Quotes of the Day:
“There is no greater evil one can suffer than to hate reasonable discourse.”
- Socrates in Plato's Phaedo
“…the Socratic style of thought is what our culture needs right now. It’s an antidote to social media and to the toxic state of our politics.”
- Ward Farnsworth
"Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please."
- Mark Twain
1. ‘Indo-Pacific is a priority: Message from White House document’
2. U.S. Battles Putin by Disclosing His Next Possible Moves
3. Biden Administration: Incompetent, Naïve, or Desperate?
4. Army of Ukraine lobbyists behind unprecedented Washington blitz - Responsible Statecraft
5. Why the West’s Diplomacy With Russia Keeps Failing
6. US adversaries have been mastering hybrid warfare. It’s time to catch up.
7. U.S. Aims to Thwart China’s Plan for Atlantic Base in Africa
8. What’s Really at Stake in America’s History Wars?
9. Russians Have Already Started Hybrid War With Bomb Threats, Cyberattacks, Ukraine Says
10. Will the West Heed Poland’s Warnings on Russian Aggression?
11. Virginia Hall Was America’s Most Successful Female WWII Spy. But She Was Almost Kept From Serving
12. “A Pleasure to Burn”: We Are Closer to Bradbury’s Dystopia Than Orwell’s or Huxley’s
13. ‘Follow the science’: As Year 3 of the pandemic begins, a simple slogan becomes a political weapon
1. ‘Indo-Pacific is a priority: Message from White House document’
An interview I did with Cleo Paskal on Friday evening after the Indo-Pacom strategy document was released.
‘Indo-Pacific is a priority: Message from White House document’ - The Sunday Guardian Live
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Published : February 12, 2022, 7:51 pm | Updated : February 12, 2022, 7:51 PM
Alexandria, VA.: In this edition of “Indo-Pacific: Behind the Headlines”, we speak with Col. David Maxwell (Ret.), a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington, D.C. about the just released White House document, “Indo-Pacific Strategy of the United States”.
Among his many assignments and commands, Col. Maxwell was Director of Plans, Policy, and Strategy (J5), the Chief of Staff for Special Operations Command Korea (SOCKOR) and commanded 1st Battalion, 1st Special Forces Group (Airborne) in Okinawa, Japan and later commanded the Joint Special Operations Task Force in the Philippines. His final assignment was serving on the military faculty teaching national security strategy at the National War College.
Following retirement from the Army he served as Associate Director of the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University. He is the editor of Small Wars Journal.
Q: What is this document?
A: It is a specific strategy for the United States, focused on the Indo-Pacific. This is a public strategy to transmit our message to the region—and the world—on how we see the Indo-Pacific, how we intend to operate in the Indo-Pacific, and what goals and objectives we seek to achieve in the Indo-Pacific for ourselves, and for the mutual interests of our allies and partners.
Normally the White House will issue the National Security Strategy (NSS) first, and a regional strategy (such as this) would be a supporting element of the NSS. What’s really interesting is that this has come out before the NSS. Usually it’s an NSS, then supporting regional and defence strategies.
This is very thorough for a regional strategy. Going back through the history of these sorts of regional strategies, I can’t recall something this public and with this much emphasis. We are trying to send a message that we are prioritising the Indo-Pacific.
The primary target for the Strategy is the security apparatus—the military writ large, interagency, Treasury, USAID, State—but it also sends a strong message to our partners, allies, regional organisations, and competitors—China.
There is a clear articulation of the basic strategic construct of ends, ways, and means—and it lays them out very clearly. And then it actually provides guidance on ten lines of effort that really provides some meat to this and gives pretty good guidance. As a former military planner, I could make good use of this to develop supporting military plans across the spectrum of conflict. I find this very useful.
Q: What are the major themes of the Strategy?
A: Overall, the strategy builds on alliances as a core, then partnerships, then international organizations, specifically ASEAN, the Quad and AUKUS. And the key point is that this is consistent with our broader strategic approach in which we build on our single asymmetric strength—our network of alliances and partnerships.
China will perceive building these networks as countering China. China will interpret it that way even though we are talking about competing with China—and it’s realistic to say competing with China.
Another aspect of all of this, in addition to our core asymmetric strength, is that integrated deterrence will be key to our strategy and will connect to the defence strategy that is currently being staffed. Integrated deterrence means that we integrate all our activities across warfighting domains, from peacetime to grey zone to conflict to major war to ultimately—worst case—nuclear war.
The strategy doesn’t say it, but integrated deterrence has to do that along with alliances and partners. This integrated deterrence focuses on dissuading and defeating aggression and, as part of this strategy, we are going to undertake initiatives to both reinforce deterrence and to counter coercion.
That, to me, is a signal for China because we see China coercing nations with its debt trap diplomacy, its use of the Belt and Road Initiative to extend influence and its conduct of malign activities in the three warfares: psychological warfare, lawfare and media or public opinion warfare.
One of the positive things I like about it is really it has a global focus—Indo-Pacific, plus Euro-Atlantic. It seems to be taking a broad focus on this, which I think is necessary because the United States has global interests. We are expecting a huge shift to the Indo-Pacific, but we need to stay engaged in the Middle East, Europe, Africa.
Q: What does it say about India?
A: There are specific things about India that are very strong. As it talks about the core of our alliances, it specifically addresses the Quad, and also says a specific objective of the strategy is to “Support India’s continued rise and regional leadership”.
That’s really important. That’s a key part of our strategy; we recognize that our interests align in so many areas. It is actually one of the ten lines of effort. Another is “Deliver on the Quad”.
This is a recognition that India is a likeminded partner and a leader in Asia and Indian Ocean, with connections throughout South Asia and globally.
Q: Any elements stand out?
A: The thing that will be a lightning rod is the discussion about Taiwan—about helping to defend Taiwan, but also paying homage to the One China policy.
[“We will also work with partners inside and outside of the region to maintain peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait, including by supporting Taiwan’s self-defense capabilities, to ensure an environment in which Taiwan’s future is determined peacefully in accordance with the wishes and best interests of Taiwan’s people. As we do so, our approach remains consistent with our One China policy and our longstanding commitments under the Taiwan Relations Act, the Three Joint Communiqués, and the Six Assurances.”]
I’m sure it is written that way so as to deescalate tensions with China. Everything that came before that section talks about alliance building, building Taiwan’s self-defence capabilities—and really this is the key point—ensuring an environment in which Taiwan’s futures is determined peacefully by Taiwan’s people.
In the US view this is consistent with One China policy commitments. It’ll be interesting to see how China responds. I’m sure it won’t be positive.
As for China, our main competitor is never identified as a competitor, or adversary, or enemy and only referred once as a “rival”. That’s really interesting because, even though it talks about the important things—values, what we intend to do, what we want to see, e.g., the international rules based order—it also recognises China’s intent to shape things in its own interest. That is the essence of the rivalry—the different values and vision between the US and China,
Q: What’s your overall assessment?
A: It’s too early to judge its efficacy but on first assessment there is a lot of goodness in this and, as a planner, I could make use of this throughout the Indo-Pacific. Planners don’t like to guess what the boss wants and this gives sufficient guidance to plan. It’s a really transparent message articulating what we believe in, what we stand for, what we intend to do.
One of negative criticisms, common with most strategies, is that it doesn’t clearly articulate priorities. It is very broad and aspirational, but it provides a surprisingly good level of detailed guidance within it that could be very useful to planners.
Pundits and analysts could criticise a lot of it. There are those who will want less detail, and those who will want more. For me there is sufficient detail so that I can understand the intention of the Administration, but it is broad enough to give flexibility to the interagency and embassies to operate with a solid but broad intent. I hope that every country team, every embassy, in the Indo-Pacific will, and must, use this to shape their country team’s strategic plan while the military develops it supporting plans.
But the proof is in the pudding. The problem is strategies are often put on the shelf and simply admired. A lot of times they just end up on briefing slides and as talking points. Civilian departments don’t take them like orders. We need to see if this will be the base document and will it be applied strategically, operationally, and tactically.
That will be in the coming years. A strategy is only as good as what we do in actual execution. Is this strategy executable? And are we going to back it up to achieve the goals and strategies? What we actually end up doing is the real message and the real strategy.
2. U.S. Battles Putin by Disclosing His Next Possible Moves
This is attacking the enemy's strategy. (identify the strategy, understand the straggy, expose the strategy, attack the strategy).
I have a counterintuitive thought about the administration's efforts. Is this exposure of the strategy and the strong US warnings of perhaps an imminent attack actually designed to provide an offramp to Putin. The administration is being criticized by creating a sense of panic (President of Ukraine and others) and overstating the threat. But the "off ramp" may actually be Putin not attacking and instead calling out the US for misleading the world on the likelihood of a Russian attack. He can blame the US for creating the tension and the situation. This could possibly find a face saving way out for Putin. The question is will he stand down and withdraw his forward deployed forces? And of course this strategy means the US will come under increased criticism for being the "boy who cried wolf" or "Chicken Little."
Of course the problem with this is it may only delay the eventual attack. There is nothing that will stop him from doing this in the future and these recent events could serve as the rehearsal and he might be able to execute this operation must faster next time. On the other hand , getting Putin to stand down now could also buy back the time we wasted over the last few years (since the annexation of Crimea) by not helping Ukraine in developing the strongest self defense capability to deter and defend. My assessment will only be correct if we continue to support Ukraine with military equipment and training after Putin stands down.
Excerpts:
It is an unusual gambit, in part because Mr. Biden has repeatedly made clear he has no intention of sending U.S. troops to defend Ukraine. In effect, the administration is warning the world of an urgent threat, not to make the case for a war but to try to prevent one.
The hope is that disclosing Mr. Putin’s plans will disrupt them, perhaps delaying an invasion and buying more time for diplomacy, or even giving Mr. Putin a chance to reconsider the political, economic and human costs of an invasion.
At the same time, Biden administration officials said they had a narrower and more realistic goal: They want to make it more difficult for Mr. Putin to justify an invasion with lies, undercutting his standing on the global stage and building support for a tougher response.
Intelligence agencies, prodded by the White House, have declassified information, which in turn has been briefed to Congress, shared with reporters and discussed by Pentagon and State Department spokesmen.
U.S. Battles Putin by Disclosing His Next Possible Moves
Declassified information is part of a campaign to complicate what officials say are Russia’s plans to invade Ukraine.
The United States hopes that disclosing the plans of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia regarding Ukraine will disrupt them, perhaps delaying an invasion and buying more time for diplomacy.Credit...Pool photo by Thibault Camus
Feb. 12, 2022
WASHINGTON — After decades of getting schooled in information warfare by President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, the United States is trying to beat the master at his own game.
Then, on Friday, Jake Sullivan, President Biden’s national security adviser, told reporters at the White House that the United States was seeing signs of Russian escalation and that there was a “credible prospect” of immediate military action. Other officials said the announcement was prompted by new intelligence that signaled an invasion could begin as soon as Wednesday.
All told, the extraordinary series of disclosures — unfolding almost as quickly as information is collected and assessed — has amounted to one of the most aggressive releases of intelligence by the United States since the Cuban missile crisis, current and former officials say.
It is an unusual gambit, in part because Mr. Biden has repeatedly made clear he has no intention of sending U.S. troops to defend Ukraine. In effect, the administration is warning the world of an urgent threat, not to make the case for a war but to try to prevent one.
The hope is that disclosing Mr. Putin’s plans will disrupt them, perhaps delaying an invasion and buying more time for diplomacy, or even giving Mr. Putin a chance to reconsider the political, economic and human costs of an invasion.
At the same time, Biden administration officials said they had a narrower and more realistic goal: They want to make it more difficult for Mr. Putin to justify an invasion with lies, undercutting his standing on the global stage and building support for a tougher response.
Intelligence agencies, prodded by the White House, have declassified information, which in turn has been briefed to Congress, shared with reporters and discussed by Pentagon and State Department spokesmen.
Avril D. Haines, the director of national intelligence, with President Biden, has shown a willingness to declassify information to complicate Russia’s planning.Credit...T.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York Times
But the disclosures are complicated by history. Before the United States’ invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Bush administration released intelligence that officials said justified pre-emptive action, including purported intercepts of Iraqi military conversations, photos of mobile biological weapons labs and statements accusing Baghdad of building a fleet of drones to launch a chemical attack on the United States. The material was all wrong, reliant on sources who lied, incorrect interpretations of Iraq’s actions and senior officials who looked at raw intelligence and saw what they wanted to see.
Most important, the officials said, there is a fundamental distinction between Iraq in 2003 and Ukraine in 2022. “In Iraq, intelligence was used and deployed from this very podium to start a war,” Mr. Sullivan said on Friday. “We are trying to stop a war.”
The last time Russia moved against Ukraine, in 2014, intelligence officials blocked the Obama administration from sharing what they knew. But the Biden administration has studied those mistakes. The new disclosures reflect the influence of Avril D. Haines, the director of national intelligence, and William J. Burns, the C.I.A. director, who have shown a willingness to declassify information in an effort to disrupt Russian planning, administration officials said.
“We have learned a lot, especially since 2014, about how Russia uses the information space as part of its overall security and military apparatus,” said Emily J. Horne, the spokeswoman for the National Security Council. “And we have learned a lot about how to deny them some impact in that space.”
One U.S. intelligence official said that when the country’s spy agencies have information that could help the world make better judgments about Russian activity, it should be released, as long as the government can avoid exposing how the information was collected or who passed it along.
It is, according to some strategists, a full-fledged information battle.
“I think it is great,” said Beth Sanner, a former top intelligence official who regularly briefed President Donald J. Trump. “My guess is that these disclosures are freaking the Kremlin and the security services out. And, more important, it can narrow Putin’s options and make him think twice.”
The Ukrainian government has expressed unease with the American disclosures. President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Saturday that “too much information” about a possible Russian offensive was sowing unnecessary fear.
For all the disclosures, the Biden administration has provided no evidence of the disinformation plots they say they have uncovered. Intelligence officials have argued that sharing details would give Russia clues to how they work. That, in turn, would allow Moscow to “plug the leaks” and would amount to disarming in the middle of an information war, officials said.
Those concerns show how difficult it is for any democracy to go toe-to-toe with an autocratic state, like Russia. Unconstrained by truth, the Kremlin is simply better at such unconventional warfare.
“Remember, Vladimir Putin is a K.G.B. guy. He doesn’t think like Biden does,” said Daniel Hoffman, a former Moscow station chief for the C.I.A. “Putin comes from Mars and Biden’s from Venus. Vladimir Putin is playing his own game and his chess games may be a little different than ours.”
During many of his recent military forays, Mr. Putin has used disinformation to create doubt about what he is doing. Such tactics have slowed international responses and allowed Mr. Putin to more easily achieve his aims. When masked men began taking over government buildings in Crimea in February 2014, Moscow said they were part of a locally led pro-Russian uprising. Only after Crimea was taken over was it clear the “little green men” were Russian military forces.
Showing its ease with information warfare, Moscow responded quickly after Biden administration officials warned lawmakers this month about the enormous possible human costs if Mr. Putin launched a full invasion. “Madness and scaremongering continues,” Russia’s deputy ambassador to the United Nations, Dmitry Polyanskiy, wrote last Saturday on Twitter. “What if we would say that US could seize London in a week and cause 300K civilian deaths? All this based on our intelligence sources that we won’t disclose.”
After Mr. Sullivan’s remarks on Friday, Russia’s Foreign Ministry accused the United States of conducting a “coordinated information attack” that it said was “aimed at undermining and discrediting Russia’s fair demands for security guarantees, as well as at justifying Western geopolitical aspirations and military absorption of Ukraine’s territory.”
The Kremlin has been on a full propaganda push since last year, not just in Russia but also in the separatist regions of eastern Ukraine, and even in Kyiv, the capital. Moscow has accused Ukraine of plotting a genocide against ethnic Russians and denounced Ukrainians as Nazi sympathizers. Russian officials have also accused Ukraine and the United States of hatching secret plots to justify an intervention or invasion of separatist-controlled territory.
American allegations of the Russian troop buildup have been verified by commercial satellite imagery showing deployments in Belarus.Credit...Maxar Technologies, via Reuters
The United States began disclosing Russian maneuvering in early December when it declassified intelligence assessments that predicted Russia could eventually mass 175,000 troops for an invasion of Ukraine.
Understand the Escalating Tensions Over Ukraine
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The Kremlin’s position. President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, who has increasingly portrayed NATO’s eastward expansion as an existential threat to his country, said that Moscow’s growing military presence on the Ukrainian border was a response to Ukraine’s deepening partnership with the alliance.
Russia struck back that month with its own allegations. In a claim repeated on social media and Moscow-aligned conspiracy sites, the Russian defense minister, Sergei K. Shoigu, said on Dec. 21 that some 120 military contractors from the United States had moved “an unidentified chemical component” into Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine “to carry out provocations.”
While the U.S. allegations of the Russian troop buildup have been verified by commercial satellite imagery, there is no evidence for the Russian claims, which American officials have called completely false.
Even before the United States began disclosing Russian military plans and plots, Ms. Haines decided to share more intelligence with allies, leading to her visit to Brussels on Nov. 17. The Biden administration was determined not to see a repeat of 2014, when NATO was confused and caught by surprise when Russian forces took over Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula largely unopposed.
Senior Obama administration officials recalled their frustration when the intelligence agencies would not allow the White House to tell NATO, let alone the public, what Washington knew about Russia’s moves.
“I can remember a dozen times when I thought our interests would be advanced if we just told the world what we knew,” said Michael A. McFaul, who was the U.S. ambassador to Russia when it annexed Crimea.
Philip M. Breedlove, a retired four-star Air Force general who was NATO’s supreme allied commander for Europe when Russia invaded Crimea and the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, took matters into his own hands. “In the first two invasions of Ukraine — Crimea and Donbas — I used commercial available imagery to make the facts on the ground clear,” he said in an interview this week.
An even more important lesson, according to former officials, was Russia’s interference in the 2016 U.S. election. Critics, including officials from the Obama administration, have said the United States was too passive in drawing attention to Russian influence operations.
U.S. National Guard soldiers during training on the use of American-provided munitions last week in Ukraine.Credit...Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times
The recent disclosures, said Jeh C. Johnson, a former homeland security secretary, are a way for the Biden administration to avoid old errors and make clear to Mr. Putin that America knows “what you are doing and we are putting your business out in the street and compromising your operations.”
“This is payback for 2016,” Mr. Johnson said.
The current information battle is playing out in a new era, where technology has allowed conspiracy theories to spread faster and wider than anytime before. At the same time, trust in government has further eroded. And that has meant many efforts to get ahead of Russian information operations are met with deep skepticism.
“If the U.S. government just comes out and says no, that’s wrong, some people will say, ‘Prove it, show me the videotape, show me the audio recording,’” said Glenn S. Gerstell, a former general counsel for the National Security Agency. “It’s an irreversible path once you start down that. And of course, the whole danger is that it risks disclosing sources and methods.”
The danger of exposing those intelligence collection techniques is real. The Kremlin could lock down its communications right before a potential invasion.
“This strategy is not risk free,” Ms. Sanner said. “If Russians are able to figure out the sources or they change how they communicate or just start locking down, it has the potential to partially blind us right at the very moment when we may need it.”
Other strategists believe that the United States could be more aggressive. The United States or its allies could release information about Mr. Putin’s top lieutenants, for example, or the oligarchs who support him. That could sow doubt about people’s loyalty, or expose their wealth.
“The new rules of war favor autocracies because they can do all these things well: They can fight sneaky and dirty,” said Sean McFate, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council who has written about the changing nature of war. “The question is what do we risk as a democracy by fighting this way? How does a democracy fight a secret war, if you will, without losing its democratic soul?”
Eric Schmitt and Robin Stein contributed reporting.
3. Biden Administration: Incompetent, Naïve, or Desperate?
At least Doug Bandow is consistent. He has not found any recent administration competent because none accept his world view.
Biden Administration: Incompetent, Naïve, or Desperate?
Quiet desperation stalks the White House. The President who promised to bring Americans together has thrown himself into the arms of his party’s radical progressives. The thin Democratic majority fractured when pressed to massively expand the US welfare state. Rapid and excessive monetary and fiscal expansion triggered inflation rates not seen for decades. Democratic pols believe their House majority is already lost and Senate control is in jeopardy.
Internationally the President has done no better. He appears torn between representing the American people, who have tired of policing the globe, and listening to his appointees, who still imagine enforcing Pax Americana. He acted courageously in facing down the Washington foreign policy “Blob” and leaving Afghanistan, but badly botched the withdrawal. He earned an indelible reputation for incompetence, which now taints his every international action.
After running as the anti-Trump he adopted his predecessor’s hostile policy toward China, enforced mostly by huffing and puffing. He blundered away the best chance to reinstate the nuclear deal with Iran, and has no answer to North Korea as the latter continues testing missiles. After promising to emphasize human rights he embraced the brutal Saudi monarchy and continued support for its murderous war against Yemen.
Most serious today, he won’t take the one step necessary to resolve the Ukraine crisis: end US support for NATO expansion toward Russia. Instead, his insistence on a theoretical possibility which virtually no member supports could lead to war at Europe’s periphery, which would speed conflict and disruption across Europe and beyond. The president’s latest gambit has been to ask the People’s Republic of China to help keep the peace in Ukraine.
Seriously.
After nearly a half-century in Washington, the President acquired the reputation as a seasoned foreign policy hand. However, only a naïf would imagine that President Xi Jinping, busy acting as Mao reincarnated—returning to totalitarianism, strengthening party authority, and crushing his enemies as he assembles a personal dictatorship—would take Washington’s side against Moscow.
Start with the bizarre choice of messenger, Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland, to deliver the administration’s message: “We are calling on Beijing to use its influence with Moscow to urge diplomacy, because if there is a conflict in the Ukraine it is not going to be good for China either.” She explained, “There will be a significant impact on the global economy. There will be a significant impact in the energy sphere.”
Nuland did her best to create the current crisis over Ukraine. In 2014 the US backed a street putsch against the elected (though highly corrupt) and Russo-friendly president of Ukraine. Nuland was caught roaming the streets of Kyiv talking with US colleagues about who she believed should take over the new government.
Unfortunately though, while Beijing said nothing about Nuland’s role, it almost certainly took note. The CCP is a malign force, but it’s not attempting to rule the rest of the world. What it most reviles is outside intervention and apparent efforts at regime change. Washington’s attempts are likely to backfire. Warned the Carnegie Endowment’s Evan S. Medeiros and Ashley J. Tellis: “Few U.S. allies and partners would support undermining the Chinese party-state—blunting perhaps the most important tool in Washington’s strategic arsenal. Such an approach would isolate the United States and intensify its already deep rivalry with Beijing.” If the CCP believes its overthrow is Washington’s ultimate objective, East Asia could become an even more dangerous tinderbox. Yet Nuland is a symbol of America’s policy of constant intervention.
Then there is the overall bilateral relationship which is not, shall we say, very friendly these days. To the contrary, America is increasingly locked in what appears to be a new cold war with the PRC. And that’s a cold war that could go hot.
The Trump administration initiated a trade war against China while targeting leading Chinese telecommunication and chip manufacturers, urging “decoupling” of supply chains, sanctioning Beijing over human rights, blaming the PRC for the Covid-19 pandemic, and launching an ideological campaign against the Chinese Communist Party.
And now another administration has taken a more aggressive military role in the Asia-Pacific to counter Chinese maneuvers and pressed American allies to commit to supporting Taiwan against the PRC. Although neither Beijing nor Washington wants war, the increasing number of military activities in the Asia-Pacific could lead to confrontations between China and American treaty allies or US forces directly.
Candidate Biden tagged Russia as America’s primary security threat and merely treated China as an economic competitor, but has since gone Trump-lite, maintaining Trump policies, just with less contentious rhetoric. Indeed, in some ways this administration has been more aggressive, responding sharply to Chinese intimidation of Taiwan while policymakers debated making an unambiguous commitment to the island’s security. The administration has tightened relations with Australia and Japan to work against China. Congress is moving forward on a mammoth piece of legislation targeting the PRC. And the president launched a “diplomatic boycott” of China’s ongoing Winter Olympic games.
An important impact of Washington’s hostile policy toward both Russia and China has been to push them together. This is a dramatic reversal of Richard Nixon’s opening to the PRC in 1971, which resulted in a loose partnership against the Soviet Union. There is much that divides Moscow and Beijing; indeed, in civilizational terms Russia belongs with the West. However, the US has suffered from the classic vice of hubris, needlessly insulting and confronting friend and foe alike. Mutual antagonism toward Washington has encouraged increasing economic, political, and even security cooperation between America’s two most important competitors/adversaries. A Chinese lurch toward Moscow against the US and Europe would only increase the Putin government’s indebtedness to Beijing.
Yet the administration believes the PRC will take America’s side against Russia?
[Wild laughter ensues, only slowly subsiding.]
After Nuland made her pitch, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi spoke with Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Helping settle Ukraine did not appear to be high on Wang’s list of priorities. He complained that “what the world sees is that the tone of US policy toward China has not undergone substantive change; nor [have] President Biden’s statements been truly implemented.” In particular, noted Wang, “As a matter of urgency, the U.S. should stop interfering in the Beijing Winter Olympics, stop playing with fire on the Taiwan issue and stop creating various anti-China ‘cliques’ to contain China.”
Preventing the start of World War III in Europe is apparently not so important. Wang cleverly dissed the US by exhibiting moral equivalence in calling on all parties to “remain calm and refrain from doing things that stimulate tension.” Then he went on to join Moscow, insisting that “Russia’s reasonable security concerns should be taken seriously and resolved.”
So much for the administration gambit!
It’s hard not to think back to President Jimmy Carter, a good, decent man, but also hopelessly naïve and incompetent, and in the end, desperate. After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979, Carter wailed, “My opinion of the Russians has changed more drastically in the last week than even the previous two and a half years.” Didn’t he realize that the ruling regime murdered and imprisoned millions of people? Apparently not. He seemed personally offended that Communist Party General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev lied—well, Carter wouldn’t use that word, instead noting that the Soviet leader provided a “completely inadequate and completely misleading” response. Sigh.
There is no easy solution to the Ukraine crisis. The only realistic strategy is diplomatic. The US should state the obvious—it isn’t going to fight a nuclear war to defend Kyiv. Washington also should recognize that America would never have accepted its own behavior. Imagine if Brezhnev had backed a coup in Mexico City, publicly discussed who he wanted in the new government, and encouraged Mexico to join the Warsaw Pact. Washington would be in a war frenzy. Neutralizing Ukraine militarily while ensuring its political and economic independence is likely the best possible outcome today.
However, China isn’t going to help. Indeed, America’s relationship with the PRC is more difficult than that with Russia. Beijing possesses the world’s largest population, second biggest economy, and third most powerful military. It is an ancient civilization with global influence, and it poses a multi-front challenge, including political, ideological, economic, technological, and security. Instead of courting war with Russia and hoping for aid from China, the US should find a modus vivendi with Moscow and concentrate on Beijing.
That won’t be easy for any administration. It might be impossible for one headed by a president who is incompetent, naïve, and desperate. Buckle up, as the fabled (though probably faux) Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times,” comes true.
Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, specializing in foreign policy and civil liberties.
He worked as special assistant to President Ronald Reagan and editor of the political magazine Inquiry.
He writes regularly for leading publications such as Fortune magazine, National Interest, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Times.
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4. Army of Ukraine lobbyists behind unprecedented Washington blitz - Responsible Statecraft
From the Quincy Institute.
Army of Ukraine lobbyists behind unprecedented Washington blitz - Responsible Statecraft
Army of Ukraine lobbyists behind unprecedented Washington blitz
An analysis of FARA filings shows they contacted members of Congress and others over 10,000 times.
February 11, 2022
Written by
As tensions with Russia reach a boiling point, lobbyists from Ukraine are working feverishly to shape the U.S. response. Firms working for Ukrainian interests have inundated congressional offices, think tanks, and journalists with more than 10,000 messages and meetings in 2021, according to an analysis of Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA, filings for a forthcoming report from the Quincy Institute. To put this extraordinary campaign into perspective, the Saudi lobby — known for being one of the largest foreign lobbies in D.C. — reported 2,834 contacts, barely a quarter of what Ukraine’s agents have done.
Russia has positioned more than 100,000 troops on Ukraine’s border and, just yesterday, it began conducting military drills with Belarus on Ukraine’s border in what some fear could be the lead-up to an invasion. As the number of Russian troops on Ukraine’s border has grown, so too have the efforts of Ukraine’s agents in the United States to secure U.S. and NATO military support.
More specifically, the far-reaching campaign has been focused on stopping the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which Ukrainian officials argue is as much of a threat to their security as Russian troops. If completed, the pipeline would allow Russia to export natural gas directly to Germany and the rest of Europe, jeopardizing the billions Ukraine currently earns from transiting Russian gas to Europe.
Congress has been the primary target of Ukraine’s agents, with over 300 House and Senate staff and members of Congress on the receiving end of more than 8,000 emails, phone calls, and meetings with Ukraine’s lobbyists. Agents representing the Ukrainian Federation of Employers of the Oil and Gas Industry, or UFEOGI, the largest association of energy companies in Ukraine, have flooded Capitol Hill with headlines like “Ukrainians call on U.S. Senate to sanction Putin’s pipeline weapon,” and others claiming “Moscow regards concessions as a sign of weakness.”
The lobbyists seem to have found a friendly ear in Senate Republicans, in particular Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX). In January, they distributed a tweet from the prime minister of Ukraine that said Nord Stream 2 is “no less an existential threat to our security & democracy than Russian troops on our border.” The sentiment was echoed, nearly verbatim, two days later by Cruz, who said he was hoping to “lift the existential threat posed by Nord Stream 2.”
In 2021, UFEOGI’s lobbyists also focused intently on senators who co-sponsored 2020 legislation to block completion of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, including Cruz; John Barrasso (R-Wyo.); Tom Cotton, (R-Ark.); Ron Johnson, (R-Wis.); and Jeanne Shaheen, (D-N.H.). These senators, all members of the Foreign Relations Committee who had previously taken tough stances toward Russia, were contacted at least 100 times in 2021 and, on multiple occasions, staffers met directly with lobbyists.
In early 2022, after Cruz introduced a bill to impose further sanctions on the building of the pipeline, lobbyists worked feverishly in support. When the bill came under fire from the Biden administration, which argued it was “Designed to undermine the unity of our allies, not punish Russia,” Ukraine’s agents quickly responded with a “facts on the ground” brief sent to nearly every Senate Democratic office and half of Senate Republican offices debunking the administration’s talking points.
The brief was distributed on behalf of UEFOGI by Daniel Vajdich, the former senior national security adviser on Cruz’s 2016 presidential campaign and current president of Yorktown Solutions, the lobbying group that represents UFEOGI. Ukraine’s agents at KARV Communications also sent a brief to journalists explaining, “The only message Russia understands is firmness and pressure.” (Disclosure: KARV Communications senior adviser Amir Handjani is a supporter of the Quincy Institute.)
Cruz’s bill received a floor vote but, despite the efforts of Vajdich and other lobbyists, it did not pass. A rival piece of legislation, introduced by Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), and supported by the Biden administration has a better shot; it also seeks to block completion of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline and has been called the “mother of all sanctions.” Ukraine’s lobbying push on Capitol Hill has been aided by former Menendez staffer, Brittany Beaulieu of Yorktown Solutions, who now represents UFEOGI and the Civil Movement for a Just Ukraine, a nonprofit whose primary goal is “the de-oligarchization of Ukraine.” In her new role lobbying on behalf of Ukraine, Beaulieu has distributed tweets from her old boss on the need for “enhanced security assistance to Ukraine and new sanctions on the Kremlin.”
Yorktown Solutions also distributed a Wall Street Journal editorial board article warning, “a failed sanctions vote would be one more reason for Mr. Putin not to take U.S. sanctions threats seriously,” in reference to the Menendez legislation that would impose sanctions on Russia regardless of whether it invades Ukraine. Reporters with the Wall Street Journal’s newsroom — which operates independently of the editorial board — were contacted on at least 147 occasions throughout 2021, including arranging a meeting with UFEOGI leadership, according to the Quincy Institute’s analysis of FARA filings.
Finally, think tanks were contacted more than 1,100 times by Ukraine’s agents, and more than half of these were directed at one in particular: the Atlantic Council. This extraordinary outreach included multiple meetings with Atlantic Council scholars, like ex-U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine John Herbst, who has advocated for a more militarized approach to Russia amid the Ukraine crisis. Herbst recently told NPR that President Joe Biden should “send more weapons to Ukraine now. By all means, get additional U.S. and NATO forces up along Russia’s border.” Herbst was also at the center of an Atlantic Council kerfuffle last March, when he and 21 other Atlantic Council staff signed a letter opposing the work of two Atlantic Council colleagues who suggested a restraint-based approach to dealing with Russia.
The Atlantic Council has also launched “UkraineAlert” which publishes daily pieces on deterring Russia. A recent article, “Survey: Western public backs stronger support for Ukraine against Russia,” notes the survey in question was commissioned by the Victor Pinchuk Foundation and Yalta European Strategy, which Pinchuk founded; however, the article does not mention that the foundation is a large contributor to the Atlantic Council, donating $250,000-499,000 a year, or that Pinchuk himself — the second wealthiest man in Ukraine — sits on the international advisory board of the Atlantic Council.
After the Atlantic Council, the hawkish Heritage Foundation was the second most contacted think tank by Ukraine’s agents. Heritage has consistently pushed for militarized solutions to the Russia-Ukraine crisis and was contacted 180 times throughout 2021 by Ukraine’s agents. This outreach was targeted at high-level Heritage experts, like Heritage Vice President James Carafano, who has repeatedly belittled U.S. diplomatic efforts related to Ukraine.
The Ukraine lobby amplifies the voices of those pushing for more aggressive U.S. responses to the current crisis, but Ukrainian interests are far from the only players in this behind-the-scenes lobbying battle. The U.S. defense sector, for example, spent more than $117 million on lobbying in 2021. With U.S. weapons manufacturers making billions in arms sales to Ukraine, their CEOs see the turmoil there as a good business opportunity. And, of course, Russian interests are spending exorbitantly on influence operations and lobbying in the U.S. — approximately $182 million since 2016, according to OpenSecrets.
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5. Why the West’s Diplomacy With Russia Keeps Failing
Conclusion:
Now we are on the brink of what could be a catastrophic conflict. American, British, and European embassies in Ukraine are evacuating; citizens have been warned to leave. But this terrible moment represents not just a failure of diplomacy, it also reflects a failure of the Western imagination; a generation-long refusal, on the part of diplomats, politicians, journalists, and intellectuals, to understand what kind of state Russia was becoming and to prepare accordingly. We have refused to see the representatives of this state for what they are. We have refused to speak to them in a way that might have mattered. Now it might be too late.
Why the West’s Diplomacy With Russia Keeps Failing
American and European leaders’ profound lack of imagination has brought the world to the brink of war.
Oh, how I envy Liz Truss her opportunity! Oh, how I regret her utter failure to make use of it! For those who have never heard of her, Truss is the lightweight British foreign secretary who went to Moscow this week to tell her Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, that his country should not invade Ukraine. This trip was not a success. At a glacial press conference he likened their conversation to “the mute” speaking with “the deaf”; later, he leaked the fact that she had confused some Russian regions with Ukrainian regions, to add a little insult to the general injury.
Lavrov has done this many times before. He was vile to the European Union’s foreign-policy chief, Josep Borrell, last year. He has been unpleasant at international conferences and rude to journalists. His behavior is not an accident. Lavrov, like Russian President Vladimir Putin, uses aggression and sarcasm as tools to demonstrate his scorn for his interlocutor, to frame negotiations as useless even before they begin, to create dread and apathy. The point is to put other diplomats on the defensive, or else to cause them to give up in disgust.
But the fact that Lavrov is disrespectful and disagreeable is old news. So is the fact that Putin lectures foreign leaders for hours and hours on his personal and political grievances. He did that the first time he met President Barack Obama, more than a decade ago; he did exactly the same thing last week to French President Emmanuel Macron. Truss should have known all of this. Instead of offering empty language about rules and values, she could have started the press conference like this:
Good Evening, ladies and gentlemen of the press. I am delighted to join you after meeting my Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov. This time, we have not bothered to discuss treaties he won’t respect and promises he won’t keep. We have told him, instead, that an invasion of Ukraine will carry very, very high costs—higher than he has ever imagined. We are now planning to cut off Russian gas exports completely—Europe will find its energy supplies somewhere else. We are now preparing to assist the Ukrainian resistance, for a decade if need be. We are quadrupling our support for the Russian opposition, and for Russian media too. We want to make sure that Russians will start hearing the truth about this invasion, and as loudly as possible. And if you want to do regime change in Ukraine, we’ll get to work on regime change in Russia.
Truss, or Borrell before her, could have added just a touch of personal insult, in the style of Lavrov himself, and wondered out loud just how it is that Lavrov’s official salary pays for the lavish properties that his family makes use of in London. She could have listed the names of the many other Russian public servants who send their children to schools in Paris or Lugano. She could have announced that these children are now, all of them, on their way home, along with their parents: No more American School in Switzerland! No more pied-à-terres in Knightsbridge! No more Mediterranean yachts!
Of course Truss—like Borrell, like Macron, like the German chancellor who is headed for Moscow this week—would never say anything like this, not even in private. Tragically, the Western leaders and diplomats who are right now trying to stave off a Russian invasion of Ukraine still think they live in a world where rules matter, where diplomatic protocol is useful, where polite speech is valued. All of them think that when they go to Russia, they are talking to people whose minds can be changed by argument or debate. They think the Russian elite cares about things like its “reputation.” It does not.
In fact, when talking to the new breed of autocrats, whether in Russia, China, Venezuela, or Iran, we are now dealing with something very different: People who aren’t interested in treaties and documents, people who only respect hard power. Russia is in violation of the Budapest Memorandum, signed in 1994, guaranteeing Ukrainian security. Do you ever hear Putin talk about that? Of course not. He isn’t concerned about his untrustworthy reputation either: Lying keeps opponents on their toes. Nor does Lavrov mind if he is hated, because hatred gives him an aura of power.
Their intentions are different from ours too. Putin’s goal is not a flourishing, peaceful, prosperous Russia, but a Russia where he remains in charge. Lavrov’s goal is to maintain his position in the murky world of the Russian elite and, of course, to keep his money. What we mean by “interests” and what they mean by “interests” is not the same. When they listen to our diplomats, they don’t hear anything that really threatens their position, their power, their personal fortunes.
Despite all of our talk, no one has ever seriously tried to end, rather than simply limit, Russian money laundering in the West, or Russian political or financial influence in the West. No one has taken seriously the idea that Germans should now make themselves independent of Russian gas, or that France should ban political parties that accept Russian money, or that the U.K. and the U.S. should stop Russian oligarchs from buying property in London or Miami. No one has suggested that the proper response to Putin’s information war on our political system would be an information war on his.
Now we are on the brink of what could be a catastrophic conflict. American, British, and European embassies in Ukraine are evacuating; citizens have been warned to leave. But this terrible moment represents not just a failure of diplomacy, it also reflects a failure of the Western imagination; a generation-long refusal, on the part of diplomats, politicians, journalists, and intellectuals, to understand what kind of state Russia was becoming and to prepare accordingly. We have refused to see the representatives of this state for what they are. We have refused to speak to them in a way that might have mattered. Now it might be too late.
6. US adversaries have been mastering hybrid warfare. It’s time to catch up.
Excerpts:
To stay one step ahead of their adversaries and counter them in the gray zone, the United States and its allies must provide effective responses—not just reactions. Bad actors are both openly embracing and actively engaging in hybrid warfare, and time is of the essence for Washington to seize the advantage and get them to play its own game.
US adversaries have been mastering hybrid warfare. It’s time to catch up.
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As veterans of the intelligence and special-operations communities, we’ve both dedicated our lives to protecting the United States and its interests abroad. Following the September 11 attacks, much of this time was spent on fighting terrorism and countering adversaries in the Middle East and South Asia. Through it all, we’ve learned a fundamental truth: The world waits for no one.
Now, the United States acknowledges that it’s locked in a long-term strategic competition with China and Russia, both of which embrace a particular type of conflict: hybrid warfare. It is fought most frequently in the shadows and what experts call the “gray zone”—falling below the threshold of conventional armed conflict—and utilizes far more than just conventional forces.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, for example, has made hybrid warfare a matter of national policy over the past two decades. His toolkit is formidable, ranging from offensive cyber operations to non-attributable physical attacks. Some of the most notorious examples include the 2015 hack of Ukraine’s power grid (reportedly by a Russian hacking group), the Kremlin’s inference in the 2016 US presidential election (which fueled a lasting erosion of confidence in the voting process and other US democratic institutions), and the 2018 nerve-agent attack on former Russian operative Sergei Skripal in the United Kingdom.
Each of these incidents stands out for their brazen nature, defying the accepted norms of statecraft for a reputable member of the international community—and especially for a permanent, nuclear-armed member of the United Nations Security Council with “great power” ambitions. And as tensions over Ukraine continue rising, the Kremlin is expected to employ its time-tested playbook again.
Is Washington playing checkers while its adversaries are playing chess? Does it have the tools and, perhaps more importantly, the will and fortitude to effectively operate in this arena?
A recipe for action
In order to discourage such gray-zone operations, and to maintain its long-term competitive advantage across all domains, the United States must effectively respond to hybrid-warfare campaigns. But being reactive is not enough, since that forces the United States to play according to its adversaries’ rules rather than setting its own. At best, being reactive is chaotic and imprecise; at worst, it is ineffective or even delayed to the point of irrelevance.
An effective response is one that is inherently proactive, based on elements that are in place well ahead of time. While responses to hybrid warfare should differ from one another depending on the situation, the aggressor, and the severity of the activities, these common elements must all be present:
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Timely attribution: The United States must be able to more rapidly identify perpetrators with an acceptable level of confidence. It must also improve releasability to partners, including the ability to declassify information in relevant and actionable timeframes. Currently, the inability to nail down timely releasable attribution on some of the most egregious examples, including anomalous health incidents or bounties on troops serving in Afghanistan, continues to hinder the US ability to counter and prevent repeat events.
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Pain points: The United States needs to accurately assess the most vulnerable points of bad actors to counter and shape their behavior. For example, simply sanctioning the Russian economy would be ineffective because it does not move the needle for Putin and his coterie of enablers; rather, it worsens an already unfavorable view of the West among the Russian people. Instead, the United States must apply real pressure against the sources of Russian money and other support, particularly in the West. Effective responses to gray-zone activities are also not necessarily limited to the gray zone—meaning the United States could be within its rights to respond with a kinetic strike following a cyberattack on critical financial infrastructure or interference with global communications. It must similarly be mindful of pain points for allies and potential partners, such as reliance on energy or foreign investment from adversarial nations, or it will fail to gain support when needed.
- Tempo and sequencing: Effective responses need to occur quickly, or they won’t even be viewed as responses. Additionally, they need to be timed and sequenced to stun, overwhelm, or disrupt the activities in question, creating what’s known in special operations and intelligence circles as “violence of action”—whether kinetic or non-kinetic. Effective responses should make adversaries feel as if they have overplayed their hand, and that things will rapidly deteriorate if they fail to de-escalate. To be dissuaded from such actions in the future, bad actors need to viscerally remember the stinging pain of regret.
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Strategic coordination: Uncoordinated responses are ineffective ones. Any response must be weighed in the big picture of what the current or future US National Security Strategy is trying to accomplish inside the gray zone and in hybrid warfare writ large. Responses should be shaped and executed appropriately. An uncoordinated but successful operation may meet all its objectives, but still create more harm than good if it is not in line with national strategy. For example, the US Intelligence Community reportedly assessed with low to moderate confidence that Russia had offered bounties to the Taliban on US and NATO troops serving in Afghanistan. But that was later publicly called into question by senior US officials, and the uncoordinated public discussion complicated any resulting retaliatory actions—potentially impacting US international standing.
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Effects-based messaging: An effective response must have a deliberate effects-based message at its core, coordinated to shape adversary behavior within the competition continuum. This applies even if that message will be unspoken. Without a deliberate planned message to shape behavior, US responses may not only lack their intended effect, but the takeaway could actually have the opposite effect. When it comes to potential new sanctions against Russian oligarchs, for instance, it is important—even while threatening such measures—to clearly and publicly communicate the role those oligarchs play in enabling Russian aggression.
To stay one step ahead of their adversaries and counter them in the gray zone, the United States and its allies must provide effective responses—not just reactions. Bad actors are both openly embracing and actively engaging in hybrid warfare, and time is of the essence for Washington to seize the advantage and get them to play its own game.
Marc Polymeropoulos and Arun Iyer are nonresident senior fellows in the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security and its Forward Defense practice. Both are veterans of the intelligence and special operations communities, with nearly fifty years of service combined.
7. U.S. Aims to Thwart China’s Plan for Atlantic Base in Africa
China is a global competitor. We cannot limit our focus on China only within Asia (Indo-Pacific).
U.S. Aims to Thwart China’s Plan for Atlantic Base in Africa
An American delegation wants to convince Equatorial Guinea against giving Beijing a launchpad in waters the U.S. considers its backyard
WSJ · by Michael M. Phillips
The delegation will be led by the State Department’s top Africa official, Molly Phee, and Maj. Gen. Kenneth Ekman of the military’s Africa Command.
The visit coincides with rising American concern about China’s global expansionism and its pursuit of a permanent military presence on waters the U.S. considers home turf.
“We’d really, really not like to see a Chinese facility” on the Atlantic, said Tibor Nagy, Ms. Phee’s predecessor as assistant secretary of state for African affairs.
The Wall Street Journal reported last year that classified U.S. intelligence reports suggest China intends to build its first Atlantic base in Equatorial Guinea, likely in the city of Bata. Bata already has a Chinese-built commercial port with water deep enough to dock naval vessels.
The head of U.S. Africa Command, Gen. Stephen Townsend, later repeated the reports’ findings, telling Voice of America in January that Beijing is “intent on building a military air base and/or naval facility in Equatorial Guinea.”
A Chinese Embassy spokesperson in Washington didn’t comment directly on Beijing’s aspirations on Africa’s west coast, but added that “China is committed to a defensive national defense policy and is always a builder of world peace.”
Chinese state-owned companies are building ports and other infrastructure all across Africa, from highways in Kenya to hospitals in Equatorial Guinea’s hinterlands. A military base in Bata would fit the Chinese model of integrating commercial and political ends, China experts say, because it would both give China’s military a place to refit and rearm warships in the Atlantic and give Chinese companies access to the interior of Central Africa via Equatorial Guinea’s excellent highways.
The U.S. is hoping to quash any deal before it is signed, and Equatorial Guinea’s leaders appear aware of the potential leverage they now hold.
In December, the president’s son and heir apparent, Vice President Teodoro “Teodorin” Nguema Obiang Mangue, tweeted: “China is the model of a friendly nation and strategic partner, but, for now, there is no agreement.”
In October last year, a senior White House official visited Mr. Obiang and his son in Malabo—the capital city, situated on the island of Bioko—to raise U.S. objections to China’s basing plans.
“We’re not asking [Equatorial Guinea] to choose between China and us,” Gen. Townsend told VOA. “What we’re asking them to do is consider their other international partners and their concerns, because a Chinese military base in Equatorial Guinea is of great concern to the U.S. and all of their other partners.”
A Chinese aircraft carrier in the Pacific Ocean.
Photo: Reuters
Equatorial Guinea was Spain’s only colony in sub-Saharan Africa. Since its independence in 1968, the country has been ruled by members of a single family.
Mr. Obiang came to power in 1979, after overthrowing his infamously brutal uncle, Francisco Macias.
Successive U.S. administrations have condemned Mr. Obiang for his regime’s alleged corruption, human-rights abuses and dictatorial rule.
In a 2014 civil settlement, the Justice Department took possession of a mansion, a Ferrari and Michael Jackson memorabilia worth tens of millions of dollars, assets the government alleged that the president’s son Mr. Obiang Mangue acquired corruptly.
At the time, Mr. Obiang Mangue denied having gotten rich by raiding state coffers.
Oil minister Gabriel Mbaga Obiang Lima, another of the president’s children and often the regime’s public face, didn’t respond to requests for comment on the allegations against his family and U.S. concerns about Chinese military overtures.
U.S. concerns about corruption and human-rights violations limit the tools the Biden administration has at its disposal in negotiating with the Obiangs, according to U.S. diplomats.
But American officials believe they might make headway by helping Equatorial Guinea secure the pirate-infested waters of the Gulf of Guinea.
A construction project in Ciudad de la Paz, Equatorial Guinea.
Photo: Michael M. Phillips/The Wall Street Journal
The country is split between a mainland section bordering Cameroon and Gabon and a set of islands in the Gulf of Guinea. Those waters generate the bulk of the country’s income, in the form of revenues from offshore oil and gas deposits developed by American energy companies.
In recent years, the Gulf of Guinea has seen a surge in piracy, threatening both the oil industry and sea traffic in Equatorial Guinea’s waters. Over the past two years, there have been 54 incidents in which pirates have succeeded in boarding commercial or private vessels, as well as four more that ended in gunfire, according to Gulf of Guinea-wide data collected by the British and French navies.
On Jan. 29, armed attackers in a speed boat approached a passenger boat between Bata and Malabo, prompting a firefight between the pirates and the boat’s security team.
“That has now become the most dangerous waterway in the world as far as piracy is concerned,” said Mr. Nagy.
U.S. officials are linking maritime-security assistance to their effort to woo Equatorial Guinea away from the Chinese.
Gen. Townsend told reporters this month that the U.S. supports creation of an international task force to combat piracy in the Gulf of Guinea, akin to an effort that has apparently succeeded in eliminating such crimes on the other side of the continent, off the Horn of Africa.
WSJ · by Michael M. Phillips
8. What’s Really at Stake in America’s History Wars?
I think the paradox is that we have these "history wars' because we do not study and know enough about our history.
What’s Really at Stake in America’s History Wars?
In debates about monuments, curricula and renaming, the facts of the past matter less than how we are supposed to feel about our country.
This curricular change, affecting a few hundred of the approximately 5,500 K-12 students in McMinn’s public schools, was quickly amplified on social media into a case of book banning with shades of Holocaust denial. The author of “Maus,” Art Spiegelman, said that the decision had “a breath of autocracy and fascism.” “There’s only one kind of people who would vote to ban Maus, whatever they are calling themselves these days,” tweeted the popular fantasy writer Neil Gaiman, earning more than 170,000 likes. The controversy sent the book to the top of Amazon’s bestseller list.
This outrage of the week will soon give way to another, but the war over history—how to remember it, represent it and teach it—is only getting fiercer. America’s political and cultural divisions increasingly take the form of arguments not about the future—what kind of country we want to be and what policies will get us there—but about events that are sometimes centuries in the past. The Holocaust, the Civil War, the Founding, the slave trade, the discovery of America—these subjects are constantly being litigated on social media and cable TV, in school boards and state legislatures.
The Princeton School of Public and International Affairs, which bore Woodrow Wilson’s name until 2020.
Photo: dominick reuter/Reuters
None of those venues is well equipped to clarify what actually happened in the past, but then, the facts of history seldom enter into the war over history. Indeed, surveys regularly show how little Americans actually know about it. A 2019 poll of 41,000 people by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation found that in 49 states, a majority couldn't earn a passing score on the U.S. citizenship test, which asks basic questions about history and government. (The honorable exception was Vermont, where 53% passed.)
Ironically, the year after the survey, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation announced that it would drop the historical reference in its own name, citing the 28th president’s “racist legacy.” It was part of a growing trend. Woodrow Wilson’s name was also dropped from Princeton University’s school of international affairs. Yale University renamed a residential college named for John C. Calhoun, the antebellum Southern politician who was an ardent defender of slavery. The San Francisco school board briefly floated a plan to drop the names of numerous historical figures from public schools for various reasons, including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson because they were slaveholders.
“Renaming is a teaching tool, one suited to the short attention span of today’s public debates. ”
It makes sense that educational institutions are leading the wave of renaming, because it is above all a teaching tool, one suited to the short attention span of today’s public debates. Actual historical understanding requires a much greater investment of effort and imagination than giving a thumbs up or down to this or that name. Often even a Wikipedia search seems to be too much to ask. One of the names that the San Francisco school board proposed to get rid of was Paul Revere’s, on the grounds that he was a leader of the Penobscot Expedition of 1779, which a board member believed was a campaign to conquer territory from the Penobscot Indians. In fact, it was a (failed) attempt to evict British naval forces from Penobscot Bay in Maine.
Clearly, the war over history has as much to do with the present as the past. To some extent, that’s true of every attempt to tell the story of the past, even the most professional and objective. In the 19th century, the German historian Leopold von Ranke saw it as his task to determine “how things really were,” but if that could be done, it wouldn’t be necessary for each generation of historians to write new books about the same subjects. We keep retelling the story of the Civil War or World War II not primarily because new evidence is discovered, but because the way we understand the evidence changes as the world changes.
That’s why so many of America’s historical battles have to do with race, slavery and colonialism—because no aspect of American society has changed more dramatically over time. It has never been a secret, for instance, that George Washington was a slaveholder. When he died in 1799, there were 317 enslaved people living at Mount Vernon.
Grant Wood’s 1939 painting ‘Parson Weems' Fable’ depicts young George Washington with the cherry tree.
Photo: Figge Art Museum/the Estate of Nan Wood Graham/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
But when Parson Weems wrote the first bestselling biography of Washington in 1800, he barely referred to the first president’s slaveholding, except for noting that in his will he provided for freeing his slaves, “like a pure republican.” When Weems does inveigh against “slavery” in the book, he is referring to British rule in America. For instance, he writes that the tax on tea, which led to the Boston Tea Party in 1773, was meant to “insult and enslave” the colonies. Today it’s impossible to ignore this glaring contradiction. Weems didn’t notice it and clearly didn’t expect his readers to, either.
Another explanation for this blind spot can be found in the book’s full title: “The Life of George Washington: With curious anecdotes, equally honorable to himself and exemplary to his young countrymen.” Weems was a minister, and his goal was moral uplift. That’s why he avoided writing about Washington’s treatment of his slaves but included the dubious story about young George confessing to chopping down the cherry tree. The point was to show Washington in a light that would make readers want to be better themselves.
Today’s war over history involves the same didactic impulses. Fights over the past aren’t concerned with what happened so much as what we should feel about it. Most people who argue about whether Columbus Day should become Indigenous Peoples’ Day, regardless of what side they’re on, have only a vague sense of what Columbus actually did. The real subject of debate is whether the European discovery of America and everything that flowed from it, including the founding of the U.S., should be celebrated or regretted. Our most charged historical debates boil down to the same terms Weems used: Is America “exemplary” and “honorable,” or the reverse?
How we answer that question has important political ramifications, since the farther America is from the ideal, the more it presumably needs to change. But today’s history wars are increasingly detached from practical issues, operating purely in the realm of emotion and symbol. Take the “land acknowledgments” that many universities, arts institutions and local governments have begun to practice—the custom of stating the name of the Native American people that formerly occupied the local territory. For example, the Board of Supervisors of Pima County, Az., recently voted to begin its meetings with the statement, “We honor the tribal nations who have served as caretakers of this land from time immemorial and respectfully acknowledge the ancestral homelands of the Tohono O’odham Nation.”
To their supporters, land acknowledgments are a way of rectifying Americans’ ignorance or indifference about the people who inhabited the country before European settlement. The use of words like “caretakers” and “time immemorial,” however, raises historical questions that the Pima Board of Supervisors is presumably unqualified to answer. People have been living in what is now Arizona for 12,000 years: Were the Tohono O’odham Nation really in their territory “from time immemorial,” or might they have displaced an earlier population?
Of course, the Board has no intention of vacating Tucson and restoring the land to its former inhabitants, so the whole exercise can be seen as pointless. Still, by turning every public event into a memorial of dispossession, land acknowledgments have the effect of calling into question the legitimacy of the current inhabitants—that is, the people listening to the acknowledgment.
The statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee is removed from its pedestal in Richmond, Va., September 2021.
Photo: Bob Brown/Press Pool
The fear that the very idea of America is being repudiated has led Republican legislators in many states to introduce laws regulating the teaching of American history. These are often referred to as “anti-critical race theory” laws, but in this context the term is just a placeholder for a deeper anxiety. The controversial law passed in Texas last year, for instance, doesn’t prevent teachers from discussing racism. On the contrary, House Bill 3979 mandates the study of Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King, Jr. , as well as Susan B. Anthony and Cesar Chavez. However, it does insist that students learn that “slavery and racism are…deviations from, betrayals of, or failures to live up to, the authentic founding principles of the United States, which include liberty and equality.” In other words, students should believe that the U.S. is “exemplary” and “honorable” in principle, if regrettably not in practice.
In the U.S., the war over history usually has to do with curricula and monuments because those are some of the only things the government can directly control. Removing “Maus” from the 8th-grade reading list can be loosely referred to as a “ban” only because actual book bans don’t exist here, thanks to the First Amendment. But other countries that are less free also have their history wars, and in recent years governments and ideologues have become bolder about imposing an official line.
In Russia last December, a court ordered the dissolution of Memorial, a highly respected nonprofit founded in 1989 to document the crimes of the Soviet era, after prosecutors charged that it “creates a false image of the USSR as a terrorist state.” In 2018, Poland made it illegal to attribute blame for the Holocaust to the “Polish nation.” In India in 2014, Penguin India agreed to stop publishing a book about the history of Hinduism by the respected American scholar Wendy Doniger, after a nationalist leader sued on the grounds that it focused on “the negative aspects” of the subject.
Such episodes are becoming more common with the rise of nationalist and populist movements around the world. When people invest their identity wholly in their nation, pointing out the evils in the nation’s past feels like a personal attack. Conversely, for people whose political beliefs hinge on distrusting nationalism, any refusal to focus on historic evils feels dangerous, like a tacit endorsement of them, as in the “Maus” episode. These extremes feed off one another, until we can only talk about the past in terms of praise or blame that would be too simple for understanding a single human being, much less a collection of millions over centuries.
It’s surprising to realize how quickly the American consensus on history has unraveled under the pressure of polarization. In 2008, when Barack Obama was running in the Democratic presidential primary, he delivered a celebrated speech rebuking his former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, for expressing “a profoundly distorted view of this country—a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America.”
Barack Obama at Chicago’s Trinity United Church in 2004. As a presidential candidate in 2008, Obama rebuked the church’s pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, for holding ‘a view that sees white racism as endemic.’
Photo: Nam Y. Huh/ASSOCIATED PRESS
In other words, Mr. Obama was saying the same thing as the Texas legislature: that racism is a betrayal of America’s authentic principles. Meanwhile, in 2003 President George W. Bush gave a speech in Senegal reflecting on the history of American slavery, in which he declared that “My nation’s journey toward justice has not been easy and it is not over,” and that “African-Americans have upheld the ideals of America by exposing laws and habits contradicting those ideals.”
In 2022, it’s hard to imagine a successful Democratic politician echoing Mr. Obama’s sentiments, or a Republican echoing Mr. Bush’s. But it wasn’t long ago that Americans of both parties were confident enough in the country’s future to acknowledge the challenging and inspiring complexity of its past.
Clockwise from top left: Protestors surround a statue of Christopher Columbus in Richmond, Va., June 2020; a map of slave and free states before the Civil War; an original printing of the Declaration of Independence; a statue of Robert E. Lee in Richmond, Va., covered in graffiti, January 2021; the cover of ‘Maus’; a portrait of George Washington by Gilbert Stuart; a 1914 photograph of Woodrow Wilson; an 1862 photograph of enslaved people in South Carolina; an 1817 advertisement for slaves; a 1590 etching of Columbus in the New World; a handwritten copy of the 13th Amendment signed by Abraham Lincoln.
Photo illustration image credits: Clockwise from top: Parker Michels-Boyce/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images; Library of Congress; Lincoln Financial Foundation Collection; Patrick Smith/Getty Images, Clark Art Institute; National Star-Spangled Banner Centennial; The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Basil Wink; Culture Club/Getty Images’ Historical Collectible Auctions (2)
9. Russians Have Already Started Hybrid War With Bomb Threats, Cyberattacks, Ukraine Says
The evolving character of war.
Russians Have Already Started Hybrid War With Bomb Threats, Cyberattacks, Ukraine Says
Moscow is using cyberattacks, economic pressure and, most recently, false bomb threats, to undermine its neighbor, Kyiv says
Russian forces and their proxies already control portions of Ukraine and frequent skirmish with government forces. The aim of Moscow’s intensifying hybrid campaign, Ukrainian officials say, is to weaken their country and sow panic, potentially provoking discontent and protests of the kind Russia fomented in eastern Ukraine in 2014 to justify its interventions there. U.S. and U.K. officials said last month they uncovered coup plots intended to install a puppet pro-Russian government.
The tactics illustrate how Russian President Vladimir Putin can maintain pressure on Ukraine without escalating to a shooting war that could provoke sanctions from the West. Ukrainian officials say a destabilization campaign is more likely than a large-scale invasion.
Bomb-threat training at a Kyiv school.
Photo: VALENTYN OGIRENKO/REUTERS
“The No. 1 task for Russia is to undermine us from inside,” Oleksiy Danilov, the top national security adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, said in a recent interview.
Since Russia invaded parts of Ukraine in 2014, it has employed a variety of tactics to try to sap the country’s resources and will to fight. The Kremlin can dial up the level of fighting in Ukraine’s east through the separatists it controls there, killing Ukrainian soldiers and wrecking everyday lives near the front-line. An increase in fighting there could provide the Kremlin with a pretext to send its army deeper into Ukraine, as it did in Georgia in 2008.
Russian destabilization efforts since 2014 have had mixed results. Ukrainian support for membership of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and European Union has grown to more than half the population. Ukraine’s economy hasn’t collapsed, and trade has shifted from Russia to the EU and elsewhere. The Ukrainian government has bolstered cyber defenses and closed TV stations it called propaganda channels.
However, weak points remain, and Russia is probing.
Ukraine is one of the poorest countries in Europe and has a vulnerable economy. The Russian military buildup has led investors to freeze projects and pull money out of the country. The national currency, the hryvnia, has weakened but not seen a full-blown panic.
A Russian navy vessel sailing past Istanbul toward the Black Sea.
Photo: ozan kose/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Russia announced Thursday naval drills in the Black Sea that would close off swaths of water along Ukraine’s southern coast, inhibiting traffic to key ports for exports. Ukraine’s foreign ministry complained about the economic consequences of the closures, calling them part of Russia’s “hybrid warfare.”
“Russia’s economic warfare against Ukraine continues,” the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv said on Twitter.
Russia has long limited sea traffic into the Azov Sea via the Kerch Strait, forming what Ukraine says amounts to a partial blockade of ports including the industrial hub of Mariupol.
“They want to throttle our economy,” said Mr. Danilov.
Ukraine has girded against some of Moscow’s tactics. Kyiv turned off Russian state channels in 2014, saying they were spreading disinformation aimed at fomenting discord. Last year, Mr. Zelensky extended a ban on Russian websites to include social network Vkontakte.
Mr. Zelensky last year also sanctioned the closure of three television channels owned by a close friend of Mr. Putin. The station had lambasted Ukraine’s leadership and promoted closer ties with Russia. Ukrainian officials say it was covertly financed by Moscow and was yet another source of Kremlin disinformation.
“We closed Russian propaganda channels financed by the aggressor country,” said Mr. Danilov, the presidential security adviser. “That isn’t about freedom of speech. It’s about the information war Russia was pursuing.”
Protesters outside the Kyiv offices of a television channel whose owner had been identified as a potential puppet ruler who could be installed by the Russians.
Photo: Anastasia Vlasova for The Wall Street Journal
After the U.K. identified a Ukrainian lawmaker and television channel owner, Yevhen Murayev, as a potential puppet ruler who could be installed by the Russians, Ukrainian protesters demonstrated outside his channel’s offices in Kyiv and called for its closure. Mr. Murayev denied involvement in any such plot.
Some Ukrainians are taking measures beyond protesting. Myroslav Hai, a military veteran and film producer, set up powerful radio equipment near the front line in the eastern Luhansk region to broadcast Army FM, a Ukrainian radio station, with such a strong signal that it replaced a separatist station in Russia-allied territory.
“It’s important to show that someone is doing something small every day,” he said.
Kyiv has bolstered its cyber defenses after a string of attacks, including with training at “hackathons” organized by the EU and NATO.
Ukraine’s state cybersecurity center in Kyiv.
Photo: Anastasia Vlasova for The Wall Street Journal
Cyberattacks in 2015 and 2016 temporarily took down power grids in Ivano-Frankivsk in western Ukraine and Kyiv, the capital. A malware attack in 2017 affected one in 10 businesses nationwide and was designed to cripple the economy, according to Viktor Zhora, deputy chief of Ukraine’s State Service of Special Communication and Information Protection.
A cyberattack last month, which authorities blamed on Russia and its close ally Belarus, defaced several dozen government websites and installed malware. Mr. Zhora says Ukrainian authorities thwarted a graver attack that was aimed at accessing the state register, a data set on companies and individual entrepreneurs.
“The plan was to destabilize and seek chaos,” said Mr. Zhora.
Another new tactic, according to Ukrainian authorities, is bomb threats.
Eduard Kryzhanivsky watching his daughter Vira Kryzhanivska connecting to an online lesson after her school was evacuated following a bomb threat. Police didn't find anything dangerous.
Photo: Anastasia Vlasova for The Wall Street Journal
Ukrainian police said there were nearly 1,000 anonymous messages in January, mostly by email, falsely claiming bomb threats against nearly 10,000 locations, from schools to critical infrastructure.
Kateryna Morozova’s 7-year-old daughter called her last month asking to be collected from school as teachers had told her to leave quickly. A teacher soon said on a messenger group that there had been a bomb threat against the school. Children who had been swimming had to grab what clothes they could and rush outside into the cold and snow, she said.
“I didn’t feel so worried,” said Ms. Morozova, 30 years old. “We got used to these fakes.”
Standoff With Russia
News and insights on the rising tensions between Russia and Ukraine and the West, selected by the editors
KYIV, Ukraine—U.S. officials are warning that Russia could be about to attack Ukraine. For many citizens in this embattled country, the assault has already begun.
Ukrainian officials say that Russia, which has positioned more than 100,000 troops around three sides of Ukraine, is stepping up a destabilization campaign involving cyberattacks, economic disruption and a new tactic: hundreds of fake bomb threats.
Russian forces and their proxies already control portions of Ukraine and frequent skirmish with government forces. The aim of Moscow’s intensifying hybrid campaign, Ukrainian officials say, is to weaken their country and sow panic, potentially provoking discontent and protests of the kind Russia fomented in eastern Ukraine in 2014 to justify its interventions there. U.S. and U.K. officials said last month they uncovered coup plots intended to install a puppet pro-Russian government.
The tactics illustrate how Russian President Vladimir Putin can maintain pressure on Ukraine without escalating to a shooting war that could provoke sanctions from the West. Ukrainian officials say a destabilization campaign is more likely than a large-scale invasion.
Bomb-threat training at a Kyiv school.
Photo: VALENTYN OGIRENKO/REUTERS
“The No. 1 task for Russia is to undermine us from inside,” Oleksiy Danilov, the top national security adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, said in a recent interview.
Since Russia invaded parts of Ukraine in 2014, it has employed a variety of tactics to try to sap the country’s resources and will to fight. The Kremlin can dial up the level of fighting in Ukraine’s east through the separatists it controls there, killing Ukrainian soldiers and wrecking everyday lives near the front-line. An increase in fighting there could provide the Kremlin with a pretext to send its army deeper into Ukraine, as it did in Georgia in 2008.
Russian destabilization efforts since 2014 have had mixed results. Ukrainian support for membership of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and European Union has grown to more than half the population. Ukraine’s economy hasn’t collapsed, and trade has shifted from Russia to the EU and elsewhere. The Ukrainian government has bolstered cyber defenses and closed TV stations it called propaganda channels.
However, weak points remain, and Russia is probing.
Ukraine is one of the poorest countries in Europe and has a vulnerable economy. The Russian military buildup has led investors to freeze projects and pull money out of the country. The national currency, the hryvnia, has weakened but not seen a full-blown panic.
A Russian navy vessel sailing past Istanbul toward the Black Sea.
Photo: ozan kose/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Russia announced Thursday naval drills in the Black Sea that would close off swaths of water along Ukraine’s southern coast, inhibiting traffic to key ports for exports. Ukraine’s foreign ministry complained about the economic consequences of the closures, calling them part of Russia’s “hybrid warfare.”
“Russia’s economic warfare against Ukraine continues,” the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv said on Twitter.
Russia has long limited sea traffic into the Azov Sea via the Kerch Strait, forming what Ukraine says amounts to a partial blockade of ports including the industrial hub of Mariupol.
“They want to throttle our economy,” said Mr. Danilov.
Ukraine has girded against some of Moscow’s tactics. Kyiv turned off Russian state channels in 2014, saying they were spreading disinformation aimed at fomenting discord. Last year, Mr. Zelensky extended a ban on Russian websites to include social network Vkontakte.
Mr. Zelensky last year also sanctioned the closure of three television channels owned by a close friend of Mr. Putin. The station had lambasted Ukraine’s leadership and promoted closer ties with Russia. Ukrainian officials say it was covertly financed by Moscow and was yet another source of Kremlin disinformation.
“We closed Russian propaganda channels financed by the aggressor country,” said Mr. Danilov, the presidential security adviser. “That isn’t about freedom of speech. It’s about the information war Russia was pursuing.”
Protesters outside the Kyiv offices of a television channel whose owner had been identified as a potential puppet ruler who could be installed by the Russians.
Photo: Anastasia Vlasova for The Wall Street Journal
After the U.K. identified a Ukrainian lawmaker and television channel owner, Yevhen Murayev, as a potential puppet ruler who could be installed by the Russians, Ukrainian protesters demonstrated outside his channel’s offices in Kyiv and called for its closure. Mr. Murayev denied involvement in any such plot.
Some Ukrainians are taking measures beyond protesting. Myroslav Hai, a military veteran and film producer, set up powerful radio equipment near the front line in the eastern Luhansk region to broadcast Army FM, a Ukrainian radio station, with such a strong signal that it replaced a separatist station in Russia-allied territory.
“It’s important to show that someone is doing something small every day,” he said.
Kyiv has bolstered its cyber defenses after a string of attacks, including with training at “hackathons” organized by the EU and NATO.
Ukraine’s state cybersecurity center in Kyiv.
Photo: Anastasia Vlasova for The Wall Street Journal
Cyberattacks in 2015 and 2016 temporarily took down power grids in Ivano-Frankivsk in western Ukraine and Kyiv, the capital. A malware attack in 2017 affected one in 10 businesses nationwide and was designed to cripple the economy, according to Viktor Zhora, deputy chief of Ukraine’s State Service of Special Communication and Information Protection.
A cyberattack last month, which authorities blamed on Russia and its close ally Belarus, defaced several dozen government websites and installed malware. Mr. Zhora says Ukrainian authorities thwarted a graver attack that was aimed at accessing the state register, a data set on companies and individual entrepreneurs.
“The plan was to destabilize and seek chaos,” said Mr. Zhora.
Another new tactic, according to Ukrainian authorities, is bomb threats.
Eduard Kryzhanivsky watching his daughter Vira Kryzhanivska connecting to an online lesson after her school was evacuated following a bomb threat. Police didn't find anything dangerous.
Photo: Anastasia Vlasova for The Wall Street Journal
Ukrainian police said there were nearly 1,000 anonymous messages in January, mostly by email, falsely claiming bomb threats against nearly 10,000 locations, from schools to critical infrastructure.
Kateryna Morozova’s 7-year-old daughter called her last month asking to be collected from school as teachers had told her to leave quickly. A teacher soon said on a messenger group that there had been a bomb threat against the school. Children who had been swimming had to grab what clothes they could and rush outside into the cold and snow, she said.
“I didn’t feel so worried,” said Ms. Morozova, 30 years old. “We got used to these fakes.”
Standoff With Russia
News and insights on the rising tensions between Russia and Ukraine and the West, selected by the editors
10. Will the West Heed Poland’s Warnings on Russian Aggression?
Will the West Heed Poland’s Warnings on Russian Aggression?
Some consider Warsaw alarmist, but the Poles have frequently been right about their large neighbor.
Less than two years later, Kaczyński died in a plane crash near the Russian city of Smolensk. His delegation had been flying to a ceremony marking the 70th anniversary of the 1940 Katyn massacre, a Soviet mass execution of more than 20,000 Polish military officers, intellectuals and police. The late president’s diplomatic legacy, and the circumstances surrounding his death, have been bitterly debated in Poland. But the prescience of his warning in Tbilisi remains unquestionable.
Facing few consequences for attacking Georgia, Vladimir Putin moved on Ukraine in 2014. The war, which has claimed some 15,000 lives according to Kyiv, never ended. But with around 130,000 Russian troops now massing at Ukraine’s borders, Polish officials are again sounding alarms that the renewed threat is about much more than one country.
“The invasion of Ukraine will not satisfy Putin’s imperialist ambitions,” an official in the Polish prime minister’s office tells me. “Today he claims that Russia is threatened by Ukraine’s sovereignty. Tomorrow it may turn out that it is the democratic values of Western countries that pose such a risk.” Warsaw has called for severe economic sanctions and support for the Ukrainian military.
But deterring Russia requires unity across NATO and the EU, and many in Western Europe see the Poles as alarmist. Germany’s uneven response has emerged as a particular stumbling block. Chancellor Olaf Scholz, a Social Democrat, leads an unruly three-party coalition with clear divisions over how to respond. While German officials often say the right things, their actions leave eastern allies uneasy.
Germany has blocked arms exports to Ukraine from a NATO ally and offered Kyiv a miserly 5,000 helmets. Some Social Democratic officials have said the Russian Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline should move forward. Economics Minister Robert Habeck, a member of the Green Party, even suggested that cooperating with Russia on renewable energy projects could help defuse tensions.
“Until now Germany pays the highest price in its credibility,” says Sławomir Dębski, director of the Polish Institute of International Affairs. “Paradoxically, not Russia. Because nobody expects from Russia anything good.”
Then there is French President Emmanuel Macron, who met with Mr. Putin in Moscow on Monday. “Macron is clearly obsessed with European strategic autonomy,” says Michał Baranowski, director of the German Marshall Fund’s Warsaw office. Mr. Baranowski largely agrees that Europe should do more to assert itself. Yet he believes the way to empower the Continent is not through “a parallel track of negotiations with Russia” but “by creating additional defense capabilities, by being clear on sanctions, by being proactive. That’s what we need from Europe as a whole.”
Despite Mr. Macron’s diplomatic efforts, Mr. Putin is primarily interested in dealing with Washington. President Biden has made a point of consulting allies, but the Polish foreign minister said last year that he learned from the media of Washington’s decision not to impose sanctions on Nord Stream 2. Although the White House’s deference to Berlin has annoyed more-steadfast allies like Warsaw, Mr. Biden has improved recently.
“It was an absolutely necessary step to reject Russian demands for security guarantees and a reduced NATO presence in Eastern Europe,” the official in the Polish prime ministers office says. “Our American partners realize that accepting the Russian ultimatum would not only fail to resolve this crisis, but would give Putin the green light to destabilize the entire region.” But Mr. Biden’s suggestion that a “minor incursion” might not lead to serious consequences made Central and Eastern European allies cringe.
Mr. Putin could avoid an outright invasion and instead destabilize Ukraine through hybrid attacks, which have already started on a small scale. An escalation could take the form of cyberattacks on critical infrastructure or political subversion to undermine the country’s fragile democracy. British intelligence has suggested Mr. Putin hopes to install a pro-Kremlin regime in Kyiv. Europe broadly agrees some form of sanctions will be necessary—and Germany is fitfully coming around to the idea of abandoning Nord Stream 2—but difficulty comes from determining what exactly would trigger those sanctions and how far they would go.
Like an outright invasion, a hybrid attack’s consequences could extend beyond Ukraine. “What we’re seeing happening in Ukraine in hybrid forms will give us an insight into the Russian toolbox and the way they operate,” a senior NATO official tells me. An escalation against a NATO ally could come sooner rather than later. “Even if the military aggression is pointed towards Ukraine, then we could still see cyber or hybrid attacks taking place against NATO allies, for example in the Baltics, as a distraction or as a warning that we shouldn’t interfere.”
I recently spoke to Giorgi Kandelaki, a former member of Georgia’s Parliament, about Kaczyński’s address and the current Ukraine crisis. He recalls the “landmark speech” but laments that Georgia now offers “pro-Western talking points” while de facto drifting toward Russia’s orbit under the leadership of billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili’s Georgian Dream party. Should the West fail to heed the Poles’ calls for a stronger response, it isn’t hard to imagine a future in which a pro-Moscow Ukrainian government stands idly by as Mr. Putin picks his next target.
Mr. O’Neal is a Europe-based editorial page writer for the Journal.
11. Virginia Hall Was America’s Most Successful Female WWII Spy. But She Was Almost Kept From Serving
Virginia Hall Was America’s Most Successful Female WWII Spy. But She Was Almost Kept From Serving
When Gina Haspel became the first female director of the CIA in 2018, she talked of how she had stood “on the shoulders of heroines who never sought public acclaim.” She was “deeply indebted,” she said, to women who had served the agency and its wartime predecessor the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) for making her appointment possible by challenging stereotypes and breaking down barriers. Perhaps no woman is a better illustration of that history than Virginia Hall, a one-legged socialite from Baltimore whom the CIA Museum would later hail as the office’s most successful American female spy of the Second World War.
Despite her record behind enemy lines in wartime France, it nevertheless took Hall years to land the post-war job she longed for at the heart of the CIA. It has only been comparatively recently that the agency has publicly acknowledged her as an unqualified war heroine and a devoted officer, giving her a citation in the CIA Museum catalogue on the OSS. It has also now named a training building after her. Yet she has remained little known outside intelligence circles and her agency career suffered from prejudice and misunderstanding until she retired in 1966.
Born to a wealthy banking family in 1906, Hall lost her left leg after a hunting accident at the age of 27 and thereafter was dependent on a wooden prosthetic she named Cuthbert. Despite her raft of languages and extensive knowledge of Europe her dreams of becoming an ambassador had been repeatedly thwarted by State Department prejudice against women — only six out of 1500 staffers in the Foreign Service at that time were female and one of her several attempts to join them was hampered when her exam papers were mysteriously mislaid — as well as the disabled. Even President Franklin Roosevelt, although himself reliant on a wheelchair, rejected lobbying from powerful family friends to overturn a bar on amputees from joining the diplomatic service.
So, as war loomed in 1939, she resigned in disgust from her clerk role at the American legation in the Baltic state of Estonia to embark on what would become a Homeric tale of adventure, action and seemingly unfathomable courage. Long before the U.S. joined the war after Pearl Harbor, she volunteered to drive ambulances for the French army on the front line during the bloody Nazi invasion of May 1940, persevering in picking up the wounded even when fighter planes swept over to pepper the roads with machine gun fire. Yet this was merely an apprenticeship.
When Hall was demobilized after France capitulated, she decided to travel to London to offer her services to the British war effort. On her journey, she was spotted in a Spanish railway station by an undercover agent who in a brief conversation with her quickly realized that here was a woman of exceptional resolve and burning desire to free France from Hitler’s tyranny. He put her in touch with a “friend” in Britain, a senior officer in Special Operations Executive (SOE), the new secret service set up by Winston Churchill to “set Europe ablaze” through an unprecedented onslaught of spying, subversion and sabotage.
SOE top brass were not keen on employing women, especially foreign ones, and were specifically barred from sending them into enemy territory. Yet after six months of trying, they had failed to infiltrate a single agent into France to embark on what Churchill branded a most “ungentlemanly” new form of undercover warfare. The search for rule-breaking recruits of “absolute secrecy,” “fanatical enthusiasm” and unimaginable courage was proving unsurprisingly difficult. Few were willing to take the estimated 50-50 chance of survival against the ruthless barbarism of the Third Reich. When Hall once again volunteered, her obvious qualities saw the old prejudices being abandoned. She was one of the first SOE officers to be dispatched from London and became, in the words of an official British government report at the end of the war, “amazingly successful.”
Even then she was patronized and underestimated until she proved herself capable of eluding the Gestapo longer than any of her male Allied colleagues and particularly adept at recruiting and organizing useful assets in the nucleus of what would become the Resistance armies of the future. She also masterminded spectacular jailbreaks for fellow agents who had been captured. For a whole year, she was SOE’s only Allied female agent in France but after 12 months of marveling at her derring-do, the service decided to dispatch more women into the field. This “gallant lady,” her SOE commanders concluded, was almost single-handedly changing minds about the role of women in combat.
When she later switched to SOE’s American counterpart, OSS, she once again had to break out of her subordinate role by stealth and simply by being better than anyone else. Even the notion of dispatching a woman on a paramilitary operation was still controversial in the U.S., let alone giving her command. So she was deployed as the mere assistant and wireless operator to an older — but inexperienced — male officer. She soon branched out on her own, leaving him flailing in her absence. Once shot of him, Hall quickly emerged as a fearless guerrilla leader who helped liberate whole swathes of France by arming, organizing and sometimes commanding Resistance units when blowing up bridges and attacking German convoys. Hall was rewarded by becoming the only civilian woman of the war to be decorated with the Distinguished Service Cross for “extraordinary heroism.” CIA officers have said that the techniques she developed 80 years ago to build up the French Resistance still inform the agency’s missions today, including Operation Jawbreaker in Afghanistan before and after 9/11.
The extreme exigencies of war had finally given Hall the chance to show what she could do; the return of peace saw the return of the old barriers. Internal personnel papers and the recollections of fellow agents reveal how she was sidelined, undermined and belittled by some of her superiors at the CIA – with her supporters saddened by her “reduced status” and angered by the fact that her track record was viewed as an “embarrassment” by the agency’s “noncombat types.” Hall never received the recognition she deserved during her lifetime, but since then her formidable legacy has gradually become better understood. And as Gina Haspel made clear, her formidable legacy lives on.
From A WOMAN OF NO IMPORTANCE by Sonia Purnell, published by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2019 by Sonia Purnell.
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12. “A Pleasure to Burn”: We Are Closer to Bradbury’s Dystopia Than Orwell’s or Huxley’s
Bradbury versus Orwell versus Huxley.
For some weekend reflection.
Conclusion:
There are elements of Orwell’s, Huxley’s, and Bradbury’s dystopian visions in our present reality, but perhaps we prefer to describe them all as “Orwellian” because it implies that our circumstances have been imposed upon us against our will. It is painful to accept that we are complicit, and that we are currently living out perhaps the darkest of those visions by demanding to live in ignorance. Yet it is precisely because we have chosen this fate that we have the ability to alter it.
“A Pleasure to Burn”: We Are Closer to Bradbury’s Dystopia Than Orwell’s or Huxley’s
For decades, it has been common to call authoritarian new laws, norms, or government actions “Orwellian.” In 1984, George Orwell so brilliantly portrayed a nightmarish future that his name became synonymous with almost anything one wishes to describe as oppressive. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, meanwhile, provided a rather different but equally bleak vision of the future that is frequently invoked to illuminate our current malaise.
Amid the technological chaos and Western culture wars of the 21st century, thinkpiece writers sporadically debate which of these novels more accurately foresaw our present predicament. Modern China most clearly embodies Orwell’s vision, and elements of both novels can be found in contemporary Western societies. However, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 offered perhaps a more accurate warning than either. Published in 1953, Bradbury’s novel is as gloomy and prescient as either Orwell’s or Huxley’s, but its explanation of how a dystopia is created comes closer to providing an understanding of our new reality.
The primary difference between Huxley’s dystopia and that described by Orwell is the methodology through which humanity is controlled by authoritarian governments. Huxley argued that humans would be tricked into embracing their own enslavement via anti-depressants and various hedonistic distractions, while Orwell held that compliance would more easily be achieved through censorship, mind control, and violence. In a letter to Orwell (his childhood French teacher) upon reading 1984, Huxley insisted that “the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience.” Certainly, Bradbury’s novel features elements of both; citizens in his future are subject to state violence and also pacified by pleasure and drugs. However, the key distinction here, and Bradbury’s great contribution to dystopian literature, is that we would choose our own intellectual enslavement as well.
In rather a clichéd dystopian trope, Fahrenheit 451 tells the story of a man awakening to the reality that society is profoundly oppressive and resolving to resist. The protagonist is a fireman named Montag, who comes to question the nature of his profession. But in this vision of the future, firemen no longer extinguish fires, they start them. They are tasked with burning books, which are now forbidden, and with the help of an eight-legged Mechanical Hound, they doggedly hunt for literature and destroy it. Technology fosters alienation, but systems of control are rarely foisted upon the population by a government.
In 1984, information is carefully controlled by the state. In Brave New World, citizens are bombarded with so much information they are unable to make intelligent judgments. In Fahrenheit 451, however, people choose ignorance as they come to reject the complexity and uncertainty provided by literature—with the proliferation of more exciting, short-form sources of media, books have gradually lost their appeal. This is explained to Montag by his boss, Beatty:
Authors, full of evil thoughts, lock up your typewriters. They did. Magazines became a nice blend of vanilla tapioca. Books, so the damned snobbish critics said, were dishwater. No wonder books stopped selling, the critics said. But the public, knowing what it wanted, spinning happily, let the comicbooks survive. And the three-dimensional sex-magazines, of course. There you have it, Montag. It didn’t come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God. Today, thanks to them, you can stay happy all the time, you are allowed to read comics, the good old confessions, or trade journals.
Initially thought of as boring, books are later considered dangerous. “A book is a loaded gun in the house next door,” Beatty tells Montag, for it promotes psychological confusion and social disharmony, allowing those who read to gain more knowledge than others, a kind of inequality now deemed unconstitutional. “Not everyone [is] born free and equal,” Beatty explains. But by outlawing literature and allowing people to grow addicted to vapid forms of entertainment, chained to their devices, “everyone [is] made equal.” Reading, it is implied, leads to personal unhappiness and social instability:
If you don’t want a man unhappy politically, don’t give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none. Let him forget there is such a thing as war. If the Government is inefficient, top-heavy, and tax-mad, better it be all those than that people worry over it. Peace, Montag. Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of noncombustible data, chock them so damned full of “facts” they feel stuffed, but absolutely “brilliant” with information. Then they’ll feel they're thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving. And they’ll be happy, because facts of that sort don’t change. Don’t give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy.
Bradbury predicted that people, disturbed by confusing or challenging ideas, might one day demand censorship for themselves and protection from any information that pierced the veil of their own simplified reality. This is, of course, welcomed by the government, but it seldom forcibly imposed. “Remember,” an old man called Faber says, “the firemen are rarely necessary. The public itself stopped reading of its own accord.”
In a society now dominated by reassuringly reductive tweets and memes, where supposedly learned people choose to boycott long-form podcasts, encourage publishers to ditch books by controversial authors, or lean on streaming providers to severe ties with comedians and other artists, this prediction from 1953 sounds eerily familiar. The Internet places an impossibly vast array of information at our fingertips, yet our apps allow us to pick and choose which facts to believe and which ideological silos we wish to inhabit. And from those choices comes the inevitable desire to stamp out contrary ideas that make us uncomfortable. Our governments may hold back some information in the name of political expediency or national security, but most of what is censored today is at the behest of the public.
Book burning may not have much allure these days, but book banning and de-platforming are in vogue. None of this, of course, is entirely new, even if “cancel culture” is a relatively recent addition to the lexicon. In 1994, as the first wave of political correctness befouled Western culture, Bradbury mused on the accuracy of his predictions. Fahrenheit 451, he told an interviewer, “works even better because we have political correctness now. Political correctness is the real enemy these days. … It’s thought control and freedom of speech control.” Of course, the problem has only deepened since the advent of social media and the echo chambers it has enabled—people feel safe sharing and hearing views that are accepted by their peer group, and reject those that contradict them out of hand. The astonishing power of the Internet has helped to mobilise angry mobs of ill-informed (albeit sometimes well-meaning) people eager to purge whatever is inconvenient, unpleasant, or otherwise disagreeable.
In both Bradbury’s novel and our present reality, a perverse pleasure is derived from self-righteous acts of censorship. Fahrenheit 451 opens with the line: “It was a pleasure to burn,” and those who engage in de-platforming, book banning, and public shaming today are clearly enjoying themselves. Not only do these activities make them feel virtuous but they also enhance in-group solidarity and boost social status. There is no shame in them, either, and no thought spared for the freedoms lost, the ideas silenced, or the lives destroyed in the process. This is how Montag describes his job early in the book:
You weren't hurting anyone, you were hurting only things! And since things really couldn’t be hurt, since things felt nothing, and things don’t scream or whimper, as this woman might begin to scream and cry out, there was nothing to tease your conscience later. You were simply cleaning up. Janitorial work, essentially. Everything to its proper place.
The woman in front of Montag does not scream or cry out. Rather, in an act that finally shocks Montag into questioning his job and the system he serves, she sets herself on fire. Her agonising death makes no impact on the other firemen. They remain proud to burn books, and believe that those foolish enough to read them deserve what they get. While Bradbury’s fictional society incarcerates, banishes, and even assassinates those who hide books, modern society prefers its transgressors to undergo ordeals of public humiliation. And although the Right decries cancel culture and the Left denies its existence, both zealously pursue censorship when their preferred taboos are violated.
Like the denizens of Bradbury’s dystopia, today’s Left and Right agree that some ideas should simply not be heard, discussed, or analysed lest they be embraced. It is far easier to silence them altogether and to shame their adherents pour encourager les autres. The prophetic accuracy of Bradbury’s work is evident in the recent controversy over Joe Rogan’s podcast. While Rogan’s views on vaccination are regrettable and profoundly unhelpful to America’s attempts to battle the pandemic, his podcast is also a near-perfect simulacrum of the books burned by the firemen in Fahrenheit 451.
The Joe Rogan Experience is the very antithesis of our tweet and meme culture, where everything is reduced to a grossly oversimplified and easily digestible phrase or image that robs discussion of nuance. The strength of Rogan’s show is that he engages in long-form conversations about difficult topics with a wide array of guests, many of whom are experts in their field. Admittedly, there are more than a few crackpots in that mix, and Rogan’s own views on some of the topics he discusses can be outlandish and dismayingly misinformed. Nevertheless, his show offers precisely the sort of thought-provoking exchanges that the inhabitants of Bradbury’s dystopia want banned.
It is hardly surprising that many of Rogan’s detractors demonstrate a startling ignorance of the show and its host, and are content to denounce him on the basis of soundbites, out-of-context quotations, and false assumptions about his political leanings. It is common to hear him disparaged as a conservative because, in liberal and progressive circles, this is not a mere description of political allegiance but a slur—an effective means of shutting someone down and ensuring that they cannot easily be defended by those disinclined to help political opponents. There does not need to be any evidence for such an accusation; the mere suggestion of it is enough to denote someone as an enemy of the in-group and therefore a legitimate target for opprobrium. But Rogan’s views are complex and unique to him—his political perspective is, if anything, somewhat to the left of centre, which only makes him and other heterodox thinkers dangerous to those further out on the political spectrum. There, people prefer to exist in purified bubbles, wilfully insulated from debate, just like the people in Fahrenheit 451.
Bradbury was right that people would choose self-censorship, led into ignorance by technological innovations that make open discourse and thought unpalatable. Were it a government that imposed such a rule, there would be an uproar, at least in Western societies. But gently coaxed by algorithms, people have voluntarily gravitated towards simple, comfortable ideas and begun to reject complexity, nuance, and the possibility that contrary opinions are not necessarily immoral or even incorrect.
Any reversal of this trend intended to arrest the slide into the abyss must start with an acknowledgment that censorship, whether top-down or bottom-up, is detrimental to society. Even when an idea is ignorant, it should still be heard and discussed. As Faber explains to Montag in Act Three, books do not guarantee that we will make smart choices, but they give us a far better chance of doing so because they “remind us what asses and fools we are.” When books are burned and voices are silenced, we not only lose outdated and misguided opinions, but everything else we need to make rational and informed decisions.
At the end of the book, a drifter named Granger offers Montag a glimmer of hope. He compares the burning of books to “a silly damn bird called a Phoenix” and says that humans repeat history and burn themselves up over and over. However:
...we've got one damn thing the Phoenix never had. We know the damn silly thing we just did. We know all the damn silly things we've done for a thousand years, and as long as we know that and always have it around where we can see it, some day we'll stop making the goddam funeral pyres and jumping into the middle of them.
Throughout the novel, people are so distracted by technological marvels, so addicted to vacuous forms of entertainment, and so utterly deluded, that they are unaware of a war unfolding on their doorstep. The “funeral pyre” Granger mentions is a nuclear holocaust that occurs as Montag meets with the drifters in the countryside, presumably ending almost all human life in the city. Given the bleakness of Fahrenheit 451, it is strange that it ends on a hopeful note, with Montag and the exiles returning to the city to rebuild society. Perhaps this seems hopelessly optimistic, but without this act of courage, we are left in a world stripped of possibility.
There are elements of Orwell’s, Huxley’s, and Bradbury’s dystopian visions in our present reality, but perhaps we prefer to describe them all as “Orwellian” because it implies that our circumstances have been imposed upon us against our will. It is painful to accept that we are complicit, and that we are currently living out perhaps the darkest of those visions by demanding to live in ignorance. Yet it is precisely because we have chosen this fate that we have the ability to alter it.
13. ‘Follow the science’: As Year 3 of the pandemic begins, a simple slogan becomes a political weapon
‘Follow the science’: As Year 3 of the pandemic begins, a simple slogan becomes a political weapon
The Washington Post · by Marc FisherToday at 7:33 p.m. EST|Updated today at 10:30 p.m. EST · February 12, 2022
Two years ago, when science writer Faye Flam launched a podcast to explore why so many Americans were drawn to misinformation about the coronavirus pandemic, she settled on a name she figured would steer clear of politics: “Follow the Science.”
The podcast flourished, but its title has posed a constant dilemma for Flam as the phrase “follow the science,” far from uniting Americans, became a weapon, wielded in derision by both sides of the national divide over how to confront the coronavirus.
Like so many Americans, when Flam hears “follow the science” these days, she braces for a statement likely to be anything but scientific: “The phrase became associated with safety-ism and overcaution, like people would use it sarcastically when they saw someone running through a field wearing an N95 mask,” she said. At the same time, “follow the science” also became a taunt deployed by vaccine and mask advocates against those who spurned such mandatory public health measures.
Now, as the torrent of covid-19 cases unleashed by the omicron variant recedes in most of the country, advocates for each side in the masking debate are once again claiming the mantle of science to justify political positions that have as much to do with widespread bipartisan frustration over two years of life in a pandemic as with any evolution of scientific findings.
A slew of Democratic governors in states that have been among the most mask-friendly are moving to scrap indoor mask mandates, even as some counties and school districts in those states promise to maintain those measures — with both factions contending they are following the science.
It’s not just politicians and school leaders making those opposing decisions. An informal network of parents, backed by like-minded scientists arguing for the “urgency of normal,” is pushing for “evidence-based decisions” to rescind in-school mask mandates. At the same time, teachers unions and other advocates for continued masking of students quote from their own roster of medical experts, urging elected officials to “follow the science” and maintain mandates.
At every pivot in the virus’s behavior, with every new set of findings about how the virus spreads and how it can be fought, “one side says, ‘Aha! Now, we’re the ones following the science,’ ” said Michael D. Gordin, a historian of science at Princeton University.
During the pandemic’s most dangerous phases, advocates of shutdowns and masks have used the phrase to belittle resisters. But during lulls in the virus’s spread, it’s those resisters who have snapped the slogan back at the cautious crowd, asking why dramatic drops in case numbers don’t justify a return to a more normal life.
Flam said she has cringed as she watched “people load up the phrase with political baggage. I agonize every day over whether to change the name of the podcast.”
From the early political struggles over confronting the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s to contemporary debates over policy toward transgender people or the NFL’s handling of concussions among football players, pleas to “follow the science” have consistently yielded to use of the phrase as a rhetorical land mine.
Those who urge others to just “follow the science” generally claim to be politically unbiased: They’re just pledging allegiance to the higher power of fact and neutral inquiry.
But as Flam has discovered, “so much is mixed up with science — risk and values and politics. The phrase can come off as sanctimonious,” she said, “and the danger is that it says, ‘These are the facts,’ when it should say, ‘This is the situation as we understand it now and that understanding will keep changing.’ ”
The pandemic’s descent from medical emergency to political flash point can be mapped as a series of surges of bickering over that one simple phrase. “Follow the science!” people on both sides insisted, as the guidance from politicians and public health officials shifted over the past two years from anti-mask to pro-mask to “keep on masking” to more refined recommendations about which masks to wear and now to a spotty lifting of mandates.
Early in the pandemic, in 2020, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) pushed for schools to reopen, tweeting, “I wonder where the ‘listen to the science’ people will go when the science doesn’t support their fearmongering?” In 2021, Republicans used “follow the science” to slap the Biden administration for not pushing harder to confront China on the origins of the coronavirus.
The president of Connecticut’s teachers union, Jan Hochadel, this month pressed for continued masking in schools, saying, “We have remained among the safest states throughout this pandemic because elected leaders have heeded the call to ‘follow the science.’ … There is no sound reason to veer off course now.”
Arguments over following the science extend beyond disagreements over how to analyze the results of studies, said Samantha Harris, a Philadelphia lawyer who formerly worked at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a conservative advocacy group. Rather, demands that the other side “follow the science” are often a complete rejection of another person’s cultural and political identity: “It’s not just people believing the scientific research that they agree with. It’s that in this extreme polarization we live with, we totally discredit ideas because of who holds them.”
Harris readily concedes that she often doesn’t know what to make of scientific findings she reads about. She got vaccinated and wears masks because doctors she trusts advised her to, but she’s constantly frustrated by her own inability to figure out the right moves.
“I’m struggling as much as anyone else,” she said. “Our job as informed citizens in the pandemic is to be like judges and synthesize information from both sides, but with the extreme polarization, nobody really trusts each other enough to know how to judge their information.”
Many people end up putting their trust in some subset of the celebrity scientists they see online or on TV. “Follow the science” often means “follow the scientists” — a distinction that offers insight into why there’s so much division over how to cope with the virus, according to a study by sociologists at the University of New Hampshire.
They found that although a slim majority of Americans they surveyed don’t believe that “scientists adjust their findings to get the answers they want,” 31 percent do believe scientists cook the books and another 16 percent were unsure.
Those who mistrust scientists were vastly less likely to be worried about getting covid-19 — and more likely to be supporters of former president Donald Trump, the study found.
A person’s beliefs about scientists’ integrity “is the strongest and most consistent predictor of views about … the threats from covid-19,” said the study conducted by Thomas G. Safford, Emily H. Whitmore and Lawrence C. Hamilton.
When a large minority of Americans believe scientists’ conclusions are determined by their own opinions, that demonstrates a widespread “misunderstanding of scientific methods, uncertainty, and the incremental nature of scientific inquiry,” the sociologists concluded.
Americans’ confidence in science has declined in recent decades, especially among Republicans, according to Gallup polls tracking such attitudes. The survey found last year that 64 percent of Americans said they had “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in science, down from 70 percent who said that back in 1975. Confidence in science jumped among Democrats, from 67 percent in the earlier poll to 79 percent last year, while Republicans’ confidence cratered during the same period from 72 percent to 45 percent.
Yet the popularity of the “follow the science” slogan on both sides of the political and cultural divide does provide some good news, said Gordin, the Princeton historian, who studies the roots and meaning of pseudoscience.
The fact that both sides want to be on the side of “science” “bespeaks tremendous confidence or admiration for a thing called ‘science,’ ” he said. Even in this time of rising mistrust, everybody wants to have the experts on their side.
That’s been true in American debates regarding science for many years. Four decades ago, when arguments about climate change were fairly new, people who rejected the idea looked at studies showing a connection between burning coal and acid rain and dubbed them “junk science.” The “real” science, those critics said, showed otherwise.
“Even though the motive was to reject a scientific consensus, there was still a valorization of expertise,” Gordin said.
That has continued during the pandemic. “Even people who took a horse tranquilizer when they got covid-19 were quick to note that the drug was created by a Nobel laureate,” he said. “Almost no one says they’re anti-science.”
The problem is that the phrase has become more a political slogan than a commitment to neutral inquiry, “which bespeaks tremendous ignorance about what science is,” Gordin said. “There isn’t a thing called ‘the science.’ There are multiple sciences with active disagreements with each other. Science isn’t static.”
But scientists and laypeople alike are often guilty of presenting science as a monolithic statement of fact, rather than an ever-evolving search for evidence to support theories, Gordin said.
And while scientists are trained to be comfortable with uncertainty, a pandemic that has killed and sickened millions has made many people eager for definitive solutions.
“I just wish when people say ‘follow the science,’ it’s not the end of what they say, but the beginning, followed by ‘and here’s the evidence,’ ” Gordin said.
As much as political leaders may pledge to “follow the science,” they answer to constituents who want answers and progress, so the temptation is to overpromise.
Last summer, President Biden said that “we all know what we need to do to beat this virus — tell the truth, follow the science, work together.” Still, his administration couldn’t resist promising “a summer of freedom. A summer of joy. A summer of reunions and celebrations.”
During the first year of the pandemic, Trump promised dozens of times that the virus would vanish. “It’s going to disappear,” he said in February 2020. “One day — it’s like a miracle — it will disappear.” Four months later, he said that “it’s dying out.” Another four months after that, he said science would prove useful against the virus: “It’s ending anyway … but we’re gonna make it a lot faster with the vaccine and with the therapeutics and frankly with the cures.”
It’s never easy to follow the science, many scientists warn, because people’s behaviors are shaped as much by fear, folklore and fake science as by well-vetted studies or evidence-based government guidance.
“Science cannot always overcome fear,” said Monica Gandhi, an infectious-disease specialist at the University of California at San Francisco. Some of the states with the lowest covid case rates and highest vaccination rates nonetheless kept many students in remote learning for the longest time, a phenomenon she attributed to “letting fear dominate our narrative.”
“That’s been true of the history of science for a long time,” Gandhi said. “As much as we try to be rigorous about fact, science is always subject to the political biases of the time.”
As a rhetorical weapon, “follow the science” has been wielded by NFL commissioners explaining why the league continued to list marijuana as a banned substance for players, by Congress as it instructed the Environmental Protection Agency on how to settle battles over laying oil pipelines, and by people on both sides of debates over the amount of salt in packaged foods, the link between cellphone use and brain cancer, and the causes of crime spikes.
A few years ago, when NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said the league was maintaining its ban on marijuana use because he was “following the science,” retired player and cannabis entrepreneur Marvin Washington pushed back: “Roger, we don’t want to follow the science,” he said. “We want you to lead the science.” The league stopped suspending players who tested positive for marijuana use in 2020.
For at least three decades, directors of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have been pledging to get back to following the science. In 1993, when David Satcher took over the CDC during the Bill Clinton administration, he said he would return the agency to its original mission, eschewing politics: “We are going to follow the science,’’ he said, by building an AIDS education campaign that promoted condom use — an approach that had been avoided during the Reagan administration.
A study published in September indicates that people who trust in science are actually more likely to believe fake scientific findings and to want to spread those falsehoods. The study, reported in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, found that trusting in science did not give people the tools they need to understand that the scientific method leads not to definitive answers, but to ever-evolving theories about how the world works.
Trust in science alone doesn’t arm people against misinformation, according to the study, whose lead author was social psychologist Thomas C. O’Brien. Rather, people need to understand how the scientific method works, so they can ask good questions about studies.
Overloaded with news about studies and predictions about the virus’s future, many people just tune out the information flow, said Julie Swann, a former adviser to the CDC on earlier pandemics and a systems engineer at North Carolina State University.
With no consensus about how and when the pandemic might end, or about which public health measures to impose and how long to keep them in force, following the science seems like an invitation to a very winding, even circular path.
That winding route is what science generally looks like, Swann said, so people who are frustrated and eager for solid answers are often drawn into dangerous “wells of misinformation, and they don’t even realize it,” she said. “If you were told something every day by people you trusted, you might believe it, too.”
The Washington Post · by Marc FisherToday at 7:33 p.m. EST|Updated today at 10:30 p.m. EST · February 12, 2022
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.
