Quotes of the Day:
“Man cannot possess anything as long as he fears death. But to him who does not fear it, everything belongs. If there was no suffering, man would not know his limits, would not know himself. ”
- Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
“If anyone can refute me—show me I’m making a mistake or looking at things from the wrong perspective—I’ll gladly change. It’s the truth I’m after, and the truth never harmed anyone.”
– Marcus Aurelius
"Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved."
- Helen Keller
1. China’s Xi Emphasizes ‘Peaceful Reunification’ With Taiwan, Days After Record Show of Force
2. The challenge facing the National Defense Strategy
3. China Will Test America on Taiwan. What Will Joe Biden Do?
4. The China Challenge
5. Drone Strikes Gone Wrong: Fixing a Strategic Problem
6. CIA's New China Mission Center: How To Do It Right
7. You Think It’s a Game? What Video Games Can—and Can’t—Teach About Strategy and History
8. U.S. investigators increasingly confident directed-energy attacks behind Havana Syndrome
9. COVID Conspiracy: Analysis of foreign disinformation driving US vaccine resistance
10. PH gov't 'must drop all cases against Ressa' – international lawyers
11. Asian countries are at last abandoning zero-covid strategies
12. Laser weapons are coming, like it or not
13. Duterte on 2022 presidential race: ‘Inday is definitely out’
14. 4 C’s Drive Biden Administration’s First Naval Strategic Guidance
15. Xi Jinping vows to fulfil Taiwan ‘reunification’ with China by peaceful means
16. Joe Biden-Xi Jinping summit is in the cards
1. China’s Xi Emphasizes ‘Peaceful Reunification’ With Taiwan, Days After Record Show of Force
I would call Xi's "emphasis" political warfare using Paul Smith's definition:
"Political warfare is the use of political means to compel an opponent to do one's will, based on hostile intent. The term political describes the calculated interaction between a government and a target audience to include another state's government, military, and/or general population. Governments use a variety of techniques to coerce certain actions, thereby gaining relative advantage over an opponent. The techniques include propaganda and psychological operations (PSYOP), which service national and military objectives respectively. Propaganda has many aspects and a hostile and coercive political purpose. Psychological operations are for strategic and tactical military objectives and may be intended for hostile military and civilian populations." Smith, Paul A., On Political War (Washington: National Defense University Press, 1989), p. 3. https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a233501.pdf
Of course it fits right into China's "Three Warfares:" psychological warfare, legal warfare (Lawfare), and media (or public opinion) warfare.
China’s Xi Emphasizes ‘Peaceful Reunification’ With Taiwan, Days After Record Show of Force
Mr. Xi’s remarks were part of a speech that marked the 110th anniversary of the revolution that overturned Qing imperial rule in China. In the decades that followed, the Communists and Nationalists jostled for control of China, which later led to a split between China and Taiwan amid a civil war. Nationalist forces withdrew to the island, and communist leader Mao Zedong proclaimed the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949.
The Communist Party considers Taiwan part of China, despite never having ruled the island, and has vowed to take control of it, by force if necessary.
In a response to Mr. Xi’s speech, Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council said China’s continued threat of military action is the key to problems across the Taiwan Strait.
“The Chinese Communist Party’s rigid Taiwan policy doesn’t take a realistic measure of the current situation, completely fails to account for the development of global circumstances, and fundamentally ignores the doubts and opposition of the Taiwanese people,” it said.
Mr. Xi has long spoken of realizing what Beijing has called a peaceful reunification with Taiwan, but his remarks came as concerns within the U.S. mounted over China’s yearslong military buildup and recent threatening moves against the island.
The PLA has flown 150 sorties near Taiwan so far this month, a blitz that has sparked expressions of concern from the U.S., U.K. and Germany.
Taiwan’s independence is the biggest obstacle to Beijing’s goal of unification and poses a “serious hidden danger to national rejuvenation,” Mr. Xi said. “Those who forget their ancestors, betray the motherland or split the country have always been doomed. They will definitely be spurned by the people and judged by history,” he added.
Mr. Xi said the issue of Taiwan is China’s internal affair and that no external interference is allowed, without naming any country. He didn’t mention the use of force on Taiwan in his speech.
2. The challenge facing the National Defense Strategy
Excerpts:
If the Biden administration remains determined to put a cap on defense spending, yet wishes to pursue all of its priorities while minimizing to the degree possible the risk to meeting its security objectives, it will have to take far more seriously the need for allies and partners. With few notable exceptions such as the United Kingdom, Australia and Japan, Washington has not done enough to convince its other allies and partners that their economic interests — especially involving China and Russia — simply do not outweigh the threats that these states pose to their security.
Part of its problem is that, in the past, Washington often did little more than pay lip service to the importance of allied contributions to the defense of common interests. The time has come to take allies and partners far more seriously, to expand its reliance on their military capabilities, to be more open to sharing technological breakthroughs, and indeed, to improve the balance of military trade that currently overwhelmingly favors the United States. Without its allies and partners, America no longer can be certain that it would prevail in a future conflict — especially if, as may well be the case, it will simultaneously have to face more than one adversary in more than one theater.
The challenge facing the National Defense Strategy
The Hill · by Dov S. Zakheim, opinion contributor · October 8, 2021
The Pentagon has begun the process of developing a strategy to meet the congressional requirement for a National Defense Strategy (NDS) report in 2022. The defense strategy is likely to expand upon the 2018 strategy, which identified China and Russia as peer competitors and assigned highest priority to deterring adventurism on the part of both states.
China’s increasingly aggressive stance against Taiwan — notably, its recent four-day surge of nearly 150 combat aircraft into the island’s air defense identification zone, as well as the expansion of its conventional and strategic nuclear forces — underscores the ongoing need for maintaining a credible deterrent against Beijing. Similarly, Russia’s continuing pressure on Ukraine, its ceaseless efforts to employ cyber to disrupt American political and economic activity, and its military modernization programs justify the priority that the 2022 NDS, like its immediate predecessor, is likely to assign to deterring Moscow’s aggressiveness.
China and Russia do not constitute the entirety of American security concerns, even if they represent the most demanding threats that American forces might have to confront. North Korea is a rogue nuclear power that can threaten its neighbors and the American homeland. Iran is poised to develop its own nuclear capability while continuing its disruptive efforts throughout the Middle East and its own efforts to fight the West in cyberspace. Washington may wish to ratchet down its Middle East military profile, but unless Iran terminates its nuclear program and ceases to undermine the stability of regional states, American withdrawal from the region will be easier said than done.
Similarly, while American forces may have departed from Afghanistan, there is little indication that the Taliban government will do anything to prevent terrorists from once again using that country as a base for attacks on Western, and especially American, targets and persons. If dealing with these challenges were not enough, the Biden administration has added both climate change and fighting pandemics as two additional threats that the Department of Defense (DOD), like the government as a whole, must face for the foreseeable future.
Strategies represent the employment of means to stated ends. Yet the administration’s future budgets, which would provide the financial sources to acquire means for coping with the array of challenges that it has identified, are unlikely to grow much beyond that which it proposed for fiscal year 2022. That budget calls for a small decline in real terms over the previous year’s budget. Indeed, even if congressional appropriations would increase FY 2022 spending levels by some $24 billion, there is no indication that the Biden administration would maintain the trajectory of that increase over the next several budget years.
In light of the administration’s reluctance to increase defense spending to any significant degree — which itself is rather puzzling given its willingness to spend trillions of dollars on domestic progress — one might have expected it to mandate a cutback in the forces and capabilities that currently are targeted against the lower priority but still potent threats that it has identified. This does not appear to be the case, however. The FY 2022 budget and the proposed congressional adds-ons both continue to preserve far too many of what have come to be called “legacy programs” — that is, weapons systems whose utility was greatest over the past two decades, but whose value in confronting the challenges posed by China, in particular, is questionable at best.
Future budget requests, and likely congressional appropriations, no doubt will incorporate many cutting-edge technologies such as artificial intelligence and systems that incorporate machine learning. Nevertheless, the expansion of these and other capabilities to meet future threats will be constrained not only by relatively flat top-line budgets but by ongoing, real-cost growth for both military personnel and operations and maintenance. The combined squeeze on defense modernization would render it highly unlikely that Washington credibly could deter China and Russia simultaneously, or indeed, any combination of the threats it might face.
If the Biden administration remains determined to put a cap on defense spending, yet wishes to pursue all of its priorities while minimizing to the degree possible the risk to meeting its security objectives, it will have to take far more seriously the need for allies and partners. With few notable exceptions such as the United Kingdom, Australia and Japan, Washington has not done enough to convince its other allies and partners that their economic interests — especially involving China and Russia — simply do not outweigh the threats that these states pose to their security.
Part of its problem is that, in the past, Washington often did little more than pay lip service to the importance of allied contributions to the defense of common interests. The time has come to take allies and partners far more seriously, to expand its reliance on their military capabilities, to be more open to sharing technological breakthroughs, and indeed, to improve the balance of military trade that currently overwhelmingly favors the United States. Without its allies and partners, America no longer can be certain that it would prevail in a future conflict — especially if, as may well be the case, it will simultaneously have to face more than one adversary in more than one theater.
The Hill · by Dov S. Zakheim, opinion contributor · October 8, 2021
3. China Will Test America on Taiwan. What Will Joe Biden Do?
Will? Isn't it already doing so?
Excerpt:
In short, no matter the explicit declaratory policy regarding the defense of Taiwan, it is the military balance that matters most to Xi and the PLA. Helpful in this regard is keeping our allies close like Japan and Australia while building our partnership with India – but is only a part of the equation. Deterring Beijing requires U.S. forward presence with sufficient modern capability; that, more than anything else, will determine whether the 2020s remain peaceful.
China Will Test America on Taiwan. What Will Joe Biden Do?
Chinese military activity around Taiwan has risen to unprecedented levels over the last few months. Chinese warplanes have breached Taiwan’s air defense zone more than 150 times in just this last week.
Given the stakes, and rather ambiguous assurances from the U.S. regarding Taiwan’s security, what happens when Beijing tries to test U.S. resolve?
The current Taiwan Relations Act does not provide any guarantee or assurance of a U.S. military response should China attack. But the 1979 Act does stipulate that the U.S. will provide Taiwan with arms to defend itself and that Washington will maintain the military capacity to compel a peaceful resolution between China and Taiwan.
Deterring China from starting a war over Taiwan is what matters most, and that only works as long as the military balance remains unfavorable to China.
Beginning in 2019, the Trump administration declassified three internal Reagan-era memos. These memos became known inside government as providing the “six assurances.” They made clear then, as do continued arms sales to Taiwan and proximate U.S. military presence today, that the U.S. will act to ensure the situation is resolved peacefully.
However, the threat from the mainland in recent years has ratcheted up significantly. And despite successive administrations continuing to provide Taiwan defensive weapons, the balance of military power has been slipping, first against Taiwan, and now against the U.S.
In 2005, Beijing passed an anti-secession law mandating that military force be used should Taiwan declare independence. However, subsequent statements from Beijing make clear patience for unification is not unlimited, and lack of tangible progress towards this by Taiwan could just as easily result in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) attacking.
At the time, the U.S. maintained qualitative and quantitative superiority over the PLA. By 2020, a decades-long build-up of the PLA, unmatched by either the U.S. or Taiwan, has dramatically unsettled the cross-strait balance of power.
So, is China going to attack?
Short answer: Only Xi knows. Absent that information, here are a few thoughts.
Then there is the “Pax Olympics” school that sees concern over global image forestalling Chinese aggression till after the 2022 Winter Olympics. There are ready indicators this is at play. The communists in Beijing have attempted to discredit critical foreign press as it seeks to validate its authoritarian governance to the world through the stage of the winter Olympics. A similar timeline revolves around next fall’s communist party congress. It’s easy to imagine that Xi will be reluctant to do anything rash before that is complete.
There is also the prospect, supported by Chinese strategic writings, that Beijing would rather wait for Taiwan to fall into its lap, than risk military action in the near-term. Beijing views the U.S. as a power in decline and itself as ascending, making it confident that the balance of power is tipping its way. Counter-balancing this (to Beijing) comforting assessment is the communists’ concern that people in Taiwan increasingly sees themselves as separate from the mainland.
Either way, the years between 2023 and 2027 are shaping up to be a most dangerous time.
On top of the unfavorable military balance, having paid no discernable price for recent transgressions, China will feel less constrained. Consider: China’s unilateral abrogation of the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration in 2021 governing the return of Hong Kong resulted in no sanctions. Its ongoing genocide of Uyghurs in Xinjian brought only weak sanctions.
So, is the U.S. ready, should China test our resolve over Taiwan?
Urgent action is needed to boost confidence in our nation’s leadership and ability to direct action in a fast-moving war. Past due is a debate on how to better posture and ensure our military is authorized to respond promptly in the event of a rapidly escalating attack on Taiwan, when time is of the essence.
Image of Chinese J-20 Fighter. Image Credit: Chinese Internet.
In short, no matter the explicit declaratory policy regarding the defense of Taiwan, it is the military balance that matters most to Xi and the PLA. Helpful in this regard is keeping our allies close like Japan and Australia while building our partnership with India – but is only a part of the equation. Deterring Beijing requires U.S. forward presence with sufficient modern capability; that, more than anything else, will determine whether the 2020s remain peaceful.
4. The China Challenge
Excerpts:
The reaction to the intermittent toughening of Biden’s China policies has been fierce. Since August, Chinese President Xi Jinping has delivered even clearer warnings to Chinese capitalists that they exist at his pleasure. The screws have been tightened on Hong Kong. Ultranationalist language is now common on official pronouncements. A blogger close to the regime posted an essay that was widely quoted in official media. It warned of the “savage and ferocious attacks that the United States has begun to launch against China,” adding that “It is necessary not only to destroy the decadent forces but also to scrape the bones and heal the wounds.”
In a September 1 speech to the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, China’s new ambassador to the U.S. Qin Gang scrapped the conciliatory tone and warned of “disastrous consequences” if the U.S. uses a “Cold War playbook.” He explicitly excoriated U.S. support for Taiwan’s independence and its blacklisting of Huawei.
As the Biden administration responds, there’s a risk of foreign-policy concerns crowding out economic ones. China will press the U.S. to relent on its economic moves, in exchange for easing military tensions. And as the big November climate meetings approach, China will be offering a deal for climate collaboration in exchange for keeping the economic status quo. When Vice President Kamala Harris made her much-touted Asia trip in late August, the one truculent remark she made regarding China was a warning that the U.S. would defend the freedom of the South China Sea. Astonishingly, there was not word one about China’s economic predation. The speech must have been reviewed a dozen times by multiple players.
Critics of Trump’s China policy, and now Biden’s, warn of a new cold war. The fact is that we are in one. George Kennan’s strategy of containment is not a bad model. If we can slow China’s rush to global and domestic domination, the internal contradictions in its model just might become more evident and problematic. What remains to be seen is whether Biden will be able to be radical enough.
The China Challenge
Biden’s aggressive push against Chinese mercantilism has been marred by turf battles and cross-pressures. Here’s what needs to be done.
There has never been a threat to U.S. well-being comparable to China. Its rapid global expansion challenges America’s economic and geopolitical security, as well as basic democratic values and the rule of law. Joe Biden, taking advantage of a door crudely blasted open by Donald Trump, has reversed the traditional course on China policy. The question is whether Biden’s administration will do so coherently, comprehensively, and effectively.
The Chinese economic model starts with state-directed and -subsidized capital. Imports are either blocked or conditioned on technology transfer and “partnerships” with Chinese state-owned or -allied companies whose eventual goal is to displace imports. Western companies are incentivized by cheap labor and capital subsidies to produce in China, but only for export back to the West (Apple), or locally but subject to sharing trade secrets (GE). Whatever China does not get through negotiated technology transfer, it gets through industrial espionage. Exports, meanwhile, are subsidized, with the objective of making China the worldwide low-cost producer. China also manipulates the value of its currency, to keep export prices artificially low. Wages are suppressed, and of course there are no labor rights.
This model has produced growth rates of 7 to 10 percent per year for more than three decades. It has driven U.S. producers out of industry after industry, making those remaining heavily reliant on Chinese supply chains. It has enriched U.S. financiers and upended America’s domestic middle-class labor market, while trying to mollify consumers with cheap goods. The Chinese state, directed by its Communist Party, is pursuing nothing less than global political and economic hegemony. Undeniably, the U.S. has facilitated this advance.
American Enablers
American elites have been blind to the nature of this threat for two basic reasons. First, China’s success defies orthodox assumptions. A state-led economic system with managed capitalist elements, run by a ruling party that prohibits dissent, is not supposed to work. Second, China has astutely given U.S. multinational corporations and investment banks a huge piece of the action. America’s most powerful economic players are part of the domestic China lobby, and resist a more assertive U.S. policy. In global geopolitics, we have never had to deal with such a Trojan horse.
It’s instructive to compare U.S.-China relations with America’s 40-year Cold War with Soviet Russia. The USSR posed a clear geopolitical and military threat to the democratic capitalist West. Both the West and the Soviets had global alliances, making the lines of conflict even clearer. But Russia posed no economic threat. On the contrary, as a clumsy bureaucratic economy the Soviet Union was a useful and instructive failure. Economics, geopolitics, and ideology thus aligned.
China today has no formal alliances comparable to NATO or the Warsaw Pact. But its economic entanglements divide loyalties, making it a far more insidious threat. There were no American capitalists working behind enemy lines, as it were, because Russia offered no investment opportunities. The Russians had pathetic American domestic allies, in the form of a U.S. Communist Party riddled with FBI informers. The Chinese have Apple, Intel, GE, Tesla, and Goldman Sachs.
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In 2000, Bill Clinton allowed China into the World Trade Organization with no enforceable quid pro quos other than access for U.S. investment bankers. The policy was called “constructive engagement.” A key architect was Clinton’s economic-policy chief, Robert Rubin, late of Goldman Sachs and later of Citigroup. One political leader after another, seconded by the media and corporate echo chamber, assured Congress and the public that two benign consequences were sure to ensue: America’s trade imbalance would shrink, and China would become more open, democratic, and conventionally capitalistic.
On the latter point, Clinton himself contended: “By joining the WTO, China is not simply agreeing to import more of our products. It is agreeing to import one of democracy’s most cherished values, economic freedom. The more China liberalizes its economy, the more fully it will liberate the potential of its people … The Chinese government will no longer be everyone’s employer, landlord, shopkeeper and nanny all rolled into one. It will have fewer instruments, therefore, with which to control people’s lives.”
Seldom has a projection proven more wishful. The regime has only become more totalitarian. Our trade deficit has quintupled. When China formally joined the WTO in December 2001, its annual trade surplus with the U.S. was $80 billion. In 2018, it hit $400 billion.
Looking at China as a long-term threat, the closest analogy is global climate change.
China simply did not carry out its WTO commitments to end its illegal subsidies, coercive partnership agreements, barriers to imports, and thefts of intellectual property. Yet for the better part of another two decades, U.S. policy under George W. Bush and Barack Obama resisted pushing back in any serious way. To the shame of Democratic presidencies, it took Donald Trump to reverse course.
The money made by investment bankers in particular since China selectively opened is staggering. The regime wanted Western capital to invest in state-owned enterprises, to link them with the West’s financial system, and to give them international legitimacy. According to Clyde Prestowitz, a prophetic China policy dissenter and author of the indispensable 2021 book The World Turned Upside Down, between 1993 and 2010 Chinese state-owned enterprises raised some $600 billion in U.S. capital markets, with underwriting fees and markups flowing to large brokers like Goldman. Unlike industrial and tech corporations subjected to rigid terms if they wanted to operate in or export to China, the big financial firms were given a free hand. They became investment bankers to the Chinese Communist Party.
China also needed U.S. financial expertise in mergers and consolidations. For example, before the mid-1990s China’s phone service was fragmented and inefficient. Goldman helped China create a single national carrier, called China Mobile. At the time, China Mobile existed only on paper, but with Goldman’s help, the company was taken public in New York and Hong Kong, and quickly raised $4.5 billion. Today, China Mobile is the largest mobile phone company in the world. Despite Beijing’s WTO commitments to open its markets, none of the Western carriers are able to operate in China.
The undertow against changing course on China remains fierce. Multinationals and big banks profit handsomely from the status quo, and hold enormous influence in domestic politics. Career policymakers are invested in the old model. Most economists and their echo chamber in the media still preach free trade and condemn protectionism and the sin of government “picking winners” when it comes to the U.S., but not on the part of China. The apostles of constructive engagement are loath to admit that they got China wrong.
The New Silk Road
It’s not as if U.S. intelligence had to ferret out China’s grand designs. They were publicly and proudly broadcast by the regime, and documented with great specificity in the reports of the U.S.-China Commission and in the work of China scholars.
For example, the One Belt One Road initiative, launched in 2013, is a decade-long, multitrillion-dollar worldwide infrastructure program that will link some 70 countries to Beijing, economically and geopolitically. Chinese state-owned companies are buying, modernizing, or building from scratch massive projects in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Europe. The EU’s neoliberal austerity policies help China by creating financial shortfalls and inviting fire-sale transfers of national assets to Beijing’s state-owned enterprises.
Belt and Road projects include rail lines from Nairobi to Mombasa in Kenya, from Addis Ababa in Ethiopia to Djibouti, from Budapest to Belgrade in Eastern Europe, and three different routes linking Singapore, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam with the Chinese rail hub of Kunming. Chinese interests have bought all or part of the ports in countries that are American military allies, such as Haifa, Piraeus, Trieste, Antwerp, Bilbao, and, appropriately enough, Dunkirk. They have bought European airports, such as Frankfurt’s, as well as entire national electrical systems, such as Portugal’s previously state-owned REN.
In these deals, China provides the up-front capital, controls the development and construction, and secures the project through extensive debt. All of this gives China extensive economic intelligence as well as commercial and diplomatic influence. Key components are of course made in China, adding to Beijing’s trade surplus and technical leadership. The West offers nothing that comes close.
To complement One Belt One Road, in 2015 Beijing launched a rival to the World Bank and U.S.-sponsored regional development banks. The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank launched with $100 billion in capital from China, its dominant shareholder. To the shock of Washington, the bank enlisted as members not just most Asian countries, but Britain, France, and Italy, as well as America’s most dependent Asian protectorate, South Korea. Compared to the World Bank, which tends to be slow, bureaucratic, and inclined to impose conditions, Communist China paradoxically knows how to cut red tape. Separately, the Made in China 2025 initiative, also created in 2015, is a ten-year plan to leverage mercantilism and achieve supremacy in every significant advanced technology, from artificial intelligence and robotics to advanced manufacturing with synthetic materials.
Meanwhile, China has become more territorially aggressive. The Chinese military already has more ships than the U.S. Navy. It has increased pressure on Taiwan and asserted regional supremacy in the South China Sea, using dredging operations to create artificial islands claimed as Chinese territory, many with airstrips. Beijing has also destroyed democratic Hong Kong, unilaterally breaking the terms of its 1997 “one country, two systems” treaty with Britain.
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But military muscle isn’t the prime locus of Chinese aggression. Rather, appropriately enough, the Chinese Communist Party relies on silken threads such as One Belt One Road, complemented by strategic purchases of entire Western corporations. This strategy flummoxes traditional U.S. assumptions about how geopolitics works. It is the economic equivalent of guerrilla warfare.
Between 2008 and 2019, Chinese state-owned enterprises purchased some 360 European companies, in deals valued at about $255 billion. The U.S. and its allies, committed to open markets, have no strategy for blocking such strategic purchases (which they might do on the reasonable ground that China is not a market economy), except in special cases on narrow national-security grounds.
Looking at China as a long-term threat, the closest analogy is global climate change. The time to get serious about global warming was 40 years ago, before the current self-reinforcing cycle of worsening catastrophic weather events. The time to alter China policy was at least 30 years ago, after the outrage of Tiananmen, when China was far weaker and more isolated, and before it was in the WTO. Beijing’s economic threat and climate change also come together in that China seeks to dominate the green technologies of the future, while still building coal plants domestically and in other countries.
There is one other analogy between the twin existential threats of climate catastrophe and death by China. Both were the result of preposterous assumptions about the efficiency of markets. In the case of climate, markets priced carbon disastrously wrong. In the case of China, elites insisted that markets had to be more efficient than state-led economies; thus China would have to become more market-like. This was not primarily an unfortunate error of economic theory. These catastrophic actions were driven by the raw economic and political power of corporate capitalists.
Biden’s Work in Progress
Joe Biden has thankfully broken with prior Democratic orthodoxy on China. He has resisted pressure to reverse Trump’s constructive policies, most importantly the imposition of across-the-board tariffs on Chinese imports. But though Biden’s approach is directionally encouraging, he has yet to fashion a coherent master policy or sort out a hierarchy of sometimes competing goals on industrial, trade, environmental, and foreign policy. What’s occurred so far is a patchwork—a mix of bold but narrow measures, temporizing, and even some backsliding, all reinforced by cross-pressures and turf rivalries.
Biden has hired mostly dissenters from the previous China consensus. The best is Katherine Tai, his U.S. trade representative, who is fluent in Mandarin and a well-informed critic of China’s mercantilism. She previously worked as the senior Democratic House staffer on trade and before that as a China negotiator at USTR. But Tai tends to be undercut on some issues by the old guard, including career USTR staff and senior White House officials, most notably Steve Ricchetti, the most corporate of Biden’s inner circle. In addition, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen did Tai no favors by publicly describing the China tariffs as a tax on American consumers and expressing concern about their impact on inflation.
John Kerry, Biden’s climate chief, is famously naïve in thinking that a climate bargain with China might lead to warmer relations generally. He has met 18 times with his Chinese counterpart, hoping to broker a grand entente built around climate collaboration.
×SUSAN WALSH, MANUEL BALCE, PATRICK SEMANSKY, SALVATORE LAPORTA, SHIZUO KAMBAYASHI/AP IMAGES
Key players in the Biden administration on China (L–R): U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai, White House adviser Steve Ricchetti, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry, and National Security Council Coordinator for the Indo-Pacific Kurt Campbell
Kurt Campbell, who runs China policy at the NSC, is intermittently hawkish, but very turf-conscious, and has sparred with Tai on some policies. Under Obama, when he served as assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs, Campbell was old-school. He was a champion of the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership, a traditional pro-corporate trade deal that would have done nothing to seriously contain China.
By contrast, Campbell’s writings in 2018 and 2019 read like rebuttals of his own previous views. Campbell also hired one of the best-informed China hawks, Rush Doshi, author of the superb book The Long Game, as his deputy. Yet Campbell has also been promoting a dubious Asian digital trade deal, a kind of cousin to the TPP. It would mainly improve access for American companies to other Asian markets, but would not address China’s flagrant “Great Firewall” suppression of free speech. Campbell has less institutional clout as China coordinator than his Trump counterpart, NSC principal deputy Matt Pottinger. Campbell is one level below Biden’s five deputy national-security advisers.
These contradictory Biden advisers have produced inconsistent and ad hoc China policies. In April, Biden reversed a November 2020 Trump order that exempted some 300 medicines and medical devices from the World Trade Organization’s Government Procurement Agreement, as part of the effort to secure supply chains. The Trump order allowed the U.S. to give preferential treatment to supplies made in the United States. The big drug companies pushed back in meetings with Ricchetti. When Biden reversed Trump’s order, it was news to Tai. According to my sources, a senior senator got wind of this and asked USTR what happened. The senator was told, “We got rolled.”
In another skirmish that combined turf and ideology, Yellen demanded that Biden shift management of a key blacklist of Chinese military companies from the more hawkish Pentagon to the more dovish Treasury. An executive order in June approved the shift. The blacklist was created in 1999 as a quid pro quo for permanent normal trade relations. Treasury Departments under four presidents blocked its implementation. Only with a Trump executive order in 2020 did the Pentagon actually create the blacklist.
×XIE ZHENGY/AP PHOTO
Chinese companies are heavily subsidized by the state, with the objective of making China the worldwide low-cost producer.
The tangle of Biden appointees echoes the limits of available policy leverage. The conventional tool kit of policies to resist unfair trade practices simply was not designed for a powerhouse nation like China that flagrantly and proudly defies the entire system. So if America is serious, we need a much more potent tool kit, as well as more resolve. The usual tools include:
Countervailing Duties and Tariffs. The default premise of the trading system is that nations must not directly or indirectly subsidize exports, or sell them in foreign markets below their true cost of production (this is known as dumping). The two often overlap, but are not identical. An exporter seeking to gain market share might dump exports, whether or not they have been subsidized by the state. And when a nation like China, with suppressed labor and subsidized capital, enters a market where there is already worldwide oversupply, dumping is inevitable.
When countries do subsidize or dump, there are remedies both under domestic law and via the WTO. In the case of countries with market economies and rules of law, the mechanisms are creaky but serviceable. But the remedies are simply swamped when an entire economic system is one grand case of illegal subsidy and pricing. Making a case against China’s predatory exports individually is all the more difficult because the system is non-transparent, and subsidies and pricing decisions are well hidden.
The remedy for illegal subsidy or dumping is selective tariffs, known as countervailing duties, which are supposed to offset the value of the subsidy or the damage caused by the dumping. The process of proving illegal subsidy or dumping is Kafkaesque. Basically, you file a petition with the Commerce Department. Your complaint gets a preliminary investigation. If it’s found to have initial merit, it is referred to a quasi-judicial body called the U.S. International Trade Commission for further investigation and eventually a ruling. For those with morbid curiosity or insomnia, the government has prepared a helpful 117-page handbook, available at this link.
The process typically drags on for years and incurs costly legal fees. By the time a domestic company files a subsidy or anti-dumping complaint (much less wins it), the company has already suffered grave economic injury. “These cases have to be brought after the damage is done,” says Lori Wallach of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch. “By the time you get relief, you are on a ventilator and you may well die anyway.” Prestowitz cites the case of SolarWorld, a pioneering U.S. solar panel company that was the victim of Chinese subsidies and pricing below market. By the time SolarWorld won its case, it had been so weakened that it was forced out of business.
China has had no difficulty purchasing most kinds of advanced technologies that do not have explicit national-security bans.
Since 1995, there have been only 35 such cases filed under Section 301 of the Trade Act, a reflection of its inadequacy. The genius of the several rounds of tariffs directed by Trump’s U.S. trade rep, Robert Lighthizer, was that they cut the Gordian knot and in effect levied one grand countervailing duty on the entire Chinese system, affecting nearly all of the $540 billion worth of Chinese goods that come into America annually. The tariffs, as high as 30 percent and in one case 50 percent, were not a precise, sector-by-sector offset to the Chinese subsidies and the damage to U.S. producers, but the overall countervail was ballpark accurate.
These tariffs began on solar panels, steel, and aluminum produced anywhere outside the U.S., but were gradually modified over the next three years to mainly target China on a more comprehensive basis. At one point, in January 2020, China promised to reform the abuses that it committed to ending as part of its WTO accession agreement 20 years earlier, in exchange for tariff relief. But no progress ensued and some China tariffs were reinstated. Today, tariffs are imposed on Chinese goods with an annual value of some $340 billion.
The value of the tariff strategy was economic, political, and ideological. For starters, the tariffs provide some respite to several U.S. industries—like steel, aluminum, solar, and auto parts—that were on the verge of being destroyed by Chinese and other dumping. Secondly, the tariffs created a new status quo, to be used as leverage in any future U.S.-China grand bargain for drastically revised terms of engagement. And though the initial reaction to the tariffs was a gasp of horror from the trade establishment, editorial scolding for “China-bashing,” and predictions of dire economic consequences, not much else happened. Many of the price increases were absorbed by sellers. “The Earth did not fall off its axis,” Lori Wallach says. The tariffs gave U.S. China policy strategists permission to think way outside the box.
However, the relentless pushback continues. Industry groups keep lobbying Biden to rescind the tariffs. A provision rolling the tariffs back for a year and refunding the money to business made it into an omnibus bill sponsored by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) that is otherwise intended to counter the Chinese threat. Even climate groups are divided between those that want the U.S. to rebuild capacity, and promoters of solar who want cheap imports from China to lower its cost and hasten its deployment.
Press coverage echoes the industry line. A September 2 feature piece in The New York Times reads like a U.S. Chamber of Commerce handout: “American businesses say they are growing increasingly frustrated by the White House’s approach to China … Mr. Biden has amplified some of the Trump administration’s punitive moves.” The piece did not contain word one about China’s predatory strategies that belatedly prompted these moves. Other “news” pieces insist, in the words of this headline, that “American consumers, not China, are paying for Trump’s tariffs.” These analyses myopically focus on short-term prices, not the long-term damage to the U.S. economy from unabated Chinese mercantilism. Had the Chinese leadership taken its advice from these economists and pundits in the 1990s, China would have simply purchased goods from the low-cost producer of the time (the U.S. or Japan), and would never have made the state investments to become an industrial powerhouse.
×WIKTOR SZYMANOWICZ/AP PHOTO
In late August, U.S. Customs seized a shipment of solar panels suspected to be manufactured partly with Uyghur forced labor.
National-Security Restrictions and Export Controls. Restrictions on trade based on national-security considerations have traditionally been fairly narrow, except in the case of well-established military enemies and terrorists. The U.S. has proven it can engage in comprehensive economic warfare. The sanctions against Iran have done grave damage, and Washington has enforced a general embargo against Cuba since the 1960s. Those vintage Chevys and Fords driving around Havana are not there because Cubans have a nostalgic fondness for ’50s cars. But in the case of China, and its tight interlocks with U.S. corporations and investment bankers, national-security restrictions are treated as isolated special cases. They are also scattered among several agencies, making a coherent strategy more difficult.
Since 1988, under the Exon-Florio Amendment, the president has been granted the authority to block a commercial transaction deemed harmful to national security, with investigative powers delegated to the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), chaired by the Treasury secretary and with participation from 16 federal agencies. China-watchers have long complained that the criteria CFIUS uses are far too limited. In 2018, the Republican Congress passed legislation written by Lighthizer, the Foreign Investment Risk Review Modernization Act, toughening these standards. That legislation added to CFIUS review foreign investments in any company that deals with “critical technology,” “critical infrastructure,” or “sensitive personal data of United States citizens that may be exploited in a manner that threatens national security,” and expanded jurisdiction to cover the purchase of minority stakes. Trump also issued several executive orders. Even so, China has had no difficulty purchasing most kinds of advanced technologies and companies that do not have explicit national-security bans.
In addition, the Commerce Department maintains an “entity list” of companies owned or directed by foreign governments or otherwise deemed harmful to the national interest. Any U.S. dealings with such companies require a special export license, which is seldom granted. There are some 260 Chinese companies currently on the list, most famously Huawei, which is a leading-edge company in 5G technology with multiple links to the Chinese state and Communist Party and spying opportunities.
In July, the Commerce Department added 19 Chinese companies to the list, as enablers of either human rights violations or military modernization. China was explicitly targeted under the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act, signed into law by President Trump in June 2020. In late August, U.S. Customs seized a shipment of solar panels, on the ground that they had been manufactured partly with Uyghur forced labor. Hoshine, the world’s largest producer of metallurgical-grade silicon, has three facilities in Xinjiang, home to Uyghur concentration camps. A tougher law increasing sanctions on China based on human rights violations has passed both houses of Congress in slightly different versions.
All of this sounds impressive, and the system of controls does block some of the most flagrant cases. But it does not add up to either a comprehensive industrial policy or a China containment policy. For one thing, crown-jewel U.S. companies such as GE have long been doing business directly with the Chinese state, helping Chinese state-owned or -directed companies acquire advanced technologies such as avionics that clearly have both military and commercial uses. This helps China in its quest to displace the U.S. as the world’s leading producer of aircraft, both civilian and military.
Even under Trump, GE got an export license to sell engines for China’s new C919 jetliner. This was part of a deal between China hawks such as Pottinger and Lighthizer, and China enablers like ex–Wall Streeter Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner. Under the deal, GE would not be permitted to sell engines to China’s next-generation wide-body jets. It remains to be seen whether Biden will retain the prohibition. (The fault lines within the Trump and Biden administrations are uncannily similar, with the hawks at the NSC and the USTR, and China’s enablers at Treasury and Commerce.)
Other multinationals seeking the same relationships as GE often win reversals or work-arounds to export controls. In September 2020, Qualcomm, a leading U.S. maker of advanced semiconductors, was initially barred from selling chips to key Chinese companies, most notably Huawei. By November, Qualcomm had lobbied furiously and got approval to sell Huawei 4G but not 5G microprocessors. More recently, Qualcomm was cleared by the U.S. government in August to sell its most advanced mobile chips to a phone company called China’s Honor, which is a Huawei spin-off that is technically no longer part of Huawei.
A comprehensive industrial strategy, pursued in combination with tough measures to resist China’s predatory behavior, would amount to full-on economic nationalism.
Ironically, Qualcomm was previously protected by a CFIUS recommendation that resulted in a Trump executive order in 2018, blocking an attempted takeover of Qualcomm by a Singapore-based firm, Broadcom, on national-security grounds. Broadcom, the creation of a Malaysian Chinese named Hock Tan, had a business strategy of acquiring companies, cutting back their R&D outlays, and making money from licensing deals. Yet, having been saved from Broadcom, Qualcomm pursued its own China ties. America’s tech companies are all too eager to do business with China and are a potent lobby for weak controls.
Buy America and Its Loopholes. In principle, the U.S. government can use procurement policies to require that all materials used in projects financed by taxpayer money be made in the United States. The problem is that our government has tied its hands by being a party to the World Trade Organization’s Government Procurement Agreement. The exports of all 45 countries that have signed the GPA agreement plus 15 more with similar bilateral deals must be given “national treatment,” another term for a blanket waiver from Buy America. In return, U.S. companies are able to compete for foreign government procurement contracts.
That sounds reasonable, but trade is so lopsided today that the GPA denies the U.S. a major tool of economic development and reshoring of production and jobs. One can also make a good case that, if U.S. taxpayer money and U.S. debt financing are used in public projects, their materials should be made domestically.
Just to confuse things further, there are actually two relevant laws and concepts here. One is called Buy America; the other is called Buy American. The older of the two, the Buy American Act, dates to 1933. Under that law and its successors, projects underwritten with the roughly $600 billion in annual federal procurement dollars must use goods made in America. That figure will only increase with expanded infrastructure spending. But due to definitions specified by executive orders, a product with as little as 55 percent domestic content is considered U.S.-made for purposes of the law. A recent Biden order gradually increases that to 75 percent. But even so, due to the Government Procurement Agreement, the exports of some 60 countries are considered domestic.
Beijing has been brilliant at moving final assembly of goods made in China to offshore producer nations that are GPA members, so that China-made products qualify as made in U.S.A. So the GPA doesn’t even give member countries refuge from China flooding the zone with subsidized exports. The president has authority to withdraw from the GPA on 60 days’ notice. Biden has shown no interest in doing this. Instead, details and definitions are being tweaked.
Buy America, without the “n,” refers to requirements of the Transportation Department and its Federal Highway Administration, covering concrete, steel, and other construction materials. In principle, construction-grade steel is not subject to the constraints of the procurement agreement, though some major projects such as the rebuilding of the San Francisco Bay Bridge were nonetheless done with Chinese steel, thanks to other loopholes.
Capital Markets. The aforementioned loopholes are trivial compared to the biggest loophole of all. Despite a few limited recent restrictions, China’s state-affiliated companies are free to raise money by listing themselves on U.S. stock exchanges, or on other exchanges such as Hong Kong’s, where American citizens make investments.
Exchange-traded funds (ETFs) invest in Chinese companies, giving Americans yet another avenue to underwrite the growth and expansion of Communist China. George Soros, in a recent piece in the Financial Times, noted that “In BlackRock’s ESG Aware emerging market exchange-traded fund, Chinese companies represent a third of total investments.” Soros added that such passive investments “have effectively forced hundreds of billions of dollars belonging to US investors into Chinese companies whose corporate governance does not meet the required standard.”
The few restrictions on Chinese access to U.S. capital markets are instructive. Once again, most are the work of Trump’s trade and national-security officials. The most far-reaching is a law signed by Trump in December 2020, the Holding Foreign Companies Accountable Act. This requires foreign companies to comply with the transparent accounting requirements of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, or be delisted from U.S. stock exchanges. It also requires listed companies to certify that they are not controlled by a foreign government. The law potentially covers all 248 Chinese companies listed on U.S. stock exchanges, with a market capitalization well in excess of $2 trillion.
Chinese-owned companies that sell stock in the U.S., such as Alibaba and the oil giant PetroChina, routinely ignore U.S. securities law disclosures as enhanced by Sarbanes-Oxley, and neither the SEC nor the stock exchanges have required compliance. China has taken the position that this was confidential or classified information, itself quite an admission.
Open Secrets reported that 133 separate lobbyists representing every corner of Wall Street got involved on this law, including at least 28 on behalf of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce alone. The lobbying succeeded in watering down the law, so that a company can be delisted only if it is not in compliance with accounting disclosures for three years in a row. There is no such loophole for U.S.-owned companies. This creates few obstacles for Chinese companies, other than the small number that are formally blacklisted for being tools of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, to raising money in U.S. capital markets or soliciting U.S.-based investors to put money into China via offshore exchanges or ETFs.
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The U.S. has had bits and pieces of an industrial policy, but the Biden administration has embraced domestic manufacturing.
Getting Serious About Industrial Policy
The U.S. has bits and pieces of a de facto industrial policy: Pentagon procurement, targeted investments in new technologies and companies, R&D incubators like the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and its Energy Department clone, ARPA-E, and episodic strategies to save vital industries such as semiconductors, dating to the SEMATECH research consortium funded with an initial $500 million from the Defense and Commerce Departments in 1987 under President Reagan. Federal investment in biotech, such as the Human Genome Project, also amounted to a tacit industrial policy. Likewise federal support for research universities and the National Labs. Indeed, if you look at any U.S. export leader that relies on advanced technology, behind it is the invisible hand of the federal government. Yet because of its self-defined role as world leader of the free-trade crusade, the U.S. has been loath to describe these as industrial policies or to embrace industrial policy as good and necessary.
This has changed under the Biden administration, a significant advance over both previous Democratic administrations and Trump’s China policy, which got tough with China on tariffs and talked a good game on rebuilding America but did nothing to advance domestic industry. The most comprehensive and far-reaching Biden blueprint to date is a book-length White House report released in June with the disarming title “Building Resilient Supply Chains, Revitalizing American Manufacturing, and Fostering Broad-Based Growth.” The blueprint was the work of four Cabinet departments and was written jointly by the NSC and the National Economic Council (NEC). A principal final author was Elisabeth Reynolds, former director of MIT’s Industrial Performance Center, who works for NEC director Brian Deese.
The report is one of the most comprehensive national economic-planning documents since the World War II era. It looks in detail at four vital sectors (semiconductors, large-capacity electric storage batteries, pharmaceuticals and active pharmaceutical ingredients, and materials critical to the national defense) and asks what it would take for the U.S. to regain leadership, both in supply chains and in final products. The report is not shy about targeting China, which “stands out for its aggressive use of measures—many of which are well outside globally accepted fair trading practices—to stimulate domestic production and capture global market share in critical supply chains.”
In the case of semiconductors, the report points out that the U.S. share has declined from 37 percent in 1990 to just 12 percent today. It recommends a $50 billion minimum investment to support domestic manufacturing and R&D, “to ensure the next generation of semiconductors is developed and produced in the United States.”
There are other crucial industries, technologies, and supply chains; but this report, pulled together in 100 days in response to a Biden executive order, can be read as a serious template. The overall strategy unapologetically defies the norms of the WTO. A more extensive report that addresses America’s entire industrial base, including energy and communications technology, will be prepared and delivered in February 2022.
A comprehensive industrial strategy, pursued in combination with tough measures to resist China’s predatory behavior, would amount to full-on economic nationalism. The world, however, is not just comprised of the U.S. and China. A much tougher China policy will need to be coordinated with America’s allies. This will require some delicate diplomacy.
Keeping China out of U.S. capital markets for violating American securities laws is one key strategy because it need not sanction or alienate other countries that follow the rule of law and have compatible financial-disclosure regimes. The same is true of national-security restrictions, which don’t target nations that are no threat to the United States, except in the case of the most sensitive military technologies. But industrial policy is trickier. If the U.S. moves more in the direction of industrial planning, targeting, and technology subsidy, it must allow trading partners that are democratic nations the same rights. This seems a drastic shift, yet it is reminiscent of the pre-neoliberal era after World War II, when all our democratic allies engaged to a greater or lesser degree in state subsidy and economic planning.
The larger point here is that a successful China strategy is not just about China. It will require the greatest government involvement in the economy since World War II, as well as a fundamental rejection of free-market ideology. This will be fiercely opposed, not only by China’s fifth columnists of U.S. companies with lucrative China deals, but by corporate America generally, by Wall Street, and corporate Democrats. That’s why China policy to date has been limited to half measures.
Under Trump, there were fierce divisions between the China hawks and the Wall Street contingent led by Mnuchin. Lighthizer and Pottinger were able to get tougher trade and export control policies; Mnuchin made sure there would be no restriction on China’s access to U.S. capital markets. The same splits are evident among Democrats. Chuck Schumer managed to get a tough bipartisan China bill through the Senate, the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act. It did a great deal on the industrial policy and export control front, but nothing on capital markets.
The reaction to the intermittent toughening of Biden’s China policies has been fierce. Since August, Chinese President Xi Jinping has delivered even clearer warnings to Chinese capitalists that they exist at his pleasure. The screws have been tightened on Hong Kong. Ultranationalist language is now common on official pronouncements. A blogger close to the regime posted an essay that was widely quoted in official media. It warned of the “savage and ferocious attacks that the United States has begun to launch against China,” adding that “It is necessary not only to destroy the decadent forces but also to scrape the bones and heal the wounds.”
In a September 1 speech to the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, China’s new ambassador to the U.S. Qin Gang scrapped the conciliatory tone and warned of “disastrous consequences” if the U.S. uses a “Cold War playbook.” He explicitly excoriated U.S. support for Taiwan’s independence and its blacklisting of Huawei.
As the Biden administration responds, there’s a risk of foreign-policy concerns crowding out economic ones. China will press the U.S. to relent on its economic moves, in exchange for easing military tensions. And as the big November climate meetings approach, China will be offering a deal for climate collaboration in exchange for keeping the economic status quo. When Vice President Kamala Harris made her much-touted Asia trip in late August, the one truculent remark she made regarding China was a warning that the U.S. would defend the freedom of the South China Sea. Astonishingly, there was not word one about China’s economic predation. The speech must have been reviewed a dozen times by multiple players.
Critics of Trump’s China policy, and now Biden’s, warn of a new cold war. The fact is that we are in one. George Kennan’s strategy of containment is not a bad model. If we can slow China’s rush to global and domestic domination, the internal contradictions in its model just might become more evident and problematic. What remains to be seen is whether Biden will be able to be radical enough.
5. Drone Strikes Gone Wrong: Fixing a Strategic Problem
Conclusion:
The sad finale to US involvement in Afghanistan continues to hang like a pall over Washington’s foreign policy. From this disaster, however, we should glean lessons that will enable the United States to do better going ahead. The needless killing of civilians on 29 August was a tragic mistake – but like so many such mistakes, not isolated by cause or effect. Only by understanding this context, can we fix a problem that has long term ramifications, and – if corrected -- will continue to plague US Foreign Policy.“‘At first, there was no support for the Taliban,’ commented Mullah Omari, a Taliban military commander, in Afghanistan’s Wardak Province. ‘It was when the Americans started killing civilians that people started supporting us, giving us food, bullets, and offering men.” Quod Erat Demonstrandum.
Fri, 10/08/2021 - 8:32pm
Drone Strikes Gone Wrong: Fixing a Strategic Problem
By Andrew Milburn
Watching the chaotic scenes in Kabul airport this last August, it is difficult to make sense of the manner in which Washington pulled the plug on a two-decade Coalition effort leaving our allies non-plussed and our partners to the mercy of a vengeful enemy. Less than three weeks later, these images came again to mind during the testimony of Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and two of his four-star generals before the Senate Armed Services Committee. Nothing in that testimony, however, brought a sense of closure. Instead, repeated attempts at justification, and ultimately – a collective refusal to take responsibility – only rubbed salt in the wound.
As we wait for the investigations and inquiries to play out, however, I want to focus here on critical lessons from a single incident. It was the last offensive action taken by the United States in a 20-year war – a drone strike that failed to hit its target, killing instead several civilians. The mistake was no isolated incident but part of a pattern that has implications not just for US counter-terrorism strategy but for US foreign policy going ahead. I discuss here what the problem is, why it matters, and how to fix it.
Stumbling Behind the News Cycle
Instead of admitting that this might be the case, however, the Pentagon reacted to emerging evidence with a sluggish response that lacked transparency. For days after the Aug. 29 strike, Pentagon officials asserted that it had been conducted correctly, despite 10 civilians being killed, including seven children. Meanwhile, news organizations raised doubts about the official version of events, reporting that the driver of the targeted vehicle was a longtime employee at an American humanitarian organization and pointing to a lack of evidence to support the Pentagon’s claim that the vehicle contained explosives.
Sadly, the New York Times revelations were not enough to prevent General Milley from calling the strike “righteous” with an enthusiasm that might seem inappropriate even if he had been correct. Instead, the strike was far from righteous. It was a completely avoidable mistake, propelled by flaws in organizational culture to a level where it would undermine US credibility on the global stage.
A Cultural Faultline
Let’s forget the troubling circumstances for a moment and take a clear-eyed look at what this tragic curtain call teaches us about the pitfalls of conducting counter-terrorism by drone, because if United States policy involves withdrawing from volatile regions around the globe, this may have to be our modus operandi going ahead.
The good news is that after the initial faltering, the Pentagon has been open about what happened. Cynics might suggest that this is merely because irrefutable evidence was made publicly available by an iconic US media enterprise, the New York Times.
The incident reveals a cultural faultline between the US military and organizations such as the media, the UN, and the various non-profit groups that work in combat zones. Such organizations tend to see the Pentagon as being purposefully deceitful and, perhaps criminally negligent when it comes to loss of human life that is not American.
I see instead an ill-informed, stumbling bureaucracy whose leaders genuinely want to do the right thing, but whose actions only continue to confirm negative perceptions around the world. And in a global landscape where the United States can no longer rely on its standing but must instead compete for influence, these perceptions matter.
Looking for Fundamental Flaws not mere Anomalies
The Pentagon has announced that there will be an investigation into the 29 August strike. I don’t intend to speculate about the outcome of this investigation, but enough is already known to indicate that flawed procedures used for targeting drone in this particular strike, align with patterns of the past. The investigative work carried out by the New York Times investigative team, offers us these insights, in contrast to similar strikes of the past which left in their wake tragedy without resolution.
The Times investigation is particularly valuable because Government investigations tend to focus only on perceived anomalies, rather than fundamental flaws in accepted procedures. It is especially important now to eliminate those flaws that consistently result in civilian casualties because President Joe Biden himself initially held up this drone strike as an example of success in his so-called “over-the-horizon” strategy to respond to terrorist threats from afar.
To be clear, airstrikes don’t comprise a strategy at all. But since I am limited by word count, I want to focus here on mitigating the most adverse effects of a policy that I believe in any case is doomed to fail.
Why Civilians Die
I need to begin by explaining that there are three reasons why civilians are killed in air strikes. Misidentification – as appears to be the case in this latest incident -- is the first. The second is when civilians are in the target area, or subsequently move there, unobserved. Given time, drone operators have methods for mitigating this risk. The third reason - not a factor in this case – is when civilians are known to be in the area, but the risk to their lives is judged to be justified by the importance of the target. There is another ascetic term used to describe this justification: military necessity. The pressure to rush to a strike is more likely to cause error in all three cases.
Sometimes a rush is unavoidable – but with flaws in the current process, this leads to a huge margin of error. Mistakes of course will happen in any human enterprise, but we should learn from a pattern of similar mistakes in the past to prevent them happening again. Let me explain what I mean by this –in terms that aren’t too technical.
Deliberate vs Dynamic
There are two types of airstrikes - deliberate and dynamic. Deliberate are planned long in advance, have numerous checks, use a pattern of life analysis, and have a relatively low incident of civilian casualties. Dynamic strikes are usually conducted when the attacker has a small window of opportunity to engage a target. In dynamic targeting there is rarely time to conduct the full process of checks and balances that mitigate risk to civilians. Because of this margin for error, dynamic targeting amidst a civilian population is a method usually employed only in cases of imminent threat or for high value targets. Even so, the one feature of targeting that dynamic strikes should never bypass is positive identification – based on credible intelligence.
Given the circumstances, the use of time sensitive targeting for the 29 August strike was certainly justifiable – but the process was flawed. Imminence does not justify pursuing a procedure that is more likely than not to result in catastrophic error – which was to conduct a drone strike on the basis of very little information. Notice that I don’t use the term “intelligence” because uncorroborated information does not earn that title.
Reasonable Certainty?
The hunt for ISIS-K operatives reportedly planning an attack on Kabul Airport in the wake of a deadly suicide bombing at Abbey Gate, was conducted by MQ-9 Reaper drones flying wide race-track patterns above the city.
Based on the information that a white sedan could be used in the next attack, one of the drones began following a Toyota Corolla of the same color in one of the poorer parts of the city. Through the drone’s high-resolution cameras, the strike cell watched the vehicle as it made various stops and observed several men pack it with large bundles, which they believed to be explosives. From this pattern a narrative emerged – one that was quickly accepted by all in the chain of command. However, what the watchers believed was an ISIS-K operative turned out to be one Zemari Ahmadi, a longtime employee of a US aid organization, and what they believed to be a safe house turned out to be a family home, full of children. The explosives were water bottles.
After the strike, General Mackenzie said the decision to strike a white Toyota Corolla sedan, after having tracked it for about eight hours, was made in an “earnest belief” — based on a standard of “reasonable certainty” — that it posed an imminent threat to American forces at Kabul airport. Having been involved in similar situations, I know that these are tough calls to make. I have no doubt that all involved in the strike process were devastated by the result and it’s not my intention to rub salt in their wounds but do believe it’s worth unravelling this account, which we have to assume is accurate.
Anyone who has spent time in Afghanistan, indeed the Middle East, must be driven to question how “reasonable certainty” could be ascribed to a target description that loosely matched one in five vehicles on Afghan roads. Mackenzie’s statement reveals an opinion based more on wishful thinking than sound intelligence. When combined with high rank and a dominant personality, confirmation bias compounds initial errors, and causes other more junior but important participants in the process reluctant to challenge the views of a commander. The result is often what followed in this case – misidentification and tragic error.
From McKenzie’s own account, the intelligence was at best tenuous and despite 8 hours of surveillance by full motion video, there was apparently no attempt to confirm it from other sources. There may have been good reason for this – but McKenzie left this question on the table as though it wasn’t important enough to answer. Given that much time, it is unusual for an experienced commander to conduct a strike based on such a thin veneer of intelligence without corroboration.
A Rush to Kill
I can only imagine that there was intense pressure up and down the chain of command to make this strike happen. At the policy level, to make good on the President’s steely eyed vow to hunt down the killers of 13 US servicemen, to show resolve and competence as a counterweight to the shambolic scenes at Kabul airport which showed the exact opposite. And for those lower down the chain, it was a more visceral motive – the desire for vengeance, a need to dispel for a moment the pall of humiliation that weighed heavily on all of us who had served in that war. These were all understandable motives certainly – but emotion is corrosive and has no place in the targeting process. If left unchecked, it will cause a rush to failure. This is especially true when employing drones.
The Thing about Drones: A Dangerous Misconception
The number of drone strikes escalated sharply over a decade ago during the Obama administration. This preference was particularly pronounced for strikes in places such as Yemen or Pakistan – foreign and supposedly sovereign countries far beyond the reach of US ground forces. One reason for this trend was that using unmanned platforms did not involve risk to pilots. But there was also an implicit but clearly evident feeling that by distancing human beings from the act, we could somehow make the whole killing thing less distasteful -- even when American citizens were the target. This was around the same time when Presidential statements gave rise to the misconception that drones are more precise, less dangerous to non-combatants.
By placing a human in the loop, with observation of the target, manned aircraft offer another opportunity to corroborate information. This advantage probably would not have made a difference in the Kabul strike since it is unlikely that a pilot would have seen anything more than the drone’s cameras. But it isn’t just the remote-control aspect of drones that makes them inherently more dangerous to civilians. During a drone strike, the process for analyzing and sharing key information is usually distributed among people who are not only geographically separated but working in different capacities, as if in silos. Sometimes one person will have critical information that obviates the validity of the target but because he is separated from the people controlling and directing the strike – it doesn’t reach them in time. Communication flow between these silos takes time – and breaks down when racing against the clock or countering other pressures such as confirmation bias.
In a recent tweet, Marc Garlasco, the former Chief of High Value Targeting on the Joint Staff, and now a leading analyst on non-combatant casualty mitigation, commented on an observation gleaned from two decades of experience with drone strikes: “I found that there was a pattern: in a set of cases, the fact that civilians were present in the target area was known by someone in the group of operators and analysts, but that information didn’t reach the commander making the decision to fire.”
All of these factors indicate that the process of dynamic targeting using drones should include rapidly executable checks that counter the obfuscating effects of confirmation bias and distribution. But there is much more that can and should be done.
Fixing the Problem
As DOD commissions two separate investigations into the situation and various Congressional committees conduct their own probes, it’s going to be important to maintain unity of effort based on the correct approach. So – from policy makers down to those directly involved in the process of hunting and killing by drone – here are some guidelines intended to keep the US military on the right side of the counter-terrorism equation.
Recognize that there is a Problem
How bad is the problem of mistaking civilians for valid targets? Well, estimates vary widely. Defense experts acknowledge that the official Department of Defense estimates are probably low, so to get a better perspective of the problem one has to look at those of the various non-profit watch dogs that track such figures.
Seth Jones a defense analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, commented recently “Even when I was in government and had access to top-secret information, I do not ever remember seeing an analysis on the costs and benefits of strikes.” It would be hard to find someone better placed to know. Jones was for several years a senior advisor to US Special Operations Forces in Afghanistan, and subsequently worked in the Pentagon, as the Commander of US SOCOM’s liaison to the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations.
Airwars, a reputable London-based nonprofit watchdog that tracks civilian casualties in war zones, estimates about 29,000 innocent people have been killed by US-led air strikes. It’s important to note that this figure reflects civilian casualties from both manned aircraft and drones across all theaters.
Even these last numbers pale in comparison to civilian casualties in wars that the United States has fought in the past – or to those inflicted by countries such as Russia and Saudi Arabia in recent conflicts. But do we really want to set the bar that low? If we have the means to narrow that margin for error why not take it – and do so transparently? For the US military, seizing the high ground should be as valuable a moral imperative as it is a tactical one.
And let’s not forget that there are pragmatic reasons for doing so. The “all’s fair in war” argument backfires when a civilian population seeks revenge against a foreign military that treats it with ruthless disdain. Being subjected to apparently random acts of devastating violence tends to nurture a desire for revenge.
Such an approach only serves to make terrorist organizations more violent and resilient while ensuring that they have no shortage of recruits from among a populace whose only knowledge of the United States, is the occasional bolt from the blue that claims innocent lives. Allegations of civilian deaths from drone strikes are widely covered by the regional media outlets and become a rallying cry for our enemies.
For those still unconvinced that the US should care about killing civilians overseas, a recent example offers sobering lessons.
A decade of US drone strikes in Pakistan which killed hundreds, maybe thousands of Pakistani civilians is attributed by experts as being a leading cause of anti-US feeling in that country. It would be hard to argue that alienating the population of an entire nation comprising some 226 million Muslims, a nation armed, incidentally, with nuclear weapons, could be anything but inimical to US interests. And as it happens now, the United States could really use having a better relationship with that particular country.
Accepting then that there is a problem, how do we solve it. I am going to focus here on improving the manner in which the US military conducts investigations. Although these occur by definition “right of bang”, fixing the problem of who conducts them and how will enable Washington to identify patterns and prevent future incidents.
Widen the Focus and Composition of Investigating Teams
An inherent flaw of the way that investigations are currently conducted is that they tend to focus on a single incident, which leads them to look for anomalies or departures from accepted procedures instead of examining that incident in its wider historical context. Fixing this will entail changing the mandate of such investigations, to ensure that they do the hard work to identify patterns. But it will also entail modifying the procedures for selecting the members of these teams together to ensure that they encompass a wider pool of expertise while providing depth and continuity of experience.
One method of doing this might be to establish a pool of experts to form fly-away teams after an incident. This pool should include non-DOD civilians to pre-empt perceptions of bias and opacity.
Many, if not most, investigations do not visit the scene of the strike or talk to witnesses. There are a number of good reasons for this, derived from understandable concerns about force protection and operational security. But these obstacles can be overcome if DOD is willing to find creative solutions. One solution would be to ensure that all those experts assigned to the pool of investigators are granted the appropriate level of clearance. There are probably also a number of non-DOD personnel with subject matter expertise who already have such clearances.
There are options available to ensure an equally thorough process for those locations which pose too great a risk for US personnel to visit. All members of the pool of experts should be trained in how to conduct remote investigations. If the New York Times has this capability –the US Government should too.
Another work-around should involve seeking help from organizations outside DOD – from the media, NGOs and organizations such as the UN. There are other reasons why this would prove helpful. Such contacts have an added advantage, because they can provide information to assist an investigative team beyond the intelligence that led to the strike – intelligence that may, as we have seen, been flawed in the first place. But making this coordination common practice will entail a concerted effort to change organizational culture.
Fix the Culture
Dr. Colin Jackson is Chairman of Strategic and Operational Research department at the US Naval War College, a former high-level Pentagon official, and renowned expert on counterinsurgency. When questioned in a recent interview about what makes a military unit good at counter-insurgency operations, he replied “Intellectual humility” before going on to define this concept as a willingness to embrace the views of outside agencies. In my experience, however, intellectual humility is hardly a main-stay of US military culture.
One indicator: military officers tend to treat members of the media with a curious mix of condescension and barely concealed hostility. Understanding that transparency serves our cause better than obfuscation, the US military should try instead to find common ground, and a desire to discover the truth should be central to that common ground. How refreshing it would have been to see DOD reach out to the New York Times investigative team in the aftermath of the 29 August strike, instead of engaging in a battle of the narrative – a battle in which the Pentagon rapidly found themselves on the losing side.
The supercilious attitude that military officials display towards the media is also an implicit theme of their dealings with Non-Governmental Organizations. Whereas reporters are seen as being inherently inimical to US national interests, NGO members are Granola Eating Tree Huggers – despite the fact that these same people routinely incur far greater risk than US military personnel who are accustomed to operating only within a cocoon of force protection.
The reality is that such organizations are comprised of dedicated, intelligent, and courageous men and women with expert knowledge of local conditions which often surpasses in depth and context anything gleaned by military intelligence sources. Even were this not the case, the military only hurts itself by not working to resolve misperceptions that naturally arise between two very different cultures.
Many reputable NGOs and Non-Profit watch dogs see the Pentagon as being purposefully deceitful and – where it comes to the expenditure of human life that is not American – criminally negligent. This latest incident reinforced that perception.
“ The U.S. military’s initial, stubborn insistence that this was a ‘righteous strike’—despite compelling and immediate evidence to the contrary—raises fundamental questions about why U.S. military commands so routinely ignore reports of tragedies from affected communities,” says Chris Woods, director of Airwars. “It can’t be right that civilians only appear to have accountability when the investigative might of U.S. media giants is brought to bear.”
Woods is not completely off-target. Over the course of a 31-year career to include multiple combat deployments I have observed an implicit but nevertheless prevalent belief in the US Military that American life is inherently more important than Afghan, or Iraq or Syrian life. It’s a belief which underlies our policies and attitudes – and saps our credibility. I like to believe that the institution that I served for over 31 years is better than that, but we need to work to make it so.
Make Reparations a Reality
Civilian deaths inevitably leave in their wake a desire for vengeance – perfect fodder for extremist groups. A process that results in rapid and fair reparations for victims will do much to undercut this tendency. In the aftermath of the 29 August strike General McKenzie apologized for the error and said the United States is considering making reparation payments to the family of the victims. Based on the US military’s track record, “considering” may be the culminating point of this process.
The US Congress earmarks $3 Million annually for ex gratia payments to war victims. In practice only a fraction of this amount is disbursed to victims and their families. The reason for this discrepancy is not indicative of a low number of civilian casualties but rather of flaws in the underlying policies and methods of investigation. Reform would be relatively simply. The policy should be re-written so as not require proof in each instance that ex-gratia payment will benefit US policy. And, as discussed, the manner in which investigations are conducted is not as rigorous as it could be.
This would be a good opportunity to make good on McKenzie’s promise, and in so doing examine why such payments often falter. The family concerned has already said with understandable outrage that an apology will not be enough. With the Middle Eastern media continuing to follow this tragedy, the world is indeed watching.
Armed Overwatch: Putting a Human in the Loop
The same technology that enables the United States to lead the world in drone technology should also be applied to fixing their flaws and finding alternate solutions to the problem of undermining extremist organizations. I have written elsewhere about what such solutions might entail – but it is worth here looking through a narrower aperture at preferred platforms from which these strikes are conducted.
We have determined why manned platforms are preferable to drones when it comes to avoiding civilian deaths – but there simply aren’t enough manned aircraft in the US military’s inventory to allow their exclusive employment for strikes. Fortunately, US Special Operations Command is pursuing an “armed overwatch” program that will provide manned platforms that are robust, expeditionary and manufactured in enough quantity to complement drones. Whilst, not a solution in itself, this will give commanders another more reliable tool for target identification.
Machines not Humans are the Automatons
Wearing a uniform should not relegate anyone to being a mere cypher – from four-star generals whose responsibility it is to inform policy makers about the disadvantages and risks of targeted killings to junior drone operators and intelligence analysts who should be encouraged to avoid compartmentalizing information. Speaking up to avoid mistakes is a practice must be inculcated into targeting in the same way as it is into training safety.
Conclusion
The sad finale to US involvement in Afghanistan continues to hang like a pall over Washington’s foreign policy. From this disaster, however, we should glean lessons that will enable the United States to do better going ahead.
The needless killing of civilians on 29 August was a tragic mistake – but like so many such mistakes, not isolated by cause or effect. Only by understanding this context, can we fix a problem that has long term ramifications, and – if corrected -- will continue to plague US Foreign Policy.
“‘At first, there was no support for the Taliban,’ commented Mullah Omari, a Taliban military commander, in Afghanistan’s Wardak Province. ‘It was when the Americans started killing civilians that people started supporting us, giving us food, bullets, and offering men.” Quod Erat Demonstrandum.
About the Author(s)
Andrew Milburn retired from the Marine Corps as a colonel in 2019 after a 31 year career. His last position in uniform was Deputy Commander of Special Operations Central (SOCCENT), and prior to that commanding officer of the Marine Raider Regiment and Combined Special Operations Task Force – Iraq.
Since retiring, he has written a critically acclaimed memoir: When the Tempest Gathers and has had articles published in The Atlantic , USA Today, JFQ, and War on the Rocks, in addition to the Military Times . He is on the Adjunct Faculty of the Joint Special Operations University and teaches classes on leadership, planning, ethics, command and control, mission command, risk, special operations and irregular warfare at US military schools. He is a co-host of the Modern War Institute’s Irregular War Podcast, and Irregular War Initiative.
6. CIA's New China Mission Center: How To Do It Right
I received these very important comments about the CIA reorganization (author must remain anonymous due to the rules of the listserv). These may be more important than any of the media reports and punditry commentary on the issue:
I have nothing against “mission centers” per se – CIA’s Counterterrorism Center was a success -- and I hope much is going on in the field and out of the headlines.
But rather than place hopes in yet another bureaucratic reorganization of CIA HQS, I wonder, are more Agency officers learning Chinese?
Are more convincing commercially-covered platforms being developed to get case officers into China?
Are we aggressively going after recruitments of Chinese officials in Third World countries with less stringent counterintelligence environments than Beijing, where the PRC is pursuing their Belt-and-Road initiative?
Are we undertaking OSS-style “political warfare” efforts to publish arguments, convincing to Chinese listeners and readers, that godless communism is bad while freedom (including free exercise of religion and rights for ethnic minorities) is good?
More and better meat-and-potatoes espionage and covert action are the keys to success, not a reshuffling of East Asia Division managers’ titles.
Article excerpts:
Larry Wortzel, an éminence grise of Chinese military intelligence who witnessed the Tianamen Square massacre while serving in Beijing as a military attaché, is “skeptical” about the mission center. He worries that the new mission center will be run by political appointees, making it more likely that “the quality, factuality and reliability of any judgements” will suffer from bias or interference.
“The fact is, however, that the leaders of such groups and the agencies that create them most often are political appointees. That means that often some sort of ideological bias may cloud assessments coming out of ‘mission centers,” Wortzel said, while carefully noting he has not worked for CIA. “It often means that political appointees do not necessarily pass on assessments that they know their appointing official does not want to hear.
Wortzel pointed to the “terribly flawed” intelligence former President George W. Bush received from his “center” about Iraqi chemical biological weapons, and to the “tainted” assessments Lyndon Johnson received about Vietnam.
“The same is true of information given to President Kennedy about the viability of the Bay of Pigs invasion,” Wortzel says.
Building a truly useful CMC capability at CIA, Eftimiades notes, will take a long time and require support from the ODNI and outside government.
“It took decades for the Intelligence Community to build the requisite knowledge and capabilities necessary to counter the former Soviet Union. For China, we are quite a ways off from that level of knowledge,” he said. “My personal hope is that the new China Mission Center reaches out to academia as its most effective means to understand China and its global ambitions.”
CIA's New China Mission Center: How To Do It Right - Breaking Defense
"Given our poor record against the Chinese,” a former senior intelligence official said, “maybe we should start with good tradecraft and attention to CI [counterintelligence]. Basics. There is no silver bullet.”
The CIA seal on the floor of CIA headquarters in Langley, Virg. (Pool Photo by David Burnett/Newsmakers)
WASHINGTON: Several experts with extensive intelligence experience are raising questions about just how effective the CIA’s new China Mission Center will be and offering advice on how to ensure it functions as well as it must.
The CIA announced Thursday the creation of the CMC, the newest of almost a dozen at the agency. “CMC will further strengthen our collective work on the most important geopolitical threat we face in the 21st century, an increasingly adversarial Chinese government,” CIA Director William Burns said in a statement.
The statement echoed what US officials and experts have said for years about China, but one former senior intelligence officer was immediately skeptical.
“We continue to follow the Brennan re-org, which emasculated the organization’s mission of stealing secrets,” the former officer told Breaking Defense, referring to former CIA Director John Brennan. “No doubt this new mission center, headed up by the analysts, will require a hiring surge, more people and a new building in Reston. (I thought the ‘pivot’ to Asia happened several years ago? With a new Powerpoint presentation, the latest pivot begins!!)”
The ex-officer pleaded for CIA to focus on human intelligence [HUMINT]. “For Huminters it is access, and access comes with territory, i.e. we have to be overseas engaging these targets,” and not in Washington building budgets and buildings.
“Given our poor record against the Chinese,” the official said, referencing the deadly collapse of an espionage network there, “maybe we should start with good tradecraft and attention to CI [counterintelligence]. Basics. There is no silver bullet.”
Another former senior intelligence officer welcomed the move, noting that “a new approach to organizing intelligence and counterintelligence to provide insight to, and protection from Chinese intelligence is long overdue.”
Nick Eftimiades, who served in the CIA, DIA and State Department, said in an email that, “many challenges [are] facing the new China Mission Center, including developing cultural and area knowledge, language capabilities, and cyber, scientific and engineering expertise.”
Eftimiades described the Intelligence Community’s analysis and espionage efforts regarding China this way: “At best, US intelligence collection and analysis against China is only good. China presents an extraordinary strategic challenge to the US and its allies.”
Still, he said that while the China Mission Center “is one step in the right direction,” the IC must fill “many intelligence gaps in support of US policy makers, diplomatic efforts, and military planning. And our counterintelligence resources and capabilities against China are quite insufficient to protect the US government, no less the defense industrial base and commercial companies.”
The recipient of the DIA Director’s Intelligence Award, DIA’s highest honor, stressed the CMC must be “expansive enough in its mission to assist the FBI, DOD, and DHS in protecting the US commercial and technological infrastructure, which is under siege by China’s intelligence services, state owned enterprises, and select universities.”
Larry Wortzel, an éminence grise of Chinese military intelligence who witnessed the Tianamen Square massacre while serving in Beijing as a military attaché, is “skeptical” about the mission center. He worries that the new mission center will be run by political appointees, making it more likely that “the quality, factuality and reliability of any judgements” will suffer from bias or interference.
“The fact is, however, that the leaders of such groups and the agencies that create them most often are political appointees. That means that often some sort of ideological bias may cloud assessments coming out of ‘mission centers,” Wortzel said, while carefully noting he has not worked for CIA. “It often means that political appointees do not necessarily pass on assessments that they know their appointing official does not want to hear.
Wortzel pointed to the “terribly flawed” intelligence former President George W. Bush received from his “center” about Iraqi chemical biological weapons, and to the “tainted” assessments Lyndon Johnson received about Vietnam.
“The same is true of information given to President Kennedy about the viability of the Bay of Pigs invasion,” Wortzel says.
Building a truly useful CMC capability at CIA, Eftimiades notes, will take a long time and require support from the ODNI and outside government.
“It took decades for the Intelligence Community to build the requisite knowledge and capabilities necessary to counter the former Soviet Union. For China, we are quite a ways off from that level of knowledge,” he said. “My personal hope is that the new China Mission Center reaches out to academia as its most effective means to understand China and its global ambitions.”
7. You Think It’s a Game? What Video Games Can—and Can’t—Teach About Strategy and History
Will be pooh-poohed by all us old guys. But we have to think about communicating with, influencing, and motivating the modern generations.
Conclusion:
Thinking back to my Sherman, the strategic errors that led me to rely on an antiquated tank to stave off the Warsaw Pact would have been the same regardless of whether I needed to go through the acquisition process and subsequent fielding, maintenance, and training on the Sherman beforehand. If players engage with strategy and history video games critically, ensure that their understanding of a historical period is not defined by a few lines of code, and focus on characteristics across games that can lead to insight, video games represent a viable way to teach strategic concepts. As more complicated strategy games are developed and global appetite for military wargaming and simulation grows, we can look forward to newer ways to apply strategic concepts and explore interpretations of the past.
You Think It’s a Game? What Video Games Can—and Can’t—Teach About Strategy and History - Modern War Institute
You can only ask so much of a Sherman tank. Tasking it and its crew to hold the last line of defense against a Russian-Czech force may have been a bridge too far. As my adversaries’ Mi-24 helicopters took turns pummeling my unfortunate tank with rockets and guided missiles, their motorized infantry advanced, winning the game handily.
For many, video games, like the one I had just lost, are an entry point into the world of military affairs and history. Video games are unique from traditional media, particularly when it comes to teaching strategy. Unlike (most) books or movies, the player maintains some level of agency over what’s occurring. The video games’ decision-making element makes them a tempting teaching tool. The level of data a computer can process allows players to engage with and visualize a more complex situation than board games or tabletop wargames.
The generations that grew up playing video games are now strategy professionals, so they have increasingly considered video games a viable tool to learn about strategy and history. The BBC intermittently runs a game show called Time Commanders in which contestants attempt to fight historical battles using games from the Total War franchise with the assistance of exasperated military historians. Max Brooks recommended a series of different strategy games in these pages. Some British Army units have used Wargame: Red Dragon, which models combined-arms operations in the 1980s and early 1990s to conduct command post exercises and vehicle recognition training.
As a media meant primarily to entertain, the creators of video games take shortcuts for the sake of practicality and fun, even if they are seeking to portray a historical era or military operation as accurately as possible. Even within the genre of strategy games, those that seek to model every possible detail are often far less popular than those that take shortcuts for the sake of playability. While the growing interest in using video games to teach strategy and history is laudable there are limits to their utility. Those looking to use video games as teaching tools would be wise to heed the following maxims before booting up.
Play Against Other People
Many strategy games, particularly those that attempt to model the entire world at some point in the past, are meant to be played by yourself. The game’s artificial intelligence (AI) controls the other nations or characters. Players attempting to gain some sort of strategic insight from games should seek out every opportunity to play with and against other humans. AI in games can vary in quality, running the gamut from brain-dead to omniscient. AI also tends to be predictable in its course of action. Real players are much more capable of the remarkable inventiveness and horrendous errors that characterize conflict than AI currently allows. Furthermore, the patterns of interaction you develop with your opponent adds another strategic layer that AI usually struggles to match.
Play Different Kinds of Games that Model the Same Thing
Playing a variety of games has the benefit of helping the player separate overall strategic lessons from tactics that work to exploit the foibles of one particular game. One of the more extreme examples is the game Victoria II, set in the nineteenth century, in which one of the resources required to create an artillery unit is liquor. The need for fire support, in turn, drives an enormous global demand for liquor to feed the war machine which consequently makes uninterrupted access to liquor more of a strategic imperative than access to traditional resources like steel, cattle, or coal. One only needs to take a sober view of similar games, which do not feature liquor as a resource, to realize that liquor is not quite so vital to the conduct of military affairs as Victoria II posits.
Use Historical Games as the Starting Point for Looking into the Past, Not as an Authority
Historical nuance is inevitably a casualty of simplification in strategy games. Many games take civilizations or nations such as the Zulu, Britons, and Aztecs and have them behave more or less the same but with aesthetic differences, a single unique feature (e.g., the Zulu can train Impi warriors), or a bonus very loosely based on history (e.g., British shepherds work 25 percent faster than everyone else’s). Sometimes, such as in the case of Rome: Total War’s portrayal of Ptolemaic Egyptians as charioteers, the developers were simply wrong. Historical games can also reinforce misconceptions. In many games featuring colonialism and imperialism, territory that can be colonized is incorrectly portrayed as empty or unsettled, just waiting to be utilized by the player. Sub-Saharan Africa is the most frequent victim of this unfortunate trope. Australia, too, is often a vacuum awaiting “civilization.” While this may model the contemporary rhetoric of colonial powers, it misrepresents colonialism as a phenomenon and callously erases its victims.
Recognize the Game’s Strategic Limitations
By necessity, video games are reductionist in their portrayal of the world. Complicated issues in social and political interactions are made abstract enough for most people to engage with them. The assumptions underlying those abstractions lead to misinterpretation. For instance, in the Civilization franchise, wars between players only end when they sign a peace treaty or one side is completely destroyed. In contrast, players of the medieval-era strategy series Crusader Kings can unilaterally force an end to a conflict if, for example, their predetermined objective has been achieved. Neither is a terrible way to portray conflict, but comparing different approaches allows for a slightly fuller perspective on war as a phenomenon than the rigid framework presented by each game.
Thinking back to my Sherman, the strategic errors that led me to rely on an antiquated tank to stave off the Warsaw Pact would have been the same regardless of whether I needed to go through the acquisition process and subsequent fielding, maintenance, and training on the Sherman beforehand. If players engage with strategy and history video games critically, ensure that their understanding of a historical period is not defined by a few lines of code, and focus on characteristics across games that can lead to insight, video games represent a viable way to teach strategic concepts. As more complicated strategy games are developed and global appetite for military wargaming and simulation grows, we can look forward to newer ways to apply strategic concepts and explore interpretations of the past.
Marcel Plichta is an independent analyst based in Washington, DC. He has previously written on security topics for Defense One, World Politics Review, and Small Wars Journal.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.
8. U.S. investigators increasingly confident directed-energy attacks behind Havana Syndrome
The question is what are we going to do when we determine the cause and who is responsible?
Excerpts:
Marc Polymeropoulos, a former CIA officer who suffered debilitating symptoms from a suspected directed-energy attack during a 2017 mission in Moscow, called on Congress and the Biden administration to respond forcefully to the attacks.
“I think it’s now time that Congress and the administration together begin discussing and formulating possible policy responses, in what was an act of war, in preparation for a future attribution call by the national security establishment,” Polymeropoulos said.
Rubio said he was hopeful that the Intelligence Committee would be able to share more information with the public “soon,” and credited Burns and other senior Biden administration officials with ramping up the investigation and devoting additional resources to helping the victims.
“It’s still a shame that this was not, in the last administration, treated with a level of seriousness,” Intelligence Chair Mark Warner (D-Va.) said. “And I think all the parts of the government are now working in tandem. But this has been going on for four, five years.”
It’s unclear when the Biden administration could begin to address the investigation publicly. CIA Deputy Director David Cohen said during a national security summit last month that the intelligence community is getting closer to identifying the source of the incidents, “but not close enough to make the analytic judgment people are waiting for.”
U.S. investigators increasingly confident directed-energy attacks behind Havana Syndrome
The National Security Council has been convening more frequent high-level meetings on the topic — a sign that the government’s review is accelerating.
“Hopefully we’ll make some headway because it’s a problem that’s escalating,” Senate Intelligence Vice Chair Marco Rubio said of the “Havana syndrome” cases. “This is not something that’s happened in the past — it’s something that’s happened and is ongoing.” | Stefani Reynolds/Pool via AP
10/08/2021 02:48 PM EDT
The U.S. government’s investigation into the mysterious illnesses impacting American personnel overseas and at home is turning up new evidence that the symptoms are the result of directed-energy attacks, according to five lawmakers and officials briefed on the matter.
Behind closed doors, lawmakers are also growing increasingly confident that Russia or another hostile foreign government is behind the suspected attacks, based on regular briefings from administration officials — although there is still no smoking gun linking the incidents to Moscow.
The National Security Council has recently been convening more frequent high-level meetings on the topic, according to a current and a former official with direct knowledge — a sign that the government’s review is accelerating.
“There have been new additional attacks, which is very disturbing,” said Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), who has been leading the push for answers on Capitol Hill. “It’s being taken very seriously now due to the director of the CIA … [who] has put very highly qualified people on it.”
“Hopefully we’ll make some headway because it’s a problem that’s escalating,” Senate Intelligence Vice Chair Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) added. “This is not something that’s happened in the past — it’s something that’s happened and is ongoing.”
Earlier this year, CIA Director William Burns tapped an officer who aided the Osama bin Laden manhunt to lead the agency’s investigation. It was the most significant escalation of the government’s long-running review of the incidents, which were first reported in Havana, Cuba, in 2016 and dubbed “Havana Syndrome.”
The phenomenon is getting more high-level attention as government officials have continued to report incidents in countries across Europe, Asia, Africa and South America throughout the year.
Most prominently, Vice President Kamala Harris’ August trip from Singapore to Vietnam was delayed more than three hours when multiple U.S. personnel reported symptoms consistent with Havana Syndrome in Hanoi. And in September, a member of Burns’ team reported similar symptoms and had to receive medical attention during the director’s trip to India, CNN reported.
A Biden administration official emphasized that the investigation is ongoing and has not yet reached specific conclusions.
“We are determined to get to the bottom of this as quickly as possible,” the official said. “The [intelligence community] is actively examining a range of hypotheses, but has made no determination about the cause of these incidents or who is responsible.”
POLITICO first reported in May that U.S. officials believed Russia’s elite spy unit, the GRU, was behind the events. While Burns and lawmakers briefed on the matter have publicly referred to the incidents as attacks, some officials remain skeptical of the prevailing theory, and some prominent neurologists have described that explanation as implausible.
But members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who are receiving weekly updates from the intelligence community on the status of the investigation, said the latest information they’ve received has disproved the skeptics — and in public statements, those lawmakers are increasingly referring to the incidents as directed-energy attacks.
“I think that’s quackery,” Rubio said of those who have argued that the symptoms are psychosomatic. “I’d invite them to explain that to the now-dozens of people who have suffered documented brain injuries that in many cases have made them incapable of ever working again.”
According to three people familiar with the matter, the Intelligence Committee’s review — based on weekly updates from the intelligence community — has continued to buttress a December 2020 report by the National Academy of Sciences which concluded that the most plausible explanation for the incidents was “directed, pulsed radio frequency energy.”
The victims — who include diplomats as well as intelligence officials and White House staffers — have reported symptoms including dizziness, intense ringing and pressure in the ears, debilitating headaches and even permanent brain damage.
The authors of the National Academy of Sciences report did not have access to classified information, but the Biden administration has since empaneled a group of medical experts who have been granted that access.
But Rubio, one of eight lawmakers privy to the most sensitive intelligence information, said the neurologists and U.S. officials who have examined the victims have found that they’re suffering from “very traumatic brain injuries” that likely came from an external force.
The Florida Republican also suggested that some of the skeptics, many of whom have written op-eds recently, are “influence agents that are being paid and or encouraged to write these on behalf of those — foreign government or whatever — that don’t want this to be discussed out there and want to cast doubt about it.”
“I mean, they’re echoing the lines that we heard from the Cuban regime and others,” Rubio added.
In a recent op-ed, for example, neurologist Robert Baloh contended that the symptoms stem from a psychosomatic illness — one caused by stress or emotional issues. Baloh said the more likely explanation is “mass hysteria,” or mass psychogenic illness.
Intelligence Committee members have roundly dismissed that claim.
“That is not my view,” Collins said, based on the committee’s briefings and “the extensive interviews with victims and brain imaging done at the University of Pennsylvania.”
“So I don’t know how you could argue that when brain imaging is showing a traumatic brain injury, somehow this is psychosomatic,” she added.
The rapid acceleration of the CIA-led probe comes as President Joe Biden on Friday signed a bill to aid victims of the suspected attacks by expanding access to medical treatment. The legislation, introduced by Intelligence Committee leaders in the House and Senate, cleared both chambers unanimously.
“Addressing these incidents has been a top priority for my administration,” Biden said in a statement. “We are bringing to bear the full resources of the U.S. government to make available first-class medical care to those affected and to get to the bottom of these incidents, including to determine the cause and who is responsible.”
There are other signs the administration is taking the incidents more seriously. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin last month issued new guidance to the Pentagon about the “troubling” events, urging personnel who believe they have been targeted to “immediately” depart the area and to report the incident.
“As part of a government-wide effort, the department is committed to finding the cause and the source of these [anomalous health incidents] and ensuring that affected individuals receive appropriate medical care as quickly as possible when needed,” Austin wrote in the Sept. 15 memo.
Marc Polymeropoulos, a former CIA officer who suffered debilitating symptoms from a suspected directed-energy attack during a 2017 mission in Moscow, called on Congress and the Biden administration to respond forcefully to the attacks.
“I think it’s now time that Congress and the administration together begin discussing and formulating possible policy responses, in what was an act of war, in preparation for a future attribution call by the national security establishment,” Polymeropoulos said.
Rubio said he was hopeful that the Intelligence Committee would be able to share more information with the public “soon,” and credited Burns and other senior Biden administration officials with ramping up the investigation and devoting additional resources to helping the victims.
“It’s still a shame that this was not, in the last administration, treated with a level of seriousness,” Intelligence Chair Mark Warner (D-Va.) said. “And I think all the parts of the government are now working in tandem. But this has been going on for four, five years.”
It’s unclear when the Biden administration could begin to address the investigation publicly. CIA Deputy Director David Cohen said during a national security summit last month that the intelligence community is getting closer to identifying the source of the incidents, “but not close enough to make the analytic judgment people are waiting for.”
9. COVID Conspiracy: Analysis of foreign disinformation driving US vaccine resistance
Excerpts:
The reason, according to NCSC logic, is that disinformation “includes technically factual information purposely presented in a misleading way and may include amplification by a bot or other inauthentic account.”
These counterfeit entities turn information into weapons. It is not a new concept, but some the tools used to do it are.
There are six major, social media platforms. Three of them claim more than 2 billion daily users. Almost 60% of the world’s population use them. Therefore, it’s easy to see how those “inauthentic accounts” can manipulate the truth.
One week after the U.S. presidential election in 2016, I was in Sofia, Bulgaria, to moderate a panel discussion for NATO’s Allied Command Transformation. Russia’s hybrid warfare program was the source of significant conversation in both official and sideline dialogues. A key component of Russia’s hybrid approach to war is disinformation.
COVID Conspiracy: Analysis of foreign disinformation driving US vaccine resistance | WTOP
wtop.com · by J.J. Green · October 6, 2021
Disinformation is based on a lie — plain and simple.
The National Counterintelligence and Security Center, or NCSC, says disinformation is “false or inaccurate information that is spread deliberately, most often by adversaries.”
While adversaries really are the genesis of most disinformation, when it comes to the unprecedented explosion of COVID-19 vaccine disinformation, you are more likely to get it from your best friend, spouse, parents or even a trusted co-worker.
The reason, according to NCSC logic, is that disinformation “includes technically factual information purposely presented in a misleading way and may include amplification by a bot or other inauthentic account.”
These counterfeit entities turn information into weapons. It is not a new concept, but some the tools used to do it are.
There are six major, social media platforms. Three of them claim more than 2 billion daily users. Almost 60% of the world’s population use them. Therefore, it’s easy to see how those “inauthentic accounts” can manipulate the truth.
One week after the U.S. presidential election in 2016, I was in Sofia, Bulgaria, to moderate a panel discussion for NATO’s Allied Command Transformation. Russia’s hybrid warfare program was the source of significant conversation in both official and sideline dialogues. A key component of Russia’s hybrid approach to war is disinformation.
After a thorough investigation, of alleged Kremlin interference in the 2016 election, the U.S. intelligence community and Special counsel Robert Mueller, determined that Russian intelligence, at the direction of Russian President Vladimir Putin, used disinformation to interfere in the election.
It took three years for that investigation to conclude and the results to be publicized.
During that critical time frame, Americans were fire-hosed, through social media, with lies about each other, elected leaders, religion, race, police, football, food and anything else that Americans disagree about.
Subsequent U.S. government and Congressional investigations determined that the Kremlin played a key role in all of that, as well.
To make matters worse, the blueprint Russia used to exploit and amplify divisions between Americans in 2016, was subsequently trafficked all over the world.
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Every U.S. enemy was taught how to attack American democracy and, in some cases, try to kill Americans using disinformation.
The COVID-19 pandemic is the proof.
The most frustrating part about what’s happening in the U.S. now, according to numerous sources, is the difficulty persuading those spreading blatantly false COVID-19 disinformation to accept the truth.
Dr. Christopher Paul, senior social scientist with the Rand Corporation, was asked on WTOP recently to explain how divisions between Americans triggered by disinformation became so profound.
“It’s complicated. We as humans have certain vulnerabilities in human nature, certain aspects of human psychology that make us vulnerable to being manipulated,” Paul said.
The current media environment is a key enabler of that disinformation.
“If you couple the changing media landscape, where media and social media allow you to get into your own echo chamber and hear only things that agree with your position; and mobilize what we call in psychology, ‘confirmation bias,’ it allows these wedges, these separations to grow and fester,” Paul said.
He said tribalism, “our tendency to give extra credibility to those we perceive as like us,” is another layer of the problem.
How do we reach those who refuse to believe proven and well-documented facts about COVID-19 vaccines?
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told me that there are three important tools that can create a path to reach vaccine resisters.
The first step is “to realize that there is a rather broad spectrum of reasons why people are hesitant,” he said.
Carefully listening to their explanations, he suggests, sends the message that their concerns “are respected.” The next step is to answer what he calls “valid questions.”
For example, questions such as, “How did you develop this vaccine so quickly, in 11 months?”
Fauci said that can be answered by saying, “It isn’t that we did it in 11 months. We got to where we are by two decades of really, very elegant basic and clinical research.”
The most important part of the equation is finding “trusted messengers” to share the truth, Fauci said.
As COVID-19 vaccine disinformation continues to spread, Fauci said another activity is currently happening in the U.S.: Americans are making life or death decisions, like refusing vaccines, “based purely on ideology.”
His observation underlines how hard pushing back against disinformation is now and could be in the near term.
Listen to Green’s investigation of the Russian-intelligence linked disinformation campaign designed to stoke fear and distrust in the COVID-19 vaccines inside the U.S. Read his investigative report.
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PART 1: Millions of Americans aren't getting vaccinated against COVID-19, WTOP's J.J. Green reveals a secret plot by a foreign entity to spread lies about the vaccines.
change volume
PART 2: A fake company busted spreading disinformation about COVID vaccines.
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PART 3: Disinformation spilled out of the internet and landed in our own community.
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PART 4: Prominent people have refused to get the vaccines — and disinformation may have played a key role.
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PART 5: Fighting disinformation about COVID-19 and vaccines is a complex venture that will likely require patience and creativity.
wtop.com · by J.J. Green · October 6, 2021
10. PH gov't 'must drop all cases against Ressa' – international lawyers
Again, I hope the publicity from the Nobel will lead to changes in the Philippines.
PH gov't 'must drop all cases against Ressa' – international lawyers
The international lawyers of Rappler CEO Maria Ressa renewed their call to the Philippine government to drop all cases against her.
Amal Clooney and Caoilfhionn Gallagher QC, who both lead the international legal team of Ressa, made the call as they congratulated Ressa for her being a Nobel Peace Prize winner in 2021, along with Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov.
“Independent, investigative journalism in the Philippines is an act of bravery. At least 19 journalists have been killed since President Duterte assumed office in 2016. Our courageous client Maria Ressa has been convicted on baseless charges, faces decades behind bars, and receives daily threats of violence and rape simply for doing her job – for being a journalist," Gallagher said in a statement.
"Today, the Nobel Committee has honored her courage. Now, the Philippines must drop all cases against Ms. Ressa. And the world must hold the Philippines to account if it fails to do so," she added.
Clooney, for her part said: “I am so proud of my client and my friend Maria Ressa. She has sacrificed her own freedom for the rights of journalists all over the world and I am grateful to the Nobel Committee for shining a light on her incredible courage."
"I hope the Philippine authorities will now stop persecuting her and other journalists and that this prize helps to protect the press around the world,” she added.
There are at least seven pending cases against Ressa, Rappler, its directors, and a former researcher, as of August 10, 2021. On top of this, the Bureau of Internal Revenue is also investigating Rappler Incorporated and Rappler Holdings Corporation for alleged tax violations.
Ressa is the first Filipino individual to win the prestigious Nobel Peace Prize. President Rodrigo Duterte has repeatedly targeted her, peddled false information against her and Rappler, and called Rappler a “fake news outlet.”
World leaders and various groups and institutions have hailed Ressa and Muratov for their Nobel Prize.
The Kremlin has congratulated Muratov, whose newspaper has probed corruption allegations in Vladimir Putin's government, but the Duterte government has remained silent about Ressa's historic feat, as of posting. – Rappler.com
11. Asian countries are at last abandoning zero-covid strategies
Excerpt:
Yet if abandonment looks like no strategy at all, then consider the alternative. Hong Kong has stuck doggedly with zero covid. A harsh, mediocre government whose public-health messaging either goes unheard or is little trusted has meant a slow vaccination drive. Less than 15% of those over 80 have had at least one jab. Because the virus is not present (for now) in Hong Kong, no level of herd immunity has been bestowed by past infections there or in the other zero-covid countries. And the low risk of infection dissuades people from getting their shots. Hong Kong’s approach condemns the territory to endless limbo. Abandonment of zero covid—for all the inevitable hesitations and temporary reversals—is the way to go.
Asian countries are at last abandoning zero-covid strategies
Despite the risks, they are right to do so
Oct 9th 2021
FOR MUCH of the pandemic, many of the wealthier countries and territories in the Asia-Pacific region have pursued a “zero-covid” strategy, whether explicit or not. The success of the approach, involving closed borders, quarantine hotels and severe lockdowns, has generally been spectacular. Hong Kong has had no locally transmitted infections since mid-August. In the pandemic’s first year, Taiwan officially counted about a dozen deaths from covid-19. New Zealand is the standout zero-covid state, with just 27 deaths. Indeed, because fewer people died of things like flu or road accidents in lockdown, both countries recorded fewer overall deaths than in a normal year, according to The Economist’s excess-deaths tracker.
Listen to this story
Yet those with a good first act are struggling in the second. The coronavirus, especially the highly infectious Delta variant, usually has the last word. In Taiwan cases leapt in May, and the official death toll has risen to nearly 850. In Singapore daily infections have risen from low double digits in early July to more than 3,000 now. Australia, with some 2,000-odd daily cases, is following a similar trajectory. Even in New Zealand, now with double-digit daily cases, the dam has broken.
“The Delta variant is already out there. It’s too late to stop it,” says Tikki Pangestu, the WHO’s former head of research policy, now at the National University of Singapore. It is therefore appropriate for countries to abandon zero-covid strategies. Singapore was the first. In June its government said it was time to live with the virus. Singapore’s vaccination programme is Asia’s most successful, with 82% of the population fully jabbed. That boosts the case for reopening.
In late August Scott Morrison, Australia’s prime minister, announced the end of his country’s “covid zero” approach. Cases would be allowed to rise, provided that hospitals could cope with them. Once vaccination rates top 80%, perhaps by the end of the year, most restrictions would be eased. “It is time”, as Mr Morrison puts it, “to give Australians their lives back.”
Vietnam ditched its zero-covid strategy last week. This week came New Zealand’s capitulation. Though the prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, won praise for her sure handling of the pandemic, the mood has soured. On October 2nd Auckland residents defied stay-at-home orders to protest against restrictions. Two days later Ms Ardern acknowledged, “The return to zero is incredibly difficult.” She announced a “new way of doing things” that included lifting lockdown restrictions.
It remains unclear what abandonment means in practice. In New Zealand less than half the population is fully jabbed. The vaccination programme is about to go into overdrive. Yet lockdowns will probably remain on the menu, and open borders are still a long way off. Ms Ardern seems to want it both ways, promising to continue a “very aggressive approach”.
Likewise, Australia’s ending of zero covid still leaves the full reopening of borders a distant prospect. The first goal, from next month, is to allow all citizens and permanent residents back in. Many of them, astonishingly, have struggled for 18 months to get home. The idea is to let vaccinated returnees quarantine at home rather than force them into hotels. Even for such small moves, Australians deliberate every detail. The country is a long way from accepting risk and getting on with living with the virus.
As for Singapore, jitters are growing with rising cases. A rare public petition calls for mandatory quarantine for all overseas travellers. The government has reimposed local restrictions, including home-based schooling for children. One innovation, “vaccinated travel lanes” allowing quarantine-free travel with certain countries, is likely to be expanded only slowly from the current jurisdictions of Germany and Brunei.
Yet if abandonment looks like no strategy at all, then consider the alternative. Hong Kong has stuck doggedly with zero covid. A harsh, mediocre government whose public-health messaging either goes unheard or is little trusted has meant a slow vaccination drive. Less than 15% of those over 80 have had at least one jab. Because the virus is not present (for now) in Hong Kong, no level of herd immunity has been bestowed by past infections there or in the other zero-covid countries. And the low risk of infection dissuades people from getting their shots. Hong Kong’s approach condemns the territory to endless limbo. Abandonment of zero covid—for all the inevitable hesitations and temporary reversals—is the way to go.
Dig deeper
This article appeared in the Asia section of the print edition under the headline "Nil and void"
12. Laser weapons are coming, like it or not
Laser weapons are coming, like it or not
Lockheed Martin has delivered the new Airborne High Energy Laser to the USAF for flight testing on an AC-130J
You are hunkered down, trapped by enemy fire.
You can’t move ahead, you can’t move back … you can’t even lift your head without it being blown off — the enemy has the upper hand, and you know it.
Thankfully, circling high above this firefight, is an AC-130J Ghostrider Gunship — the aircraft that became a legend in the Vietnam War for hosing down the Viet Cong.
Nicknamed “Hell in the sky,” it normally features three … yes, three side-firing weapons — a 25mm gatling gun, a 40mm Bofors cannon, and a 105mm howitzer.
Easy to see how it got its name. Anything in that field of fire, about the size of a football field, will die.
But this time, it is equipped with some completely different — it is armed with a high-energy laser weapon — and, the aircraft is unmanned!
An operator at a ground station thousands of miles away, perhaps even on a different continent, receives a desperate plea for help by secure sat-phone — it is code-named, “Broken Arrow.”
It translates to a ground unit facing “imminent destruction from enemy attack” and all available air forces are to provide air support, immediately.
A message is sent to the circling gunship, that is packed with defensive jammers.
Instantly, its artificial intelligence system kicks in — in seconds, it is able to discern who are the friendlies, and who are the bad guys.
The go signal is sent, and the gunship’s laser wreaks havoc on the ground. The US troops will live to fight again, as an evac chopper arrives to get them out of danger.
Rich Roberts, chief of the Aerodynamics Branch Store Separation Section of Arnold Engineering Development Complex, looks at a directed energy (DE) system turret in the four-foot transonic wind tunnel at Arnold Air Force Base, Tennessee, in March. Credit: US Air Force photo.
That entire scenario, may be farfetched, perhaps something out of the future. Could it really happen?
You’re damn rights, it could. Laser weapons are no longer sci-fi. Neither is AI.
In fact, it appears to be happening.
Lockheed Martin has delivered the new Airborne High Energy Laser (AHEL) to the Air Force for flight testing on an AC-130J aircraft following a successful factory acceptance testing period, Defense Daily reported.
“Completion of this milestone is a tremendous accomplishment for our customer,” Rick Cordaro, vice-president of Lockheed Martin Advanced Production Solutions, said in a statement.
“These mission success milestones are a testament of our partnership with the US Air Force in rapidly achieving important advances in laser weapon system development. Our technology is ready for fielding today.”
Lockheed Martin received a contract in January 2019 to integrate and demonstrate AHEL on an AC-130J, with the laser system now set to go through ground testing ahead of demonstration on the aircraft.
In July, the Naval Surface Warfare Center, Dahlgren Division then awarded Lockheed Martin a five-year, US$12 million deal for further post-delivery services with AHEL, to include integration and demonstration activities, the company also said.
Tyler Griffin, business development director for Lockheed Martin Rotary and Mission Systems’ advanced product solutions, told reporters ahead of the announcement the company could not disclose AHEL’s specific power level, but added it’s in “the same class as the HELIOS high-energy laser that was delivered to the US Navy.”
An artist’s rendering of an Air Force F-16 armed with a laser weapon. Credit: Lockheed Martin.
Lockheed Martin delivered its production unit 100-kilowatt-range High Energy Laser and Integrated Optical-dazzler with Surveillance, or HELIOS, to the Navy in January.
US Navy destroyers will soon be armed with new ship-fired lasers able to sense and incinerate enemy drones, low-flying aircraft and small boat attacks — all while firing at the speed of light, National Interest reported.
HELIOS is engineered to surveil, track and destroy targets from an integrated ship system consisting of advanced radar, fire control technology and targeting sensors.
The farther away an incoming attack can be detected, the more time commanders have to make time-sensitive combat decisions regarding a possible response. Therefore, having one system that synthesizes sensing and shooting changes the equation for maritime warfare.
Lockheed Martin is also working toward outfitting a directed energy system on fighter jets by the middle of the decade.
“We’re committing to putting a laser pod equipped with a high-energy laser in the air within five years,” said Mark Stephen, business development lead for strategic technology development at Lockheed Martin’s missiles and fire control division.
The company is a core member of an industry team partnering for the Air Force Research Laboratory’s Self-Protect High Energy Laser Demonstrator, or SHiELD, program, Stephen said during a media roundtable in September.
AFRL is developing a directed energy system on an aircraft pod that will demonstrate self-defense against surface-to-air and air-to-air missiles, the organization said.
The effort is meant to inform requirements for a tactical airborne laser weapon program of record in the mid-2020s, Stephen noted.
Pentagon officials say that even if laser weapons are not yet strong enough to, for instance, knock out an ICBM in its mid-course phase of flight beyond the earth’s atmosphere — they might be able to help with targeting or identification.
In this respect, lasers as sensors could help with targeting and sensor-shooter time when it comes to destroyer launched missiles developed to knock approaching ballistic missiles out of the air.
The technology might even have an Army application, through the Indirect Fire Protection Capability-High Energy Laser program.
“This is a 300-kilowatt class laser weapon system, which mounts on the ground vehicle to defeat drones, rockets, artillery and mortars,” said Robb Mansfield, senior manager of business development for laser and sensor systems within Lockheed Martin’s integrated warfare system and sensors business.
“The beam director is the optical system that puts the high-energy light on target and keeps it there with enough precision to defeat the threat,” he said.
According to a report in The War Zone, the Air Force has announced that recent directed energy (DE) systems tests have taken place in the four-foot transonic wind tunnel, or 4T, belonging to the Aerodynamics Branch of Arnold Engineering Development Complex at Arnold Air Force Base, Tennessee.
By experimenting with a DE system in a wind tunnel of this type, it’s possible to assess how the weapon behaves when it encounters shockwaves left by the aircraft carrying it, as well as other disturbances that might affect the weapon’s energy beam and prevent it from engaging the target properly.
“The idea that this (lasers) is 5 or 10 years away is no longer the case,” says Chris Frei, director of short range air defense at Northrop Grumman Corp.
“In the fight, there tends not to be a ‘silver bullet,’ so the services are looking at a mix of different solutions, each with its strengths and weaknesses.
“So it is critical to have a system that can pull all that together so you can defend against 30 threats in the sky or a half dozen on the ground. Doing that gets the maximum effect out of any of these technologies.”
Evan Hunt, director of business development for high-energy lasers and counter-unmanned systems at the Raytheon Intelligence & Space segment agrees.
“Laser weapons will be a core part of layered air defense employed by DOD and its coalition allies. That means laser weapons in any integrated system we have protecting serious assets in our territories. In five years, any large base that needs to defend its assets will have laser weapons, regardless of service.”
In other words, whether you like it or not, laser weapons are coming to a war zone soon, and they can’t be stopped.
That, and the onset of artificial intelligence and robot killing machines, will only get bigger.
Welcome to the new world.
Sources: Defense Daily, National Interest, The War Zone, Military & Aerospace Technologies
13. Duterte on 2022 presidential race: ‘Inday is definitely out’
I did not expect to hear this. I wonder if this is a political ploy.
Duterte on 2022 presidential race: ‘Inday is definitely out’
President Rodrigo Duterte and Davao City Mayor Inday Sara Duterte-Carpio. File photos
DAVAO CITY—President Rodrigo Duterte has discounted the possibility of his daughter, Davao City Mayor Sara Duterte, joining the presidential race in the upcoming elections.
In an interview during his visit to televangelist Apollo Quiboloy, the President said that his daughter has made up her mind not to join the 2022 presidential derby.
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“Inday is definitely out, as she has said earlier, (in) the oft-repeated statements in so many interviews,” Duterte told reporters of the SMNI News Channel.
The President flew to Davao City on Friday after lending support to his favored senatorial bets who filed their respective certificates of candidacy.
Quiboloy said the President had wanted to “come for dinner” with him, just like in previous occasions, “for important talks.”
He said “talked about the future of the country, his future after a few months, and the coming elections.”
14. 4 C’s Drive Biden Administration’s First Naval Strategic Guidance
The “Four C’s: China, Culture, Climate Change, and COVID”
Excerpts:
The guidance will inform choices to make in the upcoming 2023 and 2024 budget requests, which have become more restrictive. Del Toro says the department will have to make “tough and sometimes unpopular choices” and prioritize its capabilities around China while also having to find ways to increase efficiencies and savings.
Eaglen pointed to a number of investments that the secretary highlighted, including critical infrastructure, industrial workforce, and sustainable fuels.
“Many of these priorities are overdue and important (i.e., industrial workforce investment), but Congress will ultimately not be pleased with yet another budget that shrinks the Navy when it’s demands are growing. Even SecNav admits as much in the guidance calling for expanded forward naval presence,” she wrote—emphasis hers.
4 C’s Drive Biden Administration’s First Naval Strategic Guidance
“Expanded” posture is needed to focus on China, Navy Secretary Del Toro writes.
The “Four C’s: China, Culture, Climate Change, and COVID” are the naval services’ “most pressing” challenges, Carlos Del Toro writes in his first strategic guidance as the Biden administration’s first Navy secretary. But just one of them is the “pacing challenge” that should be the focus of planning and spending.
“The People’s Republic of China represents the pacing challenge against which we must plan our warfighting strategies and investments,” Del Toro wrote in his new strategic guidance. “For the first time in at least a generation, we have a strategic competitor who possesses naval capabilities that rival our own, and who seeks to aggressively employ its forces to challenge U.S. principles, partnerships, and prosperity.”
Released on Thursday, the guidance is meant to bring the Navy and Marine Corps together with a common vision from the new Navy secretary as well as the Biden administration’s other priorities like COVID and climate change, said Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, who participated in a workshop to help develop the guidance.
Mackenzie Eaglen, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, said Del Toro’s new guidance lacks the candor of his Oct. 5 speech at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. In that speech, he said that China has naval capabilities that “in some areas, even surpass our own.”
Eaglen found the guidance “milquetoast” and said it is heavy on investments in everything except ships.
“While there is little to disagree with – except a shrinking Navy – there is also little new,” she said in an email. “In summary, SecNav is delineating his priorities: new concepts and capabilities (technology) over capacity (hulls) to bolster deterrence over warfighting. This is in line with general DoD guidance and budget choices from [secretary of defense] on down.”
Although the guidance does not explicitly mention buying and building more ships, it does say that the Navy will expand its global posture.
“We will continue to promote sustained, persistent mobile operations forward. We will make tough decisions to maximize precious resources, ensuring our future naval supremacy against the full spectrum of potential threats, while seeking additional resources to support our increasing responsibilities in the Indo-Pacific region. It will be essential for us to set our naval posture forward to be able to effectively transition from competition to crisis to conflict as needed,” Del Toro wrote.
The guidance does not say how many ships will be needed. The Pentagon has yet to release the force posture review that is expected to signal where troops and resources will be repositioned around the world. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has also not released his new National Defense Strategy, which this guidance is meant to support.
Clark found the inclusion of developing warfighting concepts and capabilities a good idea for how the Navy will need to deter and compete with China as a near-peer challenge operating in all domains like on the sea, under the sea, and in cyberspace.
“We've been up against smaller adversaries for so long, I think the U. S. got used to being dominant and being able to basically push people around. And so up against China, it's a peer, you've got to really be creative and come up with new ways to deter China, you can't just rely on having an overpowering military like we did against Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Kosovo,” he said.
The guidance will inform choices to make in the upcoming 2023 and 2024 budget requests, which have become more restrictive. Del Toro says the department will have to make “tough and sometimes unpopular choices” and prioritize its capabilities around China while also having to find ways to increase efficiencies and savings.
Eaglen pointed to a number of investments that the secretary highlighted, including critical infrastructure, industrial workforce, and sustainable fuels.
“Many of these priorities are overdue and important (i.e., industrial workforce investment), but Congress will ultimately not be pleased with yet another budget that shrinks the Navy when it’s demands are growing. Even SecNav admits as much in the guidance calling for expanded forward naval presence,” she wrote—emphasis hers.
15. Xi Jinping vows to fulfil Taiwan ‘reunification’ with China by peaceful means
Excerpts:
In response, Taiwan’s presidential office said Taiwan was a sovereign independent country, not part of the People’s Republic of China, and had clearly rejected China’s offer of “one country, two systems” to rule the island. “The nation’s future rests in the hands of Taiwan’s people,” it said.
In a separate statement, Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council called on Beijing to “abandon its provocative steps of intrusion, harassment and destruction” and return to talks.
Speaking shortly before Xi, Taiwan’s premier, Su Tseng-chang, noted that China had been “flexing its muscles” and causing regional tensions.
“This is why countries that believe in freedom, democracy and human rights, and based on shared values, are all working together and have repeatedly warned that China should not invade Taiwan,” Su said.
Xi Jinping vows to fulfil Taiwan ‘reunification’ with China by peaceful means
Taiwan reiterates it is a sovereign nation after Xi says its ‘separatism’ is biggest ‘danger to national rejuvenation’
China’s president, Xi Jinping, has vowed to realise “reunification” with Taiwan by peaceful means, after a week of heightened tensions in the Taiwan strait.
Taiwan responded shortly after by calling on Beijing to abandon its “coercion”, reiterating that only Taiwan’s people could decide their future.
Beijing regards democratically run Taiwan as its breakaway province. In the past, it has repeatedly pledged to take it, by force if necessary. Taiwan’s leader, Tsai Ing-wen, however, has said the island of 24 million people is already a sovereign nation with no need to declare independence, and has no wish for conflict.
Tensions across the Taiwan strait have been running high in recent weeks. In the first four days of October, for example, China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) sent nearly 150 planes into Taiwan’s air defence identification (ADIZ) zone. Figures and state-run media in China have labelled such actions as a demonstration of strength, but many western governments condemned the latest shows of force as acts of intimidation and aggression.
Washington has said it is “deeply concerned” about China’s actions that undermine peace across the Taiwan Strait. “We are going to stand up and speak out, both privately and publicly when we see the kinds of activities that are fundamentally destabilising,” said Jake Sullivan, the US national security adviser this week.
Meanwhile, according to the Wall Street Journal on Thursday, about two dozen US special forces soldiers and an unspecified number of marines have been training Taiwanese forces, in the latest indication of the extent of US involvement in the tensions in the area. The report said that trainers were first sent to Taiwan by the Trump administration, but their presence had not been reported until now.
It is under this backdrop that Xi’s speech on Saturday has been closely scrutinised. Speaking at Beijing’s Great Hall of the People, Xi said the Chinese people had a “glorious tradition” of opposing separatism.
“Taiwan’s independence separatism is the biggest obstacle to achieving the reunification of the motherland, and the most serious hidden danger to national rejuvenation,” he said the day before the anniversary of the revolution that overthrew China’s last imperial dynasty in 1911. Taiwan marks 10 October, when the revolution began, as its national day.
Xi said “reunification through a peaceful manner is the most in line with the overall interest of the Chinese nation, including Taiwan compatriots”, but added that China would protect its sovereignty and unity.
“No one should underestimate the Chinese people’s staunch determination, firm will, and strong ability to defend national sovereignty and territorial integrity,” Xi said. “The historical task of the complete reunification of the motherland must be fulfilled, and will definitely be fulfilled.”
He added: “The Taiwan question is purely an internal matter for China, one which brooks no external interference.”
Analysts say that Xi’s speech struck a slightly softer tone than in July, his last major speech that mentioned Taiwan, in which he vowed to “smash” any attempts at formal independence.
“It’s actually relatively moderate – even mundane – in the section talking about Taiwan,” said George Yin, of Harvard University’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. “Although the current situation looks tense, Xi does not ultimately want to see it out of control across the Taiwan Strait, especially after this week’s meeting between Jake Sullivan and Xi’s top foreign policy adviser Yang Jiechi.”
00:42
Taiwan must be on alert against 'over-the-top' China, says premier – video
He added: “All sides – China, Taiwan and the US – understand that unnecessary accident is not in anyone’s interest, after all.”
In response, Taiwan’s presidential office said Taiwan was a sovereign independent country, not part of the People’s Republic of China, and had clearly rejected China’s offer of “one country, two systems” to rule the island. “The nation’s future rests in the hands of Taiwan’s people,” it said.
In a separate statement, Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council called on Beijing to “abandon its provocative steps of intrusion, harassment and destruction” and return to talks.
Speaking shortly before Xi, Taiwan’s premier, Su Tseng-chang, noted that China had been “flexing its muscles” and causing regional tensions.
“This is why countries that believe in freedom, democracy and human rights, and based on shared values, are all working together and have repeatedly warned that China should not invade Taiwan,” Su said.
With Reuters and the Associated Press
16. Joe Biden-Xi Jinping summit is in the cards
Excerpts:
Without doubt, there are profound contradictions in the relationship, which will not go away by holding a summit meeting. What Biden hopes to achieve at this stage is a less ambitious goal of stabilizing relations and reverse, if possible, the dangerous downward spiral lately. That means creating room for diplomatic maneuver.
Certainly, it entails the US taking a pragmatic approach, aimed at avoiding gratuitous escalation of tensions. Herein lies the rub. For so long as sources of tension remain, whether a positive trend can be sustained remains to be seen. Much could still go wrong.
That said, there is also a deeper truth. China cannot be blamed for Washington’s failure to adapt to its rise. The excessive focusing on the NATO enlargement since the 1990s, the costly overreach in the Middle Eastern wars in the following two decades, and all this amid the appalling failure to address looming domestic problems, including decaying infrastructure and faltering public education – China cannot be blamed for any of these.
Nonetheless, the view that China is the United States’ chief competitor and even adversary has become widespread and ingrained in America. When it comes to China, the sort of solid bipartisan anti-Russian consensus in the Congress may not tie the hands of Biden, but unwelcome congressional intervention cannot be ruled out.
The good part is that the United States’ European allies will be supportive of Biden’s engagement with China. Many European Union governments also recognize the systemic rivalry inherent in the relationship with Beijing, but a majority of Europeans still do not see China as a threat to their way of life and only a very minuscule opinion would probably believe that China rules the world.
Joe Biden-Xi Jinping summit is in the cards
Officials must navigate tricky issues but Jake Sullivan-Yang Jiechi meeting laid the groundwork for talks
The big question about the meeting between US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and Chinese Politburo member Yang Jiechi in Zurich on Wednesday is whether it will open the door to the pathway leading to a historic Sino-American summit.
The short answer is “yes.” However, Sullivan and Yang have the onerous task of skillfully tacking the sailboat of the US-China relationship. The main problem for tacking a sailboat is of course that the wind is coming heavily on one side of the boat and how to turn the bow through the wind until the sail catches the wind on the other side.
Evidently, it is not easy to accomplish and requires not only steady hands and precision of thinking but perfect coordination of the sort that does not exist between Washington and Beijing.
The White House readout on the talks in Zurich is unnecessarily defensive, with an eye on the domestic audience, perhaps.
In contrast, the Chinese readout, as reported by Xinhua, claimed that the six-hour talks were held in a “candid manner” and the two highly placed diplomats had “a comprehensive and in-depth exchange of views” on the bilateral relations as well as international and regional issues of common concern. The meeting was described as “constructive, and conducive to enhancing mutual understanding.”
According to Xinhua, Yang and Sullivan “agreed to take action, following the spirit of the phone call between Chinese and US heads of state on September 10, strengthen strategic communication, properly manage differences, avoid confrontation and conflict, seek mutual benefit and win-win results, and work together to bring China-US relations back to the right track of sound and steady development.”
The report added, “Yang said that China attaches importance to the positive remarks on China-US relations made recently by US President Joe Biden, and China has noticed that the US side said it has no intention to contain China’s development, and is not seeking a ‘new Cold War.’”
Neither readout throws much light on selective cooperation between the US and China in the near term. Beijing had taken a stance that selective cooperation was unrealistic so long as the Biden administration pursued hostile policies and interfered in China’s internal affairs.
Politburo member Yang Jiechi. The Chinese side said his talks with Jake Sullivan were constructive. Photo: AFP / Frederic J. Brown
Having said that, Global Times has noted, “The press releases issued by both sides were more positive in their respective contexts. This suggests that the meeting was productive.… There were no negative descriptions and accusations against the other side in both public press releases. There was only more subtle language about the differences between the two countries.”
US officials reportedly told the media later that Sullivan and Yang also discussed the possibility of a video meeting between the two heads of state by the end of this year.
Clearly, the differences between the US and China are of a serious nature. China will not accept the US pretensions of speaking “from a position of strength.” On the other hand, it is palpable of late that the Biden administration’s rhetoric is mellowing – no longer confrontational, and repeatedly underscoring that Washington does not want to see a “new Cold War.”
President Biden’s open assurance regarding Taiwan on the eve of the meeting in Zurich was indeed most meaningful, signaling that the US wants to prevent competition from escalating into confrontation.
If the unceremonious retreat from the situation surrounding the house arrest of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou carried a certain positive message, AUKUS, as Beijing sees it, turns out to be more of an acrimonious topic in the trans-Atlantic alliance. Meanwhile, the Biden administration has virtually closed the Covid-origin file.
Most important, US Trade Representative Katherine Tai announced in a speech on Monday at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) think-tank in Washington that the US will hold “frank conversations” with China on trade in the near future. Beijing has taken that as a positive signal that constructive talks can be expected.
The talks will include the Phase 1 trade agreement, but Tai said they are not intended to “inflame trade tensions with China.” (China missed out on buying US$200 billion worth of extra goods from the US in 2020 and 2021.) Interestingly, Tai also talked about “a targeted tariff exclusion process” for exemptions from customs tariffs imposed on $370 billion worth of Chinese goods a year by the previous administration of Donald Trump.
Trump’s “tariff war” has proved to be counterproductive, and it took a toll on American consumers and manufacturers. The US could neither find alternatives for Chinese products nor force industrial chains to move out of China. Looking ahead, the tariffs will only weaken the Biden administration’s efforts to combat inflation.
Significantly, Tai gave away the bottom line even before the trade talks get started – that it is not the Biden administration’s intention to seek an economic decoupling from China, and instead she will be working for a “re-coupling” that will bring more benefits to American businesses, including larger access to China’s huge market.
In political terms, it is hugely consequential for Biden if China steps up purchases of agricultural products from the US. According to reports, in mid-September, Chinese companies placed new orders for about a million tons of US soybeans alone.
Once the focus returns to trade and economic issues, the interdependency in the US-China relationship can only deepen and give a new momentum to the overall relationship. Xinjiang, Hong Kong, etc are only peripheral issues that creep to the center stage when engagement remains suboptimal.
Without doubt, there are profound contradictions in the relationship, which will not go away by holding a summit meeting. What Biden hopes to achieve at this stage is a less ambitious goal of stabilizing relations and reverse, if possible, the dangerous downward spiral lately. That means creating room for diplomatic maneuver.
Certainly, it entails the US taking a pragmatic approach, aimed at avoiding gratuitous escalation of tensions. Herein lies the rub. For so long as sources of tension remain, whether a positive trend can be sustained remains to be seen. Much could still go wrong.
US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan. He and Yang discussed the possibility of a video meeting between the two heads of state. Photo: AFP / Mandel Ngan
That said, there is also a deeper truth. China cannot be blamed for Washington’s failure to adapt to its rise. The excessive focusing on the NATO enlargement since the 1990s, the costly overreach in the Middle Eastern wars in the following two decades, and all this amid the appalling failure to address looming domestic problems, including decaying infrastructure and faltering public education – China cannot be blamed for any of these.
Nonetheless, the view that China is the United States’ chief competitor and even adversary has become widespread and ingrained in America. When it comes to China, the sort of solid bipartisan anti-Russian consensus in the Congress may not tie the hands of Biden, but unwelcome congressional intervention cannot be ruled out.
The good part is that the United States’ European allies will be supportive of Biden’s engagement with China. Many European Union governments also recognize the systemic rivalry inherent in the relationship with Beijing, but a majority of Europeans still do not see China as a threat to their way of life and only a very minuscule opinion would probably believe that China rules the world.
M K Bhadrakumar is a former Indian diplomat.
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.
