Quotes of the Day:
"Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition."
- Adam Smith
There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power of our will.
- Epictetus
The more man meditates upon good thoughts, the better will be his world and the world at large.
- Confucius
1. Deterrence Message to Moscow
2. Beyond War and Peace: The PLA’s “Non-War Military Activities” Concept
3. Philippines’ Marcos Eyes Deal With China to Resolve Sea Row
4. Pressing Questions: Offensive Cyber Operations and NATO Strategy
5. ‘My only regret is not doing more’ — Why I reported Eddie Gallagher for war crimes
6. A Revived Nuclear Deal Will Not Solve Iran’s Advanced Centrifuge Threat
7. Yemen’s Houthis Belong on the Terror List
8. FDD | Possible Netanyahu Plea Deal Could Shake Up Israeli Politics
9. To the fashionably woke, Uyghur lives don’t matter
10. Russia says "destructive" sanctions wouldn't hurt Putin personally
11. America needs a new grand strategy to navigate the 21st century
12. Ukraine's front line: Where lives turn on distant decisions
13. Your questions on the Ukraine crisis answered
14. Three of Biden's team negotiating with Iran on nuclear deal RESIGN
15. The Army wants someone to make comics about its information warfare doctrine
16. America’s War for Global Order Is a Marathon
17. US Navy wants to get crashed stealth fighter back -- before China can
18. Why Germany might be the West's weak link in the Russia-Ukraine standoff
19. Coup Nation: Americans across the country participated in an effort to subvert democracy.
20. The Global Consequences of American Polarization
1. Deterrence Message to Moscow
Excerpts:
Denying Moscow control over Ukraine is in the U.S. national interest. A Russia fortified by Ukrainian resources would be a more formidable adversary and a bigger threat to NATO. One of the great results from the end of the Cold War was the breakup of the Soviet empire. Mr. Putin wants to reassemble it into a sphere of influence that would enhance his standing at home and increase his influence abroad.
The consequences will extend far beyond Ukraine as other American adversaries try to assert regional dominance. Mr. Putin could look to the Baltics next, while Iran and China also have malign aspirations. Authoritarians are seldom content merely with controlling their own people.
The U.S. and West need to be prudent about when to push back against regional aggressors, but helping Ukraine stay out of Moscow’s maw is crucial for preventing a larger threat to European peace.
Deterrence Message to Moscow
The U.S. can’t stop a Ukraine invasion, but it can raise the cost.
WSJ · by The Editorial Board
U.S. Army soldiers prepare for overseas deployment at the 35th headquarters in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas on Jan. 22.
Photo: 35th Infantry Division
The U.S. put 8,500 troops on alert Monday with the possibility of deploying them to shore up NATO defenses in Eastern Europe, and allies are sending ships and fighter jets. The West is finally getting more serious about deterring Russian aggression, and let’s hope it’s not too late for Ukraine.
President Biden is considering the troop deployment, along with ships and aircraft, to NATO allies like Poland and the Baltic states that are closest to the Russian threat. Go ahead and send them, sir. Mr. Biden’s strategy of restraint, in the hope of not provoking Vladimir Putin, hasn’t worked. Mr. Putin has been adding to his own deployment of troops on three different fronts on Ukraine’s borders.
Ukraine isn’t a member of NATO, and the U.S. troops wouldn’t deploy there. But their arrival in Eastern Europe would send a message that the U.S. would get involved militarily if Mr. Putin makes a play for the Baltic states or otherwise moves against NATO nations. The Russian navy is planning live-fire exercises off the coast of Ireland, which isn’t a NATO member.
The troop news also helps to counter last week’s mixed messages from the White House and Europe about deterring Mr. Putin. The Russian’s goal is to conquer, or at least dominate, Ukraine while dividing the West over what the U.S. has called “massive consequences” in response to an invasion.
Mr. Putin has reason to think that might work. Germany’s navy chief resigned last week after he sent a message of appeasement to Russia. French President Emmanuel Macron chose the worst moment to say Europe should negotiate with Russia separately from the U.S. on Ukraine. Mr. Biden slipped up as well with his press-conference remark that a mere “minor incursion” might divide the West.
The centerpiece of Mr. Biden’s foreign policy platform was reviving America’s alliances, but countries don’t have allies for the sake of having allies. The President has invested in cultivating Berlin but has little to show for it. He can make clear that warming ties are subject to Germany’s cooperation on Ukraine. That means pushing the German government to support more serious sanctions and to allow third countries to export weapons to Ukraine.
The U.S. doesn’t need to fight in Ukraine, but it can do more to help that democratic nation defend itself. That means sending antitank and antiaircraft missiles, as well as assistance with air defense, maritime security and intelligence.
If Mr. Putin does invade, analysts Seth Jones and Philip Wasielewski recommend a Lend-Lease type program that would provide Ukraine with weapons at no cost. As long as Ukrainians want to defend themselves, they deserve the means to do so. The U.S. should also support an insurgency against a puppet regime if Mr. Putin attempts to install one.
The policy goal would be to raise the costs of invasion so it becomes too painful for the Kremlin to sustain—or, better, even to begin. This would include imposing the toughest economic sanctions Mr. Biden has promised, including denying access to the Swift financial system for dollar transactions.
***
Denying Moscow control over Ukraine is in the U.S. national interest. A Russia fortified by Ukrainian resources would be a more formidable adversary and a bigger threat to NATO. One of the great results from the end of the Cold War was the breakup of the Soviet empire. Mr. Putin wants to reassemble it into a sphere of influence that would enhance his standing at home and increase his influence abroad.
The consequences will extend far beyond Ukraine as other American adversaries try to assert regional dominance. Mr. Putin could look to the Baltics next, while Iran and China also have malign aspirations. Authoritarians are seldom content merely with controlling their own people.
The U.S. and West need to be prudent about when to push back against regional aggressors, but helping Ukraine stay out of Moscow’s maw is crucial for preventing a larger threat to European peace.
WSJ · by The Editorial Board
2. Beyond War and Peace: The PLA’s “Non-War Military Activities” Concept
Excerpts:
Soviet military planners famously struggled to plan around American doctrine, and it is common knowledge that the PLA closely scrutinized US military successes in the Gulf War. With the pivot to Asia underway, limited understanding of Chinese thinking, cultural barriers, and the scarcity of Mandarin speakers and translated texts may lead to missteps. The China Aerospace Studies Institute solved one of those problems in translating the Science of Military Strategy. Their work emphasizes that viewing the military challenge exclusively through the lens of technological innovation is incomplete and risks missing a contest with greater nuance.
Accounting for NWMA in US strategy and understanding the circumstances in which Beijing might wield its military outside of war allows for more effective strategies and investments to counter the United States’ pacing threat. The Science of Military Strategy signals the PLA’s commitment to use Non-War Military Activities as “a price lesser than war and a mode more flexible than war to obtain greater strategic benefit” to manifest the CCP’s will. With a full translation of the Science of Military Strategy in hand, and hopefully more translated texts related to NWMA yet to come, US and Western strategists should take heed.
Beyond War and Peace: The PLA’s “Non-War Military Activities” Concept - Modern War Institute
In 2021, researchers revealed hundreds of new missile silos in the deserts of western China. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) also tested a new hypersonic glide missile that encircled the globe and struck a test target. These actions underscore that China is the US military’s pacing challenge. But the focus on Beijing’s technological innovation and military expansion is incomplete without appreciating the political motivations of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its expectations for the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).
To that end, the United States must better understand how the PLA organizes itself and acts in support of the CCP’s political strategy. Thanks to the Air University’s China Aerospace Studies Institute and Project Everest, Western audiences can access a full translation of the Science of Military Strategy (2013), which experts regard as an authoritative PLA text that underpins its strategy and operational doctrine development. Understanding how a potential challenger is organizing itself, in its own words, is priceless.
Within the Science of Military Strategy, one concept stands out despite its clumsy descriptor: Non-War Military Activities (NWMA). In fact, there is an entire chapter devoted to strategic guidance for peacetime operations across all domains to fulfill the CCP’s political objectives. NWMA stands apart from the more familiar “Three Warfares” (public opinion warfare, psychological warfare, and lawfare) and “Unrestricted Warfare,” which receive minimal or no consideration within the Science of Military Strategy text. NWMA is central for the PLA’s military competition to assert “effective control” well before conflict by applying the concept in peacetime.
It may be stating the obvious that all militaries operate outside of war. But analyzing NWMA helps analysts understand how Beijing intends the PLA to establish a favorable strategic posture in peacetime. As the Defense Department’s 2020 and 2021 China Military Power Reports indicate, NWMA is “an important strategic means” for the PLA to serve the national interest, safeguard China’s development, expand the PRC’s global interests, and gain valuable operational experience. The United States and its allies must understand the PLA’s conceptions of NWMA in gray-zone operations and its intent to win through the gray zone in military competition.
Unpacking NWMA
The Science of Military Strategy authors identify Non-War Military Activities as one of the PLA’s three basic modes of military strength, alongside warfighting and deterrence. They note that the NWMA concept is part of the PLA’s modernization effort and central for responding to the expanded responsibilities brought on by the PRC’s economic growth and global expansion. NWMA plays an irreplaceable role in an increasingly globalized system.
PLA strategists developed NWMA from the US doctrine of “military operations other than war” (MOOTW) that emerged in the 1990s, and some translations still prefer “MOOTW” instead of NWMA. When then-CCP General Secretary Hu Jintao announced in 2004 that the PLA would undertake “New Historic Missions,” MOOTW provided an initial foundation later expanded upon in Beijing’s 2006 national defense white paper. The PLA further developed the NWMA concept to campaign through limited military aggression in support of Beijing’s political objectives.
In their analysis of NWMA, the Science of Military Strategy authors distill Non-War Military Activities into four major categories: “confrontational” (also translated as “Opposed”); “law enforcement”; “aid and rescue”; and “cooperative.” Each category includes additional missions that the PLA undertakes. For ease of comparison, the below figure depicts Non-War Military Activities based on (1) their intensity and potential or implied use of force and (2) whether the action is predominately cooperative or more unilateral in nature.
Four Major Categories of Non-War Military Activities (figure generated by author)
The confrontational and law enforcement activities illustrate some risk acceptance among PLA thinkers on taking military action for political or economic gain outside of a declared conflict. These concepts are evident through PLA engagements in the South China Sea, patrols along the Mekong River, and antipiracy patrols off the Horn of Africa. These activities illustrate a conceptual relationship between Non-War Military Activities and “active defense,” which is widely regarded as the core of CCP military strategic thought, and present tangible examples of the PLA conducting “defense through decisive engagements.” Confrontational and law enforcement activities reflect how NWMA fits into active defense through limited operational offensives intended to secure political goals without leading to strategic escalation. Unfortunately for PLA planners, the potential remains for miscalculation or for specific actions to backfire amid international scrutiny.
Toward the bottom, cooperative and aid and rescue functions more closely align with concepts like defense support of civil authorities or military diplomacy and defense cooperation. While the Science of Military Strategy writers emphasized that Non-War Military Activities provide operational experience, these activities depict how the PLA imagines using soft power to strengthen bilateral relations and gain control over potential crises in “important peripheral regions.” This rendering encourages the PLA to pursue unilateral or partnered military exercises that strive to command the strategic heights in peacetime.
Viewing NWMA through the lens of its differing intensity levels shows how the PLA can tailor its use of force for greatest effect. In this way, NWMA allows for specific actions before war to provide strategic effects on their own. “Competition with a military dimension” ceases to be a linear progression to the previously designated “phase three” that shapes traditional Western conceptions of war planning. This perspective offers greater nuance to asymmetric uses of military force in low-intensity conflict or the below-threshold aspects of the competition continuum in US doctrine, and shows that the entire PLA force can contribute when called upon.
The 2013 Science of Military Strategy makes clear that the scope of Non-War Military Activities is expansive. NWMA applies across the PLA and exceeds the scope of most Western doctrine on the military’s role in internal affairs and the coercive application of force outside of declared war. Disparate missions such as counterterrorism, riot control, armed drug enforcement, internal military patrols, and epidemic response show that NWMA could include the use of lethal force or none at all, either inside or outside of Chinese territory. These diverse responsibilities are consistent with the historical role of the PLA as the CCP’s party army.
At the same time, the NWMA concept demonstrates that PLA deployments may serve ulterior motives. Humanitarian assistance and disaster relief missions may aim to expand Beijing’s global influence, and UN peacekeeping missions provide operational experience and a forum to test warfighting concepts. The Science of Military Strategy touts the ability of NWMA to “reflect the essentials of China’s traditional military security concepts.”
NWMA also reveals blurred lines between Non-War Military Activities and the actors who conduct them, especially in the maritime domain. In 2018, Beijing subordinated the China Coast Guard to the Central Military Commission, but not as part of the PRC’s armed forces. Then, in 2021, the Coast Guard enforced China’s interpretation of jurisdictional waters. Understanding NWMA allows for drawing a connection between Beijing’s maritime security and coastal patrol activities with its use of lawfare, demonstrating a concerted attempt to normalize CCP political assertions as stated fact.
Not all PLA Non-War Military Activities are automatically suspect. Embassy security and overseas security missions to protect PRC diplomatic facilities and interests, for example, are sensible missions for any military to conduct in cooperation with host nations and in accordance with international law. But studying NWMA should increase awareness of the second-order consequences of subtle activities that may not register on a Western military planner’s day-to-day radar, and of the strategic impact that the PLA intended without escalating to war.
Implications
More than the “Three Warfares” or “Unrestricted Warfare,” NWMA represents the PLA’s menu of options to pursue CCP political objectives in the gray zone. NWMA allows the PLA to do what Peter Layton described as steadily changing the status quo through competitive campaigns. Put another way, NWMA enables the PLA to find ways to victory without fighting and avoid an unambiguous, head-on challenge preferable for Western military planners.
Examining NWMA alongside the CCP’s “Three Warfares” adds depth to Western conceptions of how the PLA complements CCP influence efforts. The NWMA concept illustrates the PLA’s supporting role for meeting larger CCP political and economic objectives by shaping facts on the ground and seas. Greater appreciation for NWMA should allow Western strategists to understand how Beijing incorporates PLA activities into a potent strategy for campaigning. To assist in this effort, Western researchers should prioritize the translation of texts dedicated to NWMA and PLA campaigning short of armed conflict.
The NWMA concept illuminates the underlying thought behind the PLA’s observable displays of gray-zone coercion and low-intensity conflict. Scrutiny of the individual activities within NWMA shows relevance in virtually every PLA-related engagement over the past decade and its potential role in future events. From the well-documented “salami slicing” in the South China Sea through maritime security, antipiracy, and coastal patrol missions, to PLA maritime patrols on the Mekong River, “riot control” demonstrations, “border control” missions inside Bhutan, and possibilities of basing to support overseas security operations, the NWMA concept is manifest in PLA military competition and efforts to control its operational environments well before conflict.
Even inclusion of “blockades” as an NWMA law enforcement activity may serve a greater CCP political end. Barring unforeseen developments, the primary adversary the PLA Navy may enact a blockade against is Taiwan. Since the CCP considers Taiwan a renegade province, Beijing might argue that blockading the island is an internal matter and not an act of war. If the “peaceful reunification” the PRC claims to prefer only implies the absence of war among mutually recognized states, then a blockade or riot control measures show how NWMA offers a potential veneer of international peace while the PLA acts forcibly and ostensibly under Beijing’s domestic laws. Including blockades among Non-War Military Activities gives valuable context to debates about the level of force the PLA considers acceptable outside of declared hostilities.
Soviet military planners famously struggled to plan around American doctrine, and it is common knowledge that the PLA closely scrutinized US military successes in the Gulf War. With the pivot to Asia underway, limited understanding of Chinese thinking, cultural barriers, and the scarcity of Mandarin speakers and translated texts may lead to missteps. The China Aerospace Studies Institute solved one of those problems in translating the Science of Military Strategy. Their work emphasizes that viewing the military challenge exclusively through the lens of technological innovation is incomplete and risks missing a contest with greater nuance.
Accounting for NWMA in US strategy and understanding the circumstances in which Beijing might wield its military outside of war allows for more effective strategies and investments to counter the United States’ pacing threat. The Science of Military Strategy signals the PLA’s commitment to use Non-War Military Activities as “a price lesser than war and a mode more flexible than war to obtain greater strategic benefit” to manifest the CCP’s will. With a full translation of the Science of Military Strategy in hand, and hopefully more translated texts related to NWMA yet to come, US and Western strategists should take heed.
Kevin Bilms is a career Department of Defense civilian serving in the Office of the Secretary of Defense and a nonresident fellow of the Irregular Warfare Initiative, a joint forum between the Modern War Institute at West Point and Princeton University’s Empirical Studies of Conflict project.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.
Image credit: Staff Sgt. D. Myles Cullen, US Air Force
3. Philippines’ Marcos Eyes Deal With China to Resolve Sea Row
Would this be a victory of Chinese Lawfare because it would not enact the ruling of the icourt?
Philippines’ Marcos Eyes Deal With China to Resolve Sea Row
January 25, 2022, 5:02 AM EST
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-01-25/philippines-marcos-eyes-deal-with-china-to-resolve-sea-row?sref=hhjZtX76
Philippine presidential front-runner Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. said he plans to negotiate a deal with China to resolve the territorial dispute in the South China Sea if he wins this year’s elections, while fostering ties with the U.S. and Russia.
Marcos said the arbitration case which the Philippines won against China was “not effective,” and that a bilateral agreement with Beijing is the “only practical option.” Asean can also help resolve the sea row, he said in a DZRH radio interview on Tuesday.
The late dictator’s son said he will not side with any superpower, and will create his own foreign policy.
Marcos’s stance is similar to that of President Rodrigo Duterte, who has warmed ties with China, while maintaining the Southeast Asian nation’s alliance with the U.S. The Philippines has repeatedly filed diplomatic protests against China for its presence in disputed waters.
4. Pressing Questions: Offensive Cyber Operations and NATO Strategy
Excerpt:
NATO has slowly begun to address the use of offensive cyber operations, and has generally limited itself to the use of these tools in traditional military campaigns. The ongoing crisis with Russia on Ukraine’s border is exposing the risk in this approach. NATO needs to figure out a way forward fast.
Pressing Questions: Offensive Cyber Operations and NATO Strategy - Modern War Institute
Erica D. Lonergan and Mark Montgomery | 01.25.22
Editor’s note: This article is part of the Army Cyber Institute’s contribution to the series, “Compete and Win: Envisioning a Competitive Strategy for the Twenty-First Century.” The series endeavors to present expert commentary on diverse issues surrounding US competitive strategy and irregular warfare with peer and near-peer competitors in the physical, cyber, and information spaces. The series is part of the Competition in Cyberspace Project (C2P), a joint initiative by the Army Cyber Institute and the Modern War Institute. Read all articles in the series here.
Special thanks to series editors Capt. Maggie Smith, PhD, C2P director, and Dr. Barnett S. Koven.
NATO members are in the midst of a crisis. With Russia massing troops along its border with Ukraine and moving additional forces to Belarus ostensibly to conduct joint military exercises, policymakers fear that Russia is on the precipice of invading Ukraine and taking additional territory by force—similar to Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. But, even if Russian President Vladimir Putin ultimately chooses not to launch a direct, conventional invasion of Ukraine, it is highly likely that he will continue to pursue Russian strategic objectives in the gray zone short of war. The crisis over Ukraine underscores the challenges NATO faces in competing with Russia in the gray zone—especially in cyberspace.
Russia has no such limitations in the gray zone. In addition to traditional forms of irregular warfare, such as the use of plausibly deniable proxy forces (Putin’s “little green men”), Russia has long relied on cyber operations to subvert and undermine rival governments while avoiding actions that would cross a threshold prompting an overwhelming retaliation. Indeed, in tandem with Russia’s conventional military buildup, Ukrainian government agencies were struck with a spate of website defacements. Microsoft also revealed that it had discovered destructive malware in some Ukrainian government systems, which Ukrainian officials have linked to the Belarusian group GhostWriter. Belarus has close ties to Russia, and observers have speculated that Belarus may have been operating in cyberspace on Russia’s behalf.
While Ukraine is not a NATO member, the current situation underscores the enduring strategic challenge the alliance faces in addressing the cyber threat posed by Russia and other actors. In particular, because cost imposition is an integral part of any deterrence strategy (and has been part of NATO’s conventional deterrence strategy), the alliance has begun to explore how it could incorporate offensive cyber operations as a component of its cyber deterrence posture. But, while NATO took important steps to address cyber defense, it took nearly a decade after Russia’s 2007 cyberattack against Estonia to begin to seriously address the issue of offensive cyber operations. Moreover, NATO cyber policy has traditionally focused on cyber operations in a warfighting context—a focus that comes at the expense of considering cyber operations below the level of warfare. As the recent cyberattacks against Ukraine illustrate, the gray zone just beneath the threshold of armed conflict is where NATO faces its most significant cyber threats. With NATO in the middle of conducting a comprehensive initiative, NATO 2030, to strengthen the alliance, it should incorporate an assessment of the role of cyber operations in routine competition.
Offensive Cyber Operations in NATO Strategy Above and Below the Level of Warfare
Historically, NATO’s cyber posture has largely focused on defense and resilience—and this continues to form the bulk of NATO’s approach. The alliance maintains that its “main focus in cyber defence is to protect its own networks (including operations and missions) and enhance resilience.” At the 2014 Wales summit, NATO endorsed the Enhanced Cyber Defence Policy, which affirmed that cyber defense is part of collective defense and that the alliance would incorporate cyber defense into its planning and operations. In 2016, NATO members pledged to improve their cyber defenses through training, education, exercises, and information sharing.
But the seeds were also planted in 2016 for NATO to consider a potential role for offensive cyber operations. That year, the alliance recognized cyberspace as a domain of military operations, comparable to land, sea, and air. At the 2018 Brussels summit, NATO began to more seriously consider offensive cyber operations. Specifically, NATO created the Cyberspace Operations Centre to coordinate requests for member states to provide offensive cyber effects through the Sovereign Cyber Effects Provided Voluntarily by Allies process. Following the 2018 summit, then-Secretary of Defense James Mattis stated in a press conference that five states—the United States, the United Kingdom, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Estonia—were contributing cyber forces to “help NATO fight in this important domain.” More recently, in June 2021, NATO convened in Brussels and committed to a Comprehensive Cyber Defence Policy. A key feature of the new policy is the prominent role of offensive cyber operations. In Brussels, member states committed to “employ the full range of capabilities at all times to actively deter, defend against, and counter the full spectrum of cyber threats.”
NATO’s shift to incorporating offensive cyber operations into existing strategy and policy has focused on integrating offensive effects into conventional military plans and operations in the context of a conflict. While NATO’s updated strategy is a positive development, its limited focus on conflict scenarios for employing cyber power fails to accurately account for the cyber threat environment NATO faces—particularly the mismatch between the alliance’s clear distinction between wartime and peacetime and the approach of adversaries like Russia, who adopt a competition-conflict continuum. Additionally, the focus on employing offensive cyber during a high-end conventional fight is also not consistent with how several NATO members are already engaged in gray zone offensive cyber operations.
The primary threat to NATO allies in the cyber domain is not from high-end, decisive cyberattacks. Instead, cyber threats more frequently and effectively manifest as gray zone tactics designed to have a corrosive effect without rising to the level of warfare. There are numerous examples of this type of threat. For instance, in July 2021, NATO publicly condemned a range of malicious cyber behavior, including the Microsoft Exchange hack (which NATO attributed to China) and ransomware attacks targeting critical infrastructure. Russia has leveraged cyber and disinformation operations to interfere in democratic elections in the United States in 2016, 2018, and 2020; France in 2017; and Germany in 2017 and 2021—to name just a few examples. Russia also conducted distributed denial-of-service cyberattacks against government websites in Montenegro during the lead-up to, and following, Montenegro’s ascension to NATO in 2017. And when NATO forces were positioned in the Baltics beginning in 2017 as part of NATO’s enhanced forward presence, two threat actors, GhostWriter and Secondary Infektion, conducted a range of disinformation campaigns.
Additionally, the reality is that several NATO members are already speaking publicly about offensive cyber operations below the level of warfare and their statements and actions have an effect on the entire alliance. In particular, NATO member nations have not reached a political consensus about the role of offensive cyber operations. In 2018, the US Department of Defense and US Cyber Command issued new strategy and policy documents that articulated a role for the military in conducting offensive cyber operations below the level of armed conflict outside of US-controlled cyberspace (part of the “defend forward” strategy), and there has been some reporting about US offensive cyber operations. For instance, in 2018 the United States disrupted the Russian-linked Internet Research Agency from interfering in the midterm elections. And, more recently, in December 2021 General Paul Nakasone, commander of US Cyber Command, publicly acknowledged that the military played a role in disrupting ransomware groups targeting critical infrastructure. The United States has also worked with other NATO allies, such as Estonia and Montenegro, to conduct “hunt forward” cyber operations on allied and partner networks to uncover and disrupt malicious cyber activity.
Other NATO allies have also been more transparent about offensive cyber operations. In 2020, the United Kingdom announced a significant investment in its National Cyber Force, its organizational arm for offensive cyber operations, and its 2022 National Cyber Strategy emphasized the role of offensive cyber operations. In November 2021, General Nakasone and the director of Government Communications Headquarters—the UK government’s principal signals intelligence agency—stated jointly that the two governments were collaborating to “impose consequences” in cyberspace to disrupt adversary operations. The Netherlands has also publicly alluded to conducting offensive cyber operations.
Next Steps: Addressing Challenges and Mitigating Risks
Given the threat environment facing NATO, as well as the activities of several NATO members, the alliance should deliberately—but purposefully—consider incorporating offensive cyber operations below the level of armed conflict into its deterrence strategy. Any effort to explore a role for offensive cyber operations should also consider the challenges and risks that may come with doing so. A central challenge is that, at the political level, NATO allies lack consensus on the appropriate application of offensive cyber power—especially below the level of armed conflict. Addressing these disagreements among member states is essential because conducting offensive cyber operations often requires maneuvering through or operating on networks controlled by an ally or allies. Right now, NATO members do not collectively agree on the protocols and processes for partner actions in allied networks—and they also disagree on how to define sovereignty in cyberspace, or when an offensive cyber operation would rise to the level of an armed attack.
Offensive cyber operations for NATO also present real interoperability challenges. The role of intelligence in cyber operations is likely to complicate NATO planning processes. Even close allies are likely to be wary about sharing sensitive intelligence for a number of reasons. For instance, they may be averse to sharing information gleaned from signals intelligence collection or because a member state may be using the same exploits for both offensive action and their own espionage—including intelligence collection against allies. Or, allies may simply be worried that sensitive information may become exposed. On top of this, it’s challenging to adjudicate intelligence requirements among allies and to deconflict intelligence and military priorities. It is also not clear whether the alliance has established consensus thresholds that specify the conditions and timeline under which a state would have to notify others of its activities on their networks—if at all.
The alliance should account for, and address, these issues as NATO explores the prospect of incorporating offensive cyber operations below the level of armed conflict into existing NATO simulations and exercises that span the strategic, operational, and tactical levels. A number of important questions about how to coordinate offensive cyber operations and define roles and responsibilities remain unanswered. For instance, how could allies improve intelligence sharing to conduct more rapid attribution, enabling one state or the alliance to respond to adversary cyber activity? What are the conditions under which allies should consider dividing responsibilities for cyber campaign planning and developing accesses and capabilities against strategic targets in, for example, Russia? If some allies are responsible for offensive cyber operations against certain targets, what are the information-sharing and notification requirements?
Finally, there is an obvious risk that moving toward a more offensive posture in cyberspace will increase the likelihood of escalation. While these concerns should not be ignored, academic research has found little support for the argument that cyber operations cause escalation. That said, the alliance should consider how to strengthen existing confidence-building measures, particularly with Russia, to enable more effective communication and transparency about cyber operations. The expert consultations between Russia and the United States that both governments agreed to in June 2021, for example, or recent diplomatic dialogue between Russia and NATO members over the Ukraine crisis, are important to strengthen processes for crisis management and reduce the risk of instability—including that which may stem from cyber operations.
NATO has slowly begun to address the use of offensive cyber operations, and has generally limited itself to the use of these tools in traditional military campaigns. The ongoing crisis with Russia on Ukraine’s border is exposing the risk in this approach. NATO needs to figure out a way forward fast.
Dr. Erica Lonergan (née Borghard) is an assistant professor in the Army Cyber Institute at West Point. She is also a research scholar at the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University. Erica previously served as a senior director on the Cyberspace Solarium Commission.
Retired Rear Admiral Mark Montgomery, US Navy, is the senior director of the Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Mark previously served as the executive director of the Cyberspace Solarium Commission.
The views expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the official position of the Army Cyber Institute, United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.
5. ‘My only regret is not doing more’ — Why I reported Eddie Gallagher for war crimes
For reflection upon another incident that tarnished the military and America.
‘My only regret is not doing more’ — Why I reported Eddie Gallagher for war crimes
"Not a single one of us could have imagined that we would have to report a friend and mentor."
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“Uncompromising integrity is my standard. My character and honor are steadfast. My word is my bond.” These words are from the SEAL Ethos and are ingrained into every single SEAL trainee. Our senior leaders created the ethos to address moral failures that were happening at home and overseas during the height of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And as a SEAL who served in Alpha Platoon under the command of now-disgraced Chief Petty Officer Eddie Gallagher, those words are what helped push me to report my own chief for his horrific actions in Iraq.
Our deployment to Mosul in 2017 had the potential to be one of the most kinetic deployments in recent Naval Special Warfare history. ISIS had taken over large swaths of Iraq and Syria. They mercilessly murdered, raped, and pillaged minority communities throughout the region. Our Iraqi interpreters told us horrific stories of the acts that ISIS committed. Many of these stories involved our interpreters’ family members.
For us, this was an easy fight to get behind. A lot of remarkable things happened on that deployment. When our injured partners from the Iraqi Army flooded into our casualty collection point, our medics spent their free time saving their lives. When seemingly endless processions of women, children and elderly people were fleeing ISIS, we offered up what little MREs and water we had, and gave medical care when possible. When ISIS launched a counterattack on our partner force, it was our SEAL platoon working in sync — firing every single weapon in our arsenal from pistols to 500-pound bombs — that stopped the counter-attack during an eight-hour firefight. And when our EOD technician was shot on a rooftop, it was Medic Corey Scott who immediately treated him and formulated a plan to get him off the roof as Lt. Tom MacNeil called in a medical evacuation — in defiance of Lt. Jake Portier, our platoon leader, who ordered him not to do so because we were in a restricted area.
Yet few people heard about the lives saved, people liberated, or hope restored in Mosul. Instead, most only heard about Gallagher committing the same kinds of horrific acts as the people we were sent to fight. Although only convicted of taking a photograph with a murdered teenage prisoner, his charge sheet accused him of shooting civilians on multiple occasions, possessing a controlled substance, torturing and killing a prisoner, and obstructing justice. After repeatedly changing his story and denying that he killed the teenage prisoner at all, he finally conceded a half-truth on Apple TV’s “The Line” documentary: He admitted to killing the prisoner, just not in the manner that my teammates saw, or in the way that he told me and other SEALs.
Clip from Apple TV’s documentary “The Line” featuring Eddie Gallagher, former Navy Secretary Richard Spencer, and Navy SEAL Dylan Dille
Many people have asked why we didn’t report these crimes as soon as they happened and instead waited months to report them. This is a false narrative peddled by Gallagher and his supporters. The fact is that we reported these crimes to Portier, who said he would handle it. As it was supposedly “being handled,” we took matters into our own hands to attempt to stop our chief.
We aren’t lawyers. We didn’t focus on keeping evidence that would hold up in court. We were Navy SEALs fighting ISIS in a battle that has been called the most intense urban conflict since World War II. We focused on trying to stop our chief from killing civilians, and getting us killed, while still affecting the battlespace and playing within the bounds of our own military and cultural rules. Would we do something different if we could go back in time? Absolutely. We took our officers at their word when we repeatedly alerted them to these crimes. Sometimes Lt. Portier would make excuses for Gallagher, and sometimes he assured us that he had taken action against him. But we trusted Jake. He told us there was a process to report these crimes and he had already notified our troop commander, Lt. Cmdr. Rob Breisch, while we were still in Iraq. As far as we knew, the ball was in their court and our officers would do the right thing.
Not a single one of us could have imagined that we would have to report a friend and mentor for war crimes. We know that mistakes and accidents happen on deployment and innocent people always die in war. But Gallagher’s repeated actions and comments proved to us that his actions were not accidents. We had given him the benefit of the doubt for a long time, but all that did was enable him.
Many have asked, “How could you turn in a brother?” Let me clarify something: Gallagher was our Chief. He made the tactical decisions and we carried them out. Gallagher repeatedly sent us to positions where SEALs and our Iraqi partner forces were wounded or killed by small arms and rockets. These weren’t SEAL tactics. These were part of Gallagher’s effort to get a SEAL injured or killed so that we would, in his words, “make it a great deployment.” In the end, Gallagher showed us he wasn’t our brother. Real brothers don’t needlessly put their men at risk. Real brothers don’t chase medals. And they certainly don’t murder unarmed prisoners or terrorize civilian populations.
A squad of U.S. Navy SEALs participates in special operations urban combat training. The training exercise familiarizes special operators with urban environments and tactical maneuvering during night and day operations.
My brothers are barrel-chested freedom fighters that go to the ends of the earth to carry out our nation’s foreign policy, fighting our nation’s enemies and liberating populations of people along the way. We act on the information that we have on hand. It is not always pretty, but just like first responders, that is the nature of our work. We do our best but can’t control the outcome. At no time is loyalty to each other put over loyalty to the country and mission. We should all know who we are fighting, why we are fighting, and the rules that we have to abide by. We raise each other up and create a culture of constant improvement and accountability. This is the reason that other countries call us to solve their problems. They trust us with the lives of their people because of the standards to which we hold each other.
As much as some fringe creatures want to argue about our rules of engagement, ROE’s were not the problem on this deployment. The problem was one man’s insecurities, greed, and addiction.
We had been through a lot, and seven of the 22 members of Alpha Platoon decided that it was more important to be able to look our kids in the eye and teach them between right and wrong than to be popular in misguided social circles. It was as simple as the banner that hung on my seventh-grade teacher’s desk: “The right choice isn’t always popular, and the popular choice isn’t always right.” My only regret is not doing more.
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Special Operator 1st Class Josh Vriens is a former Navy SEAL sniper who served in Alpha Platoon under Eddie Gallagher’s command.
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6. A Revived Nuclear Deal Will Not Solve Iran’s Advanced Centrifuge Threat
Excerpts:
At the latest talks, Iran reportedly wants to keep its existing advanced machines intact, and it is highly unlikely that Washington will demand their destruction. Whether the regime’s advanced machines are ultimately dismantled and stored—or shipped out for temporary consignment by another party—Tehran will build back its program in a handful of years.
Through its work to date, Iran has already substantially exceeded the JCPOA’s enrichment limits, including by producing 60 percent enriched uranium, which has no legitimate civilian purpose. As a result, the JCPOA’s provisions are essentially obsolete in delaying the regime’s acquisition of relevant know-how. Yet it appears that the Biden administration will allow the Islamic Republic to extort the United States out of billions of dollars for little in return.
Congress must intervene. Lawmakers should strengthen their oversight role by invoking legislative provisions in the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act of 2015 that would force a congressional vote on any decision by the White House to lift sanctions on Iran. At a minimum, congressional hearings are in order.
Any nuclear agreement that does not permanently remove Iran’s advanced centrifuge threat really is not worth the paper it is written on.
A Revived Nuclear Deal Will Not Solve Iran’s Advanced Centrifuge Threat
Any nuclear agreement that does not permanently remove Iran’s advanced centrifuge threat really is not worth the paper it is written on.
Depending on the day, media reporting suggests that nuclear talks between Iran and six world powers have either recently progressed or are on the brink of failure. Yet even if the parties to the 2015 Iran nuclear deal succeed in reviving it, the accord is wholly inadequate to address the growing threat posed by Tehran’s advanced gas centrifuge uranium enrichment program.
Although Iran in 2019 began exceeding the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action’s (JCPOA) limits on its use of advanced centrifuges—machines that can enrich uranium more rapidly and in greater quantities than Iran’s older centrifuge models—the nuclear agreement ultimately permits a major expansion of Tehran’s enrichment program, including the use of advanced machines. The deal’s advanced centrifuge provisions begin a phased expiration from 2024 until 2029.
The JCPOA permits Tehran to enrich no more than 300 kilograms of up to 3.67 percent enriched uranium—a quantity well below weapons-grade—using 5,060 IR-1 machines, which are Iran’s earliest centrifuge models. At the same time, the accord temporarily restricts enrichment using newer and more advanced models, which, termed in order of chronological development, include machines such as the IR-2m, IR-4, IR-5, IR-6, IR-6s, IR-7, IR-8, and various offshoots of the IR-6 and later generation centrifuges.
When Tehran and world powers negotiated the JCPOA, Iran was trying to get its IR-4 and other machines to operate reliably. It was, therefore, imperative for the nuclear accord to verifiably restrict Tehran’s development of advanced centrifuges before the clerical regime could master the technology.
The JCPOA ultimately required Iran to store, but not destroy, most of its advanced centrifuges, including those it held in greatest quantities, such as 1,000-1,200 IR-2m and 164 IR-4 machines. Pursuant to the accord, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) would monitor Iran’s production of certain centrifuge components to ensure it was not building whole machines.
Nevertheless, the JCPOA did not prevent the regime from working with raw materials and from stockpiling and preparing equipment for a future surge in centrifuge manufacturing. The JCPOA also did not restrict Tehran from carrying out additional advanced centrifuge research and development (R&D) and from testing limited quantities of these centrifuges. The accord permitted Iran to continue R&D via computer modeling of centrifuges, carry out mechanical testing to improve the centrifuges’ functionality, and even test certain advanced models with uranium. The JCPOA did prohibit tests that use uranium from producing any enriched uranium product. But the tests that the deal permitted would still help Iran improve the machines’ performance.
Following President Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the JCPOA in 2018, Iran proceeded to violate the deal by deploying and enriching uranium in large numbers of advanced centrifuges—namely, hundreds of IR-2m, IR-4, and IR-6 models. Perhaps most alarmingly, Tehran has now installed at least 400 IR-6 centrifuges and plans to install a few hundred more. The Institute for Science and International Security estimates that Iran, using just 650 IR-6 machines—which are more than five times more powerful than the IR-1—could make enough weapons-grade uranium for an atomic bomb within a month. Overall, Iran’s breakout time—that is, the amount of time it would take the regime to accumulate enough fissile material for a single nuclear weapon —currently stands at just three weeks.
Still, even if Iran were complying with the JCPOA, the deal itself paves the pathway for the enrichment program’s legalized expansion.
Near the end of 2024, the JCPOA permits Iran to prepare for a “gradual evolution to the next stage of its enrichment activities.” Tehran can produce—without a necessary component called rotors, which facilitate uranium enrichment—up to 200 IR-6 and 200 IR-8 centrifuges per year. Between 2026 and 2029, Iran may deploy and operate a total of between 2,500 and 3,500 IR-2m and IR-4 centrifuges or their equivalent in capacity. Tehran may also test with uranium 150 IR-6 centrifuges and eighty-four IR-8 centrifuges.
These capabilities would considerably reduce Iran’s potential breakout time. After 2031, Iran faces no additional restrictions on its ability to stockpile weapons-grade uranium. Thus, by re-entering the JCPOA, the Biden administration would—at best—buy only a short period of time before the nuclear crisis resumes.
At the latest talks, Iran reportedly wants to keep its existing advanced machines intact, and it is highly unlikely that Washington will demand their destruction. Whether the regime’s advanced machines are ultimately dismantled and stored—or shipped out for temporary consignment by another party—Tehran will build back its program in a handful of years.
Through its work to date, Iran has already substantially exceeded the JCPOA’s enrichment limits, including by producing 60 percent enriched uranium, which has no legitimate civilian purpose. As a result, the JCPOA’s provisions are essentially obsolete in delaying the regime’s acquisition of relevant know-how. Yet it appears that the Biden administration will allow the Islamic Republic to extort the United States out of billions of dollars for little in return.
Congress must intervene. Lawmakers should strengthen their oversight role by invoking legislative provisions in the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act of 2015 that would force a congressional vote on any decision by the White House to lift sanctions on Iran. At a minimum, congressional hearings are in order.
Any nuclear agreement that does not permanently remove Iran’s advanced centrifuge threat really is not worth the paper it is written on.
Andrea Stricker is a research fellow on nonproliferation at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD). FDD is a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy. Follow Andrea on Twitter @StrickerNonpro.
Image: Reuters.
7. Yemen’s Houthis Belong on the Terror List
Excerpt:
The Houthis fired missiles again at Abu Dhabi and Saudi Arabia on Sunday. Yemen continues to writhe in large part because of a violent campaign by Iranian-backed Houthi terrorists. While the White House may take heat from congressional progressives and their allies, particularly in light of Saudi-led retaliation for last week’s drone strike, it’s time to redesignate Ansar Allah as a terrorist organization.
Yemen’s Houthis Belong on the Terror List
The Biden administration removed them in an effort to appease Iran.
WSJ · by Jonathan Schanzer and Matthew Zweig
On Jan. 17 a Houthi drone attack killed three and injured six in Abu Dhabi. Nine Republican Senators responded by introducing legislation calling on the White House to reimpose the terrorist designation on Ansar Allah. Other legislators, including Democrats, also reportedly see some wisdom in a policy shift.
But Mr. Biden’s diplomats have bent over backward to appease Iran. Desperate to return to the 2015 nuclear deal, the administration wants to avoid any unpleasantness with Tehran’s clerical regime. Meantime, congressional progressives have had it in for the Saudis since they began fighting the Houthis in 2015, citing the large number of civilian casualties reportedly caused by Saudi airstrikes. The Saudi-led coalition launched a series of bruising counterstrikes against the Houthis in the aftermath of the Abu Dhabi attack.
U.S. policy in Yemen has become a partisan football. In January 2021, the Trump administration officially designated the Houthis both a foreign terrorist organization and a specially designated global terrorist. Then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that if Ansar Allah “did not behave like a terrorist organization, we would not designate it” as one. This behavior includes the support that Ansar Allah receives from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which is itself a U.S.-designated terrorist organization.
Mr. Biden’s State Department justified its reversal of the terrorist designations by citing the risk that sanctions against the Houthis might encumber the flow of humanitarian aid into Yemen. The reversal was somewhat odd given that President Obama had signed an executive order in 2012 authorizing sanctions against actors destabilizing the country. While executive-order sanctions don’t pack the punch of an official terrorist designation, the Biden administration has nevertheless used them against some Houthi members and supporters.
The Biden administration has also repeatedly condemned the Houthis for their attacks against civilians in Saudi Arabia, attacks against international shipping, seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Yemen—which included taking its local staff hostage—and targeting of Yemeni civilians. In October the State Department even condemned the Houthis for “obstructing movement of people and humanitarian aid,” which was exactly the White House’s rationale a year ago for rescinding the official terrorist designations.
U.S. policy in Yemen currently amounts to nothing more than documenting Houthi violence, which has escalated since Mr. Biden took office. Moreover, the administration’s actions have undermined the basis of the American terrorism sanctions regime. Ansar Allah is the textbook definition of a terrorist group. If it can have its sanctions lifted without changing its behavior, why can’t other terrorist organizations do the same?
The Houthis fired missiles again at Abu Dhabi and Saudi Arabia on Sunday. Yemen continues to writhe in large part because of a violent campaign by Iranian-backed Houthi terrorists. While the White House may take heat from congressional progressives and their allies, particularly in light of Saudi-led retaliation for last week’s drone strike, it’s time to redesignate Ansar Allah as a terrorist organization.
Mr. Schanzer is a former terrorism finance analyst at the U.S. Treasury. Mr. Zweig has served in senior positions at the State Department and the House Foreign Affairs Committee. They are, respectively, senior vice president for research and a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
WSJ · by Jonathan Schanzer and Matthew Zweig
8. FDD | Possible Netanyahu Plea Deal Could Shake Up Israeli Politics
Excerpts:
But Netanyahu’s absence would at least change the bargaining power of the various factions within the current governing coalition. The left-wing coalition partners would still have no leverage to forge a coalition of their own, and the conservative factions could demand a higher price for allowing them to remain in the government.
This internal bargaining would grow more acute once Yair Lapid, leader of the centrist Yesh Atid party and currently Israel’s foreign minister, replaces Naftali Bennet as prime minister in August 2023, per their coalition agreement. While the coalition’s more moderate elements are eagerly awaiting the 2023 rotation, the conservatives’ improved leverage would grant them more sway than the moderates might have wished.
FDD | Possible Netanyahu Plea Deal Could Shake Up Israeli Politics
fdd.org · by Shany Mor Adjunct Fellow · January 25, 2022
Former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is mulling a plea deal that would spare him prison time but likely bar him from politics for at least seven years. While still unlikely, such an agreement may have far-reaching implications for Israel’s current governing coalition.
Netanyahu is currently on trial on charges of fraud, breach of trust, and bribery in three separate corruption cases that allege he made questionable public decisions in exchange for favors and gifts.
Despite having dragged along for over five years, the legal process suddenly accelerated in the past two weeks, with Netanyahu, his lawyers, and his family actively pursuing and considering various plea options. The attorney general who brought the charges, Avichai Mandelblit, is due to leave office at month’s end, and both prosecution and defense see benefit in concluding the negotiations beforehand. Mandelblit’s successor, who will be appointed by current Justice Minister (and archrival of Netanyahu) Gidon Saar, is unlikely to pursue any kind of deal with Netanyahu. If the two parties do not strike a deal this week, the legal process will grind on.
An agreement would likely see Netanyahu plead guilty to certain charges, while others would be withdrawn. For Netanyahu, who has long described the investigations as an unfounded political witch hunt, the very act of seeking a deal marks a dramatic reversal — one whose impact on his standing among his supporters remains unclear.
At present, a deal seems very unlikely. The negotiations reached an impasse this week, though it is unclear if the very public blowup is just tactical.
If a deal is reached, however, it could impact Israel’s current governing coalition, which is a disparate mix of two right-wing parties, two centrist parties, two left-wing parties, and one Islamist party. This unlikely grouping joined forces in 2021 out of a desire to end Netanyahu’s 12-year reign. Having done so, the coalition now holds together thanks only to a self-enforcing equilibrium. The coalition’s left-leaning elements are roughly equal in size to the right-leaning ones, and both sides have respected each other’s political red lines. Maintaining this arrangement has been easy because the only realistic alternative — partnering with Netanyahu — is unacceptable to all.
But a plea deal could break this equilibrium. Mandelblit has made clear that any deal must include a finding that Netanyahu exhibited what the Israeli legal system calls “moral turpitude.” That would prohibit the former prime minister from seeking any public office for at least seven years.
Removing Netanyahu from the political scene would end a key rift in Israeli politics. In four consecutive elections, roughly half the voters expressed a desire to see him remain in power, and roughly half the opposite. With the polarizing Netanyahu out of the picture, Israel’s conservative parties, which enjoy an enormous majority in the Knesset but have failed to form a coalition since 2015 because some factions refuse to work with Netanyahu, could partner together once more.
To be sure, Netanyahu’s departure might not necessarily trigger an immediate coalition collapse in favor of a new right-wing government. There is still deep animosity between the rightists who helped depose Netanyahu and those who remained loyal to him.
But Netanyahu’s absence would at least change the bargaining power of the various factions within the current governing coalition. The left-wing coalition partners would still have no leverage to forge a coalition of their own, and the conservative factions could demand a higher price for allowing them to remain in the government.
This internal bargaining would grow more acute once Yair Lapid, leader of the centrist Yesh Atid party and currently Israel’s foreign minister, replaces Naftali Bennet as prime minister in August 2023, per their coalition agreement. While the coalition’s more moderate elements are eagerly awaiting the 2023 rotation, the conservatives’ improved leverage would grant them more sway than the moderates might have wished.
Shany Mor is an adjunct fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), where he contributes to FDD’s Israel Program. For more analysis from Shany and the Israel Program, please subscribe HERE. Follow Shany on Twitter @ShMMor. Follow FDD on Twitter @FDD. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focused on national security and foreign policy.
fdd.org · by Shany Mor Adjunct Fellow · January 25, 2022
9. To the fashionably woke, Uyghur lives don’t matter
Excerpts:
Since Iran’s rulers claim to be leaders of the Muslim world, you might expect them — unlike Mr. Palihapitiya — to care about the Uyghurs. But they do not. The most plausible explanation is that they have a revolutionary commitment to “Death to America!” They are counting on China’s rulers to help them pursue that goal.
On his podcast, Mr. Palihapitiya said he was “not even sure that China is a dictatorship” and that “at the end of the day, I don’t think that I have the moral absolutism to judge China.”
Elaborating on why he thinks Uyghur lives don’t matter, he said he was more concerned with supply chain issues, climate change, the incarceration rate for men of color in the United States, and America’s “crippled” health care system.
“If you want to talk about the human rights of people, I think we have a responsibility to take care of our own backyard first,” he added.
There were Americans in the last century who took that view. Had they prevailed, World War II would have had a different outcome.
Is it not curious that the ideology espoused back then by far-right isolationists is being echoed now by elite figures on the fashionably woke left? And is it not a sad commentary on our times that, for so many people, “never again!” has become “never mind”?
To the fashionably woke, Uyghur lives don’t matter
How "never again!" became "never mind"
OPINION:
Chamath Palihapitiya is a household name — at least in the kind of houses featured in the Wall Street Journal’s weekly “Mansion” section.
Born in Sri Lanka in 1976, he immigrated with his family to Canada when he was five. At the tender age of 28, he became an AOL vice president in California. He moved on to a promising new startup called Facebook one year later. Today, he’s a billionaire venture capitalist who shares his home with an Italian heiress and model.
Good for him. And good for us to be reminded that America remains a land of opportunity, not least for people of color and immigrants. But he’s in the news this month for a different reason.
On a podcast he co-hosts, he commented on what the U.S. government and others (e.g., Britain and the French parliament just a few days ago) have recognized as the “genocide” of the Uyghurs, a Turkic and Muslim people in Xinjiang, a central Asian land ruled by Beijing.
“Nobody cares about what’s happening to the Uyghurs, OK?” Mr. Palihapitiya told his co-host. “You bring it up because you really care, and I think it’s nice that you really care. The rest of us don’t care.”
A little historical context: After World War II and the Holocaust, world leaders vowed that in the new international order they were constructing, genocide, that most heinous of crimes, would be prevented or, failing that, punished.
The Genocide Convention was the U.N. General Assembly’s first human rights treaty. Adopted 71 years ago this month, it “signified the international community’s commitment to ‘never again’” and was declared a norm of “customary international law and therefore binding on all States,” according to an official U.N. statement.
Despite that, genocides have been carried out in Cambodia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Rwanda, and Darfur. More than 500,000 Syrians have been killed and more than 12 million displaced during what the U.S. Holocaust Museum calls “a decade of crimes against humanity.” In all these instances, the U.N. and the “international community” have responded fecklessly.
This pattern continues. More than a million Uyghurs are believed to be incarcerated in “reeducation camps” and prisons. Others are reportedly subject to forced labor, with women tortured, sexually abused and forcibly sterilized. China’s rulers also are strangling Tibet’s unique culture and religion.
Not only do Hollywood moguls, superstar athletes such as LeBron James, and titans of capitalism such as Mr. Palihapitiya not care, but they also profit from business relations with Beijing. Yet they have the chutzpah to portray themselves as champions of “social justice.”
Two anniversaries give these matters heightened relevance. The first: Jan. 20, the 80th anniversary of the Wannsee Conference. Wannsee is the lakeside resort near Berlin where 15 senior Nazi officials met to formally pass a death sentence on the Jews of Europe and more efficiently organize the already ongoing slaughters. A lovely breakfast was served.
The Nazis imprisoned Jews before murdering them. Why didn’t they keep them alive and use them as slave laborers in their war effort? The most plausible explanation is that the Nazis’ hatred for Jews was so intense that they rejected that more economical option.
Matthias Kuntzel, a Hamburg-based political scientist, has pointed out that, before the Wannsee Conference, Hitler promised Amin el-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, and the preeminent leader of Palestinian Arabs, that the Jews of the Middle East also would be exterminated as soon as feasible.
After the war, Mr. Kuntzel notes, the Muslim Brotherhood defended “the alliance between el-Husseini and Hitler” and went on to build “the world’s largest antisemitic movement.” The Brotherhood then “passed on the baton” to a fiery Iranian cleric who would lead the Islamic Revolution of 1979. Since then, the theocratic regime founded by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini has pursued “the project begun by Hitler and the Mufti.”
The second anniversary: Jan. 27, Holocaust Remembrance Day, the date the Auschwitz concentration camp was liberated in 1945. Last week, the U.N. General Assembly approved a resolution intended to combat Holocaust denial on social media. Iran’s rulers opposed it.
In other words, Iran’s rulers deny the genocide of Europe’s Jewish communities in the 20th century while threatening a 21st-century genocide of the only viable and thriving Jewish community in the Middle East. Inscribed on Iranian missiles: “Israel must be wiped from the face of the earth.”
Since Iran’s rulers claim to be leaders of the Muslim world, you might expect them — unlike Mr. Palihapitiya — to care about the Uyghurs. But they do not. The most plausible explanation is that they have a revolutionary commitment to “Death to America!” They are counting on China’s rulers to help them pursue that goal.
On his podcast, Mr. Palihapitiya said he was “not even sure that China is a dictatorship” and that “at the end of the day, I don’t think that I have the moral absolutism to judge China.”
Elaborating on why he thinks Uyghur lives don’t matter, he said he was more concerned with supply chain issues, climate change, the incarceration rate for men of color in the United States, and America’s “crippled” health care system.
“If you want to talk about the human rights of people, I think we have a responsibility to take care of our own backyard first,” he added.
There were Americans in the last century who took that view. Had they prevailed, World War II would have had a different outcome.
Is it not curious that the ideology espoused back then by far-right isolationists is being echoed now by elite figures on the fashionably woke left? And is it not a sad commentary on our times that, for so many people, “never again!” has become “never mind”?
• Clifford D. May is founder and president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a columnist for The Washington Times.
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10. Russia says "destructive" sanctions wouldn't hurt Putin personally
Russia says "destructive" sanctions wouldn't hurt Putin personally
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Russian President Vladimir Putin attends a meeting with his Iranian counterpart Ebrahim Raisi in Moscow, Russia January 19, 2022. Sputnik/Pavel Bednyakov/Pool via REUTERS
- Summary
- Kremlin: personal sanctions on Putin would not harm him
- Russia keeps up pressure with land and sea exercises
- Ukraine says Moscow is trying to sow panic
- Four-way talks on east Ukraine start in Paris
MOSCOW/PARIS, Jan 26 (Reuters) - Russia warned on Wednesday that imposing sanctions on President Vladimir Putin personally would not hurt him but would be "politically destructive", after U.S. President Joe Biden said he would consider such a move if Russia invaded Ukraine.
Biden said on Tuesday that personal sanctions on Putin, though a rare step, could be considered as part of a concerted drive by Washington and its allies to convince Moscow that any new aggression against Ukraine would bring swift and massive costs.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said U.S. congressmen and senators discussing personal sanctions against Russia's top leaders were ignorant of the fact they were legally barred from holding assets, property and bank accounts abroad.
Individual sanctions against Putin would be "not painful (but) politically destructive", said Peskov, who has previously said they would amount to a severing of diplomatic relations.
As officials began four-nation talks in Paris, Russia held new military drills on land and sea and moved more paratroopers and fighter jets to Belarus, north of Ukraine, for what it describes as joint exercises there next month.
Ukraine said Russia, which has gathered tens of thousands of troops near its border but denied it plans to invade, was trying to sow panic. Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said Moscow had not yet massed sufficient forces for a large-scale offensive, but that did not mean it could not do so later.
Nearly eight years after Russia seized Crimea and backed separatist fighters in Donbass in eastern Ukraine, the former Soviet republic has become the flashpoint in potentially the most dangerous East-West confrontation since the Cold War.
Russia says the crisis is being driven by NATO and U.S. actions, and is demanding security guarantees from the West, including a promise by NATO never to admit Ukraine. Moscow sees Ukraine as a buffer between Russia and NATO countries.
The United States has spent weeks trying to build agreement with European partners on a strong sanctions package if Russia attacks. But the task is complicated by Europe's dependence on Russian energy and the fact that sanctions would hurt its own businesses too.
Italian business leaders, including power giant Enel , UniCredit bank (CRDI.MI) and top insurer Generali (GASI.MI), went ahead with a video conference with Putin on Wednesday despite a call from their government not to take part.
"I would like to underscore that we consider Italy as one of the leading economic partners," Putin said, hailing cooperation with Italian companies and banks on major energy projects.
The EU relies on Russia for around a third of its gas supplies. Any interruptions to its Russian imports would exacerbate an existing energy crisis caused by shortages.
The United States has been talking to major energy-producing countries and companies around the world over a potential diversion of supplies to Europe if Russia invades Ukraine.
'NORMANDY' TALKS
In Paris, officials from France, Germany, Russia and Ukraine began talks on the simmering Donbass war in which some 15,000 people have been killed since 2014.
Andriy Yermak, chief of staff to Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, called the talks "a strong signal towards achieving peace in eastern Ukraine".
But he said major ceasefire violations were taking place, and ruled out the prospect of speaking directly to the separatists.
In Russia's parliament, Andrey Turchak, a senior member of the ruling United Russia party, said Moscow should support the separatist regions with certain types of weapons.
Russia denies being a party to the Donbass conflict but senior Ukrainian sources say they estimate it has 2,000 military personnel there, supporting about 35,000 separatists.
The four-way "Normandy format" talks, which have not been held for more than six months, are seen by the European powers as vital to remaining relevant in the broader dialogue with Moscow while the United States and NATO hold separate crisis negotiations.
French officials said they hoped that some progress could be made that would help wider efforts to reduce tensions.
A French presidential official said the aim was to set a date for talks on humanitarian measures and prisoner releases that would then lead to negotiations on the future of the Donbass region. However, he said the reality was that the Paris talks would serve to determine if Russia was serious.
"Either President Putin will seek maximum tension with us... or he assesses that in this great period of volatility, it's useful to use this format to reduce tensions."
Interfax news agency quoted the Russian defence ministry as saying a paratrooper unit had been deployed to Belarus on Wednesday, a day after moving in artillery forces and marines ahead of joint exercises next month.
It said Russia was also moving Su-35 fighter jets to Belarus for the "Allied Resolve" exercises.
The buildup of Russian forces in Belarus, a close Russian ally and former Soviet republic north of Ukraine, creates a new front for a possible attack.
RIA news agency said more than 20 Russian vessels had embarked on exercises in the Black Sea, south of Ukraine.
In the Vatican, Pope Francis led prayers for peace in Ukraine, referring to its "suffering people" and saying he hoped that wounds, fears and divisions could be overcome.
Additional reporting by Natalia Zinets, Pavel Polityuk, Matthias Williams, Tom Balmforth, Vladimir Soldatkin, Gabrielle Tétrault-Farber, Maria Kiselyova, Andrew Osborn and Alexander Marrow, writing by Mark Trevelyan, editing by Timothy Heritage and John Stonestreet
11. America needs a new grand strategy to navigate the 21st century
Can we draft another NSC 68?
And yes I am in favor of another Solarium project conducted on a routine basis (very four years). If I were king for a day I would bring together the best and brightest from across the political spectrum in the summer of every election year and conduct a "bipartisan" Solarium project (at the National War College). The results would be briefed to the new administration (or the second term administration) during the transition period so that the new administration could use the results to inform its new National Security Strategy and National Defense Strategy.
America needs a new grand strategy to navigate the 21st century
The United States and its allies are in a strategic quagmire. Buffeted along the full spectrum of hybrid warfare by peer, near-peer and nonstate adversaries, they are losing ground diplomatically, technologically, militarily and economically.
Inasmuch as they are the guardians of the liberal world order, that order is losing ground to an illiberal, authoritarian alternative. The possible end states to the current trajectory range from gradual decline and descent into a 21st century version of the “second world” to defeat and subordination under authoritarian conquerors.
Our efforts to counter our adversaries on this complex, modern battlefield are ad hoc, feckless and not very effective. There is a path out of this quagmire, but it will demand resolute conviction and a seriousness of purpose not shown by American policymakers in many years: We need a grand strategy for navigating the national security challenges of the 21st century.
The consequences of failing to have one are evident in the current Ukraine crisis, which is being dealt with piecemeal rather than within a framework that identifies and clarifies our broad strategic goals. Such a framework should rationalize our policies not only toward Russia and Ukraine, but toward China, the Western alliance and the rest of the world.
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A new bipartisan commission may finally develop a United States cyberspace doctrine.
One way to accomplish this and create such a framework is convening a new bipartisan Project Solarium that forges a new grand strategy designed to purpose for today’s global threat environment. Bipartisanship will be essential for this new solarium to succeed and to ensure the durability of the grand strategy it produces. A grand strategy forged with input and support from both parties must be able to survive regardless of which party controls Congress or even if former President Donald Trump returns to the White House.
The more perilous the global security environment, the more critical consistency is for deterrence against our adversaries and credibility for our allies and partners.
What is the Solarium Project?
In 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower recognized that the United States lacked a grand strategy for combating communism. Behind his grandfatherly public demeanor, Ike was a hard-nosed, practical intellectual who personally knew the key players in the international arena and grasped their worldviews. He scoffed at the idea of coexistence with communism. He wanted to defeat it. A hands-on executive, he recognized the need for a grand strategy.
To meet that challenge, Eisenhower initiated Project Solarium, named for a room in the White House. He created three task forces. Each received the same information and intelligence. The task: Present recommendations for a grand strategy to defeat communism.
Ambassador George F. Kennan’s team argued for a policy of containment. A second team took a tougher view that relied less on allies and more on nuclear capabilities. The third team advocated positive action to roll back Soviet power by any means available. The teams presented their arguments to 60 highly informed individuals.
Ike opted for Kennan’s approach: containment.
Project Solarium was farsighted and wise. We’ve seen the consequences of not having a grand strategy in Iraq, Afghanistan or dealing more effectively with the current Ukraine crisis, which President Joe Biden himself has said will likely produce armed conflict. The administration needs a grand strategy that looks beyond potential sanctions and asks what elements comprise a posture that protects the security interests of the West and Ukraine, while satisfying Vladimir Putin’s desire to leave behind a legacy that in his mind makes Russia great again. It’s not easy, but it is achievable.
Issues a new solarium should address
Policies have a greater chance of running off the rails when dealt with as tactical or operational problems. Crises like Ukraine and Syria, and how we deal with Russia and China, require a grand strategy.
For example, the broader issue that Ukraine raises is not necessarily just how we might respond to a Russian attack on Kyiv (although that’s a key element because while public discourse views a Russian invasion as a two-step punch and counterpunch, you can be certain that every action will provoke a counter-reaction). The dangers of rapid escalation are evident. Anyone who doubts this is possible needs only look back to the outbreak of World War I, where miscalculation ignited a sudden, undesired chain of events.
A convoy of Russian armored vehicles moves along a highway in Crimea on Jan. 18, 2022. Russia had concentrated an estimated 100,000 troops with tanks and other heavy weapons near Ukraine in what the West fears could be a prelude to an invasion. (AP)
A grand strategy should clarify what relationship we desire with Russia that is achievable. Is the goal stability in Europe? Is it preserving democracy in at least western Ukraine? Is it motivating Russia to avoid joining China in an alliance against the U.S. and the West? Russia may not be our friend, but need it be an adversary? What is plausible in forging a relationship with Russia that advances our security interests and satisfies mutual interests?
Should we treat China as a competitor/rival, or an opponent/adversary? What end state with China do we believe satisfies our security concerns and is achievable? How do we counter China’s 2049 vision for global economic supremacy or its rejection of an international rules-based order that supports democracy and freedom of expression? What ways and means should we employ to achieve that end?
Different experts have proposed diverse answers, yet the Biden administration has yet to offer its own grand strategy. Unfortunately, the quadrennial national security strategies and their derivative products are mere amalgams of observations and desires from various parts of the national security architecture and are indeed anti-strategic. Designed according to the same bureaucratic methodology as recent national security strategies, it is unlikely the imminent version will be much of an improvement.
Every administration confronts serious challenges. But taking a leaf from Eisenhower, the U.S. government — for both this or any succeeding administration — would profit greatly by assembling the kind of large, diverse, bipartisan team that made Ike’s Project Solarium a strategic milestone on the road to strengthening our national security and paving the way for the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union. We need a new solarium now, more than ever.
James P. Farwell has advised U.S. Special Operations Command and the Defense Department. He is an associate fellow at King’s Centre for Strategic Communication at King’s College in London, and he is the author of “Information Warfare.” Michael Miklaucic is a senior fellow at the National Defense University and the editor-in-chief of its journal PRISM.
12. Ukraine's front line: Where lives turn on distant decisions
Ukraine's front line: Where lives turn on distant decisions
AP · by INNA VARENYTSIA and LORI HINNANT · January 26, 2022
In trenches dusted with snow and tinged with soot, men search for enough cellphone signal to hear the latest from the distant capitals that will decide their fate.
These Ukrainians are far from the Russian ships headed to a naval exercise off the coast of Ireland, from the American-built fighter jets streaming to the Baltics and from the U.S. aircraft carrier steadily sailing the Mediterranean.
As Western-supplied weapons land by the planeload in Kyiv, soldiers and civilians alike wait here with helpless anticipation for decisions made by people who know little about the lives of those on the eastern front lines — a battle-weary region near where Russia has massed tens of thousands of soldiers in a troop buildup that U.S. President Joe Biden said could mount the largest invasion since World War II.
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The soldiers in Zolote 4 have been defending against Russian encroachment for years. They are just a few hundred meters from pro-Russia separatist fighters, who are on the other side of a checkpoint that no one can safely cross. The soldiers assume that’s where the snipers are, though they’ve never seen any gunmen.
After three days with no shooting, “all of a sudden they opened up with grenade launchers and firearms. One mortar shell flew over and fell in the field behind us. Two more hit between ours and the next position. In 15 minutes, everything was quiet again. Why? What for? Nobody knows. And that’s how it is around here,” said Oleh Surhov, a Ukrainian soldier who fled Crimea in 2014 after the Russians seized the peninsula. He joined the fight soon after he evacuated his wife, children and grandchildren to western Ukraine.
Zolote 1 through 5 got their names decades ago during the Soviet era — the name means “Golden” — when they were labeled as units of the local coal mining operation. Now 1 through 4 are in Ukraine and 5 sits less than a kilometer (half-mile) away, across the checkpoint.
The sense of waiting for someone else’s decisions has also infected the nearby village of Katerynivka, which bears the scars of eight years of shelling. It has newer trenches, which are heated by rough wood stoves whose warmth draws nearly as many dogs and cats as soldiers. The luckiest trench cats get taken back by soldiers when they rotate off the front.
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“We joke that hope is the last thing to die. All of us are waiting for peace. Neither our children nor grandkids can visit us,” said Liubov, a local woman who wouldn’t give her last name. “We talk on the phone and that’s enough. Let’s wait until peace comes!”
If war comes instead, it is as likely as not to strike first in eastern Ukraine, where the pro-Russia separatists have been in control since 2014. In Russia, across the border, more than 100,000 troops are gathering, and thousands more are going into position for what Russia says are military exercises on Ukraine’s border to the north with Belarus.
Moscow denies it is planning an assault, but the United States and its NATO allies are preparing for a possible war, bolstering their presence in the Baltics and putting 8,500 American troops on higher alert for potential deployment to Europe. Britain and the U.S. have sent multiple planeloads of weapons to Ukraine.
On Monday, the White House summoned European leaders, including NATO’s secretary-general, to a videoconference about Ukraine to discuss U.S. ideas on how to respond to Russia’s demands.
“We have shared those ideas with our European allies and partners. We are taking their feedback. We are incorporating that feedback into the written response,” U.S. State Department spokesman Ned Price said.
“We want to remind the great powers that there are no minor incursions and small nations. Just as there are no minor casualties and little grief from the loss of loved ones,” President Volodymyr Zelenskyy wrote.
In Vesele, a separatist area in the eastern Donetsk region, little has changed since the fighting in 2014. Signs still warn about minefields. Concrete block buildings have only crumbled further in the years since they were shelled, and no one has come to tow away the cars hastily abandoned under gunfire.
“There is practically no one here, because everything is broken. There is light, gas, water supply, but there is no life,” said Vladimir, a local man who refused to give his last name. He estimated Ukrainian troops were about a kilometer (half-mile) away, and he wanted them gone so people could decide their own fates.
“If they would completely leave and liberate” the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine, “then we could decide. I think nobody wants (to be a part of) Ukraine here,” he said.
___
Hinnant reported from Paris.
AP · by INNA VARENYTSIA and LORI HINNANT · January 26, 2022
13. Your questions on the Ukraine crisis answered
Your questions on the Ukraine crisis answered
Our Moscow correspondent Nataliya Vasilyeva and senior foreign correspondent Roland Oliphant answer your questions
Do the Russians feel that they have been pushed to respond to an unreasonable security crisis created on their borders by the Americans?
Ukrainian servicemen greet each other as they patrol a street in Verkhnotoretske village in the Donetsk region, eastern Ukraine Credit: Andriy Andriyenko /AP
To many people both in Russia and abroad this sounds like a reaction to an imaginary threat and obviously there are lots of things Russians worry about but I would say from recent opinion polls and talking to people, Nato is definitely not a top priority. And if we look at history such as the early 2000’s we see that Russia’s view of Nato was quite positive and we shouldn't forget that it’s been 20 years since the fall of the Soviet union and the same attitudes that were around in the 70s and 80s, were quite different to the 80’s and 90’s in Russia.
What is the potential compromise from EU/Nato to stop any invasion of Ukraine and allow Putin to look strong and not to lose face back in Russia?
Concessions from Nato. On paper everything that Russia is demanding is absolutely undeliverable from Nato: ending the open door policy, rolling back your forced posture to 1997 etc.
The Russians say that they are serious and something has got to change. I think Nato and the diplomats are hoping that this is a maximalist negotiating position and actually the Russians are going to unpack this and now say, “we know we’re not going to get all that, but we could talk again about a conventional forces in Europe treaty.”
For example, the Russians would have a certain amount of tanks on this side of the Ural mountains and we would have a certain amount of tanks this side of the Rhine - these kinds of regulatory systems which were developed in the Cold War and which they harp back to.
The trouble is that Russian diplomats like Sergey Lavrov have made the message pretty clear: we don’t want to get bogged down in these details, we want to clearly put this big strategic question on the table. Frankly, I don’t really see at this point how that gap is going to be bridged, unless there is some give and take on either side.
We’re expecting more talks this week and next and we are expecting talks on Wednesday 26 January between political aides from Germany, France, Russia and Ukraine to talk about the simmering separatist conflict in the East. They haven’t met in this format for quite a while, so there is hope that that could produce some breakthrough.
We are are still expecting to see what the Kremlin’s next steps are in terms of negotiations with the US. They have said that they are still expecting a written reply from the US on its security demands and only after that will the Kremlin be able to consider or give any idea of whether they want to engage diplomatically after that.
Employees of essential city industries and services attend a military training session outside Lviv, Ukraine Credit: ROMAN BALUK /REUTERS
Is the UK mobilising its armed forces?
I’m not aware of any particular scramble but it is clear that Nato is putting troops at readiness and you would have seen Britain already flying anti-tank missiles into Kyiv. It’s not announced a mass mobilisation of any sort, but I think we can be fairly sure there is a high level of alert from the Ministry of Defence.
Are the NATO border countries (Poland, Romania, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia) mobilising their armed forces? What level of alarm is there in these countries?
Nato is mobilising slowly. Spain is sending ships to the black sea, aircraft being deployed to Romania and Bulgaria. There was a general move announced yesterday to reinforce the eastern flank of Nato with the Americans saying they have put 8,500 troops on standby. The purpose of that is not to fight Russian troops, it is a deterrent to stop this spreading beyond eastern Ukraine in the event that it could. They are making sure there is a unified response.
If you look at Nato right now, there is a huge split between the US, Britain, the Baltic states and Poland and places such as Germany and France. You shouldn’t underestimate how worried places like the Baltic states and Warsaw are about this. This is an existential moment for them. I want to see serious moves from the western members of Nato to reinforce them. Potentially they would take their own kind of action and you would have even further fragmentation of the alliance.
How damaging were previous Western economic sanctions against Russia on the ground? How were the general public affected? Would Putin be very concerned by additional new economic sanctions?
One thing that made this escalation different is that both the EU and the US have made it very clear and they have published their plans of exactly what they were prepared to do in terms of sanctioning Russian officials and parts of the Russian economy in case of an invasion.
Servicemen of the Mechanized Brigade service and drive vehicles at an undisclosed location in Luhansk Region, Ukraine Credit: Anadolu Agency /Anadolu
There are different scenarios under discussion - they are all public and available - from targeting Vladimir Putin, to targeting banks, placing caps for Russian banks on having correspondence accounts in the west which will greatly constrain Russia’s financial institutions.
We are in a different position compared to eight years ago when Crimea’s annexation was a complete surprise and western sanctions were unprecedented and Russia was surprised and had to improvise. Russia has been living under sanctions for eight years now and despite the fact that Russia hasn’t seen this scale of escalation. Recently Russia has been preparing for any external shock, including setting up its own payment system, setting up its own interbanking payment system, cutting its dependence on the dollar, suring up public finances. Russia is well-prepared.
Can you comment on Russian force exercises in the Baltic states, off Ireland and off Norway?
That is one of the reasons why we have been worried and why people should be worried. That fact, along with a massive build-up of Russian troops near Ukraine. Not a single day passes without an announcement of upcoming military drills in Belarus. There are also joint Russian-Chinese drills off Saudi Arabia.
Russia and China have launched a joint military exercise in the Arabian Sea Credit: Russian Defence Ministry /TASS
Exercises on the Baltic Sea is something we haven't seen in recent years. It will involve over 140 vessels and about 10,000 troops which is quite a lot for a naval exercise.
Regarding the military exercises a couple of months ago, Russia would say they have a right and it is their business. This time they are talking secretly of the fact that this is a response to military drills from NATO. It looks like it is a mix of what we have seen. Both parties sustaining tension levels and one party responding to another.
Given Wallace and Truss are both due to visit Moscow - what should they signal to the Kremlin and is there still hope for a diplomatic solution
At the same time Ben Wallace was announcing he was sending weapons to Ukraine, he invited Sergey Shoygu, Russian Defence Minister, to London. To my surprise, he responded but said the last time there was a meeting between British and Russian defence ministers it was in London so this time Mr Wallace should come to Russia, which I understand he is going to do.
Defence Secretary Ben Wallace will visit Moscow next week Credit: DANIEL LEAL /AFP
What should they signal to the Kremlin? I imagine they will try to send similar signals to the United States. They will try to show there is no daylight between the United Kingdom and the United States and Ukraine on this. They will try to signal that the West is looking at this from a position of strength.
I would expect them to go there armed with a proposal that seems to acknowledge, at least in some way, these great security concerns the Russians are talking about. I don’t see the point of such talks without some kind of olive branch or offer to say we are hearing you in terms of their insecurity over NATO’s expansion. Wallace and Truss should suggest talking about it because there is not really much point in either side threatening one another.
What do you see as the first phase of invasion, if Russia invades Ukraine, with the intention of retaking Kyiv and Eastern Ukraine? Moves from Belarus and the Black Sea?
It is reasonable to assume that whatever happens, the way the Russians fight is with artillery. When you have seen Russian, or indeed Ukrainian artillery, they both have the Soviet heritage which emphasises the use of artillery on the battlefield. It is absolutely horrifying.
In terms of the first phase of invasion, it depends on whether or not Russia were going for the big show and march on Kyiv. You might see an offensive out of Kharkiv, another out of Donbas, or coming south from Belarus and something out of Crimea to surround the confused Ukrainian military, forcing them to retreat - as we saw on a much smaller scale in 2014 and 2015.
14. Three of Biden's team negotiating with Iran on nuclear deal RESIGN
Three of Biden's team negotiating with Iran on nuclear deal RESIGN
‘Biden’s put national security at risk’: GOP lawmaker slams president after three of his team negotiating with Iran on nuclear deal RESIGN because US is being too soft and calls for him to revert to Trump’s ‘maximum pressure’ policy
- Republican Rep. Michael Waltz praised the negotiators who have stepped back for 'recognizing when diplomacy is getting too desperate'
- Waltz has had his own experience in the Middle East as an Army Green Beret
- State Department official confirmed Tuesday that Richard Nephew stood down
- He was U.S. Deputy Special Envoy for Iran and known as sanctions architect
- Nephew, who wanted Biden to take a harder stance against Iran, has reportedly been avoiding the meetings in Vienna since December
- At the same time, reports emerged that two other negotiators had left
- It comes at a critical time in negotiations between the West and Tehran
- Iran has rejected talk of an interim agreement and wants a legal guarantee that the U.S. will not walk away from the nuclear deal
- It also won't negotiate directly with the US, with European intermediaries
PUBLISHED: 12:15 EST, 25 January 2022 | UPDATED: 18:45 EST, 25 January 2022
Daily Mail · by Elizabeth Elkind, Politics Reporter · January 25, 2022
A Republican member of Congress on Tuesday praised three Biden administration officials who walked away from their roles on the State Department's nuclear talks with Iran.
Rep. Michael Waltz of Florida, who served in the Middle East as one of the Army's elite Green Berets, told DailyMail.com their departure at a critical junction of the discussions is a reflection of President Joe Biden's policies putting 'national security at risk.'
A State Department official confirmed that Richard Nephew, known as the architect of sanctions on Tehran, had stepped down as U.S. Deputy Special Envoy for Iran after urging a tougher stance on nuclear talks.
At the same time, the Wall Street Journal reported that two other negotiators had stepped aside from their positions because they wanted a harder negotiating position.
Waltz joined their call on Tuesday by urging Biden to return to his predecessor Donald Trump's 'policy of maximum pressure' against Tehram's regime.
'It’s good to see some officials recognize when diplomacy gets too desperate and begins to really put American national security at risk,' the Florida Republican said.
'The Biden Administration should revert back to a policy of maximum pressure that focused on holding the Iran regime accountable for their nuclear capabilities, missile development, and regional terrorism and build on Abraham Accords to counter Iran’s aggression.'
A State Department official confirmed that Richard Nephew was no longer deputy special envoy for Iran but was still working at the State Department
The negotiating team's policy differences reportedly involved the enforcement of existing sanctions and even pulling out of the talks altogether.
Their departures, another blow to President Joe Biden's foreign policy goals and a State Department grappling with Russian diplomats who appear poised for conflict in Ukraine, come at a critical time in talks that resumed two months ago.
Western diplomats say they hope for a breakthrough in the coming weeks - but critical differences remain between the two sides and Britain on Tuesday warned of a looming impasse.
Meanwhile the Biden administration has been grappling with bipartisan criticism at home that it's taken too soft a stance against Iran as the Middle Eastern nation builds up its nuclear capabilities at breakneck speed.
A State Department official declined to comment on the specifics of internal policy discussions.
Nuclear talks resumed in Vienna, Austria, in November but have made little progress. Iran refuses to talk directly with American negotiators. As a result European diplomats have to carry communications between separate rooms but the effort has stalled
The Trump administration withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal in 2018, saying its destabilizing impact in the Middle East and developments in rocket technology put Iran in breach
'The previous administration left us with a terrible set of choices on Iran,' he said.
'Maximum pressure failed, leaving Iran with a rapidly expanding nuclear program and a more aggressive regional posture. At the same time, we were isolated from many of our closest allies and partners.
'Working our way out of this crisis requires many difficult, closely balanced decisions, on which there can be reasonable disagreement.'
Nephew, who wanted Biden to take a harder stance against Iran, has reportedly been avoiding the meetings in Vienna since December.
That same month, senior American officials involved in the talks began pushing for an end after Iran sent in a new negotiating team that reneged on most concessions made by its previous officials, sources close to the discussion told the Journal.
Talks on returning to the 2015 nuclear deal abandoned by the Trump administration resumed in Vienna last year, under the direction of Antony Blinken's State Department.
However, they have been complicated by Tehran's refusal to talk directly with American officials. Instead, communications are shuttled between separate rooms by European diplomats.
But with the clock ticking, Western officials fear it is only a matter of weeks before Iran obtains the material and know-how to produce enough fuel for a nuclear bomb.
British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss on Tuesday told lawmakers that negotiations were 'reaching a dangerous impasse' and told Iran it must decide if it wants a deal
The result was reportedly difference of opinion within the U.S. team about whether to halt talks in the face of Iran's foot-dragging and how firmly to enforce existing sanctions.
Under the terms of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, sanctions were lifted in return for limits on Iran's nuclear program.
When President Donald Trump reimposed sanctions in 2018, Iran returned to enriching uranium.
The Biden administration believes the best way forward is a return to the 2015 deal.
Iran says it also wants a return to the deal, but has rejected talk of an interim agreement in the meantime and wants a legal guarantee that the U.S. will not walk away from the JCPOA again.
The British Foreign Secretary spelled out the scale of the problem on Tuesday.
'This negotiation is urgent and progress has not been fast enough. We continue to work in close partnership with our allies but the negotiations are reaching a dangerous impasse,' Liz Truss told the British parliament.
'Iran must now choose whether it wants to conclude a deal or be responsible for the collapse of the JCPOA.
'And if the JCPOA collapses, all options are on the table.'
Iran has been building up its nuclear capabilities at an alarming rate despite multiple attacks by Israeli operatives, including the assassination of one of Tehran's top nuclear scientists.
But Iran is still ramping up its aggression against the West to test Biden's resolve. On Monday, Iranian-backed rebels launched a rocket attack against a U.S. military base in the United Arab Emirates.
And a recent report from late 2021 claims that Israel's attempts to destroy key Iranian nuclear facilities have not only led to their reconstruction but also with major improvements to their technology.
A top American official called it Iran's 'Build Back Better' plan, according to the New York Times.
Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn accused Biden of acquiescing to Iran on Tuesday after the reported setback in talks.
'Last week, Iran was the only member of the United Nations to vote against recognizing the Holocaust. The next day, the Biden administration gave Iran access to $18 million to fully re-enter the UN,' the Tennessee lawmaker wrote on Twitter.
And last year Waltz led a bipartisan 140-member effort in the House to urge Biden to take a 'comprehensive' approach in dealing with Iran.
Late last spring Iranians elected a new president, Ebrahim Raisi, a conservative former judge who is highly critical of the West.
Raisi has previously signaled a willingness to return to the nuclear deal, though his government's expansion of its nuclear capabilities throws doubt on whether he meant it.
Iran's Foreign Minister said on Monday that it was possible the nuclear talks could get to a stage where U.S. and Iranian negotiators can finally speak directly in one room.
'Reports saying that Iran and the U.S. are directly negotiating with one another are untrue,' Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian said according to Al Jazeera.
'However, if we get to a stage where reaching a good deal with strong guarantees necessitates direct talks with the U.S., we will consider it.'
The State Department on Monday repeated that it is open to meeting with Iranian officials directly to discuss the nuclear deal, as well as other issues.
Senator Marsha Blackburn took aim at the Biden administration's handling of Iran on Tuesday after Nephew's departure
Daily Mail · by Elizabeth Elkind, Politics Reporter · January 25, 2022
15. The Army wants someone to make comics about its information warfare doctrine
The Army wants someone to make comics about its information warfare doctrine - Breaking Defense
The intent is to generate conversation within the community and a more broad audience about potential threats and what the service can do to prepare for the future.
The Army is trying to find a way to get information to its soldiers, in a creative way. (Photo by: Claire Heininger, U.S. Army; Stylized by Breaking Defense)
WASHINGTON: It’s not unusual for the military to seek out specialized contractors with a unique set of skills. But a new solicitation has the Army looking for someone with a more artistic bent — someone who can take technical information about the service’s cyber and weapons of mass destruction strategies and turn them into comic books.
According to a SAM.gov notice, the Army Cyber Institute wants to use science-fiction prototyping (SFP) — science-fiction stories, graphic novels/comics, movies and animations to explore the implications of futuristic technologies — to support the service’s and NATO’s research about future operating environments.
“This includes: ARCYBER’s research on transforming into an information warfare command, HQDA G3 Protection Teams Insider Threat education initiative, and NATO’s research into emerging destructive technology coupled with the employment of weapons of mass destruction,” according to the notice. “The purpose of these SFPs is to help ARCYBER, DOD and NATO envision operations in the environments of the future (10 years out).”
The service wants one graphic novel on information warfare and two graphic novellas on weapons of mass destruction, with both products incorporating current Army and/or NATO doctrine and technological trends.
The intent of the comics is to generate conversation within the Army community and a more broad audience about potential threats and how the service is preparing to deal with them.
“The storyline will focus on the intersection of digital surveillance and privacy (or erosion thereof), insider threat and extremism,” according to the notice. “The intention of the book is to help Army leaders envision future information related threats, operations and expand the body of knowledge through futures research.”
There’s a long history of using science fiction to game out real-world issues. (Breaking Defense’s own Theresa Hitchens recently wrote about how The Expanse books and tv show is a cautionary tale for space colonization.) As Steve Leonard, author of the Doctrine Man comics and a former Army strategist, told Breaking Defense, sci-fi provides a great “safe space” to explore ideas and issues.
“We could watch an episode of Star Trek dealing with Starfleet and the Klingon Empire providing support to inhabitants of a planet, for example, and not realize that we were seeing commentary on the ethics of proxy war,” Leonard said. “Translating that to a graphic novel is also a smart move, putting the narrative into a medium that is more visually compelling. I mean, we can all read a white paper, but a graphic novel — especially one well written and drawn — will convey the ideas a lot better.”
He noted that the contract has enough structure to it that the Army could get what it wants, but “not so much that it restricts creative license” for the artist.
“That’s a novel approach, and not at all what I’d normally expect to see,” he said. “That’s promising, in my opinion.”
The Army isn’t the only branch of the military that has dabbled with using sci-fi as an educational tool. The US Naval Academy has been hosting a sci-fi convention called NavyCon since 2017, where panelists gather to talk about sci-fi and lessons learned that can help the service think differently in the future.
But not all military-sci-fi-comic-book endeavors from the defense establishment have been successful, especially when they go beyond the boundaries of the military community. In 2017, Marvel Entertainment announced and then, due to backlash, subsequently canceled a planned partnership with Northrop Grumman to unveil a new comic targeted at encouraging kids to go into STEM fields,
16. America’s War for Global Order Is a Marathon
Excerpts:
History, in fact, can never fully solve the United States’ strategic problems. Events are like snowflakes: No two are exactly alike. Luck, circumstance, and human choice ensure there are no iron laws of history. Yet, policymakers still study the past for guidance to confront the future because the past is the only place they can look to understand things that haven’t happened yet, and history can give them a deeper reservoir of insight than they might otherwise possess. “Fools learn by experience,” former Prussian chancellor Otto von Bismarck once said. “Wise men learn by other people’s experience.” Indeed, there are several reasons why wise strategists should revisit the United States’ Cold War.
First, although the Cold War isn’t a precise match for today’s competitions, it isn’t such a bad one either. The Cold War was a global duel over power and world order, just the sort of contest that is now underway. The Cold War was about ideology and geopolitics; so are America’s new twilight struggles. The Cold War was a contest of systems and a test of strategy; here, too, history rhymes. The Cold War tested the United States’ ability to develop long-range strategies and build international coalitions. It required mobilizing the U.S. government and society for rivalry while intensely studying an opaque adversary. It entailed finding areas of cooperation amid hostility and figuring out how, and whether, to split rivals and attack their political systems. It forced hard choices about how to employ U.S. power across multiple theaters; it required trade-offs between the United States’ strategic interests and its cherished values. All these tasks will be essential in the coming years. It would be strategically lazy to mindlessly apply Cold War solutions to post-Cold War problems. But it would be intellectually wasteful to ignore the insights the Cold War offers.
Second, the Cold War is a vast repository of knowledge about long-term competition. It was unique in many respects; no prior rivalry played out in nuclear war’s shadow. But the Cold War was also one of many great-power rivalries dating back millennia. If former Prussian Gen. Carl von Clausewitz could write the defining treatise on war by studying the Napoleonic conflicts, if Athenian historian Thucydides could learn basic truths about geopolitics from the Peloponnesian War, then surely a struggle as epic as the Cold War can teach the world something fundamental about long-term competition.
Third, the Cold War can teach the world how America engages in great-power rivalry. The Cold War is the only time the United States waged a twilight struggle across continents and decades and against an authoritarian foe. It is the only time the United States’ strengths and weaknesses in such a struggle have been on display. Put simply, the Cold War is the only history of sustained competition America has. To prevent policymakers from using that history badly, scholars must help them use it well.
America’s War for Global Order Is a Marathon
Washington’s latest crises with Russia and China are part of a new—and long-term—competition.
It is undeniable that the United States is now involved in a new era of great-power competition. The U.S.-led international system is threatened by authoritarian powers seeking to redraw the world’s geopolitical map and make the 21st century an age of autocratic ascendancy. “The central challenge to U.S. prosperity and security is the reemergence of long-term, strategic competition by … revisionist powers,” the 2018 National Defense Strategy summary states.
For most Americans, protracted rivalry against powerful authoritarian countries feels unfamiliar. But long-term competition seems new only because it is very old. Rediscovering the lost art of long-term competition requires only that the United States reacquaint itself with history.
This essay is adapted from The Twilight Struggle: What the Cold War Teaches Us About Great-Power Rivalry Today by Hal Brands (Yale University Press, 328 pp., $32.50, January 2022).
During the Cold War, competition was a way of life. For 45 years, U.S. officials grappled with a dangerous adversary in the ambiguous space between peace and war. They devised generational strategies while responding to crises and surprises. They racked up impressive achievements and committed grievous errors along the way. Ultimately, they defeated a powerful adversary peacefully, decisively, and without disfiguring their own nation beyond recognition.
History never repeats itself precisely. The United States’ current struggles are not exact replicas of those from the Cold War. It is a serious mistake, moreover, to think the United States’ Cold War strategy was wholly successful. The road to victory was littered with failures and higher-than-expected costs.
But examined properly, the Cold War offers insights on long-term rivalry and America’s strengths and weaknesses in such a contest. In 1947, then-U.S. Secretary of State George Marshall said no man “can think with full wisdom and with deep convictions” about the Cold War “who has not at least reviewed in his mind the period of the Peloponnesian War and the fall of Athens.” The United States needs this same historical sensibility today. To prepare for new twilight struggles, the world must reexamine how the United States waged an earlier twilight struggle. Winning the contest for the world’s future will require learning from its past.
U.S. President-elect George H.W. Bush, President Ronald Reagan, and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev meet on Governor’s Island in New York with the New York City skyline, including the World Trade Center, in the background in December 1988. Dirck Halstead/Getty Images
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. The Cold War ended with the West’s geopolitical triumph and democracy’s ideological triumph. After the Cold War, U.S. strategy sought to make these victories permanent. Multiple presidents promoted democracy and free markets overseas. They expanded the United States’ global presence to prevent resurgent instability. Most importantly, they worked to discourage potential rivals from upsetting the post-Cold War order through a mixture of military deterrence and economic integration. In short, Washington aimed to relegate great-power rivalry to history by keeping prospective challengers in check until they were pacified by globalization and liberalization.
This strategy deserves more credit than it often gets. By remaining deeply engaged after the Cold War instead of retreating across the oceans as it did after World War I, the United States provided insurance against a rapid reversion to vicious global anarchy. U.S. promotion of democracy and globalization made the world richer and more humane. If the decades since 1945 have been a time of unprecedented peace and prosperity, it is principally because the United States worked to make it so after World War II and then persisted after the Cold War.
U.S. promotion of democracy and globalization made the world richer and more humane.
Alas, the ambition of vanquishing great-power rivalry fell short for three reasons. The first was a failure of integration. U.S. officials hoped China and Russia would become responsible stakeholders in an U.S.-led world. But authoritarian leaders had other ideas. Unwilling to sign their political death warrants, they fortified their systems against liberalization (like in China) or rolled back reforms that had occurred in the 1990s (like in Russia). Once prospects for democratization faded, authoritarian regimes committed to suppressing liberalism at home were sure to feel threatened in a world where a democratic superpower reigned supreme.
In fact, Russian and Chinese leaders saw U.S. policy not as a source of stability but as a threat to their security and power. Washington was not wrong to expand NATO into Eastern Europe, give Taiwan shelter against Chinese coercion, and prevent Moscow and Beijing from dominating their surroundings, as great powers have long done. But Russia and China resented a hegemonic United States imposing its will in their backyards and thwarting their geopolitical designs.
That resentment might not have mattered absent a second factor: a shifting balance of power. So long as America’s might was unrivaled, even dissatisfied countries were loath to incur Washington’s wrath. Yet U.S. supremacy became more contested, partially owing to the prosperity the U.S.-led system fostered. Russia’s real GDP doubled between 1998 and 2014, and military spending quadrupled. Between 1990 and 2016, Chinese GDP increased twelvefold, and military spending increased tenfold. As Russia escaped its post-communist paralysis, as China rose meteorically, countries that disliked the status quo now had the wherewithal to challenge it.
This shift was exacerbated by a third factor: distraction, disinvestment, and disengagement by the United States. After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the United States spent a decade focused on the Middle East rather than on rising geopolitical rivals. For another half-decade after that, Washington slashed its military capabilities in response to budgetary pressures and political dysfunction. And following the 2008 financial crisis, U.S. presidents showed growing ambivalence about global leadership, first subtly under former U.S. President Barack Obama and then flagrantly under former U.S. President Donald Trump. The barriers to great-power rivalry were weakening as the stimulus to rivalry grew stronger. The resulting challenges have become sharp indeed.
A man walks past a propaganda mural that reads “Chinese Dream: make the country prosperous and strong, rejuvenate the nation” along a street in Beijing on June 9, 2021. NOEL CELIS/AFP via Getty Images
The Chinese challenge is the graver of the two because Chinese power and potential are so great. Although U.S. officials long hoped that Washington could avoid competing with China, its communist government has been pursuing its “Chinese dream” at the United States’ expense.
This means, first and foremost, displacing the United States as the premier power in the Asia-Pacific—leaving Asia to the Asians, as Chinese President Xi Jinping has said. Over a quarter-century, China has conducted a determined military buildup so it can overawe its neighbors and prevent the United States from defending them. China has also blended coercion and seduction to undermine U.S. alliances and increase its own influence; it has used creeping expansion to control large swaths of the Western Pacific. Like virtually all rising powers, China seeks primacy in its geopolitical backyard. Pushing the United States out is a prerequisite to pulling that region into China’s grasp.
Yet regional primacy is less a destination than a springboard. China’s Belt and Road Initiative is a multi-continent project to organize Eurasia into a geoeconomic space oriented toward Beijing. China’s military influence is following its economic and political influence. Meanwhile, China is striving to dominate key areas of high-tech innovation. And having once shunned international institutions, China is now building its own while working aggressively to capture others. To see Beijing’s assertiveness amid the COVID-19 pandemic—bullying international critics; coercing its neighbors, from India to Vietnam; destroying Hong Kong’s autonomy; threatening Taiwan—was to glimpse how China will behave as its influence grows. In “continually broadening our comprehensive national power,” Xi argued, Beijing is “laying the foundation for a future where we will win the initiative and have the dominant position.”
As Beijing builds a hypermodern police state at home, it works assiduously to strengthen autocracy and weaken democracy abroad.
China envisions a far less democratic world as well. As Beijing builds a hypermodern police state at home, it works assiduously to strengthen autocracy and weaken democracy abroad. China has exported the tools and techniques of repression to countless autocrats. It has used corruption and economic pressure to distort decision-making and suppress free speech in democratic countries. It has promoted autocrat-friendly global norms on human rights and internet management while advertising authoritarian capitalism as superior to liberal democracy. Chinese leaders calculate that the more prevalent illiberal forms of government are, the more secure autocracy in China will be.
Sources of Chinese conduct are complex. Chinese leaders see weakening the United States’ influence as the best guarantee of their own security and survival. Yet China is also spurred onward by vaulting ambition and a sense of historical destiny. This is a country, after all, that traditionally viewed its domain as “all under heaven.” Chinese behavior is driven by ideology and geopolitics, insecurity and aggrandizement—the same potent cocktail that has energized rising powers throughout history.
That cocktail is energizing Russian President Vladimir Putin too. Moscow’s long-term prospects are dimmer than Beijing’s, so its challenge has been more aggressive. Like China, Russia desires dominance of its “near abroad.” Under Putin’s leadership, Russia has dismembered former Soviet republics that were leaning toward the West while using intimidation and subversion to undermine NATO and the European Union—efforts backed by an impressive military modernization campaign.
Military power is not Moscow’s only weapon. The Kremlin uses economic leverage to pull countries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia close. Nor are Moscow’s geopolitical horizons confined to its near abroad. Putin reestablished Russia as a player in the Middle East and Africa through arms sales, proxy wars, and even direct intervention. Moscow has used its military, intelligence, and other resources to shape events and protect friendly rulers as far away as Latin America. Russia cannot create a Moscow-centric global order, but it can act as a foil to U.S. influence and drag the world back to a more predatory, disordered condition.
Indeed, the weaponization of disarray is central to Russian statecraft. Putin has unleashed political meddling and “influence operations” meant to weaken and divide countries opposing him. In 2013, Gen. Valery Gerasimov, Russia’s chief of general staff, described “new generation warfare” as the fusion of informational, intelligence, and other tools to paralyze an enemy by infiltrating and disrupting its political system. Russia’s sophisticated attack on the U.S. presidential campaign in 2016 was the most spectacular example of this strategy. And like Beijing, Moscow supports friendly autocrats while inveighing against the alleged failures of liberal democracy.
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Trump’s ambassador to the OSCE says a Russian invasion of Ukraine is an attack on “all of America’s allies.”
In Putin’s eyes, it is not Moscow but Washington that is the dangerous revisionist power. Yet if Russian policies seek to halt the encroachment of democratic norms and U.S. influence, they are hard to distinguish from offensive efforts to restore Russia as a global power. What Moscow wants, remarked Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, is a transition to a “post-West” world.
To be clear, neither China nor Russia is determined simply to blow up the existing order, as French leader Napoleon Bonaparte and Nazi leader Adolf Hitler did. Yet both are seeking a dramatically altered international environment—one where spheres of economic and geopolitical influence have returned, U.S. power is constrained, and authoritarianism advances as democracy retreats. They can succeed only if the U.S.-led order is rolled back and weakened. Because Russia and China share this objective, they have forged an uneasy but productive strategic partnership—an Authoritarian International for the 21st century.
So far, competitions with China and Russia have remained cold rather than hot. Yet China and Russia could become more confrontational if they conclude that a war against the United States or its allies would be successful, and both countries are working very hard to tip key regional military balances in their favor. The likelihood of a Sino-American war over Taiwan, for instance, has risen dramatically in recent years and will likely keep rising in years to come. The shadow of violent conflict is looming over Eastern Europe today. In the meantime, Washington will face all the dangers of great-power rivalry: high-stakes diplomatic crises, proxy conflicts, covert skullduggery, arms races, and the shadow of war.
The United States could avoid these burdens by opting out of competition. It could hope that its authoritarian challengers, who face serious internal problems, burn themselves out. Yet doing so would only increase the danger. Russia may be in long-term decline, but it has compensated with creative tactics and risk-taking. China, even if its power eventually falters, could still be the most formidable opponent the United States has ever faced. The price of retreat would be the steady erosion of the world America has built. The price of preserving that world is competing effectively.
A U.S. Navy photo shows the Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Dewey during routine operations in the South China Sea on Jan. 21. The Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Dewey in the South China SeaMass Communication Specialist 1st Class Benjamin A. Lewis/U.S. Navy
What is long-term competition? In essence, it is an ongoing, open-ended contest for influence between great powers. Beyond this, the concept has several persistent traits.
First, long-term competition happens at a geopolitical twilight between the sunshine of peace and the darkness of war. Geopolitical rivalry is not peace. The threat of violence is omnipresent, and some competitions do culminate in war. In long-term rivalry, former U.S. diplomat George Kennan noted, “There is no real security and there is no alternative to living dangerously.” Yet, competition is not all-out military conflict. It may blend rivalry and cooperation. Before World War I, for example, the United Kingdom and Germany were commercial partners and strategic foes. Competition may also feature wars that are deliberately kept limited. Indeed, the fact that long-term rivalry is long term—that it is not brought swiftly and violently to a conclusion—presumably indicates that the protagonists share an interest in preventing matters from spiraling out of control.
Second, long-term competition is interactive: It requires outplaying an antagonist that is trying to outplay you. This means a central challenge is getting inside the opponent’s head by studying how he or she thinks. It also means that the best competitors will find ways of shaping a dynamic interaction to their benefit by exploiting an opponent’s weaknesses, steering the competition into areas of particular advantage, or even molding the larger international environment to limit the adversary’s options. Long-term competition doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Affecting the wider world can be a profoundly powerful way of constraining a dangerous rival.
Third, long-term competition occurs in a world of finite resources. No one has the advantage in every dimension of rivalry; countries must tolerate weakness somewhere if they are to enjoy strength anywhere. The essence of long-term competition, then, is strategic choice. Countries must choose where to focus and where to economize; they must deftly apply limited means while forcing a competitor to squander its own. Above all, long-term competition rewards countries that pit their strengths against a competitor’s vulnerabilities and translate moments of opportunity into lasting advantages.
Long-term competition happens at a geopolitical twilight between the sunshine of peace and the darkness of war.
Fourth, long-term competition is comprehensive. The military balance invariably casts its shadow over any competition, but power is multidimensional, so struggles over power are multidimensional too. Rivalries involve economic statecraft, intelligence, and diplomacy; they play out in the realms of culture, values, and ideas. Long-term competition thus requires integrating multiple forms of influence into a coherent whole.
All this takes time, which leads to a fifth point: Long-term competition is often unsatisfying and indecisive by nature. It plays out over years, decades, even generations. It rewards the incremental strengthening of one’s position rather than one’s quest for quick, decisive triumph. As a result, long-term competition demands seemingly contradictory qualities: the ability to deploy power effectively while husbanding it for the long haul and the ability to advance consistently while retaining flexibility along the way. Commitment is imperative, but there are no prizes for what former British Prime Minister Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, known as Lord Salisbury, called “sticking to the carcass of dead policy.” And since long-term competition takes time, it makes time a weapon. Smart strategists seek an edge by exploiting windows of opportunity and manipulating the pace of rivalry.
Sixth, long-term competition is a test of systems as much as statecraft. It is a measure of which political, social, and economic model can best generate and employ power. There are no purely domestic issues. Matters that affect the performance of a country’s institutions, economy, and society may determine its geopolitical fate. The best strategies strengthen a nation’s system by undertaking needed reforms; the cardinal sin is to pursue policies—foreign or domestic—that undermine a nation’s vitality. And because long-term competition is a contest of systems, shrewd players will ruthlessly exploit a rival’s internal weaknesses.
Long-term competition might thus be considered the graduate level of strategy. It involves mastering a dynamic interaction while synchronizing initiatives across time, space, and the various dimensions of national power. It requires creating asymmetric advantages and imposing disproportionate costs rather than simply overwhelming an adversary everywhere. It involves straddling the line between tranquility and violence as well as, not least, fortifying a state’s domestic system while defending it from the strains that foreign dangers invariably impose.
Finally, the pressures to succeed in long-term competition are enormous given the costs of failure. Winners of great-power rivalries receive vast influence and the opportunity to shape the world. Losers can fall into decline, even disaster. All of which means the United States will need every bit of intellectual preparation it can get for the tests it now confronts.
A crowd gathers in Vienna on June 4, 1961, as U.S. President John F. Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev meet for the first time. Daily Herald/Mirrorpix/Mirrorpix via Getty Images
If Americans aren’t well versed in long-term competition today, it is because they haven’t had to face it recently. It has been 30 years since the United States was last engaged in great-power rivalry. Few living policymakers have deep experience with that challenge. The United States, as a result, has precious little muscle memory in dealing with powerful, persistent foes.
That wasn’t always the case. In the decades after World War II, America conducted what former U.S. President John F. Kennedy called a “long twilight struggle” against the Soviet Union. The world’s superpowers competed fiercely for geopolitical influence. They fought, as former U.S. President George H.W. Bush said, over the “soul of mankind”—over what set of political values would emerge supreme. As the Cold War shaped the postwar world, it put long-term competition at the heart of U.S. statecraft.
For two generations, U.S. officials devoted vast resources and intellectual energy to competing with the Kremlin militarily, economically, diplomatically, and ideologically. They designed generational strategies while coping with unending strategic shocks. They developed defensive policies to check Soviet thrusts and offensive policies to exploit Soviet weaknesses; they used U.S. power assertively but also sought to prevent competition from escalating into disastrous conflict. Competition’s demands even reshaped U.S. government and society.
Through all this, the United States suffered mistakes and setbacks. Prominent Americans on the left and right wondered whether the effort was worth making. Yet the Cold War was, fundamentally, a period when U.S. officials were intimately familiar with long-term competition and when the United States eventually accomplished nearly everything it wanted to. So Cold War history has much to teach the world about how the United States wages great-power rivalry and how to get long-term competition right.
The Cold War was, fundamentally, a period when U.S. officials were intimately familiar with long-term competition and when the United States eventually accomplished nearly everything it wanted to.
To be clear, the Cold War is not a perfect analogue for today’s rivalries. Neither China nor Russia is driven by an ideology as messianic as Soviet communism. Putin’s Russia is a shadow of the Soviet Union, and China lacks the global military punch Moscow once possessed, even though it is a stronger economic competitor than the Kremlin ever was. There is far greater economic and technological interdependence and a far more complex relationship between America and China than what existed between the Cold War superpowers. Moreover, the strategic context is different. Now, Russia and China are confronting a well-established, if beleaguered, international order. After World War II, the Soviet danger was so immense because there was no order; chaos convulsed much of the globe. The world can’t rerun the Cold War playbook in this very different world.
History, in fact, can never fully solve the United States’ strategic problems. Events are like snowflakes: No two are exactly alike. Luck, circumstance, and human choice ensure there are no iron laws of history. Yet, policymakers still study the past for guidance to confront the future because the past is the only place they can look to understand things that haven’t happened yet, and history can give them a deeper reservoir of insight than they might otherwise possess. “Fools learn by experience,” former Prussian chancellor Otto von Bismarck once said. “Wise men learn by other people’s experience.” Indeed, there are several reasons why wise strategists should revisit the United States’ Cold War.
First, although the Cold War isn’t a precise match for today’s competitions, it isn’t such a bad one either. The Cold War was a global duel over power and world order, just the sort of contest that is now underway. The Cold War was about ideology and geopolitics; so are America’s new twilight struggles. The Cold War was a contest of systems and a test of strategy; here, too, history rhymes. The Cold War tested the United States’ ability to develop long-range strategies and build international coalitions. It required mobilizing the U.S. government and society for rivalry while intensely studying an opaque adversary. It entailed finding areas of cooperation amid hostility and figuring out how, and whether, to split rivals and attack their political systems. It forced hard choices about how to employ U.S. power across multiple theaters; it required trade-offs between the United States’ strategic interests and its cherished values. All these tasks will be essential in the coming years. It would be strategically lazy to mindlessly apply Cold War solutions to post-Cold War problems. But it would be intellectually wasteful to ignore the insights the Cold War offers.
Second, the Cold War is a vast repository of knowledge about long-term competition. It was unique in many respects; no prior rivalry played out in nuclear war’s shadow. But the Cold War was also one of many great-power rivalries dating back millennia. If former Prussian Gen. Carl von Clausewitz could write the defining treatise on war by studying the Napoleonic conflicts, if Athenian historian Thucydides could learn basic truths about geopolitics from the Peloponnesian War, then surely a struggle as epic as the Cold War can teach the world something fundamental about long-term competition.
Third, the Cold War can teach the world how America engages in great-power rivalry. The Cold War is the only time the United States waged a twilight struggle across continents and decades and against an authoritarian foe. It is the only time the United States’ strengths and weaknesses in such a struggle have been on display. Put simply, the Cold War is the only history of sustained competition America has. To prevent policymakers from using that history badly, scholars must help them use it well.
17. US Navy wants to get crashed stealth fighter back -- before China can
Where is the Glomar Explorer when we need it? And more importantly has China built an equivalent of the Glomar Explorer?
US Navy wants to get crashed stealth fighter back -- before China can
CNN · by Brad Lendon, CNN
Seoul, South Korea (CNN)The United States Navy is trying to retrieve its most advanced fighter jet from the depths of the South China Sea, an extremely complex operation that analysts say will be closely monitored by Beijing.
The $100 million warplane impacted the flight deck of the 100,000-ton aircraft carrier and then fell into the sea as its pilot ejected, Navy officials said. The pilot and six sailors aboard the Vinson were injured.
An F-35C prepares to launch off the flight deck of the USS Carl Vinson while a second prepares to launch off the flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln on Jan. 22, 2022, in the Philippine Sea.
While damage to the Vinson was only superficial, and it and the carrier's air wing have resumed normal operations, the Navy faces the daunting task of attempting to pull the F-35 off the ocean floor in some of the most contested waters on the planet.
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"The US Navy is making recovery operations arrangements for the F-35C aircraft involved in the mishap aboard USS Carl Vinson" is all a spokesman for the US 7th Fleet, Lt. Nicholas Lingo, would tell CNN on Wednesday.
Though the Navy has not revealed where in the South China Sea the crash occurred, Beijing claims almost all of the 1.3 million square mile (3.3 million square kilometer) waterway as its territory and has bolstered its claims by building up and militarizing reefs and islands there.
Chinese naval and coast guard vessels maintain a constant presence in South China Sea waters.
US submarine hits underwater object in South China Sea 02:06
There has been no official Chinese comment on the crash, with state media reporting it only citing "foreign media."
But China will almost certainly want to get a look at the lost F-35, analysts said.
"China will try to locate and survey it thoroughly using submarines and one of its deep diving submersibles," said Carl Schuster, a former director of operations at the US Pacific Command's Joint Intelligence Center in Hawaii.
Schuster, a former US Navy captain, said it's possible China could make a claim for the salvage rights based on its territorial claims in the South China Sea.
"Salvaging the plane with commercial and coast guard assets will enable Beijing to claim it is recovering a potential environmental hazard or foreign military equipment from its territorial waters," Schuster said.
(2019) Rare footage shows US patrol of South China Sea 02:56
But such an operation would present political risks, said Collin Koh, research fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore.
"To overtly go about doing this may risk worsening tensions with the US. I don't believe Beijing has stomach for that," he said.
"However, we can expect the Chinese to shadow, hang around and keep tabs on any such American salvage and recovery operation," Koh said.
Schuster said the US Navy will likely keep some presence in the area where the wreckage is believed to be in an operation that could take months, depending upon how deep under the South China Sea the F-35 is.
US salvage vessels are 10 to 15 days transit time to the site, Schuster said, and recovery once there could take up to 120 days.
Asked whether the US could just destroy the wreckage with a torpedo or an explosive charge, analysts said that was unlikely.
The U.S. military's $400B fighter jet (2016) 02:27
"My question is whether you truly leave behind nothing of potentially consequential intelligence bonanza amongst the scattered smithereens on the seabed -- which any interested party with the capability may still retrieve after all?" Koh said.
This US Navy recovery effort will mark the third time a country flying the F-35 has tried to pull one from the depths.
Last November, a British F-35B crashed on takeoff from the deck of its aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth into the Mediterranean Sea. Britain's Defense Ministry confirmed to news outlets in early January that it had been recovered in December amid worries the sunken aircraft could have been a target for Russian intelligence.
And after a Japanese F-35A crashed into the Pacific in 2019, worries emerged that it could be a target for Russian and Chinese intelligence.
But only small pieces of the Japanese aircraft were recovered by Japan as that plane is thought to have hit the water at full speed.
In the case of the Mediterranean crash and this week's mishap, the planes were moving more slowly, so more of the wreckage is be expected to be found.
CNN · by Brad Lendon, CNN
18. Why Germany might be the West's weak link in the Russia-Ukraine standoff
Excerpts:
But German leaders have been unwilling to name that price.
Germany relies on Russia for about a third of its natural gas — a dependency that will only increase with the activation of Nord Stream 2, a multibillion-dollar pipeline finished last year and designed to send even more Russian gas to the country via the Baltic Sea.
German officials believe that being a large customer of Russian gas can give Germany leverage and help relations, but critics say its reliance is unhealthy.Maxim Shemetov / Reuters file
Dubbed “Putin’s pipeline,” the project is strongly opposed by much of the West, particularly by Baltic nations who feel threatened by Russian militarism. While Germany has not ruled out including Nord Stream in a package of sanctions, it says it would only do so if Russia used energy as a weapon.
Critics say the energy reliance and reluctance to challenge Russia are linked.
“Germany feels so secure they can afford to trade with everybody and anyone, for the last couple of decades,” Dirsus said. “That’s a very comfortable position to be in, and it’s difficult to convince your population that things need to change because the world has changed,” he added.
With 100,000 Russian troops massed on its neighbor’s border and tensions escalating by the day, that position may not be sustainable.
“It’s becoming more difficult for Germany to be seen as a reliable ally to the Americans and central Europeans, and to maintain a strong relationship with Moscow,” Dirsus said.
“It’s going to be either/or.”
Why Germany might be the West's weak link in the Russia-Ukraine standoff
Berlin has resisted pressure from its allies and neighbors to deliver arms to Ukraine while urging “prudence” when it comes to potential economic sanctions against Moscow.
NBC News · by Patrick Smith and Yuliya Talmazan
But there is one notable country that appears to be holding back: Germany.
As Russian troops have massed on the Ukrainian border, Berlin has resisted pressure from its allies and neighbors to deliver arms to Ukraine while urging “prudence” when it comes to potential economic sanctions against Moscow.
President Joe Biden came under fire for suggesting there were divisions within the trans-Atlantic alliance on the issue, but that reticence and the resignation of Germany’s Navy chief over the weekend after pro-Kremlin comments have done little to dispel the idea that Berlin might be the weak link in the West’s stand.
Jan. 23, 202202:29
Sending weapons “will not help to defuse the crisis at the moment,” German Defense Minister Christine Lambrecht told the weekly newspaper Welt am Sonntag over the weekend. Chancellor Olaf Scholz said Tuesday that his country supports Ukraine’s economy and democracy, but not through the supply of arms.
This position is “rooted in the developments of the last few years and decades,” he said, reflecting a determination not to join or accelerate armed conflict that stems from pacifist sentiment that developed in the wake of the Nazis' defeat and during the Cold War.
But Germany's ambivalence came under sharp focus this week when NATO members moved to shore up the alliance's Eastern flank around Ukraine.
Denmark is sending F-16 fighter jets to nearby Lithuania; Spain is sending ships to join a NATO fleet; France says it’s ready to send troops to Romania; the United Kingdom has sent anti-tank weapons directly to Kyiv; and on Monday night the United States said it had placed 8,500 troops on “heightened alert” as it discusses deploying forces to the region in addition to sending “lethal aid.”
And Berlin also appears to be at least delaying fellow NATO members’ efforts to send their own arms to Ukraine. A German Defense Ministry spokesperson said it was "considering" a request from Estonia to send Kyiv howitzer artillery guns after a report that Berlin was blocking the shipment of the weapons, which used to belong to East Germany. They gave no likely timeline for a decision.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba has accused Germany of taking a stance that “does not correspond to the level of our relations and the current security situation.” And Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko, a former world heavyweight boxing champion who lived in Germany for years, went further.
“On whose side is the German government today? On the side of freedom, which means — Ukraine? Or on the side of the aggressor?,” he asked on Facebook this week.
But why is Germany so hesitant to use its power and influence at a time of crisis? A mixture of short-term economic goals and the long shadow of its 20th century history, experts say.
“It’s something that’s always in the back of German minds when they think about foreign policy where it relates to Russia,” said Marcel Dirsus, a nonresident fellow at the Institute for Security Policy at Kiel University, Germany.
The Soviet Union lost an estimated 27 million people in World War II — some of whom were Ukrainian — and Germany’s role in the war is an active factor in Berlin’s decision-making today, Dirsus argued.
Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock acknowledged the “suffering and destruction that we Germans brought upon the peoples of the Soviet Union” at a joint news conference with her Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, in Moscow last week. She added that there would be a tough response if Ukraine was invaded.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz heads a recently installed center-left government. His Social Democrats are steeped in the legacy of Cold War rapprochement.Jesco Denzel / Reuters
“These are the complexities of WWII, and Germany’s dealings in Ukraine and Russia during the Soviet Union times,” said Volodymyr Fesenko, a Kyiv-based political analyst and head of the Penta Center, a think tank. “Economically and politically, they just don’t want to quarrel with Russia.”
Not everyone agrees these are the right lessons to be drawn from the country’s historical misdeeds, with some seeing the shipment of arms to Ukraine as a way to avert a new armed conflict in Europe.
Friedrich Merz, who replaced longstanding Chancellor Angela Merkel as leader of the center-right CDU party, on Monday called for Germany to intervene specifically because of its historic responsibility to secure peace in Europe.
Germany’s status as a trusted ally took a further blow when its Navy chief, Kay-Achim Schönbach, resigned on Sunday after telling an Indian think tank that it was “nonsense” to suggest that Vladimir Putin wanted to invade Ukraine and that he deserved “respect” rather than enmity.
Yet for all its ambivalence, Germany remains a key NATO member and insists it stands united with Western allies on Russia’s military threat to Ukraine. Chancellor Olaf Scholz told reporters Monday that NATO member states would act jointly if there is an invasion and that Russia would pay a “high price.”
But German leaders have been unwilling to name that price.
Germany relies on Russia for about a third of its natural gas — a dependency that will only increase with the activation of Nord Stream 2, a multibillion-dollar pipeline finished last year and designed to send even more Russian gas to the country via the Baltic Sea.
German officials believe that being a large customer of Russian gas can give Germany leverage and help relations, but critics say its reliance is unhealthy.Maxim Shemetov / Reuters file
Dubbed “Putin’s pipeline,” the project is strongly opposed by much of the West, particularly by Baltic nations who feel threatened by Russian militarism. While Germany has not ruled out including Nord Stream in a package of sanctions, it says it would only do so if Russia used energy as a weapon.
Critics say the energy reliance and reluctance to challenge Russia are linked.
“Germany feels so secure they can afford to trade with everybody and anyone, for the last couple of decades,” Dirsus said. “That’s a very comfortable position to be in, and it’s difficult to convince your population that things need to change because the world has changed,” he added.
With 100,000 Russian troops massed on its neighbor’s border and tensions escalating by the day, that position may not be sustainable.
“It’s becoming more difficult for Germany to be seen as a reliable ally to the Americans and central Europeans, and to maintain a strong relationship with Moscow,” Dirsus said.
“It’s going to be either/or.”
Patrick Smith is a London-based editor and reporter for NBC News Digital.
Yuliya Talmazan is a London-based journalist.
Associated Press and Andrea Mitchell contributed.
NBC News · by Patrick Smith and Yuliya Talmazan
19. Coup Nation: Americans across the country participated in an effort to subvert democracy.
"Tell me how this ends." For those who advocate coups explain how they would occur and what would be the result?
Excerpts;
Perhaps worst of all, the plotters seem to have gained, rather than lost, support since their plans unraveled. After January 6, a bipartisan consensus formed against Trump and the coup attempt, but since then it has splintered. Members of Congress who rejected all of it on January 7 are now mum at best and supportive at worst, led by House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy. Not coincidentally, this follows the general public. A minority of Republicans, across multiple polls, are willing to accept the results of the 2020 election. Large swaths believe, falsely, that President Joe Biden won because of fraud. Four in 10 Republicans believe that violence against the government is sometimes justified, according to a Washington Post poll. Only about a quarter say that Trump bears most of the blame for the insurrection.
Pence was right to say that not all Trump voters were in the mob of those storming the Capitol on January 6. The scary thing is that as time goes on, more and more of them are joining its already numerous ranks.
Coup Nation
Americans across the country participated in an effort to subvert democracy.
As some would have it, former President Donald Trump’s attempt to steal the 2020 election was really no big deal.
“January 6 barely rates as a footnote, really. Not a lot happened that day,” Tucker Carlson said on the anniversary of the insurrection. “If you think about it, the presidential election was not overturned, the Capitol was not destroyed. The government wasn’t toppled.” Former Vice President Mike Pence said in October that it was just “one day in January,” and accused the press of using that “one day to try and demean the character and intentions of 74 million Americans who believe we could be strong again and prosperous again and supported our administration in 2016 and 2020.” John Eastman, the author of a memo that laid out a strategy to steal the election in Congress, has on occasion disavowed his own work, telling National Review, “Anybody who thinks that that’s a viable strategy is crazy.”
These defenses are weak—true, the election was not overturned, but that was in fact the goal—and they are getting weaker each day. As more information trickles out from the House January 6 panel, in court, and in press reports, one rattling revelation is just how many people were in on the coup attempt. The plotters might have been grasping at straws, and they might have been ragtag and disorganized, but they were not just a handful of fringe actors. They were a whole corps.
The latest news concerns slates of phony electors who gathered in support of Trump in December 2020 in states with results that the president questioned. Each state submits a slate of electors corresponding to the candidate who won the state; the slate is certified by the state’s governor, and its votes are sent to Washington, D.C., where they are counted and certified by Congress. Like so much of the U.S. election regime, this is meant to be an arcane but routine process that achieves a simple result.
But Trump loyalists saw in it an opportunity. These phony electors planned to submit their own votes to Washington, even though they wouldn’t be certified by state authorities. In a couple of states, would-be electors signed ballots that they said were, in effect, provisional: If Trump’s election challenges prevailed, they were ready to become the legitimate electors. But others falsely presented their ballots to Congress and the National Archives as the rightful ones, which appears to be a violation of the law.
Asking how this was supposed to work misses the point. Congress was never going to accept the fake electors, either by mistake or by design. Instead, this seems to have been part of the Trump camp’s strategy of trying everything, seeing what stuck, and sowing enough confusion and havoc that the January 6 certification wouldn’t happen. After that, perhaps the House would have to elect the president, and because more delegations were controlled by Republicans, Trump could be installed for a second term. Or something like that; trying to understand the chaotic effort too concertedly is probably a mistake.
The phony electors were not a secret at the time. They met publicly and Trump-administration officials cheered them on in the press. But when their effort inevitably flopped, they were mostly forgotten, and attention moved on to other aspects of the assault on the election. Now, however, the phony electors have become a focus for the House January 6 committee, The Washington Post reports, and the Justice Department is also reviewing the scheme, a top official told CNN. Among the new revelations is just how closely Trump-campaign officials and the president’s loyal but bumbling consigliere Rudy Giuliani were enmeshed in the ploy. The Post reports: “The campaign scrambled to help electors gain access to Capitol buildings, as is required in some states, and to distribute draft language for the certificates that would later be submitted to Congress, according to the former campaign officials and party leaders.” To their credit, some Republican would-be electors refused to go along with the scheme.
The new information is important because it once again underscores that the most dangerous parts of Trump’s election-fraud operation were not the ill-conceived riots but the legal machinations before and on January 6, what I’ve called the “paperwork coup.” Tying the fake electors to the Trump campaign and figures like Giuliani could help rectify the uncomfortable dynamic in which foot soldiers have been prosecuted while kingpins remain unscathed.
The renewed attention to the phony electors also helps fill in the picture of how large the election-theft push was. On the surface, the whole maneuver looks like the province of a few wild-eyed figures: Trump, Eastman, Giuliani, the attorneys Jenna Ellis and Sidney Powell, Jeffrey Clark, and Mike Lindell. As more information emerges, though, the size of the front grows.
A total of 83 phony electors were submitted—and most electors are deeply involved in party politics at the local or state level, meaning these were not simply random Republican voters but seasoned political activists and operators. (Of the 83, 25 were in the two states—Pennsylvania and New Mexico—that submitted the phony slates provisionally.) The list of other participants in the broader effort has continued to grow too. White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows’s role was larger than initially understood. The public has met a series of other players: Philip Waldron, an Army veteran turned cybersecurity investigator; the businessman Russell Ramsland; the Overstock.com founder Patrick Byrne; the professional bad penny Bernard Kerik; and members of Congress such as Representative Scott Perry of Pennsylvania.
On top of that, of course, are the 2,000 to 2,500 people who officials believe entered the Capitol on January 6. Nearly 800 of them have been charged with crimes. Prosecutors have also brought charges against people who they allege were involved in a January 6 conspiracy but were not present at the Capitol, instead waiting back as a secondary strike force.
Perhaps worst of all, the plotters seem to have gained, rather than lost, support since their plans unraveled. After January 6, a bipartisan consensus formed against Trump and the coup attempt, but since then it has splintered. Members of Congress who rejected all of it on January 7 are now mum at best and supportive at worst, led by House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy. Not coincidentally, this follows the general public. A minority of Republicans, across multiple polls, are willing to accept the results of the 2020 election. Large swaths believe, falsely, that President Joe Biden won because of fraud. Four in 10 Republicans believe that violence against the government is sometimes justified, according to a Washington Post poll. Only about a quarter say that Trump bears most of the blame for the insurrection.
Pence was right to say that not all Trump voters were in the mob of those storming the Capitol on January 6. The scary thing is that as time goes on, more and more of them are joining its already numerous ranks.
Photo collage images courtesy of Brent Stirton / Getty; Florian Gaertner / Getty; Spencer Platt / Getty; Roy Rochlin / Getty
20. The Global Consequences of American Polarization
A view from Spain (via Georgetown)
The Global Consequences of American Polarization
Jan 25, 2022
The last time geopolitics defined world affairs, the US stood tall as a global leader and champion of Western interests and democratic values. Today, the country is a shell of the leader it once was, and domestic political polarization is largely to blame.
MADRID – Another bitter battle has played out in the US Congress – and amounted to nothing. US Republicans have yet again used the filibuster to thwart legislation aimed at countering new voting restrictions around the country, and Democrats have failed to change filibuster rules to get it passed. The saga exemplifies the turmoil, polarization, and paralysis that have engulfed American politics and will undoubtedly shape November’s mid-term congressional elections. This state of affairs should worry the rest of the world.Next
In recent years, American society has been riven by misunderstanding and mistrust. By creating algorithm-driven “echo chambers,” social-media platforms have compounded these problems, reinforcing people’s existing views, discrediting opponents, and facilitating the emergence of an over-zealous “cancel culture.” The honest self-reflection and open dialogue needed to enable reform and reconciliation have become all but impossible.
As political leaders have learned to capitalize on polarization, the situation has deteriorated further. Former President Donald Trump’s populist, isolationist, and capricious rhetoric and policies exacerbated polarization and stoked volatility. Now, political scientist Barbara F. Walter warns, the United States is “closer to civil war than any of us would like to believe.”
I have no desire to preach to Americans about what is in their political interest. That is a long-standing habit of Europeans, and it is patronizing in the best of times. It is all the more inappropriate at a time when Europeans are confronting our own brand of extremism and deadlock.
But the fact is that the fracturing of US society affects us all. Most obviously, America’s polarized politics are shaping its economic, climate, defense, agricultural, and foreign policies. The recent Republican-led initiative to impose sanctions on the Russian-German Nord Stream 2 natural-gas pipeline – despite the threat this would pose to both US President Joe Biden’s Russia strategy and America’s relationship with Germany – is a case in point.
But the problem runs deeper than any individual policy. After decades of emphasis on economic considerations, geopolitics has again taken center stage globally, with ideology-driven great-power competition intensifying at precisely the moment when liberal democracy has lost its shine and authoritarianism is gaining ground. This competition is playing out in various geographic arenas (Ukraine, Venezuela, Kazakhstan, Taiwan), and even bleeding into the economic sphere (as with Nord Stream 2 or the Chinese tech giant Huawei).
The last time geopolitics defined world affairs, the US stood tall as a global leader and champion of Western interests and democratic values. Today, as the ongoing crisis on Ukraine’s border shows, the world needs America to reprise that role. Yet the US is a shell of the leader it once was, and domestic polarization is largely to blame.
There is no silver bullet. But a number of ideas have been advanced, from straightforward calls to stop giving extremists platforms to detailed proposals for revitalizing citizenship through compulsory national service. In some ways, the latter scheme gets to the heart of the challenge.
Americans need to reconnect with a sense of shared ownership of their country and its trajectory. They must take responsibility for their future, including by contributing directly to the process of charting a path forward. Otherwise, popular buy-in will remain elusive.
The European Union is well-acquainted with this imperative. Like the US, the EU is becoming increasingly fragmented, as it has struggled to clarify its raison d’être in the modern age. To tackle this challenge, the EU has launched the Conference on the Future of Europe. The brainchild of French President Emmanuel Macron, the Conference entails a series of citizen-led conversations focused on clarifying Europe’s challenges and priorities and helping to “shape our common future.”
As appealing as the concept may sound, however, the Conference looks a lot like an idealistic fig leaf covering bureaucratic inefficiencies. In any case, for the US even to attempt such an initiative, it would first have to achieve some consensus on what it means to be an American.
Here, Republicans and Democrats currently subscribe to sharply contrasting visions, as the COVID-19 pandemic has made clear. If Americans cannot agree on a shared understanding of their present – including, crucially, their country’s position in the world – how can they even begin to discuss a common vision for their future?
The US has been here before. In the years leading up to World War II, the US was deeply divided, both by national policies which greatly changed the landscape (such as the New Deal) and by conflicting opinions of what US involvement in the war should entail. Yet WWII is now remembered as a “moment of American domestic comity.” While this shift can be partly attributed to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s deft political leadership, it was the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that secured broad public support for the US to enter the fray.
But a common enemy works to unite a country only if everyone agrees on who that enemy is. Given that COVID-19 – a foe shared by the entire world – only hardened America’s partisan divide, it is clear that this is easier said than done.
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In clarifying America’s role in the world, an outsider’s perspective may be of use. Non-Americans tend to have a clear idea of what the US has historically represented: ingenuity, generosity, and democracy.
The path to a reunited America, acting as a credible global leader, will be neither smooth nor straight. But, given how many actors are eager to take advantage of America’s decline, Europe must do everything it can to help the US make progress. Just as the US sought a “Europe whole and free” after the Cold War ended, Europe today needs to support an America healed and reconciled.
Writing for PS since 2011
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Ana Palacio, a former minister of foreign affairs of Spain and former senior vice president and general counsel of the World Bank Group, is a visiting lecturer at Georgetown University.
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David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Phone: 202-573-8647
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
