union Resolve 2022” exercises on February 20.[1] Khrenin stated that Russian President Vladimir Putin and Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko decided to “continue testing” Union State forces due to the “aggravation of the situation of Donbas.” Khrenin accused NATO and the West of “pumping up” states near the Union State—referring to Ukraine, Poland, and the Baltic States—with weapons, increasing their military posture against the Union State without advanced warning, and prioritizing “offensive means.” Khrenin accused the West of refusing to accept the Kremlin’s demanded “red lines” for the “security architecture of Europe.” Khrenin additionally parroted Russian Foreign Ministry rhetoric about the West undermining the “principle of the indivisibility of security” for the first time. Khrenin did not specify what Russian forces would remain in Belarus. Russian forces will likely permanently deploy to Belarus, as ISW has previously forecasted.[2]
Khrenin additionally outlined the outcomes of the exercises and stated that unified combat formations of Russian and Belarusian pilots, mechanized units, tank units, paratroopers, special forces, missilemen, and artillerymen operated with a high level of cooperation. Joint forces also addressed support issues and worked out an effective logical support system that enabled an effective Russian-Belarusian coalition. Khrenin praised the use of modern weapons systems and exchange of military expertise and experience between Russian and Belarusian troops. He thus concluded that “Union Resolve” achieved its intended goals and confirmed the cooperative capabilities of Russian and Belarusian forces in the face of Western pressure.
Russia’s ballistic early warning network, the Russian 15th Aerospace Special Forces Army, began command and staff training in Moscow on February 20 as part of ongoing Russian nuclear exercises likely intended to deter a NATO response to any Russian offensive against Ukraine.[3] Over 800 personnel from command, logistics, armaments, and other unspecified elements of the Titov Main Test and Space Systems Control Center, 820th Main Center for Missile Attack Warning, and the 821st Main Center for Reconnaissance of Situation in Space participated in the command and staff training. These elements comprise Russia’s early warning network against ballistic missile attacks. These exercises are likely part of the "GROM-2022” nuclear triad exercises that began on February 19.
Russia’s 49th Combined Arms Army of the Southern Military District (SMD) continued general readiness exercises on February 20.[4] Unspecified regiment-sized (over 1,500 personnel) tank, motorized rifle, and artillery elements conducted company-level exercises at the Nikolo-Alexandrovsky Training Ground in Stavropol Krai. The elements conducted live fires with 152mm howitzers, multiple launch rocket systems, and T-72B3 tanks to destroy targets at distances of up to 4,000 meters. Reconnaissance, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), and signal elements of the SMD conducted support tasks.
Approximately 10 Russian Black Sea fleet ships, including the large landing ships "Novocherkassk," "Saratov," and “Tsezar Kunikov” passed through the Kerch Strait into the Sea of Azov on February 20.[5] Russian Black Sea Fleet anti-submarine and patrol ships patrolled the Kerch Strait before moving to the Sea of Azov, according to local sources.[6] Russian authorities issued a NOTAM (Notice to Air Missions) alert over the Sea of Azov for February 21-26.[7]
Russian social media users observed unspecified S-300 air defense elements in Kursk Oblast and Aleksandrovka, Belgorod Oblast heading towards Ukraine on February 19-20.[8] The social media users observed at least 12 vehicles in Kursk Oblast on February 19 and 3 in Belgorod Oblast on February 20.
Russian Activity
The Kremlin intensified the tempo of the mass evacuations of women and children from the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics (DNR and LNR) to Russia to generate the appearance of a genocide against Russians in Donbas between February 19 and February 20. Russia’s Emergency Situations Ministry stated that over 53,000 DNR and LNR residents evacuated to Russia as of February 20.[9] The governors of Russia’s Voronezh, Kursk, and Ryazan oblasts declared states of emergency in response to refugee influxes on February 20.[10] Rostov Oblast authorities stated that Rostov Oblast is prepared to receive approximately 14,000 refugees on February 20.[11] At least six trains transported approximately 5,000 DNR and LNR residents to Russia on February 20.[12] The Kremlin likely seeks to intensify its evacuation over the coming days. A prominent Russian Duma deputy from Rostov stated that 170,000 residents of the DNR and LNR are currently applying for Russian citizenship with Russian migration services on February 20.[13] The Kremlin will likely use the claim of threats to civilians in Donbas to justify a Russian military deployment to Donbas or other, more serious military operations against Ukraine.
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov claimed on February 20 that Western states are abandoning negotiations with Russia after the Kremlin only received two responses to 37 letters Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov sent to OSCE member states on January 28.[14] Lavrov’s original letters demanded that individual Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) member states respond to Russian security demands individually and not as a bloc, in a Kremlin attempt to undermine Western unity. Ryabkov claimed that the recipients of the letters are “leaving this conversation in a defiant way” by not responding to Russian demands.[15] The European Union and NATO each submitted a collective response to the Kremlin that did not capitulate to core Russian demands on February 10. The Kremlin previously stated that Moscow would not accept a group response and that Moscow requires detailed responses from individual states.
Kremlin Spokesperson Dmitry Peskov claimed that Putin believes Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky “cannot, does not want [to], and will not” implement the Minsk II Accords in an interview on the Russia 1 TV channel on February 20.[16] Peskov stated Ukraine’s only option is to directly negotiate with Russia’s proxies, the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics (DNR and LNR). Peskov denied Ukrainian statements that Moscow has refused to communicate with Ukrainian leadership. Peskov claimed that the Kremlin has asked Kyiv what Ukraine wished to discuss and did not receive a response. Peskov additionally stated that Western allegations of Russian plans to invade Ukraine have fueled tensions and that daily speculation of the date of an invasion “can have detrimental consequences.”[17]
Peskov’s statement on February 20 is a significant change in tone in Kremlin rhetoric about Ukraine's intent to never implement the Minsk II Accords and is the closest the Kremlin has come to formally nullifying the Minsk II Accords. Kremlin messaging up to this point has emphasized that Ukraine seeks to sabotage the Minsk II Accords and has called on Ukraine to implement the accords, without explicitly stating that Ukraine "will not" implement these accords. The Kremlin could use the claim that Ukraine will never implement the Minsk II accords as a pretext for overtly deploying forces to the occupied Donbas
Proxy Activity
The Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics (DNR and LNR) escalated their accusations of ongoing Ukrainian plans to attack Donbas on February 20. DNR claims from February 20 emphasized false threats about Ukrainian terrorist attacks against the DNR. The DNR claimed that it found and destroyed explosives caches belonging to Ukrainian sabotage groups, that it apprehended a “terrorist group” that sought to conduct explosive attacks against critical DNR civilian infrastructure, and that it recorded five sabotage attack attempts against the DNR since mid-February on February 20.[18] The DNR reiterated accusations that the West is pushing Ukraine to attack Donbas, claiming that “Kyiv, with the approvals of the Westerners, began implementing the invasion plan for the [DNR’s] territory,” on February 20.[19] LNR claims from February 20 emphasized an accusation that heavy Ukrainian shelling killed two LNR civilians.[20] The Kremlin supported the LNR’s claims about Ukrainian forces killing two LNR civilians; Russia’s Investigative Committee announced that it would open a criminal investigation of “the Ukrainian Armed Forces’ crimes on the territory of Donbas” on February 20.[21] The Kremlin may claim that Ukrainian forces “killed Russian citizens in Donbas” as a pretext to justify new Russian military operations against Ukraine as ISW previously forecasted.[22]
Belarusian Activity
N/A
Ukrainian Activity
Ukrainian Permanent Representative to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) Yevhenii Tsymbaliuk on February 20 requested an extraordinary meeting of the OSCE Permanent Committee for February 21.[23] Tsymbaliuk placed the request for the OSCE to discuss Russia’s military buildup near Ukraine and explore paths for de-escalation.
US Activity
US officials voiced continued concern Russia will likely invade unoccupied Ukraine but maintained that a diplomatic path is still possible in press engagements on February 20. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Russia and Belarus’ continuing joint military exercises follow the Russian “playbook” of creating provocations to justify further escalations in an interview with CNN.[24] Blinken noted the joint exercises and numerous false flag operations give “every indication” that Russian invasion plans are already in motion. Blinken and Vice President Kamala Harris underscored united international support for sweeping sanctions against Russia should an invasion occur, although Harris acknowledged some differences between NATO allies on the parameters of sanctions in a press conference.[25] Blinken and Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby separately reiterated that the United States has offered Putin several diplomatic options and will continue to peacefully attempt to deter and dissuade Russia until an invasion begins, including Blinken’s planned meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on February 24.[26] Blinken clarified that US recognition of Crimea or Eastern Ukraine as Russian territories is non-negotiable when asked during an interview on CBS’s Face the Nation.[27]
CBS News national security correspondent David Martin reported that the US has intelligence that Russian commanders have received direct orders to proceed with an invasion of Ukraine on CBS’s Face the Nation on February 20.[28] Martin said Russian commanders on the ground are making specific plans for how they would maneuver in their sectors of the battlefield. Martin emphasized that Russian commanders have received direct orders and are “doing everything that American commanders would do once they got the order to proceed.” No US official has publicly confirmed that Russian forces have received orders to invade as of February 20.
NATO and EU Activity
N/A
Other International Organization Activity
Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) Secretary General Stanislav Zas said the CSTO could “hypothetically” deploy peacekeepers to Donbas with Ukrainian consent, member state support, and a United Nations mandate in an interview with Reuters on February 17.[29] Reuters published the interview with Zas on February 19.[30] Reuters reported that Zas said that the CSTO has 17,000 personnel at “constant readiness,” a specialized “peacekeeping” force of approximately 4,000 personnel and that the CSTO can swiftly deploy the “needed” number of personnel to Ukraine immediately. Zas stated that only diplomacy can solve the Ukraine crisis. The Kremlin may frame a future overt Russian deployment to the occupied parts of eastern Ukraine as a “CSTO Peacekeeping mission.”
Individual Western Allies’ Activity
French President Emmanuel Macron attempted to negotiate a ceasefire in Donbas through bilateral calls with Ukrainian President Zelensky and Russian President Putin on February 20. Macron and Putin discussed convening the trilateral contact group among the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), Ukraine, and Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics (DNR and LNR) to oversee a possible ceasefire in Donbas. Russia previously boycotted the two most recent OSCE meetings on February 18 and 19.[31] The Kremlin readout stated that Putin and Macron also agreed to resume dialogue in the Normandy Format at the foreign ministry- and political advisors- levels. The Kremlin may slow down or later refuse to pursue a ceasefire if it assesses the negotiations as detrimental to its calculus, however. The Kremlin criticized NATO and Ukraine for pursuing a military solution, refusing to implement the Minsk II Accords, and claimed that Ukraine’s “intensifying shelling” necessitated civilian evacuations from the DNR and LNR to Russia. The French readout of Macron’s call with Zelensky stated Macron praised Ukraine’s restraint and that Zelensky reiterated his determination to respect the ceasefire by not reacting to Russian proxy provocations. Zelensky’s office did not issue a readout of the call with Macron as of February 20 at 3:30 EST.
Turkish officials urged diplomatic talks and de-escalation on Ukraine instead of sanctions against Russia in several statements on February 19-20.[32] Turkish Presidential Spokesperson Ibrahim Kalin stated that additional sanctions against Russia would undermine or delay a diplomatic solution in an interview with German newspaper Die Welt on February 19.[33] Kalin criticized Russian President Vladimir Putin for seeking to redraw Russia‘s borders but urged states to listen to Russia and pursue mutual diplomacy, even if they do not fulfill Russian demands. Kalin also criticized Western and Russian statements for exacerbating tensions and recommended a flexible diplomatic approach—citing Turkey’s existing relations with Russia despite disagreements about Crimea and Libya. Kalin reiterated Turkey’s commitment to mediate between Russia and Ukraine both through NATO channels and bilaterally. Kalin additionally stated Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan will reiterate his offer to host Putin and Ukranian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Istanbul, Turkey, during a likely upcoming phone call on an unspecified date with Putin.
Separately, Turkish Chief of the General Staff Yasar Guler and NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe Tod Wolters discussed recent developments in NATO over the phone on February 20. Prior to the call, Turkish Defense Minister Hulusi Akar urged caution against the risk of possible escalations due to disinformation campaigns and underlined the need for stability in the Black Sea region in a speech.[34] Akar attended the Munich Security Conference in Munich, Germany on February 18-19 but his official agenda and Turkish meeting readouts did not focus on Ukraine.[35] Ankara has recently played down the Russian military buildup compared to other NATO allies, likely due to its fragile partnership with Russia. It has not urged its citizens to leave Ukraine as of February 20 and limited its official statements on Ukraine after the most recent escalations near the Ukrainian border despite its ongoing defense cooperation with Ukraine.
UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss announced the UK will establish a new anti-disinformation center against Russia during an interview with the Daily Mail on February 19.[36] Truss stated the UK’s “Russia-Ukraine Government Information Cell (GIC)” will expose disinformation and rebut false narratives. Truss warned that Russian disinformation campaigns have doubled in the past week and may serve as a false flag excuse for Russia to invade Ukraine. Truss stated the new GIC unit is the first revival of the UK’s original information units that it disbanded after the Cold War. Truss also warned that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine may encourage the Kremlin to pursue similar stated ambitions against other eastern European and Baltic states, including NATO allies. Truss also criticized the coordinated Chinese-Russian pressure against the right of new states to freely join NATO.
UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson highlighted the potential human cost of a Russian attack on Ukraine, stated the US and UK could suspend Russian companies from trading in pounds and dollars and underscored NATO’s resoluteness should Russia invade in an interview with the BBC on February 20.[37] Johnson claimed a Russian invasion has “in some senses begun.” Johnson said that western intelligence sources believe Russia intends to encircle the Ukrainian capital Kyiv in what would be “the biggest war in Europe” since World War II. Johnson warned this would be a “bloody and protracted” conflict that would be catastrophic for human life. Johnson maintained that the UK and US are prepared to impose extensive sanctions on Russia, including suspending Russian companies from trading in pounds and dollars. Johnson emphasized that NATO leaders learned from Putin’s annexation of Crimea and that Putin will “get more NATO” if he invades Ukraine.
The Canadian Government delivered a security assistance payload to Kyiv, Ukraine, on February 19.[38] Ukraine’s defense minister stated that the shipment included unspecified rifles, machine guns, night vision and surveillance devices, and other military equipment.
Other International Activity
N/A
[12] https://rg dot ru/2022/02/20/reg-cfo/eshche-shest-poezdov-perevezut-v-regiony-rossii-5-tysiach-bezhencev-iz-donbassa.html; https://tass dot ru/obschestvo/13774293; https://tass dot ru/obschestvo/13772091; https://tass dot ru/obschestvo/13773767.
[13] https://iz dot ru/1294227/2022-02-20/okolo-950-tys-zhitelei-donbassa-podali-zaiavleniia-na-grazhdanstvo-rossii.
[16] https://iz dot ru/1294249/2022-02-20/peskov-zaiavil-o-nezhelanii-zelenskogo-vypolniat-minskie-soglasheniia
[18] https://tass dot ru/proisshestviya/13773331; https://iz dot ru/1294161/2022-02-20/v-donetcke-blokirovali-diversionno-terroristicheskuiu-gruppu; https://iz dot ru/1294190/2022-02-20/v-dnr-zafiksirovali-piat-diversii-s-nachala-eskalatcii-v-donbasse.
2. Brilliant strategy or too much information? The U.S. shares Ukraine secrets with the world
Interview with former acting CIA director John McLaughlin.
I think it is the right strategy for the given conditions and situation. I am supportive of anything that helps us to attack the enemy's strategy (recognize, understand, expose, and attack).
Brilliant strategy or too much information? The U.S. shares Ukraine secrets with the world
As the Ukraine crisis deepens, the Biden administration has regularly chosen to disclose highly sensitive information to bolster its case. Is that a good idea?
Tom Nagorski
Global Editor
February 18, 2022
In the high-stakes diplomatic and military maneuvering that surrounds the Ukraine crisis, the U.S. has engaged in a steady public release of classified information. Details about Russian troop movements and military planning, alleged Kremlin plans to create a video showing a fictional Ukrainian atrocity — the disclosures have been frequent, and well-publicized. They are also highly unusual. The releases hark back to the Cuban missile crisis nearly six decades ago, when the U.S. showed the Soviet Union — and the rest of the world — aerial reconnaissance photographs of Soviet missiles on Cuban territory. Historians later credited the public presentation of those photographs with helping pull the two countries back from the brink of a nuclear war.
The stakes aren’t quite as high today, but the current strategy is similar in that it is aimed at showing the world what U.S. intelligence says it knows about Russia’s military plans and disinformation campaigns. It’s also clearly meant to show Russian President Vladimir Putin how much the world knows about what he’s up to.
How unusual is such an approach? What are its potential risks and benefits, for Ukraine and beyond?
Grid put these questions to former acting CIA director John McLaughlin.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Grid: It seems that almost every other day we get some remarkable and granular detail about what is going on along the Russian border with Ukraine, and in Moscow; detail about what the United States intelligence community is seeing. It’s almost as if we are sitting in the Situation Room getting a very classified briefing. How unusual is this?
John McLaughlin: What we’re seeing now, in the release of intelligence, is unprecedented. It’s a common request from the policy community — in the past, I’ve so frequently heard them say, “This is great intelligence, it’s great stuff, but we can’t use it.” Meaning we can’t go public with it. Policy people always want, understandably, to be able to deploy intelligence as a way of throwing off, or combating something from an adversary. And the intelligence community typically has been conservative about that because it risks losing sources and methods.
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The intelligence community has, from time to time, released intelligence of a consequential nature. I was involved in this on North Korea, for example. But this is an unprecedented release of intelligence, both in terms of its granularity and its frequency.
In a way, for the first time that I’ve seen it, both sides are engaging in what might be called hybrid warfare, or gray warfare. Typically, the other side does it — this is a classic Russian technique to use a mix of information psychology, conventional forces, operational forces, maneuvers, all in some sort of choreographed way to throw you off-balance. This is the first time I’ve seen the U.S. join that dance — pretty much full-scale psychological warfare, information warfare, intelligence warfare. So when this is all over, I think it’s going to be viewed as a kind of watershed moment in this competition.
Grid: We’ve had no shortage of conflicts, and probably no shortage of debates like this one about whether to release information in this way. Why do you think this is the moment when it’s happened?
JM: I think the precedent has been broken here for a number of reasons. First, this conflict with Russia is much more pointed and with broader implications than the average conflict we get into. It’s something that affects the fate of another country, it affects the strength, cohesion and fate of a major alliance — NATO — and it affects our ability to test deployment of weapons and to test the cohesion of that alliance.
It has also put us into a position where we have a major weakness that we have to make up for — and that is that we have told the other side that we will not put military forces into Ukraine; we will not fight you on the ground. That takes away a huge card in a game like this.
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And so I think we’ve had to make up for it by this extraordinary use of other tools, one of which is the release of intelligence. So I think it’s combination of the seriousness of this conflict. And the fact that we’ve got one hand tied behind our back.
A new helicopter unit and battle group deployment consisting of tanks, armored personnel carriers and support equipment has deployed to Millerovo airfield, situated approximately 10 miles from the Ukraine border, seen here on Feb. 15, 2022, in Millerovo, Russia. (Satellite image ©2022 Maxar Technologies)
G: Broadly speaking, do you think it’s a good idea?
JM: I think it’s a good idea. Up to a point. It has clearly been effective in throwing Putin off balance, I believe. When you tell the world that someone is going to do something that is objectionable or illicit, and they actually are preparing to do it, I do think it causes them to hesitate, particularly when they care somewhat about what the world thinks of them.
Right now I think we are seeing one of the intelligence predictions play out in the Donbas in the eastern part of Ukraine. In other words, the prediction that the Russians would seek to cause a provocation in order to find an excuse to do something, maybe militarily, maybe diplomatically. So what has been predicted is playing out there now.
On the other hand, I don’t think this can be a permanent feature of our policy. Because after a while the novelty wears off. And after a while the other side, they won’t care.
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And there’s another downside to this, which is that you are taking a risk with how you acquire this information. If it’s human sources, well, people will be looking for them. And if it’s technical sources, say intercepts, people will tighten up their communication. The adversaries already are wary about talking on phones or talking electronically. So there is that risk.
When I say policymakers are sometimes frustrated that they can’t use something — with all due respect to the policy side of this equation, sometimes they don’t really care as much as the intelligence people do. Sometimes the attitude is, Well, if we lose a source, you guys will find another one. And remarkably enough, quite often the intelligence community does. I mean, we lost the satellite phone of [Osama] bin Laden, for example, because of a newspaper which talked about his satellite phone. And we found other means.
So there’s a risk-benefit calculus that has to go on here all the time. So I’d say, effective, but not something you want to do as an ongoing, regular tool of U.S. national security, tactics and strategy.
Grid: One quick follow-up, because you remind me of an example that was so detailed — involving the allegation that the Russians were not only going to fabricate and stage an atrocity, but that they were going to videotape it; it was going to be this whole televised production. It’s a very precise, detailed plan. Is that an example where you might be worried about how the United States acquired that intelligence, and it being compromised later?
JM: I think you have to worry about it. But there are ways to fuzz up what you’re revealing as well. You can make a code more complicated by some tweaks and adjustments, and more difficult to break. And with the revelation of intelligence, you can also sometimes send them down some blind trails, to throw them off in their search for how you created this, how you learned this.
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Now, there’s another aspect of this that’s worth mentioning. And here’s why this world I worked in is often called the wilderness of mirrors. Even with this downside risk, you’re also tying them [the Russians] up a bit. In other words, rather than focusing on their real mission — on you — they now have to spend some time looking internally. It churns up their system in a way that diminishes their attention and perhaps ability to focus. So it’s complicated, as all these things are.
But the bottom line is, they’re going to go looking for how you knew this. And that is going to create a risk for you, but it’s also going to tie them up in knots trying to figure it out.
Like I said, a wilderness of mirrors.
Grid: You’ve talked about the goal of unnerving the enemy — the Kremlin, in this case. To what extent is this also meant as a strategy to inform our allies and others what we know?
JM: I think that’s almost entirely it. I mean, it’s to influence the Russians, but this is why I call this a kind of hybrid war. Because you are marshaling opinion; you’re marshaling support for sanctions were this to happen, by exposing and by making very clear what the adversary is going to do. I’m sure that’s a conscious objective here.
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And look what it’s done already. You know, I’ve kept my eye on or been involved in NATO affairs for 40 years. I’ve never seen NATO quite this united, except maybe for a brief moment after 9/11, when they invoked Article V on our behalf. So Putin really has solidified not only cohesion in NATO, but has justified the fears that drove some of his former republics, like the Baltic States in particular, but also former satellites like Poland and Hungary and so forth into NATO. He’s shown everyone why that was, why they wanted to do that and why, and they must now think that that was a very good idea.
So in a way, this has all been very counterproductive for Putin.
Grid: Some have said, well, this has been successful. And we should do even more. There was a suggestion made that the United States should play a similar game with some of the Russian oligarchs and friends of Putin, and release material and information about them. Do you think there are other utilities for this kind of strategy?
JM: My view is that kind of ad hominem data would not be very effective. I don’t think it would have the effect or the seriousness of purpose that we’ve seen in these releases up to now. So I wouldn’t expect that to happen and I don’t think it would be a great idea.
Grid: You described this as a kind of a sea change in approach. Do you think this might have a long-lasting effect and change the relationship between the intelligence community and the executive branch going forward? Or is the current crisis just so unusual in lending itself to this approach?
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JM: There certainly will be pressure to continue this. If the strategy continues to be successful, I think that there will be pressure to continue it, sure. That’s almost inevitable. I don’t think it would be a good idea to continue it forever. But there’s a core effectiveness. There are effects of this that go beyond what we see on the surface. I mean, they must be asking themselves now, what’s going on here? What’s going on, that we’ve not seen this before?
I am reminded of something said by the great Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu back in the sixth century B.C. What I remember most vividly is his injunction that the wisest strategist is able to win without fighting. And I think that “win without fighting” is what we’re trying to do here. You know, a sixth-century B.C. strategy, but using 21st-century methods.
3. Give Joe Biden Credit For His Handling of the Ukraine Crisis
Conclusion:
Putin will likely still invade. Biden cannot stop that, nor can NATO. Putin is so attuned to diminishing perceptions of Russia as a great power, that he may well invade just to demonstrate national toughness, even if he knows the cost-benefit calculus is balance-negative. But Biden, to his credit and within the tight constraints of a wary US public and shirking NATO allies, has substantially raised those costs and may even have delayed the attack through his diplomatic offensive and information warfare. That is quite an achievement.
Give Joe Biden Credit For His Handling of the Ukraine Crisis
Laboring under tight political constraints, US President Joseph Biden is doing a remarkably good job on the Ukraine crisis. Russian President Vladimir Putin still has not ordered an invasion which cable news and western governments have been calling ‘imminent’ for almost two months. Even a delay is a success if a war is at stake, and it looks like Putin’s curious waiting game is due to Biden’s diplomatic surge and information operations against Moscow. It looks like Putin is having second thoughts and might want a way out of a war that could easily turn into a quagmire for the Russian army.
To be sure, it still looks like Putin will attack. And there is little directly Biden can do to stop that. But that is not Biden’s fault. This is no appetite for direct US-Russian conflict; everyone but the most unreconstructed neocons realizes how dangerous that would be. But on the issues adjacent to war itself, Biden is having a good crisis. He is illustrating how to use American power wisely, without the blind rushing-in which characterized the wars of the George W. Bush administration, or the lazy diplomacy and erratic flattery of authoritarians under President Donald Trump.
Honesty
Biden has been refreshingly blunt and honest on Ukraine. He has not danced around the likelihood of war; he has been straightforward in speaking to all the interested parties about the stakes and what the US will do. Particularly, he has been honest that the US will help Ukraine somewhat, but not that much. This is a shame in a way, of course; it would be ideal to shield Ukraine against Putin’s predation. But Biden is right that it is just too dangerous; the geopolitical stakes are too low for the West; and that Western publics simply do not want this war. Biden’s realism is honest, clarifying, and credible.
This contrasts with Trump’s penchant for surprises, exaggeration, and drama as if foreign policy were reality TV, and with all the lying and dissembling from various US administrations about the War on Terror – the Afghanistan Papers, the distortion of intelligence in 2002 before the Iraq War, the use of torture. It also contrasts with the empty promises the US made to Middle Eastern partners, such as the Kurds, anti-regime Syrian rebels, and translators. Just by speaking measuredly and believably, Biden has done a huge service to US credibility.
No Over-Extension
Biden has also not used Ukraine to reassert a massive forward presence of the US military in Europe or Asia. He is not falling for the interventionist argument – also made during his Afghan withdrawal – that the global rule-based order constantly hangs on whether or not the US gets involved in crises in small countries. Biden realizes that Ukraine is a limited crisis. It will be terrible indeed for the Ukrainian people, but it is not some massive tipping point of world order. It is not 1938.
In fact, this is precisely the dilemma Putin himself faces, and Biden is wisely letting Putin stew in his own errors. He fancies Russia a great power on the order of the United States or China, but Russia does not command the resources to prosecute what might well become a years-long quagmire counter-insurgency. Biden realizes that Putin is indeed a gangster who wishes to revise the map of Europe but lacks the means to do that. So there is no need for the US to overreach, expand the crisis, and create the possibility of yet another protracted US conflict, especially when China is rising.
NATO Unity, but Pushing Europe to the Fore
Biden has also kept NATO pretty united. French free-lancing and German malaise have been tricky but nothing along the lines of the Euro-American fracture Putin has been trying to sow for decades. NATO will probably support a Ukrainian insurgency if Russia invades, even if NATO membership for Ukraine is unlikely.
Biden has also wisely avoided over-Americanizing the crisis in order to keep nudging the Europeans to take care of their own security. One of the most disappointing outcomes of this mess is the stark revelation, again, of European geopolitical weakness. Ukraine is on the doorstep of the European Union but 5000 miles from the US homeland. Putin is a gangster and predator the Europeans must live next to indefinitely. Yet the continent’s default reflex, still, is to buck its problems to the Americans. That needs to stop, especially as the US must look more and more to China’s rise in East Asia.
President Joe Biden listens during a G7 Leaders’ virtual meeting Friday, Feb. 19, 2021, in the White House Situation Room. (Official White House Photo by Adam Schultz)
Trolling Putin
Soviet and later Russian use of disinformation campaigns is a well-established tool of Moscow. The US seems, finally, to have learned from that and begun responding in kind. The US intelligence community has been leaking selectively for weeks. Biden and western leaders have been trolling Putin about his intentions, throwing out invasion dates to knock Russian state-controlled media off balance. Western governments have widely noted that a faked Russian provocation – genocide no less – to justify an invasion is likely. The US has also released lots of satellite photography to make clear the Russian army’s movements. Biden has also been forthright about heavily sanctioning Russia if it attacks.
US information operations have clearly frustrated Putin and his subservient media. Moscow has been forced to spend a lot of time knocking down Western claims and claiming that it has no intention of invading Ukraine. Those claims of peaceful intent raise the later audience costs of war. Putin looks like he desperately wants a Western or Ukrainian pretext to invade but cannot find one.
Russian Tank. Image: Creative Commons.
Russian Tank. Image: Creative Commons.
All this information war pushback has also, apparently, stirred anxiety in the Russian military and public over an invasion: Will post-invasion Russia be so sharply sanctioned that it becomes economically dependent on China? Will Russia be kicked out of the SWIFT system? Will Western companies exit Russia? Will the ruble crash? Will a Western-supported insurgency in Ukraine turn into a re-run the disastrous Soviet counter-insurgency in Afghanistan in the 1980s?
Again, Biden’s contrast with Donald Trump’s erratic, lazy diplomacy, and appeasement and flattery of – even manipulation by – dictators like Putin or North Korea’s Kim Jong Un is stark.
What Now?
Putin will likely still invade. Biden cannot stop that, nor can NATO. Putin is so attuned to diminishing perceptions of Russia as a great power, that he may well invade just to demonstrate national toughness, even if he knows the cost-benefit calculus is balance-negative. But Biden, to his credit and within the tight constraints of a wary US public and shirking NATO allies, has substantially raised those costs and may even have delayed the attack through his diplomatic offensive and information warfare. That is quite an achievement.
Dr. Robert Kelly is a professor in the Department of Political Science at Pusan National University in South Korea and a 1945 Contributing Editor. Follow his work on his website or at Twitter.
4. Joe Biden Is Convinced Russia Will Invade Ukraine. Putin Will Regret it.
Excerpts:
Two questions remain regardless of what happens next in Kyiv. Was defending Ukraine’s right in principle to join NATO even if that membership remains highly unlikely for the foreseeable future worth risking a Russian invasion we won’t protect it from now? And would Putin’s conquest of Ukraine, however illegitimate, justify a new Cold War against post-communist Russia?
Such an outcome might give NATO a new purpose if members beyond the United States and the United Kingdom so desire. Russia’s increasing closeness with China, a more serious threat to U.S. interests than Moscow itself, is troubling.
But it is not clear whether our leaders have really thought this through. This includes Biden, who is trying to escape the shadow of his botched exit from Afghanistan. There too Biden had the correct policy, but the execution mattered. Here the president is trying to pivot to a new world in which there are limits to Washington’s ability while running off the Cold War’s fumes.
On Russia, many liberals are far removed from Alger Hiss. Today Russia is to their Resistance-addled minds the misinformation-spewing government that helped elect Donald Trump and Putin has admirers on the right. Meanwhile, the more hawkish conservative voices will characterize Biden’s inability to influence Putin as a sign of weakness.
The only saving grace is that wars of choice have in recent years gone poorly for the governments that have waged them. Even if Biden and the Western world lack options for imposing its will on the Kremlin, in the long run, this could be Putin’s folly.
Joe Biden Is Convinced Russia Will Invade Ukraine. Putin Will Regret it.
Will Russia invade Ukraine or not? A resigned President Joe Biden came out late Friday afternoon to suggest that the U.S. position on a Russian invasion of Ukraine was essentially this: Pray for peace, prepare for war.
That decision, Biden says, is to invade Ukraine. “We have reason to believe the Russian forces are planning to attack Ukraine in the coming week — the coming days,” he said from the White House’s Roosevelt Room. We believe that they will target Ukraine’s capital Kyiv.”
This was the culmination of days of messaging from the Biden administration. The door to diplomacy remains open until the moment Putin invades, but nobody inside the White House appears optimistic about swaying the Kremlin. Even when Putin briefly signaled he might blink, instead of declaring victory Biden’s team mostly treated it as the head fake it evidently was.
Where Biden is projecting optimism is that the West will remain united against Putin from here on out and that an invasion of Ukraine will prove costly to Moscow. The second contention may prove true no matter what kind of sanctions package can be cobbled together, depending on the extent of the Russian incursion.
We have had our own experience invading and occupying foreign lands over the past two decades. While Afghanistan and Iraq were far more alien to us than the Russian-speaking people of Ukraine are to the Putin regime, the lesson is clear that such exercises don’t always make the invading country stronger.
The Soviet Union’s own adventure in Afghanistan was similarly disastrous, hastening its defeat in the Cold War and ultimate collapse. Putin may seek to reverse the USSR’s disintegration, but Russia today is far poorer and weaker. It is no shape to occupy vast swathes of Ukraine past where the Russians might be welcome.
The first part of Biden’s hope is more debatable. Already, Germany is showing signs of equivocating. The Europeans are more economically interconnected, even with Russia, and are already enduring an energy crisis in the middle of winter that war in Ukraine could worsen. Will these allies hang together, especially if Putin limits his ambitions?
Biden has tried to take a reasonable position: We don’t want war with a nuclear-armed Russia and will not send troops to Ukraine, but do not believe Moscow should unilaterally redraw its neighbor’s borders by force. The problem is the former, however crucial, has always limited options for preventing the latter.
If unspecified sanctions don’t deter Putin, he was always secure in the knowledge that Ukraine was of far greater interest to him than it is to us.
Two questions remain regardless of what happens next in Kyiv. Was defending Ukraine’s right in principle to join NATO even if that membership remains highly unlikely for the foreseeable future worth risking a Russian invasion we won’t protect it from now? And would Putin’s conquest of Ukraine, however illegitimate, justify a new Cold War against post-communist Russia?
Such an outcome might give NATO a new purpose if members beyond the United States and the United Kingdom so desire. Russia’s increasing closeness with China, a more serious threat to U.S. interests than Moscow itself, is troubling.
But it is not clear whether our leaders have really thought this through. This includes Biden, who is trying to escape the shadow of his botched exit from Afghanistan. There too Biden had the correct policy, but the execution mattered. Here the president is trying to pivot to a new world in which there are limits to Washington’s ability while running off the Cold War’s fumes.
On Russia, many liberals are far removed from Alger Hiss. Today Russia is to their Resistance-addled minds the misinformation-spewing government that helped elect Donald Trump and Putin has admirers on the right. Meanwhile, the more hawkish conservative voices will characterize Biden’s inability to influence Putin as a sign of weakness.
The only saving grace is that wars of choice have in recent years gone poorly for the governments that have waged them. Even if Biden and the Western world lack options for imposing its will on the Kremlin, in the long run, this could be Putin’s folly.
W. James Antle III is the Washington Examiner’s politics editor. He was previously managing editor of the Daily Caller, associate editor of the American Spectator, and senior writer for the American Conservative. He is the author of Devouring Freedom: Can Big Government Ever Be Stopped? You can follow home on Twitter: @Jimantle.
5. The Cyber Social Contract
Every American connected to the internet is a "combatant" on the cyber battlefield.
Excerpts:
The United States needs a new social contract for the digital age—one that meaningfully alters the relationship between public and private sectors and proposes a new set of obligations for each. Such a shift is momentous but not without precedent. From the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 to the Clean Air Act of 1963 and the public-private revolution in airline safety in the 1990s, the United States has made important adjustments following profound changes in the economy and technology.
A similarly innovative shift in the cyber-realm will likely require an intense process of development and iteration. Still, its contours are already clear: the private sector must prioritize long-term investments in a digital ecosystem that equitably distributes the burden of cyberdefense. Government, in turn, must provide more timely and comprehensive threat information while simultaneously treating industry as a vital partner. Finally, both the public and private sectors must commit to moving toward true collaboration—contributing resources, attention, expertise, and people toward institutions designed to prevent, counter, and recover from cyber-incidents.
...
Finally, a world where data is more secure is a world where data privacy becomes more enforceable. Americans are increasingly confused and anxious over the lack of control over their personal information, and the regular drumbeat of mass breaches does little to soothe their nerves. By contrast, an absolutely secure digital world is one where a comprehensive privacy regime becomes more practical. With greater certainty over the direction of the United States’ data security and privacy environment, U.S. firms would also find it easier to work with the data regimes of like-minded partners. Such collaboration would enable deeper interoperability and commercial exchange with countries such as Japan or those in the European Union that have already begun laying the foundations of twenty-first-century data law. U.S. diplomats would also be able to credibly wield these values as foreign policy tools to strengthen relations with allies and partners across the globe. The resulting international ties would help constrain the spread of Beijing and Moscow’s surveillance technologies and digital authoritarianism.
These futures may be rosy, but they are not implausible. By focusing Washington’s attention on realizing a preferred digital future, the United States will not only be able to identify malign actors seeking to obstruct U.S. success, it will also be able to generate a more actionable understanding of what Americans need from one another. Many digitally driven sectors have become victims of their own success. Over the past few decades, a series of small and innovative firms have become custodians of a vital new establishment. Rarely is there a clear tipping point when a startup’s mission transitions from creative destruction to societal maintenance. But with a shared and affirmative vision, the public and private sectors can build a new social contract that facilitates that transition without undermining the integrity and vitality essential to an innovative economy.
By identifying the digital future the United States wants to create and the social contract that could sustain it, Americans can fortify their resilience and establish rewards for good behavior and costs for bad behavior. Misaligned incentives and malicious actors are no match for a clear vision of where the United States wants to go.
The Cyber Social Contract
How to Rebuild Trust in a Digital World
By Chris Inglis and Harry Krejsa
February 21, 2022
In the spring of 2021, a Russia-based cybercrime group launched a ransomware attack against the largest fuel pipeline in the United States. According to the cybersecurity firm Mandiant, the subsequent shutdown and gas shortage across the East Coast likely originated from a single compromised password. That an individual misstep might disrupt critical services for millions illustrates just how vulnerable the United States’ digital ecosystem is in the twenty-first century.
Although most participants in the cyber-ecosystem are aware of these growing risks, the responsibility for mitigating systemic hazards is poorly distributed. Cyber-professionals and policymakers are too often motivated more by a fear of risk than by an aspiration to realize cyberspace’s full potential. Exacerbating this dynamic is a decades-old tendency among the large and sophisticated actors who design, construct, and operate digital systems to devolve the cost and difficulty of risk mitigation onto users who often lack the resources and expertise to address them.
Too often, this state of affairs produces digital ecosystems where private information is easily accessible, predatory technology is inexpensive, and momentary lapses in vigilance can snowball into a continent-wide catastrophe. Although individually oriented tools like multifactor authentication and password managers are critical to solving elements of this problem, they are inadequate on their own. A durable solution must involve moving away from the tendency to charge isolated individuals, small businesses, and local governments with shouldering absurd levels of risk. Those more capable of carrying the load—such as governments and large firms—must take on some of the burden, and collective, collaborative defense needs to replace atomized and divided efforts. Until then, the problem will always look like someone else’s to solve.
The United States needs a new social contract for the digital age—one that meaningfully alters the relationship between public and private sectors and proposes a new set of obligations for each. Such a shift is momentous but not without precedent. From the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 to the Clean Air Act of 1963 and the public-private revolution in airline safety in the 1990s, the United States has made important adjustments following profound changes in the economy and technology.
A similarly innovative shift in the cyber-realm will likely require an intense process of development and iteration. Still, its contours are already clear: the private sector must prioritize long-term investments in a digital ecosystem that equitably distributes the burden of cyberdefense. Government, in turn, must provide more timely and comprehensive threat information while simultaneously treating industry as a vital partner. Finally, both the public and private sectors must commit to moving toward true collaboration—contributing resources, attention, expertise, and people toward institutions designed to prevent, counter, and recover from cyber-incidents.
Although success is far from guaranteed, the benefits of such a social contract are enormous. A new vision of what the U.S. government, firms, and individuals owe one another in cyberspace—unburdened by contemporary visions of risk and threat—ultimately means a world capable of achieving its full technological potential.
A DREAM DEFERRED
Contemporary cyberthreats represent a tragic betrayal of what leading technology advocates promised at the dawn of the digital revolution. The heady early days of the Internet were suffused with optimism. Digital connectivity, many argued, would not only favor democracy and human rights but would also serve as an inherent force of progress and egalitarianism. After the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, it was easy to see the Internet as a natural and inevitable extension of liberalizing geopolitical forces—heralding a world where neither physical borders nor governmental authorities would constrain the free flow of ideas.
It soon became clear, however, that cyberspace was a tool like any other—one that would amplify the values of those who wielded it. China, initially held up as a quintessential case of liberalization-by-commerce, did precisely what techno-optimists thought impossible: it tamed the Internet, harnessed cyberspace, and subverted the digital revolution into a digital dystopia that Beijing now seeks to export to aspiring authoritarians worldwide. Russia, whose Soviet forebears were partly defeated by the free flow of information, is now a virtuosic purveyor of disinformation, digital manipulation, and cyber-enabled geopolitical blackmail.
Individuals and small businesses, meanwhile, have only partially realized the promise of a radically egalitarian digital economy. Market gains have disproportionately accrued to a few large firms. The digital criminal underground, by contrast, is far more democratic. Hacking tools are readily available, enabling cybercriminals to hold critical infrastructure hostage. The digital hopes of the 1990s are now interlaced with a series of catastrophic threats.
With that backdrop, it should come as no surprise that many cyberpolicies proceed from a fundamentally negative framing that cedes the initiative to transgressors and places excessive faith in market incentives. There is merit to these concerns: the security challenges in cyberspace are daunting because the scope and scale of any one security incident can be so vast. In a world where clicking the wrong link or neglecting a single software patch can result in a geopolitical incident, responders often focus on an attack’s perpetrator at the expense of addressing the perverse incentives that create these circumstances in the first place. Such framing has serious material consequences, however. Security is a prerequisite for prosperity in the physical world, and cyberspace is no different. Until Washington develops a better understanding of what digitally enabled prosperity might look like, the United States will continue to miss out on cyberspace’s original purpose: the ambitious realization of a better world, a more equitable economy, and a more just society.
A NEW SOCIAL CONTRACT
Neither market incentives nor existing threats are immutable forces of nature. Change is possible, and it is wholly consistent with American values for government to collaborate with the private sector to mitigate risk and better serve public interests. The best way to begin this reset is by increasing collaboration within the U.S. government and—perhaps most importantly—creating a clear framework for collaboration across the public and private elements of the United States’ shared cyber-ecosystem.
The U.S. government has made great strides in the former. The Biden administration has unveiled a series of whole-of-government initiatives meant to apprehend criminals, isolate and sanction their enablers, and mobilize like-minded states to defend against state-backed hacking campaigns. Across the public and private sector, however, there remains little common understanding of what an organization ought to do or to whom it should turn when preparing for or responding to an intrusion. Governments, firms, and citizens alike too often have no authoritative answer to the question of what we owe one another in cyberspace.
The answer to that question requires collaboration among the U.S. government, the private sector, and their international counterparts. Situational awareness—the kind needed to understand threats that operate across organizational boundaries—is only possible if each organization contributes its fractional views to a shared understanding of a common threat. Collaboration between cyberdefenders can turn the tables on attackers, but only if every stakeholder understands how their part fits into the whole and under what circumstances they must be ready to step in to help.
The United States needs a new social contract for the digital age.
As in other industries charged with providing critical services, however, market forces alone are insufficient to ensure that cyberspace serves all of its stakeholders equitably. Consistent with best practices derived from the transportation and medical sectors, government and private firms must begin to work together. Above all, that means developing new ways to address the disproportionate burden that the current system places on individuals and end users. Cyberspace is made up of overwhelmingly private components yet has incalculable public value. Private sector firms will, therefore, need to increasingly prioritize security and resilience in both their hardware manufacturing and software development, even if those priorities require more patience from their occasionally impatient investors. The government must also play an active role in easing that transition—setting standards, incentivizing norms, and providing information.
Both sides also need to match these actions with a novel vision for collaboration. Building resilience to potentially catastrophic cyber-incidents will require an unprecedented level of planning, information sharing, and operational intimacy across once-isolated fields. Existing efforts to place government and industry experts side-by-side—including in sector-specific Information Sharing and Analysis Centers—are a good way to start. The U.S. government has quickly realized that these partnerships can identify and address threats far more effectively than a single organization operating alone.
President Joe Biden’s May 2021 executive order on improving U.S. cybersecurity is a vital element of this new paradigm. The order is designed to foster resilient software supply chains by strengthening information technology standards and defending networks against known vulnerabilities. Security researchers have long called for many of the order’s new initiatives, including a so-called software bill of materials program designed to track various components used in software development. Biden’s announcement, moreover, will help disseminate these practices well beyond the public sector alone.
The federal government will also need to lead by example when building its own digital systems. In November 2021, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) issued a novel directive requiring all federal agencies to patch more than 250 known software vulnerabilities that hackers were actively exploiting. In January 2022, the administration unveiled its strategy for implementing a government-wide zero-trust architecture—a security philosophy that assumes breaches are inevitable and builds in firebreaks to contain the impact of any potential hack. Such a program lowers the risk of any single vulnerability, moving the United States away from a system that too often concentrates risk on individuals’ digital slip-ups. Beyond simply urging a change of direction and strategy, the federal government is getting its own digital house in order and blazing a path that others can follow.
Cyberthreats represent a betrayal of what advocates promised at the dawn of the digital revolution.
Translating this level of mobilization into systemic change across the private sector will be a more difficult proposition. Doing so will require an unprecedented level of collaboration between government and industry. As a start, the Biden administration is setting up a new Cyber Safety Review Board modeled after the National Transportation Safety Board. Government and private sector leaders will co-chair this body with an intent to analyze significant cybersecurity incidents, generate lessons learned, and produce concrete recommendations to avoid future crises. Washington is also easing contractual barriers that once prevented private sector actors from sharing threat information with authorities and requiring government service providers to notify federal agencies of relevant data breaches. Finally, the Biden administration established the Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative at CISA, a first-of-its-kind organization with authority to bring together representatives from government and industry to identify threats, develop crisis response plans, and foster the relationships needed to respond to malicious cyber-incidents.
This level of collaboration will require professional and operational intimacy among practitioners and considerable experience in developing plans for exceptional events. CISA, for instance, will need to convene whole-of-nation exercises designed to anticipate particular contingencies and identify the agencies responsible for specific elements of crisis response. CISA and its fellow risk management agencies across the rest of the federal government will also need to carry out their responsibilities alongside their counterpart industries. Private and public sector leaders will need to learn how to speak one another’s languages and productively share information. And the National Security Council will need to coordinate the deployment of all tools of national power when a cyberproblem suddenly becomes a geopolitical problem.
Like any well-functioning team, however, the U.S. government also needs to regularly review its performance. This is another area where the Office of the National Cyber Director (ONCD) can prove its worth. From its position in the White House, ONCD must use its perspective to champion and drive coherence across U.S. cyberpolicy. That should include carefully reviewing budgets to identify effective policies and translating national strategies into planning priorities for specific agencies. ONCD must also identify weaknesses in Washington’s crash course in public-private cooperation and repair organizational issues before they become serious problems. Cyberspace is the world’s largest public good composed almost entirely of private components, and ONCD, armed with its statutory responsibility to consult and coordinate with private sector actors, must work as the government’s translator. Finally, because cyberspace is not a purely domestic issue, ONCD should work alongside the State Department and National Security Council to ensure that lessons learned flow freely between the United States and its partners.
PRESENT AT THE CREATION
With this new social contract for cyberspace—based around investments in resilience, new forms of information sharing, and public-private collaboration—the United States will be well placed to reclaim the hope present at the dawn of the digital age. Although Americans have grown skeptical that the Internet is a net positive development for society, unrealized promise abounds at the intersection of public and private collaboration. By revamping its understanding of whom and what cyberspace is ultimately for, the United States will be poised to reap untold social, economic, and geopolitical benefits.
The tech sector, for one, is already a significant engine of innovation and growth—constituting nearly ten percent of the United States’ total economic output. Seven of the ten most profitable U.S. companies are technology, telecommunications, or software firms. Eighty-five percent of Americans own a smartphone, up from 35 percent just ten years ago—a signal of just how deeply digital connectivity is woven into the fabric of American life. And when COVID-19 arrived, 90 percent of Americans said the Internet became essential or important to weathering the unprecedented disruption brought by a global pandemic.
Digital connectivity is not only helping individuals cope with COVID-19, however. Technology is also assisting governments, scientists, and companies to manage and ultimately end the pandemic. Since 2020, a historic global mobilization of biomedical research has transformed science in the digital age. COVID-19 researchers piloted new practices for rapidly sharing data and results—frequently circulating so-called preprint papers to disseminate vital discoveries all while maintaining data security and integrity. When scientists first sequenced an early version of the SARS-CoV-2 viral genome in January 2020, for instance, researchers at the biotechnology firm Moderna and the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases simply downloaded the genome, swapped out one viral protein for another, and began testing a vaccine within six weeks.
Aligning market incentives to realize a low-carbon future requires attention and creativity.
Vitally, this newfound speed did not entail sacrifices in quality. Instead, digital connectivity helped strengthen medical science’s ethical, doctrinal, and procedural underpinnings, allowing it to operate at higher speeds without sacrificing public safety. The protections and controls that researchers built into every layer of their work—how they designed their experiments, collected and handled their data, selected and operated their tools and materials—created layers of risk mitigation that produced a faster and higher-performing industry. Although the international community still faces political hurdles to vaccinating the most vulnerable, the public now understands what is truly possible.
Beyond issues such as COVID-19, however, the United States has scarcely begun to imagine what a similar high-performance, high-confidence framework—with significant safeguards built into its design—could accomplish in other fields. As with biomedical research, the policies, processes, and technologies necessary for a stable and secure Internet are not a drag on speed but actually allow innovators to unfurl their initiatives more quickly and confidently. The United States should therefore develop its cyberstrategies, policies, and partnerships not by solely fixating on the most imminent threats but by remembering the promise that lies ahead. By more clearly articulating the digitally enabled world where Americans want to live, the path forward will become increasingly achievable.
A BRIGHT FUTURE
It is impossible to predict what an ideal digital and collaborative future might look like, but its broad benefits are increasingly visible. Some elements that hold clear promise when paired with a newly secure and durable digital ecosystem already exist. Others are more speculative. In all cases, however, a world where scientists, innovators, governments, and individuals have the confidence to move faster in cyberspace is one where the future is bright.
One of the most promising and urgent possibilities involves the transition to renewable energy. Although the Biden administration’s once-in-a-generation Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act investments will accelerate this movement, the promise of renewable energy is about more than just slowing climate change. Green energy can ultimately enable a more ambitious and compelling future than fossil fuels could ever provide. U.S. per capita energy use grew rapidly as the United States industrialized but plateaued after the 1970s as rising oil prices and pollution drove industry to do more with less. The cost of solar panels, meanwhile, has declined rapidly—more than 80 percent since 2010. When combined with the near-zero marginal cost of converting sunlight to electricity, energy may soon become too cheap to meter. Analysts have barely begun to imagine what a U.S. economy unchained from energy scarcity and pollution could accomplish.
Aligning market incentives to realize this low-carbon future requires attention and creativity. The same is true for the secure and resilient digital foundation that such a system would ultimately utilize. Solar energy, for example, is uniquely scalable—from the rooftops of individual homes to utility-scale solar farms. Designed correctly, the digital infrastructure underpinning this hypothetical energy network could generate, store, and redistribute electricity at a level contemporary fossil fuels simply cannot match. With ironclad data security, operators could trust automated software to distribute power with an unprecedented level of sophistication. Southern sunshine could backstop Iowans staring down winter storms, while offshore winds in Maine could charge electric vehicles up and down the East Coast.
Also promising and similarly urgent is the rapidly developing space-based economy. Like renewable energy, this new sector will hinge on cybersecurity and technology security. Orbital launch costs are declining, and satellite technology is increasingly available—opening up new opportunities for commercial and geopolitical competition alike. Although space-based telecommunication systems already exist, businesses, governments, nonprofits, and researchers alike need confidence in the security and resilience of the orbital investments they make and the data those systems provide. Precise climate change models, game-changing agricultural insights, real-time measurements of macroeconomic trends, and worldwide Internet connectivity may be just around the corner, but only if the hardware and software that provide these services remain trustworthy, resilient, and operational. This will only happen once the United States reaches an entirely different level of confidence in its cybersecurity underpinnings. As any motorsports fan knows, drivers can take corners faster when they have confidence in their brakes.
By identifying the digital future the United States wants to create, Americans can fortify their resilience.
Autonomous vehicles may be one such technology. The promise of vehicle autonomy is clear: safer and easier transportation of people and goods, reduced driver fatigue, vastly more efficient use of passenger and freight networks, and improved freedom of movement for the disabled or displaced. The threats posed by an insecure cyber-ecosystem, however, are equally clear: autonomous fleets will inevitably depend on densely networked systems and software guidance that are currently vulnerable to malicious attacks. The uniquely real-time and high-stakes use of artificial intelligence that truly autonomous vehicles would require necessitates paradigm-shifting cyber-protections. Once realized, these developments could usher in the most profound and positive change to the modern world’s built environment in decades.
Such bright futures also extend into geopolitics. Just as analysts often fixate on cyberthreats to the detriment of cyberbenefits, the implications of a future where the United States prevails over contemporary geopolitical threats are similarly understudied. A world in which U.S. and allied networks are resilient against state-backed hacking campaigns, for instance, would be a profoundly different one. If China or Russia had fewer plausible avenues for subverting the digital infrastructure that underpins the United States’ conventional tools of deterrence, the calculus of strategic competition would likely shift significantly in favor of the United States. The United States would also stand to benefit if China and Russia were prevented from prepositioning malware in critical U.S. infrastructure, thereby decreasing Beijing and Moscow’s ability to wield asymmetric weapons in a crisis.
And although the U.S. public is broadly aware of Chinese espionage and intellectual property theft, analysts are comparatively less aware of Beijing’s growing ability to weaponize Americans’ individual data. According to William Evanina, former director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, China has “vacuumed up the personal data of much of the American population, including data on our health, finances, travel and other sensitive information.” China is almost certainly using these vast datasets to develop models for an array of nefarious purposes, including identifying intelligence agents, stymying U.S. diplomacy, tracking influential leaders, targeting Beijing’s espionage campaigns, and even influencing voters. Individuals’ personal data is not only the lifeblood of the digital economy, it also fuels the weapons that target that economy. A durable and secure digital ecosystem, by contrast, would short-circuit such malign activity.
Finally, a world where data is more secure is a world where data privacy becomes more enforceable. Americans are increasingly confused and anxious over the lack of control over their personal information, and the regular drumbeat of mass breaches does little to soothe their nerves. By contrast, an absolutely secure digital world is one where a comprehensive privacy regime becomes more practical. With greater certainty over the direction of the United States’ data security and privacy environment, U.S. firms would also find it easier to work with the data regimes of like-minded partners. Such collaboration would enable deeper interoperability and commercial exchange with countries such as Japan or those in the European Union that have already begun laying the foundations of twenty-first-century data law. U.S. diplomats would also be able to credibly wield these values as foreign policy tools to strengthen relations with allies and partners across the globe. The resulting international ties would help constrain the spread of Beijing and Moscow’s surveillance technologies and digital authoritarianism.
These futures may be rosy, but they are not implausible. By focusing Washington’s attention on realizing a preferred digital future, the United States will not only be able to identify malign actors seeking to obstruct U.S. success, it will also be able to generate a more actionable understanding of what Americans need from one another. Many digitally driven sectors have become victims of their own success. Over the past few decades, a series of small and innovative firms have become custodians of a vital new establishment. Rarely is there a clear tipping point when a startup’s mission transitions from creative destruction to societal maintenance. But with a shared and affirmative vision, the public and private sectors can build a new social contract that facilitates that transition without undermining the integrity and vitality essential to an innovative economy.
By identifying the digital future the United States wants to create and the social contract that could sustain it, Americans can fortify their resilience and establish rewards for good behavior and costs for bad behavior. Misaligned incentives and malicious actors are no match for a clear vision of where the United States wants to go.
6. The Pros and Cons of ‘Deterrence by Disclosure’
Eric Edelman is not a fan.
Weak tea?
Conclusion:
Deterrence by disclosure may be the form of deterrence that seems safest when one is playing a weak hand. But what Thomas Schelling described as “the diplomacy of violence”—the competition in risk-taking that accompanies coercive diplomacy—always requires “the risk that leaves something to chance.” Inculcating in the mind of the adversary that starting down the road of conventional aggression creates the potential that things will get out of hand and escalating to a level that nobody wants is essential to successful deterrence. Putin’s recent decision to hold a massive exercise of Russia’s nuclear forces is just that kind of invocation of prospective dangers. Against that background, deterrence by disclosure seems like weak tea indeed.
The Pros and Cons of ‘Deterrence by Disclosure’
Analyzing the Biden administration’s policy of making information about Russia’s movements and intentions public.
Photographs by Getty Images.)
Since November, the Biden administration has pursued a policy regarding Russia and Ukraine that can best be described as “deterrence by disclosure.” The policy has operated on several levels. First and foremost has been the disclosure of Russian troop movements and dispositions as well as the plans for provocations and false flag operations that could serve as a pretext for Putin’s war against Ukraine (and, more broadly, the West and the existing regional and global order). It has also been accompanied by leaks about interagency deliberations about sanctions and disclosures about agreements being negotiated with allies to suggest the more traditional “deterrence by punishment” to come should Russia recklessly launch a premeditated and unprovoked war in the center of Europe.
“Deterrence by disclosure” suggests that the administration is playing a weak hand but hoping to play it deftly. To be fair, the Biden team’s weak hand is a function of both difficulties it inherited (geography dictates that the fate of Ukraine will always matter more to Russia than to the U.S.) and those that its own actions created or exacerbated (rolling over the New START Treaty without any conditions, waiving Nord Stream 2 sanctions, granting Putin a summit with the president in the wake of serious cyberattacks on U.S. infrastructure conducted by Russian hackers, the disastrous Afghan withdrawal, and Biden’s own gratuitous comments about not sending Americans to fight in Ukraine and “limited incursions” by Russia into Ukrainian territory). By the time you read this, an assessment of the administration’s effort at “deterrence by disclosure” may be moot. Still, it seems worth taking a crack at evaluating the pros and cons of endeavoring to deter an adversary like Russia with public disclosures like the ones we have seen coming out of the current administration these past few months.
In the first instance, disclosure of Russian troop movements had some positive outcomes. It alerted the American and European publics to the fact that a political and military crisis was brewing. It signaled to Moscow that “we are watching you,” hopefully inducing some cautionary notes into internal Kremlin deliberations. Publicizing information about possible plots or provocations to provide a pretext or bogus casus belli had the impact of disrupting operational planning by the adversary (a lesson U.S. policymakers have learned over the past 20 years of disclosing plotting by violent Islamist extremists as part of U.S. counterterrorism policy). It also forced Vladimir Putin, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, and other senior Russian officials to “deny” any intention of invading Ukraine. These denials serve several purposes in their own right. They heighten the costs for Putin in the ongoing information warfare between the U.S. and Russia by highlighting his mendacity if he commences military operations by increasing his reputational costs (not that he and his compatriots care much about reputation, given the transparent nature of many of these efforts and the insouciance with which he has treated revelations about the poisonings of Alexander Litvinenko, the Skripals, and Alexi Navalny). Moreover, they help in the battle for public opinion in allied countries, help ease the work of diplomats working on putting together an agreed-upon package of biting sanctions if deterrence fails, and will create a presumption of disbelief in Russian official statements once Putin’s war is underway.
Perhaps most important, deterrence by disclosure has bought time for the administration’s “relentless” and virtually non-stop diplomatic effort (for which it has gotten and generally deserves good grades). Moreover, there are some indications that U.S. disclosures have created some consternation in Moscow and, at the very least, produced the carefully stage-managed meetings of Putin with Foreign Minister Lavrov and Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu via which the Russians hoped to signal an intention to de-escalate and reinvigorate diplomatic efforts. That transparently false effort was quickly exposed by both Washington and its allies at NATO and in capitals.
This persistent diplomatic effort may turn out to be meaningless if, as President Biden has suggested, Putin has now made up his mind on war as the solution to the problems he had created by instigating the current crisis. But the efforts have allowed more lethal weapons to be transferred to the Ukrainian forces and some training to go on, making Ukraine a less inviting target than it might otherwise have been (although the decision to withdraw U.S. trainers has, sadly, undercut much of the administration’s deterrent messaging). Those steps have been accompanied by disclosure of the potential Ukrainian strategy of irregular warfare that would follow any initial Russian “victories” on the battlefield since most observers assume the better equipped and trained Russian army will make quick work of Ukraine’s military forces (an assumption that may or may not be warranted). Communicating the dangers of protraction, of the difficulties of waging a counterinsurgency war in a place that it took the USSR almost a decade to pacify after World War II can, perhaps, puncture the bubble of false optimism—what one political scientist has called “the strategist’s curse”—that may have inclined Putin to believe that a quick and splendid little war in Ukraine will bring him the same kind of political benefits that the largely bloodless seizure of Crimea did in 2014.
There are, however, very serious negative consequences to relying so heavily on deterrence by disclosure. First, making public information gleaned from sensitive intelligence inevitably runs the risk of giving away sources and methods. Although policymakers may judge that it is a worthwhile gamble to give away future intelligence in exchange for stopping a war now, it is impossible to calculate the potential costs for crisis management in the future. The constant warnings also run the risk of appearing to “cry wolf” too often. There already have been visible cracks in the alliance as both Ukrainians and some Europeans have offered less dire assessments. To this point, the administration has handled this complication reasonably well, but if this turns out to be a longer crisis in which Putin pursues a “no war, no peace” strategy of managed tensions, there could well be a price to be paid in allied unity over time. The disclosures also sometimes seem to be playing into Russia’s hands in the information/political warfare space. The constantly ringing alarms allow Putin to play the “strongman” card to the hilt and remind the Russian populace, “Look how much the West fears me” (with the subtext “and so should you!”). It also cedes the initiative to him and allows him to set the tempo of the crisis by dialing the military pressures up or down (and seeking to accentuate the administration’s discomfort when it lowers the temperature by pointing out that the U.S. and its spokespeople are “hysterical.”). Finally, by emphasizing that Putin has chosen war, disclosing the array of forces that have been positioned along the border and speculating about a multidirectional assault on Ukraine with a possible long-term occupation of significant parts of the country, the Biden administration has, perhaps, desensitized some proportion of the American and European public to any kind of land grab or “minor incursion” that is less than the full Monty. If, as it turns out, Putin’s objectives in this crisis are more in line with what he has done in the past than the large-scale operation that many are now forecasting, it may be harder to mobilize opposition in the West than it otherwise would have been.
Deterrence by disclosure may be the form of deterrence that seems safest when one is playing a weak hand. But what Thomas Schelling described as “the diplomacy of violence”—the competition in risk-taking that accompanies coercive diplomacy—always requires “the risk that leaves something to chance.” Inculcating in the mind of the adversary that starting down the road of conventional aggression creates the potential that things will get out of hand and escalating to a level that nobody wants is essential to successful deterrence. Putin’s recent decision to hold a massive exercise of Russia’s nuclear forces is just that kind of invocation of prospective dangers. Against that background, deterrence by disclosure seems like weak tea indeed.
Eric S. Edelman is former U.S. ambassador to Finland and Turkey and was the under secretary of defense for policy (2005-2009). He is counselor at the Center for Strategic and budgetary assessments and practitioner in residence at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS).
7. US Army Pacific Commander: Next war will be violent, very human, unpredictable and long
Excerpts:
Flynn said the US Army had six modernisation priorities—integrated air–missile defence, future vertical lift, long-range precision fires, network modernisation, next-generation combat vehicle and soldier lethality—and created cross-functional teams to develop them. ‘If we are not adapting and changing, then we’re going to fail and we’re going to get behind.’
That work benefited from cooperation with an ally such as Australia.Asked if the US and its allies could stand up to China’s growing military power, Flynn responded: ‘I don’t think it’s a question of can; I think we must.’ That came down to the strength of alliances across the region.
And how important to the US was an ability to operate from Australia?
‘Rotational and dynamic employment of forces in this region at scale is a really, important strategic deployment undertaking that we have to participate in as a US military, particularly the army,’ said Flynn.
The answer was to ‘have more faces in more places’, he said, ‘constantly rehearsing the ability to take strategic movements and conduct operational manoeuvres using air, sea, land, and shaping with cyberspace.’
US Army Pacific Commander: Next war will be violent, very human, unpredictable and long | The Strategist
Despite a strong focus on air and naval power, the commander of the United States Army in the Pacific says land forces will play a crucial role in any future regional conflict.
And to deter the growing power of China’s armed forces from conflict, the US relies heavily on friends and allies through the region, says General Charles Flynn.
In conversation with ASPI executive director Peter Jennings in Canberra this week, Flynn made clear that such a conflict would be costly in the extreme.
‘Despite any wishful thinking, we can be sure that the next war will be very violent, it will be very human, it will be very unpredictable. And so our Pacific theatre army is preparing for long war because history has proven that wars are often longer than we expect.’
Flynn assumed command of the US Army Pacific in June 2021 with instructions to urgently ‘seize the initiative, to think act and operate differently’.
The US Army, Flynn said, was taking new approaches to create new dilemmas for adversaries and to create new opportunities with allies and partners. That was being done through the cooperative training efforts of the Joint Pacific Multinational Readiness Center in Hawaii and Alaska which were used last year in exercise Garuda Shield in Indonesia. There ‘our forces trained in an environment and in the conditions that we are most likely expected to operate in’.
Such exercises increased the confidence of allies and partners and were and absolute counterweight to destabilising activities going on across the region. ‘And they are our strength being together, elbow to elbow, rifle to rifle, tank to tank, formation to formation.’
Flynn said he had three goals in talks with Australian commanders: expanding the scale and scope of exercises and experiments, tying together Australian and US training centres, and then modernising in a way that made both nations’ forces not just interoperable but almost interchangeable.
Of longstanding exercises with allies in Japan, the Philippines and Thailand, the most significant was Talisman Sabre in Australia, which tested high-end warfighting scenarios. ‘We must continue to grow together in this age of new technology and new threats,’ Flynn said.
‘The future fight will be global, it’ll be multidirectional, it’ll be multidimensional, and it’ll be multi-domain,’ said Flynn. ‘If we fight the next war domain on domain, we may not like the outcome. But if we fight across all domains with our allies and partners, and if we fight as a combined joint force, demonstrating our ability to make that problem more complex and harder every day, that is the core of integrated deterrents, and there is no adversary in a planet that can match that teamwork.’
The Biden administration’s just released Indo-Pacific strategy declares that this is the start of what it calls a decisive decade and says our collective efforts over the next decade will determine whether China succeeds in transforming the rules and norms we’ve benefited from.
Jennings noted that while that focused on the next 10 years, Australia’s plans to re-equip were set to take 20 years or more. So, he asked, what gave the US military its sense of urgency?
Flynn said that urgency flowed from the concerns of the US administration that China was both a now and a future problem.
‘I think having a sense of urgency about the challenges that are in front of us is beneficial to focusing our efforts, particularly in a time when resources for all of us are diminishing in some ways.
‘We have to be much more thoughtful about the actions that we take and the work that we do together. Because again, I think the efforts that the region is taking with like-minded countries to keep it as a free and open Indo-Pacific is the path that we need to continue to follow given the actions by China.’
Jennings noted US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s observation in Australia recently that China was focused on world domination and asked Flynn if he shared that judgement.
‘I do,’ said Flynn. ‘I think they absolutely have global aspirations. I think their first step is the regional work that they are taking on. And again, I think the things that they’re doing in the region is their effort to then achieve their aspirations globally.’
Flynn said the AUKUS agreement involving the US, Britain and Australia showed how the alliance was developing.
‘I think the benefits of agreements like that, and then the things that we can do together in the region to continue to exercise and conduct operations in support of one another, whether that’s humanitarian assistance and disaster relief to training and experiments that we have shared efforts on is really important.’
The Australian Army’s modernisation efforts were very closely aligned to modernisation of the US Army.
In terms of Flynn’s stated need to shift his army’s mindset, get organised and get into position, the general said the focus was on preparations for the future through training institutions in the region. ‘That’s one effort where we can train in the environment and in the conditions that we’re most likely to operate in in the region. And then we can build that training readiness with our allies and partners.’
That would provide pathways for the US to project ready forces into the region, Flynn said. ‘If the outcome of that is to increase the confidence in our allies and partners as we exercise forward and we enable some of their efforts, then that is another outcome we want.’
The US Army was working closely with the Australian Defence Force.
Changing mindsets among the 107,000 people in the Pacific theatre army meant ensuring that leaders at every level, from headquarters to small formations, provided identity and purpose and mission and drew on lessons from operations going back to the defence of Manilla in 1899 and the massive battles of World War II.
Military diplomacy sees Flynn travelling extensively in the Pacific and elsewhere in Asia meeting counterparts from the armed forces of friendly nations, discussing areas of cooperation such as exercises, and ‘finding out from them what it is that they need, what are their objectives, what is it that they seek from us.
‘And if we can help in some small way or large ways with training or certain expertise that we have, or expertise that they have that they want to help us with, then I think the value of that is much greater than a transactional engagement that others may be having in the region.’
Flynn said that beyond the notion of US and Australian forces being interoperable would be ‘interchangeability’. ‘If you have similar attack aviation, similar lift aviation, similar ground combat vehicles, similar air defence, short-range, long-range, similar fires, networks, then … you’re certainly going to be together.’
All the US services were working on and experimenting with new technology to give them an edge. The goal was to weave such weapons and equipment into exercises taking place in the areas where they might ultimately be deployed in a crisis or conflict. ‘I think there’s great value in that because some of the test locations that we have in the continental US look an awful lot like the Middle East and this region does not look like that.’
His would be the first army to have a hybrid cloud which would go up in the coming year. Further work encouraged under the AUKUS agreement would be in artificial intelligence, quantum physics and cyber. Bringing robotics, artificial intelligence and machine learning into this region could advance work of like-minded partners like Australia. ‘I think we’ll make some real gains by exercising and experimenting all at the same time.’ Platforms included new watercraft. Every exercise had some form of experimentation going on.
Flynn said the US Army had six modernisation priorities—integrated air–missile defence, future vertical lift, long-range precision fires, network modernisation, next-generation combat vehicle and soldier lethality—and created cross-functional teams to develop them. ‘If we are not adapting and changing, then we’re going to fail and we’re going to get behind.’
That work benefited from cooperation with an ally such as Australia.
Asked if the US and its allies could stand up to China’s growing military power, Flynn responded: ‘I don’t think it’s a question of can; I think we must.’ That came down to the strength of alliances across the region.
And how important to the US was an ability to operate from Australia?
‘Rotational and dynamic employment of forces in this region at scale is a really, important strategic deployment undertaking that we have to participate in as a US military, particularly the army,’ said Flynn.
The answer was to ‘have more faces in more places’, he said, ‘constantly rehearsing the ability to take strategic movements and conduct operational manoeuvres using air, sea, land, and shaping with cyberspace.’
8. U.S. says Russia has a list of Ukrainians to kill or detain after an invasion.
Influence operations continue. Even if we did not have the intelligence to confirm this it would be a logical assessment based on past Russian actions.
U.S. says Russia has a list of Ukrainians to kill or detain after an invasion.
- Feb. 21, 2022
- Updated 7:00 a.m. ET
A march in Odessa, Ukraine, on Sunday marked the eighth anniversary of the 2014 protests that led to the ouster of President Viktor F. Yanukovych, an ally of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.Credit...Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times
- Feb. 21, 2022Updated 2:47 a.m. ET
WASHINGTON — The United States government has sent a letter to the United Nations human rights chief in Geneva saying it has “credible information” that Russian forces have compiled a list of Ukrainian citizens to be killed or sent to detention camps in the aftermath of a Russian invasion and occupation of the country, according to a copy of the letter obtained Sunday by The New York Times.
The letter, which was addressed to Michelle Bachelet, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, also said Russian forces planned to carry out widespread human rights violations, which in the past have included torturing and kidnapping civilians.
The likely targets would be people opposed to Russian actions, including dissidents from Russia and Belarus living in Ukraine, journalists, anti-corruption activists and members of ethnic and religious minorities and the L.G.B.T.Q. community.
“We also have credible information that Russian forces will likely use lethal measures to disperse peaceful protests or otherwise counter peaceful exercises of perceived resistance from civilian populations,” said the letter, which was signed by Bathsheba Nell Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations office in Geneva.
Three U.S. officials confirmed the authenticity of the letter and its contents.
Foreign Policy first reported Friday on U.S. agencies having intelligence about a Russian “kill list,” and the Washington Post first reported on the letter on Sunday.
The letter noted that U.S. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken had raised the human rights concerns to the United Nations Security Council when he addressed that body on Thursday. “In particular, he stated that the United States has information that indicates Russia will target specific groups of Ukrainians,” the letter said.
In that session, Mr. Blinken told Russian officials they could prove their peaceful intentions to the world by not invading Ukraine and addressing their grievances through diplomacy instead. Mr. Blinken plans to meet Sergey V. Lavrov, the foreign minister of Russia, in Europe this Thursday, unless Russia invades Ukraine first.
President Biden and Mr. Blinken have said U.S. intelligence indicates Russian President Vladimir V. Putin has already decided to invade. In recent weeks, Mr. Putin has amassed as many as 190,000 troops around Ukraine. Russia-backed insurgents in the east have increased their artillery shelling of Ukrainian military forces in recent days.
Mr. Putin invaded parts of Ukraine in 2014 and annexed the country’s Crimean Peninsula. Mr. Biden has promised to impose harsh economic sanctions on Russia if Mr. Putin carries out another invasion.
9. China’s Ukraine Crisis
Excerpts:
The real driver of Chinese thinking on Ukraine likely has to do with something longer-term: the appeal of a cozier partnership with Russia. Xi views this as the best response to a bleak security environment, characterized chiefly by deteriorating relations with the United States. For all of Beijing’s talk of Western decline, China still considers the United States and its allies powerful enough that frictions with them will define the next decade. It sees Europe as leaning ever further in the direction of the U.S. position, and it feels growing tensions with countries in its immediate neighborhood, including Australia and India.
Relations with Moscow, on the other hand, have been steadily improving for more than three decades, with greater alignment on a range of issues, including ideology, security, cyberspace, and global governance. Tensions still exist, especially over the widening power gap between the two nations. But the two countries have managed their differences remarkably well. A close relationship between Xi and Putin, a shared hostility towards the United States, and an overlapping (though not identical) illiberal vision of the world order are likely sufficient to power the relationship for at least the next decade.
With no leading powers other than Russia available, Xi may have made a calculated bet that a strong relationship with Moscow could amount to a net asset for Beijing. As China presses its many territorial claims along its periphery, it is looking to Russia to counter efforts to contain it. Russia might also offer a critical lifeline if there are international attempts to disrupt the flow of critical goods to China. It has also supported the Chinese position on Taiwan, and in the event of a U.S.-Chinese war over the island, Beijing may expect Russian diplomatic and economic help.
Xi’s growing alignment with Moscow presents something of a catch-22 for China. As it competes with the West over global order, Russia becomes a more attractive security partner. But by elevating the relationship with Russia—and choosing to do so in the middle of a Putin-provoked crisis—Beijing is inviting pushback it can ill afford.
China’s Ukraine Crisis
What Xi Gains—and Loses—From Backing Putin
February 21, 2022
The Ukraine crisis is primarily a standoff between Russia and the West, but off to the side, another player stands awkwardly: China. Beijing has tried to walk a fine line on Ukraine. On one hand, it has taken Russia’s side, blaming NATO expansion for causing the crisis and alleging that U.S. predictions of an imminent invasion are aggravating it. On the other hand, especially as the risk of military conflict has grown, it has called for diplomacy over war.
If Beijing had its way, it would maintain strong ties with Moscow, safeguard its trade relationship with Ukraine, keep the EU in its economic orbit, and avoid the spillover from U.S. and EU sanctions on Moscow—all while preventing relations with the United States from significantly deteriorating. Securing any one of these objectives may well be possible. Achieving all of them is not.
If Russia invades Ukraine, Beijing could throw Moscow a lifeline: economic relief to alleviate the effect of U.S. sanctions. But doing so would damage Chinese relations with Europe, invite severe repercussions from Washington, and drive traditionally nonaligned countries such as India further into the arms of the West. If Beijing snubs Moscow, by contrast, it may weaken its closest strategic partnership at a time when, given deteriorating security in Asia, it is most in need of outside help.
The crisis in Ukraine is exposing the limits of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s foreign policy. Beijing’s global aspirations are now clashing with its desire to remain selectively ambiguous and aloof. Although Chinese leaders may not recognize it, their country’s closer alignment with Russia is far from prudent. The upsides of this move are notional and long-term: Russia might someday return the favor by supporting Chinese territorial aspirations or cooperating on revising the structures of global governance. The costs to China’s larger global strategy, however, are real and immediate.
A tighter Beijing-Moscow axis would further encourage China’s rivals to balance against it, giving them more reason to form closer economic and military ties to defend themselves against Chinese aggression. In European capitals, where the allure of China’s massive market has traditionally blunted efforts to push back against the country, Beijing is already facing stronger political headwinds. And in the United States, the mood on China has grown even darker. If war breaks out in Ukraine, many American politicians will accuse Beijing of having blood on its hands. On Ukraine, China is playing a dangerous game, one it may come to regret.
AN UNWANTED CRISIS
Beijing would no doubt prefer that the current crisis didn’t exist. For starters, Ukraine is an important trade partner for China in its own right, with more than $15 billion in bilateral trade flows in 2020. The country is also a vital gateway to Europe and a formal partner of the Belt and Road Initiative, Xi’s flagship geopolitical endeavor. Last month, Xi extended greetings to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, noting, “Since the establishment of diplomatic ties 30 years ago, China-Ukraine relations have always maintained a sound and stable development momentum.” Privately, Chinese experts have lamented that Beijing, worried about offending Moscow, doesn’t do more to support an important partner in the Belt and Road Initiative.
Beijing also has no desire to publicly support a Russian land grab, given its deep-seated concerns that others may employ similar logic to undermine Chinese territorial sovereignty. China is hardly a credible opponent of territorial revisionism, of course; look no further than its actions in the East China and South China Seas, its behavior on the Indian border, and its appetite for Taiwan. What it does object to, however, is revisionism undertaken by other powers, Russia included. To this day, it has not recognized the 2014 annexation of Crimea.
The crisis in Ukraine is exposing the limits of Xi Jinping’s foreign policy.
China’s leaders are certainly aware that any support to Russia over Ukraine would aggravate relations with the EU and the United States. Chinese strategists view Russia, the United States, and Europe as the most important determinants of the global balance of power. They have long seen Europe’s dreams of a multipolar world as aligned with their own. By cementing the split between Russia and Europe, a Russian invasion of Ukraine would thus risk dividing the most important powers into two blocs—Russia and China on one side and the United States and Europe on the other—re-creating the Cold War security arrangements that China claims to vehemently oppose. Making matters worse, China would be aligned with the weakest of the three other powers.
It is extremely unlikely, then, that Xi gave Russian President Vladimir Putin the green light to invade, as some claim. Through careful diplomatic messaging, Beijing has publicly supported Moscow’s stance against NATO expansion but still stressed its hope that a diplomatic solution can be found. As Xi said in a February 16 call with French President Emmanuel Macron, “All parties concerned should adhere to the general direction of political settlement, make full use of multilateral platforms … and seek a comprehensive solution to the Ukrainian issue through dialogue and consultation.” Three days later, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi repeated that message, calling the Minsk agreement, the pair of pacts signed in 2014 and 2015, “the only way out for the Ukrainian issue.” He reiterated support for “the sovereignty, independence, and territorial integrity of any country” and noted that “Ukraine is no exception.”
HAVING IT BOTH WAYS
This is where Beijing’s position begins to turn incoherent. For at the same time that it is calling for a de-escalation of tensions, it is feeding Moscow’s belligerence by throwing public support behind its demands and working to lower the costs of Western deterrence. Beijing’s purchase of more Russian energy and the increased use of the Chinese renminbi (instead of the U.S. dollar) for bilateral transactions could insulate Russia from U.S. sanctions. The Chinese foreign ministry’s claim that U.S. warnings of a possible Russian invasion are “false information” undermines Beijing’s simultaneous calls for dialogue, given that these warnings are in fact an urgent call for diplomacy.
Intentionally or not, Beijing has wedded itself to Moscow’s revisionism. In a remarkable joint statement with Putin released on February 4, Xi not only affirmed a shared ideological worldview between the two authoritarian powers but also connected NATO enlargement to their need to “stand against attempts by external forces to undermine security and stability in their common adjacent regions.” China and Russia, the leaders declared, “oppose further enlargement of NATO and call on the North Atlantic Alliance to abandon its ideologized cold war approaches.” They went on: “The sides stand against the formation of closed bloc structures and opposing camps in the Asia-Pacific region and remain highly vigilant about the negative impact of the United States’ Indo-Pacific strategy on peace and stability in the region.”
Beijing would no doubt prefer that the current crisis didn’t exist.
Blurring Russian fears about NATO with Chinese concerns about U.S. activity in Asia may have given Xi a momentary feeling of comradery with Putin, but it comes at the price of relations with the West, which reacted as one could have predicted. As Jens Stoltenberg, NATO’s secretary-general, told the press on February 15, “Fundamentally what we see is that two authoritarian powers, Russia and China, are operating together.” Even though Beijing publicly laments the Cold War mentality it sees as driving Western policy, its increasingly cozy relationship with Moscow cannot but remind observers of the Sino-Soviet relationship of the early 1950s.
It isn’t just China’s relations with the United States and Europe that will suffer. Indeed, its support for Putin’s gambit is enflaming fears in its own backyard. Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has stated, “We must consider the possibility that if we tolerate the use of force to change the status quo, it will have an impact on Asia, as well”—an elliptical way of suggesting that Beijing may feel emboldened by Putin’s adventurism. Australia’s defense minister, Peter Dutton, has warned that a Russian invasion would encourage China to step up its own coercion of Taiwan. For now, India has tried to remain neutral, with T. S. Tirumurti, its ambassador to the UN, calling for “quiet and constructive diplomacy.” But given rising antagonism between India and China, a Chinese-backed invasion of Ukraine would certainly push New Delhi even further away from Moscow and toward Australia, Japan, and the United States.
THE VIEW FROM BEIJING
Given the costs, why did China choose to throw its lot in with Russia? Surely it was aware that the move would exacerbate tensions with the West and countries around its periphery.
It is possible that Xi genuinely believes that Putin won’t invade Ukraine, which means that lending him rhetorical support won’t incur any costs. Perhaps Putin gave Xi private guarantees that his actions were merely intended to bring the U.S. and NATO to the bargaining table. Xi may have also failed to update his views based on what is happening on the ground in Ukraine. His support for Moscow’s opposition to NATO expansion seems to have begun in December 2021, according to the Russian account of the virtual summit between the two leaders. Back then, a Russian invasion didn’t look likely. In the months since, however, the picture has changed—and China may feel locked into a position it would no longer choose.
It is also possible that Xi believes that if an invasion does materialize, it will hurt Russia, Europe, and the United States more than it will hurt China. As long as China refrains from providing any direct military aid to Russia, it will at most suffer secondary sanctions for its political and economic support. Preoccupied with Ukraine and Russia, the United States and Europe would shift their gaze away from Asia, giving China a freer hand in its neighborhood. In short, although a conflict in Ukraine would be bad for everyone, China might emerge better than the rest.
This is a dangerous and overly simplistic line of thinking. The ramifications of war in Ukraine are too unpredictable to justify betting on conflict. Moreover, there is little reason to suspect that Washington will be battered by a war in Ukraine. Even though the U.S. campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq may have opened a window of strategic opportunity for China over a decade ago, the Chinese should recognize that the Biden administration’s approach to Ukraine is designed precisely to avoid getting bogged down in a conflict.
On Ukraine, China is playing a dangerous game.
The real driver of Chinese thinking on Ukraine likely has to do with something longer-term: the appeal of a cozier partnership with Russia. Xi views this as the best response to a bleak security environment, characterized chiefly by deteriorating relations with the United States. For all of Beijing’s talk of Western decline, China still considers the United States and its allies powerful enough that frictions with them will define the next decade. It sees Europe as leaning ever further in the direction of the U.S. position, and it feels growing tensions with countries in its immediate neighborhood, including Australia and India.
Relations with Moscow, on the other hand, have been steadily improving for more than three decades, with greater alignment on a range of issues, including ideology, security, cyberspace, and global governance. Tensions still exist, especially over the widening power gap between the two nations. But the two countries have managed their differences remarkably well. A close relationship between Xi and Putin, a shared hostility towards the United States, and an overlapping (though not identical) illiberal vision of the world order are likely sufficient to power the relationship for at least the next decade.
With no leading powers other than Russia available, Xi may have made a calculated bet that a strong relationship with Moscow could amount to a net asset for Beijing. As China presses its many territorial claims along its periphery, it is looking to Russia to counter efforts to contain it. Russia might also offer a critical lifeline if there are international attempts to disrupt the flow of critical goods to China. It has also supported the Chinese position on Taiwan, and in the event of a U.S.-Chinese war over the island, Beijing may expect Russian diplomatic and economic help.
Xi’s growing alignment with Moscow presents something of a catch-22 for China. As it competes with the West over global order, Russia becomes a more attractive security partner. But by elevating the relationship with Russia—and choosing to do so in the middle of a Putin-provoked crisis—Beijing is inviting pushback it can ill afford.
10. Behind China’s Warning Against a Russian Invasion Is a Desire to Protect Ties With the U.S.
Excerpts:
“China recognizes its relationship with the U.S. is contentious and competitive,” said Bonnie Glaser, director of the Asia program at the German Marshall Fund, a Washington-based think tank. “But they don’t want to be pushed into the Russian camp.”
Beijing started to make clear its position against an invasion of Ukraine as its topmost decision-making body, the Politburo Standing Committee, reappeared in public view. Over more than a week, the seven-member group had huddled behind closed doors for discussions, including how to respond to the Russia-Ukraine crisis and manage China’s partnership with Russia without hurting Beijing’s own interests.
The latest, more explicit remarks, mentioning Ukraine by name, indicate Beijing for now has settled on a strategy to oppose a Russian invasion of the Eastern European country while continuing to blame the U.S. and its allies for hyping the threats from Russia. In Beijing’s view, say Chinese diplomats and government advisers, that serves its interests in preventing outright hostility with the U.S.-led Western world and in maintaining its principle on opposing any country’s interference in another country’s internal affairs.
Behind China’s Warning Against a Russian Invasion Is a Desire to Protect Ties With the U.S.
After strongly supporting Moscow’s standoff with the West over Ukraine, Beijing aligns its position closer to Washington’s
But since Chinese President Xi Jinping this month gave his Russian counterpart his strongest support to date in Moscow’s standoff with the West, Beijing has been calling for a resolution of the crisis through diplomatic channels, aligning its position closer to that taken by the U.S. and its allies.
The shift in tone, say Chinese diplomats and advisers to the Chinese government, comes after days of closed-door deliberations by top leaders and reflects Beijing’s desire to avoid an even more adversarial relationship with Washington that could cause China to be isolated from the West and hurt the country’s development in the long run.
“China still wants to hold together the relationship with the U.S.,” said Wang Huiyao, a government adviser and president of the Center for China and Globalization, a Beijing think tank.
Speaking to Europe’s pre-eminent annual strategic forum Saturday, China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi used some of the clearest language yet by a senior Chinese official in seeking to temper a Russian offensive against Ukraine. “The sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity of any country should be respected and safeguarded,” Mr. Wang told the Munich Security Conference by video link. “Ukraine is no exception.”
His comments followed Mr. Xi’s remarks three days earlier, when the Chinese leader, in a phone conversation with French President Emmanuel Macron, also called for dialogue to resolve the Russia-Ukraine crisis, remarks indicating a desire not to push European countries further away.
By contrast, when Mr. Xi endorsed Russia’s opposition to any expansion by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in his Feb. 4 joint statement with President Vladimir Putin, it left out any mention of Ukraine. That statement was issued when Mr. Putin attended the opening of the Beijing Winter Olympics as Mr. Xi’s guest of honor.
President Vladimir Putin was a guest of honor at the Beijing Winter Olympics earlier this month.
Photo: Alexei Druzhinin/Kremlin Pool/Zuma Press
Behind the Beijing-Moscow joint stance against NATO enlargement is Mr. Xi’s eagerness to show solidarity with Mr. Putin as both countries’ ties with the U.S. have soured, according to people with knowledge of Beijing’s thinking. Just as Russia is worried about threats to its security from any NATO expansion, one of the people said, China is concerned about “its territorial integrity as a result of the U.S. meddling in Taiwan.”
“They feel like they’re in the same boat,” the person added. Beijing sees Taiwan as Chinese territory and bringing the self-governing island into its fold as part of Mr. Xi’s “China Dream” of national revival.
However, China’s leadership appeared to have underestimated the reaction to the Feb. 4 statement from the rest of the world.
Many in Washington and Brussels saw the entente as one of the clearest signals yet that Beijing intends to join forces with Moscow to reshape the global order closer to their two countries’ authoritarian vision. That, on top of Beijing’s coercive behavior toward countries from Australia to Lithuania and increased military activities near the Taiwan Strait, has offered more support for President Biden’s effort to work with allies to guard against China.
While tilting closer to Moscow, the Chinese leadership still sees it in its interest not to have the bottom fallout of its ties with the U.S. It needs continued access to American financial and technological resources to ensure economic security and development—an access that could be jeopardized should Beijing decide to help Moscow evade sanctions in the event of an invasion.
Members of China’s Politburo discussed how to respond to the Russian-Ukraine crisis in a way that protects Beijing’s interests.
Photo: nicolas asfouri/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
“China recognizes its relationship with the U.S. is contentious and competitive,” said Bonnie Glaser, director of the Asia program at the German Marshall Fund, a Washington-based think tank. “But they don’t want to be pushed into the Russian camp.”
Beijing started to make clear its position against an invasion of Ukraine as its topmost decision-making body, the Politburo Standing Committee, reappeared in public view. Over more than a week, the seven-member group had huddled behind closed doors for discussions, including how to respond to the Russia-Ukraine crisis and manage China’s partnership with Russia without hurting Beijing’s own interests.
The latest, more explicit remarks, mentioning Ukraine by name, indicate Beijing for now has settled on a strategy to oppose a Russian invasion of the Eastern European country while continuing to blame the U.S. and its allies for hyping the threats from Russia. In Beijing’s view, say Chinese diplomats and government advisers, that serves its interests in preventing outright hostility with the U.S.-led Western world and in maintaining its principle on opposing any country’s interference in another country’s internal affairs.
Meanwhile, Beijing is set to kick off a series of events to commemorate the 50th anniversary of former President Richard Nixon’s trip to China. The seven-day visit in 1972 paved the way for the resumption of diplomatic ties between the two countries and set the stage for China’s opening to the world.
The purpose of the events, Chinese diplomats say, is to encourage scholars, business people and others to speak up for the need for continued engagement between the two world powers. As the Biden administration continues a hard line on China started by President Donald Trump, Chinese diplomats have complained about the difficulty in getting meetings with administration officials.
One event planned in connection with the Nixon visit anniversary, for instance, is a roundtable discussion with more than two dozen international business executives, to be held on Thursday by the Center for China and Globalization, the think tank headed by Mr. Wang, the government adviser.
“We’d like to show the room for development in China’s market is still huge for American and other foreign companies,” Mr. Wang said.
—Alex Leary contributed to this article.
11. Kremlin says no concrete plans for summit with Biden over Ukraine
Kremlin says no concrete plans for summit with Biden over Ukraine
- Summary
- Macron proposes Biden-Putin summit
- Kremlin says tensions growing over Ukraine
- White House says summit possible only if Russia does not invade
- Kremlin declines to rule out direct intervention in Donbass
MOSCOW, Feb 21 (Reuters) - The Kremlin on Monday said there were no concrete plans for a summit over Ukraine between Russian President Vladimir Putin and his U.S. counterpart Joe Biden, after the French president said the two leaders had agreed a meeting in principle.
A summit might offer a possible path out of Europe's biggest military crisis in decades, and financial markets edged higher on the glimmer of hope for a diplomatic solution.
However, both Washington and Moscow played down hopes of a breakthrough, and satellite imagery appeared to show Russian deployments closer to Ukraine's border than before.
Western countries accuse Russia of planning an invasion of its neighbour. Moscow denies planning any attack but has demanded security guarantees including a promise that Ukraine would never join NATO.
Nerves were further frayed when the Belarusian defence ministry announced on Sunday that Russia would extend military drills in Belarus that had been due to end. Russia has tens of thousands of troops there, north of the Ukrainian border.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters that a phone call or meeting between Putin and Biden could be set up at any time, but there were no concrete plans yet for a summit. Tensions were growing, but diplomatic contacts were active and a meeting of foreign ministers was possible this week.
He also said Putin would imminently address an extraordinary session of Russia's Security Council.
The White House said in a statement that Biden had accepted the meeting "in principle" but only "if an invasion hasn't happened".
"We are always ready for diplomacy," White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said. "We are also ready to impose swift and severe consequences, should Russia instead choose war."
Western countries are preparing sanctions they say would be far-reaching against Russian companies and individuals in the event that Russia invades, including steps to bar U.S. financial institutions from processing transactions for major Russian banks, people familiar with the matter said. read more
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba, arriving in Brussels to meet his European Union counterparts, urged the bloc to start imposing some sanctions on Russia now to show it was serious about wanting to prevent a war. read more
The West has so far rebuffed Kyiv's calls to impose tighter sanctions now, arguing that to work as a deterrent they must be saved as a potential punishment if Russia invades.
EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said he still saw room for diplomacy, but would convene an extraordinary EU meeting to agree sanctions "when the moment comes".
U.S. stock index futures rallied on prospects for further diplomacy, the euro rose and stocks steadied around the world.
French President Emmanuel Macron's office said in a statement that he had pitched a summit on "security and strategic stability in Europe" to both leaders.
SUMMIT PLANS UNCLEAR
Macron's office and the White House said the substance of the plan would be worked out by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov during a meeting planned for Feb. 24.
French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said on Twitter that he would hold talks with Lavrov later on Monday.
Ukraine welcomed a possible summit between but said it must be included in any decisions aimed at resolving the crisis.
"No one can resolve our issue without us," Ukraine's top security official Oleksiy Danilov told a briefing. "Everything should happen with our participation."
Macron's announcement followed a volley of phone calls between Macron, Biden, Putin, Zelenskiy and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
U.S.-based satellite imagery company Maxar on Sunday reported multiple new deployments of Russian military units in forests, farms, and industrial areas as little as 15 km (9 miles) from the border with Ukraine. read more
Blinken said the extension of the exercises in Belarus made him more worried that Russia was on the brink of an attack. read more
In a letter to U.N. human rights chief Michelle Bachelet seen by Reuters, the United States said an invasion "could create a human rights catastrophe" and might include rounding up and killing opponents.
Washington has also repeatedly raised concerns that Russia could manufacture a pretext for an invasion with a so-called false flag attack designed to look as if it had been carried out by Ukraine. Russia accuses the West of hysteria.
Sporadic shelling across the line dividing Ukrainian government forces and pro-Russian separatists in the east has intensified since Thursday, with both sides trading blame.
The separatists have been busing out civilians, accusing Kyiv of planning an attack. Ukraine and the West view the rebels as Russian proxies, escalating to provide Moscow with a justification to invade.
Sounds of fighting were heard again on Monday, including a blast in the centre of the separatist-held city of Donetsk. The cause could not be determined.
Russia's FSB intelligence service said a shell fired from Ukrainian territory had hit a Russian border guard post in the city of Rostov, but that no one had been hurt. read more
The rebels said two civilians were killed in shelling by Kyiv government forces, Russia's RIA news agency said. Russian media reported 61,000 evacuees from east Ukraine had crossed into Russia.
Kyiv denies firing on civilians or across the border into Russia. Washington says accusations that Kyiv would intentionally escalate the conflict are absurd at a time when Russia has massed troops on the border.
Reporting by Reuters bureaux Writing by Kevin Liffey Editing by Peter Graff
12. Would Sanctions Mean Russia Launches a Cyberwar Against America?
Each of us should ask how prepared we are for a cyber attack by Russia or anyone else.
Conclusion:
It remains to be seen how well prepared American infrastructure is in the case of cyberattacks. They’ve studied the Russian cyber warfare examples against Ukraine from 2015-16, but these may involve a heavier threat to counter.
Would Sanctions Mean Russia Launches a Cyberwar Against America?
Would Russia unleash a cyberwar against America? While all eyes are watching the buildup of Russian military forces on three sides of Ukraine that are as high as 190,000 and rising, it seems that an invasion is inevitable as the United States and other Western nations threaten Moscow with economic sanctions.
The invasion would not only unleash what Washington characterizes as crippling economic sanctions against Moscow, but it would probably trigger a Russian reaction of cyber attacks originating from Russia which would shut down US infrastructure, and by all indications the United States is ill-prepared for such an attack.
Sanctions Mean Cyberwar?
The Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA) warned this week that the country must go full “shields up” to protect key parts of U.S. critical infrastructure – such as oil and gas pipelines, banks, commercial aviation, and hospitals from cyber attacks and ransomware.
Washington has blamed Moscow for the cyberattacks that hit Ukraine last week that targeted Kyiv’s military and banking sites, according to Anne Neuberger, the deputy national security advisor for cyber and emerging technology.
The US says that the cyberattacks against Ukraine were conducted by the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency. Back in 2014, the Russians were able to hack a Ukrainian app that was used to pinpoint artillery fire. They were then able to not only shut it down but then used it to find the Ukrainian positions and target them. It is a textbook Russian tactic of asymmetric warfare and gives them a modicum of deniability..
Neuberger warned that attacks against US sites are possible. Speaking at a White House briefing, she said, “Russia likes to move in the shadows and counts on a long process of attribution.” She said that US intelligence had detected the GRU “was seen transmitting high volumes of communication to Ukraine-based IP addresses and domains.”
“In light of that, we’re moving quickly to attribute the DDoS (distributed denial of services) attacks. We believe the Russian government is responsible for widespread attacks on Ukrainian banks this week.”
“While there are currently no specific or credible cyber threats to the homeland, the U.S. government has been preparing for potential geopolitical contingencies since before Thanksgiving,” she added. Russia has denied any involvement in cyberattacks.
American banks were targeted by Iranian cyberattacks back in 2012 after the US levied sanctions against Tehran. Since then, most banks claim to have strengthened their cyber defenses.
However, a year ago, Congress tasked the Biden administration with coming up with creating a Continuity of the Economy (COTE) plan. This plan would ensure the renewal of the U.S. economy following a significant cyberattack by identifying the most critical goods and services that would need to be protected or restored in the case of a cyberattack.
Congress gave the administration two years to implement the COTE plan, but there seems to have been no progress on implementing that goal. And there is little doubt that the Russians would resort to this.
Sanctions a Declaration of War:
Back in 2018, after the US and UK had levied sanctions on Moscow for the Skripal poisoning in the United Kingdom, then-Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev called the economic sanctions “a declaration of economic war.”
He vowed that Russia would “react to this war economically, politically, or, if needed, by other means.”
CISA posted on its website the warning, “The Russian government understands that disabling or destroying critical infrastructure—including power and communications—can augment pressure on a country’s government, military, and population and accelerate their acceding to Russian objectives.”
It remains to be seen how well prepared American infrastructure is in the case of cyberattacks. They’ve studied the Russian cyber warfare examples against Ukraine from 2015-16, but these may involve a heavier threat to counter.
Steve Balestrieri is a 1945 National Security Columnist. He has served as a US Army Special Forces NCO and Warrant Officer before injuries forced his early separation. In addition to writing for 19fortyfive.com, he has covered the NFL for PatsFans.com for more than 10 years and his work was regularly featured in the Millbury-Sutton Chronicle and Grafton News newspapers in Massachusetts.
13. Words Versus Deeds in Biden’s Indo-Pacific Strategy
Yes, actions speak louder than words. Most of us are evaluating the strategy based on agendas and pet projects we support. My "agenda" is campaign plan development and execution.
We will assess the strategy after we see execution. As I have written I believe we should evaluate the strategy on how it can be used to develop campaign plans and country team mission strategic plans. My assessment of the strategy is that I could make very good use of it. Again there is a lot to parse, to like, and to criticize but the real test is in the development and execution of the supporting plans. Let us see those in action and then we can make a judgment about the strategy.
Words Versus Deeds in Biden’s Indo-Pacific Strategy - War on the Rocks
For those watching for signs of the Biden administration adopting a more deliberate and strategic approach to Asia, last week delivered fodder for both optimists and pessimists, as the administration released its Indo-Pacific Strategy. This is the White House’s first regional strategy — coming out before even the National Security Strategy — so it deserves a careful reading. While the strategy sends many of the right signals, it is impossible to judge it in isolation from a decade of American promises about prioritizing Asia, which have too often gone unfulfilled.
As a senior official said, the goal in releasing the document was to emphasize “the importance of the U.S. playing an affirmative, positive role in the region.” Indeed, the strategy is relentlessly optimistic, advocating a free, open, connected, prosperous, secure, and resilient region —messaging clearly intended for U.S. allies and partners in the Indo-Pacific. This is why it was released while Secretary of State Tony Blinken was in the region, where he had already outlined the strategy last year.
This strategy is unlikely to make a splash in the United States, but that was not the intention. While it barely addresses China — the strategic issue of most interest to many Americans —those interested in the president’s China strategy will have to wait longer. Meanwhile, observers continue to express concern that the administration’s strategic objective regarding China remains unclear.
So, if this strategy is intended for an Asian audience, how will it be received there? Initial results are mixed. Foreign government officials have privately told me that they appreciate the White House’s efforts to carefully craft and coordinate the strategy. And they are pleased that it was released despite ongoing concerns about a further Russian invasion of Ukraine. This suggests that the administration can “walk and chew gum at the same time,” as administration officials are fond of asserting.
But Asian officials worry about America’s ability to turn these words into action. This strategy, like other recent documents issued by administrations from both parties, often appears more rhetorical than realistic. It reads more like a wish list than a strategy, which would require actual trade-offs. This is not a problem unique to the Biden administration. Like other presidents, Joe Biden has a say-do gap problem. As a result, Asian observers have learned to focus not on America’s vision but its execution. Indeed, when the White House noted “longstanding continuity… across administrations and across parties” during the strategy’s rollout, many in Asia probably thought about Americans saying one thing and doing another.
What new actions does this strategy promise? The document highlights five objectives, which fall into three main areas: prosperity, security, and values. These match the three priorities that the Biden administration presented in its Interim National Security Strategic Guidance last year. A close reading of the Indo-Pacific Strategy suggests that the commitments in each area are likely to raise as many questions as answers.
Consider the prosperity pillar, which regional players frequently call their top priority. Regional states welcome U.S. trade and investment, so there are many opportunities for deeper U.S. economic engagement. But both the Trump and Biden administrations have watched as China has struck trade deals involving most of Asia. The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership — of which China is a leading member — has now come into force. And Beijing has indicated its intention to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership. A decade ago, the United States argued that the Trans-Pacific Partnership was needed to ensure that China didn’t “write the rules” for 21st-century trade. Now, policymakers in Washington seem content to allow Beijing to do so.
One might have thought this would spur Washington to action. But all the Biden administration is offering is an Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, which officials acknowledge would not include trade or investment liberalization. This has led some to suggest that the administration “still has some homework to do on the economic dimension” of its strategy. After all, why would regional states agree to concessions on climate or labor standards if trade and investment liberalization are off the table? As a result, his framework has received a polite but disappointed reception from many in the region. The White House’s top Indo-Pacific official Kurt Campbell even noted that the United States is competing not with one or two hands tied behind its back, but “maybe one foot tied back there as well.”
The White House has done its best to salvage a positive economic message, yet it appears that Washington is content to remain on the sidelines as Beijing integrates more deeply into the region’s economic order. The administration has wisely announced that it will host the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit next year, but it will need to present concrete proposals there. Otherwise, regional observers will see this as another sign of U.S. dysfunction, made worse by reports of infighting between the National Security Council and U.S. Trade Representative.
Surely the administration must have more to offer on security and values. After all, despite Kurt Campbell’s concern about U.S. economic offerings, he has said that “Our ticket to the big game has often been our military.” Admittedly, this document is not a China strategy nor a defense strategy. But it is meant to reassure the region of American reliability. Yet when it comes to security, the only new concept in the document is “integrated deterrence,” which the strategy calls “the cornerstone of our approach.”
What is integrated deterrence? How is it applicable to Asia? The answers to both questions are not entirely clear. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin describes integrated deterrence as “using every military and non-military tool in lock-step with allies and partners.” But that is basic deterrence. If anything is new about this approach, it is the effort to emphasize the non-military elements of deterrence. Yet, relying more heavily on economic tools for deterrence is a suspect strategy when U.S. economic leverage in Asia is waning. Economic tools did not deter Xi from consolidating control over Hong Kong and are unlikely to deter action against Taiwan.
Rather than relying on catchphrases, the United States needs to counter China’s military modernization and growing assertiveness by bolstering actual U.S. military capabilities. Senior administration officials recognize this reality and should get credit for advancing cooperation with India, Japan, and Australia (known as the Quad) and inking a tripartite submarine and defense technology agreement between the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Yet, the recent Global Posture Review contained no major posture changes in Asia and questions remain about whether the Defense Department is prioritizing key elements of the Pacific Deterrence Initiative.
Small shifts are occurring out of public view, but bold action is needed if the United States is to reassure anxious regional allies and partners. Indeed, despite all the Biden administration’s talk about cooperation with allies and partners, confidence in the United States as a strategic partner and security provider declined from 55 percent to 43 percent over the last year according to a poll of Southeast Asian experts.
So, the prosperity and security elements of the strategy leave much to be desired, but what about the values component? The Biden administration’s Interim National Security Strategy Guidance promised that “democracy is essential to meeting the challenges of our time.” But making democracy the core of U.S. strategy in Asia is difficult. After all, only three of the ten members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations were even invited to Biden’s Summit for Democracy last year. And few in the region are willing to listen to American admonitions about democracy when its basic principles are under threat in the United States.
Since centering the Indo-Pacific strategy on democracy would have been awkward, the Indo-Pacific strategy only mentions democracy a handful of times in its eighteen pages. This was probably wise, but it highlights a key contradiction: the administration says it prioritizes the Asian theater, and its core mission is to show that democracies can deliver. But these components don’t mix well.
This is not to argue that democracy is unimportant as a component of U.S. global strategy. Indeed, if the United States is to remain aligned with its allies and partners in Europe to confront China’s concerning behavior, it will need to capitalize on shared values. But the administration couldn’t put democracy at the forefront of the Indo-Pacific strategy for fear of this paradox. The resulting strategy reads well but is unfortunately unconvincing. It promises prosperity, but only advocates a nebulous Indo-Pacific Economic Framework. It commits to security, but merely repeats empty statements about integrating deterrence. And it asserts that values are critical, but downplays the importance of democracy in the region.
This is not to argue that the last year has been a failure for the United States in Asia. Indeed, the Biden team deserves credit for mending ties with several key allies and partners. It has also provided vaccines to key regional allies and partners while championing cooperation to address climate concerns critical to the Pacific Islands. But the administration has also been slow to nominate key officials and to host a long-awaited U.S.-ASEAN Summit. Worse still, Biden has not visited the region nor engaged deeply with many Southeast Asian leaders.
There is a lot of work to do to convince regional players that the United States is truly “back” in the Indo-Pacific. Asian observers know that U.S. leaders often talk a good game on Asia, only to become distracted by events at home or abroad. Asian observers now are looking for concrete actions rather than words. The test of the Biden team’s strategy for this critical region will not be its words, but the actions that follow.
Zack Cooper is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and co-director of the Alliance for Securing Democracy. He co-hosts the Net Assessment podcast for War on the Rocks.
14. Flunking the New York Times Test: Making Sense of Russian “Covert” Action
Very interesting analysis. An important conclusion highlighted below.
Excerpts:
Building from the initial New York Times exposé, a community of analysts, journalists, and citizen investigators (most notably Bellingcat) has meticulously tracked and documented the supposedly poor tradecraft of Unit 29155. At face value, these revelations represent a triumph of citizen journalism and the power of open-source research in the digital age. But how do we reconcile these investigative breakthroughs with the skill sets that exist within the GRU?
The narrative of Unit 29155’s sloppy tradecraft may have begun in response to genuine mistakes. All intelligence services blunder. That said, Unit 29155’s supposed missteps were repeated time and again, after their initial exposure. Operational and digital signatures have been uncovered and revealed in the press—and then used again. There are two possible explanations for an apparent operational breakdown of this scale: either one of the most elite elements within the GRU has become grossly incompetent, or the Kremlin has been scattering breadcrumbs deliberately.
The latter explanation seems more likely: public discovery of the Kremlin’s covert activity may well have been the bedrock of a calculated Russian influence operation.
...
In an era of ubiquitous technical surveillance, truly covert action will grow increasingly elusive. Moscow appears to have grasped this reality and embraced it. Western leadership must also adapt to the environment as it is—not as it wishes it to be—and plan accordingly. Above all, the United States must not pause or prevent operations due to an outdated understanding of the tradeoff between covert operations and the risk of exposure. US intelligence must reclaim the initiative. It needs to take more risks—provided that it is taking risks that it can be proud of.
Flunking the New York Times Test: Making Sense of Russian “Covert” Action - Modern War Institute
On October 8, 2019, the New York Times published a sensational piece on its front page, detailing the decidedly mixed operational history of Unit 29155 of Russia’s military intelligence directorate, the GRU. The article revealed that the elite unit was comprised largely of former Spetsnaz unit members with deep experience in Central Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Europe. It exposed the unit’s assassination operations, along with other activities designed to destabilize political opponents in Russia’s “near abroad.” The article detailed a host of operational mistakes, outed members of Unit 29155 by name, and even provided details on the unit’s headquarters.
At first blush, it would appear that Unit 29155 failed the famous “New York Times test”—a hypothetical exercise, long used in the US intelligence community, which prompts intelligence professionals to consider the negative impact of an operation if its details were to be splashed across the front page of America’s “newspaper of record.” If the consequences are unacceptable, changes may be required to increase secrecy or mitigate fallout.
For US intelligence, the test is a risk management tool. Russian intelligence, however, takes a very different view. Recent exposures of Russian intelligence operations demonstrate an embrace of media attention to further geopolitical objectives—and a novel approach to influence in the information age.
Building a Narrative of Aggression
Building from the initial New York Times exposé, a community of analysts, journalists, and citizen investigators (most notably Bellingcat) has meticulously tracked and documented the supposedly poor tradecraft of Unit 29155. At face value, these revelations represent a triumph of citizen journalism and the power of open-source research in the digital age. But how do we reconcile these investigative breakthroughs with the skill sets that exist within the GRU?
The narrative of Unit 29155’s sloppy tradecraft may have begun in response to genuine mistakes. All intelligence services blunder. That said, Unit 29155’s supposed missteps were repeated time and again, after their initial exposure. Operational and digital signatures have been uncovered and revealed in the press—and then used again. There are two possible explanations for an apparent operational breakdown of this scale: either one of the most elite elements within the GRU has become grossly incompetent, or the Kremlin has been scattering breadcrumbs deliberately.
The latter explanation seems more likely: public discovery of the Kremlin’s covert activity may well have been the bedrock of a calculated Russian influence operation.
According to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, “Influence operations are organized attempts to achieve a specific effect among a target audience.” In this instance, the target audience is the international community, with the primary emphasis on any outspoken dissidents or opponents of the Russian agenda—and a secondary emphasis on Western perceptions of what the Kremlin is prepared to do to achieve its goals. The specific effect, meanwhile, is to amplify perceptions of Russian aggression and present Russia as a serious foe.
As public outcry flared over the attempted hit on Sergei Skripal in March 2018, the Kremlin saw an opportunity to advertise Russia’s aggression, ramping up operations and even reusing some of the same kill teams. The continued not-so-covert activity of Unit 29155 has demonstrated the Kremlin’s distinct risk/reward calculus. When it comes to risk, Russian policymakers accept that certain operations cannot withstand the scrutiny of ubiquitous technical surveillance, lengthy journalistic exposures, or law enforcement investigations. Moreover, there is substantial upside to such exposure if it furthers the narrative of Russian power and aggression.
The message Russian intelligence wishes to send is clear: The Kremlin can, and will, dispatch covert warriors to operate with impunity around the globe. This is a deliberately crafted message, which has been intentionally shared with the world.
Winning Without Fighting
This message serves multiple purposes for Moscow. First, it serves as a distinct form of deterrence to defectors, traitors, and other dissidents, signaling that political enemies are not safe anywhere. The absence of refuge, and the prospect of ever-roaming assassination squads, has a powerful psychological effect similar to that of a sniper on the battlefield. The perils of crossing the Kremlin are, all too regularly, front-page news. This explains why the Kremlin has no qualms about carrying out an assassination in London, the most surveilled city in the world.
The second purpose of this message has a more ambitious geopolitical end. A state that is willing to murder its foes in European cities like Berlin and Salisbury could also be willing to run the risk of a large-scale ground offensive into Ukraine. The implication is that Western leaders should appease Russia, and perhaps sacrifice Ukraine in the process. The madman can win in coercive bargaining situations, just as Sun Tzu argued that the aura of reckless aggression can allow one to “win without fighting.”
Both tragically and ironically, prominent Western voices have gone out of their way to propagate the Kremlin’s narrative. Within Western political circles, Russia’s reach in the information environment has been vastly overhyped. Efforts to get to the bottom of Russia’s actions and their actual impact on Western electoral politics are politicized into partisan narratives long before official reports are produced. The common thread through all of this has been an amplification of Russian aggression, reach, and strategic vision.
Where Do We Go From Here?
Today, broad segments of the Western press remain fixated on the prospect of Vladimir Putin’s next “Monster Plot”—the false Cold War–era theory that the Soviets had high-ranking moles in the CIA. This theory so obsessed elements of the CIA that it paralyzed HUMINT operations for years. Then as now, the result is the absurd mythologizing of Russian power. The West has created the legend of Putin the mastermind. It’s time to correct this imbalance.
On the home front, the United States must take ownership of its own political reality. The intertwining myths of Russian omnipresence and omnipotence in the information environment must be put to rest, regardless of their short-term utility in furthering domestic partisan ends. Russia is a geopolitical foe that meddles in elections—but this threat must be addressed without casting the Kremlin as an all-purpose and all-powerful bogeyman.
The US intelligence community, meanwhile, might reconsider how it uses the New York Times test. Russia has shown that exposure is not always a bad outcome. How should US intelligence organizations think about publicity in the information age? If Russia can turn this test on its head and weaponize it, what lessons might the United States learn about achieving strategic effects in the twenty-first century?
There are some examples of this type of success in the West. The Stuxnet attacks on Iran were an intelligence campaign wherein exposure may have amplified the effects of the initial operation by advertising the cyber reach of Iran’s foes. More recently, the US government declassified some details of Russian activity along the Ukrainian border to “narrow Putin’s options and make him think twice.”
Nonetheless, US frontline intelligence services remain dangerously risk averse. From irregular warfare to information gathering, fortune favors the bold. In an increasingly chaotic strategic landscape, the risk/reward calculus of Western intelligence agencies is a liability.
Of course, the United States is not Russia. Russian tactics are broadly beyond the pale in a democracy, where transparency and accountability are essential. The United States should not be in the business of surreptitiously manipulating the media—both for self-evident ethical reasons and because of the ever-increasing likelihood of exposure. Nonetheless, it is clear that Russian intelligence has adapted, in its own distinct way, to the realities of the information age. The Glomar response—neither confirming nor denying an allegation—is not good enough anymore. US intelligence needs to rethink its approach to risk, exposure, and accountability.
In an era of ubiquitous technical surveillance, truly covert action will grow increasingly elusive. Moscow appears to have grasped this reality and embraced it. Western leadership must also adapt to the environment as it is—not as it wishes it to be—and plan accordingly. Above all, the United States must not pause or prevent operations due to an outdated understanding of the tradeoff between covert operations and the risk of exposure. US intelligence must reclaim the initiative. It needs to take more risks—provided that it is taking risks that it can be proud of.
Chris Cruden is a former senior advisor to the under secretary of defense for intelligence and security. Prior to that, Chris worked in the private sector in emerging technology and served as an intelligence officer conducting HUMINT and SIGINT operations in support of special operations. He is currently a member of the Ridgeline International, Inc. team ensuring DoD clients have the necessary technology and training to carry out their missions securely and successfully.
Dr. Nicholas Krohley is the principal of FrontLine Advisory. He is an advisor to American, British, and numerous allied governments, and the proprietor of www.civilreconnaissance.com.
The views expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.
Image: Vladimir Putin speaks at an event to mark the centenary of the GRU (credit: kremlin.ru)
15. How to Respond to Gray Zone Aggression in the Indo-Pacific
Excerpts:
Thus far, the gray zone strategy embraced by China and other actors who would thwart a rules-based international order has been fruitful. If other nations in the Indo-Pacific are to counter malign gray zone activities, they must do so intentionally and holistically. As former Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel noted in his forward to the Atlantic Council strategy paper, “A more closely coordinated approach between nations and across the whole of government is needed to deter, defend, and shape the strategic environment, if the US security and defense apparatus is to be nimble enough to deal with the ‘gray zone’ warfare that resides just below the threshold of armed conflict.”
Hagel is right, and countermeasures can be a robust tool that the U.S. and its allies and partners should embrace if they are going successfully counter gray zone activities that undermine the international rules-based order.
How to Respond to Gray Zone Aggression in the Indo-Pacific
The U.S. and its allies and partners must rethink countermeasures if they want to compete in the gray zone.
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As any observer of the Indo-Pacific knows, changes have been afoot in recent years. Lasers temporarily blind reconnaissance satellites. Man-made islands rise atop reefs as newly minted outposts of alleged Chinese sovereign territory. “Emergency defensive measures” are threatened against aircraft that would fly through international airspace near China without obeying expansive Chinese air controls. News reports over recent years have documented these and other aggressive Chinese “gray zone” activities, which are meant to gradually achieve goals China would not be expected to attain through direct means or other international rules-based processes.
Generally speaking, gray zone activities are activities on the international relations continuum that are unfriendly and adverse to other nations but that do not cross the threshold of armed conflict. Depending on the specific gray zone activity, the action may directly violate the offending nation’s international obligations, or it may simply exploit weaknesses and vagaries in international law or international resolve. Gray zone activities are characterized by the use of an incrementalist approach to obtain geopolitical ambitions, slowly executing contentious and often internationally wrongful actions to ultimately obtain an end state that would have been resolutely opposed had it been clearly pursued in the beginning. Gray zone activities create, embrace, and exploit a murky space between war and peace. In a European context, gray zone activities are those that begin with shadowy “little green men” appearing in Ukraine and lead to the Russian annexation of Crimea.
While China and some other nations operate nimbly and effectively in this gray zone, the United States and its allies and partners have struggled to find ways to effectively respond. If the United States and others are to push back against malign gray zone activity while promoting and maintaining a commitment to an international rules-based order, they must rethink how, whether, and when they implement the international law concept known as countermeasures.
Countermeasures: What Are They?
The elevator speech description of countermeasures is that they are an international law mechanism that allows one nation to respond to another nation’s internationally wrongful acts with a move that would itself be internationally wrongful were it not for the aggressor nation’s initial wrongdoing. In other words, countermeasures let nations fight unlawful acts with tailored, and otherwise unlawful, acts of their own. Although classic countermeasures are thought of in what can be described as a non-traditional security context (the leading International Court of Justice opinion on countermeasures concerns violations of a treaty on dams and water use, for instance), there is no requirement that they be so contained. In fact, much recent scholarship has focused on the use of countermeasures as a response to state-sponsored cyberattacks.
Although countermeasures are powerful in that they allow a nation to take otherwise prohibited actions against another nation, they are governed by some restrictions. Foremost, countermeasures may not involve the use of force. This distinction should generally have little impact in the fight against malign gray zone activities, however, since gray zone activities by their nature take place below the level of armed conflict. Additionally, countermeasures must be designed and executed to bring the offending nation back to compliance with international norms and as a general rule must cease when the offending behavior stops. That again is not a significant burden in fighting gray zone activities, since the goal of countermeasures would be not to punish, but to stop the malign gray zone activity and return the parties to the position they were in before the wrongful gray zone activity was initiated. Countermeasures must also be proportionate to the injury suffered, though so many factors can be taken into account in the analysis of one’s national injury that the proportionality requirement should not create a notable hinderance to crafting effective countermeasures.
Why Countermeasures?
Countermeasures are especially suited for gray zone competition because they place otherwise unlawful acts in the toolboxes of the U.S., allies, and partners, and they need not be limited to the same military domain or even the same instrument of national power as the precipitating act. For instance, the wrongful lazing of a reconnaissance satellite’s sensors might be met with an otherwise-wrongful cyberattack against a power station that supports the offending nation’s naval logistics hub; incursions into national airspace might be met with the injured nation temporarily refusing to uphold unrelated but legally binding treaty obligations toward the offending nation. This robust view means countermeasures are agnostic to domain, geography, and instrument of national power. An aggressor nation’s repeated internationally wrongful lazing of satellites in outer space can now place that nation’s economic system instruments at proportional risk.
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Furthermore, countermeasures are important because they promote a rules-based order over raw power. Countermeasures allow the United States and its allies and partners to creatively design and employ potent responses against unlawful actions and to do so while staying within and actively promoting the rules-based international order. They provide a way to not just practice rules-based responses, but to show that they can be effective against brazen and internationally wrongful power plays.
Countermeasures also legitimize and grant access to tools that allow injured nations to at least partially circumvent the question of how to characterize what China is doing. Instead of asking whether the malign behavior in question constitutes a use of force (or an armed attack, which is generally accepted as a higher standard whose interpretation has some disagreement among the U.S., allies, and partners), the only question is whether the malign activity is internationally wrongful. If the answer to that question is yes, countermeasures may be used.
Practical Considerations
The Atlantic Council’s recent strategy paper, “Seizing the Advantage: A Vision for the Next US National Defense Strategy,” highlights a need for interagency cooperation in executing what the paper describes as hybrid warfare using all instruments of national power across the full spectrum of international competition. In the U.S., a successful and vigorous use of countermeasures will necessitate and can consequently help drive interagency cooperation, and one can expect a similar situation for U.S. allies and partners.
Since countermeasures are the execution of a normally prohibited action or omission by one nation against another nation, it is not something that can or should be done unilaterally by one government agency. As part of the interagency coordination, there will need to be a determination that the injured government does in fact consider the precipitating act to be internationally wrongful and wants to make such an assertion. Similarly, there should be a standing interagency mechanism to identify and assess internationally wrongful gray zone activities to target, and to identify and develop countermeasure options across domains and instruments of national power.
In some instances, especially those with more complex strategic implications, this interagency coordination may be a slower process. In other circumstances, such as where a reconnaissance satellite is being repeatedly blinded by a laser during escalated tension, in violation of international law’s protection of the free use of outer space, an interagency countermeasures cell could coordinate and execute “urgent countermeasures,” which may be permitted with fewer preconditions in order to rapidly protect a nation’s rights. Similar multilateral arrangements may also be helpful to coordinate with allies and partners in determining appropriate countermeasures responses, in part since a clear gray zone “victim nation” will not always be obvious.
Although countermeasures offer an important tool in fighting malign gray zone activities, they are not a panacea. As previously noted, they may only be invoked if the aggressor state’s activity is internationally wrongful. While gray zone activity is often internationally wrongful, it isn’t always. Also, some thought must be given on a case-by-case basis to proportionality and how long a countermeasure may continue, though the range of factors that can be incorporated into those determinations leave room for flexible execution in coordination with relevant government players. Other requirements, such as the need to continue to obey peremptory norms like respect for human rights, must be followed but will provide little practical impediment.
Countering Gray Zone Aggression
Thus far, the gray zone strategy embraced by China and other actors who would thwart a rules-based international order has been fruitful. If other nations in the Indo-Pacific are to counter malign gray zone activities, they must do so intentionally and holistically. As former Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel noted in his forward to the Atlantic Council strategy paper, “A more closely coordinated approach between nations and across the whole of government is needed to deter, defend, and shape the strategic environment, if the US security and defense apparatus is to be nimble enough to deal with the ‘gray zone’ warfare that resides just below the threshold of armed conflict.”
Hagel is right, and countermeasures can be a robust tool that the U.S. and its allies and partners should embrace if they are going successfully counter gray zone activities that undermine the international rules-based order.
Ross Brown is the deputy chief of operations law for Pacific Air Forces, U.S. Indo-Pacific Command's air component. He holds an LL.M. in Air and Space Law from McGill University, and serves in his personal capacity as a core legal expert on the forthcoming Manual on International Law Applicable to Military Uses of Space.
The views expressed here are his own and do not represent the views of the U.S. military, Department of Defense, or U.S. government.
16. Assessing China’s Strategy to “Hide Capabilities and Bide Time”
Assessing China’s Strategy to “Hide Capabilities and Bide Time”
Michael Losacco is a former active-duty U.S. Army officer who served in Afghanistan in 2017. He currently studies at Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service where he focuses on U.S. National Security Policy and China relations. He can be found on Twitter @mplosacco. 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 China’s Strategy to “Hide Capabilities and Bide Time”
Date Originally Written: January 20, 2022.
Date Originally Published: February 21, 2022.
Author and / or Article Point of View: The author is a former U.S. Army combat arms officer who served in South Asia. He is currently pursuing a Master of Security Studies at Georgetown University.
Summary: Since 2008, China has emerged on the world stage as a global power. Its growth within the political, economic, and military domains in international affairs has caught the world off guard. China’s success resulted from efforts undertaken to manipulate perceptions in Washington D.C., known as “hiding capabilities and biding time,” to achieve its core national security objectives.
Text: China has made major achievements in its economic, military, and political development. With a gross domestic product rising from 54 trillion to 80 trillion yuan, it has maintained its position as the world’s second-largest economy[1]. Militarily, the Peoples Liberation Army has increased its ability to implement a sea-control strategy in the Indo-Pacific by implementing new technology and structural reform. Politically and economically, China has created a favorable external environment through the Belt and Road Initiative and regional institutions. China’s core national security objective—to achieve a “community of common destiny”—drives its success[2]. Under this objective, Western powers do not dictate, influence, or shape China’s political, economic, or security domains.
China’s current success resulted from a deception strategy pursued at the end of the Cold War, designed to manipulate Chinese threat perceptions in Washington. This deception campaign kept U.S. attention away from China, while it focused on building its economic and political might at home. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the U.S. was the only superpower in the international system. If there was any perception that China wanted to challenge this status, the U.S. would have likely intervened and stopped it. As a result, it was in China’s interest to divert attention and mask its successes on the world stage.
To understand China’s deception strategy, the reader must first consider the game-theory scenario of the Prisoner’s Dilemma. In Cooperation Under the Security Dilemma, Robert Jervis, Ph.D. explains the Prisoner’s Dilemma as an individual’s decision, after being arrested, on whether to cooperate with their co-prisoner and remain loyal or defect and testify on behalf of law enforcement[3]. Each choice can lead to varying levels of reward and punishment and is further compounded by the other party’s choice. Notably, neither prisoner is aware of the other’s intentions and, thus, fear of being exploited drives the decision-making process.
Important to this decision-making process is how vulnerable the prisoner feels. Specifically, how each prisoner perceives the other prisoner’s likelihood to cooperate or defect. While neither prisoner will likely know the other’s true intentions, the perception of the other, based on previous history and actions, is critical in predicting the outcome of the dilemma.
For example, if Prisoner A is predisposed to see Prisoner B as an adversary, Prisoner A will react more strongly and quickly than if either saw the other as benign. In this scenario, Prisoner A is more likely to readily testify against Prisoner B, capitalizing on the benefits of cooperating with law enforcement. Conversely, if perceptions stay hidden or are unknown, the playing field is equal, and neither prisoner can utilize their knowledge to take advantage of the other.
The Prisoner’s Dilemma directly reflects the strategy China pursued at the end of the Cold War. After the Tiananmen Square Massacre, the Gulf War, and the collapse of the Soviet Union, China went from viewing the U.S. as a potential partner to a potential adversary[4]. China knew it could not become powerful if it was perceived as a growing threat in Washington because the U.S. would intervene—economically, or perhaps militarily—to prevent it from challenging its position as a global hegemon. Thus, China began a deception campaign across political, military, and economic domains, coined under the phrase “hiding capabilities and biding time.” This campaign sought to mask growth and prevent the U.S. from predisposing China as an adversary.
China focused on avoiding a security dilemma with the U.S. in the military domain by prioritizing its military strategy on sea denial, whereby China denies the enemy’s ability to use the sea without necessarily attempting to control the sea for its own use[4]. Sea denial was an inexpensive way to avoid setting off alarms and prevent the U.S. from traversing or intervening in the waters near China. China invested in inexpensive asymmetrical weapons such as the world’s largest mine arsenal, the world’s first anti-ship missile, and the world’s largest anti-submarine fleet. Compared to sea control, these efforts avoided a strategy focused on holding distant maritime territory that would raise concern in Washington.
At the political level, China sought to join regional institutions to inhibit Washington from building an Asian order that could prevent China from growing[4]. China joined organizations such as the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation and Asian Nations Regional Forum under the guise that it was open to transitioning to the liberal order, with a hidden agenda to blunt American power. China’s membership in these organizations allowed it to stall progress, wield institutional rules to constrain U.S. freedom to maneuver, and persuade worried neighbors that a U.S. balancing coalition was not its only option.
China moved to couple at the economic level rather than decoupling from U.S. economic institutions[4]. Recognizing its dependence on the U.S. market, and that a strategy of decoupling would weaken China and raise alarm, China sought to strengthen its economic relationship with the U.S. and lobby for the removal of annual congressional renewal of Most Favored Nation status. By eliminating this procedural rule and making it permanent, China was able to expand investment opportunities and strengthen economic and trade exchanges, while deconstructing potential economic leverage that could be imposed by the U.S., particularly with trade sanctions, tariffs, and technology restrictions.
In sum, China’s path to sustained growth required a strategy that masked its true intent to become a great power. By “hiding capabilities and biding time,” China simultaneously grew politically, economically, and militarily, while avoiding actions that could lead to U.S. suspicions. Like the Prisoner’s Dilemma, China understood that if the U.S. became predisposed to think China had ulterior motives to become a power and challenge the U.S., the U.S. would have intervened and taken advantage of China’s weakened state following the Cold War. Thus, China’s ability to manipulate its adversary’s perceptions was critical to achieving its core national security objectives.
Endnotes:
[1] Jinping, X. (2017). 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China. In Secure a Decisive Victory in Building a Moderately Prosperous Society in All Respects and Strive for the Great Success of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era (pp. 1–6). Beijing.
[2] Rolland, N. (2020). (Rep.). China’s Vision for a New World Order (83rd ed., pp. 35–41). Seattle, WA: The National Bureau of Asian Research.
[4] Doshi, R. (2021). Introduction. In The Long Game (pp. 11–12). Essay, Oxford University Press.
17. Biden Agrees to Putin Summit Provided Russia Pulls Back From Ukraine Attack
Biden Agrees to Putin Summit Provided Russia Pulls Back From Ukraine Attack
Flurry of calls from French President Emmanuel Macron sought diplomatic solution to crisis
WSJ · by Matthew Luxmoore, Yaroslav Trofimov and Brett Forrest
The White House confirmed that President Biden had accepted in principle a meeting with President Putin, provided that Russia doesn’t invade Ukraine.
“We are always ready for diplomacy,” press secretary Jen Psaki said in a statement. “We are also ready to impose swift and severe consequences should Russia instead choose war. And currently, Russia appears to be continuing preparations for a full-scale assault on Ukraine very soon.”
Another White House official stressed that the summit would only happen if Russia doesn’t invade Ukraine and that a meeting between U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and his Russian counterpart, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, would come first. The official said that the timing and the format of any summit are yet to be determined, calling it “completely notional.” It will be discussed more by Mr. Blinken and Mr. Lavrov if the invasion hasn’t started by their scheduled meeting, according to the White House official.
Earlier, Belarus said Russia would extend its military drills with Belarus near Ukraine’s borders involving some 30,000 troops. The exercises had been scheduled to wind down over the weekend, but Belarus said Sunday they would continue indefinitely after Russian-backed forces accused Ukraine of shelling civilian areas in territories they control. Western officials have backed Kyiv’s assertion that the claims are part of a false-flag operation aimed at justifying a Russian-led attack.
Russia has amassed as many as 190,000 troops on Ukraine’s borders, including some 30,000 for exercises in allied Belarus. Moscow demands that Kyiv abandon its aspirations to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and give Russian proxies a major say in Ukraine’s future
Sunday’s developments on the diplomatic front indicated that Mr. Putin could be willing to step back from the brink of war, at least in the immediate future, as he sought a face-saving end to the crisis. “Putin just started a new chapter,” said Oleksandr Danylyuk, a former Ukraine national-security adviser. “It’s a break that allows Putin to refocus, rethink and regroup before taking his next steps. The full war is unpredictable for him—you never know. It’s easy to start a war, but you never know how it will end.”
U.S. intelligence assessment offered a starkly different picture of Mr. Putin’s intentions. One U.S. intelligence official said the U.S. determined that Mr. Putin has already given attack orders to his commanders.
On Sunday, President Biden led a meeting of the National Security Council to discuss Russia’s military buildup on the borders of Ukraine.
Some U.S. officials are concerned that the extension of Russian military exercises in Belarus doesn’t signal a delay of a possible attack on Ukraine, but rather offers Moscow leeway for a prolonged military campaign against Kyiv and other cities located near the border with Belarus. A senior administration official said in January that Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko might grant Russia’s military unfettered access as a means of remaining in Mr. Putin’s good graces.
Reservists took part in tactical training in Kyiv, Ukraine, on Saturday.
Photo: Antonio Bronic/Reuters
Shelling across the cease-fire line in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region intensified in recent days, with Russian-installed authorities in areas controlled by Moscow since 2014 ordering the mobilization of fighting-age men and urging the evacuation of women and children. Kyiv and its Western partners say these moves are part of a Russian propaganda campaign to justify a full-fledged military invasion of Ukraine, which Mr. Biden has said he expects to happen within days.
Mr. Macron said that Russia, Ukraine, France and Germany will resume talks in the so-called Normandy format based on proposals presented by Kyiv in recent days. He and Mr. Putin agreed on the “necessity to favor a diplomatic solution to the crisis, and to do everything to achieve it,” according to the French account of the conversation. The French and Russian foreign ministers are slated to meet in coming days, while other consultations will take place in Paris, the French account said. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz is separately scheduled to speak to Mr. Putin on Monday, according to a German official.
An aide to Mr. Macron said Mr. Putin told the French leader that Russian troops in Belarus would withdraw from the country once their military exercise is completed. The aide added that Mr. Putin said he was working on the withdrawal with Russia’s Defense Ministry.
The Russian and French leaders disagreed over who was to blame for violence in eastern Ukraine, the aide said. Mr. Putin blamed Ukrainian forces while Mr. Macron said Russian separatists were responsible, the aide said.
“We are still in a situation of high volatility, but there is still room for diplomacy,” the aide to Mr. Macron said, adding that “diplomatic resources have not been exhausted.”
Mr. Macron also spoke with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky after Sunday’s talks with Mr. Putin, his second conversation with the Ukrainian leader in two days. The French leader commended Mr. Zelensky on his “composure and his determination to prevent escalation.”
The Kremlin, in a statement Sunday, blamed Mr. Zelensky for refusing to implement the so-called Minsk agreements that ended major combat in Donbas in 2015 and that—in Moscow’s interpretation—could give Russian proxies a significant say in Ukraine’s new setup, potentially halting the country’s alignment with the West.
A commemoration Sunday in Kyiv, Ukraine, of the Maidan revolution, an uprising that helped lead to the 2014 ouster of a pro-Russian administration.
Photo: Christopher Occhicone for The Wall Street Journal
Still, the Kremlin said Mr. Putin agreed to “intensify the search for solutions through diplomatic means,” including by holding another meeting on the Minsk accords between the four nations’ senior advisers in the Normandy format. While the first such meeting in Paris in January led to some progress, the second in Berlin earlier this month ended in failure.
Retaining Russian forces in Belarus, a short distance from the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, gives Mr. Putin extra leverage to pressure Mr. Zelensky for painful concessions. Just hours before the exercises in Belarus were scheduled to end, Minsk said they would continue indefinitely.
Countries bordering Belarus have been “pumped with modern weaponry,” Belarus Defense Minister Viktor Khrenin said. Europe is being pushed toward war, he added, and “has begun to smell strongly of gunpowder.”
“We ought to be ready to resist powerful pressure in the coming period. The enemy intends to destabilize Ukraine from within, to scare us and force us into capitulation. But we will stand firm,” he said.
Russian military analyst Pavel Felgenhauer said that the Russian troops currently in Belarus can’t stay indefinitely because of supply issues and will have to relocate to their bases at some point. In addition, the presence in Belarus of units with bases in Russia’s Far East exposes areas bordering China, a state of affairs that Mr. Felgenhauer said Russia won’t want to maintain for long.
“If there will be a political decision to have a longstanding Russian army presence in Belarus, that’s a different story,” he said.
Residents of a village in the Russia-controlled Donbas region inspected their house Sunday after it was damaged in a shelling.
Photo: Anatolii Stepanov/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
On Friday, Mr. Biden said that he expected Mr. Putin to launch a Russian invasion of Ukraine in the coming days, with targets including Kyiv. The Kremlin has been seeking a formal guarantee that NATO will never admit Ukraine and other former Soviet states as members and roll back troop deployments to the status quo in 1997, before the alliance admitted eastern and central European states.
On CNN’s “State of the Union,” Mr. Blinken said that the continuation of Russian military exercises and the massing of troops on Ukraine’s border is part of the predicted groundwork Moscow has been laying for a Russian invasion of its smaller neighbor.
“All of this, along with the false-flag operations that we’ve seen unfold over the weekend tells us that the playbook we laid out is moving forward,” he said.
Russia had repeatedly said it intends to pull the troops back once the drills are over, but intensifying fighting in eastern Ukraine has prompted claims from Moscow that Ukraine is readying a military offensive to retake territory from Russian-backed forces in the Donbas region. The separatists seized swaths of the country’s east in an armed conflict that started in 2014 and has continued ever since, claiming more than 14,000 lives.
On Sunday, Russia’s Federal Security Service, which controls the country’s borders, said more than 30,000 residents from the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk people’s republics in the Donbas area had crossed to Russia’s neighboring Rostov region since the start of a mass evacuation of residents announced by authorities in the Russian-controlled areas on Friday. In Russia, the Rostov and Voronezh regions, which border Ukraine, announced states of emergency, citing the influx of people.
Ukrainian military spokesman Dmytro Lutsyuk said on Sunday that 20 instances of artillery fire by Russian-led forces had been recorded in the space of 24 hours and that one service member had been wounded and taken to a hospital with shrapnel wounds. Mr. Lutsyuk added that more than 860 residents of the breakaway republics had entered through a cease-fire line since Saturday.
In addition to the exercises in Belarus, Russia has been conducting large-scale naval maneuvers on the Black and Azov seas, with warships in unprecedented numbers from Russia’s Baltic, Black Sea and Northern fleets.
Russia previously said these naval drills would conclude Saturday night. While the warships and support vessels have collapsed their perimeter, they remain in the area.
“The exercises should have ended last night,” said Andrii Ryzhenko, a retired Ukrainian navy captain now with the Center for Defense Strategies, a Kyiv-based think tank. “But there is no sign that they are wrapping up. Particularly, our concern is landing ships.”
Russia announced earlier this month that naval exercises near the Crimean coast would continue through March 11.
The drills’ impact on Ukraine’s vital commercial shipping, including steel, remained limited.
Photo: Christopher Occhicone for The Wall Street Journal
—Catherine Lucey and Vivian Salama in Washington, Ann M. Simmons in Moscow and Noemie Bisserbe in Paris contributed to this article.
18. India’s Stance on Ukraine Leaves West Scrambling As Jaishankar Calls Out Hypocrisy, Slams China
Very impressive. More than the master class in diplomacy (and responding to moderator questions at conferences) this provides important insights about India.
India’s Stance on Ukraine Leaves West Scrambling As Jaishankar Calls Out Hypocrisy, Slams China
Dr Jaishankar is a diplomat par excellence, and Indian foreign policy is in his reliable hands. In fact, Dr Jaishankar is inspiring an Indian foreign policy discourse that is brilliantly astute and lucid, leaving little room for foreign policy ‘gaslighters’ to manoeuvre.
This was visible at the Munich Security Conference, 2022. On Saturday, Indian External Affairs Minister Dr Subrahmanyam Jaishankar sat with the foreign ministers of France, Australia and Japan and discussed a wide range of foreign policy issues with a focus on the Indo-Pacific. However, the highlight of the event was the nature of questions posed to Dr Jaishankar by the panel moderator, and his shrewd eloquence while politely dismantling the implied premise of those queries.
How is India contributing to European Security?
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Lynn Kuok, the panel moderator, started with a rather provocative question, “We just heard about how France and European generals are contributing to Indo-Pacific security, but since we are in Europe, I’d like to ask you how India is contributing to European security.” She pointed out how India has spoken out “vociferously against China” but abstained from voting on Ukraine in the United Nations Security Council.
She went on, “Could you please help me understand if India’s position is that different principles should apply in different parts of the world?”
Of course, if the panel moderator were honest with herself she would have known that India’s China problem is different from the current tensions between the West, Ukraine and Russia. Nevertheless, the question does represent a leading Western assessment, no matter how simplistic, of India’s stand on Ukraine and Dr Jaishankar made sure to give them an answer.
The Indian EAM was quick to point out that the “situations in the Indo-Pacific and the Transatlantic” were not analogous and said, “certainly the assumption in your question that somehow there’s a trade-off and one country does this in the Pacific so in return you do something else— I don’t think that’s how international relations work.”
Dr Jaishankar stressed that the two regions have distinct challenges and “if there was a connection, by that logic, you would’ve had a lot of European powers very early taking very sharp positions in the Indo-Pacific and we didn’t see that. We haven’t seen that since 2009.”
He went on and highlighted the fact that France, Germany and the Netherlands pivoting towards the Indo-Pacific are very recent developments, while the problem in the Indo-Pacific is not recent.
“You really need to look at that question again,” Dr Jaishankar concluded.
But Lynn Kuok pressed on, asking, “So you disagree that principles, international rules-based order, international law should apply across the world uniformly?”
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To this, highlighting the hypocrisy of Western nations, Dr Jaishankar retorted, “No, I would say principles and interests are balanced and if people were so principled in this part of the world, they’d have been practising their principles in Asia or Afghanistan before we have actually seen them do.”
While Western thinkers insinuate a simplistic requisite that India must pay for the Indo-Pacific security push made by the United States and its Western allies against China, Dr Jaishankar has rightly resisted the flawed premise by way of which India should adopt a radical stand against Russia mirroring that of the United States to express its loyalty and gratitude. With such a suggestion, the strategists forget that it is as much, if not more, in the West’s interest to contain the Chinese threat as it is in the interest of India. So, Western intervention in its current form in the Indo-Pacific does India no undue favours and does not warrant unconditional support from India in other theatres.
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Has the Galwan clash pushed India closer to the West?
Another flawed question tossed at the foreign minister was about the June 2020 Galwan clash between the Indian Army and the Chinese PLA, where a significant number of casualties were seen on both sides. Lynn Kuok seemed to suggest that India pivoted towards the West as a consequence of the border clash with China. She asked if the event meant a “decisive and enduring shift towards the West.”
Again, this has been a view of amateur watchers of India-China relations, especially those without a primer on history, and it is also a view that China itself likes to propagate.
Dr Jaishankar caught the flawed basis of the question yet again. He outlined the situation with China at the border. “It’s a problem we are having with China… that for 45 years there was peace, there was stable border management. There were no military casualties at the border since 1975. That changed."
Slamming China, Dr Jaishankar said that India had agreements with China not to bring forces to the Line of Actual Control (LAC), the de-facto border with China. “The Chinese violated those agreements," he went on. “The state of the border will determine the state of the relationship."
Dr Jaishankar then proceeded to question the premise of Kuok’s question, saying, “Obviously, relations with China are right now going through a very difficult phase. But I would honestly question your question, that therefore our relations with the West are better.” He pointed out that India’s relations with the West were “quite decent” before June 2020. “So again, I’d challenge that correlation you’re making.”
‘The Quad is not a post-2020 development’
As a follow up to her question on China and the West’s ties with India, the panel moderator sought to assert that India strengthened bilateral relations with Quad members “at the very least” as a post-Galwan answer to China but Dr Jaishankar reminded the audience that the “incarnation of the Quad” started in 2017 and that it is not a post-2020 development. India’s relations with the Quad partners “have steadily improved in the last 20 years,” he said, adding, “Again, as I said, you are making it seem like cause-and-effect. I would challenge that.”
The entire course of the conversation indicates that the agenda at hand was to show India’s position on the Russia-Ukraine tensions as hypocritical and manoeuvre India into perceivably admitting the same. Lynn Kuok, who comes from the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a British think tank, sought to do her job first by posing a direct question on whether India believed in “different principles for different parts of the world” and when that did not throw Dr Jaishankar off, she seemingly sought to establish the notion that the West had done undue favours for India in the Indo-Pacific and so, in turn, India should return the love in Europe. But that ‘trap’ too did not reap any success with India’s astute foreign minister.
Words are the weapon of a diplomat, especially a foreign minister- and how he or she wields them can make or break a country’s justification of its foreign policy stands. Any unsuspecting rookie would have taken the kind of bait laid out for Dr Jaishankar, but his words were calculated to the T and his stand was not compromised at any given time.
19. The New York Times’ fake news has a Russian accent
This is why I subscribe to both the Washington Times and the New York Times (and the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal). There are always two sides and two views (or more).
The New York Times’ fake news has a Russian accent
The Gray Lady has been caught fudging facts to hurt political enemies
OPINION:
For more than three years, the Times pushed the false Trump-Russia collusion story, making the paper an accessory to what amounted to an attempted coup against the 45th president.
For its sordid role, the Times, known as “the Gray Lady,” won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for writing on “Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connections to the Trump campaign.”
This past week, it did its best to ignore a bombshell court filing by special counsel John Durham. He said that Clinton-connected people, at least one of whom now works for President Biden, hired techies to hack Trump Tower and Mr. Trump’s New York residence. They were mining data to create a scenario in which Mr. Trump had colluded with the Russians to tip the 2016 election.
Even worse, Mr. Durham indicated, they may have mined data in 2017 from the executive office of the president in the White House.
The Clinton campaign also paid for the Steele dossier full of Russian misinformation that triggered the first impeachment trial. If anyone was colluding with Russians, it was the Clintons and the subservient American media.
In 1974, Richard Nixon was driven from office for covering up a burglary of the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington.
The Obama/Clinton/Biden scandal is worse, with the latest being an electronic burglary of a candidate and the White House itself. It’s on a par with the Obama and Biden administrations’ weaponizing America’s intelligence agencies — the NSA and the CIA — against Donald Trump and the FBI’s targeting parents who protest school policies. And you thought Obama’s turning the IRS loose on the tea parties in 2010 was bad.
The Times was not alone in its lack of curiosity over the Durham court filing. Virtually all major media, including the Washington Post, ignored the story for days. But then they took a different tack, rebutting its newsworthiness. On Friday, the Post buried it on Page A-9, noting that the filing “added some details to Durham’s previous allegations.”
Like Hunter Biden’s scandalous deals in Ukraine and China, we’re told there’s nothing new to see here.
That’s how they swept Bill Clinton’s affairs with Gennifer Flowers and other women under the rug in the 1992 presidential election, dismissing it as “old news.”
The Pulitzers no longer have much to do with journalistic merit; the legacy-media-dominated committee honors those in its ranks who advance the left’s agenda. In 2020, for example, Nikole Hannah-Jones won a Pulitzer for her introductory essay to The New York Times’ “1619 Project” — a thoroughly debunked Marxist rewriting of America’s founding.
In-depth investigative reporting by conservative outlets has been all but ignored. The Washington Times’ series on the Clinton “Chinagate” scandal 30 years ago comes to mind, as do groundbreaking reports by Project Veritas, James O’Keefe’s video sting operation.
Even worse than The New York Times’ current dishonesty regarding Russian “collusion” was how the paper snagged its first Pulitzer.
The Times’ Moscow bureau chief, Walter Duranty, won in 1932 for reporting that everything was fine in the Soviet Union, even as Joseph Stalin was killing millions by starvation and executions.
“There is no famine or actual starvation nor is there likely to be,” Mr. Duranty wrote in November 1931. “Any report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda,” he added in August 1933.
In 2008, The New York Times ran a front-page story hinting that Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain had an affair with a female lobbyist. No proof was forthcoming, and the story disappeared after Mr. Obama beat Mr. McCain.
This past week, the Times’ lack of integrity was on display again during Sarah Palin’s defamation suit against the paper. The former Alaska governor and 2008 Republican vice-presidential candidate made a powerful case that the paper wrongly blamed her for a mass shooting.
The Times admitted the “error” and did issue a retraction. But Mrs. Palin said it had been no accident; they had done it on purpose to smear her. The judge directed a dismissal, and the jury ruled on Feb. 15 that she had not proved “actual malice.”
But this was clear: The Times had been caught fudging facts to hurt a political enemy.
As the Gray Lady and others try to spin the Durham findings into a non-story, we shouldn’t be surprised.
They have a vital interest in making the Russian collusion revelations go away. Working with the likes of Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff, the legacy media pushed a false, treasonous narrative.
Now that it’s unraveling, they’re obsessing on the Jan. 6 riot and scrambling away from the scene of their own crimes against truth.
It’s what Walter Duranty would have done.
• Robert Knight is a columnist for The Washington Times. His website is roberthknight.com.
20. Why Russia won’t invade Ukrainistan
Excerpts:
If Putin doesn’t want to conquer Ukraine, just what does he want?
He has three objectives.
The first is to thwart NATO expansion into Ukraine with the attendant threat of US missiles stationed on Russia’s border.
...
The second objective is to thwart the dream of Washington’s global liberals and neo-conservatives to overthrow the Russian regime and replace it with a pro-Western democracy.
...
Putin’s third objective is to enhance his bargaining position as an energy provider to Europe as well as China.
Why Russia won’t invade Ukrainistan
Latest factor: A smoking gun document supports Germans who differ with Washington on NATO membership expansion
No one wants Ukrainistan, least of all Vladimir Putin.
Its GDP of $98 billion (in constant 2015 US dollars), down 43% since 1989, falls in between Ethiopia and Angola on the World Bank tables. Its population has shrunk to just 35 million according to the country’s National Academy of Science from 52 million in 1989, rather than the 48 million reported in the official census, because nearly half of the working-age population has left. Its corruption ranking stands at 112 out of 116 countries surveyed by Transparency International.
Ukraine has some gas reserves but Russia has roughly ten times more, far more than it can transport without massive investments in infrastructure. Otherwise, Ukraine has no natural resources of note apart from farmland – and Russia already is the world’s largest wheat exporter.
Seizing Ukraine, in short, would be vastly more trouble than it is worth to Russia. To compare Putin’s threats to Ukraine with Hitler’s march eastwards offends common sense: There is no “there” there in Ukraine, nothing Russia wants: no Lebensraum, no productive population, no oil fields or other assets to be acquired by conquest.
If Putin doesn’t want to conquer Ukraine, just what does he want?
He has three objectives.
The first is to thwart NATO expansion into Ukraine with the attendant threat of US missiles stationed on Russia’s border. As Jack Matlock, US envoy to Moscow 1987-1991, explained February 15 (“Is the Ukraine ‘crisis just another U.S. charade”), there is an analogy to the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis: The US put medium-range missiles in Turkey, so Russia retaliated by putting missiles in Cuba – and withdrew them in return for a US agreement to remove the missiles in Turkey.
The second objective is to thwart the dream of Washington’s global liberals and neo-conservatives to overthrow the Russian regime and replace it with a pro-Western democracy. That is a central concern of Russian strategy. Senior officials of the Biden Administration argue in private that regime change in Moscow is both desirable and possible. That is an open secret of American policy, as Benjamin Denison of the Fletcher School explained in a 2020 survey.
State Department Undersecretary Victoria Nuland, the stage-manager of the 2014 Maidan Square coup in Ukraine, saw the fall of the pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych as a prelude to regime change in Moscow. Nuland, then assistant secretary of state for Europe, said in Congressional testimony in May 2014, “Since 1992, we have provided $20 billion to Russia to support pursuit of transition to the peaceful, prosperous, democratic state its people deserve.” Imagine if Putin had boasted of spending $20 billion in the United States to promote a “transition” to a different kind of state. “Paranoid Russian” may be a pleonasm, but even paranoids have real enemies.
Putin’s third objective is to enhance his bargaining position as an energy provider to Europe as well as China. If the Europeans support Washington’s plan to bring Ukraine into NATO, Russia says in so many words, they can freeze in the dark. Russia is discussing a ten-fold increase in its gas shipments to China via a new pipeline slated for completion around 2026.
Washington’s overreach in NATO expansion and its hopes for a Russian regime change have pushed Russia closer to China, despite some important differences. China’s bottomless appetite for overland energy deliveries (outside the reach of the American navy), its capacity to support Russia’s growing electronics industry and its common interest with Russia in suppressing Central Asian jihadists after the fall of Afghanistan create a deep commonality of interests.
But Russian and Chinese interests are not identical. Beijing is not comfortable with Russia’s sponsorship of separatists in Eastern Ukraine. As Foreign Minister Wang Yi said February 19, “All countries’ sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity should be respected and safeguarded.” China has separatists of its own.
Germany is caught in the middle. Washington has demanded a degree of Nibelungentreue (self-defeating absolute loyalty) from Berlin, threatening the Nord Stream II pipeline that will deliver Russian gas to Germans who urgently need it. The Germans have already asked for energy to be excluded from any prospective sanctions. They are also looking for a diplomatic way to distance themselves from Washington on the subject of inviting Ukraine into NATO.
By apparent coincidence, a smoking-gun document just surfaced in Europe proving that Russia was given solemn assurances in 1991 by the United States, Great Britain, France and Germany that NATO would not expand eastward after the withdrawal of Russian troops from Eastern Europe.
“Newly-discovered protocol from 1991 supports Russian allegations,” Germany’s leading news site Der Spiegel reported February 18. The German dispatch notes, “Russia has insisted for decades that the expansion of NATO eastward violates Western assurances after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Now a remarkable document has appeared.”
Reported Germany’s center-right daily Die Welt:
“We have made clear that we will not expand NATO beyond the Elbe River [the former dividing line between East and West Germany],” wrote the German diplomat Jürgen Chrobog about a conference of the United States, Great Britain, France and Germany in March 1991. This document affirms the Russian point of view about NATO expansion. The document was found in the British national archives.
Die Welt noted that the meeting in question was held in Germany’s former capital Bonn on March 6, 1991, with the political directors of the foreign ministries of the United States, Great Britain, France and Germany. Its topic was “the security of Poland and other East European countries,” the German daily reported. “The Political Director leads the political department of the foreign ministry and is considered the closest adviser of the foreign minister.”
The German representative at the 1991 meeting added, “We made clear to the Soviet Union, in the two-plus-four talks as well as other discussions, that we will not expand NATO beyond the Elbe. Therefore we cannot offer NATO membership to Poland and the others,” the document stated.
The American representative at the Bonn meeting, Raymond Seitz, then the US Assistant Secretary of State for Europe and Canada, told the group: “We have made clear to the Soviet Union in the two-plus-four as well as other talks that we will take no advantage of the withdrawal of Soviet troops out of Eastern Europe.”
“Two years later,” comments Die Welt, “the Americans changed their policy.”
Other historians have argued in the German press that the document doesn’t really say what it says, but the damage has been done: Most Germans believe that Russia has the moral high ground in the matter of NATO expansion.
Germany’s leaders face a rebellion in the ranks against Washington’s handling of the Ukraine crisis. An opinion poll last week by Germany’s broadcasting association ARD found that 53% of Germans opposed NATO membership for Ukraine, against 28% in favor and 19% who had no opinion.
Parties that backed a tough stance against Russia, notably the Free Democrats, are dropping in the polls; that threatens the stability of the governing coalition, in which Free Democrat leader Christian Lindner serves as finance minister.
America’s ignominious scuttle out of Afghanistan was a tragedy – a horrendous one for the children of Afghanistan, of whom five million are “at the brink of famine,” according to the charity Save the Children.
The Biden Administration’s humiliation in Ukrainistan, by contrast, recalls Karl Marx’s quip that great historical events occur twice, the first time as tragedy and the second time as farce.
There will be no piles of body bags, no burnt corpses and no photos of children with distended bellies and hollow eyes – just embarrassed shrugs as America’s NATO allies go their own ways.
Germany never liked the expansion of NATO, which turned the old military alliance into a diffuse and inherently indefensible social-welfare organization. During the Cold War Germany maintained 12 combat-ready divisions; today it has fewer than a hundred operational tanks. It spends just 1.5% of GDP on defense, well below its 2% commitment level.
If NATO were to shrink to a defensible perimeter, Germany in all likelihood would increase military spending, and draw a bright line between NATO and non-NATO territory. As matters stand, Putin has shown NATO to be a Potemkin Village with nothing uniting its members except rhetoric.
21. Human rights? China won that Winter Olympics battle. Almost.
Excerpts:
“It is extremely irresponsible,” van der Poel said, ”to give it to a country that violates human rights as clearly as the Chinese regime does.”
Human rights? China won that Winter Olympics battle. Almost.
AP · by JOHN LEICESTER · February 21, 2022
ZHANGJIAKOU, China (AP) — When three-time Olympian Gus Kenworthy took the remarkable, perhaps even brave decision to speak out against “human rights atrocities” while still in China at the Winter Games, the self-proclaimed “loud and obnoxious” British skier also proved that other athletes, had they chosen, perhaps could have used their Olympic platform to pipe up, too.
Because Kenworthy wasn’t hauled away and imprisoned, as Chinese critics of the ruling Communist Party routinely are. Doing so would have generated exactly the sort of global focus on the Chinese government’s authoritarian methods that it sought to avoid while global sports’ biggest show was in town.
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And with the notable exception of Kenworthy, China largely accomplished that mission.
“We have seen an effective silencing of 2,800 athletes, and that’s scary,” said Noah Hoffman, a former U.S. Olympic skier and board member of the Global Athlete advocacy group pushing for Olympic reform.
Kenworthy, speaking to The Associated Press before his 8th-place finish in the halfpipe final on the Games’ penultimate day, laid out why.
“We’re in China, so we play by China’s rules. And China makes their rules as they go, and they certainly have the power to kind of do whatever they want: Hold an athlete, stop an athlete from leaving, stop an athlete from competing,” he said.
“I’ve also been advised to sort of tread lightly while I am here and that’s what I am trying to do.”
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He prefaced criticism with praise for China’s “incredible job with this Olympics” and carefully calibrated his words. But unlike other Olympians, he couldn’t bite his tongue until he got home. Kenworthy aimed jabs not only at the host country’s rights abuses and “poor stance on LGBTQ rights” but also at other athletes he said try “to appeal to the masses” and avoid ruffling feathers.
“I’ve already kind of accepted that that’s not what I’m gonna do,” he said. “I’m just gonna speak my truth.”
The sweep and vagueness of a Chinese official’s threat before the Games of “certain punishment” for “any behavior or speech that is against the Olympic spirit” appeared to have a particularly sobering effect on Beijing-bound teams. Campaigners who met with athletes in the United States in the weeks before their departure, lobbying them about Uyghurs and the crushing of dissent in Tibet and Hong Kong, noticed the chill.
“Prior to the statement, we had been engaging with quite a few athletes,” said Pema Doma, campaigns director at Students for a Free Tibet. They “were expressing a lot of interest in learning more and being engaged in the human rights issue.”
Afterward, “there was a very, very distinct difference” and “one athlete even said to an activist directly: ‘I’ve been instructed not to take anything from you or speak to you,’” she said in a phone interview.
Other concerns also weighed on Olympians, way beyond the usual anxieties that often come with travel to a foreign land, away from home comforts.
Also wearing were daily coronavirus tests that were mandatory — and invasive, taken with swabs to the back of the throat — for all Olympians, locked inside a tightly policed bubble of health restrictions to prevent infection spreads. The penalty for testing positive was possible quarantine and missed competition, a terrible blow for winter athletes who often toil outside of the limelight, except every four years at the Games.
“Who knows where those tests go, who handles the results,” Kenworthy said. “It’s definitely in the back of the mind.”
“And there’s like all the cybersecurity stuff. It is concerning,” he told The AP.
Often, athletes simply blanked when asked about human rights, saying they weren’t qualified to speak on the issue or were focused on competition, and hunkered down.
On Twitter, Dutch speedskater Sanne in ’t Hof blocked, unblocked and then blocked again a Uyghur living in the Netherlands who posted critical comments of Olympians in what he called “genocide” Games. Mirehmet Ablet shared a screengrab with The AP showing that the skater had barred him from accessing her account, where she tweeted that she “enjoyed every second!′ of her first Olympics. Ablet’s brother was arrested in 2017 in the Uyghur homeland of Xinjiang in far western China, and Ablet doesn’t know where he’s now held.
Hoffman, who competed for the U.S. at the 2014 and 2018 Games, said internal politics within teams may also have dissuaded athletes from speaking critically. Coaches can bench athletes who bring unwanted attention and “there’s pressure from your teammates to not cause a distraction,” he said in a phone interview. Athletes with self-confidence dented by sub-par performances may also have felt that they’d lost any platform.
“There’s lots of really subtle pressure,” Hoffman said.
But he’s hopeful others will speak up on their return and that “we do get a chorus.”
Feeling unmuzzled, some already are.
“It is extremely irresponsible,” van der Poel said, ”to give it to a country that violates human rights as clearly as the Chinese regime does.”
___
AP · by JOHN LEICESTER · February 21, 2022
22. In an Information War, Be Careful What You Amplify
Excerpts:
Falsehoods are not just pieces of incorrect information shared by people who know the information is incorrect. Falsehoods are also incorrect information shared by people because they’re lazy or don’t know how to verify information. The former, disinformation, is a poison often spread by groups and countries that wish Western societies ill. The latter, though, is almost as poisonous, because it too disseminates falsehoods that distort people’s opinion-forming. It stands to reason that virtually nobody spreads alleged news of Russian provocations with ill intentions. But thanks to ill-considered social-media posting, this ordinarily boring event got enormous and panicked attention. What will happen next time Russia makes a mysterious move? What will happen when it does call up its entire reserves? Will anyone trust what they’re reading?
Verification is boring. Juicy news gets clicks. Perhaps there isn’t much harm in people thinking Russia has called up its reserves for an invasion of Ukraine. But the harm in people forming opinions based on incorrect information is incalculable. So is the harm of people deciding they can’t trust any information at all.
In an Information War, Be Careful What You Amplify
An announcement about an annual Russian reserve-forces exercise has some people speculating unhelpfully.
Staged car bombings. A mysterious Ukrainian operative making a televised confession. Announcements of Ukrainian attacks and resulting mass evacuations. A nuclear exercise. Russia is up to no good, and there’s every reason to fear what it might do next. Now a Feb. 18 Kremlin call-up order for a reservist exercise is causing even more panic—but wait! That exercise is in fact an annual occurrence.
Let’s certainly pay close attention to Russia’s plans, but let’s verify facts before adding to the panic.
Well-meaning Westerners seized on the reservist callup. “This is the order just signed by Putin ordering all army reserves to assemble. Ominous,” Bill Browder – the financier and Magnitsky-legislation activist– tweeted on Feb. 19. The order did indeed seem ominous, given that Russia has close to 200,000 troops lined up near its Ukrainian border and that the Kremlin and its proxies are carrying out almost daily provocations and false-flag operations intended to harm Ukraine. Lots of people retweeted concerned posts about the callup, by Browder and other popular Twitter accounts.
But the call-up was a far less dramatic event than the posters realized. “The Russian armed forces have conducted a reserve exercise every year since 2012,” Gudrun Persson, a Russia analyst at the Swedish Defense Research Agency and lead author of its much-used Russian Military Capability in a Ten-Year Perspective report, told me. “February has been the most common month for these exercises, followed by June, and all of the exercises have taken place in the first half of the year.”
Persson noted that these annual exercises usually involve some 5,000 to 6,000 troops, though the Kremlin wants to increase that number. Even if this exercise involves far more reservists than usual, the call-up is hardly a dramatic escalation. Indeed, like reservists in many other countries, those in Russia are hardly the tip of the spear.
“The Russian reserves are more competent than they were in 2012,” Persson said. “But the soldiers that are positioned around Ukraine are professional soldiers. When it comes to Russia, we should be concerned about a lot of things, but this call-up order is hardly one of them.”
In the frenzied atmosphere that Russia has created through its buildup at the Ukrainian border, it’s easily to believe it’s now calling up its reserves for an imminent invasion of Ukraine. And heck, why not share such a juicy announcement on social media? Verifying whether the exercise is simply this year’s edition of an annual event – most countries regularly exercise their reserves – can wait until later. Or maybe someone else can do it. In the event, a few Twitter accounts, including the Ukrainian news outlet Liveuamap, pointed out the less juicy reality of the exercise’s regular appearance, but predictably to far less effect than the dramatic social media posts.
What’s the harm in exaggerating the Russian threat? It’s harmful because the Russian threat is serious enough as it is. Around the same time as the Kremlin announced the reserve call-up, Russia conducted a nuclear exercise – certainly a serious signal. “And the nuclear exercise seems designed to provoke,” Persson noted. “It’s a regular exercise, but it normally takes place towards the end of the year. The fact that they decided to hold it now is a clear signal.”
Exaggerating the Russian threat is also harmful because it creates unnecessary panic in a situation that’s extraordinarily tense as it is. And it’s harmful because it, like all other forms of misinformation and disinformation, poisons our information environment.
Falsehoods are not just pieces of incorrect information shared by people who know the information is incorrect. Falsehoods are also incorrect information shared by people because they’re lazy or don’t know how to verify information. The former, disinformation, is a poison often spread by groups and countries that wish Western societies ill. The latter, though, is almost as poisonous, because it too disseminates falsehoods that distort people’s opinion-forming. It stands to reason that virtually nobody spreads alleged news of Russian provocations with ill intentions. But thanks to ill-considered social-media posting, this ordinarily boring event got enormous and panicked attention. What will happen next time Russia makes a mysterious move? What will happen when it does call up its entire reserves? Will anyone trust what they’re reading?
Verification is boring. Juicy news gets clicks. Perhaps there isn’t much harm in people thinking Russia has called up its reserves for an invasion of Ukraine. But the harm in people forming opinions based on incorrect information is incalculable. So is the harm of people deciding they can’t trust any information at all.
23. Workplace Harassment Undermines Pentagon Spying in Europe, Documents Say
WSJ News Exclusive | Workplace Harassment Undermines Pentagon Spying in Europe, Documents Say
Pentagon intelligence officers allege they struggle with toxic bosses, say some colleagues spy on each other
WSJ · by Jessica Donati and Warren P. Strobel
The statements were collected by a recently retired decorated pilot and combat veteran who describes himself as a whistleblower in the DIA’s defense attaché system, which liaises with foreign militaries overseas. A whistleblower inside the intelligence community is someone who reports what they believe to be wrongdoing to an authorized recipient, such as Congress or the inspector general, and is supposed to be protected from retaliation for coming forward with such complaints.
“The toxic culture within DIA is a threat to national security,” Ryan Sweazey, who retired as an Air Force lieutenant colonel earlier this month, said. Lt. Col. Sweazey said the agency’s actions are “alienating and disenfranchising our intelligence personnel while disrupting and degrading operations.”
Ret. Air Force Lt. Col. Ryan Sweazey is a pilot and combat veteran.
Photo: Staff Sgt. Delaney Gonzales/U.S. Air Force
Lt. Col. Sweazey said he became a target for reprisals after raising concerns about the workplace through the chain of command. He filed complaints with the DIA inspector general and after those investigations appeared to stall, gathered witness statements himself and submitted them to lawmakers last summer.
The DIA inspector general has been the target of previous allegations by employees who said the office’s leadership was watering down reports about problems inside the agency and impeding investigations into complaints. A council of inspectors general reviewed those complaints and closed the case without citing issues with the DIA inspector general’s role or performance, a defense official said.
The DIA said in a statement that it has “zero tolerance” for violations of professional standards. It didn’t respond to detailed questions about the allegations made by Lt. Col. Sweazey and others.
“The DIA Inspector General Office maintains a long-established record of providing independent and effective oversight and exercising rigorous investigative practices over Federal Government programs and operations in support of the Defense Intelligence Agency,” the agency said.
The statements Lt. Col. Sweazey provided to Congress include allegations that a colleague at the Defense Attaché Office in Rome was secretly reporting negative information about the performance of co-workers to superiors. The practice turned managers in Western Europe against their subordinates, creating a hostile atmosphere in the office and disrupting their efforts to gather intelligence, according to Lt. Col. Sweazey and others whose statements were submitted to Congress.
In its version of the annual intelligence authorization bill, the House Intelligence Committee, led by Rep. Adam Schiff (D., Calif.), directed the DIA to provide it with summaries of future workforce climate surveys and data about the number of employees seeking help with a perceived hostile work environment.
Photo: Amanda Andrade-Rhoades/Associated Press
The Defense Attaché Service has a presence in some 140 countries and falls under the leadership of the DIA, the Pentagon’s intelligence arm. Its personnel are known as overt intelligence collectors, meaning they operate in the open rather than under cover. They observe military exercises and track arms sales as well as military facilities. Defense attaché positions have traditionally been seen as prestigious assignments representing the Pentagon overseas.
In their statements, the witnesses said toxic workplace conditions impeded their efforts to carry out their duties.
“As a defense attaché at a U.S. Embassy in a foreign country, I should not have to spend a large portion of my time looking over my shoulder for someone nefarious from DIA,” a Navy officer wrote in one of the witness statements submitted to Congress. “There are plenty of other foreign threats for me to worry about.”
He also wrote that a manager urged him to stay away from colleagues who were perceived to be troublemakers and if needed, report back to her.
In another witness statement, a different Navy officer said that a private medical condition was exposed and used against him.
“There is little doubt as to the impact on national security,” the officer wrote to Congress last June. “Members of the attaché service cannot perform their duties for fear of being arbitrarily recalled, ridiculed for effort or threatened with poor performance evaluations.”
That officer said in an interview that he was pulled from his European attaché assignment early and experienced retaliation for bucking a culture that inhibits taking initiative. He was discouraged, for example, from writing too many intelligence reports.
“There was friction between my enthusiasm and some other people’s understanding of their roles and responsibilities,” the former officer said.
He said he filed an inspector general complaint two years ago. This month, the DIA Inspector General informed him that it had concluded there was insufficient evidence that he was a victim of reprisal, according to a copy of the letter reviewed by the Journal.
A Defense Attaché Service workforce survey dated September 2020 and reviewed by the Journal, found that almost half of 79 respondents said they had witnessed hostile behavior in the workplace, including intimidation, harassment and bullying. Some 30% of respondents said they had directly experienced racial, gender or other forms of discrimination.
The DIA didn’t respond to questions about the survey.
“The Defense Intelligence Agency is a professional foreign-intelligence organization with a highly trained workforce, including dedicated men and women of the armed forces. The agency has zero tolerance for willful violations of professional standards,” the agency said in a statement. “We would respond as appropriate to any credible allegations of misconduct, abuse, or activities that conflict with our core values.”
Defense Attaché Service Director Michael Bochna emailed his staff in November 2020 after the survey was completed, promising to address the concerns, according to a copy of the email shared with lawmakers.
“One of the big messages that came from the survey and that we have seen manifesting itself: employees feel worn out, overworked and underappreciated,” he wrote, promising that leadership was taking notice. He also said the results offer “an opportunity to inform leadership on a number of ways we can involve, improve and restore the workforce going forward.”
Mr. Bochna declined to comment.
Both the House and Senate intelligence committees are aware of concerns about working conditions in the attaché service and are examining them, committee officials said. In its version of the annual intelligence authorization bill, the House committee directed DIA to provide it with summaries of future workforce climate surveys, as well as data about the number of employees seeking help with a perceived hostile work environment.
Lt. Col. Sweazey, shown last year, said he became the victim of two reprisals after raising workplace concerns while serving as an assistant defense attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Rome.
Photo: Staff Sgt. Delaney Gonzales/U.S. Air Force
The allegations outlined in witness statements to Congress ranged from retaliation to sexual harassment.
A U.S. Army lieutenant colonel wrote in a witness statement provided to lawmakers about his experience at the Joint Military Attaché School, which trains attachés, in 2016. After he criticized certain aspects of the course, faculty members falsely accused his wife of operating a political blog, he said, in a bid to render him ineligible for service overseas.
“I was targeted for comments made in a supposedly anonymous survey,” he wrote in the statement. “These allegations were patently false (my wife ran a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization chartered to help vulnerable women).”
Among the witness statements was one provided anonymously to lawmakers through Lt. Col. Sweazey alleging that faculty at the school turned a blind eye to harassment, including an instructor who poked a female U.S. Air Force pilot in the chest. Lt. Col. Sweazey also described an end-of-course video that included a photo montage of pictures taken surreptitiously of the students during training showing them in various stages of undress and set to the 1991 dance hit “I’m Too Sexy.”
Lt Col. Sweazey said he became the victim of two reprisals while serving as an assistant defense attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Rome after raising concerns about the workplace. These included receiving a poor performance review and being removed from consideration for an assignment in Germany.
He filed a complaint with the DIA inspector detailing eight instances of waste, reprisals and other abuses of authority in August 2020. After hearing nothing for a year, he approached the DIA director and lawmakers on the House and Senate intelligence committees.
Army Lt. Gen. Scott Berrier assumed directorship of the DIA in 2020.
Photo: U.S. Navy
Toxicity in the workplace is “a cancer that directly threatens the mission and national security,” he wrote in a July 2021 email to Army Lt. Gen. Scott Berrier, the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency.
Gen. Berrier didn’t respond to the email or to a Journal request for comment.
The inspector general closed the investigation into Lt. Col. Sweazey’s complaints in November 2021 after 444 days, concluding that his allegations were unsubstantiated. In its response, the inspector general said that negative performance reviews or canceled assignments didn’t constitute clear evidence of a reprisal.
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David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Phone: 202-573-8647
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
