Quotes of the Day:
"Living is like tearing through a museum. Not until later do you really start absorbing what you saw, thinking about it, looking it up in a book, and remembering — because you can't take it all in at once."
- Audrey Hepburn
"I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes. Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world."
- Neil Gaiman
"And now let us believe in a long year that is given to us, new, untouched, full of things that have never been, full of work that has never been done."
- Rainer Maria Rilke
1. 11 Years After Trying to Kill Each Other, a Marine and a Talib Meet Again
2. The Pentagon's new strategy might already be behind the times
3. U.S. at risk of paying 'unbearable price' over Taiwan - senior Chinese diplomat
4. Opinion | The U.S. is vulnerable to cyberattack — ‘layered deterrence’ is the way forward
5. China Is Running Out of Water and That’s Scary for Asia
6. Ian Fishback: A Whistleblower Who Reminded the U.S. Military of Its Values
7. 'This Is Not a Repeat of the Roosevelt' - Navy's Latest COVID Outbreak May Show Value of Vaccines
8. Russia, US and Ukraine: The State of Play - Geopolitical Futures
9. Taiwan contingency plan: Expect Tokyo foot-dragging
10. The Unmet Promise of the Global Posture Review
11. Is Team Biden Winning?
12. Iran’s regime threatens nuclear explosion in Israel’s Dimona facility
13. 7 out of 10 in Taiwan would fight China to stop forced unification—poll
14. Conservatives and Liberals Are Wrong About Each Other
15. Russia’s Aggression Against Ukraine Is Backfiring
16. The Many Signs of American Renaissance
17. America’s Identity Crisis
18. The relentless 2021 news cycle in one chart
1. 11 Years After Trying to Kill Each Other, a Marine and a Talib Meet Again
As I have written a number of times I think TM is uniquely qualified to write the first draft of the history of the end in Afghanistan. Not only did he fight in Afghanistan as a Marine, he has reported from there in the years since and he was in Afghanistan for nearly the entire last year before the fall to the Taliban.
11 Years After Trying to Kill Each Other, a Marine and a Talib Meet Again
The Great Read
Afghanistan Dispatch
A Times reporter who once served in the Marines returned to the site of a major battle in Afghanistan to see what’s changed since the Taliban took over — and to meet a commander he once fought.
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Thomas Gibbons-Neff, in red hat, interviewing Mullah Abdul Rahim Gulab, below the weapon in the window.Credit...Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times
By
Dec. 29, 2021
MARJA, Afghanistan — The tea was hot. The room, oppressive and dusty. And the Taliban commander I sat across from in a bullet-scarred building in southern Afghanistan had tried to kill me a little over a decade ago.
As I had tried to kill him.
We both remember that morning well: Feb. 13, 2010, Marja district, Helmand Province. We were about the same age: 22. It was very cold.
Mullah Abdul Rahim Gulab was part of a group of Taliban fighters trying to defend the district from the thousands of American, coalition and Afghan troops sent to seize what at the time was an important Taliban stronghold. He didn’t know it when we recently met, but I was a corporal in a company of Marines that his fighters attacked that winter morning so many years ago.
With the insurgents’ victory in that 20-year war secured this summer, Mr. Gulab, now a high-level commander, was sitting with me in Marja’s government headquarters, a mess of a building the Americans had refurbished years ago. I was his guest, along with two of my colleagues from The New York Times. I told him that the fight for Marja had been important in the eyes of the United States, but that most people had heard only one version of the story of the battle. Not the Taliban perspective.
It was 2010, and the Taliban were once again becoming a potent military force, threatening nearly every part of Afghanistan. In Marja, the insurgents were taxing local residents, administering cruel and quick justice, and taking in a significant amount of income from the poppy harvest.
Marines taking up position in the town of Marja on Feb. 13, 2010.Credit...Goran Tomasevic/Reuters
Operation Moshtarak, as the U.S. military called the 2010 mission to seize the district, was the first set-piece battle of President Barack Obama’s counterinsurgency troop surge, which failed.
Eleven years later, Mr. Gulab and I still remember the call to prayer that February morning in the village of Koru Chareh, a hamlet set amid half-flooded poppy fields, not far from the center of Marja. The surrounding trees, leafless, looked like dead outstretched hands.
“The skies over Marja were full of helicopters, and dropped American soldiers in different areas,” Mr. Gulab said.
I had just moved with my team of seven other Marines to a small mud-brick pump house, having landed with more than 250 other troops a few hours earlier. As the sun rose, Mr. Gulab gathered his band of Taliban fighters from a nearby village.
Afghanistan Under Taliban Rule
With the departure of the U.S. military on Aug. 30, Afghanistan quickly fell back under control of the Taliban. Across the country, there is widespread anxiety about the future.
Soon after, the mullah, loud and angry, came over the mosque loudspeaker. Mr. Gulab and his Taliban fighters prayed.
Mr. Gibbons-Neff, center, during the Marja offensive.Credit...Bryan Denton
Then the shooting started.
“It was a very tough fight,” Mr. Gulab said.
He wasn’t wrong. By the end of the day, a Marine engineer was dead and several others wounded. The insurgents suffered their own casualties.
With the war ending this August, the places where I had once fought as a Marine are now reachable again — stretches of land where my friends died and I watched my country’s military failures unfold. Now, as a journalist for The Times, I wanted to return to report on what had changed, and what hadn’t, on and around these former battlefields.
In November, my drive back to the district, now controlled by the Taliban, was easy enough. The roads were busy with motorbikes and trucks packed with cotton. The pavement was pockmarked with craters from the roadside bombs the insurgents had once placed beneath them. Abandoned military and police outposts dotted the highway like sporadic Stonehenges.
Marja was as I remembered, but some things had changed. There was a paved road. The canals were dry.
And the war was over.
Schoolchildren on a road beside a dry irrigation canal system built by the United States in the late 1950s to transform Marja into an agricultural district.Credit...Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times
The fall’s cotton harvest was underway, the sound of tractor engines and chattering field hands now audible in the absence of the background noise of gunfire, though a withering drought is threatening many farmers’ financial lifelines and the country’s economic downturn has affected everyone.
The Great Read
The two-story building we had once occupied as a command center, where my friends Matt Tooker and Matt Bostrom were shot that day in February, was now a midwives clinic.
On this trip back to Marja, men weren’t allowed inside. But through the cracked door, I could see the steps where my wounded friends had sat, bandaged, on painkillers and smiling, before the evacuation helicopter swooped in.
Matt Tooker, left, and Matt Bostrom awaiting medical evacuation after being wounded in Marja. Credit...Thomas Gibbons-Neff
Around the same time that a Taliban marksman put a burst of gunfire into my teammates, Mr. Gulab lost one of his fighters — as if the pendulum of violence that played out that day was trying to balance itself.
“My friends were shooting at the foreigners from a garden and one was killed,” Mr. Gulab said, before explaining how his men planted explosives meant for advancing Marines like me.
“For each I.E.D., one Talib was there to detonate it,” he said.
Mr. Gulab joined the Taliban in 2005, a year before I enlisted in the Marines. He had just lost two brothers in the fighting, both Talibs.
I grew up in the Connecticut suburbs. Mr. Gulab grew up in an isolated and mountainous part of Helmand Province.
“When I was child I was going to the madrasa, and our mullah was telling us, ‘The foreigners want to occupy our country, and you guys, you should be ready to defeat them,’” Mr. Gulab explained. “I hoped to join the mujahedeen.”
Mr. Gulab last month. Credit...Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times
By the time I landed in Marja, Mr. Gulab was a seasoned fighter who had survived American airstrikes as the steady churn of U.S. and NATO troops flooded into southern Afghanistan. He was in charge of about 60 fighters and understood how to navigate the rules of engagement that kept foreign troops from killing unarmed Taliban fighters who tossed their weapons into the nearest ditch.
Whenever U.S. forces got close, Mr. Gulab said, “we would drop our weapons and then come out on the streets and say ‘hi’ to them, and they’d ask us, ‘Where are the Taliban?’ and we’d reply, ‘We don’t know.’”
“After that, kids and villagers would collect our weapons and keep them in their homes until we got them back.”
Mr. Gulab said his fighters would use children to spot patrols and call his men as soon as the Americans left their posts. He mentioned it as a casual aside, but a decade ago, as we started to learn that 8-year-olds were putting our friends’ lives at risk, we wondered — and argued about — how far we’d be willing go to make sure none of us died in a war we had already realized we were losing.
As Mr. Gulab recounted his memories of all the ways his friends killed my friends and vice versa, I looked at his rifle next to my right arm. He had propped it in the chair next to me before I sat down. It was an American M4 carbine, much like the one I carried in 2010.
For a brief moment I was in between time, between the beginning of my war and its end.
Marines gearing up early in the morning in Marja in 2010.Credit...Goran Tomasevic/Reuters
The rifle was a familiar tool, once an extension of myself and always within arms reach. But now that it was no longer needed, it was little more than a mass of plastic and steel, and it had no bearing on how I interacted with Marja and Mr. Gulab. He was no longer an enemy but a man sitting on the floor, pondering his next sentence. He wasn’t fighting in a war that seemed like it would never end. And neither was I.
He had won his war. I had lost mine.
I went home from Afghanistan in July 2010. Five years later, the Marja district collapsed to the Taliban, except for a few outposts. Then this summer, roughly two weeks before Kabul fell, the Taliban seized it completely.
“I am very happy that foreigners left the country and it is over,” Mr. Gulab said. “We don’t need to kill them, and they are not killing my friends.”
Throughout the interview, I wanted to tell him I had been a Marine. That I had been in Marja on Feb. 13, 2010, and that I had fought against him. I wanted to say I was sorry for all of it: the needless death, the loss. His friends. My friends.
But I said nothing. I stood up, shook his hand, smiled.
And I left Marja.
Mr. Gibbons-Neff, now a reporter, inspecting the field in which he landed at the start of the battle for Marja as a Marine years earlier. Credit...Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times
Yaqoob Akbary and Jim Huylebroek contributed reporting.
2. The Pentagon's new strategy might already be behind the times
I think the title and point of this article is a little disingenuous. I am pretty confident the authors of the NDS have considered the Russian threat (among others) in the new NDS. It would be folly to think that the NDS would be developed that focused solely or even mainly on China.
The current situation in Ukraine requires contingency planning to support the US policy toward the country and the region. The NDS should not be written for current operations which is what conditions in Ukraine should be considered at this time.
Of course if focus is only on CHina and we assume away other threats then I guess the criticism is justified. But I hope the NDS will be able to walk and chew gum at the same time. If the NDS is "upended" or "derailed" by Russian actions in Ukraine then I guess it would not be much of a stragegy
Excerpts:
Earlier this month, Mara Karlin, who is performing the duties of deputy undersecretary of defense for policy, characterized the new strategy thusly: “We will in many ways focus on getting after the China challenge while ensuring that we are responsibly working with our closest allies and partners to deal with many of the other challenges we also see metastasizing and shifting and not going away.”
...
Of course, all of that policy and strategy could be upended if Russia creates a more immediate geopolitical crisis by invading Ukraine, a move US intelligence sources have reportedly indicated could happen as soon as early next year. As of the writing of this story on Dec. 22, tensions are high, with The New York Times reporting that the US and UK have dispatched cyber experts to Ukraine, in an effort to blunt cyberattacks the countries believe could be delivered by Russia in the near future.
The Pentagon's new strategy might already be behind the times: 2022 Preview - Breaking Defense
A Russian invasion of Ukraine could derail the Defense Department's planning.
The Pentagon has big work ahead of it in 2022, with the release of a new National Defense Strategy planned for early next year. (US Army/Sgt. 1st Class Marisol Walker)
WASHINGTON: What big changes can the Pentagon anticipate in 2022? To paraphrase James Carville, “it’s the National Defense Strategy, stupid.”
The 2018 National Defense Strategy clearly articulated that China was the United States’ biggest strategic threat, and stated that the Defense Department must take action to modernize the force and regain its technical edge in order to deter and — if all else fails — win a conflict against Beijing. There was just one problem: The strategy never truly got implemented, as domestic politics and a global pandemic overtook plans to reform the military.
Now, about a year after President Joe Biden took office, the department is on track to release a new strategy in early 2022. The big questions: How are his administration’s defense priorities different from those of the Trump administration? What kind of rhetoric does the strategy contain pertaining to China, and what should the department do differently to deter and beat China? What roles and objectives should the US have in the Middle East, now that forces have exited Iraq and Afghanistan?
[This article is one of many in a series in which Breaking Defense reporters look back on the most significant (and entertaining) news stories of 2021 and look forward to what 2022 may hold.]
Finally, and most importantly, what does the department need to do to implement its strategy, and what changes to the military’s modernization plans are necessary to make that happen? One major tell will be the fiscal 2023 budget: Will the services advocate for substantial shifts, such as divesting force structure, canceling programs that no longer support US strategy, and starting new ones that do? Or will it be just more of the same?
Earlier this month, Mara Karlin, who is performing the duties of deputy undersecretary of defense for policy, characterized the new strategy thusly: “We will in many ways focus on getting after the China challenge while ensuring that we are responsibly working with our closest allies and partners to deal with many of the other challenges we also see metastasizing and shifting and not going away.”
Obviously, that statement doesn’t give a lot away, and the devil will be in the details.
Two other major studies due to be released next year — the Nuclear Posture Review and Missile Defense Review — could also lay the groundwork for greater transformation, especially if the administration backs a reduction in US nuclear armaments or proposes delaying ongoing modernization efforts like the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent program for replacing current intercontinental ballistic missiles.
Of course, all of that policy and strategy could be upended if Russia creates a more immediate geopolitical crisis by invading Ukraine, a move US intelligence sources have reportedly indicated could happen as soon as early next year. As of the writing of this story on Dec. 22, tensions are high, with The New York Times reporting that the US and UK have dispatched cyber experts to Ukraine, in an effort to blunt cyberattacks the countries believe could be delivered by Russia in the near future.
And with the Omicron variant of coronavirus spreading, the military will continue to be challenged to maintain readiness during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The services have begun kicking out servicemembers who have refused to get vaccinated, but it remains to be seen how aggressive the department will be in implementing a vaccination mandate for federal contractors; that order is currently in limbo after a federal judge issued an injunction, but several defense contractors — most notably Huntington Ingalls Industries —have said that they will not mandate the vaccine for all of its workforce.
Meanwhile, the Army on Dec. 21 announced it has developed a single vaccine that appears to be effective against all COVID variants. That could have huge implications, not just for the US military, but for populations worldwide.
Another big priority for the department is the issue of climate change, which Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has called an “existential threat” for US national security. Over the past year, the Pentagon has put out several reports — such as the climate risk analysis and climate adaptation plan — laying out the effects of climate change on the military and putting forward recommendations on how to cut the department’s own carbon footprint. In 2023, we hopefully will see whether any of that analysis has teeth.
Finally, the midterm elections could generate further turmoil in Congress that could make it even more difficult for lawmakers to pass the FY22 appropriations bill, move forward with the FY23 defense policy and budget bills and confirm the list of nominees for key defense leadership positions — where the Pentagon already has a number of nominees stalled out over partisan holds.
Republicans have shown they are effective at holding the line versus the Democrats razor-thin majority. With a strong chance to flip both chambers in November and members fleeing Washington to hit the campaign trail over the course of the year, it’s hard to envision a scenario where Congress works more effectively, and not less, than in 2021.
2022 will set the stage for whether the Biden administration can actually make meaningful changes for the Pentagon’s budget and policy. No matter what decisions come out of the department, one thing is clear: Expect fireworks.
3. U.S. at risk of paying 'unbearable price' over Taiwan - senior Chinese diplomat
Wolf diplomacy from Wang Yi.
Excerpts:
By "encouraging 'Taiwan independence' forces" the United States "not only puts Taiwan into an extremely dangerous situation but also exposes the United States to an unbearable price", Wang said.
...
"Taiwan has no other way forward other than reunification with the mainland," said Wang.
U.S. at risk of paying 'unbearable price' over Taiwan - senior Chinese diplomat
1/3
China's State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi waves as he leaves a news conference in Tokyo, Japan, November 24, 2020. REUTERS/Issei Kato/Pool/File Photo
BEIJING, Dec 30 (Reuters) - The United States is at risk of paying an "unbearable price" due to its actions over Taiwan, Wang Yi, state councillor and foreign minister, said in an interview with state media on Thursday.
China claims democratically governed Taiwan as its own territory and in the past two years has stepped up military and diplomatic pressure to assert its sovereignty claim, fuelling anger in Taipei and concern in Washington.
By "encouraging 'Taiwan independence' forces" the United States "not only puts Taiwan into an extremely dangerous situation but also exposes the United States to an unbearable price", Wang said.
Taiwan has emerged as a key factor in strained relations between China and the United States, the island's most important international backer and arms supplier despite the absence of formal diplomatic ties.
Taiwan says it is an independent country and vows to defend its freedom and democracy. China regularly describes the island as the most sensitive issue in its ties with the United States.
"Taiwan has no other way forward other than reunification with the mainland," said Wang.
While the United States recognises only one China, it is required by law to provide Taiwan with the means to defend itself and has long followed a policy of "strategic ambiguity" on whether it would intervene militarily to protect Taiwan in the event of a Chinese attack.
Reporting by Gabriel Crossley Editing by Robert Birsel
4. Opinion | The U.S. is vulnerable to cyberattack — ‘layered deterrence’ is the way forward
Excerpts:
But as we reach the end of our commission’s tenure, we believe there are important, common-sense next steps that can help protect key U.S. networks and the people who rely on them. Our strategy — “layered cyber deterrence” — is rooted in the idea that, rather than a single solution, we need a multipronged approach to both prevent attacks before they’re launched and withstand the attacks that come.
...
After years of work, the cyberspace commission is wrapping up, but our members have unfinished business we don’t plan on stepping away from — and we’ll continue our work through legislation and negotiation and pressure when necessary. Just as the United States has defended its interests on land, sea and air, it must recognize that the nation’s interests in a fourth domain — cyberspace — are central to our country’s long-term security and prosperity.
The threat will continue to evolve, but this is a challenge we can and must meet with imagination, determination, cooperation and engagement — from the desktop at the end of the supply chain to the top desk in the Oval Office and every place in between.
Opinion | The U.S. is vulnerable to cyberattack — ‘layered deterrence’ is the way forward
The Washington Post · by Angus King and Michael Gallagher Today at 6:02 p.m. EST · December 29, 2021
Angus King, an independent, is a senator from Maine. Mike Gallagher, a Republican, represents Wisconsin’s 8th Congressional District in the House. They are co-chairs of the Cyberspace Solarium Commission.
The United States is under attack. The battlegrounds couldn’t be more disparate, from our largest military installations and enormous energy-grid operators to the smallest mom-and-pop stores on Main Street and even our individual smartphones. Hackers, other criminals and foreign actors are seeking out any digital vulnerability to disrupt our lives, stall our economy and shut down access to vital information.
The pandemic accelerated an already-in-progress shift to a more digitally focused life. There’s no doubt this connectivity saved lives and kept our economy afloat over the past two years, but it came at a cost: massive, potentially devastating weak points in the systems that power our daily lives.
What happens if those networks are compromised?
Recent attacks have affected our energy sector, slowed our supply chains and damaged government institutions ranging from federal offices to local municipalities. What is the impact on society if power grids and communications systems shut down? What is the impact on the individual if they can no longer work or learn remotely or access sensitive medical documents or their bank account?
These difficult questions are why Congress created the Cyberspace Solarium Commission in 2019 to rethink our national security posture for the digital age. The commission, which we co-chair, is made up of bipartisan congressional leaders, executive branch officials, and experts from private industry, think tanks and research institutions. It met some 50 times to scrutinize the United States’ vulnerabilities in cyberspace and seek solutions. Our conclusion: America is woefully unprepared for the cyberthreats developing around the globe, but we can change that.
As the commission wraps up its scheduled work this month, more than three dozen of its recommendations have been enacted into law. These include the creation of a Senate-confirmed national cyber director to coordinate the federal government’s efforts in cyberspace.
But as we reach the end of our commission’s tenure, we believe there are important, common-sense next steps that can help protect key U.S. networks and the people who rely on them. Our strategy — “layered cyber deterrence” — is rooted in the idea that, rather than a single solution, we need a multipronged approach to both prevent attacks before they’re launched and withstand the attacks that come.
To change our enemies’ calculations, we must first harden our national defenses and resiliency. One major step toward that goal is improving the working relationship between the government and the private sector, which our commission team estimated controls over 80 percent of our threatened networks, including energy systems and financial markets. Although these systems are not under federal control, an attack on them would have a devastating impact on all Americans.
We must bridge the government-private sector gaps by passing legislation that secures our nation’s critical infrastructure and requires companies to report cyber-incidents, so that the federal government can better identify potential risks to national security and help with damage mitigation. Both of these efforts made major progress in terms of building awareness and urgency in Congress this year but ultimately fell short. We must continue to push the ball forward.
Layered cyber deterrence also calls for the United States to shape behaviors in cyberspace by working with partners and allies. The nonmilitary tools at our disposal include law enforcement, sanctions and diplomacy, which can establish clear rules for cyber-engagements and consequences for those who step out of line.
We must also be able to impose costs on those who violate these norms, so our enemies — from nation-states to criminal organizations — know that if they attack us, they will pay an unacceptable price. The best cyberattack is the one that doesn’t occur — and the best way to prevent these attacks is through a clear, unambiguous policy of deterrence.
After years of work, the cyberspace commission is wrapping up, but our members have unfinished business we don’t plan on stepping away from — and we’ll continue our work through legislation and negotiation and pressure when necessary. Just as the United States has defended its interests on land, sea and air, it must recognize that the nation’s interests in a fourth domain — cyberspace — are central to our country’s long-term security and prosperity.
The threat will continue to evolve, but this is a challenge we can and must meet with imagination, determination, cooperation and engagement — from the desktop at the end of the supply chain to the top desk in the Oval Office and every place in between.
The Washington Post · by Angus King and Michael Gallagher Today at 6:02 p.m. EST · December 29, 2021
5. China Is Running Out of Water and That’s Scary for Asia
We can count on Professor Brands to make us think about critical aspects of grand strategy.
His first sentence may go in my quote book:
Nature and geopolitics can interact in nasty ways.
China Is Running Out of Water and That’s Scary for Asia
Of all Bejing’s problems — demographic decline, a stifling political climate, the stalling or reversal of economic reforms — dwindling natural resources may be the most urgent.
December 29, 2021, 5:00 PM EST
Nature and geopolitics can interact in nasty ways. The historian Geoffrey Parker has argued that changing weather patterns drove war, revolution and upheaval during a long global crisis in the 17th century. More recently, climate change has opened new trade routes, resources and rivalries in the Arctic. And now China, a great power that often appears bent on reordering the international system, is running out of water in ways that are likely to stoke conflict at home and abroad.
Natural resources have always been critical to economic and global power. In the 19th century, a small country — the U.K. — raced ahead of the pack because its abundant coal reserves allowed it to drive the Industrial Revolution. Britain was eventually surpassed by the U.S., which exploited its huge tracts of arable land, massive oil reserves and other resources to become an economic titan.
The same goes for China’s rise. Capitalist reforms, a welcoming global trade system and good demographics all contributed to Beijing’s world-beating economic growth from the late 1970s to the early 2000s. The fact that China was nearly self-sufficient in land, water and many raw materials — and that its cheap labor allowed it to exploit these resources aggressively — also helped it to become the workshop of the world.
Yet China’s natural abundance is a thing of the past. As Michael Beckley and I argue in our forthcoming book, “The Danger Zone,” Beijing has blown through many of its resources. A decade ago, China became the world’s largest importer of agricultural goods. Its arable land has been shrinking due to degradation and overuse. Breakneck development has also made China the world’s largest energy importer: It buys three-quarters of its oil abroad at a time when America has become a net energy exporter.
China’s water situation is particularly grim. As Gopal Reddy notes, China possesses 20% of the world’s population but only 7% of its fresh water. Entire regions, especially in the north, suffer from water scarcity worse than that found in a parched Middle East.
Thousands of rivers have disappeared, while industrialization and pollution have spoiled much of the water that remains. By some estimates, 80% to 90% of China’s groundwater and half of its river water is too dirty to drink; more than half of its groundwater and one-quarter of its river water cannot even be used for industry or farming.
This is an expensive problem. China is forced to divert water from comparatively wet regions to the drought-plagued north; experts assess that the country loses well over $100 billion annually as a result of water scarcity. Shortages and unsustainable agriculture are causing the desertification of large chunks of land. Water-related energy shortfalls have become common across the country.
The government has promoted rationing and improvements in water efficiency, but nothing sufficient to arrest the problem. This month, Chinese authorities announced that Guangzhou and Shenzhen — two major cities in the relatively water-rich Pearl River Delta — will face severe drought well into next year.
The economic and political implications are troubling. By making growth cost more, China’s resource problems have joined an array of other challenges — demographic decline, an increasingly stifling political climate, the stalling or reversal of many key economic reforms — to cause a slowdown that was having pronounced effects even before Covid struck. China’s social compact will be tested as dwindling resources intensify distributional fights.
In 2005, Premier Wen Jiabao stated that water scarcity threatened the “very survival of the Chinese nation.” A minister of water resources declared that China must “fight for every drop of water or die.” Hyperbole aside, resource scarcity and political instability often go hand in hand.
Heightened foreign tensions may follow. China watchers worry that if the Chinese Communist Party feels insecure domestically, it may lash out against its international rivals. Even short of that, water problems are causing geopolitical strife.
Much of China’s fresh water is concentrated in areas, such as Tibet, that the communist government seized by force after taking power in 1949. For years, China has tried to solve its resource challenges by coercing and impoverishing its neighbors.
By building a series of giant dams on the Mekong River, Beijing has triggered recurring droughts and devastating floods in Southeast Asian countries such as Thailand and Laos that depend on that waterway. The diversion of rivers in Xinjiang has had devastating downstream effects in Central Asia.
A growing source of tension in the Himalayas is China’s plan to dam key waters before they reach India, leaving that country (and Bangladesh) the losers. As the Indian strategic analyst Brahma Chellaney puts it, “China’s territorial aggrandizement in the South China Sea and the Himalayas … has been accompanied by stealthier efforts to appropriate water resources in transnational river basins.”
In other words, the thirstier China is, the more geopolitically nasty it could get.
More From Other Writers at Bloomberg Opinion:
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The U.S. and China in 2022: A Year of Living Quietly?: James Stavridis
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6. Ian Fishback: A Whistleblower Who Reminded the U.S. Military of Its Values
We should keep Maj Fishback in mind to keep our moral compass pointed north.
Conclusion:
We should remember Ian Fishback as a hero twice over. He risked his life to fight America’s wars, and risked his career to secure America’s ideals. We have to do better for veterans like him, who give everything to protect our country and to make our country better.
Ian Fishback: A Whistleblower Who Reminded the U.S. Military of Its Values
Magazine
1979-2021
New America/Wikimedia Commons
12/27/2021 05:00 AM EST
Rep. Tom Malinowski represents New Jersey’s 7th District in Congress. He previously served as a senior director on the National Security Council, chief advocate for Human Rights Watch and assistant secretary of State for democracy, human rights and labor.
At an American forward operating base in Iraq in 2002, U.S. Army Captain Ian Fishback saw prisoners being abused, and knew that it was wrong.
From his earliest days growing up in rural Michigan, Fishback had wrestled with what would be required of him to lead a just and honorable life. His journey had led him to West Point, where he embraced the written and unwritten rules of military service. This included respect for the chain of command and a soldier’s duty to obey orders. But his training had also included the Geneva Conventions, reinforcing his belief that Americans’ conduct on the battlefield must reflect the ideals that our military fights to defend. Fishback never lost sight of those ideals — and by coming forward with the truth, he reminded the country why they were worth fighting for.
Like many whistleblowers, Fishback did not set out to be one. When he learned that detainees on his base were being beaten, stacked in pyramids and subjected to sleep deprivation and extreme cold, he raised his concerns privately with his fellow officers and with his pastor. He asked his superiors for clarification — were soldiers supposed to follow their training and military manuals, which forbade torture, or listen to the guidance coming from the highest levels of the Bush administration, which seemed to encourage it?
When he complained to his company commander, the senior officer urged him to stand down, saying: “I see how you can take it that way, but remember that the honor of the unit is at stake.” When the secretary of the Army visited Iraq, Fishback asked him to give the troops clearer answers, but was told the problem had already been solved.
Then came the public disclosures of photos from Abu Ghraib prison, which showed detainees being subjected to the same horrific treatment Fishback had witnessed on his base. He was disturbed to see low-ranking enlisted soldiers at the prison blamed for what he knew was a problem caused by those same leaders’ poor decisions.
In 2005, having exhausted all other options, Fishback sat down with an investigator for Human Rights Watch, where I worked at the time. Two non-commissioned officers who had served at the same forward operating base corroborated his allegations. Fishback asked us to relay his concerns to Sen. John McCain, whom he trusted because of the senator’s military background and personal experience with torture. He wrote a letter, which I passed to McCain, and later I took him to meet the senator.
In his letter, Fishback wrote: “I can remember, as a cadet at West Point, resolving to ensure that my men would never commit a dishonorable act; that I would protect them from that type of burden. It absolutely breaks my heart that I have failed some of them in this regard.” He urged McCain to work to give the men and women of our military “a clear standard that is in accordance with the bedrock principles of our nation.”
He concluded: “If we abandon our ideals in the face of adversity and aggression, then those ideals were never really in our possession. I would rather die fighting than give up even the smallest part of the idea that is America.”
Fishback’s revelations disproved the Pentagon’s claims that the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison were isolated incidents. They helped McCain demonstrate that the Bush administration’s decisions had encouraged widespread use of torture by military and intelligence personnel in Iraq and in the broader war on terror.
Several weeks later, spurred in part by Fishback’s testimony, Congress overwhelmingly passed McCain’s Detainee Treatment Act, which banned the cruel practices Fishback had revealed, and limited military interrogators to the humane techniques specified in the U.S. Army’s own manuals. Several years later, Congress extended the same restrictions to the CIA. They remain the law of the land today.
After serving four combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, Fishback left the Army. He taught at West Point, and even thought about running for office someday. But for reasons we can’t be fully sure of, his troubles, including with mental health, grew. He died while on a waiting list for VA care. Just as he had revealed one injustice in his life, his death revealed another — the outrageous shortage of mental health treatment beds in America, including for veterans.
We should remember Ian Fishback as a hero twice over. He risked his life to fight America’s wars, and risked his career to secure America’s ideals. We have to do better for veterans like him, who give everything to protect our country and to make our country better.
7. 'This Is Not a Repeat of the Roosevelt' - Navy's Latest COVID Outbreak May Show Value of Vaccines
Intelligence people learn from their mistakes and wise people learn from the mistakes of others. Hopefully we are intelligent and wise and that we are learning.
And we have to learn to fight through COVID just as if it were a biological warfare attack.
Excerpts:
One of the major factors in the Roosevelt disaster was an "inability to get clear guidance to the ship" from higher up in the Navy about how best to tackle widespread coronavirus infections.
The study also found that while the Navy did have plans to mitigate the spread of diseases such as the flu, a
Department of Defense watchdog report found that the vast majority of naval commanders did not conduct the required biennial training on those methods.
The Milwaukee outbreak comes nearly two years after the carrier fiasco, with the vast majority of sailors already fully vaccinated and the Navy more adept at dealing with the disease.
"This is not a repeat of the Roosevelt," Martin said. "I think the Navy has learned something."
The Navy has offered sailors on the Milwaukee booster shots. "While we recommend boosters, they are not mandatory," Meadows said in an email.
'This Is Not a Repeat of the Roosevelt' - Navy's Latest COVID Outbreak May Show Value of Vaccines
The USS Milwaukee was sidelined this week in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, due to COVID-19, but the Navy's first reported ship outbreak since the early days of the pandemic may turn out to be a lesson in the value of vaccines rather than a repeat of past mistakes.
The ship's fully vaccinated crew could serve as a case study on how the shot can keep an outbreak brief and minimally disruptive, according to Bradley Martin, RAND Corporation researcher.
Martin analyzed a massive outbreak aboard the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt during the spring of 2020 that infected 1,271 sailors and forced the ship into a nearly two-month quarantine in Guam.
"Vaccines are a risk-mitigation tool, they're not intended to be perfectly effective ... but they do help," Martin, a retired Navy captain, told Military.com in an interview. "If Milwaukee's underway in a week because everybody feels better it would kind of prove the point."
Navy spokeswoman Cmdr. Kate Meadows said the Navy had no plans to swap out any of the crew, but she also added that there was no estimated date for the ship to get back to sea. Only a portion of those infected have exhibited mild symptoms, the service said.
Martin said the Navy response is an indication the service believes the outbreak can be dealt with readily.
"Given that the vaccine is effective in mitigating symptoms and given that there's no gigantic need to be somewhere, it seems like the most sensible course," Martin said.
The Navy said the crew of the Milwaukee is 100% vaccinated. But the outbreak is not a sign that vaccines are flawed, he said.
"If something is prone to spread, it's going to spread on a ship," Martin said. "That's just the nature of ships."
Martin was one of the authors of a study that shed light on what happened on the Roosevelt in the earliest months of the pandemic before any vaccines were available. A sailor died in the outbreak that began in March 2020 and others were quarantined in Guam hotel rooms while the ship was cleaned.
The Roosevelt wasn't able to return to sea until May, nearly two months later, and the incident led to the firing of Capt. Brett Crozier, the carrier's captain who clashed with leadership over the outbreak response. Acting Navy Secretary Thomas Modly was then forced to resign following widely criticized speech on the outbreak during a trip to the sidelined carrier.
One of the major factors in the Roosevelt disaster was an "inability to get clear guidance to the ship" from higher up in the Navy about how best to tackle widespread coronavirus infections.
The study also found that while the Navy did have plans to mitigate the spread of diseases such as the flu, a Department of Defense watchdog report found that the vast majority of naval commanders did not conduct the required biennial training on those methods.
The Milwaukee outbreak comes nearly two years after the carrier fiasco, with the vast majority of sailors already fully vaccinated and the Navy more adept at dealing with the disease.
"This is not a repeat of the Roosevelt," Martin said. "I think the Navy has learned something."
The Navy has offered sailors on the Milwaukee booster shots. "While we recommend boosters, they are not mandatory," Meadows said in an email.
On Dec. 20, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby told reporters that nearly 100,000 active-duty servicemembers had already received boosters.
The Navy has not said whether the outbreak on the Milwaukee is from the highly contagious Omicron variant of the virus, but Kirby has said that "given its rapid spread in the United States, we would expect Omicron cases will continue to rise within DoD in the near term."
-- Konstantin Toropin can be reached at konstantin.toropin@military.com. Follow him on Twitter @ktoropin.
8. Russia, US and Ukraine: The State of Play - Geopolitical Futures
Excerpts:
War is filled with vulnerabilities, many of which are discovered at inconvenient times. The price Russia would pay in the event of a failed invasion is significant in terms of domestic politics and international credibility. The price the U.S. would face by a defeat would be less. Its credibility would be hurt, but a geopolitical imperative would not be lost.
The Russians know this far better than I do. So the coming negotiations will break down here and there; Russian forces will be on full alert, but Russia can’t afford a defeat and can’t be certain of victory. In the end, the thing that the Russians will have gained is that they sat down across from the Americans as equals, and the rest of the world will have seen it. There will be consequences to America for conceding the point, and the Europeans will proclaim the end of American power for the hundredth time. And history will go on.
Russia, US and Ukraine: The State of Play - Geopolitical Futures
December 28, 2021
When nations negotiate, a quiet settles in before the threats begin. Such is the case now between the U.S. and Russia, which will soon hold talks over the status of Ukraine and any number of other issues. Moscow has published its list of demands – more of a wish list, really – to try to set the agenda. But in the end, agendas are set by reality. A quick recap of Russia’s year is a good place to begin establishing that reality.
Russia has been trying to reclaim the buffers it lost after the collapse of the Soviet Union. These buffers, the most important of which are in Eastern Europe, insulate Russia from potential attack. In the past, these attacks have tended to emerge unexpectedly, so Russia wants to have them before a threat emerges. It doesn’t necessarily need the buffers to be part of the Russian Federation; it just needs to make sure they are not hostile (or occupied by hostile powers).
Thus, Russian activities in the past year were predictable. When war broke out in the South Caucasus between Azerbaijan and Armenia, Russia dispatched a peacekeeping force and, with its enormous influence in the region, constructed a system of relationships dominated by Russia. In Central Asia, Moscow built a network of airfields, a process that only accelerated as the U.S. withdrew from Afghanistan. In Belarus, Russia completely dominates Alexander Lukashenko’s government.
These were important steps for Russia’s reclamation of its buffers, but none of them are as important as Ukraine. Its sheer size allows an enemy force to maneuver, and that maneuverability forces a defender to disperse forces. In war, Ukraine gives Russia time. It spent the year – and really years before it – focused on this moment.
Moscow understood from the beginning that it had to reach an accommodation with Washington. It also understood that the United States, like all countries, comes to the table only when it has to. Washington has been content with the structure of the former Soviet Union. Russia has not. So Russia had to put American interests in the region, particularly in Ukraine, at risk.
The very obvious massing of Russian forces around the Ukrainian border was the logical next step. Deployed as they were, the massed armored forces appeared to be in a position to rapidly overrun Ukraine. The problem, of course, was that though a country as large as Ukraine could be overrun, it could not be overrun rapidly.
Militarily, the United States is in a militarily difficult position. It has no significant force in Ukraine, and any infusion of forces could lead to a long and potentially indecisive war. NATO has no stomach for this kind of confrontation on its doorstep. Apart from limited militaries, the NATO model has morphed into the EU model, and the EU model has morphed into a model whose motto is peace and prosperity. A rapid deployment with few casualties is possible, but the kind of battle Russia offered is of no interest to the EU model, save for a few countries, most notably Poland. The Russian calculation was that the U.S. would not act, and if it did, it would split the Europeans. NATO would exercise and plan in Brussels, but ultra-caution would limit collective action.
From the American point of view, there is no short-term interest in intervening in Ukraine, let alone fighting another potentially losing war at long distance with questionable allies. But there is a long-term danger. The American strategy in the Cold War was to prevent Russia from imposing hegemony over Europe. Such a hegemony would wed Russian resources and manpower to European technology and manufacturing, creating a massive superpower that could challenge the U.S. in the Atlantic. This was a long-range threat, but long-range threats had to be dealt with early and cheaply. The Soviet threat was always there, but it was blocked at relatively low cost and was therefore politically acceptable in the West, especially when they were draped in anti-Soviet ideology and the principles of liberal democracy.
The current situation in Ukraine recreates this long-range threat. The Russians view the United States as unpredictably ruthless – it never knows when the U.S. will take action, and its experience in the Cold War showed a U.S. willing to deploy massive force. Russia had to force the United States to limit its presence in Ukraine without risking a dramatic response. It had to demonstrate its power with a not fully credible force to compel a negotiation but not a massive response. And Washington could not go into talks without demonstrating a credible response to the Russian threat. It’s delicate on both sides.
Ultimately, both sides understood the weakness of the Russian strategy relative to the United States. Armored fighting vehicles such as those Russia sent to the Ukrainian border eat an enormous amount of fuel. An armored division in the U.S. military uses about 600,000 gallons of fuel per day when on the move, and Russia is deploying multiple divisions, which would have to be followed by an endless line of refueling vehicles, coming from vast fuel storages. At best, this is complicated. At worst, it’s a prime candidate for a war of attrition as the U.S., weary of Russia’s anti-aircraft capability, fires cruise missiles from afar. (Russia can, of course, shoot some down, but the losses would be huge.)
The Russian decision to carry out multidivisional armored warfare will depend on how confident it is that the U.S. would get involved, how confident Moscow is that the U.S. would choose a winning strategy, how confident it is in its own defensive systems, and how confident it is that it can politically withstand even a temporary defeat. The Russians have not engaged in multidivisional offensives since 1945. They cannot live with the loss of buffers. They cannot live with defeat.
War is filled with vulnerabilities, many of which are discovered at inconvenient times. The price Russia would pay in the event of a failed invasion is significant in terms of domestic politics and international credibility. The price the U.S. would face by a defeat would be less. Its credibility would be hurt, but a geopolitical imperative would not be lost.
The Russians know this far better than I do. So the coming negotiations will break down here and there; Russian forces will be on full alert, but Russia can’t afford a defeat and can’t be certain of victory. In the end, the thing that the Russians will have gained is that they sat down across from the Americans as equals, and the rest of the world will have seen it. There will be consequences to America for conceding the point, and the Europeans will proclaim the end of American power for the hundredth time. And history will go on.
9. Taiwan contingency plan: Expect Tokyo foot-dragging
Excerpts:
In fairness, 10 years ago nobody in Tokyo would have dared to talk about an operational plan for Taiwan – hardly even one for Japan. But overall US-Japan defense preparations are still nowhere near where they need to be – other than between the two navies.
One suspects that the Kyodo News story is part of a messaging effort by some part of the Japanese government rather than a sign of a serious desire to improve urgently needed bilateral operational capabilities. Such is the Japanese approach to things. The pro-forma over the substantial.
Tokyo is sort of saying, ”I’ve got this really big friend who’ll hurt you if you come after me (or my neighbor).” There is, of course, no reason Japan can’t send away for the Charles Atlas bodybuilding course.
There are Japanese who understand this. They won’t mind if the Americans point this out.
Taiwan contingency plan: Expect Tokyo foot-dragging
Japanese still need to study – and pass – revising laws to permit the US Marines to deploy to southern islands
Kyodo News has reported that the US and Japanese militaries have written a draft plan for a “Taiwan contingency” – and may soon draw up an “official” plan. The uninitiated might think the Americans and Japanese are finally going to buckle down and develop a real joint operational plan to handle a Taiwan contingency.
However, after spending a few decades observing the trajectory of Japan’s defensive capabilities, it’s easy to become a glass-half-empty kind of guy. And a closer look at the plan – something that should have been in place years ago – doesn’t exactly inspire excitement.
Admittedly, the news account is fragmentary and confusing.
According to the report, the plan would be set in motion once the Japanese government declares the situation around Taiwan to be serious enough to “undermine the peace and security of Japan.”
Once that happens, US Marines are allowed to set up an “attack base” somewhere along the Nansei Shoto – also known as the Ryukyu Islands chain, which includes the island of Okinawa – that stretches from Kyushu almost to Taiwan. This would be a first as the Marines are barely allowed to operate on Okinawa – even in peacetime.
Japan’s role? According to the news story, the Japanese would provide logistical support – including ammunition and fuel. If so, Japan will need to start buying HIMARS missiles of the sort the Marines use. One suspects the Japan Self-Defense Force (JSDF) has not received that order yet.
So, Tokyo permits the Marines to sally forth to do battle with the Chinese threatening Taiwan – when the Japanese decide it is time. And Japan apparently doesn’t have to join the fighting.
What a deal.
Capabilities, training, goals, laws
Almost inadvertently, the Kyodo report raises fundamental questions about the impediments to what actually needs to be done for Japan and the US to defend Taiwan, each other, and themselves.
For example, sending out a US Marine missile battery or two isn’t a contingency plan for dealing with a Chinese move against Taiwan.
Rather, a proper operational plan requires melding the full resources and capabilities of US forces and the Japan Self-Defense Force – not just sending out the Marines. And even a detailed plan is still just a plan. If forces don’t train and exercise for the plan – they might as well not bother.
Japanese sailors aboard the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force ship JS Hyuga direct a US Marines’ MV-22 Osprey to land during the Dawn Blitz 2015 exercise off the coast of Southern California. Photo: AFP / Mark Ralston
The US side is well aware of this. It’s another question of whether the Japanese side is.
Additionally, one imagines that if and when serious planning takes place, the US and the Japanese militaries may come at the problem from two completely different directions.
Whereas the Americans are interested in stopping a Chinese invasion of Taiwan – and that means killing PLA troops – the Japanese may be more concerned with the defense of the Nansei Shoto and Japanese territory – and avoiding as much harm to anyone as possible.
And other reasons not to hold one’s breath about the plan having real-world effects anytime soon is the Japanese still need to study revising laws to permit the Marines to deploy. And then they will have to actually pass the laws.
Tokyo also needs to study and pass laws and/or regulations that lay out when an event involving Taiwan threatens Japan’s “peace and security” enough to let the aforementioned laws kick in.
And don’t forget the debating that will take place over all this – slowed by lobbies of all sorts.
Such things do not move quickly in Japan at the best of times.
One fears the Taiwan matter may be resolved one way or another before Japan has the legal structures in place that allow an operational plan to be implemented.
And if the Chinese don’t cooperate and patiently wait for Tokyo to get things in order before making their move, the US and Japanese response will be haphazard and ad hoc. Not exactly a winning approach.
One retired Marine who is well aware of how things work in Japan noted on reading the Kyodo report: “Imagine the hand wringing that will ensue just to provide (the Marines with) some battle space, some fuel and moral support.”
Another former Marine who worked closely with the Japanese military for many years noted: “This plan seems a good start, but it falls far short of the operational command structure required for the US and Japan to properly fight together in a Taiwan or other contingency.”
What alliance coordination mechanism?
The Japan-US Defense Guidelines were revised in 2015 and allow Japan and the United States to do whatever is necessary to establish genuine operational linkages – for both planning and peacetime and wartime operations.
Specifically, the guidelines call for an “alliance coordination mechanism” (ACM), but don’t actually say what one is. One fairly thinks an ACM is at least a building with people in it who do alliance coordinating.
But six years after the Defense Guidelines revision – and 60 years after the Japan-US defense treaty was signed – is there a standing, permanently staffed joint headquarters in Japan where the JSDF and US forces handle the defense of Japan – to include a potential Taiwan contingency?
No. Not yet.
Now that would be news – and maybe even more momentous than drafting a plan full of caveats.
In fairness, 10 years ago nobody in Tokyo would have dared to talk about an operational plan for Taiwan – hardly even one for Japan. But overall US-Japan defense preparations are still nowhere near where they need to be – other than between the two navies.
One suspects that the Kyodo News story is part of a messaging effort by some part of the Japanese government rather than a sign of a serious desire to improve urgently needed bilateral operational capabilities. Such is the Japanese approach to things. The pro-forma over the substantial.
Tokyo is sort of saying, ”I’ve got this really big friend who’ll hurt you if you come after me (or my neighbor).” There is, of course, no reason Japan can’t send away for the Charles Atlas bodybuilding course.
There are Japanese who understand this. They won’t mind if the Americans point this out.
Grant Newsham is a retired US Marine and a former diplomat and business executive who spent many years in Asia. He is a senior fellow with the Center for Security Policy. Follow him on Twitter: @NewshamGrant. He contributed this article to the December 29 issue of Japan Forward, from which Asia Times is republishing it with permission.
10. The Unmet Promise of the Global Posture Review
How do people think we should give the appearance of more focus on Asia without base access? How many countries are willing to host US bases or even to allow more than the rotational presence that is already in place? The choices for the review were to gain host nation support for new bases in Asia, maintain the status quo, or seek new rotational force agreements. And then there was the option of withdrawing forces. There was not much to work wit. Behind the scenes are things we cannot see which as shifts in apportioned forces to support specific theater OPLANs and contingency plans. We will not see CONUS or Hawaii or Alaska based forces have new priorities for Asia. But there has likely been a significant rebalancing of CONUS base forces (that are not necessary for rotational support to CENTCOM.
I was asked often by journalists how the force structure in Asia will change based on the posture review and my response has always been where would we put new forces or where would we shift current forces to?
Of course many might argue that with a new NDS to be released that the force structure review should be undertaken again to ensure force posture supports the strategy.
I guess my question for the review critics is what did you realistically expect from the review?
Lastly, I do not remember DOD "promising" anything with the review.
The Unmet Promise of the Global Posture Review - War on the Rocks
You would be forgiven for assuming that America’s pivot or rebalance to the Indo-Pacific was a strategy being executed in the real world. But you’d still be wrong. The latest example of this “say-do gap” is the Defense Department’s newest review of its global military posture. After frenetic and even schizophrenic changes to troop deployments and basing throughout the Middle East and Europe during the Trump administration, many hoped this Global Posture Review would reflect a more concerted effort to link America’s global military footprint to its national strategy. Amidst a growing and intensifying competition with China, expectations rose that the review would mean more forces and bases in the Indo-Pacific, to strengthen deterrence by enhancing the survivability of U.S. forces and adding advanced capabilities.
Despite the Biden administration’s hype, the review failed to deliver on its promises. The public summary of the classified review suggests that, in the eyes of senior Pentagon leaders, America’s global posture did not require significant changes after all. Instead, the review took credit for earlier decisions the Biden administration made about the U.S. military footprint, and left the door open to future alterations following the release of the National Defense Strategy in early 2022. In response, the inability of the posture review to produce new announcements about U.S. basing, access, or force deployments — particularly in the Indo-Pacific — has been met with disappointment and exasperation from many onlookers.
Such frustration is warranted. U.S. military posture has long been incongruent with broader U.S. defense strategy, instead reflecting outdated interests and requirements and the sticky, inelastic nature of force movements and basing access. The review missed an opportunity to realign U.S. military presence overseas with the strategic priorities laid out in the interim National Security Strategic Guidance, which explicitly calls for changes to force posture in the Indo-Pacific and the Middle East — increases in the former and reductions in the latter. To its credit, the review did make some useful procedural changes, namely in streamlining the processes required to determine future force deployments and posture revisions. Despite these procedural improvements, however, the review delivered too little, too late.
The administration should now move swiftly to close the say-do gap by immediately working to align global posture to its strategy. The National Defense Strategy will give the Defense Department an opportunity to reinforce China as the priority challenge and clarify the global posture changes needed to counter Beijing both today and tomorrow. However, the Pentagon does not need to wait for the release of the National Defense Strategy to start altering U.S. military presence overseas. If it does, it will find itself once again doing too little and far too late to produce meaningful change. Quick wins for the administration would include improving infrastructure at a wider array of existing bases in the Indo-Pacific to enhance survivability and further curbing unnecessary deployments to the Middle East. These efforts, although seemingly small, will bolster America’s military advantage while longer-term negotiations with allies and partners about opening new bases and expanding access mature.
Plus Ça Change
The review was a corrective to some of the impulsive and imprudent changes to posture announced by the Trump administration, which often came at the expense of long-standing and important alliances, like the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Germany. By undoing such changes, the review reaffirmed commitments by permanently stationing additional forces and promising consultations before any future posture changes. It also informed decisions to withdraw high-demand, low-density assets from the Middle East that had been placed in the region in the wake of attacks from Iran. The end result largely reverted America’s global military presence back to what it had been before the Trump administration, but with additional firepower in Europe.
What the posture review did not do was significantly alter the global constellation of U.S. bases. It did not announce expected new basing opportunities in and increased deployments to the Indo-Pacific. Instead, the review made marginal improvements to U.S. basing infrastructure in important territories such as Guam and the Northern Marianas. It also promised increased access in Australia based on growing ties from the nuclear submarine and technology sharing agreement known as AUKUS. Overall, however, the review did not reflect the growing importance of the Indo-Pacific in the upcoming defense strategy and how posture improvements could contribute to managing the Defense Department’s “pacing challenge.”
In the Middle East, general expectations for a reduced footprint reflect Washington’s decision to accept risk against other threats and in other regions in order to prioritize the Chinese challenge in the Indo-Pacific. On this line of thinking, altering the U.S. presence in the Middle East not only frees up forces and capabilities for the Indo-Pacific but also translates into investments in military readiness and modernization needed to improve U.S. military efficacy in future conflicts. But the review punted on the Middle East, stating that more studies were needed before altering the U.S. regional architecture there.
Process Makes Perfect, Eventually
Despite the high expectations reinforced by its lengthy timeline, it was unlikely that the review was ever going to drastically revise America’s global presence or actualize the desired pivot to the Indo-Pacific. Posture is incredibly difficult and slow to change because global access and basing cannot be determined by the United States alone. Forward presence requires the permission of the sovereign nations that host U.S. forces and facilities on their soil. Changes to posture — whether increasing or decreasing presence — tend to involve long and arduous negotiations with allies and partners, especially when concrete has already been poured. The posture review created a mechanism for the Biden administration to engage with allies and partners about its desired modifications to U.S. presence around the globe. But altering access, or getting permission to move forces in or base forces in another country’s territory, is a deeply political and sensitive issue that cannot be overcome by a single review.
For instance, improving U.S. warfighting effectiveness and enhancing deterrence in the Indo-Pacific would require deploying U.S. forces to a larger number of distributed bases, rather than remaining concentrated on a few large bases. This, in turn, would require both access to new facilities and permission to position new forces and capabilities. Obtaining access depends on a number of factors, including many that are outside Washington’s control, such as domestic politics and threat perceptions of China. In the Middle East, reductions to the permanent U.S. presence elevate the importance of contingency access, or the ability to quickly surge forces during periods of heightened threats. But obtaining contingency access while regional partners accuse Washington of retrenchment and abandonment is no small feat. The posture review at least started the lengthy consultative process required to make bigger changes to posture.
Another overlooked element of the review are its adjustments to the process of assessing force deployments, with the aim to better enable future changes to U.S. posture. While the Department of Defense already has a process to adjudicate emergent requests for forces against resourcing and readiness tradeoffs, the current global force management process favors the U.S. combatant commands. Establishing a “disciplining framework” for more rigorously assessing posture subtly put the combatant commands — the most voracious consumers of force deployments — on notice, signaling that their near-constant requests for forces will be evaluated more critically by the Pentagon. Posture changes driven by combatant command demands have complicated previous administrations’ attempts to revise and align global posture with broader defense strategies. For example, the sizable U.S. Central Command’s successful requests for big-ticket assets like carrier strike groups and increased force deployments in the name of deterring Iran upended the Trump administration’s desire to shift away from the Middle East. In many respects, this disciplining framework is a bureaucratic victory that better ensures the Biden administration’s desired future posture changes are not upended by emergent combatant command needs.
But Timing Is Everything
Despite its bureaucratic and process victories, the global posture review was full of procedural missteps related to the timing, messaging, and sequencing of the review. One of the main problems with the review is that it delivered less than expected on a longer-than-promised timeline. But this problem stems more from overhyped expectations given the timeline and messaging, rather than the review’s results. The review, which emerged from a request from President Joe Biden, was initially intended as a quick, six-month assessment of the U.S. global footprint to roll back what the administration viewed as unhelpful posture changes made by the Trump administration. Messaging about the review overpromised, as it never intended to fundamentally reimagine U.S. basing and forces worldwide. Instead, the posture review created merely a return to normal, rather than positioning Washington to implement its preferred strategy to better manage the future challenges it may face.
Moreover, the major elements of the global posture review were completed long before its public release. While the review was initially envisioned as a quick-turn corrective to reassure allies, the prolonged process raised expectations, as many believed the delay was due to progress in negotiations with allies and partners to alter access and posture. The failure of the review to deliver meaningful changes has only added to make several allies and partners feel more insecure and less confident in the administration’s willingness to translate its words to action. The lengthy timeline only further served to make it feel like a letdown to many.
This optics problem was further compounded by the incremental roll-out of posture changes informed by the review, including freezing the removal of 12,000 troops from Germany in April 2021, the withdrawal of air and missile defenses in the Middle East in June 2021, the deployment of 500 Army personnel to Weisbaden, Germany, in September 2021 and the announcement of the AUKUS security agreement that same month, and improvements to Tinian and Anderson airbases in the 2022 budget. As these announcements preceded the public release of the actual review, they suggested that additional changes were forthcoming as part of the ongoing look at posture.
The decision to release the posture review before the upcoming National Defense Strategy was yet another blunder. If the review had been swiftly completed and advertised as merely a corrective to the unhelpful posture changes of the previous administration, it would make sense for more changes to come after the defense strategy laid out global priorities. Instead, delaying releasing the results of the posture review has blurred the lines between process and aims. While Department of Defense officials have claimed that the posture review will inform the strategy, the order should be flipped: The priority threats and missions elucidated by the National Defense Strategy should determine the necessary alterations to U.S. force presence around the globe. The National Defense Strategy may still decide additional posture changes are needed, but the sequencing of the review and the strategy will only further delay the posture changes needed to counter America’s future priority challenges.
Implementing the Review Right
Despite problems with the timeline and messaging and disappointment about the lack of tangible results, there was some good news from the review. It reversed some bad choices that did not strengthen deterrence and threatened long-standing relationships, made a few small alterations to posture to free up high-demand capabilities, and revised bureaucratic processes and established mechanisms to enable future posture changes more effectively. But the future is now, not tomorrow, and the Biden administration should act to capitalize on the meager gains of the review to make meaningful changes to America’s global posture. A failure to do so means more than a misalignment between strategy and posture. It risks weakening deterrence in the Indo-Pacific over time, compounding readiness issues and survivability risks to U.S. forces around the globe, and an inability to implement the operational concepts developed to prevail against China in a potential conflict.
As China continues to modernize, it is critical that the U.S. military adapt its posture to enhance survivability and improve deterrence in the Indo-Pacific region. There are steps the Department of Defense can take now to achieve some quick wins. These include properly resourcing the long-awaited infrastructure upgrades to existing bases and facilities in the Indo-Pacific in the next budget. Such improvements are needed to implement the operational concepts developed to counter China, many of which are predicated on distribution and dispersal. The Pentagon should also leverage its revised deployment process to curb deployments to the Middle East, particularly for heavy ground forces that may be of greater value in Europe, to recoup readiness and end a ceaseless deployment cycle. Moreover, in a distinct break with Trump-era approaches, Washington must build on its ongoing consultations with allies and partners to make the necessary long-term changes to posture. Engaging these partners quickly and honestly will help manage expectations — a missing component of the review.
The release of the National Defense Strategy will provide an opportunity to get the Department of Defense and U.S. allies and partners singing from the same hymn sheet to make sizable posture changes. In theory, the strategy will clarify the priority threats and missions and reinforce China as the main challenge. Within the department, the strategy provides a mechanism to plan, program, and resource base improvements, future facilities, new capabilities, and force deployments. Additionally, the public messaging of these priorities will communicate the rationale behind desired posture adjustments to allies and partners. This is deeply important since the Defense Department cannot simply wave a magic wand to quickly reposition forces around the globe. Getting allies and partners to understand why such changes are necessary is a critical step as they navigate aligning these requests for access with their own national interests.
The Pentagon cannot afford to dawdle. While altering posture may take time, the Biden administration should act now to make these changes. Time is not on its side. The Global Posture Review serves as a cautionary tale of the perils of moving too slowly and setting up unmet expectations. Conducting further studies or perfecting process will not improve the department’s ability to implement change. It is time to focus on faster execution and closing the say-do gap. If not, the United States will find itself in a continued state of arrested development in which it speaks of progress but fails to implement any meaningful change and finds itself unprepared for the future challenges it may face.
Becca Wasser is a fellow in the defense program and co-lead of the Gaming Lab at the Center for a New American Security.
11. Is Team Biden Winning?
I fully support the first two sentences highlighted in the first conclusion paragraph below,
Conclusion:
We should continue to assess, evaluate, and, yes, even criticize American foreign policy as it is being made. While doing so, however, we should be mindful both of how difficult statecraft is and how hard it is to assess success or failure in real time. Unlike a football game or even a season, the outcomes we care about won’t be known for years or even decades. Nor do the best processes always guarantee the best outcomes. International politics, unlike most sports, is not a closed system. Robert Jervis — an intellectual giant and dear friend (both personally and to this journal) who left us too soon — reminds us that international politics produces “unintended consequences, non-linearities, feedbacks (positive, negative, and ones that cannot be readily placed in either of these categories), and indirect effects …. [B]oth nature and politics frequently present us with chains of events in which the relevant interactions are not immediately obvious.”
Finally, to the extent that we are able, our evaluation should emerge from the rational, not limbic, parts of our brain. How do I think the Biden administration is doing according to these metrics? I certainly have views. But as I write this, the Eagles season has begun to show slight hope, the new quarterback and coach have demonstrated progress, and my brother and I must get ready to watch the game. Perhaps the season is not lost after all.
Is Team Biden Winning? - War on the Rocks
Editor’s Note: This is the introductory essay for Volume 5, Issue 1 of the Texas National Security Review, our sister publication. Be sure to read the entire issue.
My close friends know my passionate, somewhat irrational devotion to the Philadelphia Eagles football team. Every Sunday (or Monday, or Thursday, or, during Covid times, even Tuesday) in the fall, without fail and often with my equally passionate younger brother Michael, I watch the Eagles on television. If I am traveling, even abroad, I will go to great lengths — bribery, seedy bars, unstable internet connections routed through servers in unsavory countries — to root for my team.
Looking over decades of fandom, I can’t say it has been a joyful experience. Every summer, I pore over the team roster, look at the schedule, read scouting reports, and convince myself — this is our year! There are moments of exhilarating excitement, with miraculous comebacks or defeats of hated rivals, like the Dallas Cowboys. And in 2017, in quite unexpected fashion, the Eagles ran off a string of unexpected victories, culminating in an amazing upset in the Super Bowl that featured perhaps the gutsiest fourth-down call in Super Bowl history. Other than this isolated triumph and the occasional success, Eagles fandom mostly involves searing disappointment at witnessing repeated underperformance, resulting in my brother and me screaming at the television every week. Even that victory four years ago has faded — both the franchise quarterback and Super-Bowl–winning coach have departed. The Eagles are years away from any possibility of competing for another championship, their decline accelerated by hubris and ineptitude.
Sports loyalty generates interesting reactions. All fans believe they are experts, second-guessing the general managers, coaches, and players, and believing they could do better, if given the chance. If only the team had run instead of passed, or picked a different player in the draft, then they might have succeeded. These reactions, however, are not entirely rational. Sporting loyalties are shaped by the limbic part of our brain, which regulates passions: from whom we fall in love with to rooting for a team made up of strangers playing a game I have never played located in a city I haven’t lived in for decades.
For reasons fair or not, another disappointing Eagles season has me thinking about reactions to the desultory foreign policy of the first year of the Biden presidency. The administration’s preseason looked promising. The new coach was certainly old school, and the players perhaps younger and less experienced than ideal, but like many, I thought it would be hard to do worse than the previous team. One year on, however, it is difficult not to be disappointed with the results. The foreign policy equivalent of playoff glory, to say nothing of a Super Bowl victory, seems well out of reach.
Beginning with a curious decision to hold an unpleasant meeting with America’s most important strategic rival at the Hotel Captain Hook in Anchorage and continuing with the embarrassing self-own on the Australia-United Kingdom-United States (or AUKUS) pact — a promising strategic play that could not have been presented to the world in a more hapless, self-defeating manner — the Biden team has done far worse than expected. The military withdrawal from Afghanistan — which, grand strategically, was the correct move, but was carried out in a disastrous fashion — has come to reflect an administration that overpromised competence and consultation but has often delivered too little of either. Both China and Russia are more aggressive, Iran appears closer to possessing nuclear weapons, global coordination to contain COVID-19 is still poor, and America’s allies seem only slightly less suspicious of the current administration than they were of President Donald Trump and his advisers. More alarmingly, there appears to be no overarching conceptual model to make sense of and act in the world, no sense of priorities and necessary tradeoffs. Are democracy and human rights the organizing principle of America’s foreign policy, or is it the return of great-power politics? Does the country have a trade policy? What is America’s Europe policy? What should the United States focus on: transnational challenges, such as climate change and COVID-19, or geopolitical threats? And which geopolitical threats should take precedence — an aggressive Russia, an opportunistic Iran, a rising China, or a new, unforeseen adversary? In a world of limited means and unlimited challenges, good grand strategy requires both a theory of how the world works and ruthless prioritization. Attempting to do everything only guarantees you will do nothing well. Slogans, such as “a foreign policy for the middle class,” offer little guidance about how the administration will make difficult, consequential choices about an uncertain future.
That said, the historian in me worries this assessment is unfair to the Biden administration. Erratic foreign policy during the first year is the norm, not the exception, in American history. John F. Kennedy — who handled the terrifying October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis with great skill — suffered two humiliating crises in his first six months in office: the ill-fated Bay of Pigs intervention in Cuba and the terrible Vienna summit with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. Richard Nixon’s successes of 1972 — ending America’s military role in Vietnam, a historic visit to the People’s Republic of China, and signing the Anti-Ballistic Missile and Strategic Arms Limitation Talks Treaties with the Soviet Union — appeared far away and unlikely in 1969, when the first year of the administration was plagued by bureaucratic in-fighting, resistance from the U.S. Congress, and deep skepticism from friend and foe alike. Even Franklin D. Roosevelt, who eventually got around to winning World War II and laying the foundations for the postwar liberal order, had a terrible first year in foreign policy, scuttling the London Economic Conference and turning the United States away from international affairs just when the world desperately needed American leadership. This is not surprising. The United States labors under a variety of structural challenges: The president understandably prioritizes domestic policy early, foreign policies that are popular on the campaign trail often seem less appealing or appropriate once in office, top national security officials are selected and cycled out via partisan election cycles, appointments are held up by a drawn-out clearance and approval process, etc. These obstacles virtually guarantee a difficult start. Over time, a president not only learns but might also bring on more effective advisers. Ronald Reagan’s fortunes improved (at least for a time) once he replaced Al Haig with George Schultz as secretary of state.
Similar to sports reactions, real-time responses to politics and foreign policy can be misleading: We don’t possess all the information insiders do, have a tendency to discount hurdles and constraints policymakers face when making choices, wildly overestimate how well we would do if we had to make decisions, often forget that the other team/side/party/country has a vote or a role to play, discount bureaucratic and congressional hurdles, reveal a bias toward assessing short-term results instead of thinking about outcomes over a longer time horizon, and — as we do with our beloved sports teams — often think or assess more with our hearts (or limbic brains) than our heads. The evidence that a scholar treasures in order to evaluate grand strategy is, in the moment, incomplete, uneven, and, at times, misleading. The distance and perspective every historian seeks is very hard to obtain when assessing contemporary events.
That said, we have an obligation to try to make fair and thoughtful judgments. We don’t have the luxury of waiting 50 or even five years to see if Biden and his team turn out to be far wiser and more effective than they seem at first cut. How should we evaluate the foreign policy of this — or any — administration, even as it is unfolding? I reflected upon the challenge of this task as I read the excellent articles in this issue, “The Engines of Statecraft.”
We might think about evaluating statecraft along a spectrum. On the one end is a president and his or her administration’s conceptual lens for understanding the world. Under this category, we would identify and interrogate an administration’s assumptions about world politics and its notions of political causality and agency, its theories for who and what matter, and how policy can affect change. Does an administration believe the world to be zero-sum and anarchic, shaped by inevitable tragedy and conflict, or are there important opportunities for cooperation and collective gain? Is the greatest threat to America’s security great-power war, crises of the commons, or some inextricable mix of the two? Should the United States exercise restraint or hegemony when confronting pressing global challenges?
We often think of these “big picture” assessments as the purview of the academy, the kind of thing international relations professors love to obsess over and some policymakers dismiss as the realm of eggheads. For government policy to be effective, however, decisions and actions must emerge from a consistent, well-thought-out, and widely shared worldview. Such a perspective is offered by Aaron Friedberg, a renowned scholar with high-level policy experience (article forthcoming). His Strategist piece expertly combines a history of international economics with an analysis of future scenarios to better understand how globalization and the contentious U.S.-Chinese relationship may play out. Whether one agrees with his assessment or not, Friedberg admirably lays out his core assumptions about the world and how they shape choices, an exercise all presidential administrations should undertake. Richard Maass also explicitly explores assumptions about how the world works. His penetrating article, “Salami Tactics: Faits Accomplis and International Expansion in the Shadow of Major War,” identifies, defines, and theorizes about a crucial and underappreciated phenomenon in international conflict. Many of our theories of conflict, and the policies that emerge from them, are shaped by the history of and assumptions about the kind of great-power wars that dominated the first half of the 20th century. If what Maass (and Dan Altman elsewhere) suggests is correct, policymakers will need to update their conceptual lenses to understand what drives salami tactics and how to craft the most effective policies in response.
If one element of effective grand strategy is a coherent, smart, convincing “macro” world view, the other end of the spectrum might be understood to be more “micro,” or what Philip Zelikow, in his excellent 2019 TNSR article, labelled “policy competence.” How does an administration develop and implement its statecraft? As Zelikow argues, effective policy relies on the “way people size up problems, design actions, and implement policy.” This ranges from undertaking the day-to-day tasks of carrying out the diplomacy and statecraft of a superpower to making decisions about weapons procurement and force deployments. James Timbie and James Ellis’ article, “A Large Number of Small Things,” lays out what they see as a more effective military strategy to defend Taiwan that makes better use of its technological and geographical advantages. Following the Zelikow template, the authors identify the problem and design an appropriate action plan, though obviously only the governments of Taiwan and the United States could implement their recommended policy.
Danielle Gilbert and Gaëlle Rivard Piché’s article combines the conceptual lens, or how we understand the world, with policy competence, or how to navigate tricky diplomacy and negotiations with an adversary in the shadow of a great-power ally. Given the stakes, limitations, and vulnerabilities, a medium-sized state like Canada needs to think even more deeply about how the world works and how it can most effectively operate in it. Conceptual worldviews and policy competencies feed back into and shape each other. As they point out, “In Canada, the debate over the unlawful detention of the two Michaels progressively gave way to a much larger — and crucial — debate about the future of the country’s relationship with China.”
The case of hostage diplomacy also suggests a third metric by which to assess the effectiveness of policy: what Jim Steinberg, also in TNSR, has labelled “ripeness.” Good statecraft involves being “able to spot an opportunity when it is emerging.” Equally important, diplomats must understand when an issue “is not ripe for negotiation.” As Diana Bolsinger superbly lays out in her article, “Not at Any Price: LBJ, Pakistan, and Bargaining in an Asymmetric Intelligence Relationship,” Pakistan and the United States struggled in all three dimensions of statecraft. Their larger conceptions of the world diverged, and neither demonstrated the policy competencies to bridge the gap, nor did they possess or recognize the incentive to overcome both to build a more stable, lasting partnership (arguably, this could describe much of the history of the complicated relationship between the United States and Pakistan).
Is a combination of a convincing conceptual lens and policy competency enough to guarantee an effective grand strategy? Not necessarily. Few administrations had a more coherent, consistent, and strongly held worldview than the George W. Bush administration, yet its foreign policy record could most generously be described as unsuccessful. President Dwight D. Eisenhower had a very impressive policy process centered on the National Security Council. By the end of his second term, however, there was a sense that whatever its policy competency, the administration was missing important changes in world politics. Ripeness nicely captures both the macro and micro elements of statecraft, but in truth, it is often very hard to know, ex ante, if the time is right for bold diplomatic initiatives. Henry Kissinger brilliantly captured the tension between uncertainty about the future and the freedom of action policymakers possess:
The most difficult, indeed tragic, aspect of foreign policy is how to deal with the problem of conjecture. When the scope for action is greatest, knowledge on which to base such action is small or ambiguous. When knowledge becomes available, the ability to affect events is usually at a minimum. In 1936, no one could know whether Hitler was a misunderstood nationalist or a maniac. By the time certainty was achieved, it had to be paid for with millions of lives.
We should continue to assess, evaluate, and, yes, even criticize American foreign policy as it is being made. While doing so, however, we should be mindful both of how difficult statecraft is and how hard it is to assess success or failure in real time. Unlike a football game or even a season, the outcomes we care about won’t be known for years or even decades. Nor do the best processes always guarantee the best outcomes. International politics, unlike most sports, is not a closed system. Robert Jervis — an intellectual giant and dear friend (both personally and to this journal) who left us too soon — reminds us that international politics produces “unintended consequences, non-linearities, feedbacks (positive, negative, and ones that cannot be readily placed in either of these categories), and indirect effects …. [B]oth nature and politics frequently present us with chains of events in which the relevant interactions are not immediately obvious.”
Finally, to the extent that we are able, our evaluation should emerge from the rational, not limbic, parts of our brain. How do I think the Biden administration is doing according to these metrics? I certainly have views. But as I write this, the Eagles season has begun to show slight hope, the new quarterback and coach have demonstrated progress, and my brother and I must get ready to watch the game. Perhaps the season is not lost after all.
Francis J. Gavin, in addition to being a long-suffering Philadelphia Eagles fan, is the Giovanni Agnelli Distinguished Professor and the director of the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at the School of Advanced International Studies in Johns Hopkins University. He serves as chair of the editorial board of the Texas National Security Review.
12. Iran’s regime threatens nuclear explosion in Israel’s Dimona facility
Iran’s regime threatens nuclear explosion in Israel’s Dimona facility
The IRGC threatened to attack the Dimona nuclear facility, as well as Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Haifa, in a series of tweets.
Updated: DECEMBER 26, 2021 14:52
A Twitter account ostensibly run by the Iranian regime’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps on Friday threatened to blow up the city of Dimona in the Negev desert, where a nuclear installation is located.
The Jerusalem Post can reveal that the IRGC account, with its 12,100 followers, depicted a video showing multiple explosions in a desert. “Then on the day we [God] will deal you the fiercest blow. We will surely inflict punishment, “ the IRGC wrote in Arabic, citing a quote from the Koran, adding the Hashtag “Dimona.” At the top of the video, the date 2021-12-24 is listed with a timer next to it. The video runs for eighteen seconds.
pic.twitter.com/7OqXdJHPf9
— IMA Media • ایما مدیا (@imamedia_org) December 25, 2021
The account provides a link to the IRGC’s Telegram account, with its 376,084 subscribers. Both the IRGC Twitter account and Telegram account shows the IRGC logo—an arm raised while clutching a rifle.
The IRGC Arabic account only follows the Farsi language Twitter account of the Islamic Republic’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khameni, and a backup account for IRGC Arabic—perhaps in the event that its Twitter feed is suspended or deleted.
Missiles fired during Iran's ''17th Great Prophet'' drill (credit: Saeed Sajjadi/Fars News Agency)
A December 13 Tweet from the IRGC account declared "In the event of foolishness on the part of the Zionist regime, the Islamic Republic of Iran is no longer ready to destroy Tel Aviv and Haifa, but to liberate holy Quds. If the security of the holy land of Iran is compromised, no one will taste the moment of security, whether those who are at 1,000 km or at 10,000 km.“
Quds is the Arabic name for the capital of Israel, Jerusalem.
Sheina Vojoudi, an Iranian dissident who fled the Islamic Republic due to repression and who closely tracks Iranian regime social media activity, told The Jerusalem Post that “An army is supposed to protect and defend the people and the soil of its country but I don’s see any sign of my country in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, no name of Iran or the Iranian people is even mentioned in it. The Persian term Sepah-e Pasdaran has a great value and has its root in ancient Persian but the IRGC ruined it. Why should the IRGC publish its statements mostly in Arabic while the official language of Iran is Persian and most of the people in Iran speak and everyone understands Persian? Because it’s talking to its proxies like Hezbollah, Hamas, Houthis, Hashd al Shabi and the other entities under its commands not the Iranian people. The IRGC’s priority is the complete destruction of Israel and to follow Khomeini’s Ideology instead of defending its own people.”
In 2019, the US government designated the IRGC a foreign terrorist organization. The American state department—under both democrat and republican administrations—has classified the Iranian regime as the world’s worst state-sponsor of terrorism. The IRGC is estimated to have murdered over 600 US military personnel in the Middle East.
The London-based Iran International reported on its Twitter account on Friday: The IRGC-affiliated Tasnim news agency says the Revolutionary Guards have simulated missile strikes against Israel's Dimona nuclear facility in the 'Great Prophet 17' military exercises."
The Post reported last week that an Arabic language Twitter account of the Islamic Republic of Iran published an image on December 17 that showed the planned burned elimination of the Jewish state in 2022.
The picture shows Israel composed of nails and matches and a book of matches next to words in Hebrew and English declaring: “Just try and you will see.”
The book of matches, which is situated next to Israel in the image, says “Ballistic matchstick” and shows an Iranian regime flag on it. The apparent message is that the clerical regime is prepared to detonate the matches to destroy Israel in 2022.
In late November the spokesman for the Islamic Republic of Iran’s armed forces, Brig.-Gen. Abolfazl Shekarchi, urged the total elimination of the Jewish state during an interview with an Iranian regime-controlled media outlet.
"We will not back off from the annihilation of Israel, even one millimeter. We want to destroy Zionism in the world,” Shekarchi told the Iranian Students News Agency.
On December 15 the Tehran Times wrote on its front page “One wrong move,” with military targets listed within Israel.
13. 7 out of 10 in Taiwan would fight China to stop forced unification—poll
7 out of 10 in Taiwan would fight China to stop forced unification—poll
Newsweek · by John Feng · December 30, 2021
Over 70 percent of respondents in a recent survey in Taiwan said they would fight China if it tried to force "unification" with the island.
The poll, published by the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy (TFD) think tank on Wednesday, found 62.7 percent of respondents also would be willing to take up arms if a war broke out because of "Taiwan's declaring formal independence." Just over one-quarter said they wouldn't fight under such a scenario.
The strikingly high willingness to oppose Beijing "if China uses force against Taiwan"—72.5 versus 18.6 percent—may be a reflection of the question's framing, which usually doesn't include a specific hypothetical circumstance.
It's a departure from the generally ambivalent public attitude toward the perennial debate about the likelihood of war across the Taiwan Strait and the society's response.
Announcing the survey results at a press conference, TFD linked the sentiments to "China's increasingly tough attitude toward Taiwan and intensifying tension between the United States and China."
The TFD poll was conducted by the Election Study Center at National Chengchi University in Taipei. Between August 10 and 15, the ESC collected 1,299 valid samples from landline and cell phone interviews with adult Taiwan residents above the voting age of 20. The poll had a margin of error plus-minus 2.72 percent.
The ESC is one of Taiwan's index pollsters and has been tracking the island's political attitudes and national identities since the early 1990s.
A row of American-made F-16V fighter aircraft are pictured on the tarmac at Chiayi Air Base in Taiwan during a commissioning ceremony on November 18, 2021. National polling published on December 29, 2021, found seven out of 10 Taiwanese residents were willing to take up arms to prevent forced unification with China. Makoto Lin/Office of the President, Taiwan
On Tuesday, Taiwanese magazine Global Views Monthly published an annual survey whose results appeared to contradict the TFD poll. Framing the same question slightly differently, it found a majority 51.3 percent of respondents would be unwilling to fight China or see their relatives take up arms, while 40.3 percent answered in the affirmative.
The magazine, which some consider to be China-friendly, said 62.9 percent of those polled in a multiple choice question believe the U.S. would support Taiwan during a cross-strait conflict. Belief in Japanese and Australian assistance was at 57.5 and 6.8 percent, respectively. Confidence in all three regional neighbors has risen—by 5.4, 11.6 and 5.5 percent, respectively—since September 2020.
However, despite the expectation of American assistance, only 10.2 percent of respondents believe U.S. troops would fight alongside Taiwanese forces during a war with China, the polling showed. 33.7 percent said the U.S. would sell arms to Taiwan; 19.8 percent said the U.S. Navy would likely patrol near the island; and 13 percent believed the U.S. would condemn China verbally or in writing.
The general survey collected 1,098 telephone interviews with Taiwan residents above the age of 20 between November 25 and December 9.
The intensifying rivalry between Washington and Beijing in recent years has been accompanied by increased attention on the likelihood of armed conflict across the Taiwan Strait. In Taiwan, however, the public remains sanguine; some prefer to describe the sentiment as "numb."
In the same Global Views survey in November 2020, 66.3 percent of respondents said China would not achieve unification with Taiwan in the next 10 years.
Newsweek · by John Feng · December 30, 2021
14. Conservatives and Liberals Are Wrong About Each Other
I think this is one of our most fundamental problems. Neither side is as extreme as the other thinks. But the real problem is that many of those on each side cannot respect that those with different political beliefs (big government versus small government, individualism versus government safety nets, liberty versus social justice ,etc) and acknowledge that those with different politico worldviews can be patriots and desire to support and defend the Constitution of the United States and uphold the values of our federal democratic republic. I think the beauty of our the Constitution and the brilliance of our founding fathers was that they did not come down on one side or the other bgi government versus small government but instead gave us a process (checks and balances and separation of powers) to keep those competing views in balance in accordance with the will of the people without resorting to tyranny over the minority or the sacrifice of individual liberty.
We should ask ourselves do we need to hate our political opposnents to validate our poltiical and world views? Do we nee to hate "the other" in order to feel good?
Conservatives and Liberals Are Wrong About Each Other
New research shows that Americans on both sides of the political spectrum overestimate how radical the other side is.
Every movement contains a range of viewpoints, from moderate to extreme. Unfortunately, Americans on each side of the political spectrum believe—incorrectly—that hard-liners dominate the opposite camp.
After the killing of George Floyd last year, for example, liberal protesters across the nation pushed for criminal-justice reform, and many of the specific changes they sought enjoyed a lot of popular support. Even recent polls have shown that, regardless of political affiliation, most Americans remain in favor of police-accountability measures (such as body cameras and a registry of police misconduct), the banning of choke holds, and tackling racial injustices head on. Some activists went much further, though, demanding the complete elimination of police departments. Conservative pundits noticed. Soon, the Fox News host Tucker Carlson was presenting call after vivid call to abolish or radically defund policing. “They would like to eliminate all law enforcement for good,” he told viewers.
But supporters of police abolition are the exception, not the rule, on the American left, according to research that my colleagues Matthew Feinberg, Alexa Tullett, Anne E. Wilson, and I conducted. In late October 2020, we asked more than 1,000 people in the United States whether they agreed that “police departments are irreversibly broken and racist, so the government needs to get rid of them completely.” Only 28 percent of the self-described liberals even somewhat agreed, indicating that this was not a solid consensus on the left.
Although far out of step with what most liberals actually thought, Carlson’s sampling of liberal views was emblematic of what conservatives believed about liberals. Conservatives in our sample estimated that 61 percent of liberals—more than twice the actual number—endorsed the abolition of law enforcement. This is a striking example of what plagues our politics: a false polarization in which one side excoriates the other for views that it largely does not hold.
Left-leaning readers might not be surprised that conservatives would accept as widespread a caricature of the radical liberal, given that they are so clearly blinded by racism or pro-police sentiment that they would excuse even the most unjust excesses of force. But wait—is this portrayal of conservatives accurate?
No. It isn’t.
Just as liberals came to rally around #BlackLivesMatter, conservatives gravitated to #BlueLivesMatter. From the vocal conservatives who made excuses for misconduct or blamed victims, some liberal commentators concluded that the right is dominated by police apologists. In fact, many on the right recognize both the humanity and hardship of police officers and those harmed by them. When we asked conservatives if police were almost always justified in their shootings of Black people, only 31 percent of respondents even somewhat agreed with the sentiment. Liberals, on the other hand, estimated nearly double that number of conservatives—57 percent—gave police a free pass.
Some caveats: Our research, which is available as a preprint, is under review and subject to change. We drew our large samples of respondents from online survey platforms, not from nationally representative polling. We recognize that this sample—and therefore our estimates of the prevalence of liberal and conservative opinions—is not an exact microcosm of the country. Still, other researchers have concluded that these platforms are reasonably comparable to nationally representative polling.
The gap that we identified between what partisans really think and what their opponents think they think shows up again and again—but only on a particular kind of issue. People have a more accurate view of the other side’s position on many standard policy issues, such as taxes or health care. But specifically on culture-war issues, partisans are likely to believe a caricatured version of the opposing side’s attitudes. These misconceptions have hardened into enduring stereotypes: liberal snowflakes and free-speech police, conservative racists and “deplorables.”
In reality, just a third of liberal participants agreed even a little with banning controversial public speakers from college campuses, but conservatives estimated that 63 percent of liberals held that view. Only 22 percent of conservatives expressed hostile and unwelcoming attitudes toward immigrants, but liberals thought that 57 percent of them did. Our data suggest that many people are walking around with an exaggerated mental representation of what other Americans stand for.
Where do these ideas come from? Partisan media outlets have an incentive to stoke their audience’s outrage by making extreme views seem commonplace. In our work, we saw that the more people reported consuming partisan news (a category in which, drawing on the work of other researchers, we included Fox News and MSNBC), the more they believed in a caricatured version of the other side.
People’s perceptions of others are powerful, even when they’re wrong. We found that people disliked their opponents primarily for the fringe views most opponents didn’t actually hold. Worse still, partisans who disliked their opponents most were least willing to engage with them, which likely forecloses the chance to have their misperceptions corrected through real-life personal contact. Instead, an oversimplified, exaggerated version of the other side’s views is allowed to live on inside of everyone’s head.
What’s more, partisans told us they were hesitant to voice their opinions about the most extreme positions expressed by people on the same side of the spectrum. For example, liberals were less keen to talk publicly about the downsides of censoring free speech than they were to talk about the benefits of universal health care. So although a majority of liberals opposed censorship, their reluctance to criticize it openly might have led conservatives to think that most on the left favored it.
So what should politically minded Americans conclude from our research—that, gosh, their opponents are just like them, and everyone should join hands in the center? Nope. Some policies—and some partisans—deserve forceful opposition, even contempt, from the other side. Vigorous disagreement, both within and between parties, is essential in a functioning democracy. But democracy also requires at least some level of mutual comprehension. No matter where people are on the political spectrum, they ought to know whom they’re fighting with and what they’re even fighting about.
15. Russia’s Aggression Against Ukraine Is Backfiring
I certainly hope so but that backfiring could also be problematic and cause Putin to look for other courses of action. I hope the diplomats can find a constructive way out that ensures the sovereignty of Ukraine and takes into account the threats the Russians perceive.
Excerpt:
Russia’s past attempts to intimidate Ukraine into not choosing a westward path have backfired. Fifty-eight percent of Ukrainians now say that they would vote for NATO membership, and the nation has developed a greater sense of national identity and a more resilient society. Sweden and Finland are moving into closer alignment with NATO, as Russia illustrates the dangers of remaining outside the Western mutual-defense pact. NATO has held united, refusing to accept that Russia gets a veto over either its membership or its actions. The United States, while averting military involvement, has crafted a credible set of penalties and garnered international support for them. Putin lacks the imagination to see that launching successful military operations is not the same as winning a war, a lesson the U.S. recently relearned in Afghanistan. That Russia is now repeating the very mistake the U.S. made, and is slowly recovering from, is an ironic twist.
Russia’s Aggression Against Ukraine Is Backfiring
Putin’s military moves are rallying Ukrainians and unifying NATO.
Western intelligence agencies have warned that Russia is contemplating an invasion of Ukraine, perhaps involving some 175,000 troops. Vladimir Putin’s government has already moved more than 100,000 troops along Ukraine’s borders, including into Belarus. Russian officials have been making outrageously paranoid and false accusations. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, for example, recently blamed NATO for the return of the “nightmare scenario of military confrontation.” Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said that the United States is smuggling “tanks with unidentified chemical components” into Ukraine’s Donetsk. And Putin himself has been equally vituperative about NATO, threatening military moves unless it agrees to his terms. “They have pushed us to a line that we can’t cross,” he said on Sunday. “They have taken it to the point where we simply must tell them: ‘Stop!’”
Yet a recent report concludes that despite its massive deployment and threatening rhetoric, Russia is not planning to invade Ukraine. The report, produced by the Critical Threats Project of the American Enterprise Institute, where I serve as the director of foreign- and defense-policy studies, together with the Institute for the Study of War, finds that the political and economic costs of an actual invasion are too high for Russia to sustain. “Putin may be attempting a strategic misdirection that impales the West in a diplomatic process and military planning cycle that will keep it unprepared,” the report argues. Rather than directly invade Ukraine again, Russia instead seeks to further destabilize Ukraine in advance of its elections, station troops in Belarus, divide NATO, and precipitate Western concessions to de-escalate the crisis.
Even without an invasion of Ukraine, Russia’s military moves pose serious threats to America’s allies, including the Baltic states. Russia demands, as the price of even considering drawing down its military buildup, that NATO accept a different security framework for Europe, abandon any future NATO accessions, and forswear military cooperation with any non-NATO state.
The CTP/ISW assessment of Russia’s intentions is consistent with the country’s preference for hybrid or threshold warfare: the fusion of disinformation and political, economic, and military actions designed to immobilize or weaken adversaries without triggering an effective response. The terms are faddish, as though the practice were a new addition to the inventory of warfare. In fact, the simplistic definition of warfare after the Cold War as only military operations was novel, and that narrow conception has now evaporated along with American military dominance.
Strategic failures are almost always failures of imagination, as with the Trojans failing to wonder what might be inside that gigantic wooden horse. We are now scrambling to think as creatively as our adversaries. But the U.S. has a number of advantages: time, allies, transparency, and right.
Even though Russia’s military deployments have been rapid, the U.S. and its allies recognized them early enough to alert one another and agree on their response. The gathering storm of Russian revanchism since Putin came to power conditioned a quick reaction; defense spending by European NATO members has been rising since Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine. Bilateral consultations and NATO meetings produced a set of potential political and economic sanctions, especially Russia’s ejection from the SWIFT financial network, that ought to give Putin and his businessmen pause. Turkey is providing drones to Ukraine, the U.S. sent military advisers and Javelin missiles, and Germany is reconsidering the Nord Stream 2
Pipeline. Democratic societies are slow to align but durable once committed, and the U.S. and its allies have had time to organize.
In an effort to de-escalate the crisis Putin created, the Biden administration has ruled out deploying American forces to defend Ukraine. Joe Biden evidently hoped to prevent a war by miscalculation—one side misinterpreting the other’s actions, and violence spiraling into a nuclear apocalypse. And although textbook military strategy considers telling an adversary what you won’t do self-defeating, in circumstances where the asymmetry of interest is so pronounced, putting a ceiling on potential escalation will likely make America’s policy more credible. In the immediate aftermath of U.S. capitulation in Afghanistan, it just isn’t believable to claim that the Biden administration will “fight any battle and bear any burden” for the independence of a still-corrupt post-Soviet government.
Biden consented to Russia’s demand for discussions of a new European security framework. That consent was unquestionably a concession, giving some standing to Russian concerns, and it has worried frontline NATO allies who have long-standing (and justified) fears of abandonment. If we had refused to even discuss Russian concerns, however, it is difficult to imagine sustaining the solidarity of the Western alliance or American public support for the risks and sacrifices that any response to Russia attacking Ukraine might entail. And agreeing to discuss Russia’s version of post–Cold War history or its demands for a sphere of influence that would consign countries to Russian dominion is not the same as accepting them.
Having the discussions take place in a NATO forum, as Russia has now agreed to do, allows the West to showcase its increased solidarity. Russia’s threats have unified the alliance. The discussions will also contrast the U.S.’s preferred model of power, which emanates from our ability to persuade others to share the burdens of what we’re trying to achieve, with the model pursued by Russian and China, which relies on threatening nations into submission.
The United States and its allies have the easier side of that argument. As Ronald Reagan said, “There is a profound moral difference between the use of force for liberation and the use of force for conquest.” Russia may mobilize some support among countries that feel threatened by governments held accountable by their citizens, but the U.S. has the moral and mathematical advantage of arguing against strong states imposing their will on those unable to protect themselves.
Not that Ukraine is truly incapable of protecting itself. One other thing that may be restraining a Russian invasion of Ukraine is the fact that, even in the Donbas, the mighty Russian military has not succeeded in subduing Ukrainian resistance. Quite the opposite: Russia has enhanced Ukrainian national identity. A Russian occupation would encounter the sort of insurgency that the Russian military proved incapable of subduing in Afghanistan and Chechnya, despite its brutality. Half a million Ukrainians have military experience; 24 percent of respondents in one recent poll said that they would resist Russian occupation “with a weapon in hand.” Russia might succeed in taking Ukraine, but it is unlikely to hold it.
NATO countries might not fight for Ukraine, but they’re likely to arm and train Ukrainians to fight for themselves. A Russian invasion would open the floodgates of Western support for Ukraine, and activate similar mobilizations of civilian society among NATO frontline states. Putin’s threats have already convinced Germans that Nord Stream 2 is not just a business deal, but rather a means of geopolitical leverage. The EU can use its regulatory tools on Gazprom and other Russian businesses seeking access to Europe’s markets more aggressively, to scrutinize their practices and enforce compliance with the law.
Transparency is a potentially devastating tool against authoritarians, because corruption is delegitimizing. The governments of free societies already face public scrutiny, which positions them well to demand the same of others. Russia’s leaders are afraid of accountability for their wealth; the revelations of corruption in the Panama Papers appear to have led Putin to unleash cybervigilantes against the U.S.
Russia’s past attempts to intimidate Ukraine into not choosing a westward path have backfired. Fifty-eight percent of Ukrainians now say that they would vote for NATO membership, and the nation has developed a greater sense of national identity and a more resilient society. Sweden and Finland are moving into closer alignment with NATO, as Russia illustrates the dangers of remaining outside the Western mutual-defense pact. NATO has held united, refusing to accept that Russia gets a veto over either its membership or its actions. The United States, while averting military involvement, has crafted a credible set of penalties and garnered international support for them. Putin lacks the imagination to see that launching successful military operations is not the same as winning a war, a lesson the U.S. recently relearned in Afghanistan. That Russia is now repeating the very mistake the U.S. made, and is slowly recovering from, is an ironic twist.
16. The Many Signs of American Renaissance
A hopeful look ahead.
Excepts:
The challenges of continued U.S. growth and sustained global influence are hardly insignificant. Threats to a free and fair 2022 midterm election cannot be taken lightly. Failure to pass legislation to stem climate change, bridge the enormous wealth gap, and improve education would certainly degrade U.S. competitiveness.
But these would be entirely self-inflicted wounds. And they are largely within Washington’s power to overcome. For countries like China and Russia, their problems are systemic and unlikely to improve because the efforts needed to reverse these trends threaten the authoritarian systems that caused them in the first place—namely, centralized economic control and a rogue’s list of political-military relationships with countries like North Korea, Syria, and Iran.
Every new year brings with it hopes for change. As 2022 dawns, signs are good that the U.S. will muster the will to keep this political and economic revival going. That in turn will help reassert a positive influence around the globe when the world needs it the most.
The Many Signs of American Renaissance
Text size
Seagulls fly over the Capitol Reflecting Pool on Dec. 29, 2021 in Washington, D.C.
Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
About the author: Brian P. Klein is a geopolitical and economic strategist. He previously served as a U.S. diplomat and trade official.
The end of 2021 couldn’t come fast enough. A year that started with January’s insurrectionist storming of the Capitol is ending with Omicron’s December surge, threatening a tentative economic recovery. And plenty of bad news happened in-between. Social strife, rising inflation, a disastrous U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan, and political gridlock in Washington makes it seem like America is an empire in decline.
Except that the data doesn’t back up this catchy political punchline. Rather than another year highlighting the inevitable end of U.S. economic and political influence as authoritarian governments rise around the world, 2021 showed an American renaissance in the offing.
The U.S. economy is poised for a strong 2022. That’s making the world’s authoritarian leaders nervous. Driven by the recovery, U.S. international influence is growing again after years of retrenchment. From Moscow to Beijing to Istanbul, excessive state control is causing economic pain for the people in the grip of authoritarianism. Their international political isolation is growing.
It’s easy to take a negative view on U.S. prospects. At first glance, perceptions of U.S. democracy around the world are strikingly low among other advanced democracies, such stalwart proponents as the UK, Germany, and Japan. According to an early 2021 Pew research poll, 57% agreed that the U.S. political system “used to be a good example” for others, but only 17% felt that it still is.
That seems ominous, but look closer. Another Pew survey of these same countries, also in early 2021, found 61% had an overall positive view of the U.S., compared to the 27% who viewed China favorably. This preference extended to economic relations as well. When asked which country was more important for “strong economic ties,” 64% preferred the U.S. versus 21% choosing China, despite many viewing China as the dominant global economic power.
Part of these favorable views may have to do with the U.S. re-engaging with allies. As Russia cuts back on natural gas sales to Europe just as winter bites, the U.S. is increasing exports of liquified natural gas to these countries. Russian troops are on Ukraine’s borders, and Putin is attempting to wring security guarantees out of Washington. But the White House is refusing to be split off from NATO in a joint approach to Moscow.
China has amped up military threats to Taiwan. Record numbers of military fly-bys near Taiwan prompted Washington and Tokyo to state their support for the island. Chinese flights dropped dramatically shortly after. China has also sustained its militarization of the South China Sea, despite losing its case under the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea. In response, the U.S. has strengthened military ties with Australia and India in an actual pivot to an Indo-Pacific strategy.
These are not the moves of a country in decline, but rather one that puts alliances first in lieu of unilateral action.
As the U.S. economy begins to thrive again, it is helping consolidate global influence chipped away by a more insular approach.
The domestic economy has remained remarkably robust, even with the trifecta of supply chain bottlenecks, rising prices, and a Covid slowdown that for several months earlier this year devastated the services industries (restaurants, movie theaters, hotels). Consumer spending rose a solid 8.5% from the beginning of November through late December over the same period a year ago. Holiday-specific sales rose 10.7% over prepandemic 2019 spending levels.
This can be partly attributed to forced Covid-induced savings and the Federal Reserve’s seemingly insatiable desire to print money. People have been feeling so flush with cash that they’ve been quitting their jobs in droves.
Economic resilience is behind yet another positive trend: Countries around the world are making longer-term bets on U.S. growth with increased foreign direct investment.
After several years of declines, inbound FDI soared. For the third quarter of 2021, $74.5 billion flowed into the country, a 68% increase over the same period a year ago. Second quarter figures were 144% higher than the year ago period. And both were significantly higher even compared with 2019 prepandemic levels.
How are the leading authoritarian countries faring? According to the OECD, while the U.S. economy expanded by 0.6% in the third quarter over the second, China grew only 0.2%, and Russia declined by 0.8%.
The challenges of continued U.S. growth and sustained global influence are hardly insignificant. Threats to a free and fair 2022 midterm election cannot be taken lightly. Failure to pass legislation to stem climate change, bridge the enormous wealth gap, and improve education would certainly degrade U.S. competitiveness.
But these would be entirely self-inflicted wounds. And they are largely within Washington’s power to overcome. For countries like China and Russia, their problems are systemic and unlikely to improve because the efforts needed to reverse these trends threaten the authoritarian systems that caused them in the first place—namely, centralized economic control and a rogue’s list of political-military relationships with countries like North Korea, Syria, and Iran.
Every new year brings with it hopes for change. As 2022 dawns, signs are good that the U.S. will muster the will to keep this political and economic revival going. That in turn will help reassert a positive influence around the globe when the world needs it the most.
Guest commentaries like this one are written by authors outside the Barron’s and MarketWatch newsroom. They reflect the perspective and opinions of the authors. Submit commentary proposals and other feedback to ideas@barrons.com.
17. America’s Identity Crisis
Excerpts:
The undermining of the pillars of personal identity has led more and more Americans to self-segregate into like-minded enclaves. Republicans and Democrats tell pollsters they want to live in different places, surrounded by people who share their political views. As a result, more than six in ten consistently conservative Americans and roughly five in ten consistently liberal Americans say that most of their friends share their political views.
Without strong family ties, with weaker communal institutions, living in greater isolation, Americans “had to cling to something,” observed the writer Walter Weyl. And, in the absence of their old folk customs or local institutions, “the temptation to cling to party became ruthless.”
Notably, Weyl was not commenting on the partisan challenge facing the United States today, but about Americans turning to party politics as a source of identity as other pillars of personal identity withered away in the half-century between the Civil War and World War I. So, the United States has been here before and somehow survived extreme partisanship in the past. Whether it can do so again remains to be seen. But this time, the world is watching, because other countries, including Japan, have a greater stake in the outcome than ever before.
America’s Identity Crisis
In 1950, the German-born child psychologist Erik Erikson observed of his new American homeland: “This dynamic country subjects its inhabitants to more abrupt changes during a lifetime or a generation than is normally the case with other great nations.”
Since then, Americans have experienced an even greater acceleration in the pace of their demographic, societal, and economic transformation, one that threatens American democracy and the reliability of the United States as an ally.
The percentage of non-white people in the United States has tripled in the last half-century. The portion of foreign-born persons has also tripled. The share of births to unmarried women has quadrupled. The percentage of children living in single-parent households has doubled. Meanwhile, church membership has declined by a third. And the portion of the workforce employed in manufacturing has declined by two-thirds. At the same time, median incomes have largely stagnated.
Of course, change is not new in a dynamic society such as the United States. And Americans’ embrace of change has long been one of the strengths of the U.S. economy. But it is the unprecedented pace of change that is currently straining the fabric of American society because some of the fundamental pillars of human psychological identity—the sense of family, ethnic cohesiveness, the workplace, religion, the relations between the sexes—have been rapidly eroding.
All of these changes are happening at the same time, interacting with each other, often in negative ways. For example, older, white, male manufacturing workers, who were raised to believe they could expect a comfortable middle-class existence laboring in auto plants or steel mills, have seen their incomes largely stagnate through much of their adult lives. This is not just an economic issue, but a challenge to their manhood. The fathers of these men made enough money that their mothers did not have to work. Now they ask themselves: “What kind of man am I if I cannot support my own family the way my father did?” To them, the growth in female participation in the labor force has not been a question of “womenomics,” but a threat to their identity as the family breadwinner.
Immigration Nation
Moreover, the pace of change manifests itself politically. For example, America has always been a nation of immigrants. But never, in its nearly two and a half centuries of independence, has the United States experienced a tripling of its foreign-born population in such a short period of time. That share now totals roughly 13.7%. That immigrant portion of the population has only been closely matched in 1880–90, 1910–20, and today. Each time the foreign-born population reached that level in the past, there was a populist political backlash, manifesting itself in the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Red Scare and, most recently, the election of nativist Donald Trump as U.S. president.
But never, in its nearly two and a half centuries of independence, has the United States experienced a tripling of its foreign-born population in such a short period of time.
For some Americans, current levels of immigration threaten their sense of national identity. Republicans are nearly twice as likely as Democrats to say American culture and way of life have changed for the worse since the 1950s. And eight in ten Republicans believe that America is in danger of losing its culture and identity, while only a third of Democrats share those fears. Meanwhile, 78% of Democrats believe that the growing number of newcomers strengthens American society, but just 31% of Republicans concur. And 53% of conservatives believe that to be truly American one has to be born in the United States. Only 13% of liberals agree.
The challenges to personal and national identity triggered by these dramatic demographic, economic, and social changes now resonate through many different political debates. The rise in the share of non-white citizens—Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians—has called into question the white privilege growing out of America’s history of slavery. On this issue, voters are again divided along partisan lines. Asked if it is more difficult to be a Black person in the United States than it is to be a white person, 74% of Democrats (racial minorities comprise a majority of the party) agree. Only 9% of Republicans, a party that is largely white, concur.
Source: Mehlman, Castagnetti, Rosen & Thomas analysis based on data from U.S. Census Bureau, Pew Research Center, U.S. Dept. of Labor and T. Piketty, Gallup
Republicans have recently further weaponized public unease about the pace of racial change. In the November 2021 Virginia governor’s race, the Republican candidate campaigned against schools teaching critical race theory, which argues that racism or racist outcomes are the result of a long legacy of complex social and institutional dynamics rather than (simply) personal prejudice. The fact that no public school in the state actually teaches this curriculum did not matter. The demand was clearly intended to appeal to whites who are concerned that their identity, with all of its economic and social privilege, is being threatened by the rise of minorities.
The challenges to personal and national identity triggered by dramatic demographic, economic, and social changes now resonate through many different political debates.
Unease with social and demographic changes also manifest themselves in partisan views on other hot-button political issues. There is a small but growing percentage of Americans who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender. And same-sex marriages have been legal across all 50 states since a 2015 Supreme Court ruling. For some Americans, this threatens both their gender and religious identities. More than four in ten Republicans oppose gay marriage, while less than two in ten Democrats oppose such unions. The greatest opposition is among white Evangelical Protestants, who have been the strongest supporters of Donald Trump. And more than half of all Republicans, but less than a third of Democrats, believe a small business owner should be able to refuse service to a gay or lesbian couple by claiming doing so would violate their religious beliefs.
Foreign Policy Divisions
The threat to national identity posed by globalization has also opened a partisan divide on the United States’ relations with the world, with serious implications for U.S. allies, such as Japan. By three to one, Republicans are more likely than Democrats to say that for too long, the United States has allowed other nations to take advantage of the United States. By nearly two to one, Republicans say the United States should deal with its own problems, not help other nations deal with theirs. Democrats are divided on the issue. And, while 63% of Democrats believe that strengthening relations with allies should be a foreign policy priority, only 44% of Republicans agree.
63%
of Democrats believe that strengthening relations with allies should be a foreign policy priority, only 44% of Republicans agree.
The undermining of the pillars of personal identity has led more and more Americans to self-segregate into like-minded enclaves. Republicans and Democrats tell pollsters they want to live in different places, surrounded by people who share their political views. As a result, more than six in ten consistently conservative Americans and roughly five in ten consistently liberal Americans say that most of their friends share their political views.
Without strong family ties, with weaker communal institutions, living in greater isolation, Americans “had to cling to something,” observed the writer Walter Weyl. And, in the absence of their old folk customs or local institutions, “the temptation to cling to party became ruthless.”
Notably, Weyl was not commenting on the partisan challenge facing the United States today, but about Americans turning to party politics as a source of identity as other pillars of personal identity withered away in the half-century between the Civil War and World War I. So, the United States has been here before and somehow survived extreme partisanship in the past. Whether it can do so again remains to be seen. But this time, the world is watching, because other countries, including Japan, have a greater stake in the outcome than ever before.
Related Work: Poll Shows Americans Don’t Believe in “American Democracy”
American democracy faces a challenge not seen since the 1850s in the run-up to the US Civil War. Partisanship, which has long plagued politics over policy issues, now divides the public over principle.
Related Work: The Intergenerational Gap on Challenges for the Century
While the lens through which young people see international events may become more mature and nuanced as they age, how they interpret global developments is subconsciously refracted through the prism of a worldview that was hardwired in their formative years.
18. The relentless 2021 news cycle in one chart
Please go to the link to view the interesting chart of the news.
The relentless 2021 news cycle in one chart
Between a siege on the Capitol building, a Texas snowstorm, Brood X cicadas, the Olympics and a stuck container ship in the Suez Canal — not to mention endless COVID variants — it's been a busy year.
Why it matters: In the inaugural Axios-Google Trends news cycle chart, we chronicled the unprecedented first year of President Trump. Four years later, Joe Biden is president and the themes have changed, but America's short attention spans and rapid breaking news cycles continue.
By the numbers: The single topic to receive the highest percentage of Google searches all year was the Olympics, during the week of its opening ceremonies.
- Next came searches about stimulus checks at the very start of the year, followed by searches related to Trump during the week of Jan. 6.
- Searches related to Biden and the COVID-19 vaccine rounded out the top five topics overall, out of more than 50 major 2021 events and topics chosen by Axios.
- Google measures search interest on a scale of 0-100, which reflects the percent of total Google searches dedicated to a topic. Searches for COVID-19 vaccines never fell below 5 on that scale, even when compared to dozens of spiking topics over the entire year.
- Searches related to shootings also never fell below 5.
Between the lines: Overall, most major events or issues this year only managed to keep America's attention for one or two weeks.
- There was relatively high and sustained interest in topics like crime and the border this year — favored midterm talking points by the GOP. However, it was largely in line with interest over the last five years.
- Biden's Build Back Better plan received a recent spike of attention recently, but it has had relatively little national interest compared to the other times on the list.
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.
