Quotes of the Day:
“Strategy formation walks on two feet, one deliberate, the other emergent.”
- Lawrence Freedman, Strategy: A History
"Conquering the world on horseback is easy; it is dismounting and governing that is hard."
- Genghis Khan
“For it matters not how small the beginning may seem to be: what is once well done is done forever.”
- Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience
1. Russian disinformation campaigns change tack to get around western defences
2. Lithuania says throw away Chinese phones due to censorship concerns
3. US, China edging closer to war: Ex-MI6 operative
4. FDD | Reading Between the Lines of Biden’s and Xi’s U.N. Speeches
5. What’s Working and What Isn’t in Researching Influence Operations?
6. Can the World Get Aid to Afghanistan?
7. Bill To Abolish U.S. Space Force Introduced By North Bay Rep. Jared Huffman
8. Afghans arrived near a small Virginia town, exposing two different versions of America
9. The Myth That Authoritarianism Happens Only on the Right
10. China draws up list of 100 instances of U.S. "interference" in Hong Kong
11. US favourable to Taiwan trade bid, urges Beijing to cease pressure
12. China Is a Declining Power—and That’s the Problem
13. Is NATO good for Asia or is Asia good for NATO?
14. Opinion | Our constitutional crisis is already here
15. The Future of Conquest: Fights Over Small Places Could Spark the Next Big War
16. Channeling the Military Master: Top 10 Sun Tzu Memes
1. Russian disinformation campaigns change tack to get around western defences
Excerpts:
Since 2017, the biggest western social media companies have tried to tighten their policies around propaganda and disinformation on their platforms. Facebook said it has removed more than 6,000 Russian-linked accounts, pages and groups from its main site and Instagram in that time period. Twitter said it had banned more than 5,000 Russian accounts since 2018 and YouTube said it has removed more than 2m Russian videos since 2019.
Many of the banned posts and accounts have been linked to the internet Research Agency, the Kremlin-backed group that was accused of using social media to try to influence the outcome of the 2016 US presidential election, or to the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence service.
In response, Russian propaganda and disinformation efforts have pivoted to find new outlets, said Vasily Gatov, a visiting fellow at USC’s Annenberg School of Communications and Journalism.
“You can’t predict when Facebook will decide to take something down,” he said. “They’ve switched from social networks to other channels of communication.”
Russian disinformation campaigns change tack to get around western defences
Until July 2020, Ruslan Ostashko claims he was making $15,000 a month pumping out pro-Kremlin propaganda on YouTube.
But then YouTube “demonetised” his channel, PolitRussia, stopping it from earning a share of advertising revenue from views of its videos. When he tried to challenge the decision, he was told he would have to pursue legal action in the US.
“We’ve had difficulties with western social networks,” lamented Ostashko. “Our main platform is YouTube and we’ve had monetisation disabled for almost two years now.” In response, PolitRussia now appeals for reader donations at the end of each video.
Since 2017, the biggest western social media companies have tried to tighten their policies around propaganda and disinformation on their platforms. Facebook said it has removed more than 6,000 Russian-linked accounts, pages and groups from its main site and Instagram in that time period. Twitter said it had banned more than 5,000 Russian accounts since 2018 and YouTube said it has removed more than 2m Russian videos since 2019.
Many of the banned posts and accounts have been linked to the internet Research Agency, the Kremlin-backed group that was accused of using social media to try to influence the outcome of the 2016 US presidential election, or to the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence service.
In response, Russian propaganda and disinformation efforts have pivoted to find new outlets, said Vasily Gatov, a visiting fellow at USC’s Annenberg School of Communications and Journalism.
“You can’t predict when Facebook will decide to take something down,” he said. “They’ve switched from social networks to other channels of communication.”
Researchers at Cardiff University found that the reader comment sections of western media outlets such as the Daily Mail, the Daily Express, Fox News and Der Spiegel are increasingly being manipulated by propagandists, who then point to pro-Kremlin comments as evidence of sympathy for the Russian government in the west.
The comments are used as the basis for positive news stories in the Russian media, such as the news website inoSMI.ru, with headlines such as “Fox News readers: Russians are afraid of no one” and “German readers: Russians will always be one step ahead of Nato.”
InoSMI.ru is an online media outlet that translates foreign press articles about Russia and its interests abroad, for Russian-speaking audiences in Russia and eastern Europe. It is part of Rossiya Segodnya, a news agency owned and operated by the Russian government. It garners around 270,000 unique visits per day and from February to April 2021, more than two-thirds of its articles followed the “readers think” formula.
Its content is then reposted by a large international network of news sites across Europe, such as the PolitRussia and the Patriot Media Group, a conglomerate owned by Evgenii Prigozhin, who was indicted by a US grand jury for organising activities for the purpose of interference in the 2016 US presidential election.
Ostashko, who uses user comments to generate content for his channel, said: “We often use your readers’ comments as proof that the west understands us and that our politics are much better than how your politicians and journalists portray.”
Professor Martin Innes, director of Cardiff’s Crime and Security Research Institute, said that western media outlets are being targeted due to “their vulnerability and the lack of defences that are in place”.
Having conducted a “penetration test” of 18 high-profile national news outlets across the UK, US, France and Germany researchers found that no identity checks are made, online pseudonyms can be easily changed and that there is a “consistent lack of moderation and oversight”.
According to Peter Pomerantsev, a fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, the articles contribute to a wider narrative about Russia’s place in the world.
“The big strategic narrative of Russian propaganda is that there is no alternative to Putin,” he said. “The aim is to show that the west is corrupt, unhappy or full of Putin supporters. It might seem like quite a small operation, but it’s part of a much bigger and steady investment.”
Other efforts to skirt the restrictions imposed by social media platforms include the use of so-called mirror sites, new websites that are not on blacklists and which pop up to repost content from banned outlets.
Newsfront, a website set up in 2014 during the annexation of Crimea, and described by the US state department as part of a network of sites that “proliferate Russian disinformation and propaganda”, has been found to use mirror sites to spread exact copies of its articles across social media.
Clint Watts, a non-resident fellow at the Alliance for Securing Democracy and co-author of the report, said: “I think what is interesting is how important they see social media for distribution. We catch them almost weekly.”
Facebook said it was unable to comment on how many mirror sites have been identified on the site, but said added that “adversarial actors” are changing tactics in response to enforcement and that it was evolving its own defences in response.
Last week the company told Reuters that it has begun using the same approaches it uses to shut down networks of fake accounts to deal with networks of real-user accounts engaging in “co-ordinated social harm”. In July Facebook used these methods to remove real accounts associated with the Vietnamese army’s online information warfare unit.
Restricted news outlets also use seemingly independent anonymous writers and bloggers to copy out articles verbatim and post them on their feeds, as well as posting their content on alternative platforms such as Reddit, Parler and Telegram in the hope that it will be cross posted to one of the larger platforms.
“That’s tougher for social media platforms to police, because if someone posts something on their feed, are they a Russian actor? Probably not.” said Watts.
Konstantin Knyrik, a pro-Kremlin activist and Newsfront’s editor-in-chief, claimed this activity is uncoordinated: “Most of our contributors are not professional journalists, but ordinary people with convictions, who follow us and share our materials voluntarily.”
Reddit said its policies prohibited disinformation and it had taken action to prevent disinformation outlets and agents on its platform “for years”. Meanwhile, Ostanko said he was prepared for YouTube to act against the channel again.
“We’ve already created a whole community of channels on YouTube, so we have options if they decide to delete our channel again. No one will take away our right to speak.”
2. Lithuania says throw away Chinese phones due to censorship concerns
Lithuania says throw away Chinese phones due to censorship concerns
A person checks out the new Xiaomi Mi 9 mobile phone ahead of the Mobile World Congress (MWC 19) in Barcelona, Spain, February 24, 2019. REUTERS/Rafael Marchante/File Photo/File Photo
VILNIUS, Sept 21 (Reuters) - Lithuania's Defense Ministry recommended that consumers avoid buying Chinese mobile phones and advised people to throw away the ones they have now after a government report found the devices had built-in censorship capabilities.
Flagship phones sold in Europe by China's smartphone giant Xiaomi Corp (1810.HK) have a built-in ability to detect and censor terms such as "Free Tibet", "Long live Taiwan independence" or "democracy movement", Lithuania's state-run cybersecurity body said on Tuesday.
The capability in Xiaomi's Mi 10T 5G phone software had been turned off for the "European Union region", but can be turned on remotely at any time, the Defence Ministry's National Cyber Security Centre said in the report.
"Our recommendation is to not buy new Chinese phones, and to get rid of those already purchased as fast as reasonably possible," Defence Deputy Minister Margiris Abukevicius told reporters in introducing the report.
Xiaomi did not respond to a Reuters query for comment.
Relations between Lithuania and China have soured recently. China demanded last month that Lithuania withdraw its ambassador in Beijing and said it would recall its envoy to Vilnius after Taiwan announced that its mission in Lithuania would be called the Taiwanese Representative Office. read more
Taiwanese missions in Europe and the United States use the name of the city Taipei, avoiding a reference to the island itself, which China claims as its own territory.
U.S. President Joe Biden's national security adviser Jake Sullivan spoke to Lithuania's prime minister Ingrida Simonyte last week and stressed support for her country in the face of pressure from China.
The National Cyber Centre's report also said the Xiaomi phone was sending encrypted phone usage data to a server in Singapore. A security flaw was also found in the P40 5G phone by China's Huawei (HWT.UL) but none was found in the phone of another Chinese maker, OnePlus, it said.
Huawei's representative in the Baltics told the BNS news wire its phones do not send user's data externally.
The report said the list of terms which could be censored by the Xiaomi phone's system apps, including the default internet browser, currently includes 449 terms in Chinese and is continuously updated.
"This is important not only to Lithuania but to all countries which use Xiaomi equipment," the Centre said in the report.
Reporting by Andrius Sytas in Vilnius Editing by Sonya Hepinstall
3. US, China edging closer to war: Ex-MI6 operative
How credible is this sensational assessment? I leave it to the China scholars to analyze.
US, China edging closer to war: Ex-MI6 operative
China may be approaching a 'tipping point' on Taiwan reunification, warns former deputy director Nigel Inkster
Legendary CIA agent James Jesus Angleton lived and thrived in what he called “the wilderness of mirrors,” his favorite phrase for Soviet deception operations.
Nothing is ever as it seems, but then again, it could be. Such is the dilemma of the intelligence operative.
Case in point — a former UK MI6 operative, is warning that China is edging closer to war with the United States, Brinkwire.com reported.
According to former MI6 deputy director Nigel Inkster, Xi Jinping is losing patience, and China is “edging closer” to confrontation with the US over Taiwan.
Furthermore, he claims that Beijing has concluded that “peaceful efforts are no longer possible.”
China is on the verge of concluding that its ambitions to annex Taiwan will only succeed “through armed means.”
On a scale of one to ten, the likelihood of a military clash between China and the US is “as high as eight,” said Inkster, who spoke to LBC London this morning.
LBC is a British phone-in and talk radio station owned and operated by Global and based in its headquarters in London.
Whether Inkster is reading the signals correctly or not, remains to be seen.
Former President Nixon called it the “Madman theory.”
The Nixon White House tried to make the leaders of hostile Communist Bloc nations think he was irrational and volatile.
According to the theory, those leaders would then avoid provoking the US, fearing an unpredictable American response.
It’s possible Xi is stealing a page from “Tricky Dick.” Or is he?
To complicate matters, Beijing’s aggressive actions are pushing rival countries closer together, according to one policy expert.
“China is increasingly hemming itself in. Whatever objectives it might harbor for the Indo-Pacific, it’s getting in its own way,” said Ali Wyne, senior analyst for Global Macro at Eurasia Group.
According to former MI6 deputy director Nigel Inkster, Xi Jinping is losing patience, and China is “edging closer” to confrontation with the US over Taiwan. Credit: Handout.
Meanwhile, Taiwan declared an unprecedented US$9 billion increase in military spending the day before to meet China’s threat — a development that will not go over well in Beijing.
There is also danger that the highly controversial AUKUS defence treaty between the UK, the US, and Australia may drag Britain into a battle with China over Taiwan.
Zhao Lijian, a spokesperson for China’s foreign ministry, called the AUKUS pact an example of a “obsolete cold war zero-sum thinking.”
“On a scale of one to 10, how likely is it that we’ll see a military clash between America and China over this issue?” LBC host Matt Frei questioned Inkster.
“Right now, we’re up to eight,” Inkster replied.
“The best-case scenario is that both China and the United States realize they are on an equal footing militarily, with neither having a significant edge, said Inkster.
“This acknowledgement could help to keep the peace, even if it is shattered. That is our only ray of hope.”
“We may be approaching a tipping point when the Chinese party-state believes that peaceful reunification with Taiwan is not possible,” Inkster added.
As if on cue, this week China sent 24 fighter jets toward Taiwan in a large display of force Thursday, after the self-governing island announced its intention to join an 11-nation Pacific trade group that China has also applied to join, AP reported.
China’s People’s Liberation Army flew fighter jets toward Taiwan twice on Thursday, once in the morning with 19 planes, and once in the afternoon with five more.
Taiwan deployed air patrol forces in response to the Chinese jets and tracked them on its air defense systems, the island’s Defense Ministry said in a statement.
As Inkster spoke, across the pond at the Air, Space & Cyber conference in National Harbor, Maryland, Air Combat Command’s Gen. Mark D. Kelly told attendees that China must be challenged, Air Force magazine reported.
A fighter jet attached to an air force base under the PLA Southern Theater Command taxis on the runway of a military airport in south China before takeoff for a joint training exercise involving multi-type fighter jets. (eng.chinamil.com.cn/Photo by Fan Yishu)
The “cold, hard realities” are that the Air Force was superbly prepared and trained to defeat a peer adversary — Russia — 30 years ago, then achieved a highly lopsided victory in Iraq, Kelly said.
But in the last 20 years, USAF was optimized for combat in a “permissive environment” that didn’t test the force. During that same time, China was focused completely on “the high-end fight, and fighting us.”
China’s force structure and systems are “designed to inflict more casualties in the first 30 hours of combat than we’ve endured over the last 30 years in the Middle East,” Kelly said.
As the Air Force inventory has aged and diminished, the balance with China has tilted more toward Beijing, he added.
Kelly said Russia has been able to annex Crimea and China has claimed parts of the South China Sea “without firing a shot” because contesting those situations has become harder thanks to adversary air defenses.
To regain the advantage — “to be a resolute world power ”— the US, through its Air Force, has to be able to penetrate “highly contested sovereign [airspace],” Kelly asserted.
Nigel Inkster has worked at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) since 2007. He is the former Director of Future Conflict and Cyber Security and currently a Special Adviser at IISS.
Source: Brinkwire.com, Air Force magazine, CyberStability.org, Wikipedia, IISS, CNBC
4. FDD | Reading Between the Lines of Biden’s and Xi’s U.N. Speeches
"Ships passing in the night."
Conclusion:
At other points in their speeches, President Biden and Xi Jinping appeared to agree. They both spoke of the challenges posed by the coronavirus pandemic and climate change. But overall, their rhetoric left one with the impression that they were the captains of two ships passing in the night. Appearances can be deceiving.
FDD | Reading Between the Lines of Biden’s and Xi’s U.N. Speeches
fdd.org · by Thomas Joscelyn Senior Fellow and Senior Editor of FDD's Long War Journal · September 24, 2021
This week, President Joe Biden and China’s Xi Jinping spoke in front of the 76th session of the United Nations General Assembly. In this era of so-called great power competition between their two nations, it is useful to compare their arguments and rhetoric.
Xi, in accordance with usual style, spoke in flowery, benign-sounding phrases. His speech was titled, “Bolstering Confidence and Jointly Overcoming Difficulties to Build a Better World.” Who could object to such a noble goal?
Indeed, Xi often sounded like a Western progressive – not an autocrat sitting atop the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Consider these lines.
“The Chinese people have always celebrated and striven to pursue the vision of peace, amity and harmony,” Xi told the United Nations. “China has never and will never invade or bully others, or seek hegemony.” The CCP head went on to claim that China has “always” been “a builder of world peace,” a “contributor to global development,” and a “defender of the international order and provider of public goods.”
Many countries in China’s neighborhood or elsewhere around the globe would disagree with Xi’s self-assessment. China’s bullying style in world affairs is readily apparent.
But the point of Xi’s rhetoric is to deflect attention from the CCP’s own designs, while portraying America as the true aggressor. Xi and Beijing’s diplomats have adopted a common script – a set of talking points that are intended to cast the CCP as a guarantor of world stability.
Therefore, Xi spoke of “multilateralism” and “win-win” policies in which China cooperates with others on the global stage. But it doesn’t take much to see that Xi is simply gaslighting his audience.
For example:
Democracy is not a special right reserved to an individual country, but a right for the people of all countries to enjoy. Recent developments in the global situation show once again that military intervention from the outside and so-called democratic transformation entail nothing but harm. We need to advocate peace, development, equity, justice, democracy and freedom, which are the common values of humanity, and reject the practice of forming small circles or zero-sum games.
Of course, the Chinese people do not “enjoy” democracy and freedom. The second sentence in the passage above is a thinly veiled critique of the U.S.-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. But many in the U.S., including President Biden, agree that it is foolhardy to seek “democratic transformation” through “military intervention.” That doesn’t mean the CCP has a viable alternative model for democracy promotion. Quite the opposite.
Which brings us to President Biden’s speech. Throughout the first year of his presidency, Biden has repeatedly framed his foreign policy in terms of a contest between autocracies and democracies. He returned to that theme at the U.N. While the president mentions initiatives such as the “Quad” (a partnership between Australia, India, Japan and the U.S.), which seeks to contain the CCP, he did not address the Chinese challenge directly.
“Authoritarianism — the authoritarianism of the world may seek to proclaim the end of the age of democracy, but they’re wrong,” President Biden said. “The truth is: The democratic world is everywhere.”
“It lives in the anti-corruption activists, the human rights defenders, the journalists, the peace protestors on the frontlines of this struggle in Belarus, Burma, Syria, Cuba, Venezuela, and everywhere in between,” President Biden said.
“Everywhere in between.” Noticeably absent from President Biden’s list of frontline struggles was any mention of Hong Kong or Taiwan.
As President Biden’s own secretary of state, Anthony Blinken, said earlier this year: “The Chinese government continues to undermine the democratic institutions of Hong Kong, denying Hong Kong residents the rights that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) itself has guaranteed.”
Yet, for some reason, the CCP’s oppression of Hong Kongers didn’t warrant a mention in the president’s speech. Nor did the small democracy in Taiwan, which finds itself increasingly worried about its future. It is a curious omission, given that there is no better example of a democratic alternative for the Chinese mainland than Taiwan.
President Biden did mention in passing the CCP’s domineering ways in Xinjiang. “We all must call out and condemn the targeting and oppression of racial, ethnic, and religious minorities when it occurs in—whether it occurs in Xinjiang or northern Ethiopia or anywhere in the world,” the president said. But in his “call out,” the president did not explicitly lay blame on Xi Jinping’s regime.
Another nascent democracy, the one in Afghanistan, was just toppled in August. There is no question that the now deposed government in Kabul was deeply corrupt and incompetent. But it was backed by the U.S. for nearly two decades and has been replaced by an authoritarian regime that openly celebrates the 9/11 hijackings while promoting its own suicide bombers.
President Biden did not express any alarm at America’s defeat in Afghanistan. He was just happy that America’s role in the war is over. “We’ve ended 20 years of conflict in Afghanistan,” the president said. The president claimed that he was bringing a “close” to “this period of relentless war,” replacing it with “a new era of relentless diplomacy” that will supposedly be responsible for “lifting people up around the world,” “renewing and defending democracy” in the process. But the president’s contrast between war and diplomacy ignores the fact America’s engagement with the Taliban paved the way for the jihadists to take over the country.
The president went further, declaring an end to the post-9/11 era. “I stand here today, for the first time in 20 years, with the United States not at war,” the president said. “We’ve turned the page” Just one day prior, however, the U.S. launched a drone strike on a car carrying a suspected senior al-Qaeda leader in Idlib, Syria. It’s true that thousands of American troops no longer fight pitched battles, but that has been true for some time. And the drones are still flying. Moreover, the jihadists haven’t “turned the page” on us.
At other points in their speeches, President Biden and Xi Jinping appeared to agree. They both spoke of the challenges posed by the coronavirus pandemic and climate change. But overall, their rhetoric left one with the impression that they were the captains of two ships passing in the night. Appearances can be deceiving.
Thomas Joscelyn is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the Senior Editor for FDD’s Long War Journal. Follow Tom on Twitter @thomasjoscelyn. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, non-partisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
fdd.org · by Thomas Joscelyn Senior Fellow and Senior Editor of FDD's Long War Journal · September 24, 2021
5. What’s Working and What Isn’t in Researching Influence Operations?
Excerpts:
The field has come a long way since I got started in 2014. But certain pathologies still remain entrenched and hamper effective dialogue and cooperation between key stakeholders. A lack of universal definitions about the problem often means that meetings are spent level-setting, rather than problem-solving. Growing distrust of industry hinders research collaboration with social media companies, for fear of attacks on one’s credibility. For those who do have access to data, the arrangement is usually ad hoc, part of an unbalanced exchange between a company and the researchers, as exemplified in the recent debacle between researchers at New York University and Facebook. To add to that, there has been little headway on regulation that outlines a framework for transparency reporting by industry on their operations, or rules for facilitating data-sharing, and what comes down the pipe often leaves it to working groups to sort out in detail.
There have been at least three major changes in the field of researching and countering influence operations since 2016.
First, there is far more interest in this subject now than before 2016.
...
The second major change, as a result of this growing interest, is increased funding and job opportunities.
...
Third, with this increased capacity for investigating influence operations, pockets of collaboration have emerged to help detect examples of campaigns.
What’s Working and What Isn’t in Researching Influence Operations?
The world first learned about Russian attempts to manipulate the information environment in 2013. Staff hired by the Internet Research Agency (IRA) posed as Americans online posting divisive comments to social media. Continued activities during the 2016 U.S. presidential election put influence operations on center stage globally. It’s been eight years since the initial IRA operation, but how far has the field working to understand and counter influence operations come in that time? The field has certainly grown apace producing countless case studies highlighting examples of influence operations. Yet in many other ways the field has hit a rut. Scholars of influence operations still quibble over establishing common definitions and frequently come up empty when seeking to access more social media data.
Influence operations are not a new phenomenon, although the concept still has not been well defined. As part of influence operations, actors engage in a variety of activities aimed at affecting an audience or situation for a specific aim. Such activities can include tactics such as disinformation; for example, Chinese officials have repeatedly attempted to dispute the origins of the novel coronavirus through a coordinated campaign involving diplomats, state broadcasters and social media. But influence operations aren’t just limited to intentional spreading of misleading information. It’s a term that can also encompass knowing when to put an emotive message in front of an audience to encourage a behavior change, as Operation Christmas aimed to in demobilizing FARC guerrillas; agenda-setting particularly in mainstream media to frame a topic, as both Greenpeace and Shell did in encouraging audiences, especially policymakers, to adopt their side; and mobilizing audiences to participate by taking up and spreading a message.
The emergence of a field devoted to researching, and countering, influence operations is something I have watched closely. In 2014, I channeled a fascination with propaganda from the two world wars into researching how the phenomena was changing in a digital age. In those early days, there were few places to find work researching influence operations. The career paths were mostly in academia or in the military or intelligence services. Marrying the two, I chose to pursue a doctorate in war studies. Along the way, I have worked with tech companies, militaries, civil society groups, and governments, learning how each understands and works to counter (and sometimes run) influence operations.
The field has come a long way since I got started in 2014. But certain pathologies still remain entrenched and hamper effective dialogue and cooperation between key stakeholders. A lack of universal definitions about the problem often means that meetings are spent level-setting, rather than problem-solving. Growing distrust of industry hinders research collaboration with social media companies, for fear of attacks on one’s credibility. For those who do have access to data, the arrangement is usually ad hoc, part of an unbalanced exchange between a company and the researchers, as exemplified in the recent debacle between researchers at New York University and Facebook. To add to that, there has been little headway on regulation that outlines a framework for transparency reporting by industry on their operations, or rules for facilitating data-sharing, and what comes down the pipe often leaves it to working groups to sort out in detail.
There have been at least three major changes in the field of researching and countering influence operations since 2016.
First, there is far more interest in this subject now than before 2016. This interest tends to be event driven and led by media coverage about influence operations. Before 2016, much of the influence operations research focus was on violent extremism, as terrorist groups such as the Islamic State dominated news coverage and leveraged social media to grow their membership bases. Events continue to drive interest in influence operations, as well as changes in countering them—none more than Trump’s surprise victory in the 2016 election. More recently, the coronavirus pandemic pushed social media platforms to increase the number of publicly disclosed changes to the design and functionality of products, making 66 interventions in 2020, and provided governments with the renewed impetus to introduce new legislation to counter influence operations.
The second major change, as a result of this growing interest, is increased funding and job opportunities. For example, the U.S. Department of Defense recently announced a nearly $1 billion deal to counter misinformation (without sharing much about what that entails). Such investments have led some observers to dub the field the “disinformation industrial complex.” These growths in public interest and funding have helped support new initiatives and research on influence operations. For example, some 60 percent of academic studies measuring the effects of influence operations have been published since 2016. The field working on influence operations is eclectic, with people coming from a variety of academic disciplines and sectors, driving initiatives around fact-checking, media literacy, academic research, investigations, policymaking, and development of tools for potentially countering influence operations.
Third, with this increased capacity for investigating influence operations, pockets of collaboration have emerged to help detect examples of campaigns. This has resulted in ad hoc collaboration between external investigators and social media platforms where the influence operations increasingly occur, but also issue-specific initiatives, such as the Election Integrity Partnership, which was stood up before the 2020 U.S. presidential election as “a coalition of research entities focused on supporting real-time information exchange between the research community, election officials, government agencies, civil society organizations, and social media platforms.” These cross-sector collaborations are important; however, they are often event driven and operate for a short period of time, making it difficult to develop longer-term capacity. Moreover, as most funding in this space is project based, fewer investments are made into initiatives that can bring together the disparate, and sometimes competitive, stakeholders required to address influence operations, including from academia, civil society, governments, industry, and media, to name a few.
A central problem is that stakeholders aren’t even using the same vocabulary to describe the problems and solutions. Many different terms are commonly used, sometimes interchangeably, including propaganda, fake news, information operations, hybrid warfare and manipulative interference. Indeed, in the Partnership to Counter Influence Operation’s first community survey, “one-third of respondents … cited the lack of agreed-upon definitions as the most or second-most important challenge in the field.” But the gap is wider than terminology.
Beyond not speaking the same language, stakeholders often have a weak understanding of how each other works. For example, policy proposals to regulate social media platforms often lack insights into the tech companies they aim to govern, offering little detail or guidance for implementation, leaving it to industry to figure out. And similar gaps crop up in other domains. Academic research on influence operations is aimed at getting published, not policy development, and often does not translate for policymakers in either industry or government how the research might be useful. For outsiders attempting to engage tech companies, navigating the firms’ byzantine organizational structures alone can be challenging, and the polished, preapproved company talking points can come across as shallow. To put it another way, the field researching and work on countering influence operations lack glue to hold them together.
The field also lacks standards for conducting investigations of influence operations.
Around half of the initiatives researching and countering influence operations are led by civil society, through nonprofit organizations like think tanks and nongovernmental organizations, their work falling outside of the academic peer-reviewed process. Even in academia, the vast array of disciplines brought to bear in researching influence operations can make finding universal standards for reviewing the quality of outputs challenging. Good research is based on reliable data and methodologies, both of which require shared standards.
Despite issues in discerning good-quality research on influence operations from bad, there is a low bar for being picked up in media coverage. Influence operations make for good headlines and lots of clicks, regardless of the quality of the research. This has led to all sorts of issues, such as making faulty attribution of who is behind an influence operation (and no, it’s not always Russians) and mistaking correlation for causation. Misattribution can have consequences, particularly when individuals are blamed falsely. And just because two outcomes happen at the same time—troll farms and a surprise election victory, for example—does not automatically mean that one caused the other. In an election, like in many other contexts, many factors go into voters’ decisions. Is it possible to isolate and measure the influence of any single medium? Are voting choices influenced more by parents, peer groups or the economy?
The fact is, researchers’ understanding of influence operations beyond case studies showcasing examples of campaigns is weak. Little is known about how the information environment works as a system. Most research on influence operations focuses on specific campaign activity often in isolation from the audience it targets or the ecosystem in which it spreads. Put another way, researchers know little about the flow of information between different types of online platforms, through influencers, and into the media.
Knowledge about the effects of influence operations also remains limited. Most research on the effects of influence operations focuses on traditional mass media. Where social media is the focus of measuring the effects of influence operations, most work explores short-term effects only. Little is known about the longer-term effects of influence operations conducted over social media. How does engagement with digital media change user beliefs or views over time? Does repeated exposure to anti-vaccination influence operations make people more or less likely to get inoculated, and how long do those views last? Are there other impacts from such exposure, like a reduced trust in media or government, and what do those potential shifts mean for civic engagement, such as voting or compromising with others who hold different views?
Even less is known about the efficacy of common countermeasures. Most research assessing the impact of interventions focuses on fact-checking, content labeling, and disclosures made by social media companies to those users potentially exposed to influence operations. Results are promising for fact-checking as an immediate countermeasure, reducing the impact of false information on beliefs as well as subjects’ tendency to share disinformation with others. However, very few researchers have studied interventions by social media companies, such as deplatforming, algorithmic downranking or content moderation. While social media platforms have introduced new policies and experimented with interventions to counter influence operations, there is little publicly available information on whether those measures work—in fact, one count from early 2021 found that platforms provided efficacy measurements for interventions in only 8 percent of cases.
Despite these snags, this emergent field has come far. But the road ahead is long and not without bumps.
Stable funding and more coordination between stakeholders are required to counter influence operations. The field is fragile and fragmented. Funding tends to be project based, meaning most initiatives lack resources to fund ongoing operations. Likewise, the need to show results and success to donors encourages initiatives to overinflate their effectiveness as they seek continued support for projects. While the disparate community of researchers increasingly connects through professional convenings, collaboration between experts is still ad hoc. For example, experts don’t tend to build on each other’s work, as demonstrated by a lack of citations between them in drafting similar policy recommendations. Between sectors there are significant disconnects, with academics, civil society, industry and government often operating within their own communities, diminishing their ability to understand each other and their respective roles. Moreover, in some sectors there is a lack of coordination when it comes to influence operations. Nowhere is this more apparent than within the U.S. federal government: Who in government is even responsible for understanding not just countering efforts but also how the country engages in influence operations?
For key stakeholders to change, incentive structures also need to change. Most major actors who can play a big role in countering influence operations have little incentive to do so. Indeed, most are incentivized to do nothing or, worse, to engage in influence operations themselves. Politicians have the capacity to set rules around the use of influence operations—but also benefit from them. And those who do try to introduce legislative changes quickly discover how challenging it can be to draft legislation when there are definitional issues in simply articulating the problem, as was the case in Sen. Klobuchar’s Health Misinformation Act. Social media platforms make billions in revenue off connecting people and using the data generated to enable advertisers to target them. On the content generation side of the problem, business models don’t just color industry decision-making; media (mainstream and alternative alike) are in a competition for audiences and advertising revenue. Click-bait headlines and persuasive ad tech are all part of the news media practice to grow audiences and attract advertisers to target them. Often overlooked is the role of audiences, both in wanting to consume salacious and misleading material, but also in propagating it. Researchers have to stop admiring the problem and, instead, look more closely at what drives engagement with influence operations, how the phenomenon occurs within a wider information ecosystem, and how the information environment can be improved.
But it’s not just a need for funding in the short term to stand up groups to take on these problems. What’s really needed are strategic, longer-term investments into researching influence operations. Indeed, much of what needs to be done now is the unsexy legwork to ensure data-sharing and research collaboration can occur at a level that addresses the gaps outlined above.
These investments should start with articulating a framework for comprehensive transparency reporting and compelling companies to participate. Most researchers have little idea what data is aggregated by and available from industry. Transparency reporting (regularly issued statements by social media companies, disclosing aggregated statistics related to usage of the platforms, requests for data access, how the platform works, policy development and enforcement, and external requests for interventions) could help researchers understand what data might be available for research purposes. A basic first step would be to create a comprehensive transparency reporting framework, complete with prioritization for rolling out different aspects and identifying who should have access to what types of reporting. Such reporting might encompass user-level reporting (how people are engaging on the platform); data access requests (who is asking for what kinds of information and the processes for how those requests are handled); platform-level reporting (how the system works and decision-making around that); policy and enforcement (how rules are created and acted against over time); requests for interventions (who is asking for content to be taken down and the process behind that); and third-party use of the platform (who has access to data and ad tech tools and how those data and tools are being used).
In tandem, rules for data-sharing must also be developed. It’s clear that ad hoc relationships are insufficient to foster deeper insights into influence operations, but sharing data tied to individuals is fraught with challenges. Who should have access to what types of data, and for what purposes? How will the data be transferred and stored? How will the users who created this data be protected? How will abuses be handled? Who will oversee this process? These questions all need to be answered, ideally not by the companies holding the data, but as a society, through an open process. Fortunately, there are also models to draw from—society has managed the exchange of sensitive data for transparency and research purposes before in the health and finance sectors.
Ideally, both transparency reporting and data-sharing rules would be developed at an international level. As countries introduce regulation on social media, companies could face hundreds of variations on requirements around transparency reporting, data-sharing and interventions. While each country is different, a broad transparency reporting framework and data-sharing rules could be universal. Taking a joint approach would also increase the likelihood of companies meeting such requirements should they be introduced. This is particularly important for smaller countries that might not have the clout to make industry jump but could more readily benefit from a collective move that is much too big to ignore.
Finally, with reporting and rules guiding the process, longer-term research collaboration must also be facilitated. A permanent mechanism is needed for sharing data and managing collaborations that ensures the independence of researchers. Given the costs associated with and expertise required to conduct measurements research, an international model whereby several governments, philanthropists, and companies contribute to an institution or mechanism could be the boost this field needs.
Even if data-sharing challenges could be solved, the fact that academic research is seldom designed with policy development in mind means that critical learnings are not being translated and used systematically to support evidence-based policy development. Moreover, conducting measurements related to influence operations, especially over time, requires the cooperation of the platform studied, if for no other reason than to keep the research team informed of changes made to it that could affect the research. A new institution to enable effective collaboration across industry, academia and government is badly needed. One model is a multi-stakeholder research development center, which would enable cross-sector collaboration with an emphasis on facilitating information-sharing to test hypotheses and design countermeasures and intervention strategies. Another follows the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, model, supported by several countries working with multiple research organizations to create an international network, thus fostering a wider field. An international approach would also help address the imbalance in available research that skews toward the Global North, thus helping those in countries where malign influence operations are a matter of life and death. Another benefit in an international model is that it bakes in a fail-safe should any single member country slide into autocracy, ensuring that such a center cannot be abused.
Such a center would provide an independent space for collaboration between social media platforms and external researchers, with an eye toward integrating a policy focus into the research design, outputs and recommendations made. The pace and proliferation of influence operations outstrips the research and policy community’s ability to study, understand, and find good solutions to the problems presented by the new age of digital propaganda. It’s time to fix this.
Carnegie’s Partnership for Countering Influence Operations is grateful for funding provided by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Craig Newmark Philanthropies, Facebook, Google, Twitter, and WhatsApp. The PCIO is wholly and solely responsible for the contents of its products, written or otherwise. We welcome conversations with new donors. All donations are subject to Carnegie’s donor policy review. We do not allow donors prior approval of drafts, influence on selection of project participants, or any influence over the findings and recommendations of work they may support.
6. Can the World Get Aid to Afghanistan?
Excerpts:
Rory Stewart, the U.K.’s former head of international development, told a forum at the London Frontline Club that countries and organizations interested in Afghanistan should “stop pandering to the past and think about the rather horrifying future and real prospect of a collapse and an ensuing civil war.”
At the same forum, however, former Canadian Ambassador to Afghanistan Chris Alexander said that the world needs to recognize that the Taliban are largely a proxy army for Pakistan’s government, which helped employ loyal Afghan fighters to conquer the country for its own political interests. The United Nations has already set up assistance hubs in Pakistan that are funneling humanitarian aid into Afghanistan, setting up a scenario that could well benefit Pakistan’s generals in the long run, as did an international effort in the 1980s during the U.S.-backed proxy war against Russia on Afghan soil.
Despite such concerns, USIP’s Byrd and others insisted that trying to deliver humanitarian assistance directly without an overland route was next to impossible. “There is no way to avoid much in-kind aid going through Pakistan, Iran, or Central Asian countries on the way to Afghanistan,” he said.
Politics aside, there remains the question of what is in the interest of the Afghan public. Most Afghans interviewed for this story – many of whom preferred to remain anonymous because they or their family members still live in Afghanistan – insisted that the world is obligated to help. International sources with pristine humanitarian motivations agree.
Can the World Get Aid to Afghanistan?
Humanitarian aid experts desperately want to help, but their options are limited – especially if they want to avoid further empowering the Taliban.
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The troubled nation of Afghanistan, set in unforgiving deserts and the foothills of the Hindu Kush, is once again sagging under the yoke of a medieval-minded regime that enforces draconian punishments and gender rules that echo those of 16th or 17th century Europe. According to international experts trying to come up with a viable plan to help oppressed and underfed Afghans, the truth of Afghanistan in 2021 is significantly stranger than an imaginary dystopia. Certainly, it should be taken more seriously than the Hollywood thrillers likely to be spun off from its current and ongoing tragedy.
Humanitarian assistance experts desperately want to help, but their options are limited and could well, as some of them said in interviews for this story, end up strengthening a government made up of leading men often wanted for terrorism and crimes against humanity, persons U.S. military brass often referred to curtly as “the bad guys.”
Several key issues complicate Afghanistan’s current humanitarian assistance scenario.
First, some of the largest humanitarian and aid organizations concerned with helping now are also responsible for the massive failure to help create a viable and stable nation over the last two decades. In many cases, these organizations, led by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), blatantly ignored warnings (including my own on occasion) and sent project funding through corrupt Afghan warlords who were already known to the U.S. government and others as bad actors. These men did not skim a small percentage off the top; rather, they loaded suitcases full of cash and flew the money to financial safe havens abroad.
Second, the United Nations, which finds itself in a de facto position today as the “chief humanitarian fundraiser” for Afghanistan, also provided unspoken support for the U.S. military intervention in 2001 with its mandate to assist a new U.S.-chosen government lined with corrupt cronies. After the past two decades of focusing its political and monitoring efforts mostly on human rights rather than on a faltering peace process, which the U.S. government insisted on keeping control of itself, the U.N. must now grapple with how to help direct new humanitarian assistance through a Taliban government that has shown it has little stomach for gender equality or free speech, major pillars of the “universal human rights” that the U.N. claims to represent. U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres humbly conceded to Reuters news agency last week that any suggestion the world body can solve Afghanistan’s problems is “a fantasy” and that the U.N.’s capacity to mediate the creation of a more inclusive Taliban government is limited.
The broader humanitarian community bent on helping today also knows all too well that the lion’s share of the “aid” for Afghanistan, which was provided by Washington-based humanitarian contractors from 2001 to this year, came attached to the strategic goal of countering terrorism. After all, this was the original raison d’etre for a U.S.-led military intervention. While many international assistance providers, including those based in Europe, the United States, and Asia, never subscribed to U.S. goals, they are nevertheless caught in the uneasy circumstances of having supported them in ancillary ways over the past two decades.
If all these ironies and failures make for a merciless conundrum, there are still Afghans and global economic experts alike who believe that trying to help the Afghan public in its current dire circumstances is the only way forward – if only to avert a dreaded all-out civil war, which could cause even more human suffering, bring on more global terror, and spark a greater exodus of Afghans from their homeland. Many humanitarians believe that helping Afghans stuck in Afghanistan is also simply a matter of “doing the right thing,” considering that the population has suffered more war, disease, and malnutrition than any nation should have to bear. Without help, they say, Afghanistan may break apart, even Balkanize into clashing ethnic and regional factions, finally descending into a wider conflict that could well destabilize Central and South Asia.
Even then, humanitarian assistance is no panacea, nor will it necessarily prevent a civil war, said William Byrd, the senior expert on Afghanistan at the United States Institute of Peace.
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“No one can predict the future, but the really urgent need now, or opportunity if you want to call it that, is for assistance to Afghanistan to at least modestly ameliorate the very large economic and humanitarian shock resulting from the Taliban takeover and subsequent loss of aid, which previously had been on the order of several billion dollars per year,” said Byrd, a Harvard-educated development economist who also managed the World Bank’s efforts in Afghanistan.
He added, “In any country, there is a risk that large amounts of aid could entrench an authoritarian government, but particularly given that humanitarian assistance would be delivered directly and not through the Afghan government, this doesn’t look like an immediate risk.”
Direct assistance to the Afghan people, if it can be managed and properly delivered, would not provide the international community with much leverage over the Taliban, agree most experts. But like others, Byrd insisted aid distribution should be nuanced. He cited as an example “the need to employ women in aid delivering entities in order to ensure that the humanitarian aid reaches women and girls.”
The limited aid being distributed in Afghanistan today is going mainly through established channels and is focused on medical and basic food assistance, often with the assistance of the World Health Organization and the World Food Program. However, several smaller aid groups like Doctors Without Borders (MSF), the International Rescue Committee (IRC), and the International Red Cross are operating as they did before the mid-August takeover by the Taliban. Some of the smaller groups, including U.N. entities, had already established working relationships with the Taliban. On behalf of one such group, Elinor Raikes, the IRC’s vice president and head of program delivery, insisted recently that without adequate help, more Afghan women and girls will suffer, and that violence against them by men can be expected to increase proportionally.
Others, who insist that most humanitarian assistance is still political in essence, say that like it or not, aid could well help solidify the regime in power. “Now, it seems we’re condemned to helping some of the world’s most infamous terrorists – whose credentials include providing shelter and logistical support for the al-Qaida network, which launched the 9/11 attacks – and has now established itself as the government,” said Jonathan Terra, a conflict analyst and former U.S. State Department official in Afghanistan.
“Remember the U.S. wields significant influence over the international financial system and is able to prevent funds from moving around,” Terra said. “Yet, at the same time, the U.S. and its allies” – as well as the United Nations – “are in the process of putting together massive international aid packages for a government comprised of a ruthless terrorist network. You can’t make this stuff up.”
Afghans in international development interviewed for this story, said, however that humanitarian aid for their fellow Afghans was and is essential. Farhad Javid, who works for Grand Challenges Canada and is a guest lecturer at the University of Toronto, suggested the need for an assistance plan that creates a direct international support fund for non-governmental organizations, insists on the establishment of a “Directorate of Women Affairs,” and “supports women and girls education and private businesses for women.” Such an approach would need “buy in” from the Taliban, he acknowledged.
Another Afghan, who wanted to be identified only by his first name, Mustafa, and who worked in the Afghan government until recently, also insisted on the need to help his fellow Afghans, but only after the broader international community agrees on a strategy with contingency plans to do so.
“I see it through a pure cold and calculated gaming theory perspective,” said Mustafa, who moved to a neighboring Central Asian country last year after witnessing years of the former Ghani government’s incompetence. “The world can help the Afghan people through U.N. and World Bank platforms and associated distributions chains already established in the country, but this effort needs to contain a mechanism to minimize the Taliban’s benefit and maximize the public’s benefit. It must also predict the Taliban’s expected efforts to benefit from it in advance and prepare ways to counter this. The mechanism can and should be revised based on the reality on the ground.”
In the past, the Taliban have agreed in theory to remain above the fray of assistance while imposing a significant zakat or tax on humanitarian aid in its zones of control. Economic development experts do not agree on how best to distribute aid, but they almost all agree that it hasn’t been done well in the past and that it remains in the current Afghan government’s interest to facilitate assistance – if for no other reason than to guarantee its continued existence.
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Rory Stewart, the U.K.’s former head of international development, told a forum at the London Frontline Club that countries and organizations interested in Afghanistan should “stop pandering to the past and think about the rather horrifying future and real prospect of a collapse and an ensuing civil war.”
At the same forum, however, former Canadian Ambassador to Afghanistan Chris Alexander said that the world needs to recognize that the Taliban are largely a proxy army for Pakistan’s government, which helped employ loyal Afghan fighters to conquer the country for its own political interests. The United Nations has already set up assistance hubs in Pakistan that are funneling humanitarian aid into Afghanistan, setting up a scenario that could well benefit Pakistan’s generals in the long run, as did an international effort in the 1980s during the U.S.-backed proxy war against Russia on Afghan soil.
Despite such concerns, USIP’s Byrd and others insisted that trying to deliver humanitarian assistance directly without an overland route was next to impossible. “There is no way to avoid much in-kind aid going through Pakistan, Iran, or Central Asian countries on the way to Afghanistan,” he said.
Politics aside, there remains the question of what is in the interest of the Afghan public. Most Afghans interviewed for this story – many of whom preferred to remain anonymous because they or their family members still live in Afghanistan – insisted that the world is obligated to help. International sources with pristine humanitarian motivations agree.
“I believe well-fed and educated people are more likely to be a part of positive change than hungry and angry people,” said Dr. Lisa Myles, a Swedish intensive care doctor, who has worked overseas with MSF.
Earlier this week, after the director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO) visited health facilities in Kabul, WHO officials warned, “Afghanistan’s health system is on the brink of collapse.”
They added, “Unless urgent action is taken, the country faces an imminent humanitarian catastrophe.”
7. Bill To Abolish U.S. Space Force Introduced By North Bay Rep. Jared Huffman
Hmmm.... no more USSF?? (no not US Special Forces which has traditionally used that abbreviation but the US Space Force. My SF will get back its abbreviation)
Bill To Abolish U.S. Space Force Introduced By North Bay Rep. Jared Huffman
WASHINGTON (CBS SF/CNN) — A North Bay congressman has introduced a bill to abolish the U.S. Space Force, a day after the newest branch of the military unveiled new uniform prototypes.
Rep. Jared Huffman (D-San Rafael) introduced the No Militarization of Space Act as Congress moves to pass the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the annual bill that authorizes funding for the Pentagon.
Former President Donald Trump established the Space Force in 2019, creating the newest military service and the first new service since the US Air Force was created in 1947. Supporters of the move pointed to the need for developing space strategy and doctrine, along with the existence of anti-satellite threats from China and Russia. Critics said the new military branch was unnecessary since space operations have always been conducted by the U.S. Air Force, and that the move would be creating another costly military bureaucracy.
“The long-standing neutrality of space has fostered a competitive, non-militarized age of exploration every nation and generation has valued since the first days of space travel. But since its creation under the former Trump administration, the Space Force has threatened longstanding peace and flagrantly wasted billions of taxpayer dollars,” said Rep. Huffman in a prepared statement. “It’s time we turn our attention back to where it belongs: addressing urgent domestic and international priorities like battling COVID-19, climate change, and growing economic inequality. Our mission must be to support the American people, not spend billions on the militarization of space.”
On Tuesday, Space Force commander Gen. Jay Raymond unveiled new uniform prototypes during his speech at the Air Force Association’s Air, Space and Cyber conference.
READ MORE: Concord Restaurant, Bar Patrons Divided Over Vaccine Mandate
The navy-blue dress uniform has a series of silver buttons with the U.S. Space Force delta symbol on them running diagonally from the right shoulder down the front of the wearer’s chest. The name pin is on the left side of the uniform’s front under the wearer’s left shoulder. A light blue collar is slightly visible below the uniform.
A physical training uniform was also unveiled which includes a T-shirt with the Space Force symbol on the right side of the shirt’s front and Space Force written in capital white letters across the back. The shorts and sweatshirt are black, and both include the Space Force symbol on them.
In December, former Vice President Mike Pence announced that the members Space Force would be known as Guardians. The Space Force logo was unveiled in January 2020.
© Copyright 2021 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten. CNN contributed to this report.
8. Afghans arrived near a small Virginia town, exposing two different versions of America
Excerpt:
Around dusk Thursday evening, Team Rubicon returned to Crenshaw Methodist a after day of sifting and sorting, and gathered beneath the outdoor pavilion for their nightly meeting.
“Okay everyone, circle up!” the group’s incident commander, Laura Block, shouted to the group. One by one, the volunteers delivered a report on the day’s work. “Some of y’all are headed home,” Block said, as some volunteers’ rotation came to an end. “And post-op drop, it’s a real thing. So keep your eyes open, and if you start to feel sad, give somebody a call.”
The mission at Fort Pickett had been beautiful but hard to see, Block said afterward, and it could take a toll. Some potty-trained children seemed to regress, maybe due to trauma, Block said, and now they needed diapers again. Many of the Afghan families did not want to use the communal washers and dryers on base, reticent to let go, even for an hour, of what few belongings they had, and so they hung their laundry from clotheslines by the barracks.
But the image that most often followed her back to her green cot at night was of Afghan families sitting on blankets in the grass passing the time, the kids smiling and waving as Block — with “happy” written across her shirt where her name was supposed to be — tried to hide the lump in her throat. “It’s almost like they’re on an island,” she said, waiting to come ashore the mainland to new lives beyond the gates.
Afghans arrived near a small Virginia town, exposing two different versions of America
BLACKSTONE, Va. — Mayor Billy Coleburn finished his burger, pulled out his cellphone and braced himself for the two dozen Facebook notifications and slew of unread messages waiting for him. “Let’s see how bad they are,” he said, sitting in a booth at the Brew House on Main Street, in the town of roughly 3,600 people in rural southside Virginia.
The rumors seemed to be evolving each day, ever since an international humanitarian crisis made its way across the world and then landed in Blackstone’s backyard. Just over a mile from the town limits, past a thick tree line and behind the heavily guarded gates of Fort Pickett, there were now more Afghan evacuees than Blackstone residents.
Roughly 5,900 men, women and children who had escaped the chaos and the Taliban in Kabul were now sleeping on cots in barracks and tractor trailers at the Virginia National Guard installation, one of three military bases in Virginia where Afghans are being temporarily housed before being resettled in communities across the United States.
The makeshift village was largely invisible to anyone beyond the gates of the military base, as were the Afghans within it. They were nowhere to be seen in the town of Blackstone, but somehow seemed to be everywhere too, as their arrival transfixed the community.
Coleburn watched as his town seemed to crack into two different Americas: one, welcoming the evacuees with floods of donations and compassion, and the other, apprehensive and suspicious, believing the mere presence of the foreigners posed a threat to the town’s safety. The recent arrest of one Afghan evacuee at Fort Pickett on charges of grand larceny, after he was accused of stealing a car on base, had only inflamed their suspicions.
Coleburn slid open the first unread message. “A cryptic message is circulating about several escapees that have homemade weapons,” one woman warned the mayor. The second message was more specific: “Have you heard about the 60 escaped refugees? They are headed to Blackstone to rob, rape and whatever they are planning.” That woman added: “Or is this a wild rumor?” Coleburn sighed. “Where did she get that number from?”
Split opinions
Coleburn, who is also the owner and editor of the local newspaper, the Courier-Record, says it broke the news in late August that Blackstone’s own Fort Pickett would likely be called on by the federal government to host thousands of Afghan evacuees.
Now the front page of his weekly newspaper was splashed with a bold red headline, “AFGHAN NUMBERS RISE,” beside a mug shot of the arrested Afghan man, and its pages had suddenly become a sounding board for the community’s split opinions on welcoming their new neighbors.
“What’s wrong with this picture?!” wrote Sam Mordan, a resident from the neighboring town of Kembridge, in a letter to the editor Sept. 15. “The US can’t take care of its own homeless and veterans, but can bring in tens of thousands of Afghans and give them everything.”
The bottom left corner on the next page sounded a different note: “Want To Help The Afghan Evacuees?” read an ad from Blackstone Baptist Church. Down in the basement at Blackstone Baptist Church, Pastor Ted Fuson had set aside space for the dozens of hygiene kits that residents had been dropping off. As far as he could tell, politics and rumors hadn’t had any impact on the town’s eagerness to help.
“Some people were scared to death they’d be terrorists. All it takes is one person to say it. But that’s just not Blackstone. It just isn’t,” said Fuson, a cowboy-boot-wearing 78-year-old. “It’s your typical small town of people who care about each other.”
Blackstone, a diverse community where roughly half the residents are Black, is also in a deeply conservative area, with a big military and veteran population. Men and women in army green fatigues from Fort Pickett can often be seen walking along a pristinely kept Main Street, passing recently remodeled storefronts.
As he walks to the Brew House for lunch, Coleburn picks up a stray chewing gum wrapper on the sidewalk and throws it in a trash can. “Drives me crazy,” he says.
The town, he says, has taken immense pride in being the home of Fort Pickett, Blackstone’s major employer. So when he heard some complaints after the base was selected as a housing location for Afghan evacuees, “I said, folks, you can’t sit here and say, ‘We love Fort Pickett’ — and then all of a sudden we get a mission and go, ‘Oh hell no, we don’t want that.’”
Still, to Coleburn, Fort Pickett did seem a bit of an unlikely place to bring thousands of evacuees with critical needs, many arriving with little else than the clothes they were wearing. “This is in a rural area with not a lot of infrastructure. The nearest hospital is 35 miles away,” Coleburn said, and as an added challenge, “a bunch of people are wide-eyed and watching Fox News. Ain’t a lot of MSNBC ‘Morning Joe’ fans around here.”
So there were a lot of people watching, Coleburn said, when Rep. Mark Green (R-Tenn.) went on Laura Ingraham’s show on Sept. 8 and claimed he had heard that Afghans were ordering Ubers and freely leaving Fort Pickett, leading to an avalanche of concerns from Blackstone residents, which they routed to the mayor, who went on Facebook Live to assure residents he would look into it. Something he now finds himself doing almost every day.
“Every time someone sees somebody that’s not a Caucasian male, they’re like, ‘I saw one at Food Lion,’” Coleburn said between bites of his burger. “I’m like, ‘folks, they’re with the government. They’re not evacuees shopping at Food Lion.’”
Behind the bar at the Brew House, James Harvey, said he had heard the negative murmuring in town. But his instinct was to be a “humanitarian first.” As a Black man in the South, he said, he felt for the Afghans and what they would have to face as they tried to acclimate to new lives in America — “the prejudice,” he said, “as any minority in America would.”
“I don’t think not one person here would want to switch shoes with any of the refugees. They talk that talk but won’t walk that walk,” said Harvey. Still, Harvey said he could understand why some small business owners who have struggled during the pandemic could see the federal government giving money to the Afghans to help them start new lives, and feel a sense of frustration.
One was Al Moore, the owner of Farmers Cafe on Main Street. His restaurant had barely survived the pandemic, Moore said, hanging on with the help of federal relief. Now, he grumbled, taxpayers were helping people from a foreign country when people right here in his own community needed help. “We don’t owe them a damn thing,” Moore, 71, said of the Afghan evacuees, standing outside his restaurant beside a black banner hanging in the window that said, “We Will Never Forget.”
The timing of the Afghans’ arrival around the 20th anniversary of 9/11 had Moore particularly upset. Instead of honoring the military and first responders, he believed, “we bring the ones here who blew up the twin towers.” (None of the 9/11 hijackers were Afghans.)
Moore said he has found himself feeling afraid even to be walking around Blackstone, and some nights found himself wondering if an invasion was possible. “I keep a pistol on me all the time,” he said, “because you don’t know what’s going to happen.”
‘The right thing to do’
Rebecca Freeze, an Iraq combat veteran who lives 10 miles east of Blackstone in an unincorporated community called Darvills — “a suburb of Blackstone,” she jokes — had been to Fort Pickett and had seen what was happening in Blackstone. And what she witnessed had, at least on one occasion, brought her to tears.
A friend of Freeze’s thought to start a Facebook page to pool donations and volunteers to help their new neighbors, but she initially got “some kickback from people who knew her that wasn’t positive,” Freeze said. “So I told her, well let me start the Facebook page, because after 27 years in the Army, let ‘em come. As a female combat veteran I can get PMS and PTSD at the same time."
So she started the Facebook page — Helping Afghans in Southern VA — and instead of any negative reactions she got a rush of eager volunteers, turning the page into a mosaic of unique contributions. A local artist used proceeds from artwork he sold to buy soccer balls for Afghan kids. A chiropractor’s office started collecting toys. Renee and David Cannon, the owners of a clothing store on Main Street that had gone out of business, donated culturally appropriate merchandise to the Afghans.
Renee Cannon, 65, said her father, Adren Quest Hance Sr., sponsored two young Vietnamese refugees — and later, the refugees’ other family members — to come live with them in their small town in Hanover County after the Vietnam War, helping them find jobs and learn English and build new lives. When thousands of Afghans began arriving at Fort Pickett, she wanted to live up to what he had taught her.
“It just seemed like the right thing to do,” Cannon said. She connected with Freeze about how to get all the clothing over to Fort Pickett, and soon a truckload of volunteers showed up at the store to help lug it all away.
Lately, Freeze had been camped out at Crenshaw United Methodist Church or, in military parlance, Forward Operating Base Crenshaw United Methodist. The basement had been transformed into quasi-barracks for about a dozen rotating volunteers from Team Rubicon, a veteran-led nonprofit contracted with the Defense Department to lead donation distribution inside Fort Pickett. Many had driven or flown in from North Carolina and Pennsylvania and Connecticut, among other places, while a few like Freeze were from the region.
Each day, the volunteers sifted and sorted through the hundreds of boxes of clothing and toys and toiletries in a warehouse on base. Many boxes were mailed in from all over, many pooled by area churches like Blackstone Baptist and Spring Hill Baptist, which that Thursday evening was hosting its latest donation drive.
Spring Hill Pastor Travis Warren said he could understand some of the mixed feelings in Blackstone about Fort Pickett’s mission as he experienced them himself at first. His son fought in Afghanistan from 2019 to 2020, and during his tour two soliders in his son’s unit were killed in an attack by a man wearing an Afghan soldier’s uniform.
The arrival of so many Afghans who aided the United States in the war effort brought those painful memories to the surface. “But then I would ask myself this question: What would Jesus do?” said Warren, a doctor of divinity. “And in spite of what happened, Jesus would still take care of the need. So I felt like as a church, that’s what we would do.”
On the first Sunday in September, he appealed to his congregation from the pulpit in Spring Hill’s sanctuary. “One of the things I want you to think about: Imagine yourself having to leave everything that you own and possess, and go to a foreign land that you’ve never been to before with nothing but what you have on your back. Would you not want someone, anyone, to offer a helping hand to you? Well, I’ll tell you, Spring Hill, you stepped up to the plate.”
Warren called up Freeze who, wearing her Team Rubicon shirt, had come to thank the congregation for its recent deluge of charity. At least initially, the operation at Fort Pickett was bare bones, and they had run out of clothes to distribute to the evacuees. She called Spring Hill’s director of outreach, Shirverne Griffin, about 9 p.m. a couple days earlier and asked, “How quickly can we deliver clothes?”
Quickly, it turned out. “I kept saying, I’m not gonna cry, I’m not gonna cry, but I think I got to,” Freeze said to the church, “because it’s such an emotional time out there because you see such need, and then when we reach out to the community, we see such love. Somebody said that compassion is God’s love in work boots.” Warren leaned over to hand her a box of tissues.
Calming fears
At the same time volunteers were gathering in Spring Hill’s basement for the donation drive, Coleburn was firing up Facebook Live. By then fears of “60 escaped refugees” had been percolating for hours on social media, and now, citing his federal source at Fort Pickett, the mayor had some answers. “The rumor is completely false,” he assured Blackstone residents. “Completely false.”
The apprehension was starting to wear on Coleburn — “now I’m one of those people who can’t sleep,” he said — but he knew that the only way to calm fears was to deliver facts. So the day after the Ingraham segment aired, and not long after the grand larceny arrest on base, Coleburn and the town manager, Philip Vannoorbeeck, joined Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.) on a tour of Fort Pickett, eager to bring back some answers for the surrounding community.
No unauthorized people have been leaving the base, and those who are able to leave have completed health and security screenings, and were confirmed to be U.S. citizens or legal permanent residents, Spanberger said she learned. She added the base’s medical unit is equipped to handle urgent care, reducing the impact on local hospitals.
Spokespeople for the departments of Defense and Homeland Security — which declined to make officials available for interviews or provide access to Fort Pickett or to Afghans on the base — said in a statement that evacuees have gone through “a multi-layer screening and vetting process” performed by federal law enforcement and counterterrorism professionals before arriving at Fort Pickett. They include Special Immigrant Visa holders who aided in the war effort, their families and others on humanitarian parole whose lives were endangered by the Taliban.
They undergo “additional inspection” in the United States, along with coronavirus testing and a slate of mandatory vaccines. As of the middle of the week, there were 38 positive coronavirus cases and one measles case at Fort Pickett, and all were isolated.
The Afghan man accused of stealing the car has been jailed, and is awaiting possible deportation. But DHS said that was an isolated incident at Fort Pickett, and the “allegations of widespread criminal mischief, attempted escape, or other concerning behavior are unfounded,” the agency said in a statement addressing the rumors in Blackstone.
It’s unclear how long the mission might continue at Fort Pickett, as DHS could not give an estimate on the average length of stay for the evacuees, saying it will vary by individual depending on the length of time for vaccines to take effect, work permits to be completed, and on the capacity of resettlement agencies to relocate the Afghans to new homes.
During his visit to the base, Coleburn said his main complaint was the litter there, which he raised with the general in charge, while lobbying for increased security to ease the town’s concerns. Mostly, he said, they just witnessed “people waiting in long lines for those basic mundane human needs,” roughly two-thirds of them women and small children. There were prayer tents functioning as mosques, and tea tents for socializing. Kids kicked around a soccer ball, and hung pictures on the walls scrawled in crayon of imperfect American flags.
A hard mission
Around dusk Thursday evening, Team Rubicon returned to Crenshaw Methodist a after day of sifting and sorting, and gathered beneath the outdoor pavilion for their nightly meeting.
“Okay everyone, circle up!” the group’s incident commander, Laura Block, shouted to the group. One by one, the volunteers delivered a report on the day’s work. “Some of y’all are headed home,” Block said, as some volunteers’ rotation came to an end. “And post-op drop, it’s a real thing. So keep your eyes open, and if you start to feel sad, give somebody a call.”
The mission at Fort Pickett had been beautiful but hard to see, Block said afterward, and it could take a toll. Some potty-trained children seemed to regress, maybe due to trauma, Block said, and now they needed diapers again. Many of the Afghan families did not want to use the communal washers and dryers on base, reticent to let go, even for an hour, of what few belongings they had, and so they hung their laundry from clotheslines by the barracks.
But the image that most often followed her back to her green cot at night was of Afghan families sitting on blankets in the grass passing the time, the kids smiling and waving as Block — with “happy” written across her shirt where her name was supposed to be — tried to hide the lump in her throat. “It’s almost like they’re on an island,” she said, waiting to come ashore the mainland to new lives beyond the gates.
9. The Myth That Authoritarianism Happens Only on the Right
I do not know how psychologists could be so wrong. It is not about left or right or liberal or conservative. It is about power.
But we must overcome our ideological blindspots.
Excerpts:
Ideological blind spots can indeed affect researchers with a strongly conservative or merely right-of-center outlook, but there just aren’t enough of them to matter. If academic psychology had more viewpoint diversity, the political biases that distort researchers’ work would all counterbalance one another. In American universities today, those biases generally point in the same direction. In psychology, the belief that only conservatives can be authoritarians, and that therefore only conservative authoritarians warrant serious study, has proved self-reinforcing over the course of decades.
As both left- and right-wing autocracies metastasize around the globe—a “pandemic of global authoritarianism” that has “persisted and deepened” over the past 15 years, in the words of the Stanford sociologist Larry Diamond—and as the speed of radicalization of recruits has hastened, the modest cadre of researchers interested in the subject will likely grow. By recasting left-wing authoritarianism in more specific terms—anti-hierarchical aggression, top-down censorship, and anti-conventionalism—Costello and his colleagues offer other researchers and the general public a new vocabulary for discussing antidemocratic attitudes on that side of the political spectrum.
The other virtue of the Costello team’s work is its status as a sobering demonstration of how social psychology’s dominant ideological orientation has constrained the scope of inquiry. “The dominant view of RWA as the ‘gold standard’ of authoritarianism writ large is not merely an influential theoretical framework or a historical quirk,” the authors write. “It limits the questions we ask as scientists [and] the types of theories we use to interpret our results.” For many years, what was perfectly obvious to many outside the field—that extremist mindsets exist on both ends of the political spectrum—was at best downplayed by the majority of social psychologists. An ideological monoculture within the discipline has damaged our collective understanding of political psychology—and, by extension, American politics.
The Myth That Authoritarianism Happens Only on the Right
Many psychologists wrongly assumed that coercive attitudes exist only among conservatives.
Donald Trump’s rise to power generated a flood of media coverage and academic research on authoritarianism—or at least the kind of authoritarianism that exists on the political right. Over the past several years, some researchers have theorized that Trump couldn’t have won in 2016 without support from Americans who deplore political compromise and want leaders to rule with a strong hand. Although right-wing authoritarianism is well documented, social psychologists do not all agree that a leftist version even exists. In February 2020, the Society for Personality and Social Psychology held a symposium called “Is Left-Wing Authoritarianism Real? Evidence on Both Sides of the Debate.”
An ambitious new study on the subject by the Emory University researcher Thomas H. Costello and five colleagues should settle the question. It proposes a rigorous new measure of antidemocratic attitudes on the left. And, by drawing on a survey of 7,258 adults, Costello’s team firmly establishes that such attitudes exist on both sides of the American electorate. (One co-author on the paper, I should note, was Costello’s adviser, the late Scott Lilienfeld—with whom I wrote a 2013 book and numerous articles.) Intriguingly, the researchers found some common traits between left-wing and right-wing authoritarians, including a “preference for social uniformity, prejudice towards different others, willingness to wield group authority to coerce behavior, cognitive rigidity, aggression and punitiveness towards perceived enemies, outsized concern for hierarchy, and moral absolutism.”
Published last month in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, the Costello team’s paper is persuasive, to the point that you have to wonder: How could past researchers have overlooked left-wing authoritarianism for so long? “For 70 years, the lore in the social sciences has been that authoritarianism was to be found exclusively on the political right,” the Rutgers University social psychologist Lee Jussim, who wasn’t involved in the new study, told me in an email. In the 1950 book The Authoritarian Personality, an inquiry into the psychological makeup of people strongly drawn to autocratic rule and repressive politics, the German-born scholar Theodor W. Adorno and three other psychologists measured people along dimensions such as conformity to societal norms, rigid thinking, and sexual repression. And they concluded that “the authoritarian type of human”— the kind of person whose enthusiastic support allows someone like Hitler to exercise power—was found only among conservatives. In the mid-1990s, the influential Canadian psychologist Bob Altemeyer described left-wing authoritarianism as “the Loch Ness Monster of political psychology—an occasional shadow, but no monster. ” Subsequently, other psychologists reached the same conclusion.
The Trump era likely deepened psychology’s conventional wisdom that authoritarians are almost always conservatives; the insurrection at the Capitol earlier this year showed the urgency of understanding the phenomenon. And yet calls to de-platform controversial speakers and online campaigns to get people fired for heterodox views suggest that a commitment to open democratic norms is eroding at least in some quarters on the left. Much further along the authoritarian continuum, people purporting to be antiracist or antifascist protesters have set fires and committed other acts of violence since the summer of 2020. These acts stop short of, say, the 1970s bombing campaign by the far-left Weather Underground, but surely call the prevailing wisdom into doubt. (Supporters of revolutionary regimes overseas have demonstrated even more clearly that some people on the left try to get their way through intimidation and force.)
But one reason left-wing authoritarianism barely shows up in social-psychology research is that most academic experts in the field are based at institutions where prevailing attitudes are far to the left of society as a whole. Scholars who personally support the left’s social vision—such as redistributing income, countering racism, and more—may simply be slow to identify authoritarianism among people with similar goals.
One doesn’t need to believe that left-wing authoritarians are as numerous or as threatening as their right-wing counterparts to grasp that both phenomena are a problem. While liberals—both inside and outside of academia—may derive some comfort from believing that left-wing authoritarianism doesn’t exist, that fiction ignores a significant source of instability and polarization in our politics and society.
In the research that led to The Authoritarian Personality, Adorno and his colleagues developed an “F-scale” to measure fascist attitudes; Altemeyer later drew on that research to create a scale measuring right-wing authoritarianism by assessing certain personality traits—including feelings of aggression, willingness to submit to authority, and a quality that he called “conventionalism”—not strictly related to a subject’s political conservatism. Altemeyer’s right-wing authoritarian (RWA) scale remains “the gold standard for conceptualizing and evaluating all kinds of authoritarianism,” Costello told me. But when Altemeyer later turned his attention to left-wing authoritarianism (LWA), he erroneously assumed it would be identical to the right-wing variety. His LWA scale barely identified any subjects. He either had set the threshold too high or was measuring the wrong attitudes.
Costello and his colleagues started fresh. They developed what eventually became a list of 39 statements capturing sentiments such as “We need to replace the established order by any means necessary” and “I should have the right not to be exposed to offensive views.” Subjects were asked to score the statements on a scale of 1 to 7. They showed a trait that the researchers described as “anti-hierarchical aggression” by agreeing strongly that “If I could remake society, I would put people who currently have the most privilege at the bottom.” By agreeing with statements such as “Getting rid of inequality is more important than protecting the so-called ‘right’ to free speech,” they showed an attitude called “top-down censorship.” And they showed what the research team called “anti-conventionalism” by endorsing statements such as “I cannot imagine myself becoming friends with a political conservative.”
Costello and his colleagues administered their new LWA index and Altemeyer’s original RWA scale. Some differences emerged between left-wing and right-wing authoritarians; the former were more open to new experiences and more receptive to science than the latter, for example. Yet the new research documents a large overlap in authoritarian structure—a “shared psychological core,” as the authors put it—between high scorers on their new LWA index and Altemeyer’s original RWA scale, which they also administered. The authoritarian mentality, whether on the far left or far right, the authors conclude, exerts “powerful pressures to maintain discipline among members, advocate aggressive and censorious means of stifling opposition, [and] believe in top-down absolutist leadership.”
Perhaps the most compelling insight emerged from trying to separate subjects’ political ideology from authoritarianism. They found that your ideology—whether you’re a progressive or a Trumpist—is a secondary matter. Whether your values and beliefs are authoritarian or not is more fundamental. “Psychologically speaking, authoritarianism comes first,” Costello told me.
I asked Costello whether left-wing and right-wing authoritarians exist in equal proportions. “It is hard to know the ratio,” he said, making clear that a subject’s receptivity to authoritarianism falls on a continuum, like other personality characteristics or even height, so using hard-and-fast categories (authoritarian versus nonauthoritarian) can be tricky. “Still, some preliminary work shows the ratio is about the same if you average across the globe,” he said. In the U.S., though, Costello hypothesizes that right-wing authoritarians outnumber left-wing ones by roughly three to one. Other researchers have concluded that the number of strident conservatives in the U.S. far exceeds the number of strident progressives and that American conservatives express more authoritarian attitudes than their counterparts in Britain, Australia, or Canada.
That psychologists have been slow to acknowledge the existence of left-wing authoritarians at all is “puzzling,” Costello and his colleagues write. But here, I would argue, is where the pronounced leftward orientation of researchers in social psychology comes in. “Academic psychology once had considerable political diversity, but has lost nearly all of it in the last 50 years,” according to a comprehensive 2014 review. Universities have long tilted to the left, but that tendency has deepened as education has become ever more highly correlated with political ideology. Whatever its origin, this political imbalance makes truth-seeking harder. Studies have repeatedly shown that investigators’ sociopolitical views influence the questions they ask. What’s more, ideologically concordant reviewers are more likely to rate abstracts and papers highly if the findings comport with their own beliefs, all else being equal.
Ideological blind spots can indeed affect researchers with a strongly conservative or merely right-of-center outlook, but there just aren’t enough of them to matter. If academic psychology had more viewpoint diversity, the political biases that distort researchers’ work would all counterbalance one another. In American universities today, those biases generally point in the same direction. In psychology, the belief that only conservatives can be authoritarians, and that therefore only conservative authoritarians warrant serious study, has proved self-reinforcing over the course of decades.
As both left- and right-wing autocracies metastasize around the globe—a “pandemic of global authoritarianism” that has “persisted and deepened” over the past 15 years, in the words of the Stanford sociologist Larry Diamond—and as the speed of radicalization of recruits has hastened, the modest cadre of researchers interested in the subject will likely grow. By recasting left-wing authoritarianism in more specific terms—anti-hierarchical aggression, top-down censorship, and anti-conventionalism—Costello and his colleagues offer other researchers and the general public a new vocabulary for discussing antidemocratic attitudes on that side of the political spectrum.
The other virtue of the Costello team’s work is its status as a sobering demonstration of how social psychology’s dominant ideological orientation has constrained the scope of inquiry. “The dominant view of RWA as the ‘gold standard’ of authoritarianism writ large is not merely an influential theoretical framework or a historical quirk,” the authors write. “It limits the questions we ask as scientists [and] the types of theories we use to interpret our results.” For many years, what was perfectly obvious to many outside the field—that extremist mindsets exist on both ends of the political spectrum—was at best downplayed by the majority of social psychologists. An ideological monoculture within the discipline has damaged our collective understanding of political psychology—and, by extension, American politics.
10. China draws up list of 100 instances of U.S. "interference" in Hong Kong
Counter accusations.
Excerpts:
Chinese and Hong Kong officials deny the charge and say the law has returned order to Hong Kong which was hit by months of sometimes violent pro-democracy, anti-China protests in 2019.
Other U.S. officials named on China’s list include House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and his successor, Anthony Blinken.
The foreign ministry did not explain why the list was released now or whether it would take punitive action against those named on the list.
China passed an anti-foreign sanctions law in June under which those involved in making or implementing discriminatory measures against Chinese citizens or entities could be put on a mainland anti-sanctions list.
Such individuals could then be denied entry into China or be expelled. Their assets in China may be seized or frozen.
Biden last month offered temporary “safe haven” to Hong Kong residents in the United States, allowing what could be thousands of people to extend their stay in response to Beijing’s “assault” on Hong Kong’s autonomy.
China draws up list of 100 instances of U.S. "interference" in Hong Kong
By Yew Lun Tian
BEIJING – China on Friday listed more than 100 instances of what it said was U.S. interference in Hong Kong affairs, including President Joe Biden’s show of support for a pro-democracy newspaper.
U.S. politicians and officials have denounced China over its tightening control of the former British colony of Hong Kong, especially the imposition of a sweeping national security law last year cracking down on dissent.
“The United States must not tolerate any force that is anti-China and stirs troubles in Hong Kong, or else it will only be lifting a stone to hit one’s foot,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian told a regular press briefing on Friday.
The ministry posted a list on its website which detailed instances of U.S. interference since 2019, including the signing of the Hong Kong Autonomy Act in 2020 by then-President Donald Trump.
Trump ordered an end to Hong Kong’s special status under U.S. law to punish China for what he called “oppressive actions” against the financial hub, which returned to Chinese rule in 1997 with a guarantee of continued freedoms.
China criticised Biden for calling the closure of the Apple Daily newspaper “a sad day for media freedom” and a sign of “intensified repression by Beijing”.
The Apple Daily, a popular pro-democracy tabloid founded by tycoon Jimmy Lai, who is in jail and awaiting trial on national security charges, was forced to fold following a raid by 500 police on its headquarters in June 17 and the freezing of key assets and bank accounts.
Authorities say dozens of the paper’s articles may have violated the national security law which critics say has been used to stifle free speech and erode other fundamental freedoms guaranteed in the territory’s “Basic Law” mini-constitution.
Chinese and Hong Kong officials deny the charge and say the law has returned order to Hong Kong which was hit by months of sometimes violent pro-democracy, anti-China protests in 2019.
Other U.S. officials named on China’s list include House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and his successor, Anthony Blinken.
The foreign ministry did not explain why the list was released now or whether it would take punitive action against those named on the list.
China passed an anti-foreign sanctions law in June under which those involved in making or implementing discriminatory measures against Chinese citizens or entities could be put on a mainland anti-sanctions list.
Such individuals could then be denied entry into China or be expelled. Their assets in China may be seized or frozen.
Biden last month offered temporary “safe haven” to Hong Kong residents in the United States, allowing what could be thousands of people to extend their stay in response to Beijing’s “assault” on Hong Kong’s autonomy.
11. US favourable to Taiwan trade bid, urges Beijing to cease pressure
It would be good if we would join as well.
US favourable to Taiwan trade bid, urges Beijing to cease pressure
By The Straits Times2 min
WASHINGTON (AFP) - The United States on Friday (Sept 24) praised Taiwan's record as a candidate to join a trans-Pacific trade deal and criticised Beijing for stepping up jet incursions near the island.
Taiwan, a self-governing democracy claimed by Beijing, formally sought on Thursday to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) after years of lobbying following communist China's own application for membership.
The vast trade pact is a successor to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which was championed by the United States until former president Donald Trump withdrew in 2017, calling it bad for workers.
President Joe Biden's administration, which is close to organised labour, has made clear it is not rushing to rejoin and the State Department acknowledged it had no formal say in the Chinese and Taiwanese applications.
"That said, we would expect that Taiwan's record as a responsible member of the World Trade Organisation and Taiwan's strong embrace of democratic values would factor into the CPTPP parties' evaluation of Taiwan as a potential candidate for accession," State Department spokesman Ned Price told reporters.
"We urge Beijing to cease its military, diplomatic and economic pressure against Taiwan and instead engage in meaningful dialogue with Taiwan," he said.
Taiwan said that 24 Chinese planes, including 18 fighter jets and two nuclear-capable bombers, crossed into the island's air defense identification zone on the day of the application announcement.
China, whose defeated nationalists fled to Taiwan in 1949 after losing the civil war, considers the island a province awaiting reunification, by force if necessary.
Japan, the largest economy in the 11-nation Asia-Pacific arrangement, has welcomed Taiwan's bid to join.
12. China Is a Declining Power—and That’s the Problem
Co-authored by one of our nation's noted grand strategy scholars.
A very interesting thesis.
Excerpts:
Most troubling of all, China will be sorely tempted to use force to resolve the Taiwan question on its terms in the next decade before Washington and Taipei can finish retooling their militaries to offer a stronger defense. The People’s Liberation Army is already stepping up its military exercises’ intensity in the Taiwan Strait. Xi has repeatedly declared Beijing cannot wait forever for its “renegade province” to return to the fold. When the military balance temporarily shifts further toward China’s favor in the late 2020s and as the Pentagon is forced to retire aging ships and aircraft, China may never have a better chance of seizing Taiwan and dealing Washington a humiliating defeat.
To be clear, China probably won’t undertake an all-out military rampage across Asia, as Japan did in the 1930s and early 1940s. But it will run greater risks and accept greater tensions as it tries to lock in key gains. Welcome to geopolitics in the age of a peaking China: a country that already has the ability to violently challenge the existing order and one that will probably run faster and push harder as it loses confidence that time is on its side.
The United States, then, will face not one but two tasks in dealing with China in the 2020s. It will have to continue mobilizing for long-term competition while also moving quickly to deter aggression and blunt some of the more aggressive, near-term moves Beijing may make. In other words, buckle up. The United States has been rousing itself to deal with a rising China. It’s about to discover that a declining China may be even more dangerous.
China Is a Declining Power—and That’s the Problem
The United States needs to prepare for a major war, not because its rival is rising but because of the opposite.
Why do great powers fight great wars? The conventional answer is a story of rising challengers and declining hegemons. An ascendant power, which chafes at the rules of the existing order, gains ground on an established power—the country that made those rules. Tensions multiply; tests of strength ensue. The outcome is a spiral of fear and hostility leading, almost inevitably, to conflict. “The growth of the power of Athens, and the alarm which this inspired in Sparta, made war inevitable,” the ancient historian Thucydides wrote—a truism now invoked, ad nauseum, in explaining the U.S.-China rivalry.
The idea of a Thucydides Trap, popularized by Harvard political scientist Graham Allison, holds that the danger of war will skyrocket as a surging China overtakes a sagging America. Even Chinese President Xi Jinping has endorsed the concept arguing Washington must make room for Beijing. As tensions between the United States and China escalate, the belief that the fundamental cause of friction is a looming “power transition”—the replacement of one hegemon by another—has become canonical.
The only problem with this familiar formula is that it’s wrong.
The Thucydides Trap doesn’t really explain what caused the Peloponnesian War. It doesn’t capture the dynamics that have often driven revisionist powers—whether that is Germany in 1914 or Japan in 1941—to start some of history’s most devastating conflicts. And it doesn’t explain why war is a very real possibility in U.S.-China relations today because it fundamentally misdiagnoses where China now finds itself on its arc of development—the point at which its relative power is peaking and will soon start to fade.
There’s indeed a deadly trap that could ensnare the United States and China. But it’s not the product of a power transition the Thucydidean cliché says it is. It’s best thought of instead as a “peaking power trap.” And if history is any guide, it’s China’s—not the United States’—impending decline that could cause it to snap shut.
The retreat of the Athenians from Syracuse in the Peloponnesian War is depicted in “Cassell’s Illustrated Universal History, Vol. I—Early and Greek History.”The Print Collector/Heritage Images via Getty Images
There is an entire swath of literature, known as “power transition theory,” which holds that great-power war typically occurs at the intersection of one hegemon’s rise and another’s decline. This is the body of work underpinning the Thucydides Trap, and there is, admittedly, an elemental truth to the idea. The rise of new powers is invariably destabilizing. In the runup to the Peloponnesian War in the 5th century B.C., Athens would not have seemed so menacing to Sparta had it not built a vast empire and become a naval superpower. Washington and Beijing would not be locked in rivalry if China was still poor and weak. Rising powers do expand their influence in ways that threaten reigning powers.
But the calculus that produces war—particularly the calculus that pushes revisionist powers, countries seeking to shake up the existing system, to lash out violently—is more complex. A country whose relative wealth and power are growing will surely become more assertive and ambitious. All things equal, it will seek greater global influence and prestige. But if its position is steadily improving, it should postpone a deadly showdown with the reigning hegemon until it has become even stronger. Such a country should follow the dictum former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping laid down for a rising China after the Cold War: It should hide its capabilities and bide its time.
Now imagine a different scenario. A dissatisfied state has been building its power and expanding its geopolitical horizons. But then the country peaks, perhaps because its economy slows, perhaps because its own assertiveness provokes a coalition of determined rivals, or perhaps because both of these things happen at once. The future starts to look quite forbidding; a sense of imminent danger starts to replace a feeling of limitless possibility. In these circumstances, a revisionist power may act boldly, even aggressively, to grab what it can before it is too late. The most dangerous trajectory in world politics is a long rise followed by the prospect of a sharp decline.
As we show in our forthcoming book, Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China, this scenario is more common than you might think. Historian Donald Kagan showed, for instance, that Athens started acting more belligerently in the years before the Peloponnesian War because it feared adverse shifts in the balance of naval power—in other words, because it was on the verge of losing influence vis-à-vis Sparta. We see the same thing in more recent cases as well.
Great powers that had been growing dramatically faster than the world average and then suffered a severe, prolonged slowdown usually don’t fade away quietly. Rather, they become brash and aggressive.
Over the past 150 years, peaking powers—great powers that had been growing dramatically faster than the world average and then suffered a severe, prolonged slowdown—usually don’t fade away quietly. Rather, they become brash and aggressive. They suppress dissent at home and try to regain economic momentum by creating exclusive spheres of influence abroad. They pour money into their militaries and use force to expand their influence. This behavior commonly provokes great-power tensions. In some cases, it touches disastrous wars.
This shouldn’t be surprising. Eras of rapid growth supercharge a country’s ambitions, raise its people’s expectations, and make its rivals nervous. During a sustained economic boom, businesses enjoy rising profits and citizens get used to living large. The country becomes a bigger player on the global stage. Then stagnation strikes.
Slowing growth makes it harder for leaders to keep the public happy. Economic underperformance weakens the country against its rivals. Fearing upheaval, leaders crack down on dissent. They maneuver desperately to keep geopolitical enemies at bay. Expansion seems like a solution—a way of grabbing economic resources and markets, making nationalism a crutch for a wounded regime, and beating back foreign threats.
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Even if it does, the real estate giant’s crisis doesn’t bode well for the economy.
Many countries have followed this path. When the United States’ long post-Civil War economic surge ended, Washington violently suppressed strikes and unrest at home, built a powerful blue-water Navy, and engaged in a fit of belligerence and imperial expansion during the 1890s. After a fast-rising imperial Russia fell into a deep slump at the turn of the 20th century, the tsarist government cracked down hard while also enlarging its military, seeking colonial gains in East Asia and sending around 170,000 soldiers to occupy Manchuria. These moves backfired spectacularly: They antagonized Japan, which beat Russia in the first great-power war of the 20th century.
A century later, Russia became aggressive under similar circumstances. Facing a severe, post-2008 economic slowdown, Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded two neighboring countries, sought to create a new Eurasian economic bloc, staked Moscow’s claim to a resource-rich Arctic, and steered Russia deeper into dictatorship. Even democratic France engaged in anxious aggrandizement after the end of its postwar economic expansion in the 1970s. It tried to rebuild its old sphere of influence in Africa, deploying 14,000 troops to its former colonies and undertaking a dozen military interventions over the next two decades.
All of these cases were complicated, yet the pattern is clear. If a rapid rise gives countries the means to act boldly, the fear of decline serves up a powerful motive for rasher, more urgent expansion. The same thing often happens when fast-rising powers cause their own containment by a hostile coalition. In fact, some of history’s most gruesome wars have come when revisionist powers concluded their path to glory was about to be blocked.
German Kaiser Wilhelm II meets with troops during World War I in 1914.
Japanese schoolgirls wave flags in front of the Imperial Palace in Tokyo on Dec. 15, 1937, in celebration of the Japanese capture of the Chinese city of Nanjing. PhotoQuest/Getty Images
Imperial Germany and Japan are textbook examples.
Germany’s rivalry with Britain in the late 19th and early 20th centuries is often considered an analogue to U.S.-China competition: In both cases, an autocratic challenger threatened a liberal hegemon. But the more sobering parallel is this: War came when a cornered Germany grasped it would not zip past its rivals without a fight.
For decades after unification in 1871, Germany soared. Its factories spewed out iron and steel, erasing Britain’s economic lead. Berlin built Europe’s finest army and battleships that threatened British supremacy at sea. By the early 1900s, Germany was a European heavyweight seeking an enormous sphere of influence—a Mitteleuropa, or Middle Europe—on the continent. It was also pursuing, under then-Kaiser Wilhelm II, a “world policy” aimed at securing colonies and global power.
But during the prelude to war, the kaiser and his aides didn’t feel confident. Germany’s brash behavior caused its encirclement by hostile powers. London, Paris, and St. Petersburg, Russia, formed a “Triple Entente” to block German expansion. By 1914, time was running short. Germany was losing ground economically to a fast-growing Russia; London and France were pursuing economic containment by blocking its access to oil and iron ore. Berlin’s key ally, Austria-Hungary, was being torn apart by ethnic tensions. At home, Germany’s autocratic political system was in trouble.
Most ominous, the military balance was shifting. France was enlarging its army; Russia was adding 470,000 men to its military and slashing the time it needed to mobilize for war. Britain announced it would build two battleships for every one built by Berlin. Germany was, for the moment, Europe’s foremost military power. But by 1916 and 1917, it would be hopelessly overmatched. The result was a now-or-never mentality: Germany should “defeat the enemy while we still stand a chance of victory,” declared Chief of Staff Helmuth von Moltke, even if that meant “provoking a war in the near future.”
This is what happened after Serbian nationalists assassinated Austria’s crown prince in June 1914. The kaiser’s government urged Austria-Hungary to crush Serbia, even though that meant war with Russia and France. It then invaded neutral Belgium—the key to its Schlieffen Plan for a two-front war—despite the likelihood of provoking Britain. “This war will turn into a world war in which England will also intervene,” Moltke acknowledged. Germany’s rise had given it the power to gamble for greatness. Its impending decline drove the decisions that plunged the world into war.
Imperial Japan followed a similar trajectory. For a half-century after the Meiji Restoration in 1868, Japan was rising steadily. The building of a modern economy and a fierce military allowed Tokyo to win two major wars and accumulate colonial privileges in China, Taiwan, and the Korean Peninsula. Yet Japan was not a hyper-belligerent predator: Through the 1920s, it cooperated with the United States, Britain, and other countries to create a cooperative security framework in the Asia-Pacific.
During that decade, however, things fell apart. Growth dropped from 6.1 percent annually between 1904 and 1919 to 1.8 percent annually in the 1920s; the Great Depression then shut Japan’s overseas markets. Unemployment soared, and bankrupt farmers sold their daughters. In China, meanwhile, Japanese influence was being challenged by the Soviet Union and a rising nationalist movement under then-Chinese leader Chiang Kai-Shek. Tokyo’s answer was fascism at home and aggression abroad.
From the late 1920s onward, the military conducted a slow-motion coup and harnessed the nation’s resources for “total war.” Japan initiated a massive military buildup and violently established a vast sphere of influence, seizing Manchuria in 1931, invading China in 1937, and laying plans to conquer resource-rich colonies and strategic islands across the Asia-Pacific. The goal was to build an autarkic empire; the result drew a strategic noose around Tokyo’s neck.
Japan’s push into China eventually led to a punishing war with the Soviet Union. Japan’s designs on Southeast Asia alarmed Britain. Its drive for regional primacy also made it a foe of the United States—the country from which Tokyo imported nearly all of its oil with an economy vastly larger than Japan’s. Tokyo had antagonized an overwhelming coalition of enemies. It then risked everything rather than accepting humiliation and decline.
The precipitating cause, again, was a closing window of opportunity. By 1941, the United States was building an unbeatable military. In July, then-U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt imposed an oil embargo that threatened to stop Japan’s expansion in its tracks. But Japan still had a temporary military edge in the Pacific Ocean, thanks to its early rearmament. So it used that advantage in a lightning attack—seizing the Dutch East Indies, the Philippines, and other possessions from Singapore to Wake Island as well as bombing the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor—which guaranteed its own destruction.
Japan’s prospects for victory were dim, acknowledged then-Japanese Gen. Hideki Tojo, yet there was no choice but to “close one’s eyes and jump.” A revisionist Japan became most violent when it saw that time was running out.
Relatives pause as they place the ashes of a loved one in a metal chute on a ferry in the East China Sea off Shanghai on March 22, 2014. A number of Chinese cities promote sea burials as an attempt to offset a shortage of land for cemeteries due to a rapidly ageing population. Kevin Frayer/Getty Images
This is the real trap the United States should worry about regarding China today—the trap in which an aspiring superpower peaks and then refuses to bear the painful consequences of descent.
China’s rise is no mirage: Decades of growth have given Beijing the economic sinews of global power. Major investments in key technologies and communications infrastructure have yielded a strong position in the struggle for geoeconomic influence; China is using a multi-continent Belt and Road Initiative to bring other states into its orbit. Most alarming, think tank assessments and U.S. Defense Department reports show China’s increasingly formidable military now stands a real chance of winning a war against the United States in the Western Pacific.
It is unsurprising, therefore, that China has also developed the ambitions of a superpower: Xi has more or less announced that Beijing desires to assert its sovereignty over Taiwan, the South China Sea, and other disputed areas, becoming Asia’s preeminent power and challenging the United States for global leadership. Yet if China’s geopolitical window of opportunity is real, its future is already starting to look quite grim because it is quickly losing the advantages that propelled its rapid growth.
From the 1970s to the 2000s, China was nearly self-sufficient in food, water, and energy resources. It enjoyed the greatest demographic dividend in history, with 10 working-age adults for every senior citizen aged 65 or older. (For most major economies, the average is closer to 5 working-age adults for every senior citizen.) China had a secure geopolitical environment and easy access to foreign markets and technology, all underpinned by friendly relations with the United States. And China’s government skillfully harnessed these advantages by carrying out a process of economic reform and opening while also moving the regime from stifling totalitarianism under former Chinese leader Mao Zedong to a smarter—if still deeply repressive—form of authoritarianism under his successors. China had it all from the 1970s to the early 2010s—just the mix of endowments, environment, people, and policies needed to thrive.
Since the late 2000s, however, the drivers of China’s rise have either stalled or turned around entirely. For example, China is running out of resources: Water has become scarce, and the country is importing more energy and food than any other nation, having ravaged its own natural resources. Economic growth is therefore becoming costlier: According to data from DBS Bank, it takes three times as many inputs to produce a unit of growth today as it did in the early 2000s.
China is also approaching a demographic precipice: From 2020 to 2050, it will lose an astounding 200 million working-age adults—a population the size of Nigeria—and gain 200 million senior citizens. The fiscal and economic consequences will be devastating: Current projections suggest China’s medical and social security spending will have to triple as a share of GDP, from 10 percent to 30 percent, by 2050 just to prevent millions of seniors from dying of impoverishment and neglect.
China is also approaching a demographic precipice: From 2020 to 2050, it will lose an astounding 200 million working-age adults—a population the size of Nigeria—and gain 200 million senior citizens.
To make matters worse, China is turning away from the package of policies that promoted rapid growth. Under Xi, Beijing has slid back toward totalitarianism. Xi has appointed himself “chairman of everything,” destroyed any semblance of collective rule, and made adherence to “Xi Jinping thought” the ideological core of an increasingly rigid regime. And he has relentlessly pursued the centralization of power at the expense of economic prosperity.
State zombie firms are being propped up while private firms are starved of capital. Objective economic analysis is being replaced by government propaganda. Innovation is becoming more difficult in a climate of stultifying ideological conformity. Meanwhile, Xi’s brutal anti-corruption campaign has deterred entrepreneurship, and a wave of politically driven regulations has erased more than $1 trillion from the market capitalization of China’s leading tech firms. Xi hasn’t simply stopped the process of economic liberalization that powered China’s development: He has thrown it hard into reverse.
The economic damage these trends are causing is starting to accumulate—and it is compounding the slowdown that would have occurred anyway as a fast-growing economy matures. The Chinese economy has been losing steam for more than a decade: The country’s official growth rate declined from 14 percent in 2007 to 6 percent in 2019, and rigorous studies suggest the true growth rate is now closer to 2 percent. Worse, most of that growth stems from government stimulus spending. According to data from the Conference Board, total factor productivity declined 1.3 percent every year on average between 2008 and 2019, meaning China is spending more to produce less each year. This has led, in turn, to massive debt: China’s total debt surged eight-fold between 2008 and 2019 and exceeded 300 percent of GDP prior to COVID-19. Any country that has accumulated debt or lost productivity at anything close to China’s current pace has subsequently suffered at least one “lost decade” of near-zero economic growth.
All of this is happening, moreover, as China confronts an increasingly hostile external environment. The combination of COVID-19, persistent human rights abuses, and aggressive policies have caused negative views of China to reach levels not seen since the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. Countries worried about Chinese competition have slapped thousands of new trade barriers on its goods since 2008. More than a dozen countries have dropped out of Xi’s Belt and Road Initiative while the United States wages a global campaign against key Chinese tech companies—notably, Huawei—and rich democracies across multiple continents throw up barriers to Beijing’s digital influence. The world is becoming less conducive to easy Chinese growth, and Xi’s regime increasingly faces the sort of strategic encirclement that once drove German and Japanese leaders to desperation.
Case in point is U.S. policy. Over the past five years, two U.S. presidential administrations have committed the United States to a policy of “competition”—really, neo-containment—vis-à-vis China. U.S. defense strategy is now focused squarely on defeating Chinese aggression in the Western Pacific; Washington is using an array of trade and technological sanctions to check Beijing’s influence and limit its prospects for economic primacy. “Once imperial America considers you as their ‘enemy,’ you’re in big trouble,” one senior People’s Liberation Army officer warned. Indeed, the United States has also committed to orchestrating greater global resistance to Chinese power, a campaign that is starting to show results as more and more countries respond to the threat from Beijing.
In maritime Asia, resistance to Chinese power is stiffening. Taiwan is boosting military spending and laying plans to turn itself into a strategic porcupine in the Western Pacific. Japan is carrying out its biggest military buildup since the end of the Cold War and has agreed to back the United States if China attacks Taiwan. The countries around the South China Sea, particularly Vietnam and Indonesia, are beefing up their air, naval, and coast guard forces to contest China’s expansive claims.
Other countries are pushing back against Beijing’s assertiveness as well. Australia is expanding northern bases to accommodate U.S. ships and aircraft and building long-range conventional missiles and nuclear-powered attack submarines. India is massing forces on its border with China while sending warships through the South China Sea. The European Union has labeled Beijing a “systemic rival,” and Europe’s three greatest powers—France, Germany, and the United Kingdom—have dispatched naval task forces to the South China Sea and Indian Ocean. A variety of multilateral anti-China initiatives—the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue; supply chain alliances; the new so-called AUKUS alliance with Washington, London, and Canberra; and others—are in the works. The United States’ “multilateral club strategy,” hawkish and well-connected scholar Yan Xuetong acknowledged in July, is “isolating China” and hurting its development.
No doubt, counter-China cooperation has remained imperfect. But the overall trend is clear: An array of actors is gradually joining forces to check Beijing’s power and put it in a strategic box. China, in other words, is not a forever-ascendant country. It is an already-strong, enormously ambitious, and deeply troubled power whose window of opportunity won’t stay open for long.
A Chinese military band plays after Chinese President Xi Jinping’s speech at the opening session of the 19th Communist Party Congress in Beijing on Oct. 18, 2017. Kevin Frayer/Getty Images
In some ways, all of this is welcome news for Washington: A China that is slowing economically and facing growing global resistance will find it exceedingly difficult to displace the United States as the world’s leading power—so long as the United States doesn’t tear itself apart or otherwise give the game away. In other ways, however, the news is more troubling. History warns the world should expect a peaking China to act more boldly, even erratically, over the coming decade—to lunge for long-sought strategic prizes before its fortunes fade.
What might this look like? We can make educated guesses based on what China is presently doing.
Beijing is already redoubling its efforts to establish a 21st century sphere of economic influence by dominating critical technologies—such as artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and 5G telecommunications—and using the resulting leverage to bend states to its will. It will also race to perfect a “digital authoritarianism” that can protect an insecure Chinese Communist Party’s rule at home while bolstering Beijing’s diplomatic position by exporting that model to autocratic allies around the world.
Most troubling of all, China will be sorely tempted to use force to resolve the Taiwan question on its terms in the next decade.
In military terms, the Chinese Communist Party may well become increasingly heavy-handed in securing long, vulnerable supply lines and protecting infrastructure projects in Central and Southwest Asia, Africa, and other regions, a role some hawks in the People’s Liberation Army are already eager to assume. Beijing could also become more assertive vis-à-vis Japan, the Philippines, and other countries that stand in the way of its claims to the South and East China Seas.
Most troubling of all, China will be sorely tempted to use force to resolve the Taiwan question on its terms in the next decade before Washington and Taipei can finish retooling their militaries to offer a stronger defense. The People’s Liberation Army is already stepping up its military exercises’ intensity in the Taiwan Strait. Xi has repeatedly declared Beijing cannot wait forever for its “renegade province” to return to the fold. When the military balance temporarily shifts further toward China’s favor in the late 2020s and as the Pentagon is forced to retire aging ships and aircraft, China may never have a better chance of seizing Taiwan and dealing Washington a humiliating defeat.
To be clear, China probably won’t undertake an all-out military rampage across Asia, as Japan did in the 1930s and early 1940s. But it will run greater risks and accept greater tensions as it tries to lock in key gains. Welcome to geopolitics in the age of a peaking China: a country that already has the ability to violently challenge the existing order and one that will probably run faster and push harder as it loses confidence that time is on its side.
The United States, then, will face not one but two tasks in dealing with China in the 2020s. It will have to continue mobilizing for long-term competition while also moving quickly to deter aggression and blunt some of the more aggressive, near-term moves Beijing may make. In other words, buckle up. The United States has been rousing itself to deal with a rising China. It’s about to discover that a declining China may be even more dangerous.
13. Is NATO good for Asia or is Asia good for NATO?
I do have to agree with Van on one key point: It is all about strategy.
Excerpts:
So does a European presence makes sense in Asia? Lots of pros, lots of cons. How you weigh these different factors will depend on what kind of baggage you bring to the issue. Given the row with France, the EU and AUKUS will not be a single strategic entity. That may well tip the scales toward the negative.
For me, there’s just no winning here if there’s no plausible strategy. What I see is an impulse toward Asia rather than a clear wager explaining how a military presence would help realize goals of whatever kind – and yet there are upsides. So while I wouldn’t die on a hill opposing Europe’s military re-entry into Asia, the fact that it’s a mixed-bag proposition means that it’s hard to cheerlead for.
As Sir Lawrence Freedman says:
“Having a strategy suggests an ability to look up from the short term and the trivial to view the long term and the essential, to address causes rather than symptoms, to see woods rather than trees.”- Lawrence Freedman, Strategy: A History
Is NATO good for Asia or is Asia good for NATO?
There’s no winning without a plausible strategy showing military presence helps realize goals
Over the past six months or so, I’ve gotten a lot of pings about NATO and the “Big 3” (UK, France, and Germany) taking on a role in Asia – specifically, a bigger military presence in the region. The issue has come up a few times on my podcast. I got an early preview of a book about a closely related question by a European scholar. I’ve had EU parliamentary staffers reach out to me about this. And I gave an interview to a lefty newspaper in Norway that was trying to make sense of NATO’s approach to China/Asia/Indo-Pacific. It keeps coming up.
Then, of course, the big Australia-US-UK (AUKUS) trilateral defense cooperation announcement dropped on September 15 — which made the media lose their minds with embarrassing proclamations — in the process creating a rift between France/EU and AUKUS that complicates the larger NATO calculation.
I think I’ve commented slightly differently in every interaction I’ve had about this topic, so I thought I’d try to set down something logically consistent below.
Asian presence: pros
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Multilateralizing US power: One upshot of European defense engagement in Asia is that it enmeshes America’s regional posture in webs of democratic multilateralism. The U.S. brand of liberal internationalism is prone to cowboy cosplay, often with tragic consequences. Multilateralism is no guarantee against reckless US judgment, but the more America’s friends can bridle its unilateralist impulse, the better off we’ll all be. Yes, America has the “Quad” as a multilateral thing organic to Asia, but let’s be honest — India’s claim to democracy at the moment is thin (not throwing stones!) and Australia and Japan … well, they haven’t exactly encouraged American military restraint. Much the opposite, in fact. And yes, the United States now has AUKUS too, but as of now it’s just an intelligence- and technology-sharing thing.
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Post-unipolar burden-sharing: European presence is also welcomed for its peacetime burden-sharing. This is desperately needed. American officials have long complained about allies not spending enough or contributing enough toward burden-sharing (I’ve written those talking points) … but it was always in a context where the United States had no intention of disentangling from its security commitment. That world is gone. We’re way past the point of the United States being able or willing to carry the burden for regional stability alone. I’d go so far as to say that, contra the unipolar moment, relying too much on the United States will actually destabilize Asia in the next few years. US global commitments are internally contested as part of US politics in a way that they didn’t used to be. And even beyond legitimate contestation over policy differences, our politics are too demonstrably volatile now to entrust that the United States will deliver on being “the security provider of choice” around the world indefinitely. Worst of all, we need a reckoning with how allowing one state to accrue so much overwhelming power helped poison American society with a militarism that – in a perverse way – ultimately gave us not just Trump’s strong man politics, but also the Capitol insurrection itself. In light of all these reasons for pricing in expectations of high American volatility, NATO in Asia could be the offset. Sure, you can count on Biden to keep the ship steady. Probably. But military balancing games transcend individual presidencies. Such decisions must be driven by trends. And the trend that matters more than any other is the trend of growing US strategic insolvency.
- Makes China more than just a US problem. The other boon from military involvement of NATO/”Big 3″ in Asia is its potential to dilute the dyadic rivalry quality to the current pattern of Sino-US competition. To the extent China is a problem, it’s a problem that should not fall to the United States to manage on its own. And the more outside powers can be involved, the more room Asia’s smaller states will have to maneuver without locking into a Cold War-like binary of “us” and “them.” If we want to have any legitimate standing in Asia, we need to make sure smaller states have options.
Reasons for skepticism
- Trivial to the balance of power. It’s no secret that the preponderance of NATO’s hardware capability is America’s capability. Given that China has been on a naval modernization binge, the NATO/”Big 3″ contribution to the regional correlation of forces will be … not decisive. I’m not throwing shade at NATO capabilities, but all that counter-insurgency prowess built up from the War on Terror doesn’t stretch very far in a high-end conflict. The US military shortfall in a real fight with China is primarily an issue of positioning and secondarily an issue of missile inventory (China’s got too many, and a lot of smaller-class ships to target). If you think about the hard problems for US forces, like Chinese air superiority over Taiwan, it’s usually an imposition of geography that no amount of ally capability will rectify. And when we think about where France in particular might park its military presence, it’s probably the Pacific side of the Indo-Pacific, where the United States already enjoys untrammeled primacy and China has … zero bases. Don’t get me wrong, in a fight, the more the merrier. But the difference NATO makes in the balance of power is marginal.
Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison leaves a meeting with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell at the US Capitol on September 22. Last week, Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom announced a security pact (AUKUS) to help Australia develop and deploy nuclear-powered submarines, in addition to other military cooperation. Photo: AFP / Kevin Dietsch / Getty Images
- Looks very white man’s burden-y. Like AUKUS, the “Big 3” showing up to take on China has a civilizational hue to it. I’m not saying racism is motivating NATO interests in Asia per se, but it doesn’t look good. For some, the whiteness of the coalition is at the heart of the problem. For policy wonks, the subtle racial dimension is a blind spot; something to which they pay no heed. But for people who care about history, Europe doesn’t have a good track record in Asia.
- Red gets a vote. By NATO’s own proclamation, its interest in the broader Indo-Pacific is all about supporting the “rules-based order.” I get it. But why is defending the principle of freedom of navigation the only way that the West ever seems to be able to manifest its interest in a rules-based order? More broadly, you have to ask how further militarizing the region actually advances any kind of measurable goal, especially because China will adapt to whatever Europe brings to the region and grow both its capabilities and regional presence based on what its perceived enemies do. That’s why the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has had a semi-worrying growth spurt in the first place – they’re trying to catch up to the United States. This is obvious. It’s the security dilemma in action. But it’s also the truest thing that we ignore, and we do so at our peril.
- Distracts from the EU-military question. As long as NATO is gainfully employed worrying about Asia, there will be plenty of incentives to dodge the real question about the future of an EU defense force. America is simply too volatile to be the centerpiece of European security indefinitely, and there’s no shortage of organic interest in an EU military. But that difficult conversation is too easily thwarted by the immediate focus on China. And conversely, if NATO didn’t have a play in Asia, it would heighten the urgency of actually moving toward a European defense force.
So does a European presence makes sense in Asia? Lots of pros, lots of cons. How you weigh these different factors will depend on what kind of baggage you bring to the issue. Given the row with France, the EU and AUKUS will not be a single strategic entity. That may well tip the scales toward the negative.
For me, there’s just no winning here if there’s no plausible strategy. What I see is an impulse toward Asia rather than a clear wager explaining how a military presence would help realize goals of whatever kind – and yet there are upsides. So while I wouldn’t die on a hill opposing Europe’s military re-entry into Asia, the fact that it’s a mixed-bag proposition means that it’s hard to cheerlead for.
Van Jackson is a professor of international relations at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, and a think tanker at variousplaces around the world: a distinguished fellow at the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada; an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security; a senior associate fellow at the Asia-Pacific Leadership Network for Nuclear Nonproliferation & Disarmament (APLN); and the defense & strategy fellow at the Centre for Strategic Studies in New Zealand. He also hosts The Un-Diplomatic Podcast. This article was first published by the Duck of Minerva.
14. Opinion | Our constitutional crisis is already here
We should take Madison's words to heart. And Kagan's as well.
Conclusion:
One wonders whether modern American politicians, in either party, have it in them to make such bold moves, whether they have the insight to see where events are going and the courage to do whatever is necessary to save the democratic system. If that means political suicide for this handful of Republicans, wouldn’t it be better to go out fighting for democracy than to slink off quietly into the night?
Opinion | Our constitutional crisis is already here
Contributing columnist
September 23, 2021 at 3:32 p.m. EDT
“Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation.”
— James Madison
The United States is heading into its greatest political and constitutional crisis since the Civil War, with a reasonable chance over the next three to four years of incidents of mass violence, a breakdown of federal authority, and the division of the country into warring red and blue enclaves. The warning signs may be obscured by the distractions of politics, the pandemic, the economy and global crises, and by wishful thinking and denial. But about these things there should be no doubt:
First, Donald Trump will be the Republican candidate for president in 2024. The hope and expectation that he would fade in visibility and influence have been delusional. He enjoys mammoth leads in the polls; he is building a massive campaign war chest; and at this moment the Democratic ticket looks vulnerable. Barring health problems, he is running.
Second, Trump and his Republican allies are actively preparing to ensure his victory by whatever means necessary. Trump’s charges of fraud in the 2020 election are now primarily aimed at establishing the predicate to challenge future election results that do not go his way. Some Republican candidates have already begun preparing to declare fraud in 2022, just as Larry Elder tried meekly to do in the California recall contest.
Meanwhile, the amateurish “stop the steal” efforts of 2020 have given way to an organized nationwide campaign to ensure that Trump and his supporters will have the control over state and local election officials that they lacked in 2020. Those recalcitrant Republican state officials who effectively saved the country from calamity by refusing to falsely declare fraud or to “find” more votes for Trump are being systematically removed or hounded from office. Republican legislatures are giving themselves greater control over the election certification process. As of this spring, Republicans have proposed or passed measures in at least 16 states that would shift certain election authorities from the purview of the governor, secretary of state or other executive-branch officers to the legislature. An Arizona bill flatly states that the legislature may “revoke the secretary of state’s issuance or certification of a presidential elector’s certificate of election” by a simple majority vote. Some state legislatures seek to impose criminal penalties on local election officials alleged to have committed “technical infractions,” including obstructing the view of poll watchers.
The stage is thus being set for chaos. Imagine weeks of competing mass protests across multiple states as lawmakers from both parties claim victory and charge the other with unconstitutional efforts to take power. Partisans on both sides are likely to be better armed and more willing to inflict harm than they were in 2020. Would governors call out the National Guard? Would President Biden nationalize the Guard and place it under his control, invoke the Insurrection Act, and send troops into Pennsylvania or Texas or Wisconsin to quell violent protests? Deploying federal power in the states would be decried as tyranny. Biden would find himself where other presidents have been — where Andrew Jackson was during the nullification crisis, or where Abraham Lincoln was after the South seceded — navigating without rules or precedents, making his own judgments about what constitutional powers he does and doesn’t have.
Today’s arguments over the filibuster will seem quaint in three years if the American political system enters a crisis for which the Constitution offers no remedy.
Most Americans — and all but a handful of politicians — have refused to take this possibility seriously enough to try to prevent it. As has so often been the case in other countries where fascist leaders arise, their would-be opponents are paralyzed in confusion and amazement at this charismatic authoritarian. They have followed the standard model of appeasement, which always begins with underestimation. The political and intellectual establishments in both parties have been underestimating Trump since he emerged on the scene in 2015. They underestimated the extent of his popularity and the strength of his hold on his followers; they underestimated his ability to take control of the Republican Party; and then they underestimated how far he was willing to go to retain power. The fact that he failed to overturn the 2020 election has reassured many that the American system remains secure, though it easily could have gone the other way — if Biden had not been safely ahead in all four states where the vote was close; if Trump had been more competent and more in control of the decision-makers in his administration, Congress and the states. As it was, Trump came close to bringing off a coup earlier this year. All that prevented it was a handful of state officials with notable courage and integrity, and the reluctance of two attorneys general and a vice president to obey orders they deemed inappropriate.
These were not the checks and balances the Framers had in mind when they designed the Constitution, of course, but Trump has exposed the inadequacy of those protections. The Founders did not foresee the Trump phenomenon, in part because they did not foresee national parties. They anticipated the threat of a demagogue, but not of a national cult of personality. They assumed that the new republic’s vast expanse and the historic divisions among the 13 fiercely independent states would pose insuperable barriers to national movements based on party or personality. “Petty” demagogues might sway their own states, where they were known and had influence, but not the whole nation with its diverse populations and divergent interests.
Such checks and balances as the Framers put in place, therefore, depended on the separation of the three branches of government, each of which, they believed, would zealously guard its own power and prerogatives. The Framers did not establish safeguards against the possibility that national-party solidarity would transcend state boundaries because they did not imagine such a thing was possible. Nor did they foresee that members of Congress, and perhaps members of the judicial branch, too, would refuse to check the power of a president from their own party.
In recent decades, however, party loyalty has superseded branch loyalty, and never more so than in the Trump era. As the two Trump impeachments showed, if members of Congress are willing to defend or ignore the president’s actions simply because he is their party leader, then conviction and removal become all but impossible. In such circumstances, the Framers left no other check against usurpation by the executive — except (small-r) republican virtue.
Critics and supporters alike have consistently failed to recognize what a unique figure Trump is in American history. Because his followers share fundamentally conservative views, many see Trump as merely the continuation, and perhaps the logical culmination, of the Reagan Revolution. This is a mistake: Although most Trump supporters are or have become Republicans, they hold a set of beliefs that were not necessarily shared by all Republicans. Some Trump supporters are former Democrats and independents. In fact, the passions that animate the Trump movement are as old as the republic and have found a home in both parties at one time or another.
Suspicion of and hostility toward the federal government; racial hatred and fear; a concern that modern, secular society undermines religion and traditional morality; economic anxiety in an age of rapid technological change; class tensions, with subtle condescension on one side and resentment on the other; distrust of the broader world, especially Europe, and its insidious influence in subverting American freedom — such views and attitudes have been part of the fabric of U.S. politics since the anti-Federalists, the Whiskey Rebellion and Thomas Jefferson. The Democratic Party was the home of white supremacists until they jumped to George Wallace in 1968 and later to the Republicans. Liberals and Democrats in particular need to distinguish between their ongoing battle with Republican policies and the challenge posed by Trump and his followers. One can be fought through the processes of the constitutional system; the other is an assault on the Constitution itself.
What makes the Trump movement historically unique is not its passions and paranoias. It is the fact that for millions of Americans, Trump himself is the response to their fears and resentments. This is a stronger bond between leader and followers than anything seen before in U.S. political movements. Although the Founders feared the rise of a king or a Caesar, for two centuries Americans proved relatively immune to unwavering hero-worship of politicians. Their men on horseback — Theodore Roosevelt, Grant, even Washington — were not regarded as infallible. This was true of great populist leaders as well. William Jennings Bryan a century ago was venerated because he advanced certain ideas and policies, but he did not enjoy unquestioning loyalty from his followers. Even Reagan was criticized by conservatives for selling out conservative principles, for deficit spending, for his equivocal stance on abortion, for being “soft” on the Soviet Union.
Trump is different, which is one reason the political system has struggled to understand, much less contain, him. The American liberal worldview tends to search for material and economic explanations for everything, and no doubt a good number of Trump supporters have grounds to complain about their lot in life. But their bond with Trump has little to do with economics or other material concerns. They believe the U.S. government and society have been captured by socialists, minority groups and sexual deviants. They see the Republican Party establishment as corrupt and weak — “losers,” to use Trump’s word, unable to challenge the reigning liberal hegemony. They view Trump as strong and defiant, willing to take on the establishment, Democrats, RINOs, liberal media, antifa, the Squad, Big Tech and the “Mitch McConnell Republicans.” His charismatic leadership has given millions of Americans a feeling of purpose and empowerment, a new sense of identity. While Trump’s critics see him as too narcissistic to be any kind of leader, his supporters admire his unapologetic, militant selfishness. Unlike establishment Republicans, Trump speaks without embarrassment on behalf of an aggrieved segment of Americans, not exclusively White, who feel they have been taking it on the chin for too long. And that is all he needs to do.
There was a time when political analysts wondered what would happen when Trump failed to “deliver” for his constituents. But the most important thing Trump delivers is himself. His egomania is part of his appeal. In his professed victimization by the media and the “elites,” his followers see their own victimization. That is why attacks on Trump by the elites only strengthen his bond with his followers. That is why millions of Trump supporters have even been willing to risk death as part of their show of solidarity: When Trump’s enemies cited his mishandling of the pandemic to discredit him, their answer was to reject the pandemic. One Trump supporter didn’t go to the hospital after developing covid-19 symptoms because he didn’t want to contribute to the liberal case against Trump. “I’m not going to add to the numbers,” he told a reporter.
Because the Trump movement is less about policies than about Trump himself, it has undermined the normal role of American political parties, which is to absorb new political and ideological movements into the mainstream. Bryan never became president, but some of his populist policies were adopted by both political parties. Sen. Bernie Sanders’s supporters might not have wanted Biden for president, but having lost the nomination battle they could work on getting Biden to pursue their agenda. Liberal democracy requires acceptance of adverse electoral results, a willingness to countenance the temporary rule of those with whom we disagree. As historian Richard Hofstadter observed, it requires that people “endure error in the interest of social peace.” Part of that willingness stems from the belief that the democratic system makes it possible to work, even in opposition, to correct the ruling party’s errors and overreach. Movements based on ideas and policies can also quickly shift their allegiances. Today, the progressives’ flag-bearer might be Sanders, but tomorrow it could be Sen. Elizabeth Warren or Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or someone else.
For a movement built around a cult of personality, these adjustments are not possible. For Trump supporters, the “error” is that Trump was cheated out of reelection by what he has told them is an oppressive, communist, Democrat regime. While the defeat of a sitting president normally leads to a struggle to claim the party’s mantle, so far no Republican has been able to challenge Trump’s grip on Republican voters: not Sen. Josh Hawley, not Sen. Tom Cotton, not Tucker Carlson, not Gov. Ron DeSantis. It is still all about Trump. The fact that he is not in office means that the United States is “a territory controlled by enemy tribes,” writes one conservative intellectual. The government, as one Trump supporter put it, “is monopolized by a Regime that believes [Trump voters] are beneath representation, and will observe no limits to keep them [from] getting it." If so, the intellectual posits, what choice do they have but to view the government as the enemy and to become “united and armed to take care of themselves as they think best”?
The Trump movement might not have begun as an insurrection, but it became one after its leader claimed he had been cheated out of reelection. For Trump supporters, the events of Jan. 6 were not an embarrassing debacle but a patriotic effort to save the nation, by violent action if necessary. As one 56-year-old Michigan woman explained: “We weren’t there to steal things. We weren’t there to do damage. We were just there to overthrow the government.”
The banal normalcy of the great majority of Trump’s supporters, including those who went to the Capitol on Jan. 6, has befuddled many observers. Although private militia groups and white supremacists played a part in the attack, 90 percent of those arrested or charged had no ties to such groups. The majority were middle-class and middle-aged; 40 percent were business owners or white-collar workers. They came mostly from purple, not red, counties.
Most Trump supporters are good parents, good neighbors and solid members of their communities. Their bigotry, for the most part, is typical white American bigotry, perhaps with an added measure of resentment and a less filtered mode of expression since Trump arrived on the scene. But these are normal people in the sense that they think and act as people have for centuries. They put their trust in family, tribe, religion and race. Although jealous in defense of their own rights and freedoms, they are less concerned about the rights and freedoms of those who are not like them. That, too, is not unusual. What is unnatural is to value the rights of others who are unlike you as much as you value your own.
As it happens, however, that is what the American experiment in republican democracy requires. It is what the Framers meant by “republican virtue,” a love of freedom not only for oneself but also as an abstract, universal good; a love of self-government as an ideal; a commitment to abide by the laws passed by legitimate democratic processes; and a healthy fear of and vigilance against tyranny of any kind. Even James Madison, who framed the Constitution on the assumption that people would always pursue their selfish interests, nevertheless argued that it was “chimerical” to believe that any form of government could “secure liberty and happiness without any virtue in the people.” Al Gore and his supporters displayed republican virtue when they abided by the Supreme Court’s judgment in 2000 despite the partisan nature of the justices’ decision. (Whether the court itself displayed republican virtue is another question.)
The events of Jan. 6, on the other hand, proved that Trump and his most die-hard supporters are prepared to defy constitutional and democratic norms, just as revolutionary movements have in the past. While it might be shocking to learn that normal, decent Americans can support a violent assault on the Capitol, it shows that Americans as a people are not as exceptional as their founding principles and institutions. Europeans who joined fascist movements in the 1920s and 1930s were also from the middle classes. No doubt many of them were good parents and neighbors, too. People do things as part of a mass movement that they would not do as individuals, especially if they are convinced that others are out to destroy their way of life.
It would be foolish to imagine that the violence of Jan. 6 was an aberration that will not be repeated. Because Trump supporters see those events as a patriotic defense of the nation, there is every reason to expect more such episodes. Trump has returned to the explosive rhetoric of that day, insisting that he won in a “landslide,” that the “radical left Democrat communist party” stole the presidency in the “most corrupt, dishonest, and unfair election in the history of our country” and that they have to give it back. He has targeted for defeat those Republicans who voted for his impeachment — or criticized him for his role in the riot. Already, there have been threats to bomb polling sites, kidnap officials and attack state capitols. “You and your family will be killed very slowly,” the wife of Georgia’s top election official was texted earlier this year. Nor can one assume that the Three Percenters and Oath Keepers would again play a subordinate role when the next riot unfolds. Veterans who assaulted the Capitol told police officers that they had fought for their country before and were fighting for it again. Looking ahead to 2022 and 2024, Trump insists “there is no way they win elections without cheating. There’s no way.” So, if the results come in showing another Democratic victory, Trump’s supporters will know what to do. Just as “generations of patriots” gave “their sweat, their blood and even their very lives” to build America, Trump tells them, so today “we have no choice. We have to fight” to restore “our American birthright.”
Where does the Republican Party stand in all this? The party gave birth to and nurtured this movement; it bears full responsibility for establishing the conditions in which Trump could capture the loyalty of 90 percent of Republican voters. Republican leaders were more than happy to ride Trump’s coattails if it meant getting paid off with hundreds of conservative court appointments, including three Supreme Court justices; tax cuts; immigration restrictions; and deep reductions in regulations on business. Yet Trump’s triumph also had elements of a hostile takeover. The movement’s passion was for Trump, not the party. GOP primary voters chose Trump over the various flavors of establishment Republicanism (Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio), and after Trump’s election they continued to regard establishment Republicans as enemies. Longtime party heroes like Paul Ryan were cast into oblivion for disparaging Trump. Even staunch supporters such as Jeff Sessions eventually became villains when they would not do as Trump demanded. Those who survived had a difficult balancing act: to use Trump’s appeal to pass the Republican agenda while also controlling Trump’s excesses, which they worried could ultimately threaten the party’s interests.
That plan seemed plausible in 2017. Unlike other insurgent leaders, Trump had not spent time in the political wilderness building a party and surrounding himself with loyalists. He had to choose from an existing pool of Republican officials, who varied in their willingness to do his bidding. The GOP establishment hoped that the presence of “adults” would restrain him, protecting their traditional agenda and, in their view, the country’s interests, from his worst instincts.
This was a miscalculation. Trump’s grip on his supporters left no room for an alternative power center in the party. One by one, the “adults” resigned or were run off. The dissent and contrary opinions that exist in every party — the Northeast moderate Republicans in Reagan’s day; the progressives in today’s Democratic Party — disappeared from Trump’s Republican Party. The only real issue was Trump himself, and on that there could be no dissent. Those who disapproved of Trump could either keep silent or leave.
The takeover extended beyond the level of political leadership. Modern political parties are an ecosystem of interest groups, lobby organizations, job seekers, campaign donors and intellectuals. All have a stake in the party’s viability; all ultimately depend on being roughly aligned with wherever the party is at a given moment; and so all had to make their peace with Trump, too. Conservative publications that once opposed him as unfit for the presidency had to reverse course or lose readership and funding. Pundits had to adjust to the demands of their pro-Trump audiences — and were rewarded handsomely when they did. Donors who had opposed Trump during the primaries fell into line, if only to preserve some influence on the issues that mattered to them. Advocacy organizations that had previously seen their role as holding the Republican Party to certain principles, and thus often dissented from the party leadership, either became advocates for Trump or lost clout.
It was no surprise that elected officials feared taking on the Trump movement and that Republican job seekers either kept silent about their views or made show-trial-like apologies for past criticism. Ambition is a powerful antidote to moral qualms. More revealing was the behavior of Republican elder statesmen, former secretaries of state in their 80s or 90s who had no further ambitions for high office and seemingly nothing to lose by speaking out. Despite their known abhorrence of everything Trump stood for, these old lions refused to criticize him. They were unwilling to come out against a Republican Party to which they had devoted their professional lives, even when the party was led by someone they detested. Whatever they thought about Trump, moreover, Republican elders disliked Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and the Democrats more. Again, this is not so unusual. German conservatives accommodated Adolf Hitler in large part because they opposed the socialists more than they opposed the Nazis, who, after all, shared many of their basic prejudices. As for conservative intellectuals, even those who had spent years arguing that Woodrow Wilson was a tyrant because he created the Federal Reserve and supported child labor laws seemed to have no concerns about whether Trump was a would-be despot. They not only came to Trump’s defense but fashioned political doctrines to justify his rule, filling in the wide gaps of his nonexistent ideology with an appeal to “conservative nationalism” and conservative populism. Perhaps American conservatism was never comfortable with the American experiment in liberal democracy, but certainly since Trump took over their party, many conservatives have revealed a hostility to core American beliefs.
All this has left few dissenting voices within the Republican ecosystem. The Republican Party today is a zombie party. Its leaders go through the motions of governing in pursuit of traditional Republican goals, wrestling over infrastructure spending and foreign policy, even as real power in the party has leached away to Trump. From the uneasy and sometimes contentious partnership during Trump’s four years in office, the party’s main if not sole purpose today is as the willing enabler of Trump’s efforts to game the electoral system to ensure his return to power.
With the party firmly under his thumb, Trump is now fighting the Biden administration on separate fronts. One is normal, legitimate political competition, where Republicans criticize Biden’s policies, feed and fight the culture wars, and in general behave like a typical hostile opposition.
The other front is outside the bounds of constitutional and democratic competition and into the realm of illegal or extralegal efforts to undermine the electoral process. The two are intimately related, because the Republican Party has used its institutional power in the political sphere to shield Trump and his followers from the consequences of their illegal and extralegal activities in the lead-up to Jan. 6. Thus, McCarthy and Rep. Elise Stefanik, in their roles as party leaders, run interference for the Trump movement in the sphere of legitimate politics, while Republicans in lesser positions cheer on the Jan. 6 perpetrators, turning them into martyrs and heroes, and encouraging illegal acts in the future.
This pincer assault has several advantages. Republican politicians and would-be policymakers can play the role of the legitimate opposition. They can rediscover their hawkish internationalist foreign policy (suspended during the Trump years) and their deficit-minded economics (also suspended during the Trump years). They can go on the mainstream Sunday shows and critique the Biden administration on issues such as Afghanistan. They can pretend that Trump is no longer part of the equation. Biden is the president, after all, and his administration is not exactly without faults.
Yet whatever the legitimacy of Republican critiques of Biden, there is a fundamental disingenuousness to it all. It is a dodge. Republicans focus on China and critical race theory and avoid any mention of Trump, even as the party works to fix the next election in his favor. The left hand professes to know nothing of what the right hand is doing.
Even Trump opponents play along. Republicans such as Sens. Mitt Romney and Ben Sasse have condemned the events of Jan. 6, criticized Trump and even voted for his impeachment, but in other respects they continue to act as good Republicans and conservatives. On issues such as the filibuster, Romney and others insist on preserving “regular order” and conducting political and legislative business as usual, even though they know that Trump’s lieutenants in their party are working to subvert the next presidential election.
The result is that even these anti-Trump Republicans are enabling the insurrection. Revolutionary movements usually operate outside a society’s power structures. But the Trump movement also enjoys unprecedented influence within those structures. It dominates the coverage on several cable news networks, numerous conservative magazines, hundreds of talk radio stations and all kinds of online platforms. It has access to financing from rich individuals and the Republican National Committee’s donor pool. And, not least, it controls one of the country’s two national parties. All that is reason enough to expect another challenge, for what movement would fail to take advantage of such favorable circumstances to make a play for power?
Today, we are in a time of hope and illusion. The same people who said that Trump wouldn’t try to overturn the last election now say we have nothing to worry about with the next one. Republicans have been playing this game for five years, first pooh-poohing concerns about Trump’s intentions, or about the likelihood of their being realized, and then going silent, or worse, when what they insisted was improbable came to pass. These days, even the anti-Trump media constantly looks for signs that Trump’s influence might be fading and that drastic measures might not be necessary.
The world will look very different in 14 months if, as seems likely, the Republican zombie party wins control of the House. At that point, with the political winds clearly blowing in his favor, Trump is all but certain to announce his candidacy, and social media constraints on his speech are likely to be lifted, since Facebook and Twitter would have a hard time justifying censoring his campaign. With his megaphone back, Trump would once again dominate news coverage, as outlets prove unable to resist covering him around the clock if only for financial reasons.
But this time, Trump would have advantages that he lacked in 2016 and 2020, including more loyal officials in state and local governments; the Republicans in Congress; and the backing of GOP donors, think tanks and journals of opinion. And he will have the Trump movement, including many who are armed and ready to be activated, again. Who is going to stop him then? On its current trajectory, the 2024 Republican Party will make the 2020 Republican Party seem positively defiant.
Those who criticize Biden and the Democrats for not doing enough to prevent this disaster are not being fair. There is not much they can do without Republican cooperation, especially if they lose control of either chamber in 2022. It has become fashionable to write off any possibility that a handful of Republicans might rise up to save the day. This preemptive capitulation has certainly served well those Republicans who might otherwise be held to account for their cowardice. How nice for them that everyone has decided to focus fire on Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin.
Yet it is largely upon these Republicans that the fate of the republic rests.
Seven Republican senators voted to convict Trump for inciting an insurrection and attempting to overturn a free and fair election: Richard Burr, Bill Cassidy, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Romney, Sasse and Patrick J. Toomey. It was a brave vote, a display of republican virtue, especially for the five who are not retiring in 2022. All have faced angry backlashes — Romney was booed and called a traitor at the Utah Republican convention; Burr and Cassidy were unanimously censured by their state parties. Yet as much credit as they deserve for taking this stand, it was almost entirely symbolic. When it comes to concrete action that might prevent a debacle in 2024, they have balked.
Specifically, they have refused to work with Democrats to pass legislation limiting state legislatures’ ability to overturn the results of future elections, to ensure that the federal government continues to have some say when states try to limit voting rights, to provide federal protection to state and local election workers who face threats, and in general to make clear to the nation that a bipartisan majority in the Senate opposes the subversion of the popular will. Why?
It can’t be because they think they have a future in a Trump-dominated party. Even if they manage to get reelected, what kind of government would they be serving in? They can’t be under any illusion about what a second Trump term would mean. Trump’s disdain for the rule of law is clear. His exoneration from the charges leveled in his impeachment trials — the only official, legal response to his actions — practically ensures that he would wield power even more aggressively. His experience with unreliable subordinates in his first term is likely to guide personnel decisions in a second. Only total loyalists would serve at the head of the Justice Department, FBI, CIA, National Security Agency and the Pentagon. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs will not be someone likely to place his or her own judgment above that of their civilian commander in chief. Nor would a Republican Senate fail to confirm Trump loyalists. In such a world, with Trump and his lieutenants in charge of all the levers of state power, including its growing capacity for surveillance, opposing Trump would become increasingly risky for Republicans and Democrats alike. A Trump victory is likely to mean at least the temporary suspension of American democracy as we have known it.
We are already in a constitutional crisis. The destruction of democracy might not come until November 2024, but critical steps in that direction are happening now. In a little more than a year, it may become impossible to pass legislation to protect the electoral process in 2024. Now it is impossible only because anti-Trump Republicans, and even some Democrats, refuse to tinker with the filibuster. It is impossible because, despite all that has happened, some people still wish to be good Republicans even as they oppose Trump. These decisions will not wear well as the nation tumbles into full-blown crisis.
It is not impossible for politicians to make such a leap. The Republican Party itself was formed in the 1850s by politicians who abandoned their previous party — former Whigs, former Democrats and former members of the Liberty and Free Soil parties. While Whig and Democratic party stalwarts such as Henry Clay and Stephen Douglas juggled and compromised, doing their best to ensure that the issue of slavery did not destroy their great parties, others decided that the parties had become an obstacle to justice and a threat to the nation’s continued viability.
Romney & Co. don’t have to abandon their party. They can fashion themselves as Constitutional Republicans who, in the present emergency, are willing to form a national unity coalition in the Senate for the sole purpose of saving the republic. Their cooperation with Democrats could be strictly limited to matters relating to the Constitution and elections. Or they might strive for a temporary governing consensus on a host of critical issues: government spending, defense, immigration and even the persistent covid-19 pandemic, effectively setting aside the usual battles to focus on the more vital and immediate need to preserve the United States.
It takes two, of course, to form a national unity coalition, and Democrats can make it harder or easier for anti-Trump Republicans to join. Some profess to see no distinction between the threat posed by Trump and the threat posed by the GOP. They prefer to use Trump as a weapon in the ongoing political battle, and not only as a way of discrediting and defeating today’s Republican Party but to paint all GOP policies for the past 30 years as nothing more than precursors to Trumpism. Although today’s Trump-controlled Republican Party does need to be fought and defeated, this kind of opportunistic partisanship and conspiracy-mongering, in addition to being bad history, is no cure for what ails the nation.
Senate Democrats were wise to cut down their once-massive voting rights wish list and get behind the smaller compromise measure unveiled last week by Manchin and Sen. Amy Klobuchar. But they have yet to attract any votes from their Republican colleagues for the measure. Heading into the next election, it is vital to protect election workers, same-day registration and early voting. It will also still be necessary to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which directly addresses the state legislatures’ electoral power grab. Other battles — such as making Election Day a federal holiday and banning partisan gerrymandering — might better be postponed. Efforts to prevent a debacle in 2024 cannot. Democrats need to give anti-Trump Republicans a chance to do the right thing.
One wonders whether modern American politicians, in either party, have it in them to make such bold moves, whether they have the insight to see where events are going and the courage to do whatever is necessary to save the democratic system. If that means political suicide for this handful of Republicans, wouldn’t it be better to go out fighting for democracy than to slink off quietly into the night?
15. The Future of Conquest: Fights Over Small Places Could Spark the Next Big War
Excerpts:
There is compelling evidence for only one approach to deterring small conquests: tripwire forces. For decades, NATO’s tripwire warded off the Soviet Union and preserved the West Berlin enclave deep inside East Germany—notwithstanding the fact that West Berlin was hopelessly surrounded and indefensible. The United States maintained a tripwire force in South Korea for all but one of the last 75 years; that one year was when North Korea invaded. A tripwire is poised to continue ensuring the security of the Baltic states in the years to come.
Conversely, U.S. deterrence in many of its potential flash points with China suffers because American tripwire forces are absent. There are no tripwires protecting the Senkakus, the Spratlys, and Taiwan and little political will to deploy them going forward. Against Russia, the same is true for Ukraine and Georgia. Where the United States is unwilling, partner state tripwires are the strongest tool available, but they are no guarantor of success.
A future of great-power competition with China and Russia conjures images of world wars, cyberwars, and trade wars. Those threats are real, but history tells us that—strange as it may seem—sudden seizures of small territories will continue to be the most common spark for wars and near wars between powerful nations. Despite the small size of the territories seized, these events are not of small importance. And the world has not seen the last of them.
The Future of Conquest
Fights Over Small Places Could Spark the Next Big War
The relationship between conquest and conflict may seem straightforward: start a war, prevail on the battlefield, take control of desired territory. Yet more and more, this is not how states take each other’s land. Instead, they use a different strategy: seize a small piece of territory quickly and with minimal bloodshed, then try to avoid war. Today, conquest looks like what Russia did in Crimea and what China could do once again in the South China Sea.
For the last 20 years, scholars have agreed that conquest has steeply declined, perhaps nearing the point when it will cease altogether. A global norm of respecting countries’ territorial integrity, which has been backed by U.S. power, is thought to have become so strong that conquest has largely subsided. This shared understanding that it is unacceptable to take territory by force is believed to have taken hold after World War II and come close to ending conquest by the late 1970s. In his influential 2011 book on the global decline of violence, Steven Pinker was one of many scholars who found reasons for optimism in this decline: “Zero is also the number of times that any country has conquered even parts of some other country since 1975.”
That portrayal of conquest’s demise is hopeful, but it is not accurate. Conquest remains a central issue in international politics—it has merely become smaller. Yes, attempts to conquer entire countries became rare after World War II: more than 30 years have passed since the last wholesale conquest of a country, when Iraq briefly conquered Kuwait. But there have been more than 70 attempts to conquer territory since 1945. As a rule of thumb, modern conquests ordinarily seize territories no larger than one province in size and typically much smaller. When the aggressor seizes only a small piece of territory rather than an entire country, the international community rarely intervenes to defend the victim. Indeed, attempts to conquer territory succeed about as often as they did a century ago: approximately half the time.
There is a clear strategy behind these small conquests. The idea is to take a small enough piece of land that the victim will relent to its loss rather than escalate the conflict to retake it. This strategy provokes war much less often than attempting to conquer countries outright. It succeeds much more frequently than diplomatic threats.
Small conquests are not new; they are an age-old practice. However, they are now more important than ever before because, like civil wars, they have persisted as larger conquests and great-power wars have declined.
Looking only at the U.S. experience, it is easy to miss the importance of small conquests. Over the past two decades, for example, the United States has intervened in other countries’ civil wars, such as in Syria and Libya, and invaded countries to impose regime change, as in Afghanistan and Iraq. Some believe these wars are a glimpse into the future, while conquest is a relic of the past. The reason for this misconception is that U.S. interventions in wars of conquest are comparatively rare: while Washington has intervened to oppose the relatively infrequent attempts to conquer entire countries, as in the Korean and Gulf Wars, it has stayed on the sidelines during the much larger number of conquests of only parts of countries.
Unless the United States embraces a level of restraint not attempted since Pearl Harbor, sitting out future territorial conflicts may not come as easily as in the past. Too many of the world’s most dangerous flash points pit China or Russia against U.S. allies threatened by conquest. Understanding how these flash points could erupt is essential to understanding the globe’s future conflicts and the dilemmas that await the United States in the years ahead.
SMALL TERRITORIES, LARGE CONSEQUENCES
In May 2020, Chinese soldiers encroached into territory along their country’s disputed border with India. They advanced in several areas of the mountainous Ladakh region, taking positions patrolled but not permanently occupied by Indian forces. Though initially bloodless, their advance precipitated a June 2020 clash that killed 20 Indian soldiers and four Chinese soldiers, marking the gravest crisis between the world’s two most populous nations in over a half century. Eschewing guns to limit the risks of escalation, the two sides fought with makeshift weapons that included clubs studded with nails or wrapped in barbed wire.
Medieval weaponry aside, this is a textbook example of modern conquest. These small territory grabs are most common in Asia and also continue to emerge in the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and eastern Europe. Such maneuvers usually avoid war but nonetheless always represent a gamble about how the other side will respond. Indeed, the miscalculated small conquest ranks among the most important causes of modern war. That is what happened in 1962, in much the same area that continues to raise tensions along the Chinese-Indian border. At the time, both countries sought to strengthen their claims over the disputed territory and advanced in small slices, built posts to expand their control, and attempted to block each other’s encroachments. This strategic gamesmanship remained bloodless for months, but China eventually upended the playing board and attacked, beginning the Sino-Indian War. That war continues to cast a pall over relations between China and India and spurred India to develop nuclear weapons.
Small conquests have persisted as larger conquests and great-power wars have declined.
Some conflicts over small territorial grabs escalate into larger wars with lasting consequences. In 1978, for example, Uganda seized the small territory known as the Kagera Salient from Tanzania. Rather than accept the loss, Tanzanian forces attacked, retook it, and then continued on to Uganda’s capital of Kampala, where they ousted the infamous dictator Idi Amin. The genocidal Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia met its demise under similar circumstances, when its aggressive encroachments along its border with Vietnam provoked the Vietnamese to invade.
The two most violent conflicts ever fought primarily between nuclear powers arose over small territories whose importance seems grossly out of proportion to the risk of nuclear war. In 1999, Pakistan infiltrated military forces disguised as Kashmiri militants to seize several strategic hills on India’s side of the Line of Control. India suffered hundreds of casualties in the fighting to expel them. In 1969, fighting broke out between China and the Soviet Union over Zhenbao Island in the Ussuri River. Both conflicts raised fears of nuclear escalation from around the world.
Looking forward, possible Chinese and Russian conquests loom as many of the most consequential and plausible scenarios for conflicts among the world’s great powers. But they are not the only potential conquests that should concern policymakers: enduring rivalry between India and Pakistan will continue to present opportunities for territorial encroachments in Kashmir. The Abyei dispute between Sudan and South Sudan is merely one of many potential flash points that may not make headlines until it is too late. Appreciating the importance of small conquests and understanding how they have played out historically can help policymakers to manage them more effectively—or prevent them altogether.
CHINA AND THE FUTURE OF CONQUEST
Whether and where China seizes territory will be defining facts about the twenty-first century. As the country grows more economically and militarily powerful, disputes with many of its neighbors threaten to lead to war.
Nowhere have China’s territorial ambitions more often created tensions than the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea. China claims sovereignty over all the Spratly Islands but currently occupies only a minority of them. Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Taiwan control the remainder. These islands, which are so small that they qualify merely as rocks under international law, are precisely the type of territory that still falls victim to conquest.
Since 1918, there have been 28 instances of a country seizing one or more islands from another in peacetime. Only one—Argentina’s ill-fated attempt to take the Falkland Islands in 1982—led to war. While the Falklands War invalidates any easy dismissal of concerns that seizing islands can spark serious conflicts, it represents the exception, not the rule. In a majority of island seizures—15 out of 28—the territory grab did not result in even a single fatality. This track record underscores why China might expect to get away with seizing islands.
The South China Sea is no stranger to such events. There is a history of countries accepting the loss of small islands to conquest, choosing peace over such minor pieces of territory. China clashed with South Vietnam over the Paracel Islands in 1974, ultimately seizing and holding them ever since. In 1988, China and Vietnam battled over Johnson South Reef in the Spratlys, with China again prevailing. Although the success rate of conquest attempts is around 50 percent overall, it rises to 75 percent when islands alone are seized.
There is too little appreciation in Washington for how historically exceptional—even aberrant—it would be for the United States to engage in hostilities with China over the Spratly Islands.
Despite frequent interventions overseas, Washington has never intervened militarily to defend another country’s sovereignty when an aggressor seized an island or small border region. Indeed, the past century contains no instances where any country fired even one shot in response to the seizure of another country’s outlying islands—and only a handful of cases for small territories along land borders. Interventions to oppose conquests of entire countries were more common, but they remain rare for smaller territories.
China could also find itself in conflict with Japan over the Senkaku Islands (known in China as the Diaoyu Islands), an assortment of barren rocks in the East China Sea. Although Japan is more powerful than the claimants at odds with China over the Spratlys, it faces a disadvantage in the Senkakus: the islands are currently empty. No Japanese troops are stationed there as a tripwire to bolster deterrence. No Japanese civilians live there. Both increase the chances of China successfully seizing the islands while avoiding war, presenting Japan with a fait accompli.
Although an outright invasion of Taiwan does not fit the mold of modern conquest, seizing small Taiwanese-held islands does.
Chinese soldiers unexpectedly occupying the Senkakus is the most likely pathway to armed conflict between China and Japan. In this scenario, Beijing would take the islands without firing a shot, but Tokyo would not then have the option to recover them. This could leave the Japanese government with an unenviable choice: attack Chinese forces or tacitly acquiesce to their presence by responding with only diplomatic and economic measures. Japan may come to regret having refrained from deploying and maintaining troops in the Senkakus long ago, when China was weaker.
Unlike these outlying islands, Taiwan boasts a globally integrated economy, a capable military, a vibrant democracy, and a population of 24 million. Its violent subjugation would send geopolitical shock waves worldwide. Of course, Beijing would deny that invading Taiwan constitutes conquest; instead, China would regard the island as its rightful territory. The few countries that attempted to conquer another outright since World War II expounded variations of this argument: North Korea’s and North Vietnam’s respective claims on their southern counterparts were straightforward; Iraq advanced arguments that Kuwait was historically part of its territory when it invaded in 1990; and Indonesia did the same while conquering Timor-Leste in 1975. Yet those same precedents offer reason for optimism, because they are so few.
Although an outright invasion of Taiwan does not fit the mold of modern conquest, seizing small Taiwanese-held islands does. It would be a mistake to plan for a potential Chinese invasion, blockade, or aerial bombardment of Taiwan while neglecting the more likely scenario of China seizing outlying Taiwanese islands.
Taiwan controls Kinmen and Matsu, islands located within artillery range of the Chinese coast. Seizing these islands would allow Beijing to rally the Chinese people around the flag, send a clear message of intimidation to Taiwan, and risk a military confrontation on the most favorable ground possible. It would also confront Washington with a dismal set of options: either intervene close to the Chinese mainland to defend small islands or be accused of abandoning Taiwan to suffer defeat alone.
Taiwan also holds the largest of the Spratly Islands, Itu Aba, and the Pratas Islands in the South China Sea. Although tensions pitting China against the Philippines or Vietnam have received greater attention, the deep divisions between Beijing and Taipei suggest that China might prefer to advance its claim to the Spratlys by assailing Taiwan. It is hard to escape the conclusion that China is more likely to seize Itu Aba than any other defended area among its many territorial disputes.
Finally, the extensive, rugged border between China and India will always furnish undefended areas that provide fertile ground for territory grabs. Most crises like that which occurred in Ladakh will end without war. However, the risk of war is real, as is the prospect for years, even decades, of standoffs that sow the seeds of future conflicts. More optimistically, a minority of these episodes have ended in mutual pullback deals like those India and China negotiated in February 2021 for areas around Pangong Lake, in Ladakh.
However, New Delhi cannot put too much faith in the staying power of such agreements. Mutual pullbacks create neutral zones between Chinese and Indian forces that become tempting targets for future territory grabs.
RUSSIA AND THE FUTURE OF CONQUEST
No event brought more troubling changes to European security since the end of the Cold War than Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine. Seizing and annexing Crimea and its more than two million inhabitants shattered the false hope that conquest was a thing of the past in Europe. It underscores why the next Russian conquest is the most pressing foreign threat to European stability. The question is, where will it occur?
The worst-case scenario envisions Russia openly invading the Baltics—Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. These NATO members were once part of the Soviet Union and contain Russian-speaking minorities. NATO planners fear a Russian advance through Belarus to close the Suwalki gap, the narrow land connection between Poland and the Baltics, and conquer all three countries.
Although any scenario this grave deserves serious assessment, the modern history of conquest provides reason to believe it is unlikely. A Russian attempt to conquer three countries outright— after only four total attempts to do so since 1945—would be the most aggressive action taken by any nation since World War II. And it would also represent a departure from Russian behavior, as Moscow has pursued conquest only when it could do so without undue risk of provoking a major war.
The more likely scenario is a sudden Russian seizure of a smaller area. The Estonian town of Narva, which juts into Russia and contains a mostly Russian-speaking population, offers one such a target. Even there, it would be unusual for a country to seize territory to which it has no long-standing public claim. The fact that Moscow has not articulated such claims in the Baltics is encouraging, though Russia’s willingness to engineer rationales to justify its conquest of Crimea should temper any optimism.
Russia’s seizure of Crimea shattered the false hope that conquest was a thing of the past in Europe.
The presence of NATO troops serving as a tripwire deployment in the Baltics further reinforces deterrence against Russian invasion. History even suggests that deterring Russia would not require NATO to maintain enough military strength in eastern Europe to immediately repel an invasion. For every attempted conquest defeated short of its objectives, there have been several where the aggressor achieved its aims only to be driven out by political pressure or—more often—military force. Russia would have no sound historical basis for imagining that a conflict would fortuitously end after initial advances but before NATO mobilizes.
Although the history of modern conquest provides reasons for optimism in the Baltics, further Russian encroachments in Ukraine and Georgia remain all too plausible. Neither Ukraine nor Georgia is a treaty ally of the United States. No U.S. or NATO tripwire force is forthcoming.
In Ukraine’s Donbas region and Georgia’s South Ossetia and Abkhazia, Russia has partnered with (ostensibly) local rebels, embracing the art of seizing territory while obscuring its own role. Removing insignia from the uniforms of “green men” lent Russia’s conquest of Crimea a threadbare fig leaf of deniability. Given its success with these tactics, Moscow may well try them again in Ukraine, in Georgia, and even against NATO allies such as Estonia.
There is nothing novel or inventive about these tactics. In 1919, ironically, Finland attempted to capitalize on the chaos of the Russian civil war by sending thousands of soldiers disguised as independent volunteers to occupy the border region of East Karelia. The Red Army defeated the invading force. In 1999, the Indian Army similarly defeated the Kashmiri militants who were in actuality Pakistani soldiers.
When possible, the best response to “green men” tactics is to defeat the incursion as if the opposition were truly rebels while not engaging Russia otherwise. Russia cannot maintain the ruse and intervene fully, such as with airpower operating from Russian bases. And by allowing Moscow to deny that it had been defeated, this approach offers the hope that Russia will accept a limited failure rather than escalate the conflict. In Karelia and Kashmir, that approach prevailed without widening the war. The United States should further understand that its own military strength does little against this threat and work to help its partners strengthen themselves, equipping them to prevail in such fights. Ukrainian and Georgian military capabilities—and their presence in border areas—are what will matter most for deterring future Russian conquests.
THE UNITED STATES AND THE FUTURE OF CONQUEST
Even though small territorial grabs occur almost routinely across the globe, the United States has responded in the same way nearly every time: by staying out. Only Iraq’s and North Korea’s attempts to conquer neighbors outright provoked American military intervention. This sobering track record underscores why small conquests are poised to confound U.S. policy in the years ahead.
Today, small conquests directly threaten U.S. allies and partners in Asia and Europe. Such operations rest primarily on a calculation about what can be seized without sparking a war based on the national interests of those involved. They only secondarily revolve around a military calculation, and the balance of power is not a strong predictor of the outcomes of small conquests. Increasing U.S. defense spending or deploying more forces to Asia or Europe would contribute only at the margins. China and Russia will naturally doubt whether U.S. alliances, designed with larger aggressions in mind, extend to small territories. History even suggests that Washington cannot assume its allies would request U.S. military intervention to expel, for instance, Chinese forces from seized islands.
Sudden seizures of small territories will continue to be the most common spark for wars and near wars between powerful nations.
There is compelling evidence for only one approach to deterring small conquests: tripwire forces. For decades, NATO’s tripwire warded off the Soviet Union and preserved the West Berlin enclave deep inside East Germany—notwithstanding the fact that West Berlin was hopelessly surrounded and indefensible. The United States maintained a tripwire force in South Korea for all but one of the last 75 years; that one year was when North Korea invaded. A tripwire is poised to continue ensuring the security of the Baltic states in the years to come.
Conversely, U.S. deterrence in many of its potential flash points with China suffers because American tripwire forces are absent. There are no tripwires protecting the Senkakus, the Spratlys, and Taiwan and little political will to deploy them going forward. Against Russia, the same is true for Ukraine and Georgia. Where the United States is unwilling, partner state tripwires are the strongest tool available, but they are no guarantor of success.
A future of great-power competition with China and Russia conjures images of world wars, cyberwars, and trade wars. Those threats are real, but history tells us that—strange as it may seem—sudden seizures of small territories will continue to be the most common spark for wars and near wars between powerful nations. Despite the small size of the territories seized, these events are not of small importance. And the world has not seen the last of them.
16. Channeling the Military Master: Top 10 Sun Tzu Memes
And after all the depressing news, now for something completely different. A little humor for the weekend.
Channeling the Military Master: Top 10 Sun Tzu Memes
Mention him by his given name, and no one blinks an eye. Nevertheless, Sun Wu is arguably the most influential military theorist in human history. His writings on strategy are required reading in many circles; it’s rare to find a professional military reading list that doesn’t include his work. His thoughts on warfare are so ubiquitous that it’s as common to find him cited in the rings of the Pentagon as the halls of business and academe. But call him by his honorific title, Sun Tzu, and people take notice.
Master Sun – the literal translation of his honorific – is synonymous with the competitive strategy. His classic treatise on warfare, The Art of War, dates from the Late Spring and Autumn period (approximately 771-476 BCE) of Chinese history and has had a profound influence on military thought. Master Sun drew on his experience as a general and strategist to craft The Art of War, which is composed of 13 chapters that capture the essence of warfighting as only he could.
THE RISE OF THE MEMES
For nearly 1,500 years, The Art of War opened a Chinese military anthology that was eventually formalized as Seven Military Classics in 1080. In 1772, The Art of War was translated into French and published for the first time in Europe. The first full English translation was completed and published in 1910, allowing the wisdom of Master Sun to continue to influence Western military thinking.
Given the broad and lasting influence of Sun Tzu, it was inevitable that he would eventually find new life as a meme. The relative simplicity of his treatise lends itself to the format. Quotes such as, “be where your enemy is not” or “all warfare is based on deception” make for pithy memes that capture the imagination. With Sun Tzu’s tendency for brevity, it’s almost as if the memes write themselves.
Given the nature of contemporary humor, however, it was probably just as inevitable that Sun Tzu would eventually become a source of levity. Wes Studi brilliantly channeled the master in the 1999 film, Mystery Men, in which he played the role of The Sphinx, a near-mythical figure with a classical bent for military wisdom. His lines from the movie all carry a certain feel to them, almost as if Sun Tzu was mocking himself:
“He who questions training only trains himself at asking questions.”
“When you can balance a tack hammer on your head, you will head off your foes with a balanced attack.”
“We are number one. All others are number two, or lower.”
“You must lash out with every limb, like the octopus who plays the drums.”
It’s almost as if The Sphinx foretold the coming of the comical Sun Tzu meme, heralding their arrival years before they were a thing. But, by the time the Forever Wars reached full steam, those memes were here, and they only gained prominence as the last of those wars came to an abrupt and inglorious end.
TOP 10 SUN TZU MEMES
My favorites among those memes are probably unrepeatable, at least in a safe for work short article. They range from the sublime to the absolutely glorious. Some spur you to spit coffee at the screen before you while others just cause you to stop and shake your head. But they are all brilliant in their own right.
1. “Always abandon your most strategic airbase right before an evacuation.”
Brutal, but accurate. This meme more or less captured the end of the war in Afghanistan: the frustration, the anger, and the absolute chaos. You can find it on t-shirts and coffee mugs now. Get ‘em while they’re hot.
2. “Everybody is an atheist until they clog a toilet in someone else’s house.”
This is pretty much the acme of bad houseguesting. Do it and you’ll be amazed at the stream of vulgarity that spews forth from your gaping maw. Write them down. You might need them later when you have to explain it all.
3. “Meme them until they cry, then make memes about them crying.”
When it comes to memes, this is the supreme art of war.
4. “Flank ‘em, then spank ‘em.”
Of all the Sun Tzu memes you can find, this one is probably the most accurate when it comes to actual warfare. It’s clever, it’s got rhythm, and it’s funny. This also works on Twitter.
5. “Retreat swiftly when the public affairs officer approaches.”
Without a doubt, one of the most useful pieces of advice. If PAOs had existed in Sun Tzu’s time, I’m fairly certain he *would* have said this.
6. “All warfare is based on quad charts.”
Oof. This is sadly true. And it’s probably a good thing that quad charts didn’t exist in Master Sun’s time, or The Art of War would have a 14th chapter that addresses font choices and general slideology.
7. “An empty browser history reveals more than a full one.”
That one needs to sink in for a moment. It’s true, you know.
8. “If you want to know how to fight, always ask the generals in comment section.”
Keyboard warriors tend to think they all have a little Sun Tzu in them. Most of them are idiots. Be wary about taking any of their brilliant advice. Remember: never read the comments.
9. “The acme of war is to subdue the enemy with briefing slides.”
Anyone who has ever sat through a 100-slide brief on acquisition reform can attest to this. The surest way to defeat an enemy without fighting is to lure them into a mandatory briefing.
10. “When I die, I swear to god I hope no one makes up fake quotes from my book.”
Too late.
V/R
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.
